Richard Smoley: Atlantis Then and Now

[Music] [Music] well thank you all very much the pleasure to see you all here to hear me talk about the legendary lost continent of Atlantis about which most of you have heard at least something and one thing we will consider is to what extent it actually was legendary now the idea of a lost continent that sank into the ocean 50 years ago was laughed at nobody took it seriously no could possibly believe that things didn't work that way well let's take a look at option one here United States in 2100 this is not this is not political blues and reds although it almost looks like it this is what is going to be submerged by certain models by the year 2100 it's not 80 years from now what was always 80 years ago 1940 so all of this is going to be submerged what does that include will include Seattle San Francisco LA San Diego New Orleans I don't know exactly where Houston fits in here but certainly New Orleans Miami all of Florida Washington our nation's capital New York Boston so on so here are any number of potential lost civilization now do I know that this is going to happen no this is a model as I think you probably have already realized this is not going to be a lecture on climate change and the simple reason for that is I don't know much more about climate change than you do but the idea of a whole civilization just sinking is not quite as ridiculous it was a couple of generations ago week it's something that everybody has to take really quite seriously so the idea that there was a continent that sank and when it's sank supposedly we'll get to the idea that it's sank is not quite as ludicrous as it was very recently now where is the Atlantis myth come from well comes from him Plato and you've all heard of certainly one of the greatest of all philosophers some would probably say the greatest philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato and whether that so or not in a way all of the lore about Atlantis is a footnote to Plato because this is where we first read about it and he wrote two dialogues they're late he know maybe the last decade or so of his life one is called the tiniest and one is called the Critias and in these he described the lost continent of Atlantis now Plato in a Plato's writings are mostly dialogues so he's never speaking in his own voice so when someone else is speaking as a character you always have to ask to what extent Plato himself is saying this and to what extent he's putting words in someone's mouth for the sake of a discussion in this case so these are dialogues on Atlantis and one of these this character is mentioned was so long who was a great Greek legislator and poet and he was a collateral ancestor of Plato's and in this story so lon took a trip to Egypt now Solon lived that era so let's say around 600 BC these dates are very approximate the Greeks or not very good at keeping track of this kind of thing he went to Egypt and he talked to a priest in Egypt and this priest said I'm not gonna read this but there have been many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes they just have been brought about the agencies of fire and water and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes now here's something now by the way yeah you remember a single deluge only but there have been many previous ones now the Greeks had a flood myth very much like the one in the Bible it's remarkably similar to the one in the Bible in fact the flood myths around the world are all remarkably similar to one another in a very weird way ranging from Indians and South America to Polynesians to the Chinese of course in the Bible to Africa and you really have to ask why this flood myth is so universal far more so than just about any other that however is another thing that is not a topic of the lecture tonight because it's another Houston but there were many previous ones and again you know going back 250 years ago when the Western world believed that the Bible was historical nobody would have agreed with that why because the Bible like Greek myths mentioned one flood only but this time scale is much more Brod so and here's a description of Atlantis again you can read it I'm not going to read it out loud but there was this continent now the legend is very elaborate because according to Plato Atlantis tried to dominate the whole Mediterranean world and it was the Athenians who stopped them and since Plato and so long were Athenians of course that was a source of great pride yeah Athenians were very proud of their city for reasons you can easily understand I mean there's a lot more to this like to go back for something here's a funny little detail this name had a rather unsavory reputation in the Athens of Plato's time because after the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC the Spartans were actually rather nice about it and didn't destroy the city and enslave all of its inhabitants which was pretty much standard practice at the time they just let them go but they set up a Athenians set up a kind of a lawmaking council called the thirty because they were thirty of them and the leader was kritis who was Plato's uncle by the way and it rapidly turned into a bloodthirsty hunter lots of lots of people were just done away with finally about a year later they got the thirty to step down on condition of being granted amnesty so they wouldn't be prosecuted for all of the things they'd know why is this an interest well prettiest like Plato and his circle were all students of Socrates who's so famous a philosopher that all the other philosophers before him are simply called the