Transcription
And the author who's with us tonight is a man who in his his past writings has shown that he is no stranger to these traditions. Uh, that that he understands and studies and uh, and thinks about these traditions in in ways that that have a lot to teach all of us. And and I'm excited about getting into his new book and and seeing where that takes me. And I'm very excited and honored to have him here as our presenter tonight. And I give you Tim Wallace Murphy.
[Applause]
Thank you very much indeed. Uh, and Brother Tom, that was the most appropriate introduction I've ever had the pleasure of receiving. Our most worshipful Masters, Brethren, ladies and gentlemen. A few words about me, then. A little introduction to the ideas of spirituality, and then we'll go straight into the meat of the book. However, a health warning. Uh, it's impossible to condense a book that took over 18 months to write into a little less than an hour of talk, even with illustrations. So, what I intend to do tonight is tease you. I want to provoke you. I'm not here to inform, and I'm certainly not here to educate. I'm a spiritual burr under your saddle. My idea and my function in life is to make people think about the standards and beliefs they've taken for granted all their life, to question them. And if they happen to validate them, that's fine. If they find them faulty, then with a bit of luck, they will start searching because it's all a quest, a long search.
Now, my name is Tim Wallace Murphy. It's a rather odd name for a very eccentric Irishman. I sometimes have been described as a two-fisted, fast-talking Irishman with both feet planted firmly in mid-air. And I grew up in a rather odd background. My father was an Irish Catholic, my mother was a French Jew. So I'm a Franco-Irish Yiddish boy who survived a Catholic education. And if you want to grow up spiritually confused, I can assure you that's a pretty good way to go. Many years ago, I studied the noble art of medicine. And although I was academically brilliant, I realized it wasn't for me. And I deserted the noble art of medicine, thereby probably saving more more lives than your local hospital. And I announced to the world my intention of becoming a writer. And the guy standing next to me in the bar I was in at the time was a fellow called Brendan Behan, who was a very famous Irish writer of his time. And and he said, "Jesus, Timmy, every Irishman's got a good novel in him, and that's usually the best place to keep it."
Now, undeterred by this salient piece of wisdom, I traveled the world and sought for material for the great Irish novel I have yet to write. And became slightly disillusioned with myself and with life in general. And eventually started following a spiritual path. I went back to college, got a PhD in in Psychology. And some 15 years later, there was still this germ of an idea at the back of my mind: I want to be a writer. And one of my clients who had a massive drink and drug problem was a very gifted, very flawed human genius called Trevor Ravenscroft. He'd written a bestselling book back in the '70s on spirituality, the history of spirituality, called *The Spear of Destiny*. And he'd written an even more important book about the Grail sagas, called *The Cup of Destiny*, which I could recommend to each and every one of you. Trevor and I became good friends. I started writing with him. We wrote a book together, a sequel to *The Spear of Destiny*. And sadly, he died before it could be published. And I carried on writing. I'd found what I was here for. Not writing novels. All my work to date, apart from the book I'm working on at the moment, has been about one form or another of spirituality because it is the core of life. And as Tom has so wisely mentioned, its roots lie back in the earliest times, in prehistory.
Now, a lot of people get confused between spirituality and religion. And some years ago, a colleague of mine faced just exactly that problem. And his teacher very wisely refused to answer the question, "What was the difference?" and suggested he talked to an expert. And recommended a Jesuit priest. And my friend was a lapsed Baptist from the deep South. And he was horrified at the idea of talking to a Catholic, much less a Jesuit. I said, "You want me to talk to a Jesuit?" "I don't want you to do anything. You want your questions answered. He's the guy to ask." So, much to his intense surprise, he found himself in front of this big, tall, limping Irish priest. And he said, "Father, what's the difference between spirituality and religion?" And he received the following answer: "Well, my son, to explain that, you see, I've got to tell you a little story. Spirituality is the fresh spring water of representing God's love for all of creation, which arises naturally near the top of the mountain. And under God's wonderful gift of gravity, trickles down the mountain side and sustains and strengthens and refreshes everything it touches. Now, religion, that's something else again. That's the well-intentioned, man-made plumbing, which, as often as not, will make the water go uphill where it shouldn't go, and will usually whistle it past your backside without the benefit of a tap. Now, being man-made, it always pollutes the water. So, if you have any doubts, my son, go back to the spring." Which, of course, is what people have been doing since time began.
There was another, much more beautiful definition of spirituality by a great Sufi teacher here in America. And he wrote the following: "Spirituality is a river that descended to Earth through Adam, may God grant him peace, was refreshed by the great prophets Abraham, Moses, Elisha, and Jesus, may God grant them peace, by the great prophet Muhammad, may his name be blessed, and may God grant him peace. It is a river that knows no boundaries in space or culture or time. Yet, sadly, but understandably, every race, every creed, every culture claims it for its own. My brethren, it is always the same river. To which I would add, my friends, it arises in your heart. Learn to bathe in its healing waters and go with the flow. It will lead you to God."
Now, we're going to be talking about the Western esoteric tradition. The Western esoteric tradition was described by Professor Ted Radek, a good friend of mine, as probably the single most imaginative and influential spiritual tradition of European culture. It's a big thing. While there's been enough continuity to use the word tradition, it must be remembered that the tradition vanishes from plain sight periodically, sometimes for reasons of persecution, sometimes for other reasons. It's constantly resynthesizing, reaugmenting itself, and it can usually only be intermittently perceived by the achievement of its initiates. And the list of that, those initiates in European culture are almost without end. Just a few: Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Flood, Bo, Leonardo da Vinci, Vico, Belli, Lafayette, and Washington of American fan, Blake, W.B. Yeats. And one could add Nikola Tesla into that list very easily. And yet, these people all came from different countries and different cultures, but they were all plugged into exactly the same spiritual tradition.
And this spirituality, as Tom has mentioned, starts with our earliest history. The earliest archaeological artifacts we have known to mankind are the cave paintings at Altamira, Lascaux, and Les Trois-Frères in the Ariège in France. And along with those cave paintings were found small figurines representing fertility goddesses of one sort or another. And Jacob Bronowski, when describing the cave paintings, said there was some form of ritual magic. And then he shied away from it because he was an agnostic or an atheist. If he'd gone a little further to Les Trois-Frères, he would have found this one. Now, it's only a drawing because we're not allowed to take photographs. It's a drawing of a man in shamanic costume. And my good friend and colleague, Colin Wilson, who wrote *The Occult*, said that in the earliest primitive tribal societies, there was a small percentage, a predictable percentage of people that he called "the few." And these were the people who knew they had spiritual insight and who sought ritualistic ways of enhancing it. And they sought it not for their own selfish ends, because here's another word that's going to repeat throughout my entire talk this evening: they used it for the benefit of the community in which they moved. It's all about service to other people.
