The Gospels of Thomas and John

Transcript (PDF)

Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 50 of 54

The Gospels of Thomas and John
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 19, 1985

Transcript:

This is a tape of the lecture that was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on November 19th, 1985.

Thomas and Gospel of Thomas and John. We're using a technique that Benjamin Franklin pioneered. Were discovering that we can constantly improve with effort on our part, but it requires keeping track of where we have been and where we are. The tendency in our time is to throw the past away. And of course, the existential present becomes a challenge and adventurous. Then, as long as one has a euphoric carefreeness. But when the euphoria palls or pales as it were, sometimes, then anxiety and alienation result. The time period that we're dealing with is related to our time period, which is why we have undertaken to examine it. And one of the basic discoveries that we have made this year is that while archetypal images are indeed eternal, they're constellated form is time bound. And that they archetypal forms that are available for us up at the top, you can turn it off. There's a switch in the very top.

It's all right if it's off, as far as I'm concerned.

So the time bound forms seem to occur on the deepest levels for us, approximately back in time. One great year. A great year is about 2100 years. And this great year seems to have its efficacy. The distances seem to be kept so that for individuals living 2100 years ago, their archetypal images were constellated somewhere around 2200 BC. And of course, the primary image around 22 2300 BC was that of Sargon the Great, Sargon, the first really great cosmic king, the first king to hold sway over the entire Fertile Crescent. And we have a profile bust of Sargon, and it shows every bit of the regal kingly power that we would expect of a great emperor. We have seen progressively how this image began to tyrannize. And actually to use the terms bedevil the Roman mind, and that from the crisis. Of the Hannibalic War, the Roman mind suffered a sea change, a brutalization of its essential nature and character, and that progressively over the next hundred years the Roman mind became completely magnetized by the idea of a superman not just a great general, but someone who became a god. And that progressively, the figure that emerged in that role first, clearly but briefly, was Julius Caesar. And how the assassination of Julius Caesar was, in fact a great dramatic, almost melodramatic event. But the captive eyes mentality just shunted someone else into the position. And that other two command was Mark Antony, and he was electrocuted by divine fire.

He was unable to become the god. And his involvement with Cleopatra was a valiantly vain attempt to become divine with her. And they could not. And we saw how Augustus Octavian become. Augustus filled those shoes and became that figure, and that the poignancy, the fulcrum. Of this whole series of events was not Rome. It was not Athens. It was Alexandria in Egypt, in Greco Egyptian terrain. The final confrontation between Augustus and Cleopatra was in the ballroom, the royal palace in Alexandria. She poisoned herself there by an asp, and it was at that point that Egypt and Egypt, for all intents and purposes, was under the aegis of the power from Alexandria, became a very special possession of Augustus. Egypt was not a province that belonged to the Senate and the people of Rome. Senatus populusque et Romanorum SPQR, which was the symbol of the power of Rome, did not apply to Alexandria, did not apply to the city, did not apply to Egypt. It was the personal property of Augustus Caesar, so that it was the personal property of the Caesars. This makes Alexandria a very significant diadem in the power consciousness of the Caesars. Two elements emerged. One was the food supply, the nutrition. Egypt at this time was the breadbasket that fed the corn dole. That ensured the tranquility of the city of Rome. Alexandria had about 2 million people. Rome had about three. But some three quarters of the citizenry of Rome were on doled out food supply, which meant a tremendous logistical problem and keeping quiet the mobs.

The population involved not only circuses, but bread, bread and circuses. And the bread came from Egypt, controlled by Alexandria. And likewise the nourishment of the body was complemented from Egypt, from Alexandria, by the nourishment of ideas. Alexandria was the great metropolis of ideas in its time, much like Paris has been in our time. And much like Los Angeles is becoming now for the next century. In this dependency, the state of mind in the Roman Empire steadily deteriorated. In just a few quotes from a book called Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety by E.R. Dodds in Chapter two, man and the Demonic World, he writes, I have described the progressive devaluation of the cosmos in the early Christian centuries. The progressive withdrawal of divinity from the material world, and the corresponding devaluation of ordinary human experience. In the next two, I shall describe some extraordinary experiences of which the record has survived from the second and third centuries. There was a progressive devaluation of human life. By human life we mean the personal. The personal focus of life lost its hold, lost its viability, and at the same time, divinity seemed to withdraw itself from the material world into a metaphysical realm. And of course, that metaphysical realm increasingly became demonic. We followed how in even in Cicero's time, the great Roman historian Livy wrote some 50 or 60 BC, 100 years before.