pre-socratics well you remember that Socrates was put to death in 399 BC for corrupting the youth of Athens right well this didn't mean pederasty which was a perfectly accepted and normal practice and in those days whatever you think of good for you boy to have an older man take an interest in him I suppose they thought no I don't know but it was not you're not talking about corrupting sexually he was talking about corrupting their ideas about government and they couldn't get to kriti as' because he had amnesty so having Socrates put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens was a way of getting at him so it was not usually you all know the story of the death of Socrates again another yet another so not the subject of this lecture but the idea is that he was arrested and put to death because of his religious beliefs or his ideas or something no this was a totally political thing because Socrates like Plato like Curtius did not like the Athenian democracy they hated the democracy they thought it was awful Plato thought it was awful to his Republic is not a republic in our sense of the word that's a side to tale but of course but it is extremely interesting in that Wow I mean it took a major moment in the history of Western thought and it's often misinterpreted well why am i bringing it up here well kritis is the narrator of or a major narrator in these two dialogues and it's critics that tells the story now prettiest was plato's uncle and as I said Socrates Silvan was a collateral ancestor so this may be an old family tradition you know plain I was writing this you know a lot a couple of hundred 250 years later than this story about so on supposedly took place but we could be dealing with an authentic family tradition that was handed down so something like this could have happened all right here it is here's a map this is a map by one Athanasius cure who was a Jesuit polymath of the 17th century and this is Atlantis Africa Spain the Atlantic Ocean America this was this is a right this is this gets really interesting this is just simply says the location of the Isle of Atlantis which sank in the ocean a long time ago according to the thought of the Egyptians and Plato's description why did he put America in well look at this I flipped character strong you know why because the original head south at the top so this is upside down but it's a little easier for us to imagine because well here's Spain here's Africa here's America so this is and this is characters description account Matt I mean Matt makers can be quite imaginative do you know there there there's there's like some Island the Caribbean that no one has ever been able to find and it's they've decided or least one article I read suggested that it never existed that mapmakers could kind of put fake islands in to see who is copying their Maps now why you would want to put you know just liver deliberately misleading information in your own map is a question yet again we don't have to get into so when I did was navigable which is an interesting point which might get back to the pillars of Herakles are the Straits of Gibraltar the ayah was larger than Libya which was what the Greeks call Africa and Asia put together and was the way to other islands from these you could go to the opposite continent which surrounded the ocean this could be called a boundless continent alright as I told you this was written in 360 BC so this tradition knows if there were the Americas on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean which nobody else did there's no reference to this anywhere that I've ever seen in classical literature so you're starting to think well you know um how much is this really just a legend and how much of a tradition of general truth is oh you know here's the boundless continent I mean he didn't it's kind of a sloppy just view of America because um although character lived in 1680 or so certainly knew what a map of America looked like but Plato didn't so he didn't really feel any particular desire or need to make it look like that and all Plato says it's truly a boundless continent so we don't have a lot of descriptions of that so when did all this happen according to again the tiniest 9,000 years ago from Solon's time so you add your numbers up and you get to 9600 BC according to this dialogue Atlantis sank in 9600 BC again these are very very around dates you know people did not have calendars or think in terms they didn't even have numerical calendars each city has it had its own Cowen they said when so and so was Archon of Athens this happened and as long as you knew had the Arcana list you kind of had an idea but people didn't think in terms of decades and centuries well let's let's look at geology the quaternary era was 206 million years ago to the present we're still in it and the coronary era is characterized by glacial periods which lasts a hundred thousand years and in Turkish glacial periods which lasts between ten and fifteen thousand years the last glacial period ended around eleven thousand seven hundred years ago it's not entirely reassuring to see that we're probably at the end of this interglacial period and I have heard it suggested it's definitely a minority opinion but I have heard it suggested that what we're calling global warming is actually a predator coming ice age that's why I'm not a climate change skeptic if that's troubling anybody too bad but I prefer to call it climate change rather than global warming because who knows that it couldn't flip those scientific models work with what they know already and there's a lot they know but anyway we're at