Once agriculture started and the rise of cities and civilizations began, shamanism became formalized into various forms of religion. And these again have left us records. This is a Sumerian cylinder seal, dated about 2,500 BC. And it shows a male God and a female goddess at either side of a tree of light. And behind the God and the goddess is another recurring theme that we're going to be hearing about this evening. It's a serpent. And it has one symbolic representation, and it is represented by the serpent or the winged dragon. And that is the idea of sacred gnosis or sacred wisdom.
Now, that type of religion where there was an initiatory tradition imparting sacred knowledge to a select few reached its peak probably in ancient Egypt. These, of course, are the three Pyramids of Giza. And this, particularly for the members of the Craft among you, is a very important building. It's Khufu's pyramid. It is the oldest masonry building in the world. It actually has seven steps, one of which is covered in sand. And it is held to represent the seven degrees of initiation. It was designed by a genius called Imhotep, who was not only a master architect but is for his medical knowledge, he was equated with the Greek Asclepius. Spiritual knowledge in Egypt sustained an entire empire for several thousand years. And it brought them knowledge of astronomy and science in a worldview that we are still struggling to understand today. They had levels of surgery, brain surgery, that we cannot yet replicate. And you saw earlier on the three pyramids at Giza. A modern construction company, led by a Japanese team of experts using modern technology, could not recreate them. Every time they tried to build them, they collapsed. So, the Egyptians had something we don't, and it's called sacred knowledge or gnosis.
The two kingdoms of Egypt were regarded as a living temple built by Almighty God, wherein man could perfect himself by some transformative or alchemical process. And that transformative or alchemical process was spirituality. And under the panoply of a range of gods, it has been argued that truly Egyptians were monotheistic, and they dedicated their entire lives to the service of others. The initiates of Egypt were the hereditary priesthood and the Pharaonic royal family. And unlike today, where we all go on mass to church, chapel, or synagogue or temple, um, most of the religious rituals in Egypt were conducted by the priesthood alone. The general public only went on to join in on state occasions and special days. Now, the priesthood and the royal family had all the privileges of rank, wealth, position, and power. But their knowledge, their sacred knowledge, was again used to sustain the people of the entire country. And again, we're back to this principle of service.
At the pyramid at of Unas at Saqqara, back at the beginning of the 20th century, or the tail end of the 19th, some chambers were discovered. And they were discovered in a rather odd way. A workman saw a desert fox going into a crack into the pyramid. And possibly descending treasure, he followed it. And inside, he found chambers beautifully decorated. And you can see the ceiling of the chamber here, immediately to my right, which is decorated with five-pointed stars, which also used to decorate the temples of Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylon. And on the left, you will see hieroglyphics. Now, sadly, this photograph is not in full color because the hieroglyphics are beautifully decorated with turquoise and gold. And they are known as the Pyramid Texts, those and others in pyramids around them. Now, although the Pyramid of Unas is quite late in Egyptian history, it has been estimated that the Pyramid Texts embody a vast quantity of knowledge. It's almost an encyclopedia of spiritual traditions that predate the writing of the Old Testament by something like 2,500 years. So, we're looking at what is, in effect, the oldest body of spiritual or esoteric knowledge in the world. And this is what sustained the empire.
Wisdom was afforded special veneration in Egypt, and its symbolic color was black. And one of the seats of wisdom was the veneration of Isis and the Horus child. Mark that well, because it recurs during Christian tradition. Each pharaoh had, by tradition, an obligation, a sacred obligation, to erect two freestanding obelisks on the avenue approaching the Temple of Karnak. And each obelisk was surmounted by what they call a Benben stone, which was like a miniature pyramid. And the Benben stone was the legendary resting place of the phoenix, the bird that burst into flames and then regenerated itself. And again, symbolically, this meant death to the things of this world and rebirth to the things of the spiritual world.
Now, the Pharaoh Thutmose IV broke with tradition. He didn't erect two obelisks. He erected two freestanding pillars which fulfill no architectural purpose whatsoever. And may well be the precursors to Boaz and Jachin. In fact, they might be the actual true Boaz and Jachin, because Solomon's Temple, despite the fact that Israel, who is the most heavily excavated country in the world, has never been found, not in Israel. It might well have been based on something in Egypt. And you will notice on the top of the pillar to my immediate right, there is carved a stylized lily. Now, the lily was not a native plant for Egypt. It was cultivated by the Pharaonic royal family alone and was ingested for its mood-altering or consciousness-altering qualities. And it became symbolic of royal descent from the House of Egypt, and through the House of Egypt, later on, through the House of Israel, and eventually it was adopted by the Capetian kings of France, who claimed descent from Mary Magdalene. So, we have a continuity of ideas here, reaching from the far distant past into relatively modern European history.
Probably the most famous piece of archaeology in the world from Egypt, the death mask of Tutankhamun. And I've put this in because if you notice above his headdress, you have again this twin symbolism of snakes, wisdom, the wisdom of the pharaohs, the wisdom of Egypt. Wisdom is the key.
The transition between Egypt and early Judaism, and this is best encapsulated in some carvings that are on the north portal of Chartres Cathedral, is known as the Portal of the Initiates. Immediately here on my left is the figure of Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, carrying the Grail chalice with the Grail stone protruding from it, an initiate to whom Abraham paid tithes, so he was a man of some considerable importance. Standing in the middle is the figure of Abraham with his son bound and ready for sacrifice. And there, standing at their feet, you will see a ram's head, the ram that was actually used for sacrifice. When Abraham, as he has pictured at this moment, received a message from an angel who's above Melchizedek's head, saying that human sacrifice was no longer necessary or required by the people of Israel. Now, it says in the Bible that Abraham was born in Ur. But if you read Genesis very carefully, you find that he married his sister. And that was a tradition that only existed in one family in the Near East at that particular time, and that was the royal family of Egypt. So, in all probability, the people, the person who the prophet who is regarded as the founder of the people of Israel was Egyptian to start with.
