The Eugene Halliday Tapes
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APPLYING WHAT WE KNOW
APPLYING WHAT WE KNOW
The précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday
At Parklands, Altrincham to members of Ishval on 2nd October 1983
Eugene begins with the observation that, although all humans have the same origin, we are always at war with others. Not just nations but tribes, families, neighbours. Why have we not learned the lesson of history that all such quarrels do not bring lasting peace? The answer is “inertia,” the tendency to carry on doing what we are doing. This inertia is at all levels in us, physical, emotional and mentational. All are habitual and all are acquired from outside of ourselves, from parents and other educators, and from wider society. We are conditioned into disliking others from different backgrounds, different countries, races, religions, etc., and do not question where these ideas come from. We internalise them in the same way we learn to drive a car; they become automatic responses in us. Volition has no inertia and is always initiative. Inertia is when we identify with either a mentational, reaction from parents and society, an emotional attitude, or by a physical, habitual tendency. We often identify with a form that we make, such as when we see ourselves as a certain kind of person and then make our life into a pattern consistent with that form.
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How to break inertias: “How” begins with ‘H’ and signifies “a hierarchy of powers.” We have this hierarchy within us. We are a mass of energy: physical, emotional, mentational, conceptual, volitional. We have to start with volition and bring the others into line: will; concepts; thinking; feeling; body. We can change habits of body, feeling and thinking. We cannot change eternal truths on which religious ideas are based, but we often forget these truths. Often our thinking is at odds with these. e.g. The Afrikaners during apartheid, although nominally Christian, considered the indigenous people of South Africa to be racially inferior. We all may have such ‘biases’.
Many people who are looking for spiritual enlightenment adopt a concept that a particular spiritual practice, such as chanting, or a particular kind of meditation will achieve this. “It won’t, of course.” Krishnamurti has spent most of his life telling his followers that “there are no gurus.” On one occasion he asked his audience, “Why do you keep coming?” A voice replied, “to be reminded.” This is true.The reality is that, “We are all of one origin, and that origin is Spirit, Intelligent Power.” The problem is we forget, daily and from moment to moment, “because we get caught in mentation.” “Why do we get caught in that? Because of pleasures and pains. Why do we get those? Because we have got focused on a body.” How can we remember? With symbols. The word ‘sym-bol’ is ‘seed of will’, which means it can grow and become free volition. ‘Sym’ is ‘mys’ reversed, the mys in ‘mystery’. In the seed there is a mystery. You cannot find an oak tree in an acorn. “There is a will hidden in every seed.” We can see this very clearly if we watch a seed germinate and grow. Its will is to push outwards from its centre. Likewise, a growing embryo.
We have to “re-member” that we are “members of an Infinite Continuum of Sentient Power.” “We are all points of in-tension in an ex-tension of power.” But individuation is limitation. To express ourselves we have to drive outwards again to transcend that limitation. A symbol can remind us of this. The masons use the idea of an ‘Ashlar’, a cube inside which you sit and are aware of the powers above you, the powers below you, developed talents to the right, undeveloped ones to the left, the past behind and the future in front. The cube has six faces and to exist is to be ‘six-faced’, to ‘stand out’. We stand in the middle. We are the seventh, the day God rested. “You rest on the point of your individuation, not on the point of your empirical ego, because that is not in the centre.”
The ego is a construct made from a collision of the inner spirit and the contingent stimulus. It is half-way between the innermost, true Self and the outer world.” “When these…impinge, they spin and make an ego.” “That ego structure is empirical, mentational, temporal…it has no power whatever of itself.” All the power that appears to be in it is from centre.” We can use the idea of the Ashlar cube even more simply “Spin it, and all the corners will wear off and you will have a sphere.”
He suggests that we draw a circle, put a dot in the centre and write I on this, and do a little drawing of an eye, an observer, in the middle. The circle around the I is our peripheral interest. The distance this goes to is self-determined and we think we must understand this world that we have determined for ourselves. But we should be doing just the opposite: “What you have to do is understand you.” We are precipitating an egoic world; Why? Because we have a motive and we must understand our motive to understand ourselves. “You never, ever, in the whole of your existence, have or ever will know, anything other than you modalising you.” It is “the modalities you, with your appetite, have imposed on you.” Enlightenment, therefore, can only be found inside. This is why Krishnamurti said “there are no gurus.” The Guru is hidden in each one of us.
The world of humans is made by interested appetites defining situations, borders, boundaries, fences, etc. This tendency is in every one of us. We cannot remember without a symbol because “a symbol condenses fantastical histories of thoughts.” Christ said, “Is it not written ye are gods?” The trouble is we have forgotten this. We have been taught that to think in this way is heresy. “But you are God, because, absolutely, there isn’t anything else but God. Where you are, as you are, you are God being you.” A symbol can remind us of this daily.
The cross in the circle is the ‘Master Symbol’ and appears in all religions. The George Cross means ‘balanced power’, eternal truth that cannot change. The Andrew Cross means the same, but now rotating, “spinning, creating time.” The one super-imposed on the other symbolises eternity and time. The circle represents Absolute Wisdom, Sophia, the female cosmic principle of creativity. The cross represents man, the principle of initiative. The horizontal is the principle of passivity, the vertical the principle of activity. Together they represent the hermaphrodite. The vertical is male relative to the horizontal, which is female, but they are inside the circle, which is female. The Cross symbolises Infinite, Absolute, True form with a circle, a limit around it. This is the ‘Divine Hermaphrodite’, ‘The Heavenly Sophia’, ‘The Messiah’. “The appetival drive is the circle and the cross is the form.” We all have fundamental, appetival, Sentient Power inside us but we disguise it by presenting ourselves as “a form, a cross, an identity.”
From our master symbol we can derive others. The primary symbol is a circle which means “all and nothing, zero.” The inside and the outside are identical. It is a primary symbol of encapsulation. It means inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion. What is enclosed is finite and what is outside is infinite, We have to remember that, in order to draw a circle, we must have a central point, a dot. That dot is the I the observer. As soon as we posit that dot we feel differently about the circle. Now there is a point of reference at its centre and therefore a relationship between this point and the periphery. If we imagine that the dot is I, myself, then the circle is the limit of my environment. In astronomy the symbol of the circle with the dot at the centre indicates the sun with an attendant planet in orbit around it. This gives us the idea of hierarchy. Wherever there is a centre there is something going round it. If we now draw the George cross in the circle we have quartered it and it becomes a ‘mandala’, an object for meditation. He then takes the circle and puts the cross underneath to represent Venus, the symbol of love, and then Mars, by moving the arms of the cross, the symbol of war. He then divides the circle vertically and puts the cross on top and then below to represent Saturn and Jupiter. The circle with the dot is the sun.We can then shade part of the circle to leave a crescent, to symbolise the moon. He then draws Mercury. He has now broken down the mandala into its constituent applications.
Meditating on the master symbol tells us how to conduct our lives. The first one says, “all beings are bound.” We all have a certain amount of free energy, the vertical, and all beings are passive to stimuli from other beings. We have a sign for lovingness and another for anti-love, for war; a sign for greed and one for generosity; a sign for radiant giving of light and information to others; the
sun, a constant, and a sign for variability, or passivity; and then a sign for them all together; Mercury. This has now extended the master symbol. It says that if there is war it is because somebody is loving something and wants to get hold of it. If there is love the person will fight to defend the things it loves. If there is constant light, the sun, there will be periodicity because we cannot stand being in the light all the time.If there is too much generosity, everything will disperse to infinity, so there must be a saturnine grab to stop the dispersal. And if there is greed, there must be open-handed generosity, as shown by some rich philanthropists. “Now we cannot do anything without doing both of the opposites and all of them are mixed up continuously by this Mercurial spin.” Our master symbol covers everything. “There is no thought, no feeling, no will, no love, no hate, that is not contained in that master symbol.” We should use this symbol all the time. At the point of death the RC church gives ‘extreme unction’ to remind the dying person of religious truths. The Tibetan Book of the Dead does similarly. “What is that supreme concept that guarantees absolute salvation? The concept that you are the mysterious Self that you are looking for.”
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FATHERHOOD
FATHERHOOD
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 03.10.1976
The word ‘Father’ means ‘to differentiate power’. Christ says we have a ‘Father in Heaven’. ‘Heaven’ is the zone of balance. When the Absolute, Sentient Power condensed itself to form the world, it pressed upon centres and the centres pressed back to a certain distance. Where these pressures balanced is the zone of Heaven, the place where two powers meet and press, a zone of equalisation of pressures. This is the ‘firmament’ in Genesis. The inward pressure is Saturn, the outward pressure Jupiter, the zone where they meet is Mercury. Mercury is the Greek Hermes, the Egyptian Toth, the Hebrew Messiah. “So the balancer of power is the Messiah, the Saviour, and the Redeemer in every situation is the one that holds the balance of power.”
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In science, power is the rate at which you use energy. Energy is that which does work. The thing that does that work is a force. When energies rotate they make matter. When energies translating strike against a rotation, the result is work, and this equals some kind of change induced by an applied force. This is exactly what happens in conception. A rotating egg is penetrated by a translating sperm. No human has created these. The so-called ‘father’ simply delivered the sperm, which he could not possibly have made by his own cleverness, into the woman. The egg, which she did not make, chooses the sperm it wants. The people involved are instruments. They did not design or make the egg and sperm.
“We are all children of God.” Christ said “No” to the Pharisees. Only those who believe in God are his children. Those who do not believe are children of the devil. We can identify two kinds of people in the world: believers and non-believers. The latter are materialists who believe that material particles somehow, by accident, got together and produced amino acids or whatever, and that, over time, all the life that we know of, including ourselves, came from this. Many people believe this. All of us may have a doubt in our minds that, possibly, this could have happened. There is doubt in the human being. The word ‘doubt’ means ‘doubleness’. Doubleness was created when the Absolute, Sentient Power made a centre and the centre pressed back to make a balance.
So the source of doubt is creation. Before creation, there was only the Infinite, and that is doubtless, but with the creation of a finite world there is a “doubleness of presentation,” which is doubt. There is now the doubleness of “a finite self-encapsulated being and an Infinite beyond.”
There is now a precipitated centre, an Infinite beyond, and both are in consciousness, so we can conceive of both simultaneously. This is doubleness, doubt. We can identify with either or both. If we identify with the finite we become egotistic. But at the same time, we can be aware of the Infinite beyond us, so there is double presentation. This is the origin of doubt. “Doubt is in the human being. It is quite dishonest to pretend that it isn’t there.”
Lucifer and the Fall; The first precipitations of energy into being were spheres of light. These were called angels and archangels. These were spheres of intelligent light. They could think, feel and will i.e. they were persons. Our own physical bodies are made in the same way. They are photoplasmic light bodies, compressed and slowed down into material ones. (Just like coal is condensed sunlight.) In the beginning there was an infinity of spheres of light. By distorting their shape they could move about. The bigger spheres had smaller ones inside them that they could feel, just as we have cells within our bodies that we can feel if we have a pain. Some of these spheres were also lighter and brighter than others, and the brightest of all was Lucifer. The other spheres admired him and he enjoyed this and he sought to make himself brighter still by drawing more power from the Infinite. In doing so he gets hotter and at some point seizes up. The most brilliant of all the spheres is now darkness. “It is now earth. It is choked with energy. It is void.”
At this moment his name changed from Lucifer to Satan. This is where the Book of Genesis begins. The spirit of God moves on the surface of that sphere and He separates light from darkness. Milton says that one-third of the Heavenly host were dragged in with Lucifer when he fell. So God starts to work on the sphere to bring out these. These ‘sheep pf Christ” have to be rescued. Man is made of the dust of the ground and therefore has a double principle: that ground is satanic yet man is made by God. Your body is satanic, it wants to be admired. But the other part, that was dragged in at the Fall, wants to return to God. Here is the doubt, the doubleness. Part of us wants to go back to truth, beauty, goodness, divinity, the body of light etc. but the satanic part contradicts this. When God created Adam, he gave him a simple commandment. Adam disobeyed. Why? Because the egoic, satanic principle in him says to God just what Lucifer did earlier. “Maybe God does not want me to know (shine) too much.” Adam was innocent. So are we. Before we have had an experience of God, we don’t know Him; but we can believe. We don’t have to be disobedient just because we don’t know anything. We can choose to believe.
Down in our HARA centre resides a power, a will, the power of God the Father. This power can formulate and evaluate. It can do so egotistically, for private reasons, or divinely inspired for God’s reasons. The same power can be used for good and evil, for example, nuclear power. This power is also the power of the imagination. By His imagination power, God created the world. By this same power, a genius creates an idea. “There is only power self-formulating, and in this process, its own name, quite simply, is imagination.”
“God breathed His Spirit into man and man became a living soul.” Animals have a soul also, (anima). But in man, this soul can become reflexive i.e. it knows what it is doing continuously. Animals cannot convert their soul into spirit. Only humans can do this. We are the masters of our own destiny, by Divine permission. Christ kept telling us to “wake-up”. Every time you worship an external object you are dead. “You have forgotten to return.” You are identified with an object. As long as we believe in God we are his children. If we give ourselves to the ego we are children of satan. “You have divided yourself from infinity by your own imagination.” We have to believe God and this is an act of faith.
There is a war on inside us between egotism and love of God. We cannot sit on the fence, we must choose. “You are a father when you consciously, reflexively generate and put something into being that was not there before, and you are a master of creative imagination when you know…that you are able to imagine, to create.” How do we control this imagination? Imagination controls the universe. The imagination is the power of God. How to control it? “First of all, you must become aware that it is controlling you. You have to believe this and this is an act of faith.” We have two kinds of imagination: one that “plots incessantly” to boost the ego, and another that can turn towards our source. When we look inside ourselves we find a power that is imaginating all the time. We have a thought process imagining all kinds of things, new acquisitions, new activities, new everything. Simultaneously, there is another imagination thinking “This is rubbish.” You are between two beings: spirit and flesh. St. Paul expressed it well: “The Spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh lusts against the Spirit.”
We have a war inside us between egotism and “real knowledge that God has given us to develop our talents through the imagination.” And we must choose. We cannot avoid it by waffling because we then have chosen waffling!
Imagination is power. For most of us it has been destroyed by education to control us in society. We are taught that we can only act by thinking rationally; we must obey reason. This has been useful in the past. But In the future: “No man will need another to tell him about God because all shall know Him…the Father will be reflexive in the human being because the human being has worked to develop the talent given to him to become reflexive, and he will be able to imagine, to bring forth, by power, to model his field, the bio-magnetic field of his body and to create situations so that there will be a new kind of earth. In those days the whole earth will be a garden; everything about it will be worth having because it will be product of reflexive self-conscious imagination.”
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CYCLIC LAW
CYCLIC LAW
The transcription of a talk given by Eugene Halliday
At Parklands, Altrincham to members of Ishval
Cyclic Law is the big law. We are not training for time, we are training for eternity, we are working through time for the timeless for the absolutely permanent. We have got work to do as long as we have a physical body. If when we finish up on our deathbed we’ve accumulated enough directive forces in us to carry us into the next world with the right direction that is all we ought to hope for. Human birth is hard to get. To get into a human body and complete your evolution is very very great good fortune to ignore the opportunity is foolishness. To climb out of the dominion of cyclic law we must practice non-identification with it and to aid in this we must assert the opposite phase of the cycle. The aim is to be able to elevate or depress oneself at will in order to stay on the median line and not be subject to cyclic law. The first step is to think that cyclic law really exists and it is quite a good thing to stop it. The technique of stopping it is stating the opposite. To see summer in terms of winter is to see summer properly.
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HERE AND NOW
HERE AND NOW
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands in1968
The ‘Here and Now’ is about Space and Time. E.H. illustrates this with printed music and ledger lines. The musical stave is the ‘space’ and the movement along it is ‘time’. On a piano keyboard we have space and the speed at which we play is time. Playing involves energy expenditure; the faster we play the greater the energy expended. So we have space, time and energy expended. (space, time, power.) ‘Time’ turned backwards, is ‘emit’; energy is released at every moment by an existential observer of time. i.e. you cannot observe time without releasing energy, moment by moment.
The eye cannot focus sharply over a large area. A small area focussed on can give a sharp image, but this is static. However, on the periphery of vision, where the image is vague, we are conscious of movement. This has a survival value; any moving object, out of focus, will attract our attention, because it could be a threat from a predator. So our visual sense operates in these two ways. We can look at a room full of people and choose to focus on a particular one, or to scan the room, focussing on each in turn. When we do this we lose formal consciousness of the others, but if any should move, then we will be aware of it in our peripheral vision. To focus sharply on one thing means excluding, for the time being, a sharp focus on the rest. To see another thing in sharp focus requires turning the eyes, and that takes time. My ‘here’ is the centre of my consciousness and ‘there’ is everywhere else. But I can say that someone else who is in the room with me is ‘here’ also. If a add a ’T’ and say ‘there’ then I am indicating something on the periphery of my awareness.
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All experienced events are “protensive” – stretched in time. The process of perception is such an event; it takes time to perform it. So we have the “quick” and the “dead,” those whose perceptions are at a faster rate than others. (He gives the example of city pickpockets robbing a country gentleman whose mentation is slower because of his lifestyle.) We see everything extended in time and space. It takes time to see space and we cannot separate time and space from the energy expended in perceiving them. Power is expended over time in a given space. How ‘quick’ we are can depend on circumstance. If we are suddenly in danger our perceptions may speed up – to avoid being knocked down, for instance, but normally our speed of perception will be slower. The gap between our percepts is not something we usually think about, but a musician is very aware that he must speed up his response to quicker passages in the music.
It used to be thought that there was a ‘sound barrier’ through which aeroplanes could not fly. Scientists now think the same about the speed of light as the ultimate’ barrier for all motion.
We tend to think of time as proceeding in a straight line. This is how historians see it, as a progression of dates, 1066, 1215,1812 etc. All those who were born before us and have now died, we think of as non-existent. But this is a gross oversimplification. The earth is rotating, travelling round the sun, which is travelling round the galaxy. These movements cannot be plotted on a straight line. Even a simple road journey cannot be seen this way because we cannot drive from A to B in a straight line. Yet, we think time is simple; one-dimensional. We know that space is more difficult to deal with because it has three dimensions. Every event takes place in time. Time moves and so, therefore, does place. The earth tomorrow will be in a different place than it is today. Every event happens, not only in time, but in a specific location within time. i.e. time has a spatial reality. Every event takes place in its own locus in time and moves on. The place where it was is still vibrating so all past events still exist in their own places- and so do all future ones. “All time, past, present, future, is a function of an Absolute Here/Now.”
‘H’ is an old glyph meaning ‘power’ and ‘hierarchy’ (like a ladder.) The ‘here’ is a power situation, the ‘now’ is created by emitting energy. When we emit energy (a ‘now’) onto a particular part of the ‘here’ we create a ‘moment’. A ‘moment’ is a point in time where a change of direction of motion occurs, a new orientation. “Only in a moment are you free.”
All the famous dictators of history achieved their status because they lived in the ‘here and now’.
Napoleon, Hitler, et al were ‘momentary’ figures doing ‘momentous’ things at a ‘moment’ in history.
Anyone who does not live in the ‘here and now’ is at the mercy of those who can.
Every event perceived is a content within consciousness. The consciousness of an individual is far greater than any object within it. The consciousness of the human race is far greater than all the objects within it. Logically, consciousness itself is infinite- only it’s content is finite.
Simultaneous perception, rather than serial presentation of percepts, is the goal. Consciousness does not see the universe serially, but simultaneously – “one-ly”. Christ, “The only Begotten” means “one-ly generated.”
Christ told us to be “Quick” – “If you go to my Father greater works than these shall you do.”
So, how do we do it? Answer: By doing it! By practising it every moment. H and N (HAN) means Grace. Grace can only operate in the ‘here and now.’ You can only be free in the moment. ‘G’ is the gross body, our reference point; ‘race’ is Time; “ace” is like the ace in a pack of cards; you can be ‘ace high’ – above the king (the one who defines the situation), or ‘ace low’ – a finite individual, passive to the activities of others higher up the hierarchy of self-knowledge.
Eugene suggests writing ‘HAN’ on a postcard and carrying it at all times as a reminder to do it. This mnemonic will begin to operate as a control function, “throwing out every lesser concept that would impede you.” He advises reading faster than usual to increase our rate of perceptions, yet focussing on each word and retaining it’s meaning… “and do it until you get hot.”
The other way is the ‘sudden school’ of stopping all serial thought, in the moment. (Zen).
He describes the complexities facing the musician, who has to keep in mind time signatures, instructions from the composer, the form of the music, the timing of the parts, and of course, the notes. Also, the conductor who must coordinate all the different players in the orchestra – “and you can understand why there are very few, what are called good conductors. And then imagine another being that is conducting total reality in a block, non-serialised. He is cleverer than Mozart.”
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ILLEGITIMACY OF GOD
ILLEGITIMACY OF GOD
A synopsis of the talk given by Eugene Halliday
At Parklands, Altrincham to members of Ishval
Despite its cryptic title, this talk explores the inner meaning of the concept of Law and how God is beyond all limitations. God, the Father is the creator of all laws yet remains free of any restrictions these laws may impose. The infinite power undulating not rotating is pre-legal. The only valid law is a law that can enforce itself. The word law cannot be used unless there is a binding, and therefore the infinite force that is there prior to first ensphering or circumscribing process is pre-legal. No man at any time has seen the father, this means that no finite sense organ can perceive an infinite field of power therefore the infinite prior to that ensphering process is not legal. Although there is only one supreme law, everything is made of cycles, of forces, there are many little laws and each law is effective at its own level. There are within the first sphere innumerable little spheres each one with the divine consciousness that is the property of the infinite and which cannot be destroyed. This is the supreme purpose to create an infinity of beings who know what they think, what they feel and what they will and will be absolutely self-determinant within the infinite. Every single human being in the world is a little sphere with an authority effective in so far as they comprehend the meaning of their own thought processes, control their own likes and dislikes and are able to compel themselves into action or to withhold from action at their own will.
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INVOLUTION
INVOLUTION
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday
Eugene begins by saying that he has been asked to talk about Evolution – but he is going to talk about Involution instead. “Evolution the other way up.”
Evolution requires a prior Involution. You cannot get something out if it wasn’t first put in. However, to put something in suggests that it previously was out. So Involution (inward turning) requires Evolution (outward turning), and vice-versa. Either process presupposes the other. The important question is: what is it that is in turning or out turning? What is the constituent of Ultimate Reality? What are the essential qualities, the “inherences?” The fact that humans exist means that the forces within us “must be an inherency of ultimate reality, the origin from which humanity came.”
The Greek thinker Thales thought it must be water, he was looking for unchanging substance. Others thought ‘air’, they were looking for forces. Heraclitus said ‘fire’, also a force. So, from the beginning there have been two opposing views; one temperament concerned with ‘substance’, materiality, and the other with energy, force.
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Modern physics is much closer now to Heraclitus. We know today that there is no such thing as ‘matter’ in the sense that earlier periods believed. All matter is simply energies rotating to give the appearance of physical, material bodies. ‘Involution’ is the ‘in-flowing’, the ‘in-fluencing’ of energies into such bodies from a prior state in which those energies are in a field of power, a continuum of energy. This process produces local zones of compaction, relative to the space between them. Matter is compacted energy and has, therefore, all the essential qualities of the field of energy which precipitated it. In human beings we have evidence of such qualities as thinking, feeling and willing; these attributes must, therefore, be inherent in the field prior to such precipitation. Ultimate Reality, we may say, is a field of intelligent energy, thinking, feeling and willing, and self-condensing to make material bodies. Logically, whatever energies are condensed in this way to make a body, can be subsequently released on the dissolution of that body. The energies are eternal but the forms in which they are contained cannot be.
A problem for humans is that we tend to forget about the spaces in the field and focus only on the gross, material bodies in it. We see this in its most extreme way with ‘atomists’ and empirical scientists. Some other animals, notably cats, are clearly aware of phenomena that we are not. We humans are generally focussed on the finite and this has resulted in a world view which is granular, corpuscular. It is much easier, for example, to count the number of people in a room by counting their heads rather than by counting their heat auras. Man is a counting animal. (Man – manas – the lower mind.) Counting is easier at lower levels of vibration. Heat auras vibrate at higher rates and their boundaries are not clearly defined. Heads vibrate at lower frequencies and have sharper edges. The sharpest edges of all are found at the lowest vibrational frequencies of the mineral world, such as stones. The higher the frequency, the less defined the form. At the top level of vibration it would be a fallacy to look for boundaries of any kind because there aren’t any. There are higher frequencies than any yet discovered by modern physics. The entire universe is really a continuum of energy at different frequencies. The gross, physical world of the scientist is really an abstraction of the intellect, it has no actual reality. Physicists are discovering ‘new’ kinds of radiation, at increasingly higher frequencies, but there are many yet to be discovered that are higher than they can presently conceive.
Angels and ghosts are existential beings of a different order. They vibrate faster than we do and so are not detected by our five senses. In earlier times angels were accepted as real but when the Industrial Revolution came all other orders of beings had to be denied. You could not build a successful factory on a spot where some atrocity had been committed unless you could convince the workforce that such phenomena were unreal. “Two hundred years of thinking this way has produced human beings who think that only that is real which you can kick.”
The mineral world has the appearance of stability and timelessness because it changes so slowly. We regard the moon as reliable because it is always there and apparently unchanging. It is the “dead end” of involution, the mineral limit of energy into matter. The mineral world appears not to change. It does, of course, but at a very slow rate. Even diamonds are not forever; they can be reduced back to energy with sufficient force.
The field is a continuum incapable of disruption. We can conceive of separation between two points of the field’s precipitation but this separation is simply a conceptual construct, it cannot be real. There can be no absolute severance between centres. “All bodies are modalities of a continuum, the attributes of which must include thoughts, feelings, volition, coordination and possible self-condensation. These attributes can be seen in the human hand. The thumb is used for pushing and represents will-power. When the field of power pushes onto a centre it produces form. Forms are shapes, that is, an energy with a circumscribing line. The ideas we have are forms in this sense and the index finger is used to represent them. People use this finger to point at gross, material objects, or wag it up and down to emphasise an idea. The index finger, therefore, is used to represent the intellect. The middle finger represents desires, ‘preferred responses’. The field of power, “flowing in precipitates a form” and then “investigates the form it has precipitated” and finds it “pluralised internally, that is, it has differences within it which give rise to preferred responses.” The field of power then “devotes itself to that zone.” “The form contains an infinity of possibilities…some of these are selected and the power then devotes itself to the selected forms.”
The selected form which the power prefers is then focussed upon and the in-flowing energy wraps around it and produces a bio-field, a field of life for that form. The ring finger represents this.
From the Absolute Power there is a step-down of energy to formulation, because all formulation implies circumscription. This binding contour around all forms means that the energy inside the boundary is less free than the energy outside. It is therefore at a lower frequency and as it goes through the stages of its analysis into desires, and then into the bio-field, it is stepped down again. As energy continues to be pushed into the bio-field it will generate a physical body within that field.
The bio-field is not, therefore, the result of a living being, but its cause. Every living thing is a precipitate within the bio-magnetic field which permeates and surrounds it. It is not an emanation from that being. Our physical body is represented on the little finger.
A bio-field always conceals a system of preferred responses. Whenever there is such a system, there is form. Elephants chase elephants because, in the psyche of the elephant there is a form, and that form is related to the involution of power that has, after precipitation, pluralised itself in the process called “generation of individuals” for that species. “The forces that condense and become ‘elephant’ are formally different from the forces that condense and become ‘lounge-lizard’.”
“All the forces there are that are condensing, are condensing in a formally different way. When we find a zone of preferred responses we know that there are forms inside that being that are already stressed and precipitated in a special way.” (He gives an example of a man, snoring on a train.) There are no two zones of space that are formally identical in their energy pattern. The Infinite Power Field is structured and produces an infinity of forms, each one unique. All the forms there are are “hidden” in the field until precipitation. Since no two are identical we can never hope to find another person who will agree with us completely. It is impossible. The only thing we can agree on is our will to differ. So if we do agree with another “it is not because you agree, it is because you will to agree.”