the end of this so as 11,700 years ago okay the end the Ice Age 9700 BC because you have to subtract 2000 years because it's been 2,000 years since the birth of Christ right what do you get Atlantis sank in 9600 BC those given as I said the incredibly approximate dating that we're working with here this is really remarkable even though it's like wow there was there could well have been that could have happened because there was land that was submerged at the end of the last glacial period here's one well take a look at this this is there are lots of maps like these they're all rather um I'm sure they're all rather approximate all of this light green land is what's land then during the Ice Age and the dark green land is what's land now this is not from some crackpot you know alternative historian this is this is pretty much what people believe with no doubt various differences in detail and here's one that's kind of interesting England Britain in those days was a peninsula and not an island and there is this territory they're called doggerland the British channel was a English Channel was a river the Irish Sea was a river dogger comes from some gut fishing term which I don't really remember but in any case um there was this flame there you know this is the land above sea level at 8000 BC you know which was about a little later than Atlantis so we're talking about the idea that there was a lot of Europe ten thousand years ago which is very very short in geological time that was above the water and to go back to this alright well we're here are the pillars of Herakles right this was supposed to be on beyond it so we're couldn't lantus have been well maybe like around here somewhere I'll get to that more specifically this is I think the I'm pretty sure this is the island of Madeira which was above the ocean then and now I mean there are other curious to know to go back to this the Atlantic was navigable in those days that is ninety six thousand 9600 BC and there are ancient sources that say you couldn't really navigate in this area beyond the pillars of Herakles or the Straits of Gibraltar because of the mud Shoals there so and we're talking about well Aristotle said this and Aristotle was Plato's pupil so you know pretty much the same time so conceivably the sea levels have dropped even since those years so the idea that there's so there are some civilization here oh by the way they fought the Athenians we don't asin's maybe over here I don't know for control of this area well it was all land and today it's the Mediterranean ocean so what's that all about oh yeah here's that here's I think about doggerland sea level and the line began to tilt in an isostatic adjustment as the huge weight of ice lessened so that's starting to look like you know you know something sinking again I am not by the way I'm not suggesting that doggerland was Atlantis I'm simply saying that this is a much more established kind of previously previously uh above the ocean that later saying and another little thing here I don't know much about this but look now this is not the time of Atlantis but some of this was just kind of swamped by a tsunami that flooded everything around them which is obviously geological information and this kind of brings us to another kind of important point about this which is until very very recently like maybe a hundred years ago everybody thought scientists thought that the continents were really pretty stable but some crackpot came up with this idea called plate tectonics and everybody laughed at it they thought it's most ridiculously because there he said well there are all these plates see on the earth and and they kind of shift and they move around and over geological periods they move apart they come together when they bump up against each other or they scrape against each other like San Andreas Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area we have earthquakes the earthquake belt and the Pacific Rim is because of various plates that meet at that point so and this crackpot theory is now widely accepted I don't know I don't know if the guy lives to have it ever accepted or even remotely accepted but sometimes that just doesn't happen the point of all this is until not so long ago scientific thought believed everything kind of happened either didn't happen or happen over an enormous period of time but we're now starting to see and and you know again this seems to be standard that you know there are cataclysms you know there's like you know as in the famous bestseller there's a tipping point right all of this starts to melt and everything suddenly you know all of it crashes into the water and the land shakes and gets to sort ruptured because all this ice isn't on it anymore and that is kind of a cataclysmic theory of geological history and again this is much although kind of novel many destructions of mankind so and this this leads me into another side point that's um also very important as you know a lot of the esoteric traditions in traditional talk a lot about climate about you know these cataclysms and these lost civilizations modern science really doesn't want to hear much about it and we started and have to ask ourselves well is this just because of some prejudice that you know nothing happened before this point nobody did anything I mean the general idea is while writing is we know it was invented around 3,000 BC in Egypt and Sumeria so there aren't a written records before that so there's kind of an assumption that everything before that was utterly you know primitive and that people were like totally barbaric it's just that we don't