Earlier this month a sixty two year old student of mine wrote a short appreciation of the Emerald Tablet for me. I was amazed at the new perspectives she brought to it. The Emerald Tablet as most of you will know is a one page summary of the most important principles of alchemy.

I learned it by heart when I began my interest in alchemy at age seventeen. I read it, contemplated it and repeated it at least once every day for ten years or so until I finally got what it meant. When I began my studies in mathematics I thought of the consummate genius Newton, who I knew was one of the last famous alchemists. I got hold of his translation and used that too. So when I read the report of my student I had thought about, read about, and contemplated the Emerald Tablet for sixty years. Her take on it was refreshing and contained all kinds of new dots and perspectives to connect.

The important thing is that she had never studied this type of material before. She looked at it with an innocent eye, with no pre-conceptions or other people’s opinions to skew her vision, or restrict her options.

Because it happened in June I was reminded of another innocent eye that made such an impression that I began to work out ways to look at things I had known for years as though I saw them for the first time. This is how it happened.

In the early 1950’s I belonged to the British Interplanetary Society. We were basically a bunch of science and mathematics heretics who thought that the next big step for mankind would probably be into space. The current experts, including the Astronomer Royal jeered at the whole idea of space flight. We read each others reports and did physics and engineering calculations about what would be needed before space flight could happen, and how to deal with the possible boredom of space flight, the length of the journeys, and how to feed the space people and take care of their biological needs. I was not one of the ‘experts’ of the Society, but was well informed enough to enjoy and appreciate their work.

Well, six months after the Astronomer Royal said, “Space flight is bilge,” in October 1957 the Russians were first into space with their Sputnik…going round the Earth and broadcasting on ham radio frequencies so that the US government could not keep it secret. It flew a carefully and brilliantly calculated orbit that took it right over Little Rock, Arkansas where National Guardsmen at the time were escorting a black girl to a segregated school every day in the land of the free.

So the Society was delighted and clung to every atom of news coming out of the Russian Space Program. Then in 1963, June 16th, a day I always remember with pleasure every year, the Russians put two people into space one after the other. The mission of the second was to control HER spacecraft’s orbit to rendezvous with HIS spacecraft.

The first woman cosmonaut was to become Major General Valentina Tereshkova, of the Russian Air Force, who had a PhD in aeronautical engineering. She orbited the Earth 48 times and brought her vehicle within a mile of so of that of Andrian Nikolayev. Her code name was Chakya, which means Seagull. She married Andrian after the flight and Krushchev gave the toast at the wedding and made a speech revealing the name of the inventor of the rockets used. Her daughter Elena Andrianovna is now a doctor, and the only person in the world both of whose parents were in space. Valentina was born in 1937 and on her 70th birthday party on March 6th this year she told Vladimir Putin, who was there, that if there was a flight to Mars she would like to be on it, even if it was one way.

Obviously and unashamedly she is one of my heroes, and well deserves the honor of having a crater on the Moon named after her, as did my other hero Sakajaweya, the young Indian girl largely responsible for the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I have written about the Sputnik era and how the Society invited Valentina to London, to a banquet in her honor, and how Sputnik was responsible for my being here, in the posting Sophia the Goddess and the Influence of Women, 11/05/2006.

What has that to do with the innocent eye? Well, it was because of the obvious superiority of the Russian education system in which half of the engineers were women, that we in the West began to take notice of everything they said. This had been largely ignored, particularly here in America, where even an interest in the Russian language could get you labeled as a communist and fired from your job. A similar thing occurred when the Pentagon in its wisdom fired the gays from the forces in the Iraq war. They, of course, being more sensitive to language than the Marine sergeants who shouted at them so manfully, were actually the ones who spoke other languages, and included many Arabic speakers.

And I read some of the bulletins about letters that passed among Russian specialists. One I read was from the man who calculated the satellite orbits for the Russian program. Of course he was an atheist and a communist. A colleague of his was a professional geologist and had been studying the interesting fact that in some areas of the world there were tektites in the desert sand. These have been found at the sites of nuclear weapon explosions. The effect of the enormous heat generated melts the sand into these compounds. But the site of the tektites he was studying was in the general area of what was believed to be the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Biblical story.

The geologist had read the Bible before he became a party member and was interested in a possible connection between his research and the old story. He mentioned it to his atheist colleague who had no idea of who or what Sodom and Gomorrah were. So the geologist sent him a copy of the Genesis story of Lot and his wife and the destruction of the cities.

The atheist wrote back and said, “This is obviously a primitive mind relating the tale of an atomic explosion. The angels were people wearing space suits. That’s why they were given such authority by the shepherds. It’s why Lot said “Don’t pass over me.” The fire came DOWN from above. The woman who loitered was covered with ash as she died, just like some of the Hiroshima victims. The primitive story teller could only call it salt.”

This was an informed, but innocent eye reading from a highly intelligent person. I had read that story dozens of times, starting around age seven, but had always added onto it the teachings about sin and punishment and the god throwing thunderbolts idea.

So I began practicing the same skill when I read the Judeo/Christian scriptures. What I found out by doing this amazed me, and kept me busy as a hobby, checking this and that in the Greek and Latin and Hebrew, and the Roman and Jewish history for some forty years.

One of the things that the innocent eye approach showed me immediately, forty years ago, was that Judas was NOT a traitor. He was probably the most trusted of the disciples of Jesus, most of who were not too smart. When Jesus ORDERED him to set the betrayal plan in motion he gave his life into the hand of a man who knew that if he succeeded in getting Jesus into the judicial system in time for the Friday crucifixion, which was done by the short method instead of the nailing method, if he succeeded in doing what his master wanted, he was signing his own death warrant. The supporters of the Jesus rebellion would undoubtedly kill him. And they did. The plan succeeded because of the sacrifice of Judas, and Jesus did not die on the cross, as he would have done if Judas had been unsuccessful.

This is all in the New Testament if read with an innocent eye and no reference to the story line put out by the Church for centuries. I wrote my first edition of Who was Jesus Really? in 1980, explaining this part of the story and much else, in detail.

Very recently, this year, The Gospel of Judas has been discovered which tells just about the same story by someone in the first century incensed at the injustice done to the true hero. Theologians are astonished that they may have to change their viewpoint about Judas. Many will not, because changing their minds is like dying to them. I am not a genius by any means, but using the innocent eye technique made the story clear to me decades ago even in the distorted, edited and twisted versions now in the accepted scriptures. The innocent eye method can also tell you who the real father of Jesus was, and who he married,the name of one of His children, and where he finally died at an advanced age.

If you are interested in the result of some forty years of innocent eye work on the amazing story of Jesus, whose teachings I revere, but whose Church I despise, you can just click on the title in the My books section on the right. There you will find hundreds of interesting dots that your familiarity with the story prevented you from seeing, as they did me.

Even if you are not interested in what can be derived from an innocent eye reading of the New Testament, I suggest that you try to cultivate the innocent eye in your work and play. You will find the most amazing things among the most hum drum and familiar.
Blessings,
Douglas