Clement of Alexandria

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 51 of 54

Clement of Alexandria
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, November 26, 1985

Transcript:

It is November 26th, 1985. This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School. On this date, this lecture is titled Clement of Alexandria. This lecture is a very crucial lecture. We've been tracing almost the minute, creeping motion of the way in which Western civilization went through an emotional trauma around the turn of the millennium. And we have been spending about eight months tracing patiently from about 250 BC on down to about 100 A.D. and it seems that we've just been creeping along, sometimes not making very much headway, sometimes taking long digressions. Now we're going to jump ahead 100 years. We spent the last 3 or 4 weeks on the Gospels. Not only the traditional Gospels of Mark and John, but the untraditional gospels of Thomas and Philip. And we have seen that the experience of the character of Jesus was so startling for the world at that time, that juncture, that only those who initially had contact with him were able to understand, to pass on the experience of that first generation of individuals who had that contact, who had that experience. The outstanding character was Mark. John Mark. He was the secretary to Peter, Simon Peter, Saint Peter. He was his traveling companion in Rome. He had started to be a traveling companion for Paul, Saint Paul, and had a lot of trouble with Paul's personality and Paul's type of insight, and Paul's Christianity.

And the difference between John, Mark and Saint Paul was the difference between the experience of the personality of Jesus, the character of Jesus, and the nascent Christianity, of the doctrinal understanding of Paul. Now John Mark, after Peter was martyred, took the notes. Of Peter and went to Alexandria, and he is the traditional founder of the Christian Church in Alexandria. Now the church was situated near the wharfs. Near where the food supply which was garnered throughout all of Egypt. And don't think of Egypt as just being a what we think of it today as a desert. Egypt was the Kansas, the Iowa of its day. It fed the city of Rome. It was the personal property. The whole province of Egypt was the personal property of the Caesars. It didn't belong to the people of Rome. It was their guarantee. And all the emperors on down. It was their guarantee that they had control over the population because they could cut off their food supply. And Rome, as the power center was the base of power for the emperor in his political kingly stance. He had to have control of the city of Rome. So the population of Rome was kept on just a few short days or weeks supply of food, so that they were dependent on a on a supply. The Christian church in Alexandria was right next to the corn magazines where the ships would load this food.

This is extraordinarily symbolic to have the early Alexandrian Christian Church and the food supply for the city of Rome together on the wharf. The organization of the early Christian Church in Alexandria was very democratic. The city of Alexandria was divided into 12 precincts, and each precinct had a representative called the presbyter. And those 12 presbyters met together, and they chose a president called a patriarch. And that's how it began. That's how the patriarch. That's how the presbyters began. Very democratic. And the Patriarch was not superior in power. He was merely the governor of the meetings. He was merely the president, the first among the rest of them. This situation in Alexandria. Because of its protection by the emperor's own concern, left Alexandria unscathed almost in an age of rebellions and riots. It was the most quiet, secure place in the Roman Empire. Other places suffered from rebellions, from military incursions, from disciplinary actions. But Alexandria, and especially around where the Christian church was, was almost guaranteed quiet. And so the Christian community there grew enormously. But the population of its growth were from people who were from the other religions, largely pagan religions. And so there had to be established a school which taught and prepared these people to enter the Christian church in that school. It's called the Catechetical School of Alexandria, and it's the first Christian university. The Catechetical School, in fact, was not a separate building, but was held in the home of the teacher.

There was only one teacher, kind of a small operation like this, and it proceeded along those lines for a number of decades, until a very fantastic individual named Pantaenus became the head of the Catechetical School in Pantaenus. Through his reputation, his expertise raised the Catechetical School overnight by his presence to a major institution. Now, Pantaenus was an extraordinarily well-traveled and well-versed individual. He was so famous. That a group of Indian Brahmins sent a deputation to Alexandria and brought him back to India to examine there a Hebrew manuscript of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, which had ended up in India, taken there by Saint Bartholomew and Pantaenus while he was there, consulted and studied with the Buddhists of that day. This would be about one 3140 A.D. now, the development in India at that time was a gorgeous efflorescence of Mahayana Buddhism. The great development at that time was based upon a powerful ruler named Kanishka, whose empire extended not only throughout most of what we recognize as India today, but on into Afghanistan, over the Hindu Kush, into Central Asia. Because Kanishka was a Kushan prince and his empire extended almost all the way to China, so that when Pantaenus went from Alexandria to India, he went as an invited guest. He went with all the credentials of a great man, and was received. And he was exposed to the cream of Mahayana Buddhism at a time when the empire that was spreading, Mahayana Buddhism went into Central Asia as well as India.