have any written records we don't have any written records that survived because if you wrote on paper or wood which I think they did in some areas it wasn't gonna make it so we have to start thinking in terms of there are these lost civilizations and they are legendary but we start to have to ask ourselves how much of this legend has some basis in truth here's another thing and this is the exact opposite of modern-day thinking there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition in those days the antiquity of an the fact that it went back was more of a source of validity rather than its novelty or its likeliness you know getting some genius a Nobel Prize and we're the exact opposite we just assumed that all these old traditions are rubbish there's probably a middle ground there and you know it leaves one at least to think we have to take some of these stories somewhat more seriously as I said I don't think doggerland was it and again the shallows due to mud so where is it Lantis well here's a contemporary kind of topographical map let's see where are we well here's there's Portugal so the Straits of Gibraltar around here and there's this thing around here called the ampere seamount chain I'm sorry the horseshoe seamount chain the ampere seem out is just one of them and here's the island of Madeira which apparently is a lovely vacation destination I've been told by friends where would i look for atlantis if i were gonna find i would probably look somewhere around here not me to my knowledge I don't know where there's anybody's looked or any serious way but if it were going to be anywhere it might be around here and what evidence would we find now again this is a very long quote but lucidity Z was I don't know I guess he was the age of like Plato's parents I suppose it was it was that time he was the first he wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War he was the first man to think about archaeology that we know of because here he's thinking about what Sparta the city of the lassiter millions would be like and nothing left at his ruins and he said well you know actually it's just kind of if there's really not very many impressive buildings they're just it's just kind of like a bunch of little villages because the Spartans were as I think you can probably easily surmise extremely Spartan but I'm a you know you know they they ruled a good part of the Greek world but if you just went by their ruins and I don't think I don't know I've never heard anything about any ruins of Sparta I imagine they are a spare as Thucydides thought you would think there was nothing there so even if no ruins are found even if nothing magnificent is found you know the as is said the absence of proof is not the proof of absence and although you know the Atlantis they're often envisaged in a kind of science fictiony way you know like they're kind of like ancient Greeks with temples who somehow had airships or something like that um you know which may have nothing to do with anything it's quite conceivable that they were very sophisticated without being technologically sophisticated what example would I cite from a present day how about Tibet Tibet in its Lama period now I'm not going to talk about the Chinese business because it's again just too much but if you read descriptions of Tibet from like a hundred years ago it was you know incredibly impoverished incredibly impoverished you know all they really had to eat was tea yak milk and kind of flour they were very very poor but their technological sophistication was very little yet their psychological sophistication was actually pretty great so you could have a civilization that was very advanced in certain ways and very primitive in others and one of the legends of about Atlantis that is definitely found in Theosophical writings as well as in the channel work of Edgar Cayce is that the Atlanteans were punished by the gods for misusing mystical powers maybe we're being punished going to be punished today for using technological power it's a question that at least should cross people's minds oh by the end of the kritis Zeus decides to punish the Atlanteans for their wickedness and then he says here is what we will do and that's where the dialogue ends you know a lot of the greatest works of classical literature were not finished like lucidity like this book is it you just he just stopped it's just I mean you know he wrote is great but he didn't know to the end of the war he just stopped why who knows very likely he probably just died Virgil's Aeneid which is kind of considered to be the great work was also unfinished and he wasn't even happy with it he just told his literary heirs to burn it but they didn't like put it pulled it together and published it and one of the foundational texts of the West anyway so just as the Critias just ends there so what Plato thought is unclear but oh well here's what here's a potential new Atlantis it's really fascinating to see and you can if you go online to like reputable news sources practically every day you can see some story about something like this well this is a place in the Philippines that is obviously sinking you know I think I was reading about one island that was sinking and then it got so bad that they're all their pets had to learn how to swim as a future Atlantis here's another real possible future Atlantis over here the Maldives well here they are yeah the string of islands in the Indian Ocean that the population of about a half million if things keep going the way they are they're all gonna be underwater in 80 years again these are scientific projections but