We are dealing with 150 years that we can no longer stand our vices, nor can we stand the cure needed for them. So we must live lives out in limbo. A typical individual, a man named Aristides, at the age of 26, visited Rome and was presented at court at a great career in public affairs, opening before him when he was struck down by the first of a long series of maladies which were to make him a chronic invalid for at least 12 years and transform his personality for life. Most, if not all, his ailments were of the psychosomatic type. This is an example of what was happening millions of times over. Among the medley of symptoms, which he reports, we can recognize those of acute asthma and various forms of hypertension, producing violent nervous headaches, insomnia, gastric troubles. It is therefore not surprising that the strange prescriptions which he obtained from his god in sleep should often have given him at least temporary relief from the worst symptoms. Anxiety. Dreams. Terrifying. Panic. Tax increasing phobic disposition. All of this indicative of the character of the time. And increasingly there was a need for oracular responses. Astrology. The civilians they. One papyrus containing a list of 21 inquiries addressed to some oracle, included questions. Am I to become a beggar? Shall I be sold up? Shall I take to flight? Shall I get my salary? Am I under a spell? These are the kinds of questions that were being asked by supposedly mature individuals.

Cosmopolitan early in Rome at the time, cutting through this morass was the experience of Jesus. The only assessment that we have come to again and again over the last month and a half is that the character of Jesus cut through this entire demonic morass and all of the, um, paranoiac realms that spin in this, uh, maelstrom in the Gospel According to Thomas, which is material that was, of course, found just recently in our time. It begins with these are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke. And Didymos, Judas Thomas wrote. And he said, whoever finds the explanation of these words will not taste death. Jesus said, let him who seeks not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds, he will be troubled. And when he has been troubled, he will marvel and he will reign over thee all. The sequence here is one of conscious incubation, instead of the old pagan idea of going to have a dream and being healed by the dream, the ante is being raised. That one is assumed that the life one is living is a dream state, and one must wake up from this life condition. And that that is the new covenant. That is the new message. How can this be done? By collecting together the entire legalistic structure from the Torah and resolving it to a single new commandment love one another.

It seems so simplistic to us, and yet they involvements in the convolutions of that single commandment are the issue which we are going to deal with tonight, with Thomas and with John. We have already looked at the Gospel of Philip, and we have seen how the relationship of Philip and John, those two gospels, are extremely close, that they form, as it were, a balance, almost like an equinoctial balance between two other individuals, which are extremely powerful and important at the beginning. One of them was Simon Peter, the other was Simon Magus, Simon Peter for the institution, the doctrinal institution of a church in Simon Magus, for the magical mysteriousness. Beneath the church. One. The spire. The other the basement. And that Philip is about the bridal chamber, about the coming together of the two becoming one. And John is about the word becoming life via the medium of light, and that these are balanced and in the center quintessentially of this quaternary is the gospel according to Thomas. Thomas, of course, being the doubter, I have to see for myself a missourian always in the gospel according to Thomas, there is a series of quotations, almost like pearls strung onto a necklace. And each one begins with Jesus said, almost in the form of Confucius says that sort of format. Jesus said, if those who lead you say to you, see, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you it is in the sea, then the fish will precede you.