This was an extraordinary meeting in Pantaenus was an incredible individual, and he came back to Alexandria. Saint Jerome says he brought the Hebrew Bible back. We're not able to confirm that. And Jerome lived several hundred years after the event. We don't know. But Pantaenus then? Became interested in developing many ways of insight in the Catechetical School, and his star pupil was Clement of Alexandria. And so Clement got the full benefit of this great man, and got the full benefit of the intuitional insight that was required to understand spiritual truth. And one of the basic elements in Clement's thought is that a human being must start off with faith, what he called pistis faith. And that faith has to be on a sensate basis. It has to be on an understandable sensate basis. And that only within the mysteries of pistius could one then graduate to gnosis. That gnosis was something else. And in fact, that there were two stages in gnosis. One of them was the interior recognition realm of a human being, their spiritual center awakened. And the second was a rising to heaven away from this earth, away from this world in oneself. And there the culmination, the second stage of gnosis, was affected. So that Clement's whole emphasis was, first of all, to wean you away from the pagan world.

And most of the writings of Clement that we have. If you read them without any introduction, they would appall you. His most famous work, The Exhortation to the heathens, contains all kinds of diatribes against the pagan religions and beliefs of the day. He does his best to ridicule them. He writes in here, um, constantly of the stupidity of the pagans, of how they worship fire and water and different gods, and they have no idea of what they're doing, of how it is absurd, and the impiety of heathen mysteries and fables about the birth and deaths of their gods are not even fit for children, that they have, in fact desecrated all human values. And we find the immortality of human beings disgusting and ridiculous, and that, uh, the only thing that could be said for the pagan world was that the philosophers at least prepared people through the study of astronomy and geometry to begin to think and to form some regard in their understanding for the sensate basis of evidence. And Clement will always stress that there is needed evidence in order to have faith up to a certain point, because, he says, then, that faith actually is a very peculiar undertaking. He says sensation is first and of sensation and understanding. The essence of knowledge is formed between sensation and understanding. The essence of knowledge, the essence of gnosis is formed and evidence is common to understanding and sensation.

Well, sensation is the ladder to knowledge, while faith advancing over the pathway of the objects of sense leaves opinion behind and speeds to things free of deception and reposes in the truth. Should anyone say that knowledge is founded on demonstration by a process of reasoning? Let him hear that first principles are incapable of demonstration. Now we have a prejudice in our day which Clement does not share, and which we are well advised to set aside. We associate in our empirical bias that sensate evidence and reasoning go together and are inseparable. But this is not the case. And Clement is saying that reasoning cannot follow the path to gnosis, but that on a sensate beginning one can get a good start towards bringing that sensate. Experience into juxtaposition with understanding and there in the relationship between the two. Gnosis is engendered. Where is it engendered? Not in the mind, but in the person, which is why reasoning cannot follow it. Now the person has to be available for this focus, and it's not a thing. It's not a it's not a meeting as in a synthesis. It's a focus. But the focus can only be apparent in an individual, in a human being who is there, present, aware, alert. And Clement says that the problem in his time is that no one is present to themselves. That what is wrong with all of the pagan religions, the pagan gods, is that they have destroyed human character.

They have made it impossible for a human being to be present to themselves so that they cannot learn. They have no capacity to entertain that focus of the initial gnosis in themselves. And this is what the problem was. And his cue from Pantaenus at the Catechetical School was to bring together an external sifting process, whereby the individual is brought in layer by layer by layer, patiently. Clement, uh, advocated the use of cyclical knowledge. Study everything. Study every single thing. But as you study it to constantly review for yourself what you are understanding, what out of this are you able to understand so that the individual becomes the sifter? And by discussion, the catechetical students and there were men and women, boys and girls, all ages, that community of students progressively over the years became used to working together to achieve their individuality, not their egotism, but individuality and their individuality. Achieved in this way left them open to the experience of community as being an indelible part of their individuality. On that basis, they would have the understanding to bring into confluence with the sensate knowledge and be able then to engender gnosis. Now the doctrine of faith. And we have to use the Greek terms here for faith. Pistis. You're familiar with that from Pistis Sophia, which I hope next week we'll go to Pistis Sophia, the book itself.