there aren't scientific projections they're not you know they're not crackpot things even though the crackpots them as you've seen already sometimes turn out to be right so in any case we have to start thinking that yeah there may be was such a place and could it be found well maybe you know the archaeology as we know it today started with this German businessman called Huayra shame on who got another crackpot idea in his day all the scholars and learned opinion said that the Homeric poems were just pure legends they were just pure fiction but Schliemann said no I really think there was a troy and you know how he found it he looked where Homer said it was you can you I mean you can go online and see the ruins he found several layers of Troy's only one of who had all of which had been destroyed only one of which was probably the city that Homer wrote about so again we have to start being a little more humbler a little humbler in just dismissing all sorts of things that don't fit in with our preconceptions and this is very much a problem of the learning world there's certainly a huge amount of lore about Atlantis beyond that now I was once told in person by the legendary medicine man Rolling Thunder that the Cherokees he was part Cherokee were descended from the inhabit of Atlantis I mean I can say for a solid fact that Rolling Thunder told me that whether there is such a Cherokee legend or whether this legend reflects anything is quite another matter but there's certainly a lot of lore around Atlantis and again at the Theosophical literature you know suggests they were punished for abusing psychic powers they had powers that allegedly we don't have and then of course you know the story goes on from there there's certainly one of those books over there Landis in the end of the Lully in the world that was written by an American congressman in the 18th the 19th century and a lot of his argument is the enormous similarity of various things like for example pyramids on both sides of the Atlantic how good is argument is I don't really know I I haven't read the book since I was 12 but um you know he does pull together a lot of things that should lead us to question and then we have this flood myth what is that about it the flood myth is so ancient that some have argued that it goes back to the time when the whole human species lived in Africa like tens of thousands of years ago which would make it a little more bleak plausible because if you were living in a small part of Africa there could well have been a flood in which just about everybody was wiped out except for a couple of people that's that's extremely speculative of course but that is a very universal myth magic my own feeling is that yeah there was probably some kind of primordial event like that and in later memory it was kind of conflated with all of the other destructions of humanity that took place in between possibly even the one that ended the last ice age but that's all of this is very speculative and I think speculation is legitimate the real the only real danger with speculation is that you can suddenly be somewhat bewitched by your own theory and decide well this all is so this is the way it must be it's it's better to take it with a lighter touch I think - hey this could have been you know what I say something is speculative or when I say something is that I I admit is speculative it means this all fits with what known evidence we have but it would take a lot more evidence that we don't have to really prove it you can say certain things about Jesus in the New Testament and you can say certain things a certain number of things you can speculate about but if you don't have you know the Jerusalem newspapers from ad 33 you're not gonna be able to prove this or disprove them and you have to just bracket it in that way and I think I think this is a very useful and legitimate way of thinking about all this lore Oh while we're on the Indian Ocean some of you who Theosophical II learned it will heard of Lemuria which is a lost continent supposed to be somewhere around here and this was originally positive because there were lemierre's these monkey like creatures here and here so they figured there must have been a continent that expanded so they could have traveled now with plate tectonics well this area was once closer to that and the lemurs stayed some lemurs stayed on this side some stayed on the other but that was taken as by the Fiat as another civilization now that is also based in legend the legends of the Puranas in India which spoke of a continent and these you know these are very ancient tradition somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean what was it called it was called Lanka and it's probably some connection with the fact that they renamed this island which used to be called salon Sri Lanka so that is another set of legends and traditions which of course I go to there's a man in church word wrote some books in the 30s about a lost continent of MU mu in somewhere in the Pacific using something like they have it's it's really fascinating stuff and you know although it's very very speculative it does I think it's valuable simply to consider the possibility that things are not always as we think they were I am like journalism for example various times I've read journalistic account in newspapers and a lot of a couple of times even about me and sometimes they say they completely said the opposite of what I said and then you sort of have to think well gee did they just do a bad job on me particularly for you know cuz somebody was hungover or something or do I have to wonder if