Refund and Reparation

Now, Socrates was holding forth for the existence of a personal being, or as we would say, thetan. And the religious ah, bigots, ah, bums, ah, tramp—ah, the religious hierarchy, excuse me, I was looking for that word! Having an awful time there—they disagreed with this. And they disagreed with this so thoroughly that they slipped him the hemlock. And he was so henpecked at home that they couldn’t even get him to escape from jail. He went ahead and drank the hemlock just to make them good and guilty. And he made them guilty, man, they still preserve his jail.

But then some time later, sometime later the Nicene Creed was developed which we now have in the form of the Dead Sea Scrolls and which was then put forward about a hundred years after its original development by Jesus of Nazareth. Now he—this church is having an awful embarrassing time with that. But I don’t see why they should have an embarrassing time of it. So the guy was a powerhouse and he had a philosophy which had already kicking around and so forth, that was pretty good.

But they have to acknowledge the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, don’t you see? And they date one hundred years before Christ and they contain the New Testament. You didn’t know about that? There are some pocketbooks out on it and you should read them, it’s very funny. And the Arabs get ahold of these things, there are lots of them, they find them all over the place now if they know where to look. And the Arabs get hold of them because they can get something like five pounds for a little centimeter square scrap of one of these scrolls. They tear ‘em all up!

And then some high muckymuck, some super - sultan potentate - God - help - us, he figured out he was going to make a real—real grab out of it, so he, by force and other means, managed to collect a tremendous collection of these bits. And he unfortunately let them be copied photographically and so he was never able to sell his collection. He’s still got it.

But these Dead Sea Scrolls are a terrific embarrassment to the Christian church at this particular time. I don’t see why they should be. But they are. And all of this is simply the advance of Buddhism as an idea into Western culture. And it’s easily traceable. There’s even the tradition of Christ having studied in the East, you know. Where did he disappear to for thirty years or whatever it was? You know, there’s a lot of these traditions. And this doesn’t make less out of some fellow who went through all that, you know? But it was pushing wisdom into the West. And the West has been very; very hard to push wisdom into.

The early monks of Christianity tried to push wisdom into these areas up here. And over there in Scandahoovia—Scandinavia—I didn’t mean to use it as a verb—and into Ireland, into these chilly northern climes. And they uniformly were spitted on stakes and chewed up and so forth. The monks would come in and they would say that they were going to cure them up with some relics and so forth. They were healers basically—and they moved in and they were going to help the community and so forth. And the answer was to skin them alive or some thing—other delicate process.

So, trying to push—well, the way paganism fought against the basic ideas of Christianity and so forth is a very gory chapter. And the way the Christians then fought against the non - Christians during the days of the Spanish Inquisition is also gory. But by that time they’d lost most of the philosophy. Man had a soul, it was over there, and it belonged to God and he was nothing. And they had things pretty well scrambled up. By the time Buddhism had been transported, in other words, from India through the Middle East to Greece, to Spain, to Scandinavia, to Ireland or the North Pole or something, it was almost an unrecognizable idea. Now, just giving you the scouted background history of this thing. Now the most that was ever achieved by any of these was a type of Release. And since the beginning of the universe, so far as we know; there has never been anything but a Release. There has never been a Clear. There has never been a cleared anything. So that these are all forms of release. Dharma is release by wisdom. Buddhism: that was release by exteriorization. Christianity: release by repentance and being good. And you have in actual fact then, the total background history—if you want to read about these chaps and know more about these chaps, in fact it might make good fun. But it’s those things which are there to understand in the light of what we’re doing today.

There are no more complexions or complexities than that to understand about these. I would be accused by any scholar of these works of considerable oversimplification but I could answer from the very interesting height of saying, yes, it took twenty years to make a bodhi but we can make one in about twenty seconds. And we can, at a far higher percentage.