The field itself is eternal, beyond time. Time begins when a form is created. As soon as encapsulation occurs, then the form produced is projected into the time-process. The whole process of involution means that nothing can go in to a body that was not already in the infinite field. We can view the field as God the Father, the form as the Son, and the preferred response as the Holy Ghost, the ‘life’ issuing from these three, and then the body. This corresponds with the Christian Trinity and also with Hinduism.
We are all unique creations and therefore there can never be a community of people of identical thought. From the very beginning of Christianity there have been disagreements and in-fighting resulting in the persecution of those whose thinking diverged from the powerful. The word ‘heresy’ means ‘I do my own thinking’.
When we look inside ourselves we find uniqueness of thought, feeling and will. “This means that…each one of us has a unique mode of internal involution.” No two beings are formally identical. All
formal precipitations are willed and uniqueness is an essential intent of God the Father, the generative power. He does not want a world of identical beings. The individual is always more important to God than the collectivity. Only when we recognise this can we talk about evolution in an intelligent way. True education is finding out who we are. As such, it is opposite to indoctrination
which means ‘pushing in’.
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YOGA
YOGA
Yoga synopsis
A talk of about one and a half hours on the subject Yoga given in Liverpool in the early 1960s
The talk starts by looking at the origins of the word Yoga and the link to the word religion. Religion is a quite legitimate translation of the word Yoga. Religion means to yoke back to the source of being, the practice of Yoga is an attempt to return to the relationship that was once ours in the infinite and the Yogi aspires to join him or herself to infinite power. There is a discussion of philosophical basis of Yoga in India and an analysis of the terms used.
Yogis aim to become one with pure consciousness, pure consciousness is a continuum that precipitates forms within itself. The technique is to move backwards from object identification to identification with the source of all being. There is much else in the talk about universal substance, cosmic reason and Buddhi.
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BODY WISDOM
BODY WISDOM
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 24.07.1974
Eugene begins by saying that he is going to talk about the wisdom in the body, and not of it. He defines wisdom as “total knowledge in its simultaneity.” Anything less may be knowledge, but it is not wisdom. We have extensive knowledge of the body from the world of empirical science, but the accumulation of this knowledge does not give us ‘body wisdom’.Taking a body to pieces may give us information about it and make us feel clever that we can do this, but the exact opposite is to observe and understand that what the scientist has “discovered” was already in it. “If you examine the brain of a frog, what astonishes you is not your own cleverness, but the cleverness of the intelligence that made the brain of the frog.” This second way is far more ancient than the scientific way and reveals the innermost soul of the being examined. Whatever organism we examine, we can say that the forces that produced that organism must have been involved into it. Every part of the structure of a living being is a wonder of intelligent organisation, and behind both structure and function is energy. Energy means “in work affirming,” en-erg-y(a). Somehow, this energy can cause a chameleon to change colour and a plaice to disguise itself from predators. Somehow, it can cause intuition in humans, and all the complex, mental processes that we are capable of. All are functions of energy, manifesting in the organism.
Read more . . .
When we examine organic structures we are constantly asking “What does it do?” What is its function? Function is the way in which energy moves. If we think of our bodies we know that we can move them in various ways. If we open and close a hand, it is we doing it. We feel that we are free to do this. But there are limits to our movements caused by the form of each part of us. These forms are the ‘dome’ in ‘freedom’. Free means ‘unimpeded motion,’ ‘dome’ means impedance. We demonstrate daily that, although we are bound by natural laws of gravity, magnetism, chemistry etc
nevertheless, we are free to choose our response to them. i.e. we are free in the middle of bondage. We are free to jump off a cliff, and become bound by the law of gravity, but we do not have to jump. There can be no doubt of our freedom to choose, because if a man says, “we are not free,” he has chosen to make that statement!
He suggests that when we examine our own bodies, we should be “astonished” at what we find. e.g. the bones and muscles of the arms are arranged in such a way that we have greater strength to pull things towards us than we have to push them away. “Taking muscles are stronger than giving muscles.”
Man is the evaluator, ‘manus’ is Latin for ‘hand’, the instrument he has always used for counting. “Intelligence means ‘the essence which binds a purpose in itself’.” So when we see energy functioning in a purposeful way, we have to say it is intelligent. Therefore, we have to say that the power that created the world and everything in it, must be intelligent also, because energy is power at work. If we accept that man has intelligence, and that intelligent energy is evident in our bodies and in all bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral, then we have to accept that intelligence was in the power from which all these things have come.
Whatever we “discover” in nature is already there waiting to be discovered. This was understood by some ancient, priest kings, who thought of themselves as ‘solar beings.’ By contrast, most of humanity thought of themselves as bound by external forces to behave in routine, predictable ways which were passed on to each generation. Such behaviour is similar to that of the moon, a lifeless, inert body whose movements and phases are entirely predictable. So the moon became equated with ancestors. i.e. unchanging, mechanistic movement through time.
Our bodies are largely ‘flesh’-protoplasm, “the original plastic substance of life.” We develop from a tiny egg, barely visible to the naked eye, contained in the body of the mother, which develops itself, progressively, by internal cell division, to make a baby and every development shows function, organisation, purpose. “So we have to say this protoplasm is shot through with purpose and, therefore, with intelligence.” Our bodies give concrete evidence of intelligent, working energies. Our bones have been wonderfully designed to enable the fleshy parts to operate efficiently. And this intelligent power within us is not different from that which made everything else, so we are “not in any way separated from the power of the universe that created the star system, the solar system, the planetary system, organic life on earth, and us.” “We are still in contact with that power, and that power is working intelligently in us.”
If we study the nervous system, from books and other authorities, we will learn that the nerves are there to communicate messages to and from the brain. “This is not so!” An amoeba, a simple mono-cell, can send messages all over itself without a nervous system. The nerve lines within us run in sheaths to prevent energy leaking out to parts not intended for the message. i.e. the nervous system is built for “economy of function,” just as the bones are an economic way of saving energy.
When we look at an embryo we cannot see within it the complex arrangement of bones, muscles and nerves that we know it will grow. Yet, as it develops, all of these structures become evident. This can only be because the pattern for what that embryo shall become is already in the bio-magnetic field in which it is growing. A human embryo will grow into a human being, an elephant embryo into an elephant, and so on. “Therefore the field of the Infinite Power contains every conceivable form.”
Yoga is based on the idea that the physical body is a means of finding union with the power source “Your body is nothing but embodied intelligence, embodied structure, embodied function…self-precipitated, concreted as a body.” The dualism between spirit and matter is a false one. “Your body is Spirit, because it is structured, because it is functional.”
We are deceived into thinking of the body as material through identification. (He gives the example of the Hindu god Indra in the pig.) “Identification is the key to all misery.” “If you identify with an object, you come under the law governing that object. But if you identify with free spirit, then you go under the law of free spirit.” “But it’s either/or” “You identify with the form, or you identify with intelligence.”
He introduces a gong to represent a human egg. “We were all, once upon a time, more or less gong-shaped.” He suggests that to understand the gong, taking it to pieces, as an empirical scientist might, is not the way. Better to tap the gong to express its function. He taps it to make it ‘sing’ and says that some intelligence designed that gong to make that sound. We assume that intelligence was a human one, but though a human made it, the intelligence to do so came from beyond that human hand. “The gong responds, because it has been built to respond, and I respond to the gong’s capacity to respond, because I have been built to respond.”
We can equate the gong with the human. The centre of it to represent the heart, its upper part our head, and its lower part our belly region. If someone hits us hard in the chest area, the energy response in us will go down into the belly and from there into the legs to make us run away. If, when we run away, we crash into a wall, then the stimulus from doing so will go up into the head to make us think about what has happened. First we feel, then we move, then we think. “Centre, down, up, is the order.” We see this clearly demonstrated in the baby. First it feels, then it moves, thinking comes later. This is why, in Buddhism, the mind is said to be the ‘organ of fear’, because it has been made by “crashing into obstacles.” There are five such obstacles: physical bodies, like walls; emotional walls, raised by other people; mental energies, presenting you with ideas that disagree with yours; governing concepts, world views that totally disagree with yours; initiative, that totally disagrees with yours. These five ways throw us back on ourselves and make us think.
He demonstrates the ‘Doppler Effect’, by swinging the gong when struck. There is a feeling of threat as it swings towards us which reduces as it swings away. This effect is greatest at the bottom of the gong, because it is suspended from the top, so the swing is greatest at the bottom. Comparing this to our body we can say that the swing, the response to a stimulus, is greater in our appetite centre than in our head. Because we too are suspended, like the gong, but on a concept, the concept that we are human, and this inhibits us. We constrain ourselves in the lower region because we tend to ‘swing’, “there is more hip-swinging than head-swinging.” (He asks for a lady volunteer to demonstrate head-swinging, whilst keeping the hips still. She can’t.) This demonstrates that we are more urgeful in the lower part of the body and more inhibited in the head. The same law is operative in both human and gong. The intelligence that has produced all forms is such that “if you define the function of any one of them fully, then you define the others.” All forms are linked together: “ji-ji-muge, the Absolute, reciprocal, interpenetration of all beings.”
In our bodies we have in-built the bones, the muscles, the nerve-lines to establish “habitual patterns of response” so we don’t need to think about what we are doing when we are walking, or doing routine jobs. “For every function that we can establish a habit pattern, we release our consciousness to attend to something else more important.”
We cannot gain unity if we ignore feeling. We must learn to “enjoy” our function. (Yoga Bahoga.)
“Worship is continual remembrance.” ‘Worship’ is the ‘shape’ of worth, of value, of importances. The first thing to be remembered is sentience. Before anything else, “I feel.” (Descartes got this wrong.) Feeling has a centre, but no edges, it goes to infinity. The gong being struck, sends out sound waves to infinity.
Rule one: We are Infinite, Sentient Power with no edges. Rule two: ‘Ahimsa’. Absolute harmlessness to all beings. “We are sentient beings in a continuum. If we harm another sentient being we harm ourselves.” We are not separate, not only from each other, but from everything else. When the gong sounds we hear it, not only through our ears, our whole sensorium is vibrated, we feel its vibrations in our bodies. In this way we can ‘feel’ the ‘atmosphere’ in a room, we can ‘sense’ how other people are feeling.
First we feel. If we pile energy into that feeling, it can flow out,(emotion) into the motor centres. It moves us. We can recognise a feeling and build it up by feedback, until we become emotionally charged and spurred into action. Emotion is a mediator between the feeling and motor centres.
Feel – overcharge feeling, emotion – motor centre – crash into wall – bounces into head as thought, via another mediator, the larynx. This is a mediating centre between thinking and feeling. It is concerned with speech. Thoughts from the head are verbalised in speech. The tongue is a marvel of design to enable this. This gives us five centres. And all “put there by purposeful intelligence.”
The whole process; feeling, overflow into emotion, motor response, back into the head, thinking, articulation, back to the feeling centre. “Worship is continual remembrance.”
Every word, every idea, has an emotional overtone which moves us in a certain direction. To gain balance, we have to use our thinking to oppose this tendency. When a word or idea produces movement in us, we should look inside our mind for its opposite. “There is no balance in the universe other than the balance of opposing forces.” “If you don’t use energies in opposition, you are not balanced.”
Rule one: WICR (Worship is continual remembrance.)
Rule two: Ahimsa
Rule three: feel, emote, motor action, crash, think, verbalise, back to feel. “and watch the cycle.” State what has happened, back to the feeling centre and re-evaluate.
“Do those five and you will come into balance.”
“All opposite ideas are equally valid. Unless you are balanced, you are not free.”
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COMINGS OF MESSIAH
COMINGS OF MESSIAH
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 25.06.1985
Eugene begins by writing the numbers 0 – 6 vertically, to give seven numbers. The zero at the top signifies God prior to creation, and therefore contains all forms within Him. This zero is “God with Logos.” He takes the word ‘Logos’ and analyses it, drawing a diagram of a six-spoked wheel.There
is an L (Lambda), G (Gamma), two ‘O’s and an ’S’. Lambda means ‘light’, ‘total awareness’ and Gamma means ‘dark, unconscious’. Lambda means ‘spirit’, Gamma means ‘matter’. But the matter is only spirit condensed to provide itself with a resistance. So there is no duality here, “God with Logos” means that the Logos is hidden within God before its cosmic expression. Logos means ‘word’ and ‘ratio’ and “intellect of the highest order…pure a priori thinking from pure logic.” Logos is both light and substance, spirit and matter, consciousness and unconsciousness.
Read more . . .
The diagram represents a six-spoked wheel and six is the basis of existence (‘existere’ means ‘out of six’) So “the Logos is the very principle of sixness equals existence.” He uses the palm of the hand as a mnemonic to illustrate. Existence also means ‘to stand out’ and to do so we must have a binding integument, the skin, and this zone of encapsulation we call the ‘self’. So self-hood is the very beginning of existence. Without the bondage of encapsulation, no creature could exist.
God is Infinite, Sentient Power and we are made in His image, so we are sentient beings who can know of Him and from Him we have the power to do what is needed to know Him. The function of God is to go down to level 6 so that the total creation can be enlightened about its origin. He writes Logos against 6, so that 0 and 6 are joined together. This represents the Logos entering all of mankind. “And that is the final condition of evolution.” He then looks at the steps needed to get from 0 to 6. The first step towards this is 1, the Macro-logos. This is the entire sphere of the universe. To get the concept of this into the human race we need prophets. “Prophets are people who posit, rationally beforehand, something to be attained.” So 1 is joined to 5, because the macro-logos has to become manifest in the time process. 5 is the ‘Second Coming’. The prophets are the ones who foretell a coming, embodied intelligence. They have to prepare the way so that humanity is prepared for the coming of the Messiah, a saviour who will lift us out of the inertia of matter. They can do this because “prophecy is… magical stuff…they actually cause a growth in the nervous system of the human race to enable that nervous system to be able to comprehend the meaning of the Logos when it finally comes.” “No prophesies, no Messiah.”
The Messiah, at 3, is the Logos incarnate. It is intelligent, mathematical, geometrical logic and has resulted in every scientific discovery made. It is the intelligence behind Hi-Tech of all kinds and everything else in the universe. The prophets go down from 2 to 4. Level 4 is ‘The Elect’. They ‘elect’, i.e. they ‘call out’ of the masses the few who are ready to learn first. These are the ones ready to listen to spiritual truths. The second coming of the Logos is yet to come, but before that, the elect will prepare the rest of mankind as the prophets prepared them. The second coming will occur in the individual ‘elect’ before it occurs in all mankind. “We all know that there are people on earth, about 5% who are genuinely interested in philosophical, ontological, religious, spiritual problems, but we know that 95% at this stage of evolution are not…and they have to become educated towards attaining that interest.” The prophet’s function is to describe rationally, beforehand, the characteristics of a perfectly self-conscious, self-created being. Most people are attached to their idea of self and are not going to be changed easily. We have to follow the example of the butterfly and be prepared for ‘metamorphosis’. We must learn to build our view on the macrocosmic, logical structure of reality. Unless we destroy the erroneous structure built by egotism, we cannot enter into the kingdom of free, spiritual creativity. The ego structure must be destroyed.
There are two deaths, that of the physical body and then a second death of the ideological definition of self. By obeying the Logos we ‘will not be hurt of the second death’. The structure of ideas built from the macro-logos is indestructible and immortal, and if this structure is inside us we cannot be destroyed.
“Now the whole system is a guarantee that ultimately all mankind will become enlightened. But before that time, the elect, the few who are interested first, must know about it and they would not know about it if the prophets had not spoken about it.” These prophets were wise men who had gained their wisdom from studying the night skies of the Arabian deserts. It is no accident that three of the major religions came about in this way: First Judaism, based on Law and emphasising Fear of God. Then Christianity, emphasising the Love of God, and finally Islam, emphasising the Knowledge of God. These teachings spread eastwards into India and pre-dated Brahmanism.
Islamic science came long before European science. “When you know something, that is the end of the process.” Mohammed said Islam was the last religion.
Blake said, unless the babe born in Bethlehem is born in us as individuals then it avails us nothing to talk about it. Someone who is able to comprehend the Logos has the ‘Christ mind’. This is to understand that all being is circumscribed and is active to its capacity for choice and passive as to its suffering the choices it makes.
Once “we understand the whole process, we gain immortality through the self-consistency of the formal, constructive apprehension of that simple diagram.” If we become perfectly self-consistent then we become one of the immortals. “But…do you want to become immortal?” Many do not. They just want to die. Others may not want to die but are not prepared to give up their egotistic standpoint. The materialistic, empirical scientist has made for himself a definition that he is a material being also. After death he is locked-in to this definition. So, after death, “all he can do is live within the dictatorship of his erroneous concept.” Many who die like this can become convinced that they have not died. “They are lost souls.”
By contrast, we find in Buddhism the idea of the ‘Boddhisattva’. This is a being who has achieved enlightenment and can leave the earth but chooses to stay to help others towards it. Once we have achieved self-consistency, as he has, then we can choose whether to incarnate or not. The enemy, as always, is the ego structure built since babyhood. This structure will fight to defend itself and if it wins we are held in by our own definition. “And that’s called Hell.”
Better is “a reflexive, self-conscious, self-determinant, self-consistent, logological structure …which could never change in any world whatever…that consistent structure cannot be broken.”
“And with that you can walk in and out of universes and other worlds, and this one, and return or leave at your own, free will.”
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CORKS
CORKS
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 29.05.1983
Eugene begins by explaining the statement in the bible: “I have loved Jacob and hated Esau.” Esau was “a hairy man,” uncivilised, but Jacob made a great civilisation. The nomadic way of life, represented by Esau, cannot progress but remains fixated in its ways because it is always on the move. For humans to develop, they had to settle down and make a civilisation, in order to evolve.
We can think of the universe as a great ocean of energy surrounded by a spinning belt of power to hold it in. Beyond this is Infinite Power, non-rotating, extending in all directions. Likewise, we have a skin, an integument which holds our body in. Our body is mostly water, an ocean of life-fluid inside our skin. We call it ‘protoplasm’, a sort of colloidal jelly-like substance. Inside the universal ocean, the macro-cosmos, there is a process of turbulence, turnings, which make little turnings within the big turning, and the little turnings go right down to sub-atomic level. Halfway between the smallest sub-atomic particle and the most distant star-system is the human being, which is itself, full of much smaller turnings.
Read more . . .
He uses the analogy of a ‘cosmic bath’ in which are an enormous number of corks (humans) bobbing up and down. If a force from beyond cosmos comes in and hits one of them, that cork bobs up and down more than the rest. It is said to be ‘enthused’ which means God has entered in that individual as initiative. When energy hits an individual cork he is said to be ‘inspired’, he becomes enthusiastic. It is an act of grace and grace means to be free. But you can get this without waiting for grace, by realising that you are not at the whim of the ocean’s movements. You can change your bobbing up and down by an act of will. You can be self-motivated.
In the ancient world, the men who realised this thought of themselves as the “Elect.” They defined themselves as gods to rule over the masses. These were men who understood that the few who could be self-determinant could rule over the rest who were not. He gives the examples of the Brahmins in India and the emperors in China, Japan and Rome. These were men who understood initiative and how those who had it could enslave those who had not.
We can think of corks bobbing in a bath as our heart centres, subject to ripples of stimulation from the cosmic ocean. Another analogy he uses is that of jellyfish, which are mostly seawater surrounded by a thin membrane, just as we are spirit, permeating our protoplasm, enclosed inside our skins. Jellyfish feel their way around in the oceans, moving with currents and tides. Like the jellyfish, we are able to feel ourselves within the cosmic ocean if we choose to do so.
He borrows terms from Hinduism to explain this more fully. ‘Brahman’ is the universal ocean, the macro-cosmos. Beyond this is the ‘Para-Brahman’, the Infinite, Sentient Power which lies behind everything, which theologians call ‘The Godhead’, and in Christianity is ‘God the Father.’ The individual human soul is ‘Atman,” and the empirical, egoic self is ‘Jiva’. We can visualise these different levels as concentric rings extending from the centre of each one of us. Our physical bodies are entirely transparent to Spirit. Our human soul, our Atman, is in no way separate or different from the Brahmanic ocean in which we move or from the Para-Brahman beyond. But,
just like other creatures in the ocean, humans can choose to defend themselves with a hard shell, like crabs, or become soft, like jellyfish, to the movements of the ocean in which we live. He says that the crustaceans have grown a hard skin for protection against predators, from fear, whereas jellyfish go ‘with the flow’. We are to emulate these and not be like crabs.
He gives an example of a drop of water passing through a bubble of water without breaking the skin of the bubble. The bubble lets the water drop through but stays intact. We must behave in the same way. We should let an incoming stimulus pass through us without being disturbed by it. Any criticism, rude word, or insult should be allowed to go through us without reacting to it. At the level of the Atman, the membrane is so thin it can feel every intention of the Brahman and can alter its shape a little bit to fulfil its destiny. If it hardens itself to these messages it does not have a destiny, but only a fate. Destiny means ‘having somewhere valuable to go’ and fate means whatever befalls us. Following the impulses of the ego-self can produce fate. Destiny is following the promptings of spirit. We can become so sensitive that when an attack comes we open up and let it through and then close again on our self. In this way we cannot be wounded. If we can open to an experience and remember who we are, a zone of Infinite, Sentient Power, we can let the experience go right through and not be hurt by it. Christ taught us this same message in ‘turn the other cheek’, and that in doing so we ‘heap coals of fire’ on the head of the aggressor.
No two human beings have got the same hard shell defending the ego self. It depends on nation, some nations have a more violent history than others. Caucasians are stiffer in the body than Asians, apart from the different individual experiences.
We must remember that the only difference between the Para-Brahman, Brahman, Atman and Jiva is modes of actuality. The more we can become aware that our thought is our will, our feeling is our will, our physical action is our will, all expressed in different ways.
Sometimes, corks hit against each other. When this happens they vibrate and obscure their awareness of the cosmic ocean. They confuse, they turbulate the water, they cannot see the pattern of their own beings because of their contingent, mutual stimulation. This is exactly what happens with human beings. We have to learn to become still. ‘If you can keep you head….and you’ll be a man, my son’. “The Para-Brahman penetrates the Brahman, the Brahman, with the Para-Brahman, penetrates the Atman, the Atman penetrates the Jiva, the individual ego, and that thing penetrates nothing, except with swords, daggers, guns etc. in a contingent relation with other, identified, ego structures.”
He uses the example of Eastern, martial arts as the way to respond to attacks from others. “The universe is a sphere, there are no straight lines, so do not oppose a force that attacks you with another force, opposite in line with it. Move at right angles.”
He gives the wisdom of a sage who said: “If you want freedom, its easy, just don’t have habits.” Whatever it is, physically, emotionally, mentally, conceptually. Don’t have these four habits. All levels of our being are operating simultaneously, we have to keep reminding ourselves of this. If we bend a finger, who is bending it? The answer is that all levels are bending it, right up to the Para-Brahman. He asks: Who is beating your heart? It cannot be the empirical ego. We can see evidence in the growth of a baby in the womb, of Spirit operating to grow that baby. The first slap after birth is the beginning of the process by which contingent stimulation destroys our awareness of Absolute Spirit. This process is continued by parents and later, by our other educators. We become afraid and harden ourselves against attack, like the crab. At the Atman level we all get the same amount of stimulation, but at the Jiva level we defend ourselves unequally. Some have a harder shell than others and defend unequally.
We know that every individual, every Jiva, is nothing but Atman, Brahman, Para-Brahman, incarnate in everyone of us. “No-one can be justified in making you, from outside, by contingency, do something that you do not will to do.” Whoever you are “He has to be your God, not just the God of humanity at large, and that God is free initiative, here-operative, now, spiritual being.”
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DESIRE AND THE EGO
DESIRE AND THE EGO
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 25.09.1977
Eugene is asked 3 questions: 1. How to still desire. 2. How to use intelligently, the egotism with which we are burdened. 3. What is the origin of all true religion?
1. Stilling Desire. He says that “desire is not to be stilled but a worthwhile object for it is to be attained.” Desire is a force, an energy, and is essential within us. Desire is always towards or away from a stimulus. If we were to try and sit still and do nothing, we would find it impossible. Energy coming through us from the Absolute, Sentient Power will make us move. “You cannot still desire absolutely down to nothing.” ‘De sire’ means ‘from the father’. He asks the audience to breathe out and see how long they can hold the breath out. They are to will to hold it out and not breathe in. This cannot be done for more than a few seconds. Something is willing the organism to breathe. This is the energy of the Absolute, Sentient Power and is ‘from the Father’, ‘de sire’. “The function of desire is to force us into progressively higher levels of understanding through the hard, experiential cycle of events.” The purpose of desire is to force us into situations in order to have experiences, because these inform us and lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves. “You cannot still desire. What you can do is refine your understanding of its object, if you are lucky…the wanting is part of the movement of the self-educating energy.” Stilling desire is not possible but we can align our desires with God’s desire for us which is for our evolution to reflexive, self-consciousness.
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2. Intelligent use of Egotism. He defines the ego in the Freudian sense between id and Super-ego. i.e. between the sexual force from the belly and the restraining force from the head. We can locate it, therefore, in the chest. The id is the libido – wanting something. The super-ego is the restraint, learned from educators, parents and society, which makes the rules restraining the operation of libido. Egoic consciousness is sharpened the greater the conflict between the other two. i.e. the tension between the primordial drives of the belly and the restraining forces in the head, produces in the organism a tension, a very strong tension, which makes the organism aware that it is. Without this conflict we would not be aware of our self as an individual egoic being.
He gives the example of crowd behaviour at a football match. “The crowd, the mass, the herd mentality functions below the level of the enlightened egotist.” When people get together in large crowds “instead of functioning like an intelligent individual, it functions like the Gadarene swine.” People lose their individual responsibility. “So we say, quite correctly, that the behaviour of the crowd is below the behaviour of the separated individuals. The reason is that the mass of energy in the crowd is not separately restrained as it is in the separated organism and consequently the bio-magnetic field, the energies of life, flow out beyond the restraining limits of your skin surface and they begin to commingle together and they make a vast sea.”
The conflict between the belly and the head means that the individual is ordered in two directions simultaneously. “The enlightened egotist is the person who knows the function of the ego to be a means of rescuing him from the mass response, the crowd response, the sub-human response.” The ego is a reference point to rescue us from the crowd. Without an ego we could only make a crowd judgement, not an individual one. This is its only function. Once so rescued, we have to keep the ego from doing the opposite of the crowd. This is a tendency to do something independently and look for worship from others. The function of the ego is so that we can develop a type of judgement in which we make a separate, intelligent, sensitive assessment of reality and do not require other egos, or the crowd, to worship us because of our ability to separate our self.
3. Religion. All religions derive from the same source. They all derive from observation of the processes inside man and outside. The observation of seasons, of planetary movements, of the rotating star system, the cycles of nature, of animal reproduction in Spring. The Sun is the Father, the Moon the Mother, the Earth is the nurse. All religions have no other purpose than the “freeing of the fallen.” To be fallen is to be identified with the periphery of our being instead of the centre. All religious rituals, prayers, meditations, etc., are to remind us of this. The only difference between religions is a matter of terminology. “Become what thou art” is the imperative of all.
The enemy is the protoplasm, with its records of all previous stimuli, physical, emotional and mental, since the beginning of time. This causes us to lose awareness of our innermost centre. Compounding this is that we have, in our unconscious, not only our own ancestral records, but the thoughts of every human who has ever lived! This is because the Absolute, Sentient Power is a continuum which is part-less. Any stimulation from any point goes to all points. “The enemy is the inertia of unconscious processes of millions of individuals and of the Infinite Field itself.” We can do nothing successfully without the permission of the Absolute: so how do we practise conforming to the intentions of the Absolute, evolutionary force for us? “Inasmuch as you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.” i.e. because we are in a continuum, every thought, feeling and action is happening within that continuum and is therefore affecting all parts of it. This is inescapable. It is not possible for a human being to act upon another individual without acting on all. We can all of us avoid the necessity of learning through contingent stimulation by educating ourselves. The essence of the martial arts is to not be there when the blow lands! If we get hit we cannot blame another for this.