Next to him is the figure of Moses. And Moses again is carrying a tablet of the law here and a rather ornate staff. And entwined around that staff is our old friend, the serpent of wisdom. And that staff is the royal staff of the Pharaonic House of Egypt. And the argument that the Bible set: "Was Moses a pharaoh or a foundling?" may still go on in religious circles. But amongst Egyptologists, it has been settled years ago. The only argument today is, which pharaoh was he? Now, most of the work by Sigmund Freud, Dr. Solomon on the Jewish side, Ahmed Osman from the Muslim world, and Robert Feather from the Christian world, all point unswervingly to a 98% probability that the figure we know as Moses was most probably the deposed Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who was paid to go away with his followers and settled in Canaan. He was deposed and thrown out for a very simple reason: he formed a new, he imposed a new form of monotheism in Egypt, which totally screwed up the entire economy, which was built around temple life in the polytheistic system. So, he got slung out on his ear.
We don't get any mention of the people of Israel for another 200 years until another Egyptian pharaoh called Merneptah conquered the Israelis and erected a stele to that effect in Canaan, saying, "I have laid waste the people of Israel and their seed are scattered." That is the first mention of the Israelis as a separate nation. Don't forget, what you read in the early part of the Bible was written eight or ten centuries after the events it purports to describe. It was written during the exile in Babylon and it was designed as to convey the sacred law or Torah, mythology, and history to well, together a disparate and dispossessed people who were in a state of near despair. And it certainly did that. So, start to rethink about the roots of Judaism. It's Egyptian from start to finish. They use the same terms, they use the same hereditary priesthood. The term "Ark" occurs in both. They had the same animals that they sacrificed. They had the same prohibitions. They even had circumcision, which, previous to that, had been restricted to the Pharaonic royal family. So, start to rethink about where this comes from. The new Judaism that started, or early Judaism, was a direct continuation of a much earlier tradition which predates Judaism by several thousand years, and which had its roots in shamanism. So, there's continuity beginning to build up.
Wisdom in biblical Israel was afforded particular reverence. The cloud that led the people of Israel through the wilderness was regarded as the seat of wisdom. Wisdom adopted was adopted as a feminine form, the Shekhinah, who was regarded as the consort of God, which, if you care to think about, is a rather odd concept for people who claim to be monotheistic, God having a wife. Furthermore, sacred wisdom was attained by following approved mystical paths, such as Merkavah or Ma'aseh Merkavah mysticism, or Hekhalot mysticism. And most of these traditions are held to have derived from teachings brought down by, uh, the brother of Moses. And many, many centuries later, in Christian Europe, well, in Muslim Europe, in fact, in southern Spain, all of these traditions were very largely combined and given written form for the first time as the Kabbalah. And this was done under the tolerant rule of the Muslims in southern Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries, and also in Northern Italy.
The wisdom of Solomon, we are well aware of. And there are constant references to wisdom, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example. At the same time as Egypt was reaching its peak, another culture arose on the other side of the Mediterranean in Classical Greece. It was the first full flowering of European classical consciousness. And to the ancient Greeks, philosophy, science, and spirituality were not separate issues. They were all part of the same deal. They made no difference between spirituality, science, and philosophy. They all had the same roots. And Socrates, pictured here, held that ignorance was the cause of sin, and that if only man learned enough and educated himself enough, he could attain the good and the beautiful and the true and be without sin.
This carving is from the west front of Chartres Cathedral, and it's a rather odd one to find on the west front of a Christian Cathedral. It's Pythagoras, who ran a school at Crotona in southern Italy. And Pythagoras is important to us because he is the first clearly identifiable individual in European history who we know without doubt was an initiate of the Egyptian temple mysteries. He was Europe's first true initiate. And he and Plato founded schools which exerted their effect for not merely centuries, but for millennia afterwards. In fact, the last place I talked in a Masonic lodge was a couple of days ago at the Atlas Pythagoras Lodge in New Jersey. And the light evening it was. And he is responsible for more esoteric thinking than anybody else of his period.
The Greek mystery cults existed. These were cults of initiates. Admission was by invitation only, after a very prolonged novitiate, because spiritual knowledge and spiritual power are neutral. They can be used for good or ill. And this is why any true spiritual fraternity is incredibly selective about who it admits. And there are obvious parallels here with the Craft of Freemasonry. And the cults of the Orphics, the Dionysians, and the Eleusinians. All of their insight on gnosis as a gift from Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice Blessed, otherwise known as the messenger of the gods or the trickster. And Hermes is the purported author of some wonderful works known as the Emerald Tablets, which are still being studied today. His badge is the Caduceus, the staff surmounted by a phoenix. This idea of spiritual regeneration and rebirth, entwined by two snakes representing sacred wisdom. And I would like you to look at that and recall drawings you've seen from the modern era purporting to show the DNA spiral. They're remarkably similar, and that may not be a coincidence. As you'll hear later.
This is a statue of Hermes near the site of the Temple of Hermes in Toulouse in France, where Hermes is still accorded some degree of veneration. And there was a Templar church built within 100 yards of that spot, right on top of the site of the Temple of Hermes. It was built in the 12th century and sadly burnt down in the 14th. And there is another church on its site today.
Greek thought was powerful and pervasive. The Greeks were incredibly creative and deeply spiritual people. But we would know nothing of their learning if it wasn't for another people who were far from innovative, but who were great purveyors of education, and that was the Romans. And the Roman Empire spread from the British Isles in Portugal in the west to Persia in the east, and spanned both sides of the Mediterranean. And it was the perfect vehicle for the dissemination of spiritual ideas. All the Greek mystery cults flourished throughout the empire, as did the Egyptian cult of Isis, the Horus child. The Romans were incredibly tolerant religiously, provided you paid homage to the gods of Rome once or twice a year on the appropriate days, you were free to follow whatever other religion or religions you wished. And so there was a vast, thriving set of mystery schools throughout the empire. And among which, particularly towards the latter days of the Roman Empire, the Mithraic school was probably the most popular because that traveled with the army. And remember, Freemasonry came to the North Americas through the army, through military lodges. So, nothing new is under the sun.