But the kingdom is within you, and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty. The emphasis here, as we have seen, is on a presence, a quality, if you like, of presence, which is constantly being contrasted to precedent, to the kind of precedent that is made by following a law, either a Roman law or a the law of the Torah. And we have seen that this quality of presence is something that is passed on directly. In Thomas, Jesus said, I have cast fire upon the world and see I guard it until the world is of fire. Jesus said this heaven shall pass away, and the one above it shall pass away, and the dead are not alive, and the living shall not die. In the days when you devoured the dead, you made it alive. When you come into light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you had become two, what will you do? So this directness of Thomas seems to the colloquial mind to be a dabbling with innuendo until we position ourselves, position our sense of understanding to penetrate through. And we realize that there is a juxtaposition constantly being offered us, and that the resolution of the juxtaposition is a sense of completeness, and that the completeness is available only when there is a dynamic sense of presence uniting the polarities.

This is the quality. This, of course, is an extraordinary development. It's a development that bases itself upon the Alexandrian development of allegory and metaphor. But whereas the Alexandrian Hellenistic Jewish idea exemplified by Philo, that one should learn to allegorize and one should learn to make metaphor extend meaning into realms of increased mental labyrinths, Jesus turns that upside down and shows that the making of allegories, the making of metaphors, is exactly the process that has to be reversed, so that instead of the meaning going out into allegory, that that same kind of a process is imploded so that all of the meanings come to rest to the same focus, that focus being a sense of interior presence, which the individual then recognizes. Is an eternal self. In the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus said, men possibly think I have come to throw peace upon the world, and they do not know. I've come to throw divisions upon the earth, fire, sword, war. And he said, if you fast, you will beget sin for yourselves. And if you pray, you will be condemned. And if you give alms, you will do evil to your spirits. And if you go into any land and wander in the regions, if they receive you, eat what they set before you.

Heal the sick among them, for what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out from your mouth, that is what will defile you. The emphasis upon an internal focus is an emphasis that in the internal individual, the real person exists. Not the mask, not the conditioned set. But indeed that most personal sense. But if one is caught in the allegorizing, if one is caught up in the mental projection of this sense, then the person, the interior person will seem to occur as a transpersonal. And this transpersonal will then be projected outward and need to be cast upon some other object in the world. And this is where the false idols gain their energy. This is where the demonic gains its, uh, currency. In Thomas we read, Jesus said, I shall choose you one of 1002 out of 10,000, and they shall stand as a single one. His disciples said, show us the place where thou art, for it is necessary for us to seek it. And he said to them, whoever has ears, let them hear within a man of light there is light, and he lights the whole world. When he does not shine, there is darkness. This quality of the interiorization, this quality of the light occurring, it is the light then. Not symbolically, not allegorically, but the light as illumination. Then that becomes life. That life is an illumined dynamic. But as an illumined dynamic, only has its traction when it comes from some one, so that the achievement of a person is absolutely essential.

Without the achievement of a personal, there is no sense of real life. Thus not the consciousness, but the character, the character itself. The personal character becomes the issue. This notion of community we have seen becomes extremely important here. In the communion. It is not the bread and the wine. And as we saw in the Gospel of Philip originally in the communion, there was also olive oil. There were three elements oil, wine and bread. There was a triune element. The oil had been weeded out of the communion. The oil is the element for the Holy Spirit. This communion, in the doctrinaire approach and in Allegorizing approach, in a metaphorical approach, it is the shared bread and wine that knits together the congregation. But in the experience that Philip and John and Thomas give us of Jesus, the community is the body of the people who are nourished by this bread, by this wine, by this oil. It is the congregation, is the community itself, that is the unity and is the efficacious element, and that their sense of personal presence is a shared continuum among themselves, so that the Christian community, in its more Gnostic mode, we have to use that terme now, because it became that very quickly in Alexandria at this time, in its Gnostic mode, became a an experience of shared immanent presence.

But when the allegorizing mind tried to explain this to itself and to others who had not the experience, it converted itself into a transcendental, speculative, shared self, as if it were a heavenly body, a heavenly person. And one then was faced with a duality that there is another being which is yourself, which is in heaven, which is clothed with the garment of light. And that is this that one needs to approach. This, of course, is a very difficult distinction to make, but in early teachings it was the quality of internal presence which was shared, which was the community. So in Thomas we read, Jesus said, whoever is near to me is near to the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom. Jesus said the images are manifest to man, and the light which is within them is hidden in the image of the light of the father. Let's try that. The images are manifest to man, and the light which is within them is hidden in the image of the light of the father. He will manifest himself, and his image is concealed by his light. Jesus said, when you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into existence before you, which neither die nor are manifested, how much will you bear? The illumination of the individual who is still keeping one foot in the mind, one foot in the ideational realm, one foot in the psychic realm runs a risk of being short circuited.