“Blaming other people for the misfortunes that happen to us is a very, very fruitless and stupid error…because it further peripheralises our attention and makes us progressively more and more dependent on the behaviour of other beings and thus more and more a member of the crowd.” The Infinite cannot operate particularly except through a particular and the human is the only particular capable of this. “Only one being, the human being, is fit to act as the particular through with the universal pursues its creative intent.” “We are all emissaries, sent out from the Infinite, to express particularly the universal, because the universal cannot speak particularly except through a particular organism, and the function of the evolving human being is to serve as the particular through which the universal speaks.” “God made us for Himself.”
“There we have the first two points: stilling desire is not possible, refining desire is possible and the ultimate of all desires is to desire that for you which the Absolute, Sentient Power wills for you. Because what it wills for you is your total development, your evolution towards a state of total, reflexive, self-conscious, self-determined, creative function. That is its will. And to become aware of that will so that everything you do is for your evolutionary development and is not simply wasting your time by amusing yourself with external pleasures derived from contingent stimuli. When you have understood this, your desires have reached their ultimate state of refinement. They are the same as the desire of God for you. When you desire what God desires for you, you desire your evolution towards the perfectly free state in which whatever you do will be intelligently determined by you in total separation from the mob impulses of the crowd.”
“Now, you cannot still desire absolutely; you can refine the object of it. The correct use of enlightened egotism is to serve as a reference point through which the Absolute creates new heavens, new earths, through you. It is never to be allowed to dictate. You keep your foot on it; and that is the function of world religions.”
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COSMO SEXUAL POLARITY
COSMO SEXUAL POLARITY
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday in 1983
Eugene begins by exploring the concept of transcendence. He describes the state of the Infinite before creation began. The sentience and power of the Absolute are inseparable and the power must be used in order for Infinity to feel itself. For this to happen there had to be movement and this resulted in the production of wave motions within Itself. These motions are the ‘ananda’ of the Yogis, uninterrupted bliss. Where such motions intersect with others there appeared vortical spin zones. Such “arking” produced zones of increased self-resistance and therefore self-awareness. Each such “ark” is a zone of being, self-precipitated, and is the beginning of the fall into materiality. In this fall there is a progressive forgetfulness of the higher levels and the consciousness becomes increasingly identified with the created zone. Eventually, this finite zone has created for itself a physical body and the descent into matter is apparently complete.
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He talks of single-cell division and the need for greater differentiation than is possible in that way. The differences between men and women are willed by the Infinite to wake us up to the higher levels of our being. “Women are more sensitive to this than men so women are always reminding men there is a thing called relationship.” Men know about relationships with things in the material world but they don’t tend to relate back to the woman and need constant reminders.
The gross, physical body is not the only one. It contains also an emotional body, a mentational body, a conceptual body and a volitional body within the field of consciousness so the possibilities of differences between men and women are endless. The conflict caused by these differences can be the cause of great unhappiness when it is not understood. However, when an individual is not receiving stimuli from another they can also fall into despair and feel unwanted and unloved. This can lead ultimately to suicide. The relation between man and woman is to wake us up through mutual stimulation so that we do not fall in this way. Most people are ‘asleep’ through identification with the physical body and need external stimuli to wake them up. If they don’t get this they fade.
The microcosm of our being and the macrocosm of the universe are identical. The sphere of the universe was created to provide a resistance for the Infinite and this is reproduced in the human. Inside us we have forces rotating just as there are in the universe, and we have phases in the mind corresponding to the phases of the moon and other planets. Inside us we have parts of us seeking expression by knocking on other parts to try to wake us up.
We have 3 main divisions: we feel, we move, we think. First, we feel in the heart a need for a stimulus. We move to seek it and we encounter a resistance and this provokes us to think how to overcome it. Knowing this, we can stimulate our thought, our feeling and our will within ourselves, and this is a kind of internal, sexual relation. If we feed an idea into the belly that is irrelevant to it, it remains asleep, but if we feed an idea related to food or sex, it wakes up. If we feed an idea into the heart, the centre of compassion, the head will find reasons to justify it but if we feed it into the belly, the belly will find reasons to disregard it, if it contradicts its own search for pleasure. By this process of internal self-feeding, comes heightened awareness. Instead of waiting for an external stimulus from another being, we can meditate on the kind of response that we would give to any of those energy inputs.
There are 7 chakras (nerve plexi) in the body: “3 baddies, 3 goodies,” and the heart. The lowest one is intent on pure survival. The second is for sexual enjoyment and is aimed at reproduction. If it is in a male it looks for a suitable receptacle, if female, for something to receive. The third is the will to power, the will to be better than anyone else. The fourth is the heart centre and is concerned with the whole being. It can feel everything in the body, and delivers blood and oxygen to every part. It is the centre of compassion. (The word feeling has two opposite meanings: you can feel by touching, the lowest sense, or by pure awareness. e.g. You can feel your nose,or any other part, without touching, simply by focussing awareness in that place.) Above the heart are the 3 “goodies.” One is the larynx centre, dealing with articulate expression. The next is between the eyebrows, the ‘third eye’, where you are aware that you can command things and they shall be done. “Let it Be,” and it is. On the top of the head is the Lotus centre, said to be “thousand petalled” which simply means a very large number, because it includes everything there is. So here on top of the head is true speech, firm command, based on the truth, and awareness of the Absolute. The middle one, the heart centre, is where everything is to be coordinated. If we feed anything into any of the other centres without this, it is self-destructive, because that part grows, and in the process becomes independent. If we feed any part of our being without compassion, we make aggressive that part on which we concentrate.
In addition to the chakras, we have four bodies: physical, emotional, mentational, conceptual, and permeating all of these we have the will. He uses the mnemonic of the hand: little finger, physical body; ring finger, emotional; middle finger, mentational; index finger, conceptual; thumb, will. The four bodies are passive, the will is not. Just as the thumb can oppose all fingers, the will can focus on all organs of the body. In the reflexive being, the will can focus wherever it goes. In the fallen being, fallen into identification with the external world, it does not use the will but is determined in its behaviour by external stimuli. It reacts mechanically and is enslaved. At its worst level, this is the ‘dark night of the soul’ of total misery in the belief that the being has no value and is better off dead. For the fortunate ones, this has often been the point at which they have been rescued by the intervention of the Absolute, as Grace. The less fortunate have died.
Wanting to escape into the bliss of Nirvana is a mistake, and is unlikely to be the teaching of Gautama Buddha, but more likely a misunderstanding by his disciples hundreds of years later. Christ taught us to be individuals and commanded us to stand out and speak out in the world to enrich the possibilities of God. We tend to forget this and, to smooth social intercourse, we are constantly presenting ourselves to each other in the best possible light. i.e. we are lying to each other all the time. We must be prepared to be different to be individual, for God’s sake. This means being awake not asleep. ‘Quick’ not ‘dead’. The greater the diversity of humanity, the greater the enrichment of the Universal, Sentient Power. This is also the message of the Bhagavad Gita, “to act without regard to the fruits of action’ i.e. we must act but not identify with the action or its result.
At the moment of orgasm you don’t exist. Who is getting the benefit? Not the ego but the universe is being enriched. This is a dialectical process. “Creation requires suffering.” Not the miserable kind where somebody imposes suffering on you, but deliberate suffering where you choose a difficulty and push through to the end, that enriches the universe and causes enlightenment. The six chakras must be used in harmony with the heart or they are destructive. Involving the heart makes the profane sacred. e.g. sex without compassion is profane; it is using the body of another person for its own gratification. It is possible to have the idea of compassion without the feeling e.g. donating to charities may make you feel good about yourself but may not be done with compassion.
There are two major problems for humanity at its present stage of evolution: concupiscence and envy. “Compassionate joy in the good fortune of another human being is nearly an unknown quality in the human race.” Secondly, using another’s body for sexual gratification. “Two points, envy of all the goods of the world and compassion within the sexual situation. Those are the two rarest things on earth today.”
When we try to be compassionate we create situations within us. The words ‘fire’ and ‘pure’ have the same origin; fire purifies. To generate it inside ourselves we have to oppose whatever tendencies, inclinations, arise within us. If we do not oppose we cannot generate the heat that burns away the rubbish within us.
“In order to become a free, intelligent, self-initiating power at our stage of evolution, we have to practise self-opposition.” We must oppose our own inclinations on the inside. Inclinations are inertias, not free spirits. “Now the fight against inertia is the fight-back to free initiative. There is no other way to get it other than self-opposition. In the Russian prayer of Jesus there is a lovely statement: “When engaged in prayer, one prays in the heart. One is not to allow oneself to be diverted by high thoughts.” “Thinking is not the same as compassion, and only compassion, universal compassion, attends to everything.”
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LUCIENT FISH
LUCIENT FISH
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 30.10.1983
All thoughts are symbolic, so are all words. Every syllable, every letter, is a symbol for something. The F in ‘Fish’ can be written as V and the ‘Vish’ is in Vishnu, Shiva, Ishva. The creative, preserving and destroying gods are the same letters rearranged. ‘I’ is the principle of individuation, ‘H’ is hierarchy, ‘HR’ means ‘power differentiated’. “All hierarchies are built of power, and the power has grades, less power down there, more up here; initiative up here, inertia down there.” The V is drive, “the initiator of the act.” The ‘i’ is the point on which the Field focusses and thereby makes a hierarchy “because, as you posit the point, there is a gradation from the point outwards, the power becomes less effective the further you move away from the initial idea.” S = Spirit, and also serpent (undulating power) “When you insert energy into a closed system, it shakes.” That shaking is the letter R, the ruach, discriminating power. Our alphabet is simply original hieroglyphics from Egypt, India, China and Babylonia. Spirit can be closed, as in the ‘serpent with tail in mouth’ or free. (The keys of binding and loosing.) ‘Vish’ means ‘drive man’ and refers to the convergence of our powers internally; so the sign of Christianity was the fish.
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Everyone has good ideas and also bad ones. If good ideas do not translate into action then the reason is a simple neurological one. For ideas in the forebrain to become action, they must be emoted in the mid-brain and put into the hind brain. To embody truth, “you must move the physical body in accordance with the idea..and to get the idea to move you must emote. Without an emotional charge, you cannot move.” Convergence is the key.
He refers to Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be’. A force from Infinity comes in. It turns around and stimulates itself. “Until it hits itself, it is not conscious…it must feel this state.” Without a resistance to oppose it, it would not be aware of itself. (The ‘sci’ in consciousness is ‘to cut’.) “We become aware only when we get opposition.” (‘Conscientious’ means cutting, analysing, all the time.) If a movement is uniform, no matter how fast it is, the motion will remain unconscious unless there is acceleration or deceleration. (Astronauts know this.) To be conscious there has to be resistance of some kind. “And that is why we are all here, to impede, and thereby waken up the potential consciousness of the Field.”
‘To be or not to be’. Being means encapsulation, bound. Not to be bound means not to be, not to exist. “No-one has ever seen an observer but the observer can precipitate a self-opposition and can see that.” “The eye,” says Shakespeare, “sees not by itself but by reflection.” Beyond being, there is nothing that is detectable, “it is there but it is unknown.” The negation of free motion is being. “To be is to be encapsulated, to be captured.” “The power that posits, captures itself, puts itself in bondage, and without that bondage there would be no individuated self-consciousness.” Prior to encapsulation is the ‘Parabrahman’, the infinitely-extended No-Thing, before the creation of the universe.
He introduces another symbol: the trinity or triad. Think, feel, will, (act). Thinking must be calm and not emotional, yet without emoting it cannot result in action. We must feel the idea, liking/ disliking, and from this will emerge our action. The symbol of a triangle on its own signifies fire, fire means energy. If we invert the triangle, it signifies water, or the plastic substance of matter. If we superimpose them we have the Star of David, fire/water, heaven/earth, in perfect balance = Heaven. All symbols have infinite implications so we should never think, when we understand the meaning of a symbol, that we have exhausted it.
All matter is energy, bound by rotation. Between the energy and its material expression there is a point of singularity, ‘Laya’. It is the moment of balance between a force and its application. e.g. if you decide to bend your finger, there is a point between the decision and the movement of the finger. This is a point of initiation. (He now goes back to Hamlet “Whether it is nobler in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?” The ‘sea of troubles’ is the action band i.e. being = trouble. But to get out of being, to die by suicide, is not necessarily to get out of trouble. There could be nightmares from which you cannot wake up if you have no body. Hamlet is unconsciously incestuous, wanting his mother for his wife. (As do all men…all little boys prefer their mother to their father, not realising that the mother is his own substance, his own matter. (mater)
“When Jesus says: “I and my Father are one.” He means his particular power that generated Him particularly is one with Him.” When we say “Our Father” we mean the power that generated all of us. So we each have a different father. “Individually, we have individual powers that generate individual beings and the amount of power doing the generating is identical with the being.” So we can pray to ‘Our Father’ or ‘My Father’. “The power is there, you are the power, you are listening to you.” “The essential centre of your being is self-generated power.” There is no other bondage than one’s own definition of self. Within the parabrahman appears a sphere, and within that appears another, smaller, and smaller ones, and each is solo. “Even the minutest cell in your body has a mind, a feeling, an opinion. If you doubt it, stick a pin in your body and the place where you stick it will react. It won’t ask your permission.” “Every minutest cell in your body is a little being…and therefore evaluating itself within the bigger sphere that you are. We are all little beings inside a big being.”
The Infinite is an ocean of equable light which can produce points of light within itself. Each one is a monad, an individual. This light is your intuition. Intellect, however, is darkness. A very clever man can be intellectual and feel very bright in comparison with others, more dull-witted, but this can only be at the expense of intuition. Formal knowledge, intellect, is darkness. The intellect functions by means of ideas, each of which is a compression point, an interference point. “So the cleverer you are intellectually, the darker you are intuitionally.” The failure of empirical science is that “it doesn’t like the idea that the universe is a living organism, there are no dead forces, that all the forces in the universe and in our body, and in our brain, are not mechanical forces at all, they are free, self-mobilising, spiritual forces.” When you move your hand, who moves it, mechanics, or what you call your desire? And what is your desire but an intention, and what is your intention? It is not a gross body and it has no spatial location, but it can locate itself anywhere.” You must have an idea in your mind to establish a hierarchy of powers. If that idea is false, your hierarchy will be erroneous. You must have a true idea “and the true idea is this: every point, the centre of every individuality, is absolutely self-generated and the clash of all these points of generation constitute, in their relationships, the universe in which we live…we are of power, we are self-mobile, but through inertia and miseducation, we think, and in the process tie ourselves up. Thinking creates the bondage so somehow, we have to arrive at …the Zen, no-mind.” “I and my Father are one.” mean it! MY generative power and this being are one.” “When you were five years old,your generative power, your degree of awareness were you aged five.” You were the product of those things. “It is always you generating you.”
When Jesus says “Father, why hast thou forsaken me? He is referring to God, the Father of all fathers…in order to become an individual, self-determined absolutely, you must not rely on the Infinite, must you?” So the Infinite Father must desert you in order for you to find your own initiative.” Then He says: “It is finished,” He means “I can now afford to die because I know I can resurrect.”
“If I know I am a self-generating being and others try to convince me otherwise, I can wait until they have left and then go ‘Whoosh’ and re-posit myself. That is resurrection.” “You don’t accept these depressive nonsenses. “You might pretend to, but when they go out, you put the Hi-Fi on and you have a cup of coffee and you think an improving thought like ‘I and my Father are one’. You are then called resurrected.”
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LIFE IS HARD
LIFE IS HARD
A synopsis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parkland, Altrincham to members of Ishval in 1985
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 29.09.1985
Eugene responds to an audience member who states “Life is hard and ends in death.”
‘Hard” = HRD =Hierarchical, Discriminative, Division. “The ‘universe is hard’ means that, actually, there are differences of power and discriminative ability.” People are different in all manner of ways. They do not think, feel or will in the same way. “No two individuals are identical in any respect, that is the meaning of hard.”
Everybody believes that death is certain, but what is it? It is the leaving of the life-principle which animates the physical body. He gives the example of a dying sparrow; the eye is bright and then suddenly “ceases to shine.” A moment before there was a consciousness looking out of the eye, and now it has gone, departed. i.e. death is when a being loses interest in the body and withdraws from it. That consciousness does not move to a different spatial location, so we cannot say where did it go?It has simply ‘detuned’ its “hierarchical, discriminative power”, it has stopped its focus on that body. Instead of saying a person has died, we should say that they have withdrawn their interest from that body. Some people can make sudden recoveries from near death if they suddenly find a new interest, such as a long, lost friend coming to see them. Some people can get into states so close to death that all functioning stops; and then they come back to life. The original statement should be: “Life is hard and ends in withdrawal of interest.” Interest can be created by forbidding it. e.g. If we are denied something we tend to want it more than when it was allowed to us. “Everything that is forbidden is brought into focus.” God invented this trick and played it on Adam and Eve – forbidden fruit is always the most attractive.
He remembers giving advice to a potential suicide: “Have you died before that you remember?” “No.” “How do you know that when you are dead you are dead? Supposing you are not properly dead? What condition are you in? Have you ever been in a nightmare and been glad to have a body to wake up in?”
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He changes the topic to examine the idea of ‘inertia’. “Inertia means that you are affirming a life-motion pattern that you, initially have established and then forgotten about it.” We tend to think of inertia as something to be overcome but it does have its positive aspects: …“things that remember themselves automatically are inertias.” e.g. where the loo is. Without inertia there could be no recognition of anyone or anything; every moment would be a new one. “Now once you have established it as important in life, it is a self-remembering energy, and that is inertia.”
In the Absolute, Sentient Power there is no inertia, it is pure initiative. Initiative is always a fresh start, the beginning of something not previously done. Therefore, there can be no recognition of anything and no relation, no value.
The positive value for inertia can be seen in pure logic: a triangle always has three sides, twice one is always two, forever. i.e. we can re-cognise a circle, a square, a triangle. We can re-know these forms and so we can orientate ourselves in our life.
The Absolute, Sentient Power has made itself a ‘Logos’, a sphere of infinite power, self-incarnate as that sphere. So we have a primordial sphere of logic “in the midst of an infinite ocean of uncommitedness.” Outside the logos sphere is an infinite, non-recognition energy. When these energies hit the logos sphere, they annoy and upset the periphery. Man is a microcosm of this sphere, and in the same way, is surrounded by an infinite field of energy which is pure initiative. These energies do not want to be bored by repetition yet we are in a sphere of logic which always says the same thing. “Man is the little universe inside the big universe, and there is nothing in man that is not everywhere and there is nothing anywhere that is not in man.”
The macrocosmic logos is always expanding, creating as it does so. It retains all that it has made in the past but has an infinitely expanding new world. “Behold, I make all things new.” So we can never know everything because the universe is expanding and evolving by its own, willed initiative to new truths that have never been known before. Man, being a microcosm of the universe, has also a logos sphere expanding. “Every time we get a new idea, a new viewpoint, we expand our mind and with it our being.” Man is between the infinitely expanding logos sphere, the world of Plato’s ideas and the concrete, solid earth. “He has already gained a certain amount of logic since he swung in the trees and a lot of energies have been trapped by his newly-acquired logic and they do not like it.” “They really do hate being trapped in decent, logical, geometrical, mathematical behaviour.” (He mentions his ‘Mathematics of Love’, not yet published. He suggests it is possible to analyse the love-life of a woman in pure, mathematics, with graphs.) From the point of view of uncommitted energy of love, this is awful!
The withdrawal of interest from the body is usually by an act of will; but not always. “You can decide to live longer, if you wish, or die earlier if you wish. There is an old saying, “Live until you die” because, in fact, most people do not.” In taking a human birth, we have made for ourselves a reference point and if someone attacks our body, we tend to hang on to it. “The virtue of having this body is because, without it, we are in a continuous danger of nightmarish uncommitedness.” He describes how, in nightmares, we are pursued by “unknown assailants”, undefined, unknowable energies chasing us and we are terrified that they will tear us to pieces.
He mentions the story of Beowulf and says we find the same thing in religious scriptures, stories of how uncommitted appetite is terrified of committal, because committal means logical structure. But logos is not static, it is an infinitely expanding sphere of ever-new possibilities without loss of the old ones because these are still retained in memory. So we can “open ourselves to the newness of creative possibilities without losing memory of all the things you have already done.” We are then committed and uncommitted; we have solved the problem. We cannot get rid of this polarity of a sphere of defined, form within an infinite formlessness. Similarly, the microcosm of man cannot escape this duality of function, of gathering together, that is the logic, and a function of scattering what has been gathered together. This scattering contains all the seeds and logic. Nothing is lost, only gained. “A little sphere of logic is the very essence of the human soul.” This makes it impossible for anyone else to control our thoughts, emotions and actions. Most people do not believe this. “We need never be afraid of anybody, in any way, because we have an indestructible centre of logos in us and this is our personal, individuated ‘Rock of Ages’. “Now we can learn to gain an absolute control over this sentient power in our own being by referring to the logos seed inside us. We have an absolutely, impregnable, unassailable, unbreakable, impenetrable logic seed in each one of us, and it is unique, and it is the very, very essence of individuation.”
Audience member asks about holding on to this if suffering torture.
E.H.replies “You have an erroneous idea. You have identified with a body being tortured and not with your pure consciousness.” “If you are centred, you know you have two selves, the lower, empirical, egoic self and your true, higher self. the Atman.” If you focus on the lower self, you are terrified of your body being in pieces.
“Adequate knowledge = activity = happiness; inadequate knowledge = passivity = misery. When we are attacked we should bless the attacker, thank them for the attack i.e. take the initiative and become active, rather than passively enduring the attack. You say to them “How very interesting.” “How do you go on under torture?” The answer is to remind yourself that you put yourself there. You did.”
When a being takes a human birth it organises the resident consciousness in both ovum and sperm. Sentient power takes both and fuses them together and organises a body. “Has it not put itself in the position where it is being tortured? Did it examine its situation beforehand…or did it fall into it through lack of observation? Now, if the latter, does it not deserve it? And if it chose it, is it not glad?” This is how we convert ourselves from the misery of passivity to the happiness of ‘power applied precisely’. “No passivity, nothing is happening to us except that which we will to happen to us and provoke so that we can learn our personal next step.” “It is a hard world…and if we accept that fact, we expect from other beings nothing except hardness, which we provoke by the way we relate to them.”
The positive value of inertia is this. If we did not have it we could not have recognition of our own being. “Every time we get reborn we are reborn into a world that is made of the debris of prior buildings that we have made, (karma), We are always dealing with what we ourselves have precipitated for ourselves. Have we any legitimate grounds for complaint? None at all. So when we can accept that factually and realistically and say, “OK” I am going to give up complaining. I will stop complaining about myself, my partner, or anybody else. I will stop complaining and I will start initiating something worthwhile. I become a cooperative, co-creator with the Absolute.”
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THE BARDO
THE BARDO
Précis of a talk given at Ishval 29.05.1977
Eugene begins by asking: “What are we going to talk about tonight?”
An audience member asks about the ‘Bardo Thodol’, the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.
He draws a circle and puts an arrowhead on the circumference to show that it is going round.
Without circumscription, there would be no ‘ground of being’. (‘Ground’ is G-round: the going round of energy.) Opposite to the ‘dead’ are the ‘quick’, the ‘wicca’. He uses the mnemonic of ‘Whicker’s World’ (a popular TV programme at the time,) WICR: ‘Worship is Continual Remembrance’. Remembrance of what? To remember is to re-member, a member of self-consciousness. The circle represents ‘continual remembrance’ as we run round it in our minds. A circle includes and excludes. It includes the finite and limitation, it excludes the infinite and limitlessness.
A circle can also be represented by the word ‘ON’. This is an ancient word for the sphere of the Sun, and is seen in ‘Babylon’ and Aton. We all begin life as a sphere, as an egg. Although now elongated, the sphere of the egg still surrounds us in the form of our skin.
Science now accepts that there is only energy, but has not yet accepted that energy is sentient. It feels, and through feeling knows its own state. Sentience means to know by feeling. Feeling is our primordial mode of awareness. We are inside a skin, we are made of energy, and that energy feels itself and therefore you feel that you are a being. This feeling of being is simply that the skin provides a resistance. Your energy reflects back from the skin to the centre, carrying with it the memory of impinging on the skin.
He asks the audience: “How does an Infinite Power, which is infinitely sentient, feel to Itself?” Answer: “Absolutely dreadful.” Because of its enormity and responsibility. This state of ‘dread’ is
anxiety. (German word ‘angst’. ) The Infinite, Sentient Power, prior to creation, is in a state of infinite anxiety.
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He draws another circle. Between the inside and outside of the circle he draws a line. This line can be drawn more widely to show another zone, an intermediate zone, between inner and outer. This
is the intermediate zone we all must pass through in the shift of consciousness that happens when we die. It is a process of transition from one level of consciousness to another. This zone is the ‘Bardo’. He gives the example of a sparrow dying – going from the finite zone to the infinite. We do this every night when we go to sleep; we ‘die’ every night. Between waking and dreamless sleep, there is the dreaming state: the Bardo.
He asks the audience to look at the image of the circle he has drawn and then to close their eyes and try to retain the image. Some people are able to retain an image with complete clarity – this is eidetic imagery, but most people retain a less-focussed, less clearly-defined image. This is similar to what happens when we dream. We retain images from the outside world but in a less clearly-defined form. (He draws a serrated edge on the circumference of the outer circle, to represent the clearly focussed images of the external world, and an undulating edge on an inner circle to represent the dream images.) There is a second skin around our ideas with their emotional charges. This is the dream state. The images are not sharp here (unless we have eidetic imagery). This circle represents the non-sharp, emotionally charged forms within consciousness. Some people have audio-eidetic imagery and hear sounds just as sharply in memory as when they were actually heard. (Both kinds of eidetic imagery can be a curse and result in seeing and hearing things that are not there!) Right at the centre of our being we have another zone, the one we go to in deep, dreamless sleep. This zone is our centre of Immanent Spirit and is identical with the Transcendent Spirit that made us. All great scientists have agreed that the solution of their problems came to them from some inner place, often whilst sleeping. Our innermost centre contains the solution to all problems because it was from this centre that they were projected.
The energies coming in, once they have rotated and made a circle, which is our skin surface, or the skin surface of the solar system, or the skin surface of the universe, once they have made it, have to drive in again, as near as they can to the centre, and then drive out again to the skin. So information is coming in and responses going out. When you go into deep, dreamless sleep you are actually at your highest level of awareness. This innermost zone at the centre of our being, is the same Infinite, Sentient Power that created the universe. This must be so, just as when we make a drawing on paper, the paper remains beneath the drawing. The drawing is a point of reference, just like our body and the appearance of it in the time-world cannot change the underlying reality on which it rests. This un-drawn on zone at our centre is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. All of our experiences in life cannot touch it. It is our essence and this essence is eternal. This inner state is what we aim to reach in meditation. All of the experiences of life are resting on the surface of our being. At centre, nothing can be changed by such experiences. Nothing can touch it. It remains eternally pure. But the power at centre is sentient power and it can, and does, take an interest in things. It can flow out of that centre and go into the zone of activity i.e. all zones beyond the centre. But when we are interested we can forget that the things we are interested have been willed by us as interesting. This is the Fall into identification with the external world. This is the ‘dreadful’ part. The spirit at our centre is the same as that Absolute which feels anxiety. “We are just as anxious as the Absolute…we worry about all kinds of things.”
When dying, it can be helpful to be reminded by somebody who is aware of the process, to focus on pure light, pure consciousness, and not to be diverted by memories of things we have experienced during life, otherwise we are likely to carry those memories through the Bardo and into the next incarnation. The purpose of the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ is to teach how to get through the intermediate state between living in the physical world and living in another world, a subtle world, and it is telling you how to get to the causal. This is the level of the will, beyond the subtle level of ideas and the gross level of external stimuli.
When external stimuli hit upon us they mean nothing whatever until we say so. We have the power to interpret external reality and when we do so we are imposing on ourself and no one else. We are imposing a dream we have fabricated by an act of will. When we impose our will we should be careful because we have to pay for the imposition, because the whole of reality is cyclic. “Whatever you impose on anybody will curve back on you.”
How do we reach the inner centre? By daydreaming consciously and carrying this through to the night dream. To reach it from the external, waking state we have to go into the dream state. We have to remove ourselves from the dominion of the external stimulus. We can learn to day-dream consciously and carry this through to the night dream.We can train ourselves to dream on purpose.