Pistons. We think today of faith as being, um, something that you just take, um, blindly that you have to accept. But for Clement, pistons is a very specific event. It is acclimating oneself towards the unknown. It is giving a positive personal ascent, a definite ascent towards the unknown, so that what is the workable veracity in pistons is one's commitment. One does not have an object towards which you are committed. One is in fact discouraged from having an object towards which one is committed. One does not have an idol or an image of the Godhead. One does not, in fact, have anything whatsoever that you could make an image of in your mind or in the material world. Now, this is a very peculiar thing, because the sensate juxtaposition with understanding almost always depends for its viability upon having an image. And Clement is saying that with the divine, we must purposely train ourselves to make an absolute exception. There must be no image whatsoever. There must be no confidence that there is a hidden image whatsoever, that the pistons, the veracity of the pistons is that one's own ascent towards the unknown is unshakable. This is what faith is, that it is unshakable. Now the burden of the proof, the burden of the evidence is not upon God but upon man. Because if you cannot do that, you cannot believe you do not have the capacity to believe. And if you can't do that, you go back to school so that in graduating from the Catechetical School to join the Alexandrian Church after the time of Pantaenus, after the time of Clement of Alexandria, right up to the time of Origen, which takes us up to about two 4250 BC, A.D., right up to the time when Plotinus was viable in Alexandria.

The Christian community in Alexandria was quite distinctly different from the Christian communities elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere in the world, the doctrinal aspects of belief were gaining currency. The church was based upon what you believed in terms of church doctrine and experience. More and more about the time that Pantaenus was teaching Clement in Alexandria, Irenaeus, Bishop of uh Lyon in France, wrote against heresies adversus Haereses, and you have ever after that time increasing Christian polemics against the Gnostics, against Valentinus, against Marcion, against Basilides, against everybody, forming more and more church doctrine in Alexandria. The exception to this was that all of the doctrinal issues were but curricula that you studied and sifted through in order to set aside, and that the mysterium of the character of Jesus and the nature of the divine was unknown, and could only be determined by one's individual capacity to assent, to believe in it implicitly unshakably, and that one's own assent was the only evidence that there was. This formed a spiritual character. This did not form a religious character in the sense of the creed.

It did not form a psychological character in the sense of ego, but it formed a spiritual character. And Alexandrians become, towards the end of the second century, in the beginning of the third century, very peculiar people, because when you had a large community of individuals like this, I should think many thousands. They were a standout. And because of this, in 202 A.D., the first severe Christian persecution in Alexandria was undertaken by the emperor Severus. Septimius Severus was from the province of Numidia in Africa. So severe was this persecution that the Catechetical School was almost knocked out of business. Clement was forced to flee. Because Clement was the focus of this, because Clement had hit upon the right way to educate human beings to spiritual freedom. And when you do this by the thousands, when you do this approaching almost the tens of thousands, you have created an incredible negative in terms of authoritarian power, but an incredible positive in terms of spiritual energy. And it shows up the ineffectualness of worldly power. What can they do to you? And so Clement became the focus of a great Christian persecution in 202 A.D. he lived on for at least another 17 or 18 years. He fled to Jerusalem and Syria and Antioch. But almost all of his writings come from this, this time of just before the persecution. And in fact, his writings are a perfect example of how when you really beard the lion, he bites.

Now, in Clement's idea of pistis, we come back to this for a minute because this is extremely important. We don't understand this anymore, and it's the very core of spirituality. Pistis is a very peculiar attitude of the human mind, because we have to understand that the mind itself can understand only in terms of reasoning, only in terms of intellectual demonstration, that this procedure is a process, and that this process always tends towards a conclusion, and that there is a way to organize the process of reasoning so that it leads to an inconclusiveness, so that one understands in a rational way that you have exactly, precisely gotten to the open end of that line of reasoning that there is no conclusion. That you can go back and you can recheck that process. It's absolutely right. It's absolutely true. You have followed every logical path. Exactly. And it leads to openness. And when you can do that for every single logical pathway, every avenue that is available for the mind, and you end up at the same openness, then you have pistius, then you have faith which is unshakable. How are they going to tell you it isn't so? You know that it's so what arguments are they going to use? You've used them yourself, but you've used them meticulously and you've found that they lead to openness. How do you know that God is real? Because there's no way that he cannot not be.