And this was a very great danger. Jesus said, Adam came into existence from a great power and a great wealth, and yet he did not become worthy of you. For if he had been worthy, he would not have tasted death. The foxes have their holes, the birds have their nests. But the Son of Man has no place to lay his head to rest. Now, the popular interpretation of that as being one of wandering, solitary loneliness completely misses the point. The reason why the Son of Man has no particular place to lay his head is that it is a spiritual presence which has no need of any particular place. Any place. Every place. Is home. It's that kind of a quality. Towards the end of the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas records Jesus said, the heavens will be rolled up and the earth in your presence, and he who lives on the living one shall see neither death nor fear. Because Jesus said, whoever finds himself of him, the world is not worthy. Woe to the flesh which depends upon the soul. Woe to the soul which depends upon the flesh. And they ask him, when will the kingdom come? And he said, the kingdom will not come by expectation. They will not say, see here or see there, but the kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. Simon Peter said to them, Let Mary go out from among us, because women are not worthy of the life.

And Jesus said, see, I lead her so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. And the Gospel of Thomas ends there with that the bringing up of the deepest quality of the self, so that the complementation of the surface personality brings itself into an equilibrium. And this equilibrium is sustained only by a sense of spiritual presence. If it is done within a mind, the mind cannot hold this quality in its unity, and so reduces it to an equivalence. And so in this equivalence, the mind then seeks to fortify the equivalence by extending an allegorical interpretative ness, almost like a net of understanding around it. And of course, this has no grounding except in further extension, and this eventually ends up in projecting out in forms of anxiety and uneasiness into the world and onto other people, justification for keeping this equivalence there, so that literally one's sense of mental identity is a phantom illusion, and living according to that kind of identity I am. I leads one into a paranoiac, delusionary world almost automatically, almost by structure and by design, that only a sense of unity, which is not an equivalence, can transform that. And it's rather like taking the one equals one, and seeing that the equal sign must be transformed into a horizon where the one goes over one and one over one is a unity.

It's that kind of a transformation in the gospel according to John, this is the most difficult element in the teaching. How this happened and the latter half of the gospel according to John deals with the Last Supper, the First Communion, and in the communion, what is brought out is the sense that Jesus is going to leave the situation because of an essential quality which needs to come into the situation, which is not there. As long as he is there, the quality which needs to come in, he calls in Greek it is called the Paraclete or a Paraclete, a spiritual counselor, a Holy Ghost, a Holy Spirit. Actually, in the current translations, it's called the Spirit of truth, that the spirit of truth can only occur if Jesus, as a personal, is taken out of the situation. That Jesus as a personal has culminated, has brought together a culmination of all of the Scripture, of all of the laws, so that, as we talked about last time, the culmination then displaces those laws. And by taking the culmination away and with it, then the efficacy of all the displaced laws leaving in its stead one simple commandment love one another. The spirit of truth, then is able to come and all. Things are able to be understood by man from that. This is the direction in the Last Supper.

The institution of communion by the Last Supper is only the, um, dramatic choreography of how this is able to happen. This is how it begins. John writes, it was just before the Passover feast, and Jesus was aware that the hour had come for him to pass from the world to the father. Having loved his own who were in this world, he now showed his love for them to the very end. And he goes on, and he takes off his robe, and he begins washing the feet of the disciples. He wraps a towel around himself, and he's drying their feet. And Simon Peter says, uh, you shouldn't do this, master. And he says, this is what I am doing to show you this is what we must all do. We must care for one another in this way that it isn't master and disciple like you've been thinking, but it's of serving one another, loving one another, and taking care of one another in just this way. And he writes. Or he he, John writes. Let me firmly assure you, no servant is more important than his master, no messenger more important than the one who sent him. Now, once you understand this, happy are you? If you put it into practice. What I say does not refer to all of you. I know the kind of men I chose, but the purpose is to have the Scripture fulfilled. I tell you this now, even before it happens, so that when it does happen, you may believe that I am.