If we are all God why is there such misery in the world? It is ‘autohypnosis’. We put ourselves to sleep by identifying with the things in which we are interested. We interest ourselves in a thing or person, define it in our terms, not theirs, and push it with all the energy we have.Then, when it turns out other than we thought we are upset. The only misery in the world is defeated self-identification.
We can all learn to become aware of the spirit within us and learn to trust it. The enemy is our identification with the external world, through our five senses and a faulty education. If we know our own motive, in any situation, we have integrity. This can only be done in the here-and-now. We have to gather ourselves together in every instant. The particular habits we have of thought, feeling and will persist in us because we re-posit them from moment to moment. “There is no preservation of individual life other than this repositing.”
“Think of the thing you would like best in all the world.” I’ll tell you what you like best in all the world. You like a very intimate, personal, spontaneous, relation in which you do not need to guard yourself against other beings, in which you do not have to tell lies to protect your self-image, in which you can afford to lay yourself absolutely naked before total reality. That is what you really want.” “But the whole of your training is quite otherwise. You are taught what are called ‘good manners’. You are taught civilised behaviour and all of these things are devices to divert you from the essential nakedness of your primordial soul.” “What you really want is for you to walk about naked, without criticism, physically, emotionally, rationally, spiritually, in every way to be absolutely acceptable to every other being. And that is the prophecy of what will happen to the human race eventually. And, in about 4000 years time, bang in the middle of Capricorn, it will be that people won’t bother about what people are, or where they come from, or anything else, because they will all know the same thing. And that same thing will be: we are volitional beings, generating ourselves from the very centre of ourselves, and nothing but our own volitional generation is the yardstick of our validity.”
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THE FALL
THE FALL
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday 27.07.1986 at Parklands
A baby is an open sensorium. It is a feeling being. They turn over in the womb to make themselves comfortable. The baby is feeling its body and it does this in a kind of dream state, rather like a caterpillar pupating to become a butterfly. The caterpillar makes for itself a chrysalis and then “dreams it way’ through to emerge as a butterfly; the perfect insect. The Greek word for ‘butterfly’ is ‘psyche’, also the word for ‘soul’. In the same way, the human is encased in a physical body and “dreams its way” through to a fully developed, divine being, by its own, internal process. The Fall is the process whereby the human falls into identification with the body, the case, rather than focussing on the future transformation into the perfected being.
We put the body on the little finger because it is the smallest of our fields of awareness.The feeling of the baby is of the body. Feeling goes on the ring finger. The next, middle finger, is time. While in the womb, the baby dreams ancestral dreams. A white child will dream white dreams, a Chinese baby Chinese dreams etc. The body at first is a zone of in-tension, a pressing-in to become, from infinity, a finite being. It dreams through all its ancestral processes. Those it likes it gathers into its focus of awareness, those it dislikes it pushes back and out of the way. These are pushed back and down into the sacral area, and can be the cause of low back pain later on.
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Some painful stimuli are pushed up the spine to produce the swelling at the top of the spinal cord which becomes the brain. These are stimuli which will be needed for survival. “All that you call your intelligence in the forebrain…are the products of unpleasant experiences recorded and pushed upwards to be on guard.” This process of focussing on ancestral pleasures and repressing pains, is the root of the Fall. Both are forms of identification. The Fall is identification with the body as the centre of pleasure and pain.
The index finger is wired neurologically to the forebrain, to make concepts. These are built from ancestral percepts gained on the middle finger – time. We can now conceptualise our time-based experiences under categories of thought. You see a ball and then another and you recognise a concept out of both percepts. Similarly with dogs; an Alsatian and a Labrador are grouped together as ‘dogs’, while a cat will have a separate category. Later on, all moral, philosophical ideas, all principles of behaviour and feelings are now categorised on the index finger. You have now conceived yourself as human and the Fall is complete. Your identification is the concept: “I am a human being.”
Gradually, the identification has shifted from the body, through the feeling, through temporal experience records into the concept: “I am a human being.” The idea is now so strong that if you should lose a part of your body, you still identify as a human. Out of this identification you build a moral view of the universe: “I have a sense of value, I know good and bad.” You now internally build up a sense of “I” ness. This goes on the thumb. We now believe that we are human beings with individual will and that this is the most important thing there is. We now have “conceptual egotism.” We now believe ourselves to be separate, individual, conscious beings, an ego self. The more energy you put into that concept, “I am an individual,” the more you confirm the Fall. (The biggest egos are the ones least likely to see through this.)
If we look at the process the other way round…first of all there is a will. “This was an individuated will but it had not yet pushed itself through the resistances represented by intellect, time-sense, pleasure/pain, physicality.” This was a spiritual monad. It was a self-determined unity. “Our individual will is simply a zone, an infinity of conscious power.” “The Fall was the fall out of the universal awareness of power.” “There is an infinity of possibilities in the Infinite, Sentient Power and one of these is self-precipitation by grasping.” Once a zone is grasped it is a self. The field of Sentient Power prior to creation is pure consciousness, power aware of itself. If it centres itself and grasps itself it makes a sphere of its own being. This grasp is a precipitate of the Eternal. Lucifer was the first of these, in mythology. And the first sin was the sin of pride. Lucifer wanted to outshine his creator and incandesced to the point of collapse into darkness. Throughout human history individuals have tried to be superior to others in all sorts of ways. But it does not matter how superior we feel ourselves to be, the fact remains that as long as we are centred on a finite body the more we are tied down by our own definition. To reverse the Fall we have to untie this definition of ourselves as egoic, finite beings.
Health and disease in the physical body. We are taught to think that health and disease are the products of external forces. This has become more apparent since the discovery of bacteria and viruses. We believe that we have a physical body, “but scientifically, you know for a fact that your body is not an entity, it is a process of energy.” (Buddha taught us this 2600 years ago!) More subtle is your body of emotions. These are real forces and quite different from the physicality of the body. Bodies are visible, emotions are not. Emotions can be very dangerous and we tend to identify with them. The control of these forces is “the key to all that is called magical operations, poltergeists, clairvoyance,” and so on.
Next, we have the mentational. This level of being contains all the thoughts of your total ancestry. This is a higher level of vibrational body, but there is another above this: the eidetic field. This is a world in which all forms are mutually interpenetrating, though not in time. Two bodies adjacent are separate in time, but at a higher frequency, the energies co-mingle. We feel we are separate but the people around us are sitting in our space, and we in theirs. In order to avoid the interference with their thoughts, their feelings and their physicality, we say “I don’t believe it.” We don’t want to be interfered with, so to rescue ourselves from psychic interference, we must not believe that this is so. We each identify separately, and the more concepts we have of our own separate selves, the safer we feel. But, in fact, we are in greater danger because we are ignorant of reality. Even worse would be to believe that another being can actually move our body against our will, so we believe our will is confined to our body, increasing our identification with the finite. Experiments have shown that a new baby can actually wake up its mother from another room. They still share the same bio-field. The more we consider this, the more terrified we could become. How can we be sure our thoughts are our own? What of the inclination to do something? It could be someone else willing us to do it. “So we are trained to believe in separativity and we know factually, that this is a myth.” We cannot be separate, but we hope to be so, to lead our lives without interference.
The Fall. The fall comes with identification as a separate self. We would all like to believe that we are not responsible for our fallen state, that we did not ask for it. Perhaps we were pushed out of eternity into time against our will? This is the ego trying to extricate itself from guilt. The reality is that we have chosen to come into the time-process and we have to choose to leave it. It says in the Bible: “All have fallen short of the glory of God.” Nobody is sinless. How do we know? Because we are in a body; we must have identified at some point. We fell from Heaven, from eternity, into time.The spheres of creation are eternal, mutually, interpenetrating spheres. They are not separate.
In response to a question about the incarnation we choose:
As a spiritual monad, you see all kinds of possibilities; to become famous, to be remembered in history…“This is the Luciferan determination to be brighter than everybody else.” “My mother was a soprano, my father was a musician, you see, when they got together, I saw an opportunity, I seized it. I can’t blame them.” (so you saw it? “Yes” and you remembered it? “Oh Yes. I bothered to remember it.”
Beyond the physical body we have a heat aura, then a bio-magnetic field, the life-force, then an emotional body, then a mentational one, a conceptual one, and a volitional one. Each at a higher level of vibration. “We are involved with each other whether we like it or not.”
We are conditioned by our experiences in the womb. We tend to forget that we, as babies, made our own placenta, that we began this life as parasites, growing at our mother’s expense. We have to remember that we came here for experience, not to enjoy ourselves. We must not get lost in the process. The whole of yoga is a means to re-enter union with our original, pre-fall state before we identified as separate. The enemy is self-conceptualising. This is the Fall. We have to gather ourselves together and say: “All structures whatever are ego-defences.” The opposite to order is chaos. “I now commit myself to chaos, anything can happen. I commit myself to chaos.”
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ACCIDENT
ACCIDENT
Précis of a talk by Eugene Halliday given on 05.05.1985
Eugene begins by saying that everybody believes that accidents happen. He says “There isn’t any.” He goes back to the fundamental idea that dualism is impossible and asks someone to say why. The proof is that absolute un-likes could not communicate and therefore there cannot be more than one basic reality. As human beings, two facts are obvious to us: we have physicality, in our bodies, and we have consciousness of it, and of our ideas and feelings. These two facts interact with each other. Our volition, thoughts and feelings interact with our body, so the physical body and our consciousness of it cannot be fundamentally different.
If dualism is impossible then everything that happens must be caused by the “ultimate, non-dual reality.” “There cannot be an event that is not caused.” The word ‘accident’ means ‘to falling’, something falls without a cause. But if sentience and matter are not different, everything that happens, physically, like a falling object hitting someone, must have an aspect of consciousness, of intention, of volition. But we don’t want to believe this. Why? Because we don’t want to accept the responsibility for being on the receiving end. ‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’. If we are not continuously watchful, we can become the ‘victim’ of an ‘accident’.
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‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’. The Absolute Will is pure because, being Infinite, there can be nothing outside to interfere with it. Therefore, there can be nothing accidental in God. God is the only absolutely free motion and remains free unless, “It binds Itself by a Self-committal.” This happens when the Absolute commits Itself to objective existence and makes a finite world, the Universe. The Bible tells us that we are ‘made in the image of God’. This means that we have the same three attributes of Intelligence, will and the ability to articulate them. Intelligence is sentience, will is initiative, and “the power to express what your intelligence and will motivate themselves by.” The power of speech is important because if we do not verbalise what we are doing, we cannot be clear about it. A baby has intelligence and will but cannot yet express itself. By the time it can, its innate intelligence has been imposed upon by parents and other educators, and it has been reduced to the level of a civilised being.
“Now there is nothing in our non-dual universe that is not caused by intelligent will.” The universe is made of vibrating energies in rotation and translation. Each structure is the form which determines any vibrational frequency. A structure is a ‘stricture’, a restraint. Everything in the universe is a creation of fundamental power. We call it ‘cosmic reason’, the Logos, and it is an encapsulation of that power, a compression, and a release, an expansion, producing a rotation, and thereby beings. Every such being is an encapsulation of Sentient Power, but when such beings are created there arises the possibility of contingent relation, and from this comes the idea of ‘accident’. The Absolute can “knock” on the walls of any such sphere and the being will not have any warning that this knock is coming. If the being is surprised in this way, it will view the knock as ‘accidental’. We should all be expecting this to happen, but because of an erroneous education, we are not. We think something knocking on us has ‘befallen’ us. From the point of view of the Absolute, of course, this is not accidental at all. The Absolute can push its creations around “without bothering to consult them.” If such a push is unpleasant we interpret it as an ‘accident’. So to avoid accidents happening to us we have to be conscious that the Absolute is always with us and inside us. An Islamic saying is: ‘When you are living, live as if you can see God in everything. And if you can’t see Him, nevertheless, He sees you’.
If we accept that there are no ‘accidents’ then we should become as conscious as we can, all the time. “As long as we know that every act is caused, ultimately, by the Absolute Infinite and we adjust to that and remain awake, we are relatively free from ‘accident’.”
We can divide reality into two kinds: Absolute and relative. Absolute reality is the Absolute differentiating Itself. It has differentiated a Universe and we are a product of that process. If we accept this, then we are true ‘Children of God’, we accept whatever happens to us. Relative reality is when we, as humans, break up further the Absolute reality. We “differentiate the already differentiated” and complicate our lives. In doing this, we become more and more subject to ‘accidents’. In this more complex world, we are “battered by stimuli”… “all of which tend to disrupt us, to break us into pieces, to destroy our fundamental unity.”
The word for unity is ‘one’ and in many languages this word has just three letters: ein, une, uno, una etc. This means that in the ‘one’ are contained three aspects: force, form and function. “There is no being that is not triple ‘F’: force, form, function.” All beings are triple in this way, from an amoeba to a genius, and can respond in any of the three ways, all of which can be invisible to us. This triplicity in us reflects that in the Absolute, which is the meaning of the word ‘Logos’. L is ‘light’, lambda, consciousness, force; G is ‘dark’, gamma, the body. The S is the out-flowing function. We do not usually think of consciousness as force, but it is, and we are at our most vulnerable when unconscious. Consciousness is a force that can change things. It is a catalyst which can cause things to change, but itself remains what it is. It can change ideas and activity, form and function, but is untouched by the change. “Consciousness is the real power. And the form that it wills by focusing, to come to be, is the idea that governs the activity.”
‘I was a hidden treasure, I desired to be known, therefore I created the world’. If God had not made a world His ‘treasure’ could not have been revealed. ‘Treasure’ means ‘triple-assurance’; force, form, function. When we are in deep, dreamless sleep, we are not using them and our treasure is hidden. “There is only one law, there is no other law..it is the law of the triple: force, form, function.” “We cannot think about one without three. Because whatever we think of is a force, form, function, and in it, there is no room whatever for accident of any kind. But there is plenty of room for ignorance, misinterpreting events as accidents.”
There is a question from the audience about the word ‘accident’. He explains it is from the latin cadere ‘to fall’. He goes on to explain the meaning of the word ‘cad’ which comes from it. He then goes on to talk about ‘private purpose’ saying it is the “most dim-witted thing anybody could have” and condemned by all the great religions. ‘Private’ means to private, to separate ourselves. “You draw a line around you, physically, mentally, emotionally, and believe, most stupidly, that no-one else knows what you are up to.” But, “actually, everybody is watching all the time, with different degrees of efficiency, but nevertheless, watching.” “So ‘private purpose’ is a very good way of increasing ‘accident probability’ for oneself.” Also, the more private our purpose, the more ignorant we are of the purposes of others. The more we focus on ourselves, the less aware we are of what others are doing “and so ‘private purpose’ is a dialectical self-defeating.” ‘Private purpose’ and ‘accident’ are closely related; they increase together. If we insist on driving in the fog to achieve some private purpose then…
If we study some other creatures we find “marvellous examples” of group cooperation and selflessness. He gives the example of a colony of ants bridging a stream with their bodies to allow others to cross. It is another example of our ‘private purpose’ that we regard all other creatures as inferior, and do not learn from their example. In the Koran it says: ‘Man’s stupidity is so great that he cannot see the intelligent demonstration amongst the animals.’ The intelligence of animals comes, of course, from the same source as ours, namely, the Absolute. We humans think we are very clever and yet it is we who are spoiling the earth, not the animals.
There is only one religion: Torah, Rota, Wheel, Being, Logos, Yin/Yang. And only one law: force, form, function; consciousness, idea, activation; “Precipitation by acts of will.” He analyses the name of God, Jehovah, into the ‘tetragrammaton’, the four-letter name of God. “The key to existence is in that name.” It reduces to ‘He-She’ ‘She-He’.
He asks the audience what makes us so stupid to have ‘private purpose’. The answer, of course, is God! It is for our education. “It’s God that makes the prodigal.” “The more stupid you are, the greater the forgiveness of God.” “The more you try, the more intelligent you get…the more intelligent you get, the harder it is to make a stupid error…It’s a big twist, isn’t it?”
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ADVICE TO YOUNG GIRLS
ADVICE TO YOUNG GIRLS
SYNOPSIS: ADVICE TO YOUNG GIRLS
Life is an energy, that energy is able to tense itself, and that tension, that power of focus we call masculine. To bring consciousness to a point is masculine; to leave it spread out is feminine. An example is while driving a car, normally when driving a car you drive with your consciousness spread out, the moment you see the possibility of danger you convert from the feminine to the masculine, you converge. There are two kinds of awareness convergent-masculine, spread-feminine. But to make the change between the masculine and feminine you have to use your initiative.
Centering is the beginning of axiality, you posit that you are inside your being, if you positively get hold of yourself you have become a centre of interest. Most human beings are not interested in themselves at all. They are not interested in their real self they are interested in something outside themselves. Where you are interested the universal field is interested, The Field, the whole field of the universe begins to converge on you and you begin to become more powerful.
The way of doing it, which is very difficult, is being still on the inside, feminizing instead of converging on an external object, which is a masculine thing, spread consciousness, sit still and wait. That is called “conquering with the way of a woman”.
This talk also details the difference between Aristotelian Logic and the logic of the Logos, Logologic. Reference is made to the inner meaning of the bibles use of the word eunuch and the meaning of the Egyptian gods Isis, Osiris and Horus and their relationship to matriarchy and patriarchy and the age of the combined being.
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How to break inertias: “How” begins with ‘H’ and signifies “a hierarchy of powers.” We have this hierarchy within us. We are a mass of energy: physical, emotional, mentational, conceptual, volitional. We have to start with volition and bring the others into line: will; concepts; thinking; feeling; body. We can change habits of body, feeling and thinking. We cannot change eternal truths on which religious ideas are based, but we often forget these truths. Often our thinking is at odds with these. e.g. The Afrikaners during apartheid, although nominally Christian, considered the indigenous people of South Africa to be racially inferior. We all may have such ‘biases’.
Many people who are looking for spiritual enlightenment adopt a concept that a particular spiritual practice, such as chanting, or a particular kind of meditation will achieve this. “It won’t, of course.” Krishnamurti has spent most of his life telling his followers that “there are no gurus.” On one occasion he asked his audience, “Why do you keep coming?” A voice replied, “to be reminded.” This is true.The reality is that, “We are all of one origin, and that origin is Spirit, Intelligent Power.” The problem is we forget, daily and from moment to moment, “because we get caught in mentation.” “Why do we get caught in that? Because of pleasures and pains. Why do we get those? Because we have got focused on a body.” How can we remember? With symbols. The word ‘sym-bol’ is ‘seed of will’, which means it can grow and become free volition. ‘Sym’ is ‘mys’ reversed, the mys in ‘mystery’. In the seed there is a mystery. You cannot find an oak tree in an acorn. “There is a will hidden in every seed.” We can see this very clearly if we watch a seed germinate and grow. Its will is to push outwards from its centre. Likewise, a growing embryo.
We have to “re-member” that we are “members of an Infinite Continuum of Sentient Power.” “We are all points of in-tension in an ex-tension of power.” But individuation is limitation. To express ourselves we have to drive outwards again to transcend that limitation. A symbol can remind us of this. The masons use the idea of an ‘Ashlar’, a cube inside which you sit and are aware of the powers above you, the powers below you, developed talents to the right, undeveloped ones to the left, the past behind and the future in front. The cube has six faces and to exist is to be ‘six-faced’, to ‘stand out’. We stand in the middle. We are the seventh, the day God rested. “You rest on the point of your individuation, not on the point of your empirical ego, because that is not in the centre.”
The ego is a construct made from a collision of the inner spirit and the contingent stimulus. It is half-way between the innermost, true Self and the outer world.” “When these…impinge, they spin and make an ego.” “That ego structure is empirical, mentational, temporal…it has no power whatever of itself.” All the power that appears to be in it is from centre.” We can use the idea of the Ashlar cube even more simply “Spin it, and all the corners will wear off and you will have a sphere.”
He suggests that we draw a circle, put a dot in the centre and write I on this, and do a little drawing of an eye, an observer, in the middle. The circle around the I is our peripheral interest. The distance this goes to is self-determined and we think we must understand this world that we have determined for ourselves. But we should be doing just the opposite: “What you have to do is understand you.” We are precipitating an egoic world; Why? Because we have a motive and we must understand our motive to understand ourselves. “You never, ever, in the whole of your existence, have or ever will know, anything other than you modalising you.” It is “the modalities you, with your appetite, have imposed on you.” Enlightenment, therefore, can only be found inside. This is why Krishnamurti said “there are no gurus.” The Guru is hidden in each one of us.
The world of humans is made by interested appetites defining situations, borders, boundaries, fences, etc. This tendency is in every one of us. We cannot remember without a symbol because “a symbol condenses fantastical histories of thoughts.” Christ said, “Is it not written ye are gods?” The trouble is we have forgotten this. We have been taught that to think in this way is heresy. “But you are God, because, absolutely, there isn’t anything else but God. Where you are, as you are, you are God being you.” A symbol can remind us of this daily.
The cross in the circle is the ‘Master Symbol’ and appears in all religions. The George Cross means ‘balanced power’, eternal truth that cannot change. The Andrew Cross means the same, but now rotating, “spinning, creating time.” The one super-imposed on the other symbolises eternity and time. The circle represents Absolute Wisdom, Sophia, the female cosmic principle of creativity. The cross represents man, the principle of initiative. The horizontal is the principle of passivity, the vertical the principle of activity. Together they represent the hermaphrodite. The vertical is male relative to the horizontal, which is female, but they are inside the circle, which is female. The Cross symbolises Infinite, Absolute, True form with a circle, a limit around it. This is the ‘Divine Hermaphrodite’, ‘The Heavenly Sophia’, ‘The Messiah’. “The appetival drive is the circle and the cross is the form.” We all have fundamental, appetival, Sentient Power inside us but we disguise it by presenting ourselves as “a form, a cross, an identity.”
From our master symbol we can derive others. The primary symbol is a circle which means “all and nothing, zero.” The inside and the outside are identical. It is a primary symbol of encapsulation. It means inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion. What is enclosed is finite and what is outside is infinite, We have to remember that, in order to draw a circle, we must have a central point, a dot. That dot is the I the observer. As soon as we posit that dot we feel differently about the circle. Now there is a point of reference at its centre and therefore a relationship between this point and the periphery. If we imagine that the dot is I, myself, then the circle is the limit of my environment. In astronomy the symbol of the circle with the dot at the centre indicates the sun with an attendant planet in orbit around it. This gives us the idea of hierarchy. Wherever there is a centre there is something going round it. If we now draw the George cross in the circle we have quartered it and it becomes a ‘mandala’, an object for meditation. He then takes the circle and puts the cross underneath to represent Venus, the symbol of love, and then Mars, by moving the arms of the cross, the symbol of war. He then divides the circle vertically and puts the cross on top and then below to represent Saturn and Jupiter. The circle with the dot is the sun.We can then shade part of the circle to leave a crescent, to symbolise the moon. He then draws Mercury. He has now broken down the mandala into its constituent applications.
Meditating on the master symbol tells us how to conduct our lives. The first one says, “all beings are bound.” We all have a certain amount of free energy, the vertical, and all beings are passive to stimuli from other beings. We have a sign for lovingness and another for anti-love, for war; a sign for greed and one for generosity; a sign for radiant giving of light and information to others; the
sun, a constant, and a sign for variability, or passivity; and then a sign for them all together; Mercury. This has now extended the master symbol. It says that if there is war it is because somebody is loving something and wants to get hold of it. If there is love the person will fight to defend the things it loves. If there is constant light, the sun, there will be periodicity because we cannot stand being in the light all the time.If there is too much generosity, everything will disperse to infinity, so there must be a saturnine grab to stop the dispersal. And if there is greed, there must be open-handed generosity, as shown by some rich philanthropists. “Now we cannot do anything without doing both of the opposites and all of them are mixed up continuously by this Mercurial spin.” Our master symbol covers everything. “There is no thought, no feeling, no will, no love, no hate, that is not contained in that master symbol.” We should use this symbol all the time. At the point of death the RC church gives ‘extreme unction’ to remind the dying person of religious truths. The Tibetan Book of the Dead does similarly. “What is that supreme concept that guarantees absolute salvation? The concept that you are the mysterious Self that you are looking for.”
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APOCALYPSE
APOCALYPSE
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 30.06.1985
Eugene begins by saying that the prophets in the earliest times were men who were persecuted and killed for speaking out against the wickedness of the rulers. An example being that of John the Baptist who criticised Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias. The prophets heard voices inside themselves and declared these to be divine in origin, and so it was their duty to speak out. Some of these had ‘visions’ instead of voices and began to make ‘apocalyptic writings’ in which they could disguise what they were saying so that the rulers would not realise it was they who were being described. A lot of the symbology used in these was borrowed from previous writings and Old Testament sources. We know that ‘power corrupts’ and it always did. From the earliest times we find that governments have made rules to control the people whilst protecting themselves. Those who disagreed with the rules were punished and killed to maintain the position of the rulers. The prophets were the ones who spoke out against the corruption inevitable in such systems. The apocalyptic writers could not speak out openly and so had to create a symbology to do so. The idea of ‘The Beast’ became the symbol for the state. In ‘Revelation’, the lawmakers, the power pursuers, are called the ‘anti-Christ’ because they are opposed to ‘Cosmic Logic’, the logic of the relationship of all beings, introduced by Christ. The human race can be divided in this way into those who love power and want to rule over others, and those who do not.
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Laws are made by use of words and to become conscious we must use words. The ‘sci’ in ‘conscious’ means ‘to cut’, ‘con’ is with, and ‘ous’ is being. Without words we may be aware of something but not conscious of it. e.g. we can be aware of a truth and not be able to put it into words. Without words we cannot define an idea, but we can be aware of confusion in out minds. “Governments formulate intellectual rules in order to try to control, from outside, the appetite of non-intellectuals.” Non-intellectuals cannot understand the meaning of the law. The prophets saw that the intellectual rulers imposed on the non-rational masses, rules which the masses could not make for themselves, but then fell into enjoying the power this gave them. This is the “number one crime” in the Universe, “the crime of Lucifer.” “Pride in self-power is really the only sin, the desire to rule other people, the rest are merely particular applications.” Since Christ, there is only one law with two aspects: Love God, and your neighbour as yourself. “The rest are commentary.”
The apocalyptic text denouncing this has the title ‘Revelation’. This does not mean ‘reveal’ in the sense of ‘taking off the veils’, but rather ‘re-veiling’, in changing the image to one that is less obvious. By writing in this way, rulers could be insulted without them becoming aware of it. There are many writings of this kind, mystical, occult, Cabalistic, esoteric, (a word meaning ‘essential secret’.) “They are all gatherings of insults against governments who have been corrupted by the ‘will to power’.”
History has shown that the orthodox leaders of the Jews connived with their rulers during captivity in Babylon and again under Rome. The apocalyptic writers were supported by rebels who rose up, not only against their captors, but also against their own leaders, as in the Jewish revolt which led to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. There became two groups of rulers and the rebels had to oppose both.
He analyses the story of Adam and Eve and their sons. Adam represents the man of intellect, of initiative, who is seduced by his wife, that is, his feminine side of emotion and desire. He is corrupted and mislead away from his prior intellect, his Cosmic Logic. They have a son, Cain, whose name means ‘cunning’, who murders his brother Abel, a name which means ‘he who thinks that God is his father’. “So faith in God is murdered by intellectual initiative.” God puts a mark on Cain so that no man will kill him. This is because, if Cain, the intellect, was killed after ‘faith’ had been killed, “there would be no possibility of the evolution of the human race.” Adam and Eve had a third son, Seth, to replace Abel. Out of his line will come the ‘Sons of God’, whereas the line from Cain will be ‘sons of men’. The descendants of Cain will pursue power over others on earth. “Meanwhile, inside our bodies, crying for vengeance, is ‘faith’, Abel reborn as Seth.” (In Genesis the blood of Abel ‘cries for vengeance from the ground.’ i.e. our bodies.)
We all want to have faith but we find that our intellect will try to ‘murder’ it. The intellect will always say, “You could be wrong,” when we feel faith within us. We are all microcosms of the big universe where we see, over time, intellect increasingly throwing doubt on faith. We want to believe in God, in Infinite, Sentient Power, and that this power made the universe, and us, and is the very life within us, and therefore we can relate harmoniously with every other being because we are all God, but the intellect still says, “you could be wrong.” We have to take sides; especially if we think that Armageddon is coming. If we choose faith then we are not influenced by the arguments of intellectuals.