all of the news stories I'm reading are not contained do not contain some element of the same inaccuracies you know it leads us into the vast arena of which is definitely not something I want to touch on fake news and whatnot but the records of what things were and what actually happened is always good to be a little different and I think that's true about whatever event you happen to read about today and you may be upset about something in the news that may have nothing to do with anything you you meet completely wrong about the thing you're most upset about that's happened to me which is good news for you because it means you know let's not take our little upsets about you know you know you have one set of villains the other people have the other set of villains who happen to be your people and we know what that but it's well not to take this quite as seriously as people are inclined to do in any case so I think that's pretty much where I want to leave it there's certainly a lot more discussion edgar cayce by the way said that's Atlantis kind of a part of the Atlanta the Atlantis that had stayed above the ocean was the Isle of Bimini in the Caribbean if you're really old you'll remember that Bimini was the vacation home a rather notorious congressman named Adam Clayton Powell but that's trivia from when a senior citizens were young how long did it take a lantus to sink was it something that happened and then went down in an hour or so but so it takes years of centuries I overnight again according to Plato it's like a day and the night I think it's the way he described the map that you show this which is more like 80 years well go back to this again it goes back to the cataclysmic theory and the tipping point you know something can be slipping for a long time and then it finally falls have you ever happened you know like some some picture in your house it's not really it's not really on the nail right and you know it's it's it's stayed on forever and ever and then Oh for god knows what reason it just falls down one day I would imagine it would have been something like that or at least that is one possible answer to your question Richard you mentioned Theosophical teaching on this could you expound on that a little bit and are there any compendium books that gather up all the various lectures and writings on on Atlantis from Theosophical teaching ah the best overview of it is this book like Jocelyn Godwin called Atlantis and the cycles of time this is a fairly scholar this is a scholar because he is a scholar view of all of this and he draws it in it's called Atlantis and the cycles of time by Jocelyn Godwin that's it's a bit dry but it's it's accurate and it is fairly comprehensive some of those other books are there to the theists the Theosophical teachings the best general guide Theosophical teachings I know is a book called the divine plan by a 1 Geoffrey barb Orca because it takes all of the stuff that's in the Lots key secret doctrine and talks about it in a coherent and organized way so I would look to that if you wanted Theosophical teachings specifically and Theosophical teachings which I have not even which I barely touched on are really quite different and by those teachings and Edgar Cayce somewhat the same way Edgar Cayce had some interface with theosophy is that the whole destruction of Atlantis was over a much longer period than even we're talking about and that the last that that the part that Plato talks about was just like the very tail end of a very long process that you know I was really starting to get into areas that what would be very hard to prove one way or the other and of course the Theosophists have this very some perplexing to some theory of root races different kind of strata of humanity and the Atlanteans I think we're the fourth I think we're the fifth right well the word just just using the word race at this point you know just infuriates everybody and suddenly start people start accusing all the kind of wildest nonsense which has happened with the ah sorry but that's the Theosophical he's sort of sketcher chill thank you Richard I also believe that when an idea has been around for so long that we don't even know where or when it originated that there's probably some truth underlying it even if we don't have physical evidence of it um in terms of the if Atlantis disappeared overnight an earthquake and a tsunami yeah I don't know very much about geology but it seems to me that could wipe something out that quickly again I'm not saying that's how it happened but I am saying that that's what Plato said how it happened and yeah it's possible and there's enough in his account that's like well I don't think he's making these these things up in this particular case now one thing that's curious about Plato is that in his dialogues he has inserted what are called myths that's what scholars called them and for example at the end of the Republic there is a long kind of near-death experience about by a soldier who almost gets killed but doesn't because he comes back to tell the day and it's an elaborate description of the afterlife including by the way artists question of reincarnation now Plato made up that story probably but it also probably reflects the teachings of the mystery religions of this time and so where does this come in again it's it's a question one has to ask now if you're if you're if you're talking the typical philosophy professor at the typical university even if they're a specialist in play it's something that usually they don't want to like bother about or think about it's all just well I don't know it's some sort