The main responsible for the installation of present-day forms of Christianity in Europe was not Jesus. It wasn't St. Paul. It was a follower of the cult of Mithras, one of the Mithraic cults, a man called Constantine the Great. Now, Constantine the Great was actually born in England. He won a rather vicious civil war. And just before the final battle which gave him victory, he saw a sign in the heavens and he was told, "In hoc signo vinces" – "In this sign you will conquer." And it was the Chi-Rho, a sign used by the Christian cults at the time. And the Christian cults in Rome were persecuted from time to time, not as much as the church would have us believe. And most of the persecution was actually financial. They would lose property and be fined. Uh, but the Christians were very decent, law-abiding people. And Constantine thought he could use them as some form of social cement to heal the wounds created by the civil war. So, he legitimized them and gave them certain advantages. And then, to his intense horror, found they were fighting like cat and dog. And they were fighting over one issue: was Jesus a man and a supreme teacher, or was he God who died to redeem us from sin? Had he come to reveal or to redeem? So, Constantine, the consummate politician that he was, decided to fix this. So, he convened the first rigged council we improve in history. It was called the Council of Nicaea. Invitation only got you to Nicaea. And if you were invited by the emperor, you had to be a bishop at least, and you had your expenses paid. And if, at the end of the conclusion of the business, you went to vote on the various issues, you would find the head of the Praetorian Guard, the Imperial Guard, and his secretary standing over you as you voted. And if you voted the right way, you got magnificently rewarded. And if you voted the wrong way, you got declared a heretic and all your property was confiscated. It was a great way of rigging things. And that gave us the somewhat dubious gift of modern-day Christianity.
But one day, Christianity still carried within it the seeds of the teaching of the people who had actually walked and talked with Jesus, his brothers and his sisters and his apostles, the people who knew the truth, the people who knew that he was a man born like any other, that he was a descendant of David, and that he was a supreme teacher, and that his message was far more important than the man. And so here we have that recorded into carving at Amiens Cathedral. There is Jesus with his hand raised in blessing, the Good News in his other arm, and he has standing on a couple of winged serpents. He is the bridge between sacred knowledge and the Christian teaching, all symbolically nice and simple in a way that the church couldn't object, didn't even notice.
The kingpin of the whole deal happened in the middle of the Dark Ages. The Papal States in Rome, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, were being invaded by barbarians. And they were saved by a usurper who had just taken over the Royal House of the Franks, a man called Charlemagne, who was known as Shaman Charles the Great. And Charles the Great was crowned by the Pope, rather to his surprise, as Holy Roman Emperor. And there were a few odd things about this empire. It wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman, and it wasn't really much of an empire. It was a loose confederation of states. And Charlemagne had to rule this vast area at a time when there was no internet, no telephone, no telegraph, no newspapers. So, he appointed various counts and countesses and barons and lords, and he appointed them all from a family, a set of families he could trust. You see, Charlemagne was a claimed to be a direct descendant of the House of David. He was a member of a group of families who claimed descent from the 24 hereditary priestly families who were the hereditary High Priests of the Temple of Jerusalem, priests who had deserted the temple after the Greeks defiled it during the Greek occupation and had set out sharp near the Dead Sea and formed a very spiritual and very strict organization called the Essenes, again, an initiatory cult. And Jesus was not Jesus of Nazareth, because Nazareth didn't bloody well exist when he was walking the earth. He was Jesus the Nazarene. He was an initiate of part of the Essene business. So, here we have a direct descendant of these people in a position of power, putting all the people he could trust into power throughout southern Europe and Western Europe. And as a result, from the time of Charlemagne onwards, members of the Rex Deus families had positions of power throughout Europe. And as I mentioned earlier on, the Capetian kings of France, who ruled until the 13th or 14th century, adopted the Fleur-de-lis as their emblem because they claimed descent from the Magdalene. We will say who the Magdalene's father, father of her children were, in a moment.
Now, at the time of Charlemagne, Europe was in a state of abject misery. Life was short and brutal. Nobody, not even Charlemagne himself, could write his name without assistance. The only people with any education were the priesthood, and their education was severely limited to a little bit of Neoplatonism and some classical Latin, because that was always deemed necessary by the church. Everything else was pagan and thrown in the dustbin. The Greek scholars, the Nestorian scholars, had been expelled from Christian Europe and had found refuge in what is now Persia, Northern Persia, a place called Gundishapur. And there, amongst their Arab brethren, the learning was treasured and transcribed into Arabic. And with the advent of Islam, the whole picture started to change. Because while Christians were busy having conventions, debating how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, or had a whole school of study of theology, the nature of God, in the Holy Quran, it says that anybody who tries to decipher the nature of God is crazy. But if you want to know about God, you study his works in nature. And so, a flourishing series of schools and scholarships started studying nature, science, the Greek texts which they had inherited from the Nestorian scholars. And the world's biggest library was amassed at Baghdad.
With the advent of the Moorish invasion of Spain, Moorish toleration came to Europe. Now, in Christian Europe, pagans and Jews alike were persecuted. In Moorish Spain, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side by side. Each had their own schools, they had their own education. The foundations of European literature were laid there. The foundations of European science were laid there. There was a university at Cordoba in the 9th century, which later became the role model for the University of Paris, and later, in its turn, through Paris, the precursor of Oxford and Cambridge. And it was from Spain that knowledge of the Greek classics started to seep back into northern Europe. The Greek classics were translated, not from Greek, but from Arabic. And not by Christian scholars, but by the most multilingual group of people in Spain, namely the Jews. It was at the Jewish yeshivas that the Greek classics were translated into European languages and into Latin. And then, through the Rex Deus influence, spread back into Chartres, the theological school at Chartres, which stimulated a movement known as the medieval schoolmen, the schoolmen of the medieval Middle Ages, people like Thomas Aquinas. And they would not have been able to do their studies without this input from the classical times, an input which came in despite the church, not because of it. And it is for that reason that Pythagoras and Socrates are carved on the west front of Chartres Cathedral. This is the reason why you have an ancient initiate and a couple of pagans on the west front of a Christian church.
And in Moorish Spain, we not only had glorious architecture, such as this at the Alhambra, but we had scientific studies. They produced this instrument. It's called an astrolabe. It is the precursor to the sextant. And a Christian monk called Nicholas of Lynn in the 1300s used one of those. It was a new toy to him, to explore the North Atlantic, an island hop right across the North Atlantic, setting a precedent for another member of the Rex Deus families, Sir Earl Henry Sinclair of Orkney and Roslin, who crossed the Atlantic 100 years before Columbus landed in Nova Scotia, over in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and went back and forth at least twice. And that is recorded not only in stone in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, it's recorded here in the United States as well, with the carving of the Westwood Knight at Westwood in Massachusetts, and the erection of probably the most controversial building in the United States, which is namely the Old Stone Mill at Newport, otherwise known as the Newport Tower, which is built precisely according to Templar principles. I wrote a book about that some years ago, which got the dreadful title *Templars in America*. But I blame my publisher for that, not me. The book was good, the title was dreadful.