That's pistius. This is then a firm conviction. This is a conviction. And Clement says that only then does a human being have the conviction. Only then, and that this conviction then allows you to position yourself in your ascent, and your saying to this mysterium to begin to understand truth, that truth is not a mental product, but that truth occurs in its fullness and only can occur to a mind which has cleaned itself out, which has formed this open frame of reference within itself, created a whole within its logical patterning, where all the patterns run to the openness. And it's only there in that space, that gap, that presence of the pause, that truth finally occurs to man. And Clement says at that point, one is a Christian. Then you are a Christian. Then you understand, because nobody had ever done that before Jesus, that that's what he had done. That's what he had passed on. He had passed on that capacity to do that. That is redemption. That is the kingdom. When one is there in that presence, one is not transcendental or imminent, one is not rational or in any other mode except in the kingdom, that the divine is all that there is there, and that truth comes through this clement. Calls gnosis. This is quite a different thing from the usual understanding of, um, uh, what we would call, um, uh, Gnostic revelation.

You can see how powerful this is. This makes then gnosis a very peculiar non functioning occurrence. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't go any further. There's no more development. It is as it is. It occurs. And Clement says that when a human being in his character has that gnosis present in himself, he is able then to take himself away from this world into that center. It's almost like the, uh, I containing the pupil in the middle of the iris, that when you're able to see with the pupil, you can carry your whole presence into that pupil. And wherever that pupil has seen, you can go there. And the pupil of the presence within one's character spiritually sees only God, and one goes there, and that's heaven. Now, this is a perfect Alexandrian presentation of nirvana. It's exactly what sophisticated Mahayana Buddhism would say is the way to enlightenment. You can read Ashvaghosha Awakening of Faith, or you can read the gospel according to John, and you can use Clement's technique, and you can get to the very same exact no place that's home. This made Clement the number one target for the Roman emperor, because he was dangerous, because he's training people by the thousands to be free of the Roman world. The only way to deal with this was to cover it up. Now, Clement, in his writings again and again assures us that there is a esoteric, secret tradition, that it's not just a question of throwing pearls before swine.

It's a question that there is an esoteric tradition because one cannot tell someone, as I am telling you tonight, these things and expect them to understand. First of all, they won't believe it. Second of all, if they happen to get curious and believe it, they'll make a mental image of it. And if they make a mental image of it, it will complicate their existential occurrence of actually enjoying it, living it. The image will get in the way. It'll seem like an analogy. And this is exactly what happens in paranoiac, uh, phenomenon. One makes a perfect rational image of truthfulness and believes that. And that image doesn't work because it doesn't have any veracity in the world, only in your mind. And because you can't make it work in the world, you get upset because you know it's true in your mind. And how dare the world not behave according to reason? And this is how one churns the ocean, as the Vajrayana says, and you really churn the ocean because you know darn well that you've thought this through. So they have to be stupid. They have to be wrong. The world has to be crazy, because you've got to this realization perfectly well. And you have only you've just made an analogy. Nothing real. It's just mental. And you spend your wheels and you can burn out if you keep on.

So it's with great practical, spiritual insight that Clement forbids. And the Catechetical School in Alexandria forbid, and the whole Christian church in Alexandria forbid talking about these esoteric mysteries until one was thoroughly prepared, until one had been in the community for a long time. And the tradition of this then goes all the way back to those communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, but especially the Therapeutae out across Lake Mariota's from Alexandria, that it took you a long time before you were admitted into the community, and that the process of being admitted into the community was learning to time yourself to a spiritual sine wave that occurs in human nature, and the sine wave occurs every 50 days, every 49 days. And then the 50th day is is day one. Of a new cycle, that there is a spiritual rhythm in human nature. A bio rhythm if you want to use the terms today. Every seventh Sabbath, which is a seven. Every seventh seven. Every 49th day in the cycle is a portal by which one can conclude. A spiritual realization. And if you tune yourself patiently over the years to that 49 day cycle, you can begin to experience the truthful motion of reality in life. And that truthful motion is light. That's the light. So that real time can be computed for the first time by Jubilees.

Real time is what actually occurs in the spiritual veracity of human life, not in terms of clocks, not in terms of edicts by the Caesars, not in terms of what people think is happening because it's some pagan calculation, but because of this cycle and this essence. The difficulty with the Therapeutae, which were a special case of the Essenes, a very powerful case of the Essenes. The difficulty with those communities was that they were outside of the world. They were monastic. They were for men and women, but they were monastic. Clement and Pantaenus. And these individuals in Alexandria found a way to bring that out of the monasteries and put it into life, put it into families, put it into men and women, not only as individuals but as married couples, so that this tremendous spiritual capacity was with engineering like precision brought into the human community. And that's why, when it was understood what he was doing, Severus lost control of his temper in order to complete persecution of the Christians in Alexandria, and put a reward out for Clement's head because he had found the way out and was teaching it. Authority does not mind if you go off and do your own thing. They have never minded that you're just getting out of our way, but to stay in there and produce results which, if the word gets out, will proliferate. And where is it going to end? It's going to end by the entire population being free.