Just as intellect and faith can fight inside each individual, they fight amongst nations, and ‘Revelation’ prophesies that they “will confront each other in a final, showdown battle.” In the individual, this can become a ‘crisis’, but in nations, ‘Armageddon’. But, the battle was won before it began, “because ‘faith’ has not got parts and the intellect has.” It can “fall to bits.” We become “persons of faith” by an act of will: self-contradiction belongs to the intellect, not to faith. With St, Augustine we can say, “Love God, and do what you will.” If you love what you do then it does not matter what the act is. The intention makes all the difference between a surgeon and a murderer.
The battle is between the empirical intellect and faith “And on earth, it is the intellectual power pursuers” that try to suppress the ones with faith. We know that in the world today there are greater numbers of non-believers than there are of the ‘faithful’. Revelation predicts that ‘not all shall be saved’, but those who remain faithful to the end shall be. However, a precondition of salvation is that we must be persecuted to test the strength of our faith. Until we are tested we cannot know if we will stay faithful. Revelation says the final battle will be a confrontation of ‘Cosmic Logos’, represented as a being on a ‘white horse’ with a two-edged sword in its mouth. This is the tongue and is the weapon of logic. It is called two-edged because it cuts the ‘haves’ (the power-pursuers) and the ‘have-nots’ (those of laziness of intellect, for non-decision.) The rulers at that time will have weapons only now being dreamed of by the scientists, but to those of faith these will still be mere phenomena, because those of faith will know that the human soul is indestructible. “Now, as soon as you don’t care about physical death, your faith improves.” In the battle to come, truth defeats error, but the book says that, after “a thousand years” of the Messiah ruling, the devil will be loosed again. This means that the conflict will start again because “there will be many who pretend to have faith and haven’t.” But this time the victory will be absolute and these will be destroyed and after that there will be a ‘New Heaven’ and a ‘New Earth’. The New Heaven is the new group of concepts that will be in the head, the “heaved-up place,” cosmic, universal truth. The New Earth is the physical application of these concepts. This unity will have won the battle against the disintegrating tendencies of the power-pursuing intellect. Those who were on the wrong side will go to ‘Hell’, which means ‘held-in’ by their own beliefs. Knowing that they have done this to themselves by their own pursuit of power. So they are “not condemned by anything other than their own self-evaluation. And how can there be an escape from that? Not possible.” They are stuck with the knowledge “I was deceived, because I deceived, firstly myself, in my secret pursuit of power.”
The one who then sits in power is “The Messiah,” “The Son of Man” so-called because He is the “totality of all the judgements ever made, historically, by the total human race,” which is nothing but the extended ‘Being of God’ through all of humanity. Total humanity is God manifest as human beings. The ‘Son of Man’ is also the ‘Son of God’.
The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are war, disease, famine and pestilence. War always brings the other three. When fully understood, then every human being is the rider on the white horse; white to symbolise the mixing of the seven colours of the rainbow, which are the seven temperaments found in man. The implications of ‘Revelation’ mean we have to choose, and if we do not choose, that is also a choice! We have decided to “shirk” the necessity of choosing. The word ‘shirking’, in Arabic, is ‘shira-king’, which means ‘not believing in God.’ So a person who dodges responsibility is a ‘shirker’, and also, one who does not believe in God. Not to make the choice is “the worst crime of all.” Christ says to those who ‘sit on the fence’, “I will spew thee out of the mouth.”
“So, we’re in a cleft stick, aren’t we? We have to choose, and to refuse to choose is a choice, and that’s the worst guilt of all.”
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APIS
APIS
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 3.10.1982 I
Eugene begins by writing the word ‘APIS’ on the screen and asking the audience what it means.
Answer: ‘BEE’ to the Romans, but ‘BULL’ to the Egyptians. It is also the name ‘Joseph’. He draws a wave to represent the Absolute. The ‘Absolute’ is Ab: Father, Sol: Son, ute: Holy Ghost; a triplicity of powers. ‘A’ is also ‘Aleph’, (Alpha). ‘Ah’ indicates ‘prime breathing’ and is the primary phonetic symbol for the Absolute, Sentient Power. The Absolute has a three-fold function of form, feeling and will, appearing as a two-fold polarity of power and sentience. The triangle represents this triplicity, a symbol used, even in the Vatican.
The two-fold polarity of sentience and power we can find in ourselves. If I move my hand I can feel that I can move it, even when I am not doing so. This feeling is of ‘potential’; ‘power held in.’ To wave the hand is an action, so is to point and to punch; I can feel all these without doing them. Therefore, we can feel potentials which may never become actualised. Power can be exercised without sentience and without thinking: e.g. we can rush about and bang our head on the door. Our sentience may then feel a pain but this comes after the action. Power without sentience is action without awareness and can be very destructive, for example drink driving. Also, we can have sentience without power, for example feeling that something must be done to save the world, but without having the power to do so. The difficulty we face is getting hold of both simultaneously and converging them onto a point.
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The Absolute has done this so we must attempt to do so as well. He draws a diamond shape to illustrate: At the top point is the Absolute, at the bottom point is the Individual, spiritual monad. On the dexter side he puts ‘Power’ and on the sinister side ‘Sentience’. He draws a vertical line to connect the top and bottom and a horizontal line to connect the sides. We reflect the Absolute, so each one of us is an individual with a polarisation of Power and Sentience. We all have an infinite number of potentials, ways of doing things, but although our potentials are infinite, our ability to actualise them is limited. For example, potentially, we could all copy Michelangelo and sculpt ‘David’; but not in actuality. To actualise a potential we must converge our sentience and our power. If we can achieve this, then we have produced a descent of the Absolute into incarnation in us. This is ‘divinisation’: to know ourselves as well as the Absolute does. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The Absolute is perfect because His power and sentiency do not quarrel; they are convergent.
The word APIS, the four points of the diamond, now means: “The absolute individual who has polarised his power and his sentiency, consciously, so that he can actually know what he can do, and do what he knows.” Such an individual is now a divine being, even though incarnate in a body. When we get upset and frustrated by our inability to do something it is because of a lack of convergence between sentience and power. These split apart when we forget: we feel our sentiency and forget to initiate our power, or we are powerful but forget our sentient awareness of the possibilities of the situation. There is a ‘fight’ within and this vibrates in us and differentiates into a five-fold function. These five are: B-the physical body, F-the feeling, M-the mentation, O-Intellectual comprehension, V-volition. (VOMFB). The body contains all five and together they form the empirical ego. They are built from the body encountering other bodies and things in the material world. The individual is a spiritual monad with a physical body which develops an empirical ego from its five functions.
For the individual to control these five functions it must ‘pin’ them, ‘nail’ them, ‘crucify’ them. The problem we have is how to differentiate them. When life is easy we feel we have no problem but when a problem arises then life becomes hard: ‘Life’ = ‘live’ which then changes to ‘evil’. ‘Life’ is working for the development of our three parts; thinking, feeling and willing. To control anything we must first become conscious of it; to be ‘alive’ is to be aware of these three. (He gives an example from sea-life of the Absolute demonstrating these three functions, harmoniously, in the way that some fish have adapted to predators.) This can happen “because all intelligence is nothing but the Absolute operating within Itself, with absolute convergence of power and sentience. Human conceit of the empirical ego, makes him think he is the only smart fellow in the world.”
The monad is an individual differentiating sentience and power. We want to converge so why don’t we? The answer is: pleasure and pain. Sentience is fond of pleasure but not partial to pain. If pleasure is in view, power will go towards it; if pain, then away from it. So sentience is duped into use or misuse of power by pleasure/pain stimuli.
Every individual is a spiritual monad and is a being with the job of converging sentience and power. It is: “nothing but the Absolute precipitated.” Because it is infinite, it vibrates with possibilities; we all know we are capable of much more than we presently are. In a ‘survival situation’ we react appropriately, immediately. If we can do this all the time we are ‘divinised’. “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” But the differentiation of stimuli coming at us every day, on TV, in the newspapers, and so on, causes our brains to scatter. Our sentience and power are disintegrated by incoming stimuli, we fall apart and stop realising what we are.
Jesus said: “Is it not written… ye are gods?” We are absolute being, individuated, trying to converge sentience and power within us by nailing it, crucifying it, so that it cannot scatter and run away with us. At the point of death, those who have not gathered themselves together, scatter, disperse into Infinity. These are ‘mortals’. A being that can hold together the convergence they have achieved in life is ‘immortal’, not falling to bits.
We have to train ourselves to put up with painful things otherwise we are at the mercy of painful stimuli. With every cell that wants pleasure we say: “I nail you. I am sentient power and nobody moves unless I say so.” We can order our bodies to behave and likewise our feelings and our thoughts. “I am a five-fold being in a Field, which is the sixth that holds the five together.” We can all do it if we remember to. How do we remember? The Egyptians used a glyph: the ‘watchit’ eye; the observer. Jesus said: “Do not let your left hand know what the right hand is doing.” The right hand is the will. It has a function: the goal to be attained. The intellective, left-side parts, will take it to bits, they will destroy its unity if you let them know about it. We can do this because we have a conscious mind and an unconscious. Our conscious mind can verbalise our intent, but behind it is the unconscious, determined to thwart it. The unconscious is the repository of millions of ancestral memories which will contradict our good intentions, as well as our friends and acquaintances. As soon as we say: “I will do so and so, tomorrow,” all the recorded negatives will try to stop us.
Our life is a triplicity of thought, feeling and will, but these remain a potential until we can actualise them and converge them into a unity within us. Only we can do this; each individual for themselves. Only the individual can save himself. In Buddhism this is the ‘Hinayana’, the narrow path. The Mahayana says: “everybody can do it for everybody else.” This refers to the concept of the ‘Boddhi Satva’, who stays behind to help others. (Eugene is dismissive of this ‘Great Vehicle’ of Buddhism.) He insists: “only the self can do it for the self, the individual.” You have to be able to say: “I am Absolute, Sentient Power” and substantialise it with your own efforts, your own sentience, your own power “self-incarnate.” The total philosophy of the world is in the simple, little diagram (the diamond) but putting it into operation is the problem. We think we have a body in which feeling, thinking, comprehension and willing are all separable. “They are not. What they are is stressable.” We can focus on any one and forget the others but they are, at all times, co-present.
It is our own fault if we get into trouble by forgetting this elementary fact. The qualities of the Absolute, split into a five-fold being is only apparent, the split is an illusion, simply a matter of stress. “It’s your interest in the particular.” He uses the example of sexuality. In our relations we tend to focus on only one of the five, and suffer the resultant problems. “Nothing but the simultaneous co-presentation of that being is enough to make what you call the perfect relation.”
It is very hard work to gather together the differences and assimilate them. He asks: What does it feel like to think you have infinite potential and all you need is an awareness of that fact and then you can start moving according to it. How does it feel?” Answer: Very dangerous! Christ was crucified for saying it. (He suggests going into the lowest pub in Manchester and shouting out the topic of this talk!) He suggests we experiment: like the little child who tries to do too many things at once and falls over. But with the knowledge we have, we should be like the child and try to coordinate our functions. Each one of us is an individual with the problem of trying to integrate the functions within us. The concept of Sentient Power polarised from the Absolute gives us the chance to rise above our present level. We are the only way the Absolute can demonstrate plurality. “If the seed does not fall to the ground and die it abides alone.”
Prior to creation the Absolute is equivalent to a no-thing, full of potentialities but doing nothing – how does this feel? Terrible. It needs earth, ‘terra’, ‘terrification’. So it vibrates and produces patterns of interference. Like Chladni figures, the nodal points are where the sand collects, like bodies. All around the sand is vibrating. A physical body is a nodal point, a point of node, a point of no-differentiation. The gross body is the least powerful because it is on a nodal, precipitation point, but that is the beginning of individuality. Individuality begins with a feeling of impotence. The Absolute precipitates centres of personal impotence, but these are seeds, reflexive individuals, after they have been educated. “They have to start with personal impotence, otherwise their conceit will be boundless.” “Impotence means ‘power held down’.
(Looking at the diagram): “That’s a nice shape. Go fly a kite.” (The diamond looks like a kite.) “Kite means ‘lock it up and crucify it’, and then you can fly it.”
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ARROGANCE
ARROGANCE
Précis of a talk by Eugene Halliday given on 22.02.1987
Eugene begins by asking his audience for the meaning of the word ‘arrogance’. He gives a dictionary definition: ‘The taking to ourself, of anything whatever, without entitlement.’ He distinguishes between the Godhead, the Infinite, Sentient Power, and God as creator. The Infinite Field winds in and posits a point. We are all such points of reference within the Infinite Power Field.
As long as we remember this we are not arrogant. The problem is that the Infinite has made many such points, which produces contingent relation between them. The Field winds in but cannot go to dead centre because it is essentially dynamic and must keep moving. It winds out again, leaving a centre of pure spirit. This centre is in every being and is identical in every being. Our problem is that we forget that, at centre, we are this spirit. We forget that we have come from Infinity and we fall into identification with our periphery. If we all remembered our origin we could relate to each other harmoniously, but the contingency obscures the reality and we relate to each other contingently, that is, from our egoic self, which is built from our empirical experience in the world. “The cause of all the trouble is identification with the point of contingent stimulation; forgetfulness of the Absolute.” The energy going out from each centre meets the energy coming from another and, at the point of meeting, the energies “spin in each one, and this becomes the centre of egoic defence in the time-matter process.” When such a situation arises there is always a relative hierarchy of power because the energies in each one are not equal. One initiates, the other reacts, one is active, the other passive. The being, at centre, is ‘Atman’ which is identical with ‘Brahman’, the ‘extended power’ of the Infinite. The egoic complex created by contingency is ‘Jiva’.
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Arrogance comes from the belief that a being “has something of itself not derivative from the Absolute.” It is “pretending to have authority.” Any earthly ‘authority’ that forgets that power has been conferred upon it is arrogant. This applies at all levels. A leader has such authority conferred upon them by the electorate. This is the lowest level of conferring a label of responsibility. The next level is from the elected government. Once elected, they think of themselves as the ‘elect’ and choose those suitable for their purposes. Such a person must then do as they are told by their electors, who can be considered an oligarchy, a tightly-bound small group. However, all electors are elected by the Absolute. “The Absolute, Sentient Power chooses upon whom it will confer a label,” and it may not be a nice one – as with the Old Testament prophets who were chosen to talk truth to power and were often killed for doing so. At every level people are willing the choices made, but the Absolute will is always going to win. “So the victory has been gained before the foundation of the world.” Everything in the universe, the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the terrestrial systems, governments, “are all appointed from above.” Nothing can happen without the will of the Absolute, and if we believe this then we are not arrogant. But if we appropriate anything whatever and say, “It is mine,” we are arrogant. Anything at all, no matter how large or small, will be destroyed if we think it belongs to us. “Because the Absolute cannot abandon its own power; God cannot eliminate God, only His modalities.
Whatever we do we must remember this. When we say, “I have done my best,” what we should say is, “I have done the best conferred upon me by the Absolute.” We all like to think that something we have done has been through our effort, but that is simply the egoic self taking the credit. The reality is that nothing is ours; we can take credit for nothing. Every talent we have is a gift from God.
The word ‘own’ means ‘owed to the Absolute’. How do we get rid of arrogance? By allying ourselves with the Absolute and nothing else. This will not make us popular, because others want us to think as they do and share their beliefs. As Gurdjieff and Ouspensky found, friends will desert us. The only one who will never desert us is the Absolute Itself. It is intelligent for us to identify with the ‘Atman’ at our centre, the true Self, the real ‘I’, and not with the ‘Jiva’, the egoic self, the false ‘I’ as most people do. Our very existence came this way. Our parents did not make the egg and sperm from which we derive, only the Absolute can confer life on every being. The choice between ‘Atman’ and ‘Jiva’ appears easy but in daily living we forget. The reason? “the inertia of the contingent, stimulus memory.”
All opposites are equally valid and in the Absolute they are mutually interpenetrating. “The evil, soaked through and through with good, is wisdom. It’s the list of all the things to avoid, all the things not to be done. That’s conscience inherent, essential consciousness.” Socrates had a ‘demon’, which only said “No.” We all have the same one. ‘Demon’ means ‘analytical mind’, the ‘spirit of analysis’. This is the ‘still, small voice’ that reminds us when we are about to do something wrong. We often ignore it and suffer the consequences. If we do not listen to it then we are in trouble “and that trouble educates you.” We tend to remember these times, the embarrassments, the humiliations, the opprobrium of others, much more than we do the praise of others. This is because the egoic self, the contingent one, is “finite, limited, vulnerable, terrified of annihilation.”
Many people are terrified of dying and what may lie beyond death, because of identification with the ego. If we remember we are eternal then we can ‘fight the good fight’ using the words of universal logic as our weapons. This logic says that we own, of ourselves, absolutely nothing. We are “an image in the mind of God…and God made the image.” Whatever power or talents we have were given to us by God. If we can remember this daily in our relationships with each other “then our relationship is divine, and we are no longer arrogant.” We can all talk to each other from centre to centre. Mostly people relate ego to ego and this is the cause of all our troubles. But if we remember our origin we can relate to another’s ego “without being in any way influenced or conditioned by it.” “Now isn’t it obviously logical to get rid of arrogance?” “Remember…nothing exists, even the worst crime, even AIDS, nothing exists without permission of the Absolute. Why? There’s a lesson in it.” If we relate centre to centre then there are lots of things we would not do that we would do if relating ego to ego. “As soon as you start to utilise any other being in any way that it, from its centre, would not approve of…then you are being arrogant…You are arrogating to yourself the right to treat another being as a mere means to a finite end of yours.”
(The talk continues as a number of answers given to an audience member’s questions. The questions themselves are too indistinct to be faithfully reproduced in the transcript.)
“‘Ignorance is wilful disregard’ and you are disregarding when you are arrogant, something you know to be perfectly true.” “Ignorance is wilful disregard of anything that impedes you…if it gets in your way you ignore it” “The ‘Golden Rule’ is an Absolute rule. What you would like to be done to you, and what you would not like to be done to you. Use that as a rule for you with other people.”
“Ignorance is not nescience, it is not simply not knowing, it is not innocence. Ignorance is wilful disregard of something you know.”
There is no ‘unconscious’ in the Freudian sense, “except that which you have repressed because you know it will impede you if you don’t repress it. There’s no excuse.” “In law, ignorance is no excuse, but innocence is – like a baby. If we don’t know the law it is because we have not examined it, because it might impede us.” “There is no unconscious for the human race, other than the buried elements they don’t want to know about.” “We cannot hide behind the unconscious, because we can always dig out our real motive if we wish to…hard work…but we can do it. Inertia says, “No, don’t examine it, you’ll be stopped doing what you want to do.”
“You escape arrogance if you say, “that which I have not willed to know.” We all put a terrific amount of energy into defending the egoic structure, “not only you, your parents, grandparents, the whole of your ancestry backwards is weighting you against acting on what you know to be true.”
The Infinite, Sentient Power makes a universe and then, within that sphere, makes smaller circles, “right down to human beings, who are little gods.” At the centre of each one of us is that same Infinite Power. The enclosing circle “in no way stops the continuum nature of the Absolute.”
If we spin water we make vortices in it but we do not stop the water being water inside and outside those vortices. The continuum of the water is not broken. A continuum is part-less and “what is part-less is not in any way limited by any function of it…we individuals are individual functions of the non-individuated Absolute.” “And we are in and of, and have no reality of our own independent of it. So we should be kind to each other. We are kin to the Absolute and to each other.”
“The only true will is the will of the Absolute.” Our egoic will is to educate us. It is “the will of the Absolute that you will to be ignorant in order to have an experience which will enlighten you.” “The will of the Absolute is in every, individual finite…as the will of the Absolute.” “And it is that that makes you make mistakes and get into trouble, and suffer, and educate, and become enlightened.”
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BOWL OF CHERRIES
BOWL OF CHERRIES
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 26.02.1978
Eugene begins by saying that he is going to talk about the last thing we might say before death. When the Buddha was dying, his disciples asked him for a final teaching, a ‘special secret’ perhaps? His reply was, “I am not he of the closed fist,” and then he died. A second example is of a wise, old rabbi. Again, the disciples gathered around him and asked for a final message. This was: “Life is a bowl of cherries.” His followers could not understand and eventually went back to him for an explanation. This time he said: “Life is not like a bowl of cherries,” and then he died.
Eugene asks the audience for explanations of these riddles. There are many suggestions but none that do so adequately. Eventually, he begins to explain and says that the two riddles are pointing at the same thing. That of the Buddha to his disciples, is saying that his, the Buddha’s way, is not that of the ‘closed fist’. A closed fist is used for thumping, it is aggressive, non-discriminating. ‘Buddha’ means ‘intellect’, and the intellect is used for discriminating. The open hand, by contrast with the closed fist, indicates discrimination in the spread fingers. His teaching was an analytical method of extricating us from desire, from the ‘thirst for life’. “It was an intellectual solution to the problem of desire. The answer is to give it up.”
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There is a parallel between the ‘closed fist’ of the Buddha and the ‘bowl of cherries’ of the rabbi. Both ideas symbolise the female principle, ruled by Saturn. The one bowl is woman. There is only one woman in the world. The cherries are the men. The closed fist is like the bowl, and the cherries are like the fingers of the open hand, “analytical demonstrations of the intellect.” A woman is non-analytic, in essence.
There is only one primary substance underlying all phenomena. Spinoza said, “Substance is God,” because we worship that which stands underneath the whole, phenomenal world. This substance corresponds with the ‘closed fist’ and the ‘bowl’. The cherries, like the fingers of the hand, are the differentiations, the phenomena. There is only one primary substance, one woman, one bowl, one fist. To get hold of the cherries, the differentiations, the phenomena, this primary substance, like a woman, sends out a sentient power. This power is feminine and contrasts with the masculine one of discrimination, intellective consciousness. These are not separable. “This primordial power differentiates Itself into phenomena in order to taste the cherries.”
To understand both final statements of the Buddha and the rabbi, we have to remember that Infinite, Sentient Power underlies all phenomena. The Power Itself is non-discriminative “because It is dedicated to holding in Its closed fist, to putting in Its bowl, the phenomena that It generates. So the woman is dedicated to unity like man is dedicated to plurality.” “Man pluralises because he is looking for formal information, for uniquenesses of shape. That is his function within the universe, but woman’s function is to take this information and digest it in her one substance.” “From Eve…came out all the men in the world, and they must return.”
Unlike the man, woman has not let go of her “primordial unity,” she is still the “original, cosmic woman” and “every woman knows this.” All phenomena are behaviours of one, primordial substance. Every idea is unique and masculine. Men are separated in their ideas, unique in their ideas, whereas “every woman is the same as every other except for her superficial appearance.” But every man is “utterly different from every other man.”
All phenomena are precipitates of Absolute, Sentient Power, which means that we have all precipitated ourselves, “nobody is precipitated by a power other than itself, which makes us absolutely self-responsible.” “What you see is what you will to see.” We live in a “multi-faceted, glorious world.” We are all little facets in each other’s worlds and we are willing this to be so. When the rabbi reversed his statement he was saying that for those who do not understand that life is like ‘a bowl of cherries’ then, for them, life is not like a bowl of cherries. Only for the man who realises it, is it true. We have no destinies other than the ones we fabricate from moment to moment. If we accept this, it is because we choose to do so. If we reject it, it is because we choose to reject it. Either way, it gives us an idea, and this is to further our purpose, and this purpose is emotionally charged. “Every idea has an emotional charge, and every emotional charge changes your body chemistry.” When we have an idea we either like or dislike it. This feeling about the idea is synthesised into our body chemistry to reinforce it. If we love an idea, it will be strengthened with love, if we hate an idea it will be strengthened by hate. “So that you physical body…is a chemical precipitate of the totality of your emotional charges from the ideas in which you have acquiesced.” Whatever we get we have willed, a malfunction, like a disease, or something to further a more positive purpose.
We are all hermaphrodites. As to our substantiality we are women, as to our analytical power we are men. Affective reaction is female, discriminatve power is male. orientation to physicality is female, because the one primordial substance is the body of reality. “The body feels itself, so that sentience and body go together.” Both are feminine because they are recipients of stimuli. Initiative and intellection are both male. Woman is orientated to the body by childbirth and menstruation. “Woman is concrete, substantial…the continuum principle… the sustainer… the preserver of reality” But the man, with his intellectual, analytical capacity is the destroyer. His analysis takes everything to pieces and his initiative interferes with the status quo and changes it.
“You have to remind yourself that you are a free being in the very act of committing yourself to bondage” This is freedom. We have to identify to learn, but if we only identify, and forget that we free, we are lost. Every cell in our body is a precipitate of our intention to be.
We must live in the here/now. The here/now does not move but time is running through it. “and all you have is an observer’s peep-hole.” “Here/now is Infinite, Sentient Power, time is running through it, and time is a function of it, within it.” “…the changeless presence can only be the ultimate, original substance, because that can’t go anywhere.”
The intention of Infinite, Sentient Power is “to make you like nothing else. To make you a facet on a cosmic diamond that will flash the light in a way that no other facet does.” “But it isn’t other than yourself, punishing you, torturing you, to make facets. And it doesn’t care what it does, because it is out for lots of facets.”
There is no escape, because God “is nothing but the Infinite substance of which we are modalities, and we are only modalities limited to the modal operation if we identify ourselves with our human beingness and forget our divinity.” There can be no difference between this substance and the phenomena it produces, but we see the phenomena and forget that they are simply that same substance “self-phenomenalising”. If we identify with the body we finite ourselves by identification and “go under the law of that to which we give credence.” i.e. we go under the law of physical bodies and can’t do anything other than react as bodies. If we identify with the substance behind all forms, then we transcend this definition. We do this by feeling our substantial presence. We then have God “right there, in your physical body.” “Your body is God, phenomenalising as you.”
“Remember we are all suffering from the biting of that Tree of Knowledge. Human beings think they know what is good and what is evil…but there is no good that is not presupposed in the evil, and there is no evil that does not presuppose the good. They are simultaneously, mutually, interpenetrating. They are discriminable but they are not substantially distinct.”
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BEAUTY, TRICKERY & SUFFERING
BEAUTY, TRICKERY & SUFFERING
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 28.10.1984
Eugene starts with a dot, a red dot. ‘Red’ means “a vibratory process of life, creating a division.” The dot is the first point of condensation of the Infinite Power. “the dot is a point of concentration of that power, by that power, for that power.” Before the positing of a point, the Sentient Power is an extended Field with no content. Without a content the Power has “no profit to Itself.” One dot creates the possibility of other dots, and though the relation of the Infinite to a single dot is relatively simple, to a plurality of dots it is less so. Also, the dots can be joined by a line, which is really a travelling dot, to create shapes. A simple shape is that of a triangle and we can make two such triangles and invert one and superimpose it over the other to make a Star of David. This shape symbolises a triad of power, form and function, in two worlds. The one pointing upwards is the world of Spirit, the one pointing downwards is the physical world. We live in both: a world of consciousness, and a world of physicality, our body, which is within the field of consciousness.
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‘Beauty’ means “that which is attained with ease.” It is another word for ‘economy’. The ‘eau’, French for water, means that beauty flows like water, as in the graceful movements of an accomplished ballet dancer. If we analyse the word ‘beauty’, it is a house (B) of ‘eau’, crucified (T) and affirmed (Y). The earliest form of the letter B was a circle, representing a sphere. When a sphere spins, it flattens into a disc, like a galaxy, such as a spiral nebulae. Similarly, our own galaxy and solar system. We can also use the B to represent our own ‘house’, the container that is our body. The E in Beauty is life, the A is the “action of affection,” the U is drive, the T crucifixion, and the Y, affirmation. To establish anything, we have to say ‘Yes’ to it, to affirm it. First, we have to posit it, and in so doing, we crucify it, because the active force is striking a passive force. This is symbolised in the cross, where the vertical force, the active one, comes in and strikes the horizontal one, the passive. The Y is the ‘Yes’, the affirmation of the positing.