And this, in Christian Europe, the spirit of initiation was kept alive throughout the Dark Ages and the medieval period by several initiatory orders, orders of people who the church even today describes as illiterate workmen. Illiterate, my backside. They were highly skilled people. These were the craft masons who built the glories of Chartres Cathedral, who built Cologne Cathedral, who built Notre Dame, and who built every major church building in Europe. They had no architects. They worked as teams. Now, Chartres Cathedral was built in the unbelievable time of 30 years, and it was built by five separate craft Masonic teams, all working seemingly independently to one another. There is no existing overall plan for the place, and yet the whole thing comes together as a harmonious whole which baffles description. It enhances the powerful earth energies that are already there. It is acoustically perfect, and it is a place of incredible beauty. Professor Joseph Campbell described it as his parish church, and I regard it as mine, although I live about 600 miles from it.
Now, these craft masons were divided into four main groups. They were known, they're known today collectively as the Companions. And they were the Companion Masons who built bridges, made road structures, and built castles. The Children of Mother Subis, who mainly worked in the Romanesque style with rounded arches, thick wall buildings that couldn't rise very high because of the structural inherent structural problems with it. Then there were the Children of Solomon. And this is a very, very disputed group. It's very difficult to discern. Were they actually part of the Templar order? Were they merely affiliated to them, or were they employed by them? The Templars certainly gave them their rule, and they built in the new style that the Templars had brought back the secret from the Holy Land: how to build with a pointed arch. They got that from their Sufi brethren in Jerusalem. And the first pointed arches that the Templars have commissioned are still there to this day on Temple Mount, and were replicated at Saint-Denis in Paris and at Chartres Cathedral in France almost immediately afterwards.
Now, with Gothic building, the pointed arch, the flying buttresses, the stresses are totally different, so you can build high, you can build within walls, you can have large window spaces which allow the glories of stained glass to come into play. And the mystery at Chartres is that the stained glass there is particularly special. The secret was brought back by the Templars from near Persia. And that stained glass filters out certain wavelengths of light and only allows those through that are conducive to a change in consciousness. So, all the things necessary, physical conditions necessary for a change of consciousness, can be found in Chartres and in several other cathedrals too. The light is right, the earth energies are enhanced and amplified, and the acoustics are perfect. And it's all about spiritual change of consciousness, transformation. God was regarded as the Architect of Elegance. That's not so different from the Great Architect of the Universe, is it? And here he is depicted in a medieval manuscript dating from the 13th century.
Now, this is the earliest piece of Masonic carving I have yet to meet in Europe. Masonic symbolism. You will note here the square, the compasses, and our old friend, the serpent of wisdom. That's in a little tiny little provincial church at a place called Uzerche, and it dates from the 11th century. The next earliest ones I found are in stained glass windows in Chartres, which date from the 13th century, and that is in superb condition. And it's only about 10 miles from the church of La Roche-Rigault, which is decorated with the coat of arms of the Knights Templar, to commemorate the fact that the Knights Templar, the founding members of the Knights Templar, Hugh of Champagne and Bernard of Clairvaux, all met there before the order, before they went to Jerusalem for the formal recognition of the order by King Baldwin III. They passed over the coast of Italy into Northern Italy to a place called Sorga. And at Sorga, there is a large Cistercian abbey founded by Bernard himself and headed by the Abbot Edward. And that abbey was founded to house some unspecified great secret. We're still trying to figure out what that was. But the Knights Templar were formally instituted in secret at Sorga, and Hugues de Payens was appointed its Grand Master.
When they came into the open in Jerusalem, they were courted in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and their intention, stated intention, was to protect the pilgrimage routes. Now, how nine or eight or nine elderly knights, who were well past their sell-by date, were going to do that is remains a bit of a mystery, particularly as they did nothing of the sort for the first nine years. Yet they burrowed through solid rock in Temple Mount, 120 feet down, and then dug a series of radiating tunnels. They knew exactly where to dig because of the family traditions of the Rex Deus families who founded them. The Templars were a family business. They were not in the business of liberating the Christian sites from the Muslims. They were in the business of reclaiming their ancient patrimony in the Holy Land. And they knew precisely where to dig. But what they found is still a matter of speculation to this day. Among the items that are listed as possibly having been found by the Templars are replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which bear some credence because when John Allegro went to some of the treasure sites described in the Copper Scroll, he found Templar artifacts in many of them. It may have been the Ark of the Covenant, which is commemorated by a carving of the Ark on a wheeled cart in the north portal of Chartres Cathedral. It may have been Templar treasure. Hand on heart, I just don't know. It's a fascinating piece of speculation. But the Templars were awarded this insignia by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who, surprise surprise, was a cousin of Bernard of Clairvaux. The family linkages start to get start to proliferate.
This is the Templar Cross, a coat of arms of a fairly late time, which was later used by Columbus on the sails of the ships that he used to cross the Atlantic. And this is the most important Templar Cross of them all, and the least understood. It's called the Quetzalcoatl, the Cross of Universal Knowledge. It is pure heresy as far as the church is concerned because it's talking about sacred knowledge and sacred wisdom. And the church regarded Gnosticism of any description as heresy. And yet, that was in plain use, and you will still find it in certain medieval churches to this day.
The Templars were recognized by King Louis VII in somewhere around about 1118. In 1127, they came scurrying back to Europe, all of them, all nine met with the King of France, and then went north to Scotland to a family known as the Sinclair of Rosslyn, another branch of the Rex Deus families. And within 10 years, they had been granted properties everywhere you see a dot. They were granted properties at such a speed that in many cases they couldn't garrison for some time afterwards. Very nearly every Rex Deus family in Europe gave them property. Within 8 months of returning to Europe, they had obtained, through the good offices of another Rex Deus member, Bernard of Clairvaux, or Bernard de Fontaines, to give him his real name, they had obtained papal recognition. And a couple of years after that, they were granted exemption from taxes and exempted from for the for the church and exempted from exemption from taxes from the state. And they were responsible to no king, no emperor, no bishop, only to the Pope alone, through their Grand Master. It was a degree of autonomy that has never been granted to any order before or since. Within a few weeks of arriving in Europe, they had amassed a body of 300 mounted knights with all their servants, farriers, and squires, accoutrements, and blacksmiths, and took them to the Holy Land, almost doubling the military force in the Holy Land overnight. Now, go back again. Remember, this is a time of very poor communication. They could not possibly have organized it in the time scale of that. This had been long planned. And once the process started, the machinery worked like clockwork. It was a family business. And the principle that lay behind the Rex Deus family, this was very, very simple. Outwardly, they would practice the religion of whatever country they lived in. So, if they were in Europe, they would practice Christianity. If they were in the East, they would practice Islam. But secretly, they practiced the secret teachings of Jesus as they understood them. I will refer to that again.