Let me firmly assure you, whoever welcomes anyone I send welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes him who sent me. And this is the way it begins in the development of the meal, in the conversation, the old Ten Commandments are replaced by one commandment. He says, I am to be with you only a little longer. You will look for me. But as I told the Jews, and now I tell you to where I am going, you cannot come. I am giving you a new commandment. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this will all identify you as my disciples, by the love that you have for one another. In this loving for one another, John then brings into the conversation the two other disciples, which are very close to him, Thomas and Philip. And you're seeing now that the structure is that John and Thomas and Philip are form a triad. So in John 14th, um chapter, Lord said, Thomas, we don't know where you're going, so how can we know the way? Jesus told him, I am the way, and the truth and the life. This is entirely commensurate with the quality that's there for Thomas, that there is a presence. That's that's there, Lord, said Philip. Now we shift over to Philip right after this. Lord, said Philip, show us the father.

That's enough for us, Philip, Jesus replied, here I am with you all this time, and you still don't know me. So that there's a quality of recognition of the personal in the presence. The Gospel of Philip presents how one recognizes the personal through love, that a person can only be seen in a state of love, that the completeness, the unita's use the, um, Renaissance terms that Ficino used to use unitas, the unitas of the human individual can only be seen in a state of love. The cosmic completeness of that person only occurs in the state of love. And if that state of love has its context, its other coordinate, that of the quality of spiritual presence, then the recognition in love joined with the spiritual presence, gives us the coordinates of reality, so that the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas brought together give us coordinates of reality. And in John then is that wholeness, that circle of shape which the word confers, that then that presence and that recognition together, that is the divine, that is the life, that is the light. So it's this kind of a. Quality that's there. And of course, it's difficult for us to understand how skewed doctrinaire Christianity has become over the last 17 or 1800 years. Now, as this is established in the Gospel of John, remember that the Gospel of John is a teaching template. It's a workbook of how to learn to see spiritually.

If you miss the lecture last week, it's all on last week's lecture. You can get tapes of it. It's a workbook of how to see spiritually, how to get out of meditation, how to get out of psychic allegorizing into the clarity of spiritual perception by presence and by recognition, through love and understanding that that is a shape of completeness. When that is established, then comes the talk about the Paraclete. Only then, when that stage is set, when that coordinate is there, then Jesus brings in this the spirit of truth, that the spirit of truth can then come the spirit of truth, of course, being the feminine Sophia. Feminine wisdom. The feminine wisdom can only come when there is a home there for her to be in. Only then. So he says, according to John. At this point, if you love me and keep my commandment, what is that commandment? Love one another. Just one commandment. Then, at my request, the father will give you another Paraclete. Or the way that it literally reads in the Greek is another comma, a Paraclete. He is to be with you forever. He is the spirit of truth whom the world cannot accept, since it neither sees nor recognizes him. Two qualities the world cannot see the spirit of truth, nor can the world recognize, because the world does not have a sense of presence. Why? Because the world does not a person. Only human beings are persons.

What does the world have? The world has a prince. The world has a prince who is a fallen angel. He is the liar. He is the Satan. And in the old Hebrew, Satan was never male or female, always neuter. There was always the article The Satan. This is especially poignant in the Book of Job. Um, in the book of job there. There's a day in heaven when the Satan, along with all the other angels, present themselves before the throne of God. And right away the question is, um, where are where have you come from? And the answer is always from roaming to and fro on the earth has no idea of origin or purpose, from roaming to or fro. And many times in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, the Prince of this world is coming. I have to meet him now. But the prince of this world has no person, has no self, has only a power extension in allegory, a power extension in metaphor, a paranoic realm which by its very nature is a lie. The nature of evil in John is one of lying. It's a neurotic, compulsory tendency out of a paranoic mentality. That is why the world then cannot neither sees nor recognizes the spirit of truth. So that the spirit of truth can only be brought into reality by human beings who become themselves. This is why at, uh, as we have seen several junctures during the last 4 or 5 months, that human beings have an enormous responsibility in this universe, that the gods must learn from man.