We all begin life as a sphere, an egg, impregnated by a sperm, “a more formulated force.” The relation of the two, the ‘life-force’, feels itself to be and then drives itself to become itself, to express itself to itself. We see this very clearly in athletes and others who use the body to express the life-force within themselves. Someone who gives a good performance “swells” with their success. Conversely, one who does not achieve their aims visibly “shrinks”. He feels diminished. To control the ‘eau’ within us, we must have a container, a body. If the ‘eau’ is not controlled it is chaos. ‘Control’ means ‘with linkage’. It means “binding up and then flowing within a boundary.” “You can’t have beauty unless you commit yourself to the ultimate degree of restraint within the situation into which you enter and affirm that restraint. That restraint is educational.” This is the ‘suffering’. We have to accept the restraint and remind ourselves that we are power, form, function. We are “little gods” and have to self-realise this by power, by formulation, and by functioning as little circles within the big circle of God.
When we look at the dot we know that there is an infinity beyond and where infinity meets the edge of the dot there is an interface. The idea of interfaces is one that he is going to use to explain “beauty and trickery.” “Trickery is a little troc(k)ery. ‘Troc’ is Big Law, Cosmic Law. “trick is a little application of a little knowledge of that law.” A trickster is one of the oldest figures in mythology, such as the Messiah. Jesus spoke in parables all the time, to make his audience think.
Infinity, whenever it posits a finite, makes an interface. If we expand the dot to a circle then the periphery becomes an interface with the Infinite. “When an active force hits a passive, it vibrates on that point and differentiates both the passive and the active…both the active and the passive are modified by the mutual encounter in the interface of both.” When a dot is posited, if it is moved it becomes a line. That line is pushing through a field of Sentient Power and warps it. “The travelling line, which is nothing but the point repeated, has hit the Field and created a receptive warp.” “The whole universe…is nothing but activated powers warping recipient, Sentient Power wrapping round it.” In the same way, forces from outside our Solar System, hit the plane of the Solar System and produce changes in our weather. The entire phenomena of our perceptual world is caused this way also. Always there is a propelling force and a recipient force and an interface between. This
interface “is the means by which we become conscious.” Consciousness is the function of the activating and receptive field. When we fall asleep we lose consciousness because we have lost awareness of this interface.
In positing anything, the Infinite, which is absolute positivity, has to negate Itself. It has to say “Yes” to “No.” These negations are the world of phenomena. Every form so posited is a negation, not only of Infinity, but also of every other form that could have been posited. “So you have to say, absolutely “Yes” to No. “At each point there is an interface and it is in the interface…that consciousness exists.” Our bodies are full of them. If we oppose forefinger and thumb, the thumb can feel the forefinger and the forefinger can feel the thumb, depending on where we focus our attention. The retina is an interface between the inner and outer worlds. Light reflected from an object strikes the retina and an electrical impulse goes to an ocular centre in the brain and a store of memories feedback from the brain to the retina. A similar interface exists in the ear. Such impulses are interpreted by the mind, which is much finer than the physical brain, which the mind has made as a recording device. We have interfaces all over the body. Wherever there is a cell surrounded by other cells, there is an interface. Wherever there are interfaces, there also is consciousness. The external world is really a projection of our own intention. Nothing but. “We are dealing with nothing whatsoever except Sentient Power projecting a universe through you, first projecting you as a point for investigation and positing, and then through you, projecting a universe, uniquely, your version.” We will out to our skin surface, as does everyone else. This is ‘contingent relationship’, and is the interface where we “Fall” if we identify with that periphery. We have left the centre of our creativity: “You have forgotten that you are an observing, intelligent, sentient power creating your universe.”
(The rest of this talk consists of questions from the audience. Some of the answers are given here)
Synaesthesia: where all five senses can interfere with each other.
Kissing and cannibalism! and the Eucharist.
The difference between morality and ethics.
The significance of Christ’s crucifixion for all religions.
“We are all working for God but don’t know it. If you cheat somebody you are working for God – to wake up the stupid person who is dim enough to be cheated. There is nobody who is not working for God.”
Example of a person drowning: People do not appreciate being resuscitated! “There is no death. Identification with a finite is the only death there is.”
On liking certain music: “you are satisfied with you and attribute it to the music.”
“You can’t not get away from yourself.” (audience member). “A double negative. You can. How?
Remember you posited it, and stop positing it! The mind then goes void…like before the dot was put down.”
Dreamless sleep: We cannot say we are not aware of it otherwise we would not know we had had a good night’s sleep. It is the Buddhist nirvana. It is pure, subjective, self-awareness, the highest conceivable state. “You are suspended in infinite self-being without an object to annoy you. You are having a rest. It is a lovely feeling.”
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THE BUDDHIST WHEEL OF LIFE 001
THE BUDDHIST WHEEL OF LIFE 001
Synopsis; Symbology of the Buddhist Wheel of Life
There is only one being, and all functions of this being produce, apparently, a plurality of beings. But these beings are fundamentally one being, who is the host- and the plurality are the guests within the house. The Buddhist Wheel, called the Wheel of Life is usually described as a wheel illustrating six totally different realms. The talk illustrates in detail the six realms. The wheel of the gods, the titans, the men, animals, hungry fellows, and the beings in hell, is dependently originated on desire-aversion-egotism. Therefore the cure of desire, aversion and egotism, is the same thing as escape from the wheel. Escaping the wheel is the whole meaning of all the religions of the world. This wheel in its dependent origination, has all its zones presupposing each other. To get out of it, we have to conquer egotism, desire and aversion simultaneously. If you conquer one of those, you conquer the other two. The talk also touches on Buddha’s enlightenment and how it came about.
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DIALECTICS
DIALECTICS
Précis of a talk given at Ishval 29.05.1977
Eugene begins by asking: “What are we going to talk about tonight?”
An audience member asks about the ‘Bardo Thodol’, the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.
He draws a circle and puts an arrowhead on the circumference to show that it is going round.
Without circumscription, there would be no ‘ground of being’. (‘Ground’ is G-round: the going round of energy.) Opposite to the ‘dead’ are the ‘quick’, the ‘wicca’. He uses the mnemonic of ‘Whicker’s World’ (a popular TV programme at the time,) WICR: ‘Worship is Continual Remembrance’. Remembrance of what? To remember is to re-member, a member of self-consciousness. The circle represents ‘continual remembrance’ as we run round it in our minds. A circle includes and excludes. It includes the finite and limitation, it excludes the infinite and limitlessness.
A circle can also be represented by the word ‘ON’. This is an ancient word for the sphere of the Sun, and is seen in ‘Babylon’ and Aton. We all begin life as a sphere, as an egg. Although now elongated, the sphere of the egg still surrounds us in the form of our skin.
Science now accepts that there is only energy, but has not yet accepted that energy is sentient. It feels, and through feeling knows its own state. Sentience means to know by feeling. Feeling is our primordial mode of awareness. We are inside a skin, we are made of energy, and that energy feels itself and therefore you feel that you are a being. This feeling of being is simply that the skin provides a resistance. Your energy reflects back from the skin to the centre, carrying with it the memory of impinging on the skin.
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He asks the audience: “How does an Infinite Power, which is infinitely sentient, feel to Itself?” Answer: “Absolutely dreadful.” Because of its enormity and responsibility. This state of ‘dread’ is
anxiety. (German word ‘angst’. ) The Infinite, Sentient Power, prior to creation, is in a state of infinite anxiety.
He draws another circle. Between the inside and outside of the circle he draws a line. This line can be drawn more widely to show another zone, an intermediate zone, between inner and outer. This
is the intermediate zone we all must pass through in the shift of consciousness that happens when we die. It is a process of transition from one level of consciousness to another. This zone is the ‘Bardo’. He gives the example of a sparrow dying – going from the finite zone to the infinite. We do this every night when we go to sleep; we ‘die’ every night. Between waking and dreamless sleep, there is the dreaming state: the Bardo.
He asks the audience to look at the image of the circle he has drawn and then to close their eyes and try to retain the image. Some people are able to retain an image with complete clarity – this is eidetic imagery, but most people retain a less-focussed, less clearly-defined image. This is similar to what happens when we dream. We retain images from the outside world but in a less clearly-defined form. (He draws a serrated edge on the circumference of the outer circle, to represent the clearly focussed images of the external world, and an undulating edge on an inner circle to represent the dream images.) There is a second skin around our ideas with their emotional charges. This is the dream state. The images are not sharp here (unless we have eidetic imagery). This circle represents the non-sharp, emotionally charged forms within consciousness. Some people have audio-eidetic imagery and hear sounds just as sharply in memory as when they were actually heard. (Both kinds of eidetic imagery can be a curse and result in seeing and hearing things that are not there!) Right at the centre of our being we have another zone, the one we go to in deep, dreamless sleep. This zone is our centre of Immanent Spirit and is identical with the Transcendent Spirit that made us. All great scientists have agreed that the solution of their problems came to them from some inner place, often whilst sleeping. Our innermost centre contains the solution to all problems because it was from this centre that they were projected.
The energies coming in, once they have rotated and made a circle, which is our skin surface, or the skin surface of the solar system, or the skin surface of the universe, once they have made it, have to drive in again, as near as they can to the centre, and then drive out again to the skin. So information is coming in and responses going out. When you go into deep, dreamless sleep you are actually at your highest level of awareness. This innermost zone at the centre of our being, is the same Infinite, Sentient Power that created the universe. This must be so, just as when we make a drawing on paper, the paper remains beneath the drawing. The drawing is a point of reference, just like our body and the appearance of it in the time-world cannot change the underlying reality on which it rests. This un-drawn on zone at our centre is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. All of our experiences in life cannot touch it. It is our essence and this essence is eternal. This inner state is what we aim to reach in meditation. All of the experiences of life are resting on the surface of our being. At centre, nothing can be changed by such experiences. Nothing can touch it. It remains eternally pure. But the power at centre is sentient power and it can, and does, take an interest in things. It can flow out of that centre and go into the zone of activity i.e. all zones beyond the centre. But when we are interested we can forget that the things we are interested have been willed by us as interesting. This is the Fall into identification with the external world. This is the ‘dreadful’ part. The spirit at our centre is the same as that Absolute which feels anxiety. “We are just as anxious as the Absolute…we worry about all kinds of things.”
When dying, it can be helpful to be reminded by somebody who is aware of the process, to focus on pure light, pure consciousness, and not to be diverted by memories of things we have experienced during life, otherwise we are likely to carry those memories through the Bardo and into the next incarnation. The purpose of the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ is to teach how to get through the intermediate state between living in the physical world and living in another world, a subtle world, and it is telling you how to get to the causal. This is the level of the will, beyond the subtle level of ideas and the gross level of external stimuli.
When external stimuli hit upon us they mean nothing whatever until we say so. We have the power to interpret external reality and when we do so we are imposing on ourself and no one else. We are imposing a dream we have fabricated by an act of will. When we impose our will we should be careful because we have to pay for the imposition, because the whole of reality is cyclic. “Whatever you impose on anybody will curve back on you.”
How do we reach the inner centre? By daydreaming consciously and carrying this through to the night dream. To reach it from the external, waking state we have to go into the dream state. We have to remove ourselves from the dominion of the external stimulus. We can learn to day-dream consciously and carry this through to the night dream.We can train ourselves to dream on purpose.
If we are all God why is there such misery in the world? It is ‘autohypnosis’. We put ourselves to sleep by identifying with the things in which we are interested. We interest ourselves in a thing or person, define it in our terms, not theirs, and push it with all the energy we have.Then, when it turns out other than we thought we are upset. The only misery in the world is defeated self-identification.
We can all learn to become aware of the spirit within us and learn to trust it. The enemy is our identification with the external world, through our five senses and a faulty education. If we know our own motive, in any situation, we have integrity. This can only be done in the here-and-now. We have to gather ourselves together in every instant. The particular habits we have of thought, feeling and will persist in us because we re-posit them from moment to moment. “There is no preservation of individual life other than this repositing.”
“Think of the thing you would like best in all the world.” I’ll tell you what you like best in all the world. You like a very intimate, personal, spontaneous, relation in which you do not need to guard yourself against other beings, in which you do not have to tell lies to protect your self-image, in which you can afford to lay yourself absolutely naked before total reality. That is what you really want.” “But the whole of your training is quite otherwise. You are taught what are called ‘good manners’. You are taught civilised behaviour and all of these things are devices to divert you from the essential nakedness of your primordial soul.” “What you really want is for you to walk about naked, without criticism, physically, emotionally, rationally, spiritually, in every way to be absolutely acceptable to every other being. And that is the prophecy of what will happen to the human race eventually. And, in about 4000 years time, bang in the middle of Capricorn, it will be that people won’t bother about what people are, or where they come from, or anything else, because they will all know the same thing. And that same thing will be: we are volitional beings, generating ourselves from the very centre of ourselves, and nothing but our own volitional generation is the yardstick of our validity.”
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THE DEMONIC
THE DEMONIC
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 26.07.81
Eugene begins by analysing the word ‘papyrus’. To the Egyptians the word meant more than ‘paper’. It represented the three-fold function of the Absolute, the Trinity; the same trinity that we find in all the ancient religions. He asks the audience to imagine a sheet of paper infinitely extended in space in three dimensions. This ‘papyrus’ now represents “a three-dimensional continuum of power, total reality.” The waving of the paper represents modalities, ways of operation of that power. This power is infinite and eternal and has no barriers. It must, therefore, introduce them into Itself to create individual modalities of Itself.
To do this, the Absolute, Sentient Power precipitates centres of reference, individual beings, from the most fundamental wavicle to a universe and, of course, us. He illustrates by drawing a number ‘6’ to show Spirit winding in and positing such a centre. Six means ‘existence’ and gives us the hexon, the Star of David and, of course, our five senses plus our common one.
He analyses the word ‘demon’ to show that it means ‘the dividing function of power which manifests by self-precipitation’. The magical number 6 splits what is inside a circle from what is outside, and this gives us the name ‘demon’. The number 6 contains the same idea as the letter ‘b’, which means a ‘house’ or zone of encapsulation.
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He draws a circle to represent a man. The power coming in is dynamic and therefore cannot stop moving. It cannot go to the dead centre because this would halt its motion, so It circulates within the being and flies out again but leaves a ‘hole’ at the centre. This ‘hole’ is Immanent Spirit, the Higher Self, the Atman. Around it, the flying energy creates an ‘action band’ of rotation. This action band “is your mental life and, on the periphery, is your physical life. But in the centre is your spiritual initiative, and nothing can touch this. No external power can possibly make the Immanent Spirit change Itself. Change, if it comes, must come from within that Spirit.” Outside of the action band is Transcendent Spirit, the Absolute. This is the Brahman of Hinduism, the ‘infinitely extended’, and is in no sense different from the Immanent Spirit within. Between the action band and Transcendent Spirit is a boundary, a demonic one. Between Immanent Spirit and the action band is another demonic boundary, but this one has a hole through which Transcendent Spirit can enter, and Immanent Spirit can leave, back to the Transcendent. Neither demonic boundary can interfere with the movements of Spirit. Every centre the power creates is a negation of Its freedom, but without these the Infinite could not know of Itself. By binding Itself into beings it can experience Itself. “To be encapsulated is being.” We are such beings.
He draws another diagram to represent the human being. The diagram shows the two demonic zones, one between the central, Immanent Spirit and the action band, and another between the Transcendent Spirit and the action band. The outer one makes us forget Transcendent Spirit, and the inner one makes us forget Immanent Spirit, since we become identified with the action band processes of mentation, mental activity. “On the periphery, the mentation is interfered with by an external, physical stimulus from some object, but on the inside, it is interfered with by the Immanent Spirit command that you do something, and when these two forces meet, they make a record of the meeting and the conflict.” They make a conflict because the external sense stimuli says, ‘enjoy yourself’ and Immanent Spirit says, ‘be intelligent about it’. So within the action band there is a division into external, sense-stimulus knowledge, the empirical knowledge of scientists, and spiritual knowledge. Immanent Spirit speaks and there arises in the mentational zone a fight. A fight between Truth and pleasure-subjection. So the mentation zone can be divided into two bands, external stimulus dominated, and Immanent Spirit dominated, and a sort of ‘no-man’s land’ between. 95% of people live in this outer action band dominated by external self-stimulus. Religious and ethically-trained people have been moved towards the voice of Immanent Spirit but there is a large number of people who are not sure whether they should listen to Immanent Spirit or the external world. “There is a fight going on, and this fight ‘plays the devil’ with us, because we have Immanent Spirit, which we call, ’conscience’, and she is telling us all the time that we are better off being nice to people rather than horrid.”
We cannot avoid this fight, and there is no safety from it other than being dead. We have to learn to live in danger. On this, all the great philosophers agree. The goal of yoga is to kill the mental activity. How do we do this? We have to look at it and become convinced that it is “rubbish.” We have the inertia of millions of years of ancestral records trapping us and presenting us with things whether we like it or not. We must not wallow in that mentational band. We will never give it up until we are convinced it is rubbish. We should just view it, impartially, without trying to suppress it or condemn it. We should just watch it, see it as it is, and it will begin to die down. As it does so, we will begin to see that Immanent Spirit and Transcendent Spirit are not different and we can then understand that the action band between them was deliberately precipitated by Transcendent Spirit between itself and Immanent Spirit, to create a world of particularised individuals. “God made man for Himself and all the egoic differences of man were made in order to produce varieties of functions.”
There is a division at our skin surface, so that when we identify with it we forget Transcendent Spirit and are trapped in the stimulus in our skin, and when we go inside to try to find Immanent Spirit to climb out of the mess that the stimulus has got us into, there is another band that says “‘keep out,’” your education is not yet finished.” So it is a double demon. The demonic divides us from both Transcendent and Immanent Spirit and traps us in the action band of mentation. And this action band is also double because the outer part thinks about pleasure, and the inner part thinks about enlightenment and escape from the physical world, and the quarrel between the two is perpetual until we see the fantasy as fantasy and not as truth. Ultimately, we do not have to side with either Transcendent or Immanent Spirit, we can simply watch the rubbish of the action band die down. “…and then the fruit of that is absolute, free, intelligent, creative, self-determination…the True Self, the Atmanic Self, the Brahmanic Self, in its absolute creativity.” We then see that the demonic is there for a very positive reason; to bring us to this realisation. If we do not see this, and identify instead with the action band, then we are “encapsulated with the door shut…it is a negative
demonism, and it is death, it is corruption.” Every ‘ism’, is a closed system of thought in this way, a negative demon: “communism, conservatism, liberalism…are all wrong because they are closed.”
If we remove all phenomena from the world then all that remains is that which precipitated the phenomena by looking. ‘The Observer is not the observed.’ The pupil of the eye is correctly named. It is a hole through to the retina and from there to an ocular centre in the brain. “If you go through that ocular centre, you change frequency and you will come to that very principle of intelligent self-observation which precipitates the world. We are all self-precipitated, every one of us, and we have a destiny determined by us. Nobody has put us here..we have.” Every baby has chosen the womb it wants to grow in; every baby grows its own placenta. It is a parasite, feeding from the body of the mother. “It is a power of Spirit and entirely responsible for its own precipitation.” The price we pay for this is called karma, the law of action/reaction. “What you love you will do, and what you do you will pay for.” Every action divides us from a different one we might have done. “In the realm of time, matter, space, every act…is a non-doing of an infinity of other acts that you might have done.”
How do we get out of this? We must act but not identify with the act. If we do we fall into identification with that which differentiates. Because we are fallen, we get hit. When hit, the pain reminds us that we are self-precipitated. If we are foolish, we blame somebody else. “If you wish to grow spiritually very quickly, you don’t blame anybody else, no matter what it is.” “Only intelligent, self-awareness rescues you.”
To be demonic is neither bad nor good; it has the potential of both. We must choose. If we close down to retain what we have learned, we are negative demons. But, if we close down to meditate, to contemplate, to bring forth new emergents and share them, this is positive, demonic behaviour.
What is my intention? Am I trying to keep this to myself and hope to retain it, and not to ever give it out to other people? “Or do I close myself in order to be quiet and clear and then discover my immanence, transcendence and then to give forth the fruits of this to other beings?” “Then you are a positive demon and absolutely justified because the Absolute has made you for that very end.”
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FIRST LOVE
FIRST LOVE
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 25.05.1980
Eugene says the talk is prompted by a young woman who thought she had fallen in love for the first time. He describes a young woman who has decided she is going to become the perfect , hermaphroditic being. Then she meets the perfect young man and her chemistry becomes unbalanced. She “falls in love.” Her intention of becoming the perfect hermaphrodite loses glamour. She falls towards the feminine pole of being. Her intelligence disappears, along with her intention of becoming perfect.
However, when the ‘messiah’ comes there rises in her soul an impulse to complain, to nag, to find deficiencies in him. Deficiencies he did not know he had. Being the messiah, he does not react in the way she expects. On the contrary, he understands her complaint! He knows she is upset but he does not react. She now cannot comprehend why she has started to correct him, why she is disappointed in him, why this determination to perfect him?
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The answer lies in the Garden of Eden! It began with Eve. Eve encounters in the serpent, a being of initiative and intellect. It is only natural that Eve should listen to him. Adam bites the apple and immediately realises his mistake. He hides, as guilty people do. He knew he had made a mistake, because his light went out. Prior to this he was suffused with light and had not seen his own nakedness. Adam chose to know the knowledge of good and evil. He chose to know duality, and so was no longer in a state of innocence. Eve “wishes to submit to intelligent will and it happens that the one she has, Adam, was asleep, and there was another one there” (the serpent). So afterwards, they are gross beings, their light has gone out, riddled with guilt, and we, were all there at the time, as ‘logos spermaticos’ in Adam’s body. So the guilt of Adam is inside our protoplasm from the beginning.
They were not allowed back into the garden, because they might have eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and lived forever. This would have resulted in them being immortal, with a knowledge of good and evil. They had to ‘die’ in order to rethink it. This ‘death’ was the division of the being: thought severed from feeling, feeling from will, internal disintegration. “If you choose to know good and evil, you will divide yourself, and that is elementary logic.” You have divided, in your consciousness the contents; and you have named a content ‘good’ and a content ‘bad’ and you have done it, nobody else.”
If we do this then, as Paul says, we are ‘dead in our sins’. ‘Sin’ means ‘aim’ and the mark is the absolute, integrated, total balance of the total possibilities of infinite being. “Each one of us is an infinite being with an infinite capacity for comprehending mysteries, for loving and for action.” “We all have the power to do it.” If we do not do it, we have chosen to divide ourselves. We have separated thought from feeling and feeling from will. Our thinking chops everything to pieces. This pluralises, not only the forms, but also the emotional charges on those forms. Each affectively charged idea will be wanting the will to favour it. The will is then scattered and unsure what to do. The being becomes disintegrated. This is known as ‘losing one’s soul’.
When you integrate your soul, you make your thought, feeling and will into one, compact trine, mutually supporting. But if we are divided, then we are spread through Infinity; the soul is ‘loosed’ i.e. ‘lost’ in Infinity. If a man should die suddenly, as in a car crash, and he is not integrated, then his soul is ‘loosed’. He cannot feel happy. When Adam fell, he disintegrated, and God, in His mercy, said, “I will allow you to die grossly, physically.” “Now the soul, in the moment before death, if the death is not violent, the soul gathers itself together. The dying person thinks about their past and tries to integrate it, bring it into a one-ness. “…and when they have got it sufficiently at one with itself, that is called ‘atonement’, at one-ness, then they let go of the gross body and they pass on to another level of being, a level of a life-field, without a gross body, in which they are able to meditate upon the whole of their life for long enough to assimilate the message of their own errors. And then, when they have lived long enough in that level of being to assimilate that lesson and they have designed for themselves a new orientation towards life, then they come back again and they reincarnate in a protoplasm related most strongly to the kind of errors that they committed and have to correct.” If we want to avoid losing our souls, there is only one remedy and that is to stop pluralising our purposes. “We must have only one purpose.”
A woman caused the Fall and so in every woman there is a sense of guilt. She brought man down and “…so now she flies into the opposite error, she will pick him up.” “She will now reform this manifestly fallen, degenerate piece of Adamic tissue.” “What woman has to learn, a terrible lesson, it is God that can reform man, not woman.” God wills to make creatures in order to express Himself, as in a mirror, His own content. “And logically, He is required to will for Himself, an incarnate representative of Himself, fully developed as a divine being on earth, and this is man, perfected, the divine human.”
When people fall in love, their chemistry begins to change. Sexual hormones are released “and switch off all intelligence that might defend itself in individual, egotistic, survival modes. Sexual hormones switch off reason in man, and switch off that wonderful feeling assessment power in woman.” Both are forced to converge on the one who has triggered them into that hormonic, reactive, state.
“We are hermaphroditic… we have a body, we have feelings, we have intellection and we have initiative and we are led by the time impulse to evolve, and in that we have ‘mentation’.” This is serial, it thinks one thing after another, it can never arrive back at the non-dual, Edenic state of being. We have been trained, over thousands of years, to think in this way, and unless “…we can learn to stop serial, mentational thinking and replace it by something totally different, we can never attain what we are looking for.” All the great religions agree on this: the pursuit of a state of awareness, not dependent on serial thinking. This non-serial awareness is not new to us: we can all be aware that there are a large number of people in a room, without having to count them. So this is not strange to us, but we tend to ignore it, and when we do ignore it, we are in trouble. We are linear descendants of Adam and so are disintegrated souls. “The only thing we can do is stop mentational thinking and allow ourselves to be healed by God.” The Absolute, Sentient Power is the only healer. “You have to stop your private, mentational, egoic striving and really believe that there is an intelligent power that knows you exist.”
“It is not possible for a mentational mind to know that God exists. It is not possible for that mentational process to comprehend the Infinite. How can a mentational process, based on seriality, comprehend the Infinity, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence? It cannot! Only a ‘leap of faith’ can do this. We have to believe. The only choice is whether to believe or not. “…there is an unbridgeable gap, which logic cannot bridge, between serial mentation and the simultaneity of absolute, spiritual consciousness.” God “takes it out of your hands until you are ready enough, ripe enough, to make the leap. But to do that you have to be empirically, egoically dead. The empirical ego must die.” This means the ego self, the one based on temporal, material experience, the one we normally refer to as ‘I’, has to die. “Except the seed die and fall to the ground, it abides alone.” “You cannot return to the Absolute consciousness, which is the Spirit of God put into man, until you give up relying on your materialistic, temporalistic, egotistic, atomistic analysis of the world.” How to do this is to give up all private purposes, “… of time, matter, serial nature, of success, temporal, material.” Give up the concept of ownership, of everything. Give up the concept that something “…is there for your benefit and reverse it; it is there for divine service. Every penny you earn is His and “…is to be deployed for divine purposes, not private, egotistical ones.”
“Lay yourself at the service of God.”
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FOUR FIXED SIGNS
FOUR FIXED SIGNS
Synopsis of a talk by Eugene Halliday given at Parklands on 25.01.1981
The Zodiac is often used for predicting the future, Eugene is only concerned with using the four fixed signs in the present “because we live in the present and have never lived at any other time.” The four signs are Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius and they correspond with the four Gospels of the New Testament.
TAURUS symbolises Infinity, looping to encapsulate itself in a zone. This is creation. Taurus means ‘to turn’. “What is captured is a zone of chaos,” because, before creation, there is Infinite Power with no control. “The purpose of encapsulating is simply to make the first step towards control.” Taurus is the sign of embodiment.
Every religion is about binding back to the original, Infinite source, and not being led astray by the contingent relation. “The moment you identify with an external stimulus, you go under the law governing that stimulus.” The human being lies between Heaven, the free energy above, and the bound, inertic energy of the earth; between Spirit and matter. Encapsulation creates stable zones of reference.
LEO: In the sign of Leo we see that the loop is open. We now have two opposite signs: Taurus, in-binding, creating a dome, and Leo, the sign that dares to open itself after it has been closed
SCORPIO: means devotion, it means dedication, it means attachment to the job of ordering your inner chaos by your own effort.”
AQUARIUS: means memory. If we look carefully at our chaos, “you will find a very simple thing that chaos is highly repetitive.” Sharp observation produces order, because we see the same thing again and again.
Power is continually coming in and creating zones of rotation, right down to the electron and beyond.
The wise man recognises that the stimulus is a form from outside himself and allows it to pass through, he does not make it his.