Chartres Cathedral was built and financed by the Templars. That's how it was erected so quickly. Normally, it took two or three centuries to finish a cathedral. Chartres was done in 30 years. And over the west front of Chartres, which is one of the earliest pieces of Gothic architecture in Europe, there is over the main door this tympanum with Jesus sat in glory, so surmounted by a mandorla, which according to straight church iconography means he is God. And there is another significant symbol of his deity, which is his halo, and it's a halo with a cross in it. That symbolizes the deity. But if you look very carefully at the shape of that cross, if you can see it in this light, you'll find it's our old friend, the Gnostic cross. We've got heresy again. So, we not only have on here heresy behind the head of Jesus, but we also have Europe's first known initiate, Pythagoras. And there is more. Above the three pillars supporting the main door, there is a frieze, and it's only about that deep, and it's very intricate. And it shows what the church guides tell you are the principal scenes from the life of Jesus. But it's deliberately designed to confuse you. Don't start at the left and work right. You start in the middle and work left. And when you've got to the left, you go back to the middle and you work right. And on the right, you will find Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey, being hailed as the King of the Jews. And immediately next to it, he's being laid in the tomb. Well, my Christian friends, what's missing? The crucifixion. The crucifixion, the central issue of Christianity. And what these boys are trying to tell us is two things. Because there are two or three little triggers like this, you are free to interpret any piece of symbolism in that particular cathedral in the Gnostic tradition, in the heretical point of view, secret symbolism. I wrote a book on it called *Cracking the Symbol Code*, which somebody asked me to sign earlier this evening. That's part of what it's about. But the real issue: they did not believe that Jesus came to redeem us from sin. They believed he came here to reveal a pathway of spirituality, which, according to them, is just as valid today in the 21st century as it was at the time of Jesus. And they stressed not the personality of Jesus, but the system of communication of these ideas from one person to another. And so, the people on either side of Jesus, his teacher and his star pupil, are particularly revered by the Knights Templar. His teacher was a man called John the Baptist, who again, despite what it says in the Bible, according to Rex Deus tradition, was a direct descendant of the Davidic line, but this time from Ethiopia. He was a descendant of Menelik, the child of Solomon and Sheba. And he was black. He was Jesus's teacher. And Jesus's star pupil was John the Divine, the Beloved Disciple, who is depicted in the Da Vinci Code book. The Da Vinci Code book claims that the depiction of St. John the Divine in the Last Supper is Mary Magdalene. And I'd love to believe that, but I'm sorry, it just isn't true. The people, people whose work was used as a basis for that, got it wrong. St. John was depicted deliberately, according to the traditions of the time of Leonardo da Vinci, as a hermaphrodite, the perfect blend between yin and yang, neither male nor female, but the perfect combination of the two. And this was symbolizing the fact that he was the supreme initiate. And the two Johns became of vital importance to the Knights Templar, along with another cult which we'll describe in a second, and they have some considerable importance in the present-day Craft of Freemasonry.
Over the portal of the initiates, there is a most beautiful rose window, which I haven't got a picture to show you, my apologies. But underneath it are five lances. That's very difficult to see in this light. There, on the far side, is our old friend Melchizedek again. Next to him is David. In the middle is a female figure, I leave to last. Then we have Solomon, and then we have Aaron. All spiritual initiates, all spiritual teachers. The figure in the middle is labeled Saint Anne. Who, according to church tradition, was Jesus's grandmother, the mother of his mother, Mary. There are a couple of problems with this. One, she's black. And she also has a very distinctive and very specific halo, which I'd never noticed. And I was leading a crowd of priests through Chartres Cathedral, and one of them pointed up and said, "Why hasn't Anne got the Magdalene halo?" Now, the Magdalene, according to tradition, was the daughter.
Of John the Baptist, who was black. She was also the wife of Jesus and the mother of his children. So maybe that's how they snuck in this one and got it away without being persecuted by the church, by labeling it as sanne principle of wisdom. Again, West front of Notam deari, the Scola Philosophorum, the Philosopher's Ladder, a representation almost precise of the Greek goddess Sophia, with the Philosopher's Ladder resting against her breast and two two books in her hand, one open for all to see, one closed for the initiates only.
In other words, there are two streams of knowledge in forming European culture: the obvious, the open, the church, and then behind that, the hidden streams of spirituality. This one is slightly later than the Templar period; it's 14th century and it's to be found in Chartres Cathedral, and it's called Notam, and it's built on a specific energy site within the cathedral. And if you kneel down in front of that pillar and bring your hands together towards the pillar, you will feel the bolt of energy going through you. And she's black, and she's always garbed in a way so it's almost a triangle, and as often as not, those clothes are green, the color of initiation.
This is a replica of the Black Madonna that used to reside in the crypt of Chartres. It's a replica because the original was destroyed during the French Revolution. And again, there is a degree of serenity in her eyes and her features, which is quite startling. And remember, black is the Egyptian color for wisdom. I mentioned the Templar Church in Toulouse that was built on the site of the Mercury Temple. This is the Black Madonna that was safe from the fire that resides in the church that is built in its place. It's called Notam de Ba, and again, she is garbed in green, the color of initiation.
Back to our old friend Isis and the Horus child. Now, according to Dr. Rudolph Steiner, sacred symbolism can always be interpreted at at least nine different levels, depending on the perception of the initiate who's looking at it. So when you're looking at a Black Madonna, you could be looking at Mary and Jesus. You can be looking at Isis and the Horus child, or more likely, you can be looking at the Magdalene and the children of Jesus. And it is rather odd that after writing, uh, the document in praise of the new militia, Bernard of Clairvaux required the Templars to swear obedience to the House of Bethany. The House of Bethany, the House of the Magdalene, are one and the same thing. And how, why should he ask them to swear obedience to something that didn't exist? Think about it.