I shall not leave you orphans. I am coming back to you in a little while. The world will not see me anymore. But you will see me because I have life, and you will have life. On that day you will recognize that I am in the father, and you are with me, and I in you. This is the quality in love of the reciprocality of giving and receiving. That's the perfect reciprocality. One can only receive if one can give, and likewise the other way. And this quality then abrogates the old law of equivalence. Because in identity also there is the implicit notion of differentiation. If one has in the equivalence identity, one also has to have the exclusion, the negative. And this is what goes when they, uh, compromise. Mention is made when the transformation from equivalence to presence is made, and that that presence only can be focused when there is the quality of recognition that comes in the state of love. Whoever keeps the commandment that he has from me is the man who loves me, and the man who loves me will be loved by my father, and I shall love him and reveal myself to him. Lord, said Judas, this is not Judas Iscariot. What can have happened that you are going to reveal yourself to us and not to the world? This is an interesting question.

Now you say you're revealing yourself to us and not the world. What can have happened? Remember, the world has no self. Only human beings. So Jesus answered, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word. Then my father will love him. And we shall come to him and make our dwelling place with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my word. Yet the word that you hear is not my own, but comes from the father who sent me. Now you can begin to see that without an in a sense of of penetrating envisioning the gospel according to John becomes double talk on the surface. It's only when one realizes that there is this dynamic movement from polarity to complementarity, from identity by equivalence to comprehension, by unity, that in the exchange of selves one finds they are all as as he is in here in chapter 14. The tension is raised and Jesus sensing the context in John putting it this way. But now I have told you this even before it happens, so that when it does happen, you may believe. I shall no longer speak much with you, because the prince of this world is coming. Actually, he has no hold on me, but the world must recognize that I love the father, and that I do exactly as the father commanded me. Get up. Let us leave here and be on our way. Now, notice here that the seal of integrity is maintaining the state of love and the state of presence.

And when those two are brought together, then the Holy wisdom is there and can maintain itself. He talks about how the world hates this because the power of the world, the coherence of the world, is kept up by maintaining a paranoid kingdom. Only by keeping the neurotic world intact do the false centers of identity as egos, or as false idols, or as the projected dependence that one has upon ambitions. Only then do they remain viable. And so there is a defensive hate on their part to undercut any attempt to discover the real. And this, of course, um, is, uh, directed to them again in 16. At the beginning, I did not tell you this because I was with you, but now I am going to him who sent me. Yet not one of you asks me, where are you going? Just because I have said this to you, your hearts are full of sadness. Still, I am telling you the truth. It is for your own good that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Paraclete will never come to you. Whereas if I do go, I shall send him to you. Where is he going to go? He is going to go to the father. Where is the father? If he is in heaven up there, the birds are going to get there before us.

If he's under the sea, the fish are going to get there before us. Where is the father? The father is very deeply in within us. It is only by Jesus as the cosmic person of going deep into ourselves and releasing the spirit of truth from in ourselves to come out into our lives. It's only that way that one can have then the illumination of this juxtaposition of the sense of presence and the condition of love that has to be energized. And the only source of energy for it to make it real is the spirit of truth must well up from each individual, from deep inside, from the father who is deep inside. And it's like, Jesus, is that special? Um, primer, that needle, that quality that has to be dropped deep down into the self of each individual to release that spirit of truth, to come back up to the surface, to energize the sense of presence and the recognition in the state of love and thus give reality and illumination. That's the light. That's the light. The mind can only entertain allegorical surrogates of that. But the experience of it, this is different. So he writes or he speaks when he comes. However, being the spirit of truth, he will guide you along the way of all truth. You're saying? I have a lot to tell you, but I could only tell you so much. But when the spirit of truth comes is released from within you, then you will know all things.