of eccentricity in his or something but I think it's not really a very fair way of evaluating because because in a lot of ways these myths like the one in the Republic are kind of the capstone of the work and they're they're also point he's leading up to so just to say he threw this in that's kind of his own eccentricities as a short sighted in the area is that you say that the map show where Atlantis could have been is there only been any exploration underneath to see my impression is that there has been some but nobody has found anything that's that's a general impression i from just reading some things I couldn't cite that it would it would make sense that somebody went looking for Atlantis but I don't think anyone has found anything that could really be linked with it that's a very interesting perspective with all the landmasses and everything but what about the the punishment for misuse of technology or misuse of spiritual powers is there anything and if anything that we can for some reason I thought that's what you were going to talk about this like you know mapping that onto our time and then have you also and my second question is about the the dating of the Sphinx that it's supposedly was has been more or less proven but again I don't know if archaeologists accept it but some someone archaeologists that Colin Wilson wrote about dated at around the same time now about 10,000 BCE yeah well with the snakes the controversy has to do with this because the Sphinx is eroded but people have kind of taken samples of it or photos of it and showed it to geologists and specialists and they've said this is water erosion not sand erosion and Egypt was around 6,000 BC or there abouts it was kind of like a wetter savanna kind of climate than it is now so the theory is that if it's if it is water then it really has to be a hell of a lot older than the 2700 BC date that's usually given that's and again I mean Egyptologists are are again very very I often narrow-minded in their thinking you know each according to the Egyptian civilization sprung up overnight in 3000 BC suddenly there are all these people well there has to be a little more to the story than that I'm not saying I know what that other part of the story is but I get it with that particular case I would think well if there was climate change and there's been climate change in the lifespan of the human races have you already seen and Egypt was a savanna at one point probably traces of this earlier civilization or somewhere out there and then desert or nobody thinks to look I mean that's again an option as far as the punishment goes well that is again a long-standing motif that the gods were angry the there's a flood motif in Sumeria the myth would not be steamed and why did the gods decree this flood because there are too many people and they're making too much noise it was kind of you know the humans were coming kind of noisy neighbors oh the the Greek epic cycle why did it why did the Trojan War start well they're all these you know the judgment of Paris and you know you all know the myths but it started out because Zeus decided there are too many people in the world so Zeus decided to start the Trojan War that's that's when the Greek epic cycle so there is always a sense of the gods deciding hey enough is enough certainly the Bible has the same thing you know a flood is flat-out a punishment for human degeneracy now are we gonna look at this in a contemporary light well we might in that we can adopt it to a or adapted to a present anything are the gods going to punish us for shall we say desecrating the environment well maybe not maybe maybe it doesn't really kind of come down that way but if you abuse something enough whether it's your kind of like mystical psychic powers or you know your capacity to burn fossil fuels it's going to come back to haunt you and I think that's that's kind of the core of the message which in ancient times was thought in terms of the punishment of the gods although I have to say this is just a gut reaction that you know I've had every time that some new Cataclysm or tsunami or whatever hits all I can things like wow the earth gods are mad do some articles allude to the fact that Atlantis was one more advanced civilization than what we are now yeah do you have any theories on that not other than that I've already said because advancement is very different kinds and frankly let's put it this way a really advanced civilization would make much more focused and disciplined use of mental powers than we do because our civilization can barely begin to admit that they exist in most cases don't so if if you were you know and thoughts do have power you can I mean this is what fundamental alcohol teaching you can train your mind to you know enhance the power of thought so what if Atlantis was more advanced in this way which again might not mean they had fancy temples or anything like that that's at least one possibility I mean it's I think it's very very important not to make them the modern mistake of ik waiting technological advancement with advancement per se you know for example I think it's quite clear that our technolog technological advancement now had better be met really fast with an advancement in moral development or things are going to be even worse than they are now and yeah we're up here we you know there's quantum computing going on and while walgreens has an app that can pinpoint where you are in the store so there's so you can a little coupon will ping to tell you that crest is a dollar off that's that's advanced but aren't we morally advanced enough to use this