He also mentioned the Holy Land. Now, remember, Bernard of Clairvaux was an Abbot of a Cistercian monastery. He was theoretically a strict Christian, and the Holy Land had produced, according to Christianity, the salvation of the world. And yet, Bernard of Clairvaux said, "Hail, land of honey, from which will come the salvation of mankind." Future Templars, we're still trying to parcel out precisely what he meant, but I think we're back to sacred teaching again.
I mentioned the importance of the two jobs. This is one of the most imposing statues of John the Baptist I've had the pleasure of looking at, and it's found in the Cathedral of Autun, and it is, it dominates the entire south wall. Another symbol of spiritual transformation is something that is was found so widespread over Europe in medieval churches that William Anderson, the historian of church architecture, described it as the Mason's mascot. He's called the Green Man. He takes many forms of a face with foliage growing from it. I like this one because he reminds me of something. When I was a kid, there used to be a cartoon at the end of the war when there was shortage of everything, and a man with his hands over a wall in the face saying, "What, no bananas?" or "What, O.T.?" Well, he looks just like that.
But in fact, the Green Man, uh, is representative of the same principle represented by Tammuz, the resurrecting god of ancient Babylonia. We're back to death to the things of this world and rebirth, fertility, but spiritual fertility. He's also equated with St. George and Elidius, the legendary teacher of the Sufis, a source of spiritual strength and tradition.
The master stroke that the Rex and Templar families used to spread their teaching through Europe was a series of stories called the Grail Sagas. The first was written by Chrétien de Troyes very shortly after the Templars were founded, and in the same county of Champagne, that was never finished. Probably the most complete and perfect one is Parzival, written by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who some authorities claim was a Templar, but I've yet to see any proof of that. The Grail Sagas describe medieval knights setting out on perilous, long journeys, searching for some holy relic, which is usually described as the chalice used at the Last Supper, or the chalice used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect Jesus's blood.
My first great literary elaborator, Trevor Ravenscroft, said it wasn't that at all. It was a coded allegory for a pathway of initiation, and his masterwork, "The Cup of Destiny," describes just that. Now, Trevor was not alone. That wonderful American, wonderfully gifted man, Joseph Campbell. Professor Joseph Campbell posed the question in his series, "The Power of Myth," "Why should any medieval knight set out in search of any relic, however holy, when all he had to do, according to the belief systems of the time, was go to the nearest church and through the miracle of transubstantiation, partake directly of the body and blood of Jesus?" And Campbell said the same as Trevor. He said it is an allegory, it is a story telling us about the principles of initiation.
And to back up his argument, he cited a passage from the Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus is reported as saying, "He who drinks from my mouth, I shall become he, and he shall become me." In other words, all of us, without exception, if we do the work and spend a lifetime at it, are capable of the same acts of compassion, humility, gentleness, and healing that Jesus was capable of, if we follow the path.
Now, this carving, which you probably won't be able to see because of the light coming through, is the only symbolic in I've ever come across between the Knights Templar and the craft of Freemasonry, and it represents two kneeling figures, one of whom has a Templar cross on his breast, and in his hand is a running noose, cable-turn noose, which is around the neck of his colleague who is blindfolded. It's very badly weathered, but it's still very discernible, and it's to be found on the outside of the south face of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. Rosslyn Chapel, which was built by Earl William Sinclair, another member of the Rex group, and it is a hymn to transformative spirituality. It commemorates Knights Templarism, it commemorates ancient Egyptian mysteries, it commemorates Zoroastrian mysteries, it commemorates Hebraic mysticism. I call it the most superbly carved reliquary of the Holy Grail in the world, and it's all about transformative spirituality.
Now, a lot of nonsense has been written pro and con as to how Freemasonry sprang somehow from the Knights Templar or didn't. And the only thing that distinguishes both sides of that argument is the vigor and vehemence with which it is conducted. Neither side seems open to reason, and they're both half right, and they're both half wrong. Templar thinking came into Freemasonry by an indirect but very discernible root. The same families that founded and sustained the Knights Templar Order for the 200-odd years of its existence were the same families who were instrumental in whatever transformative process changed craft masonry into Freemasonry in Scotland in the 17th century. And that's the route by which the thinking came through. That is also the route by which a lot of ancient Egyptian mythology and teaching came through, because you care to think about it, in the early 1600s, mid-1600s, how much was written about Egyptology? How much was known in Europe about ancient Egypt and its practices, except for the families who claimed descent eventually from that source? Nothing was known about it. Egyptology as a science and a study didn't start until the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon, just after the turn of the 19th century. Yet that knowledge was already around and already beginning to filter into craft Freemasonry, and that's the route by which it came.
Anybody who disagreed with Holy Mother the Church in the Middle Ages was in for short shrift. They'd be invited along to the next church barbecue as the chief item on the menu. And principal amongst these was a group of deeply spiritual people who followed an initiatory pathway in the southwest of France, Northern Italy, and also in the county of Champagne. There were known as the Cathars, and this, that tiny little dot on the top of that mountain, was the last of their fortresses to fall to a crusade to exterminate them. The crusade lasted 30 years, 30 years of one of the most brutal wars ever recorded in European history. The cruelty was bestial from start to finish. The church wasn't satisfied with merely eliminating the castles like this one, and just visualize what fun it must have been to attack that. Yet, one by one, they all fell. Most of them were starved into submission. After the 30 years of war, the church set up an institution and headed by a Spanish gentleman called Dominic Guzmán, called the Inquisition, and they tortured people and set the pattern for every secret police force that has ever existed in Europe, and they set the pattern for rule by terror. And the Inquisition is still with us to this day. It goes under a very innocuous name; it's called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and was until recently headed by a gentleman called Cardinal Ratzinger, who was known as God's Rottweiler, because he excommunicated more devout Catholic theologians in his 15 or 20 years of tenure of that office, more of them than his predecessors had done in two or three centuries. The repression is still there. The mechanism has changed, but the rigidity and the repression is still the same. And as Pope dear darling Benedict has said, he would rather have a small church, but an obedient one, than a large one.
Come the Reformation, the sad news is, but the newly emerging Protestant churches tended to persecute and burn heretics with as much unholy zeal as their Catholic forbears. But there were movements at this time to try and diffuse the situation, and ultimately they won through. There was the Third Force, which included Erasmus, which were trying to bring peace to Europe, riveted by religious wars. There was the Family of Love. There were a group of scholars known as The Invisible College, all of whom were spiritual initiates of one or another of the hidden streams of spirituality. And then Freemasonry came onto the scene.