For he will not speak on his own, but will speak only what he hears, and will declare to you the things to come. With this concludes the whole section of the Last Supper in the gospel according to John. After that, as the passion, the passion play, the seizure in the garden, and so forth, so that the the moving fulcrum in the gospel according to John in the first half of it is the preparation of the way to teach ourselves how to envision spiritually, how to think, if you will, in spiritual terms. Then comes the great example of the Last Supper, of seeing the relationship between a the character of Jesus, the innermost quality of the father within ourselves, and how they have to come together. It's almost like the image of, um, there's a Chinese image of a well where the rope has to be long enough to get the bucket down to the water, and the bucket has to hold the water to bring it back up. These are the two essential elements. If one has a mental idea of how long that rope is supposed to be, you only play out that much rope. And if it doesn't work, you say the well is dry, but the spiritual sight is that however much rope it takes, that's how much it is. That well, may be extraordinarily deep, so that if one has some kind of a external plotting ness, that in one week or in seven weeks, or in seven years, one is going to be there, do or die, that's the wrong approach.

Totally the right approach in every case is however long it takes. That's how long it takes to plumb down to those depths where the divine within, within oneself can send the spirit of truth back up to the surface and illumine one's sense of reality. As we observed last week, the Gospel According to John when it was written in the late 90s, somewhere between 90 and 95 A.D., was taken to Alexandria. It was not received with as much depth elsewhere in the classical world, even though it was written in Ephesus. In Alexandria, there was a tremendous change that happened because of the arrival of the gospel according to John between 100 and 150 A.D. this change slowly made its way in Alexandria and produced a revolution in the whole outlook of the religious, uh, cosmos of the city, the person who exemplifies more than anyone else. That change was Clement of Alexandria. And so next week we're going to look at Clement of Alexandria, because in him, for the first time, we see the beginnings of what we recognize as proto Christianity. But Clement is not so much proto Christianity of the kind of church structure which we have received. But he is a sophisticated Alexandrian culmination of that experience that began with Mark, who was in Alexandria by 50 AD, and the Gospel of John that came, uh, half a century later, and that the development in between, in The Secret Gospel of Mark and the Gospel According to John, produced in Clement the shift of emphasis from belief to knowledge.

And Clement talks always about gnosis, not in a Gnostic sense, but in a sense of recognition by presence. And we'll see next week by looking into Clement of Alexandria, that we have, for the first time, a complete retrospective understanding of how all of these energies, all of these ideas had, in fact, been brought into a single integrated unity. We look in vain for anybody else who did this other than the character of Jesus. There isn't anyone in all that time. Time period in that whole worldview. Who could have made that other than the character of Jesus? And we can tell from Clement of Alexandria, in retrospect, who lived from about 150 to about 220 AD, we can tell in retrospect that the integration had been made with supreme agility of insight. But what did not respond to this integration was the Roman Empire world, because if it was right, then they were finished. And this became the problem in the second century AD, and the problem became very simply a massive struggle between the power of the world and its control, its authority, and the person sized recognition of presence that was spiritually accurate. The little flames of loving light that were let in individuals, and the massive context of insanity that sought to snuff it out.

And by the end of the second century and the beginning of the third century, this tussle between the flames of spiritually alive individuals and a context of Roman Empire tyranny produced what Jung calls an enantiodromia a complete flip flop of values so that we'll see in a couple of weeks how the third century AD was a living nightmare, absolute living nightmare. And by the time the third century was over, the classical world was in shreds. It would never be put back together again. And when we read the supposed learned documents from the beginnings of the fourth century, what we see are children speculating they no longer have any kind of mature adult sense whatsoever. And this is true for all of the supposedly great authors. When we read, um, somebody like, even as sophisticated as Augustine, the City of God, we can see that he had very little capacity to really understand the classical world as it had been, and sees it with an overlay, a mythological overlay. All of this is a product of the tremendous explosion that happened to the human, uh, character in the third century. But we have to next week look at Clement, because he is the only chance that we have to see, in retrospect, that the integration had been made, that flames of living love could be lit in individuals, but could not be lit in the world because the world was not a person. It was an empire. Well, let's stop there for the night.

END OF RECORDING