That's the only possible ending that there is. And its growth is rather almost like a geometric growth. Clement had shown by 200 AD that man was sophisticated enough to free himself completely from this world, by the thousands in town, in families. It was an unheard of revolution. Now in gnosis. Clement had to stress several items. One real gnosis, by its essential nature, must be a secret esoteric tradition. It cannot be given to everyone. You have to be prepared patiently in order to have it. Think of it as you have to construct the eye. This is how Clement would talk. You have to construct the eye before you can see. You think you have eyes. You do not have eyes. You do not know how to see. We have developed therefore a technique, an educational cycle by which you can develop your eyes to see, your ears to hear. And when you have eyes to see and ears to hear, then you will have the sensate basis upon which understanding can meet it. And in that relationality will be born that first gnosis. But you have to be transformed. You have to be reconstructed. You have to be patiently brought from profanity, from paganus into reality. And it takes a long time to wake up. And one of the difficulties is, is that as you begin to sense that you are making the transformation, the profane, egotistical self balks at it and says, I'm not going to go, that's a death.

And it sure is a death for the ego. You're not going to be the same anymore. You're. Are going to be able to go and shop at Vons just like old times. You're not going to be able to drive the freeways just like you did, because you're going to be conscious. And all of the absurdity of all of the illusion is going to occur to you in one massive, indigestible realization that the world is crazy. That is a complete delusion. All of it. Now, if you get stuck there, if you balk at that and it sticks in your craw, you become a Gnostic. You become convinced that this is a dual world. But if you go a little bit farther, if you're brought a little bit farther, you come into the veracity and you become a Christian. You become someone for whom Jesus becomes real. If you're there in the experience of understanding and reformed sense, coming together to produce that first gnosis, if you stay there, here on this planet, in this world, seeing the ugliness of all the illusion, then you're a Gnostic. But if you're able to take that and rise with it into the kingdom, then then you have eternal salvation. Then the compassion matches. The wisdom of seeing through the darkness of this world.

Then the compassion is, is not only is this world evil and full of illusion and delusion, but that it doesn't really matter because none of it is real. I hope you notice how the machines cut off. They don't like to hear this. Because if we understand what we're saying, we'll turn them off. I mean, we don't need to record this. We don't need to have the mind record this. I'm speaking in esoteric way now. We don't need those rafts. All we have to do is get across the stream of consciousness and we just leave all that behind. What do we need? So that's why they. They shut off and the lights blow out. Because everything is real. Everything senses that coming along. The culmination of gnosis is that it must rise. It must rise to God. If it stays in the individual qua individual, then you're a Gnostic. If the individual rises at that moment in his sense of spiritual reality goes home, then he is saved. In Clement's writings. There's a large work called the Stromateis. In Greek it means miscellaneous. He likes to talk about gnosis, representing something hidden. It's hidden and that only a very few people can know. And he offers in various areas of this huge several hundred page book, The Miscellaneous the Stromateis. He offers some insights. And there's a little list here. The objects which are recorded to stay on the Holy Ark symbolize what is within the intelligible world, which is hidden, enclosed to the many.

The prophet indicates that the holy, really mystical speech concerning the Unregenerated Ungenerated principle and its powers must remain hidden. This is esoteric speech which speaks only truth, and it's like a hieroglyph. And if you can't read the hieroglyph, you don't know what it is, because it isn't language in the mental sense of verb and noun and grammatical sense and syntax. It's only that the hieroglyph of that that's true. And this is a secret speech, and only by one's quality of presence being refined in order to receive truth can that occur in oneself. He also writes, the Gnostic about whom I speak comprehends what seems to be incomprehensible to other people. They say, oh, this is incomprehensible. And the Gnostic says, precisely. I comprehend that it's incomprehensible. And in doing that I understand. Well, to someone who has an undisciplined mind, that is an unrefined, untransformed mind, this is double talk. This is exactly what is crazy about them. How can they live such pure lives and be so calm and and think these weird thoughts? We'd better get rid of them. He writes also in a hidden way and in mystery. Clement always uses the Turm of Mysterium. It's a mystery. Why is it a mystery? Because it cannot be formed. It is, of its nature, unfathomable. And we can have occur in us the unfathomable ness.