And Freemasonry, in its turn, led to the foundation of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in England. This 17th and 18th centuries were highly productive periods, because for the first time, people could be relatively open about their belief systems and how they got their knowledge, and the whole period became known as the Enlightenment. And one of the gifts I pass on in a moment. Freemasonry at that, in its early days, was not so secretive. This is a gravestone at Canongate in Edinburgh, and there are hundreds of them like this. People were as proud of their membership of the craft in death as they were in life, and rightfully so.
Freemasonry and America are inseparably entwined. This is a modern painting of Washington laying the, uh, foundations for the Capitol. The influence of Enlightenment thinkers and members of the Craft of Freemasonry and the development of the American Constitution is beyond count. And that Constitution, you live under it, you probably take it for granted, you don't realize that it is still a beacon of light to much of the rest of the world who would dearly love to have the freedoms you live under. And it is very largely influenced by the Craft of Freemasonry, who embody within their teaching, in ritual, in allegory, many of the streams that we have touched on earlier on this evening.
Then in the 19th century in Europe, there was a further esoteric revival, and a rather strange and bizarre lady called Helena Petrovna Blavatsky claimed to have spent most of her life traveling the East and bringing back Eastern spirituality to the West. She is a very complex character, and the arguments are still raging as to how truthful she was. But she opened the floodgates. She did us all a favor. She opened the floodgates to the European mind of a vast range of Eastern spirituality of immense validity. Through her influence, we began to learn about Tibetan spirituality, Indian spirituality, and then, then in its turn, this led to the discovery of the work of the Chinese sages.
Then in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century, we had the modern initiate, Rudolph Steiner, who found in a movement called the Anthroposophists. And Steiner, again, was almost like a classical Greek scholar. He not only taught spiritual initiation and made it widely available to the general public who are prepared to work for it, but he did magnificent work in homeopathic medicine, biodynamic farming, and his work in education is almost beyond par, all fruits of the spiritual world.
Then came the gifted man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit, a straight Christian, who working from the Christian mystical tradition, wrote a work, wrote several works of cosmogenesis, which were amongst the most beautiful I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The church forbade him to publish it, but he kept writing, and when he died, he left his work to a friend and colleague outside the order so it could finally reach the public, which it did.
That wonderfully gifted Austrian PhD, Professor Kepler, was studying in California, and he was studying quantum wave theory, and he sat by the seashore. Now, he's a widely read and erudite man, and he suddenly realized that the ancient Chinese sages of two and a half or three thousand years ago had described quantum wave theory, just using different terminology. And he said, "How did they do it?" A similar question was posed by Carl P. Bram, a neurophysiologist, who said, "How did the ancients understand the working of the pineal gland before they had the science to understand it?" And the answer is spiritual insight.
I leave it to you, my friends. Look around the world you live in. People persecute each other. There are wars, and wars, and wars. There's terrorism. We are facing an ecological crisis of enormous proportions, because I promise you, the climate change, the greenhouse effect, is very real. I leave it to you to decide whether the old way of knowing, the spiritual way of knowing, the path that we follow within the craft of Freemasonry, of trying to build brotherhood and love on a basis of truth and justice, is the one to follow. I put it to you that the ancient way of knowing, of treating the Earth as our mother, would have us treat it very differently. You do not rape and despoil your mother.
The fruits of spirituality are many and varied, and so are the roots to it. There is a colleague of mine called Elena Viva, who is now no longer in the first bloom of youth. She's almost my age. When she was a young girl, she was doing a PhD thesis in anthropology, and at that time, she was an agnostic. She didn't know whether to believe in God or not. And she chose a rather odd subject for somebody of that persuasion. She did her PhD on the behavioral change brought about by pilgrimage, and her research meant walking to Camino de Santiago several times and talking to pilgrims en route. And at one point, she met an elderly gentleman at the Cathedral of León. She said, "Excuse me, sir, are you on the Camino de Santiago?" And he said, "No, my friend, I'm on a much older pilgrimage trail, the Camino de las Estrellas, the Pilgrimage of the Stars. The ancients were using it for centuries before the Christians came along and ruined it, and they have left us signs and symbols, and some of us are trying to recreate it." And she had a moment of insight, and she realized that under all valid spiritual paths, there is the truth of the one.
So please reflect on that. It took her some years to figure out the true profundity of what she said. And when she eventually became a Sufi, where the one is described as the indivisible, almighty God himself, she realized the serious nature of what she'd written. It is not for me or anybody else to suggest which spiritual path you should follow, because searching that path is an intimate and integral part of the transformative process for each individual. And if anybody offers you instant enlightenment for a fee, run. No true teacher will ever charge you. They may accept donations because they have to pay the rent of the gross, the same as anybody else. And I promise you this much: there should be a health warning on every spiritual path. It's a life's work. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes perseverance. I've been following my own path for some 39 years now, and each year on the anniversary of starting, I do a review of that year, not financially, because I have no money, I've always been broke, perpetually, but in creative terms, in emotional terms, in physical terms. I'm 80 years of age, and I'm still fit, and every year I've come up with the same answer: this has been the best year yet.
You see, the church sold us a pup. I don't care about the flimflam and the dogma, because a lot of people gain enormous comfort from that and strength. And if we had abolished the churches tomorrow, we'd have to reinvent them, because who is going to give the pastoral care to the sick, the bereaved, the troubled, other than the pastors, the rabbis, the priests, and the mullahs? We need them. But the church sold us a pup. They said spirituality is for a select few, the people we call saints, and it's all about getting brownie points to earn your place in the feathered choir for all eternity, a prospect that fills me with object, bloody horror. Spirituality is not about that. It's about changing your life and my life today, right here in New York, in 2010, with all the complexities of life that we face.
I'm not a great believer in gold or jewelry, yet I wear two rings. One is a simple Masonic ring, and the other is a ring of no intrinsic worth given to me by a Muslim friend many years ago, and it poses the only question in life really worth answering: "Isn't God enough for you?" I have come to change my viewpoint about the Divine. I used to think, because I was tainted with church teaching, as everybody who grows up in this age is, that there was God was somewhere else, in some mystical way. I cannot explain. The Divine operates for me through other people. We're all, in some strange way, part of it. There is not a dualism of us and God. There is a unity here, and the spiritual path is all about strengthening and enhancing that unity. It matters little whether you're Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, or whatever. God, in his infinite wisdom, has laid down paths for you which you can access. Access them, follow them, treasure them. They will transform your life. Bless you. And thank you. [Music] Thank you.