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GOD OR FEILD
GOD OR FIELD
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 23.10.1974
Eugene begins by declaring that he is going to state clearly his thinking on this question in reply to some who have challenged him about it. He mentions Thomas Aquinas, and others, who have tried to prove the existence of God by logic. Today, we can do something similar because we now know, scientifically, that all ‘matter’ is energy. William Blake said “Energy is of the body,” but Eugene turns this around “The body is energy.” In philosophy there have been monists, dualists and pluralists. The monists think there can be only one fundamental cause, only one, ultimate reality. Dualists point to good and evil and say the fundamentals of the world must be two: a good principle and an evil one. Pluralists say there are an infinity of ultimates to constitute reality.
He destroys the dualist position because, if there were two ultimate principles, mutually exclusive, they could not interact. “In A there is no B, in B there is no A.” “If there were an ultimate dualism there could not be an inter-relation of function between the two absolutely discrete aspects.”
He destroys the monist position because the word ‘one’ in any language, implies a circumscription, a universe, a one-turn. There is a great big circle and everything that exists is included in it. But, every circle, no matter how big, still has infinity beyond it, so another term is needed. In Yoga, there is such a term, advaita, meaning ‘not two-ness’. i.e. a non-dualism. “The big sphere of the Universe is nothing but a modal expression of the Infinite.” and “Each one of us is a centre within the Infinite.” “We then have a non-dualistic, non-monistic, Infinite source power of all things.”
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According to science, the consciousness of the scientist, and the object on the table in the laboratory, are alien. i.e. the consciousness and the object of the consciousness are not of the same order. Yet, we can move any part of our body by an act of will. i.e. material muscles and bones are under the command of our will. This shows us that there can be no separation between consciousness and its object. The Absolute, Sentient Power is a Continuum and is, therefore, partless. It is an Infinite Continuum, an Infinite Field of power, and by its movements creates within Itself everything that we call the objective world. i.e. Everything that exists is a modality of Itself. “Now in this way, the objective world is nothing other than the continuum behaving locally like an object, and there is no dualism.”
There is no difference, fundamentally, between desire, want, will, and the physical body. They are all modalities of the Continuum. “The qualities of that Continuum are everywhere identical…and these are observable in two ways: as consciousness and as objective content of consciousness.” Whenever we look at an object we become aware of the space beyond it. Awareness is always beyond the object observed. Any object we observe is always internal to our field of awareness, which extends further.
The Infinite Continuum has a dual aspect, but not an ultimate dual reality. (There could not be two Infinites!) This dual aspect is, apparently, two worlds: a field of awareness and a world of the objective contents of that field of awareness. The Infinite, Sentient Power Field is aware of its contents and knows them as we know the contents of our world, only infinitely, and in the minutest degree. “There is no object that is not known to the Field that precipitates the object.”
He examines the idea of ‘personality’. The word ‘person’ is from ‘persona’, a ‘through-sounding’. “Through this organism sounds an intention.” Our personality “is nothing but a modality of the Infinite, Sentient Power and this…has all the personalities that we have got, whereas we generally, only have the little bit we have.” This Infinite, Sentient Power is not only omnipotent but also omniscient. “It knows everything, down to our least breath, our minutest itch…the total wisdom that the human race will eventually arrive at will be no more than the introjected, self-expression of the Infinite, Sentient Power.” (Which hereafter he calls God, for economy.)
Question: Does it mean that God made sin as part of creation?
The word ‘sin’ means ‘to miss the mark’, and also, to have a goal. If the goal is finite then you are missing the mark and you are a sinner. In the act of defining the goal it becomes finite. It is not possible for a human being to declare his aim and say he will fulfil it. Everything that we do and will to do, can be contradicted by God, so to declare a finite aim is commit a sin. The earth is God’s ‘footstool’, created by Him to rest His foot on. Everything in it and on it is a modality of Him, “and we have no possibility of escape.”
He says we can divide the human race, historically, into two kinds: those that like the idea of an Infinite, Sentient Power creating and maintaining the universe, and those who hate the idea because it interferes with their private aims, “the Herods of this world.” In occult terms, the first kind are those on the right-hand path “those who like the idea of intelligence being in charge,” and those of the left-hand path, “who dislike it and wish to wriggle out of it.”
He challenges the audience to disagree with him – they don’t! “Krishnamurti has spent fifty years trying to convince people that he is not a divine messiah. He doesn’t understand why they persist in believing it. Well, it saves believing in the other one, doesn’t it? It is an economy.” There is written knowledge from the last six-thousand years of the Truth “and individual, empirical, egotistically-centred people don’t like it.”
In our bodies we have cells in our blood stream, phagocytes, whose function is to absorb harmful bacteria. They do not know that we exist! They simple carry out the function they were designed for. They live and die completely unaware of their host. We, as humans living in our world, are in the same position as those phagocytes. We live inside the body of the Cosmos, we each have a function, and most people are no more aware of their position than are those phagocytes inside us. However, unlike those cells, we cannot claim ignorance of our situation. ‘Ignorance is wilful disregard’. (ignore-ance). We know when we do something wrong, but God is not going to stop us. We all have free will and can do whatever we like but we cannot complain when we get our ‘karmuppence’! There is no escape from the law of karma – ‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap.’
When Buddha said there was no God, what he was denying was the plurality of gods of the Hindu religion. He knew that the gods the Hindus were worshipping were not real. He knew about Infinity and taught that it was good to aim for. For the Hindu gods Buddha substituted the idea of karma, the law of cause and effect. This teaches that we have permission to do anything we wish with the knowledge that we shall get our just reward. “We are literally at the mercy of an Infinite, Sentient Power.” Because It knows everything about us, our thoughts and feelings and intentions as well as our actions. Since everything is a modality of that power there can be no aspect of Its creation of which It is not aware. “You are creative expressions of the Infinite, Sentient Power. There is nothing you can’t do except defeat it.” “You have full permission to do anything you wish and you have full certainty of receiving your reward.” When we recognise this, instead of saying “I will…” we should use the expression “Let there be that which is most appropriate.”
Question: Why does God allow terrible things to happen?
“Thus it becomes to fulfil all righteousness.” In order to know something, it is necessary for it to be actualised. God is omniscient and therefore must allow all things to happen. There has to be “an actualisation of every conceivable crime.”
We are not aware of God each moment because He has been pressing on us, very gently, for millions of years. (Constant stimulation is no stimulation.) When we sit quietly we can feel the Absolute holding us in being. “And then, one day, over my left shoulder, (the left shoulder because that is where all the ancestral deaths have been recorded.) the warning voice, the Absolute has stopped pressing quite so hard.”
“We are held in being by the Infinite, Sentient Power and when It decides to, It withdraws Its holding. We all have a choice to follow the right-hand path, or the left-hand one.” At the end, “Does He eliminate the ones that were on the left, or does He put them on the right?” “Now all the ones on the left are prodigal sons, all the ones on the right could have been believing to save trouble.”
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GOD BECOMING
GOD BECOMING
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 26/6/1983
Eugene begins by drawing a circle to represent the skin surface of a human being. At the centre he draws a small circle to represent “the unassailable, impregnable” Immanent Spirit. “The power there is so great no stimulus from outside can enter into it.” A stimulus comes to a new baby and consciousness runs out to meet it and makes a record. This process is repeated endlessly and the records build up until they almost completely block the left side of the brain. Central to all is the child’s name. The right side of the brain is kept for intelligent new discoveries.
At some point, early on, a message goes out from centre, to attack the source of external stimuli, usually the mother. (He marks it with an Andrews cross.) Afterwards, there may be a period of identification with this rebellious zone. The person may become a political revolutionary, determined to smash existing society and replace it with a new kind of social structure. Later still, comes another phase, when the attacker becomes depressed because it cannot defeat society. This is the ‘drop-out’ phase. This means dropping out of the social system, usually in the late teens. “It wanders about, it goes to Stonehenge at Midsummer, it goes to Findhorn.” This being is on the path to salvation. He now believes in the possibility of a saviour, and, together with his drop-out friends, he is looking to find a ‘Messiah’. A real one would, of course, tell him to go back into society and learn to assimilate it. He won’t want to hear this. He would rather meditate on a mountain top than be in the city, so he looks for a guru. “Now this is only the idea of a messiah, but it is a true idea, it is the idea of the Logos.” A true messiah would say to the drop-out, “Don’t drop out, go back in and you will have your daily cross…Everybody you meet will crucify you in one way or another.”
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“Now somehow that idea of a messianic figure is simply the pre-vision of yourself which is hidden in the innermost centre of your being.” However, it can happen that a being gets ahead of themselves and starts to think that perhaps they have already discovered it. It is possible for a being to believe that, because they have always been a ‘good’ person, and done the right thing, that they are ‘saved’. But this is simply an idea from outside and not congruent with Immanent Spirit. We have to make the idea of the messiah congruent with our Immanent Spirit against the resistance of the outside world. “Unless we have this opposition and push towards centre against resistance, we cannot become that messianic reality.”
The saviour is ourself, the Atman, the Emmanuel, the Christ within, that Immanent Spirit. If we think of ourself as an island, a circumscribed zone. We are a triplicity of power: form, feeling and will. The spirit inside the island and the spirit outside are identical. So at the feeling level, you can contact Transcendent Spirit if you expose yourself to it without private purpose. The inner field awareness and the Infinite Field are non-different. If Immanent Spirit is not disturbed, it can feel the intention of the Transcendent Spirit. There is a relation of exchange between the inner, bound life and the outer life.
(There now follows a lengthy discourse on words: jewel, diamond, Jew, Om Mani Padme Hum, Lotus, on Hebrew and Egyptian sources and glyphs.)
SELF means something very different from the meaning of “I myself”. It means God has tied you to a body to have experiences in the time-world and simultaneously, it means the God within. “And this polarisation is essential; there must be a resistance in order to make you conscious of what it is that you are willing to become. It is only by willing against a resistance that you build yourself up…and therefore, the enlightened person, instead of avoiding blockages, deliberately sets them up, deliberately creates obstacles in order to overcome them.” This is how we learn about ourselves.
The SELF can be split: The S is the serpentine, feminine Eve, and the F is the phallic, masculine force of Adam. (The EL at the centre is God.) The male side posits what he thinks is a worthwhile form “Thats my boy” and the function of the feminine side is to loosen the concept of the male that has posited what he thinks is a worthwhile form. “It is the function of the female to see beyond the definition that he makes, to see another aspect of it.” The female is dedicated to being dissatisfied with what ever she is given. The male has to transcend every time and give her something better. “because at some point that F and S have got to meet again to attain the divinisation.” i.e. the eventual realisation of the Divine Hermaphrodite. For the man this means that he must learn to accept the criticism that comes from his female half, and the woman must learn to overcome her emotionality to reveal the logic hidden in her. “Each human being is bi-polar and has to come to terms with the other pole.” This is not easy and was not designed to be. It came about as the result of the process known as ‘The Fall’. This was a fall that occurred a long time ago into contingency.
“Each being, in order to enrich the Infinite, Sentient Power, is formulated uniquely, and providing they don’t collide with each other, they develop towards their uniquenesses.” However, when they do collide there is a mutual obscuration of form. “That means a loss of identity…that is called contingent relationship.” To avoid this we need tolerance. This word means the same mechanically and psychologically. To reduce friction in mechanics we use oil. To reduce it psychologically, we use the oil of love. All oil is made from love. The love of life that minute marine animals made millions of years ago, essential oils from plants, from metals, animals and humans. That love-life oil is the lubricator of our relations and should always be there between beings. “Love thy neighbour.” “So this mysterious oil, a physical fact, is what it is because of the spiritual intentions to allow freedom within the relationship. To demand nothing, to push for nothing, but to be ready for anything, open, sensitive, non-compulsive, non-coercive.” In Christianity the symbol for this is the cross in the circle. In Chinese symbology it is the yin/yang circle. They have exactly the same meaning. “The one whole being polarises itself towards form for clarity, towards feeling for relations between the forms.” “The feeling sensitivity can find the significance of the form, whereas the form without the feeling is totally locked up in itself.”
The earth is in the middle of 3 planets closer to the sun: Venus, Mercury and the sun itself, and 3 further away; Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The job of the human is to assimilate one trine outside the earth’s orbit and another trine within it. Saturn symbolises greed, possessiveness and the Sun symbolises generosity. These are two opposites. The human being has to learn to balance his greed, without which he could not become a human being, with generosity. If we did not have an appetite to eat, we would not exist. But, “When you eat, you eat to be of service with the energy you get from the food.” Jupiter is the biggest of the planets and symbolises expansiveness. Opposite is Mercury, symbolising intellectual cleverness. Whatever a Jupiter man does turns to success, to wealth, to power. “Because it is the will of the Absolute that he collects these things.” Mars symbolises war. Opposite is Venus, love. The human being has to know how to make love and war simultaneously. “If you have an enemy you must love him.”(He refers to the Argentinians in the Falklands War.) “Now if you can balance these two trines in an earth body, and there is nowhere else in the solar system, or in the sidereal system, where this can be done, then you are divinised, you attain the goal.”
He draws a Hexon and includes the six planets with the earth at the centre. This creates a six- petalled lotus, with earth in the centre and both trines surrounding the earth. “Now we have got our six days of the week balanced on the seventh one.” God rested on the seventh day. Our gross body is a precipitate of the divine intention to incarnate itself in the human being. “The function of the time-matter process is to discover the divinity within it, in the presence of resistances specially designed to make that discovery very, very difficult.” ”There is no middle, we are either moving towards that centre or we are being flung out by centrifugal force, from a centre, to have further experiential events which will drive us back to centre, ultimately.”
“We tend to forget we are God…Do we think like God when we forget? Do we feel like God, when we forget? Do we act like God when we forget?” No, we don’t “Worship is continual remembrance.”
“The more you comprehend the divinity that you have got, the more you will comprehend that everyone else has the same and then you will have a level of cooperation that cannot be attained in any other way.”
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GOODNESS, TRUTH & BEAUTY
GOODNESS, TRUTH & BEAUTY
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 23.02.1975
Eugene begins by drawing the three-part man. Truth goes into the head, Beauty in the chest, and Goodness in the belly. Truth is perfection, as in a perfect circle, or a perfect straight line. A circle includes and excludes; it includes a finite amount of space and excludes an infinite amount. It is a synonym for rota, form, shape, sphere, eidos (idea), and for True. When we think we encapsulate forms, shapes of experiences, in ideas. If all of our ideas correspond with the external forms we see in the world then they are true ideas. This is how a sane person can operate in the world. It is how we can converse meaningfully with other people because we can all agree on the truth of our sense perceptions.
He draws a hexon to illustrate; six identical circles around the circumference of the original one, creating the appearance of a six-petalled flower. He says he could do this infinitely and they would all obey the same law, the ‘Torah’. “Man has given rise to the idea of law from the idea of the circle.” The entire universe is arranged this way: electrons orbit their nucleus, planets orbit the sun, which orbits a central point in the galaxy. Simultaneously, every body is spinning on its own axis. “This turning around a centre is everywhere the same, so the one, universal law is rotation.” Whenever a circle is drawn, the ratio of the radius to the circumference is the same. “So one law rules all form.” This is the basis of classical philosophy and Plato was very interested in Truth. All the great philosophers, in talking about truth are “…talking of nothing but a circle which encapsulates finitude and excludes the Infinite.”
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Classical philosophy elevated this truth to the highest position. All things are cyclic and so be born is also to die. The Stoics tried to live their lives in accordance with this truth. If we imagine a continuum of circles, interlocking in all three dimensions, then we have a hexonic field which fills all space. When we look into this mesh of interlocking circles we see patterns – this is the whole of reality. Plato calls them the ‘real’ and they are eternal. In Hindu philosophy, the same circles are said to be made by sound. Sound is an alternation of compression/decompression and the vibrations are the ‘cosmic, creative sound’ which vibrates through the cosmos and is conceived to be eternal.
“We contrast time with eternity in a very simple way.” He draws a line. The line can be seen by running along it with the eye and counting how long this takes. This is seeing it in time. But we can also see it in its entirety without moving our eye along it. To see it simultaneously in this way, is to see it eternally. He does the same with a saw blade. Time is serial, so counting the teeth is serial time; seeing the whole blade is apprehending it as a unity, as a whole. We can count the teeth or we can see the whole blade. He says this kind of analysis will not be interesting to the feminine side of our being. “It is the truth, it is the rigid, it is the cold, it is the undeviating…absolutely unalterable. The universe is made in such a way that its fundamentals cannot be altered.” This idea of eternal truth appealed to the ancient Greeks, especially the rulers, and, of course, the Stoics.
The eternal truth cannot be changed and yet change happens! The initiator of change is the will. This power seems to operate independently of ideas and truth. It acts conatively, by drive, by impulse, and behind the impulse is initiative. This is the good. The ‘goo’ is a primitive form of will; you “goo” along to a certain distance and where you stopped was ‘d’- the ‘good’. The eternal law of truth is being broken by this mysterious power of the will. We see this demonstrated, sometime later, with the Romans, who pushed out their empire from its centre in Rome until it became as big as they could control.
The idea and the will are antithetical. Eternal truth is unchangeable: a triangle is a triangle in any universe, for ever. but the will is always changing. So at one end of the body we have a truth in the intellect and at the other end we have an urge which does not believe that the truth is important and continuously pushes out to transcend the position it had before. “The idea is quite rigid; the will is utterly unrigid.” “An impulsive power inside you is every bit as real as your definition of a triangle.” “These two, being co-present in the human…the being has to choose whether he will obey an idea or allow an impulse to operate immediately.”
This realm of choice is called “the beautiful”. This is the zone of feeling. Feeling is not emotion. “Emotion is an overspill of energy when the will is pushed into an idea and the idea cannot contain it so that it flows out – emotion. “Feeling is the capacity we have to evaluate the impulse without letting it overflow, to look at an idea which is rigid without becoming rigid.” “So that all you call beauty in art, in life, springs out of this peculiar centre of decision, of choice, and the activity of a being is called beautiful when he can actually balance his will and his idea.” ‘Look before you leap’ is an evolutionary strategy because impulsive behaviour often leads to early death.
We cannot progress by pure reason, as the Stoics tried, or by pure will, as tyrants have tried, we have to have an ultimate mediator, the feeling. “Field” and “feeling” are related. Originally, there was a field of energy. When we feel ourselves to be what we are, feeling is the energy occupying the zone of our being. The centre of this feeling is the heart. The heart in most people, is slightly to the left of centre, because “left means thinking.” This feeling has polarised itself and devoted one end to action and the other to thinking, so the two forces are created by the same field of energy which now has to mediate between them. Philosophers have always been suspicious of feeling because it has no edges. Classical philosophers emphasised the idea and later ones, like Nietsche, the will. Self-awareness can only come from feeling.
Feeling allows us to think and to will. Willing does not allow thinking, and thinking does not allow willing, but feeling allows both. “So feeling is a very mysterious power. It is a power that knows itself and can do two opposites: it can become rigid in triangles and wiggly in action.” “Feeling is really the source of thinking and willing.” When we focus our attention on something we bring it into our awareness. The movement of the eyeball does not cause the shift in attention- it follows it. “My awareness includes space, and space is infinite, therefore my awareness is infinite.” “We can be aware of a number of people in a room and when we shift our attention to one of them, followed by the eyeballs, we do not lose our awareness of all the others.” “So… this field, which is infinitely extended, and cannot go anywhere, and therefore in which movement is totally impossible, is incapable of stopping me shift my attention…the hexonic field does not immobilise consciousness.” Consciousness has created this hexonic field.
All the presences in the room are “pi-ratio essences,” i.e. in the hexonic field, there is a circle called ?, and another called ?, another called ?, and so on. and each has its name and form. The Supreme Presence comprises all our little circles in Itself and is Itself watching i.e. it is aware of the feelings of tension inside Itself, each little tension zone an individual, like ? or ?, or ?. No form in the field ever moves, because it is already infinitely extended, but the intention moves in the consciousness. “So by a simple shift of consciousness there is apparently a movement of body.”
You cannot insulate yourself from feeling, because feeling is the field of reality. Confining a field is impossible. In electronics you cannot prevent a field from transcending the insulating material which keeps the current from flowing out. Therefore, feeling is transcendent, and it transcends both the idea and the will.
There are idols of truth and idols of power, and feeling can transcend both.We have to become conscious of our feeling transcending both the ideas we have and the impulses to action which follow them. We are “already in full possession of infinite sentience, infinite sensitivity, infinite beauty.. but you have made a mistake of thought or will; the thought that you are finite, limited, or you have operated as an independent being.” Two ways of falling: to idea and to will. Both are a fall out of feeling. We have become fascinated by knowledge; of the world around us, the planets, solar system, etc. When you put energy into something you say that it is good. For centuries we have been doing this. “Meanwhile, on the outside of that same sphere, there is one eternal, infinitely spreading smile.” “Now we could never get out, if ever we were in.” “You never were in this sphere. The sphere has always been inside consciousness and this consciousness you are .” We have never been locked up; by our body, our planet, the macrocosmos – not by anything. “The reality that you cannot get rid of is the infinity of your feeling sensitivity.”
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HEAVENLY JERUSALEM
HEAVENLY JERUSALEM
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 27.11.1977
Eugene begins by drawing a circle with a cube inside. This is his picture of a Heavenly Jerusalem, the City of Peace. A circle is a sacred enclosure and represents a sphere. It is a sphere of influence to protect it from the infinity of possibilities outside. The central point is posited first and then the power posited there heaves itself up to a certain distance and then rotates, making a periphery around the central point. All activities start with a point; the point of initiative, an atom, a planet, a thought, a universe, everything. “That primordial point is the Absolute essence of all structure whatever.” An enclosure is always needed to build an integrated, functional structure. We all have such a structure, with its periphery, the skin. “It is the very beginning and end of your integration.” However, a round structure is not very good for building and, according to the gospel of Barnabas, there is a necessity of ‘flattening’ the human race. That sphere must be flattened in six planes to make a perfect cube. To make a city you have to flatten the citizens, the stones, either by violence or intelligence.
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‘The wall of that Holy City is made of Jasper, a most precious stone, and the name of that stone is Jasper’. Jasper means ‘the affirmation of reason’, pure logic. Inside our skin we have an anatomy which imposes restraints on primordial energy. Without the binding integument of the skin, “we would all leak.” We cannot be absolutely free and in a body. We need a ‘dome’ in which to be free. Dome means a sphere. ‘Exist’ means ‘stand out’. It means ‘be a unity’, ‘be encapsulated’, ‘be uniquely protected in your sacred, secret, area of operation’.
The Heavenly Jerusalem is an encapsulated zone, to allow individuation; unique developments of character, function, creativity. A good mason can tell you about a perfect cube, and that cube is your own being, perfected by work. When the stone is taken from the quarry, it has been taken out of the ‘mob’, the crowd, and been shaped by a gavel. (gabble).
The six faces are: future, past, power on your right side, deficiencies on your left, Heaven above, infinite power you cannot control, and beneath you the earth, mass inertia. We must have a defined goal. If we study the conditions of our existence we can draw a line from where we are to where we will to be. The existing conditions start as nature and we try, as we grow, to modify them, as a nature made by man. The first nature is given to us by the Absolute ,Sentient Power; the man- made one is all of the changes man has made to this. By studying nature, man has created civilisations and all technology. This ‘second nature’ changes the original one. e.g. the movement of the wind is changed when it encounters a building.
Our goal is defined for us in the Book of Revelation Ch. 22. ‘It is a city that needs no light of sun or moon’. Our goal is to develop into a being that is lit from inside. The Heavenly Jerusalem is ourself (fallen) but a self that can be shaped, progressively, into a cube with six concepts to control. The city is of pure gold, yet transparent. Gold is an incorruptible metal and symbolises the will. This will is from God, inserted into man. It is “Divine power encapsulated in the physical integument of the human being.” ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’. The will is the JA in Jasper and the per means ‘pure logic’. “Jas per is, literally, ‘to affirm pure logic’.”
Inside every human being is the seed of a will which is utterly incorruptible. i.e. you cannot break it because it is not made of parts. This is the continuum of the universe itself operating in the centre of a living being. A continuum has no parts, it is throughout itself identical, it has no divisions, it cannot break, it is incorruptible. A centre of this continuum is in every one of us. It is the ‘seamless garment’ of Christ. Our will is a centre of Infinite Power, incorruptible as gold and yet also as clear as glass, but to ourself only. Each individual will is opaque to every other i.e. it is wholly individual. “To be transparent to oneself, one must love oneself throughout. One must, in loving oneself, know oneself because you cannot love that which you do not know.”
“The Heavenly Jerusalem is the macrocosmic human being, the Adam Kadmon of the Hebrews, the original Adam, the one whose body constitutes, symbolically, the whole universe.” A man known fully to himself is pure gold and transparent “and he cannot be that unless he loves the continuum and all that the continuum does.” A man who attacks another, or any created thing, is ignorant of the continuum, which is partless, and is therefore attacking himself. He makes a mnemonic of the word ‘Jerusalem’ to put on the hand. This gives “a peculiar polarisation… “Spiritual activity has made Itself into a discriminative, affirmative power and a clinging, inertia power. To make the Heavenly Jerusalem we have to balance these facts.”
“What are these facts?” Comfort we all like it. We have it as babies and are encouraged from the beginning of life in this. We have comfort in the womb and throughout childhood. We have learnt to expect it. We must unlearn this. To be a new Heavenly Jerusalem we have to learn to balance five-in-one. “You are a six-fold being and you have to balance these five in this way.” We have to learn to flatten ourselves, to have plane surfaces which can be put against the surfaces of other beings to build the walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and that wall is Jasper, translucent, yet gold.
It says, ‘There is no temple in the Holy City’. ‘Temple’ means ‘time-play’. There is no such temple in us when we know ourselves, but there is something else: the Power of God, essential creativity, and His Son, the Lamb, “which is your capacity for meekly taking whatever comes to you and converting it into pure gold.” “And this gold will be transparent and this gold will be Jasper.” “You are yourself, internally, the temple,the living God and His representative Son.” How are we to get to this state?
The fact that it is a cube is the key. You stand in the middle of six orientations: you can think forwards and backwards, to the right, to your powers, to the left, to your deficiencies, above to the powers you must obey, and below to the clay you have to model. You have to stand at every moment in the ‘here and now’. You have to be aware of you orientation immediately before any thought, word or deed. If you can do this you cannot be wrong.
However, the difficulty of doing this makes us keep still. If we can still ourselves inside we can become doorways for the Absolute to use. The purpose of sitting in mediation (contemplation) “is to reduce our egotistical impedances to nil in order that the Absolute, Sentient Power can use this organism for its own purpose, whatever that might be.” You cannot choose what will happen, only submit. It is essential to be in the here/now. “If you have no present you have no presence, and if you have no presence, you have no creativity. The here and now is all there is.
‘Opposition is true friendship’ “All conflict is a means of education of consciousness.” You can say to your opponent: “Give me another insult, I rode that one too easily.” (then)”Thank you very much, that really hurt.” “Now I can examine myself, because what I want is volitional purity and I can’t get it until I get rid of my hurts.” Don’t be criticised merely by your superiors. “Find the stupid and get them to criticise you.” Every person is building their own Heavenly Jerusalem. “Each skin is a wall protecting you from interference in some degree by others also trying to build their cities, and to build you must have an enemy.”
Every city succumbs to gravity if it is not maintained. You must transcend your previous creation, if you do not, you are dead. “you are in process of self-education and you go about the world looking for means of self-development.”… “There is only one way and that is simultaneous development of your total faculties.” We can go wrong in all six ways “but nothing less than all of them will constitute simultaneously that Heavenly Jerusalem: That is hard work and it can only be done now.” If we think of any of the six planes separately we have unbalanced ourselves. Our physical action does not in any way impede our non-action spiritually. “Whatever you do, if you are on centre in the middle of that perfect cube… with those six awarenesses around you, whatever you do is a perfect act.”
Right at the end of Revelation it says, ‘Behold, I come quickly, I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and I come quickly’. “Why does it say that?” Because it can only come quickly: this realisation comes in a now. Now is not a temporal event at all. “Now is an in-break of eternity into the consciousness of man, not a temporal event, but it appears in the middle of the time structure and totally changes it.”