wisely the whole lesson of Atlantis at least according to most of the traditions was that they weren't and that you know yeah I think the lesson I think I would you know at least draw for our time actually I'm incorrect Walgreens does not have that out they developed it but people found it too intrusive so they they just let it go this is if there's no sign of Atlantis then how do you know it existed and the other thing is what kind of society did they actually have and technically speaking and in relation to these so-called mental powers just how advanced were they but it's all speculative so no because because you know to start with your first point none of this amounts to prove that there was such a place as Atlantis I'm not saying this cut I this is what I'd called speculative earlier that is to say everything I've given points to the possibility of a place called Atlantis more or less when and where Plato said it was it doesn't prove that I you go away thinking that that's what I said in this lecture tonight you would be wrong I'm not saying it proves it it's it's very indicative and suggestive and as what kind of society they had I think there are lots of guesses about it Edgar Cayce oh by the way here's my book supernatural and it actually has an article on Atlantis in it which actually answers a lot of this these these questions and there's more in it than I was able to deliver tonight but I think Casey's thing was that the they had had the Atlanteans had bred these kind of semi human creatures and they were kind of abusing them for sexual and other purposes and that was kind of one of the things that brought them down again no there's no there's there's no proof of those I will add however that another elements of traditional teachings is other races that is not not to say black Caucasian and so on but other races that preceded us and that too is been demonstrated you know what is it according to the reports I've read what we have we are the average person today has 5% Neanderthal genes and then they came across this totally different race of humans called the Denisovans because it's found someplace with that name in siberia who are apparently taller than we are and their genes really only have survived and for whatever reason on the Polynesians so you know that there are these legends of these different races some of them giants like the Denisovans again these folk memories probably do reflect something and you know another important point is the reliance of contemporary scholarship on written records is based on the assumption that all oral tradition is just hearsay the thinking is it's like the telephone game you know you sit around and you know you whisper something and it comes back to you to cook the completely wrong way well there is that element of it but people did make an enormous and particularly in traditional societies they made an enormous effort to pass down the traditions and knowledge of the people and you basically had to learn it you had to there are no books so you had to be the book a how well does this work well you've certainly heard of the Vedas the Sanskrit sacred texts well according from linguistic evidence they were probably composed around 1500 BC some people would say earlier but they weren't really written down until a thousand ad so these texts were preserved including the method of chanting them which if there's a traditional method of chanting them was preserved orally perfectly accurately for 2500 years all of which is to say that these supposedly ancient traditions these ancient legends these these folktales of these primitive peoples may have been not dismissed a little too callously well I don't understand is if you have the game a telephone you know phenomenon then how could they keep something accurate through the centuries you know buy it buy it all this chanting when they go off kilter with that as well well this is I mean these these are like rigorous traditions then they basically started with small children and trained them for years and years and years and they they weren't trained in anything else and if you had been that rigorously trained and you trained the next generation that rigorously it's possible whereas at out the game of telephone is you know it's just an idle thing I mean a gossip is really just kind of an idle thing and people have a lot of interests just for the sake of enjoying that if nothing else and distorting you but if you have a totally different attitude toward spoken knowledge oral tradition you'll have different results or anything Plato himself said that it was regrettable that writing had been Advanta because it would really deplete and reduce the power of human memory and like India is much more of memory oriented than we are like dhanunjay who was here sometimes he's professor statistics among other things he's from India and he said you know we have atom memorize all the logarithms do you can calculate or you can look them up in the exams but then you memorize them because it helps you get through the exam faster so that's a very different attitude today memory as a mental power is not very well cultivated because there's this idea that well as for thinking and memory our computers will do that for us

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 9,858

Rating: 4.6697249 out of 5

Keywords: theosophical society, theosophy, Atlantis, Lost Continent of Atlantis, Mythology, Plato, Plato's Dialogues, Edgar Cayce, Richard Smoley (Author), Theosophical Society in America

Id: 7rIR_sovrKI

Length: 64min 15sec (3855 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020