It doesn't bother us. In fact, it's downright homey. This is peculiar. So, in a hidden way and in mystery, according to allegorical interpretation, such things are said into the ear. Scripture keeps its meaning hidden for several reasons. First, that we may be disposed to search. If it weren't hidden, if it weren't acrostic in its structure, we wouldn't have the tussle with it that we have to have. We have to have a struggle. There has to be a spiritual struggle. One has to accept the suffering. Because without that struggle and that suffering, we don't become keyed up enough to realize that we have to change. We have to transform. And a good spiritual teacher, when he or she sees someone who can become spiritually mature and sees them balking at it, always makes sure that they're uncomfortable. You can count on it at a certain stage where you have to make a transformation. Spiritually, it would be a sin to coddle you and leave you where you are because you cannot stay there. You cannot remain a child. You cannot remain an adolescent. You cannot remain 20 years old. The time has come for you to transform, to change, and this has to be effected. And if you don't do it yourself, and a spiritual teacher cannot do it by goading you to do it, making you even more intolerably uncomfortable, then you have to be left alone on your pile of ashes until you do it yourself, because your own inner spiritual sense will finally do it.

Finally make life so uncomfortable for you that you can no longer stay there. It keeps narrowing the world of possibilities down until it's a razor's edge, and you can't sit on it anymore. There's nothing safe or secure or pure or nice anymore. The nice world is gone. Where in the world did it go? It went because it had to go. Because in spiritual maturity, you can't cling to this earth. You can't cling to Mama and Daddy. You can't cling to the ego. You've got to let go of it all. And it takes faith to do that. And that's why pistis is essential. Before you can have gnosis. And pistis is giving your assent to the unknowable 100%, and only your ability to commit 100% to the unknowable. Only that assent is your veracity. You're all alone in the cosmos. You don't have one single clue. You have got nothing to stand on. You've got only your capacity to say, I do. That's the spiritual marriage. And when you say I do and mean it, then gnosis comes and you understand that that's it. Isn't that mysterious? No one else had to say I do at all. Just you. You had to give yourself permission through belief to have knowledge that that was it. And then you have to let that rise to the all.

Then you're home free. You can see that Clement is an extraordinary individual. If you read his collected works, if you read his exhortation to the heathens, his miscellany, if you read his, uh, pedagogy, the instructor, you will not come to what is being presented here tonight. Because those works were meant for students coming in out of the cold. The exhortation to the heathens was meant to disenchant. It's filled with all kinds of of vile pagan practices. Some of the contents of this are so, uh, stiff that they don't even translate the Latin. They just put the Latin in here. That's what they used to do. Because he wants you to understand how rotten things are. And so he gives you a complete survey of hell, a complete survey of hell. You think this is a nice world? Read em and weep. This is what people do. This is what they believe. You think sacrificing little children to bits of wood is nice? This is a nice world. And so the exhortation to the heathen is meant to give you a little tour of the cemeteries, a little tour of the mortuaries to show you what deadness looks like. Living in this way is really dead. Then the instructor, the pedagogy is like the Purgatorio. It's like bringing you into equilibrium and showing you how, showing you how, showing you how. This is how we do it. You don't have to stay in that world.

You can step by step, just like all of us have done, learn to disengage and come this way, to stop trying to pin the tail on the donkeys out there and make an ass out of yourself and stop those games and be able to start to interiorize interiorize meaning interiorize significance, and see that all significances, all meanings that really conscientiously and consciously followed through end in an openness which is a quality of spiritual presence, and into that occurs truth. And if that rises, one is free. The truth shall make you free, says John, not a mental truth. He's not talking on that level at all. He's talking spiritually. He's saying that truth will make you free. And he meant it. I think we better just end there. We're going to come to Pistis Sophia next week. Clement is a man. The Pistis Sophia presents what we have talked about tonight from the feminine, and I think it'll be interesting to you if you compare the cassette from tonight to the cassette from next week. But this is Sophia. I did five lectures on it the PS one time. So we have a lot of of cassette material here on it, but I'll take it up again from scratch extemporaneously and present it again. You can see that we just need to know this. There's no where else that we can find it except in our new Alexandria.

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