[Music] that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again and we resist. This quote here holds one of the most important thoughts to come out of Escilis's Oraaya, the trilogy, the only known trilogy to have survived from classical Greece. And it is a great one. This quotation comes from the first chorus in the Agamemnon, the first uh part of the trilogy, the first play in the trilogy. And in a way, it epitomizes everything Escilis has to say about life. Uh we suffer, we suffer into truth. We cannot sleep because of the pain remembered. In other words, our past coming to haunt us again and again and a resistance to these truths. Life is suffering, Escilas is telling us. And it is only through our own efforts at selfexloration, the willingness to go inside and battle with our demons that any hope of redemption can arise. Escilis is not only considered one of the great tragedians of classical Greece, he is really one of the great innovators of the art form. He lived in a period of time that Carl Jasper's the German philosopher has referred to as the axial age. You have an explosion of new ways of thinking all across the world. You have la in confucious and China. You have in India the pananishads and Buddha and Palestine you have the prophets of the old testament and in Greece of course you have this incredible explosion in science and philosophy and drama and architecture. The two interlocking myths that lie behind the orestaya is the story of the Trojan war and the curse in the house of Atrius. If you think of the curse in the house of Atrius as being a psychic problem that gets transferred from generation to generation, then I think we'll leave that story as what it is. Fundamentally, it is a story we all encounter in our lives of our families wounding through unconsciousness. Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, a hero, but it can't be forgotten what he sacrificed. his own daughter. Janiah, thinking she is to be wed, is instead slaughtered so that the Greek fleet can sail towards Troy. Archetypally, we know what this points to. We know that the destruction the Trojans will face, the rape, the pillaging, the disproportionate devastation that leads the Greeks to acts of atrocity can only happen because something symbolized by that young girl has been sacrificed. A sense of connection to oneself and the others is what is encoded in the feminine. The thing is in the Iliad the men fight and then they cry together atoning for what they have done. It is one of the tragic consequences of our disconnection from our feeling function that leaves so many suffering in the world. These ancient stories point to just that. Nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except pain. And you know the way into that pain is by shining the light of awareness or consciousness into things and into our past and into our family history. And this is what this trilogy does. So, Agamemnon arrives to find his wife, Clay Nestra, being a little bit overdone in her rhetoric about her own misery and his absence and how much she's missed them. And she's made the servant spread out embroidered cloths for him to walk on. Now, he knows a part of him knows he shouldn't walk on those cloths. He knows that it is almost tempting the gods to do so, but his ego really can't keep him back. See, those cloths are lavish garments or tapestries. These are not carpets. They are not really suited to what he is meant to do. They symbolize trampling on something fine just like he's done by sacrificing his daughter and the feeling function. A part of him knows so he complains but then he walks. A man not in contact with his feeling side is capable of trampling on all sorts of lovely things. As we will see from what happens to Cassandra when he does walk in. Cassandra finally speaks. She tells the chorus her own story and prophesizes what will happen to Agamemnon and herself once they are both inside that house. Now Cassandra is cursed. She had promised to sleep with a god Apollo and he gave her the gift of prophecy. But then she went back on her word and Apollo cursed her by making it impossible for anyone ever to believe her. So as she tells the chorus she's about to be murdered and what's going to be happening to Agamemnon, they do not believe her. Perhaps this points to the fact that intuition cannot really ever mate with rationality as represented by Apollo. They're very different ways to apprehend reality. After Cassandra enters the house, the chorus has time to only sing sing about 26 lines before Agamemnon is heard crying that he has been struck. Kitamestra comes out of standing over the bodies of her victims and announces to all that the deed has been done and that she feels no remorse. Now in the second play of the Oristaya, the libation bearsers, Electra, one of the daughters of Agamemnon and Clamestra goes to her father's grave where she encounters Arrestes her brother who has been exiled. Now Arrestes has heard that his father has been murdered by his mother and he is ready to come back and take revenge. That is essentially what this second play is about. Arrestes goes back disguised. The mother senses that this might be Arrestes at some point. But she does not heed that intuitive hunch until it's too late and Arrestes reveals himself to be the son. At which point she stresses that he cannot kill his mother. She is after all who gave birth to him though she has now raised him. Arrestes falters but eventually gives in to his rational side in his need for vengeance and kills her and her lover Augustus. Now here's the problem. Apollo the god of rational thought has ordered him to do something rational. Kill your mother to avenge your father's death. But the furies who protect family members do not look kindly on this action and they now start to haunt him. Now here we enter the third play, the human amenities where this gets resolved. And how does it get resolved? Well, the god Apollo actually tells arrestes go to Athens and get justice there. through the court system with Athena the goddess as the judge and a jury will decide what his fate is. So Apollo is his defense lawyer. The furies are the prosecution and Athena will serve as a judge. After a trial in which Apollo argues that a woman can not necessarily be considered a mother if she is only a vehicle to carry a child, something which doesn't seem to convince the jurors. Arrestes is finally acquitted. But here's the really important part. Athena ensures the transformation of the psyche and the society at the same time by converting the furies into the kindly ones who will now guard over Athens. Now what does this mean? Or on a practical level, it means the curse on the house of Atrius is lifted and arrestes can now go on to live a normal life where he does not pass this crazy curse that has been hovering over the house of Atrius since time immemorial. But on a bigger sense, an archetypal sense, it means that the way through suffering is through transformation. And the transformation of the furious into the kindly ones is from rage to compassion. At the end of the day, the story pits two sides. On one side, blood, vengeance, irrationality, night, earth, wildness, and on the other side there is justice and reason, including logic and rhetoric, day, sky, civilization, and so on. Both these sides of the society and the psyche must be integrated for something to be healthy. And this play brilliantly allows for that resolution through Athena's judgment. Now, Athena is interesting. She's a female goddess, but she's emerged from the head of Zeus. So, she has a great combination of male and female qualities. So, she is eminently suited to this role. The trial brings to an end the age of heroes. We are now in the twilight of the gods of the Greek age. The gods have become integrated. The gods are forces that are can be seen as something within the self. They are not up there. They are within. Over 2,000 years later, the great psychologist Carl Jung would say that the Olympians had become diseases. The gods had become diseases. Suss no longer rules Olympus, he said, but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting rooms or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. Becoming conscious means reconciling the opposites and creating a third. That's what Carl Jung said as well. And in arrestes, we see that coming to fruition. The circle of consciousness has widened through the confrontation between those two opposing forces. And we have arrived at a new level. All of this of course has been done through suffering. As Ben Oakri wrote, the most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, and to be greater than our suffering. [Music]