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ON JESUS
ON JESUS
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday 26.01.1975
“All anti-Semitism is anti-Christian.” Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, the embodiment of God on earth. He represented the goal of the human race. He was the first to attain that goal and he laid down a method for others to attain that same goal. He claimed, and demonstrated, complete control over his own organism and that every other human being who believed him and followed his recommendations would become like him. They would be sons of God also. Others had predated him: Zarathustra in Persia was persecuted and killed, but not by his own choosing. Buddha died at 80. He was supported by the establishment and not persecuted. There were others but none chose to be killed and then resurrected.
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He draws a circle with six others around it to create the appearance of a six-petalled flower. It is the overlapping of the circles that creates the appearance and this arises automatically from the geometry. The word ‘six’, in Latin ‘sex’, and in Greek ‘hex’, gives us the name for this: ‘hexon’. “Now this hexon means exactly what you think you mean when you say “I exist.” The word ‘exist’ means to ‘stand out from’. So the number six means existence. To exist is to be six, and the Latin ‘sex’ is the means by which we come into existence. When this diagram is drawn, it is simply six circles drawn around another one, but we tend to interpret it as a central circle with six petals. Yet that form is not there. The petals do not belong to the centre circle but to others drawn outside it. This same drawing could be extended infinitely and the illusion of the six-petalled flower would also continue in the same way. i.e. the mind would continue to see the image again and again. In the Bible this is what is meant by ‘Logos’. In Greek, this word means ‘ratio’, ‘proportion’, ‘truth’. The diagram is made by pure logic. The necessary relation between all of the circles is clear, so if we can analyse any one of them accurately, then in principle, we have analysed all. This means that if we can understand any individual being then we have understood all, because all are identical. In the Gospel it says: “Christ knew what was in man.” One man thoroughly analysed was all men. We know that we all derive from the same protoplasm so we are essentially the same.
This infinitely extended field we can call the ‘hexonic’ field. We could also say the ‘eidetic’ field from ‘eidos’ meaning idea, form, shape, structure. A field is a zone of influence, so the hexonic field is one in which the hexon’s structure is influential; it will condition us. So our eye is conditioned to see six-petalled flowers. But the ‘petals’ do not belong to the circle that appears to have them but to the six circles surrounding that one. “So that no person with an internal structure has that structure from himself…it is the product of his relation with the totality of other beings.” He demonstrates that we can draw any shape we like on these intersecting circles by emphasising different lines. This does not introduce anything new to the diagram other than the stress on certain of the lines. In this way it is possible to draw portraits of people, showing that each person is already structured by the hexonic field. What is drawn stands out from the field but only “because we will it to stand out to make a centre to rest our consciousness upon it.” So all the great philosophies are geometrical, mathematical, logical. “With these three subjects all the inventions of the world have been made.”
Unless a person was structured in this way, he would not be able to understand the diagram. At some point in history there had to be a man who understood this principle perfectly: intellectually, in feeling and in will.He would be six-petalled in each department; head, chest and belly, giving the number 666. This, in Revelation, is the number of man and also the beast.
Every thought we have, every feeling and every action has been gained by interaction with others. Some early thinkers understood this: Plato, Shankara, Omar Khayam and others, but Christ was the first to embody it “and arrange his own fixation.” He had to drive himself in thought, word and action to integrate himself so that he could demonstrate this possibility. Jesus declared that he had done it and then proved this by his death and resurrection. To follow him we have to see that the ‘Logos’, the hexonic field, is an absolute truth and that we have nothing, as individuals, that is our own. Everything we have has come from our inter-relations with others. We cannot be self-made, egotistic beings. Instead, we are indebted to an infinity of ancestors, of others we have met, and to forces “that our egoic consciousness is totally unaware of.” Jesus has shown us the way in some, very simple rules: one, is to ‘turn the other cheek’ i.e. we must not be reactive to situations. All wars are fought over contested land. The solution to this is simple: since the land really belongs to neither, you simply give it up. If one of the contenders does so then the ‘victor’ has increased responsibilities and problems. The one who has backed down can then find more pleasant things to do than make war. “In other words, accommodate yourself so efficiently to the other man’s egotistic grab that his responsibilities are increasing and yours are decreasing.” If any establishment claims absolute authority over others it is illogical, because no finite can dominate an infinity. Every thought, feeling and action within us has been gained from others, and this is true for dictators also.
The hexonic field, being circumscribed, is finite. Beyond it is the Absolute, the ‘para-hexonic’ field. This Absolute substance lies behind all appearances. If the entire universe were erased this force would still be there. This is what is meant by ‘salvation’; literally, the ‘washing away of all forms’. Those who understand this are entitled to be members of the “ecclesia para-hexon’. (‘Ecclesia’ is Greek for ‘church’.) This does not mean that your work is finished, you still have inertias to overcome, you may still be reactive to situations “but it does mean that, when you thoroughly understand it, you will know why that reaction occurs.” It may not feel comfortable to know that every thought, feeling and action we have are not our own, but come from relation with others, and from ancestors, but it is the truth. Many would find this too uncomfortable and would deny it. These are also 666 in Revelation. “He would be 666 but he would not be a human being anymore, because he would have cut himself off from the infinity of benefits of the recognition of the reciprocal interrelationship with all beings.” Also, the tendency in the ego is to keep to an untrue position even when the truth is seen, to ‘save face’. Such a man, if he says he is a separate entity and in no way indebted to others, has cut himself off and alienated himself from them. So 666 is the number of man and beast. “It all depends on the orientation.” The ‘self-made’ man is a beast because his understanding is falling below the level of humanity.
Jesus was the first to make all of this clear to us. He understood the principle and embodied it in his substance. He is therefore the head of the ‘ecclesia para-hexon’. “And left such a mark in the human race that he became a controversial figure for all time.” Reciprocally interpenetrating thoughts, feelings and will are the realty. Anyone who is not moved by the emotion in great music is a beast. “Anyone who chooses not to be moved by the art of another being, by the science of another being, by the action of another being, demotes himself from the human level.”
Eugene puts another interpretation on the story of Gethsemane. He suggests Jesus was anxious, not for himself, but for his disciples, who could not even stay awake for him. He knew he could go through with it, but what of them? Would they go back to sleep when he was no longer there? Would there be anyone awake in 2000 years? His disciples had already squabbled about the best seats in Heaven, and such disagreements were to continue after his death between the followers of Peter and Paul. It must have seemed to Jesus in Gethsemane that the crucifixion might be a waste of time. Yet he chose to do it. He says that he will do the will of the Father; not that he is passive to it. By his example we can choose to become members of the ‘ecclesia para-hexon’. We can follow the examples he gave in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, and accept the inter-relationship and interpenetration of all beings. “To prefer it is already the beginning of the opening of the door.” ‘Perfection is made of trifles, and perfection is no trifle’. This is the ability to give way to another, to let a contested zone be taken by another, even in little ways, such as giving up a seat on the bus. The goal is “to become the man 666 who evaluates on his three levels, total reality.”
By condensing into physical bodies it appears that we are separate but at the hexonic level we are not. The hexonic field can also be called ‘Heaven’. When Paul said: “Our conversation is in Heaven,” this is what he meant. At the level of the hexonic field, our energies of heart, mind and will are reciprocally interpenetrating; conversing with each other. When we appreciate this we can call ourselves members of the ‘ecclesia para-hexon’.
We know that the physical separation between us is not real because we can now measure, electronically, the fields of force between us, and these are shown to be different between people. We are all uniquely related and interpenetrated at energy levels.
Jesus shook the foundations of the Herod world, even as a baby. Herod wanted to kill him because he knew, according to prophecy, that this man would undermine the authority of the established order. The ancient world had always rested on the power of kings and emperors, either by descent or conquest. But here was a man who could overthrow all of tradition by declaring the uniqueness of every individual. Since Jesus we have seen uprisings against the established order by some who have recognised that subordination to a dictator is not an intelligent way to live. This is why Christianity is not tolerated in totalitarian states. It is fundamentally opposed to the idea that a population can be controlled by the use of force. “There is in the human soul now, a deep awareness of individual, personal right to be, to be present, to stand inside one’s own being, not to be enslaved by the tyranny of large architecture, by impositions of pyramids, of sphinxes, of temples, not to be intimidated by a cathedral into feeling meagre.”
Contemplating all this, we can choose whether we like Jesus or not. Whether we prefer him as a companion, because he is a companion, because our physical bodies are modalities of the hexonic field. His intelligence permeates our minds and we have immediate access to Him in our own innermost centre. If we do this then the hexonic level of awareness begins to permeate us. We can no longer be an “egotistic slave” to the time-process. We then know that we are eternal beings, permanent members of the ‘ecclesia para-hexon’.
“…in any individual there is a debt, absolute. Not a debt of a few years. Not a debt owed to a man 2000 years ago, of merely an idea, a debt that is absolute, that stretches back changing the course of history and the interpretation of it, stretching forward into an endless future of absolute, continuous indebtedness to the being that came down from the hexonic level and posited itself in the time-process.”
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MEDITATION
MEDITATION
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday in 1977
Eugene begins with the statement: “Mediation is providing a middle between two extremes.” We know about these two extremes from experience; order and chaos. He asks: “What would we be like if we had no bodies but simply a kind of presence, a kind of being, but not focussed on a body?” Like the ocean. To be a body you must have a perimeter. Without this, you cannot be a ‘self’. The Absolute, Sentient Power moves by positing a point of initiation, a zone of focus. Consciousness must be focussed. When we sleep we are not conscious but we are aware. “Unconsciousness does not mean you are not aware, it simply means that you are not ‘k-onscious’, you haven’t got a sharp focus.” (Like the ocean.) To be conscious you must have focus; of a body, or a form (idea) of a body in the mind. But we are always aware because we cannot be otherwise. “…because, factually, you are sentient power; you are power that feels itself.” Between the state of deep, unconscious sleep, (causal), and awake object-consciousness, (gross), is a middle state, subtle, of dreams.If we did not have gross bodies we would have no evidence that our experiences in the world were real. They could be just hallucinations. In the dream world the forms are vague and we do not collide with them as we do with physical ones. The energy in those forms is not compacted enough. A dream is emotional energy which passes from one form to another without stability. Our external waking awareness is objective, but the dream awareness is subjective.
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People often get depressed as Christmas approaches. This goes back a very long way and is because, in ancient times, the sun was getting lower and lower in the sky and the people thought it might not come back. The priest-kings who understood the cycle kept it secret from the people who believed that the priests had power, by prayer, to raise it again. The lowest point is the 21st December but by 25th it is clearly beginning to rise again. This is why the 25th was chosen for both Zarathustra and Christ, because it was seen as the birthday of the Sun/Son. These priests were mediators between the people and the knowledge the people did not have. The priests gained this knowledge from observing the skies. In the same way they learned of the cycle of the seasons, the circling of the star formations and the orderly movement of the planets.
Mediators are needed at all level of human relationships. Logically, there can be a mediator who knows only one thing more than his colleagues and one at the highest level who knows more than any other. We can represent this with the mnemonic of the hand. The middle finger mediates between your little finger, representing commerce, ruled by Mercury, and your thumb, representing free will. In between, there is the ring finger and the index finger, which are sub-mediators. If we place our finger tips on the paper we have five circles. The middle one is Saturn, creator of time and matter. i.e. time-consciousness. If we imagine our hand as an animal, with the extended, middle finger as the head, then, as it moves forward, the head is time-consciousness. The consciousness of time mediates between eternity and the material world. Our physical body is a precipitate of the will and is a focus for consciousness. This is very different from the awareness of deep sleep. The ‘sci’ in con-sci-ousness means ‘to cut’, as in ‘scissors’, and what it cuts is forms, one from another. It cuts round them and separates them. In deep sleep our awareness cannot do this. It is pure sentience yet we cannot use it in the same way we can our waking consciousness. However, we need both. Because in deep sleep, we have: “Absolute form outshone by its own sentience.” i.e. it is omniscient and yet we cannot access it; so a mediator is needed. This mediator is our solar plexus.
The solar plexus is so-called because it is in the middle: “the mediator between the gross, external world of bone and muscle and the world of the will that can induce changes immediately.” The sun“It is a step-down transforme
“It is a step-down transforme
We are entirely solar beings on earth. The question is; do we know we are?” If we do then we are also responsible for knowing it. “You cannot have knowledge without responsibility.” This responsibility means we have to treat every other body as we treat our own. “Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, you do it to me.” “That is you responsibility.” We are all modalities of the one, primordial field of power. All the bodies belong to that power so none of us can ever think of our body as ‘ours’ and we must treat every other body as we treat our own.
In history there have been many attempted mediators between eternity and time: Mahavira, Gautama, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and others.
(An audience member asks: “Why where they all killed?”)
Answer: “People would have to become responsible for each other in a way that they are not prepared to be responsible.”
All major religions say that “the sun is the centre of sacrifice.” “That colossal mass of energy has condensed itself there and is squeezing itself there to make rays of light come out.” All power is sentient so the sun feels itself squeezing itself to provide light and heat for the earth. It is sacrificing itself for us. “Is it not a crucified God, that sun?”
He asks the audience: “Do you believe that women are superior to men?” “They really are superior, but God has put them with a bad habit…but without that bad habit, called ‘manipulation of the tongue’, men could not improve.” So woman is a mediator between God and man. He says: “Most of the work I have done over the last sixty years has been trying to persuade ladies not to try and treat their husbands shamefully, reactively, but only deliberately, as an act of free will.”
The solar plexus is a special kind of brain, very much older than the one in the head. The forebrain is a lower mediator between the five senses and other information in the brain. The solar plexus mediates between you and spirit. Whenever you do something wrong, it squeezes, just like the sun, and you feel this squeeze. Remorse (biting back) can kill you. It bites you and you can feel it biting for others. e.g. for a child getting it wrong. “The solar plexus mediates between the field of power, which made your body, and your waking, conscious brain.”
Question from audience member about responsibility for others.
Answer: We are directly responsible for others and we know it. It is only through the ancestral dispersion of races, nations, tribes and families that we regard others as separate. We are responsible for everything that happens to others, wherever they are in the world. “What do you feel like when you recognise that total knowledge is total responsibility? Don’t you thank God that you are as ignorant as you are?” “Everybody who commits himself to the full service of the human race, is a sacrificial figure.” e.g. Christ. “Necessarily, sacrifice is the work of an enlightened being.”
The word ‘sacrifice’ means ‘to do in secret’. The sun is doing something in secret. Astronomers think it is simply a mass of incandescent gas, but actually, the sun is squeezing itself intelligently to radiate life on earth, so that astronomers, who don’t believe it, can live.” “That is a lovely sacrifice isn’t it?” “Every life on this earth is dependent on that solar sacrifice…and every human intelligence is dependent on those beings who…duplicate it.” such as Buddha, Christ etc.
Question: “But if you dodge the sacrifice, what happens to you?
Answer: “Necessarily, if you try to avoid the sacrifices that are proper for you to make, you perish.” You begin to corrupt and disintegrate.” “Only the sacrificial life is worth having and the sun is our standing proof of that fact.” “You are not sacrificed until you, yourself, make a secret deed.” “Psychopathology, all the neuroses and psychoses are nothing but the logical result of dodging sacrifice, dodging responsibility.” To rescue a disintegrated individual, a non-disintegrated individual has to go and look for the bits and put them together again. “Whichever way you look at it, finally, self-sacrifice is the only comfortable sacrifice there is.” “A mediator must understand the meaning of sacrifice. He can’t afford to have a pride that is injured can he?” The virtue of the sun is that it gives and gives and gives.”
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MANIPURA
MANIPURA
Précis of a lecture given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 24.11.1985
OM “Means the pre-analytic wholeness of being, in two aspects: the ‘O’ is the intellective, not substantial; and the ‘M’ the substantial aspect of the same (God) “So the next word must be analysis.” AN means a serpent running. It tends to cross itself and make a closure. This creates an ‘island of being’. (B, in ‘being’ was originally a sphere, then drawn as a circle, then split.) It signifies “anything that can be circumscribed with a line and therefore recognised as a form.” The M means the substantial aspect of that sacred ‘OM. The English letter E is the Hebrew ‘Heh” and signifies force, form, function. “It means life without impedances.” The English H signifies hierarchical control. The free spirit in English is represented by A, the Absolute which is “above the concepts of the O and M as polar opposites: O the intellective, non substantial idea and the substantialised body M which is simply the idea compressed.” These are not two separates but two aspects of the Absolute. Before polarisation the Absolute is “a no-thing, It is not a form at all.” Substance is “resistance encountering opposition,” and it is the experience of this that makes us aware that we are physical body entities. M is a closure. Energy comes in and makes a circle. It then goes inside and keeps hitting against the boundary wall and being reflected. It feels impeded. This is substance. We also have an idea of it, which is not substantial, and so merely an idea. This is an abstract idea.
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The body is full of resentment. ‘Resent’ means to re-feel. Spirit feels annoyed with itself because of the closure “but at the same time feels itself to be a being of substance and meaning and it doesn’t like to let go of that.” “The polarity which was in the O and the M is now hidden in the M and the M remembers that it was once free absolute and it resents losing its freedom, but is delighted at finding its substantiality.” Apart from the closure we would not be separate, since we come from the same source.
MANI is translated as a diamond or jewel. “The word jewel is a semitic reference and means God himself. The word Jew actually means ‘mysterious perfection of God’, and EL is the form, the first form of God, Elohim, which in the Muslim world is Allah. “Being is a verb. It’s a continuous form…continuously eating the infinite…to manifest as a body.” “The substantial aspect of being; angels, humans, animals, vegetables, minerals, is frustrated by existing and delighted to be manifest… there is the ‘mani’ in manifest.” The MA is the appetival aspect of the being and the NI is negative individuation i.e. the control of appetite. “Mani means appetival control by the negation of form.” This polarity is inside us: The NI is the O and The MA is the M. This has often been seen as a diamond, e.g.Buddhism, ‘diamond body’. A diamond has facets internally. A good diamond cutter can see the lines of cleavage and cut away what he doesn’t want to make a facetted jewel.We see this in the six-pointed star, which signifies the facetted whole. In this the “light of consciousness shining through it comes out at different angles and displays marvellous colours.” Throughout history the diamond has been worshipped as the type of being to be. The diamond body signifies a being that was once an abstraction in the infinite, brought down substantially, then counting its own appetite (man) and individuating the products of its counting, it has become a highly-facetted individual.” Everything we know is a facet of our being and the totality of that knowledge is our mani. “The I signifies the individual who has done the work of negating his appetite in order to discover his facetted, hidden self.” “So whereas the wholeness is simply whole without form, the diamond, the mani, is the same wholeness analysed into an infinity of facets.”
PADME: “When you have completed your mani phase you have to bang reality to get something out of it.” Padme means ‘lotus’ means ‘play’. Lotus is really ‘let us’. Instead of ‘let us pray’ we could say ‘lotus pray’. That means if you thoroughly understand yourself, you know how to enjoy yourself.
HUM: In this fourth phase, the OM has became HUM. Whereas the OM was unanalysed, the HUM has been analysed, through self-counting and playing with that which has been counted “with great joy, because you know what you are doing.” You have now become ‘Manipura’. Mani means jewel and pura means city. You are now a diamond city. “Your very being, your physicality, your emotionality, your tactics, your strategy, your volition, your consciousness as a sphere of self-discovered being is called pura. ‘Pu’ means power and ‘ra’ means rulership. “So you have built your own being, your own body, your own mind, your own heart-felt evaluation, these are being built into a special, magical city and nobody else can disturb or penetrate without your permission.” You are the attained man who has realised his origin.
COMPASSION: means ‘with suffering’. Prior to creation the Absolute, Sentient Power is feeling itself in its absoluteness utterly unimpeded, unformed, unmanifest. “Can we comprehend what it means to see nothing, feel nothing? In the Quran God says: “I was a hidden mystery, I desired to manifest myself, therefore I created the world…” He created not only the world, but man. Man is the evaluator, and Mani is the perfected man. He perfected man as his measure of the universe.
“Man was made lower than the angels but is destined to be higher “because man can actually comprehend everything whatever that there is, by simply comprehending himself.” “Why? because all spheres are identical.” To analyse one thoroughly is to analyse all. If you know yourself you will know all selves. We all have inside of us what every other being has inside of them and everyone, everything, is within the Absolute because there is nothing else. Christ said: “Inasmuch as you do it to the least of these you do it to me.” “So compassion means that in no way can the Absolute origin escape the effect of its actions upon itself and therefore upon any creature that it produces.” The arabic word for compassion means ‘womb’ and this has two characteristics: Protection against outer chaos and enclosure for nourishing. “The macrocosmic sphere is the big womb of total reality and inside that it has produced lots of little ones, of which human beings are some examples.”
ADAM: The first human is Adam; da/ma, male/female in one body; Intellection and materiality in perfect balance. Two forces in opposition, if equal, cannot move. So God made Adam a helpmate. Eve was taken out of Adam. She was the developmental half. The totality of all human beings in all history, past, present and future, all these beings add up to a man. That man is Adam, Adam Kadmon, Cosmic man. “So we are in an absolute condition of an absolute, categorical imperative to relate to each other, in the full awareness that we are actually relating to the Absolute.”
Every being whatever, down to the smallest virus, is nothing but the Absolute in the place of that thing, being there what it is. “ There can be no absolute evil because ‘being’ itself is good. Being is the definer of the good. You can’t define unless you first ‘be’. “You can have ‘good/bad’, but you can’t have ‘bad/bad’.” Therefore evil is only relative. A ‘good/bad’ forces people to choose what they would like to do to themselves. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’. Also, there is no ‘good/good’. Evil is a necessary part of temporal existence. “And temporal existence is a necessary means whereby the manipura can be built.” “Only by experience of good and bad, jointly presented, can we choose in what way we are going to cut our diamond and show facets” “Now the final result of the processes of evolution of these beings is that there are an infinity of facetted diamonds. each one is unique..every individual man and microbe is unique…to express an infinity of formal, dynamic possibilities.” “In order to know good you must have an idea of evil in you…in order to know it is not this.” Sin is similar to ‘shine’, enlightened. The difference is the stress on the being. If stressed in the belly, the sexual department, it is sin; if in the head, enlightened. The Absolute “knows that you cannot know what is goodness, or posit what is evil to judge it with. So the absolute good posits the bad for you to look at, to decide not to have it.” “You can’t sin consciously. You can only sin by being unconscious and stupid.” If we want to improve i.e. internally prove/probe ourselves to discover our own, internal capacities of total creativity, absolute self-determination, then we have to follow the same process by which the Absolute created the world, and we need ‘Grace’ to do this.
Grace means free spirit. “It is the freedom of the Absolute to knock the creatures about and wake them up from their self-sleep of identification with finitude.” “We are, whether we like it or not, precipitates of the Absolute who has come from Absoluteness through Godhead to God, to Cosmos, to individuals within Cosmos, to the human being, and everywhere and nowhere is not, is the Absolute, operative as that being, in that way, in that time and place…and that means now.”
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LUCKY NUMBERS
LUCKY NUMBERS
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 5.10.1986
Eugene begins by defining ‘Lucky’ as “the capability to be in the right place at the right time and to be able to utilise the opportunities therein contained.” To ‘get lucky’ you have to be alert, to wake up. NUM means: “a motion of power in a substance” and is another form of the indivisible triad: force, form, function; force = will, form= intellect, function=activity. Similarly: thinking, feeling and willing. You can stress one more than the others but you cannot get rid of any one of the three. You cannot divide the substance: force, form, function are inseparable. They may appear to be separable, because we can super-stress any one and forget the other two. “…so that when we stress, it is our will to stress that causes our trouble.” ‘Distress’ means two stresses. ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
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He deals with the numbers 1 – 7 to correspond with 7 aspects of the human psyche, and also the 7 planets “which are not referring to those objects in the sky, but to the universal field of power which precipitated them.” The number ‘one’ has three letters in many languages: une, una, ein etc. This is the triple ‘f’ again: force, form, function. “…so if one is there, the three are there.” To get this unity we have to become reflexive: we must think that we think, will to will, feel that we feel. This reflexion makes them into a unity, (like the process of tempering steel – as in a Samurai sword.) In the mind we should think about thinking, about feeling, about willing. We should feel about thinking, feeling and willing, and we should will about thinking, feeling and willing. This gives us the magical number 9. If we don’t get oneness in our lives, we are bound to fail. “Unity is all we need.” If we get unity, we have omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. “the human mind and soul knows the world that it knows only because that world is inside it.” “It is no bigger than you are when you are reflexive. The world that you see, apparently outside you, is a projection of your intention that there be a world.” “The world we live in is a construct of all our intentionalities. Every one of us is contributing into a vast, infinite field of sentient power. We are projecting into it, thoughts, feelings and wills and the totality of all these is the universe.” “We will never find anything in it other than that we are projecting into it.” This is MAYA.
A sensum is anything whatever that you can feel. To turn the sensum into a percept that you can recognise, you must define it verbally. He asks: “Can anyone smell caramel?” The name ‘caramel’ evokes the sensation of its smell. “You cannot utter a letter, a single letter, without invoking a correspondence for it in your mind.” “To be is to be perceived.” “You cannot conceive yourself having or knowing a being without perceiving it.”
One = force, form, function = Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The Father is the power, the will; the Son is the intellect, the logic, and the Holy Spirit is the activity resulting from the will and the intellect. “These three are never separable, but we can superstress one at the expense of the other two…or two at the expense of the remaining one.” “Those who pursue power and want power for themselves over other people are utterly lacking in intellectual balance.” “You can’t pursue power over other people if you have any deep logic, because you cannot have that power. It isn’t possible.” We can never find complete unity in people; they are all of different ages and what babies want is not the same as old men. If you have not got the same vocabulary, with identical meaning, you cannot find agreement. The only thing that we can all agree on is that we all want our own way. ‘One’ means power, form, function. If we don’t remember the first two then our function, our activity, is bound to be deficient. “If you want to be efficient in any field…you have to come to terms with oneness.” “Oneness is something we must have if we are to be efficient and it requires us to put together thought, feeling and will. If they are not perfectly balanced, the act cannot be perfectly efficient.”
“Every being is circumscribed by binding force…so we should really start with a circle and call it zero and say zero is really number one.” If we make a point, a dot, and then draw a circle around it, the circle is really a travelling dot. This “produces a twoness, a travelling force, the rota or torah, a wheel and a central static, positive hub. A centre of rotation which itself, does not move.” Every thing in the whole of reality, is made of energy rotating around centres. “The atom, the electron, everything whatever, …is made of a force spinning around a centre, and the centre is relatively static compared with the spinning motion.” The dot in the circle represents every one of us “all observers, as central to a universe, a one-turn which they observe from within by projecting their attention outward.” Every individual dot, human or otherwise, has absolute validity. Each one wishes not to be subordinate to the will of another. Every human, just like every microbe, does not want to be dictated to but rather to centre itself and treat other beings as peripheral to it. This is the origin of all conflicts.
Number 2 is the “mark of duality.” It could be cooperation or it could be warfare. The X, the Andrew Cross, signifies the possibility of friendship, but also enmity. The number 3 is the triangle of thought feeling and will, the trinity. It must be an equilateral triangle to balance them. If you have all three in balance you have efficiency in whatever you do.
There are two religions in the world and always have been. One is the religion of external ceremonial and the other is that of internal meditation. The dot in the centre is the religion of initiative. In this, you refer always to your centre. The other is concerned with the external circle, the rota, the torah, the Tarot, rituals which repeat, like the seasons. These extrovert our attention and take us off-centre. The religion on the inside cannot be touched by the outside. The innermost centre of our deep will is not affected by anything external to it.
The number 4 “means the establishment of the three in a stable condition, so is the mark of the true free-mason.” (Triangles are not good for building with; building bricks need 4 sides for stability) “Four-square means you are a mason, a ma-son, a son of your mother.” “Now your real mother is your very own protoplasm…your substance is you, it doesn’t belong to your external, so-called mother.” We begin as a part of the protoplasm of our parents, egg and sperm, but as soon as fertilisation occurs, the being is independent. The baby grows the placenta, not the mother. The child is a parasite, an independent entity from the moment of conception. Your Father is the infinite, generative power of the Absolute. “That is four, the establishment of the three…so that you can erect in the time-world, structures of thought, feeling and will which will be eternal, you will be a true free-mason, a free son of your mother.”
The number 5 is the five-pointed star signifying the five senses. Your five fingers do the same, Little finger is Mercury, commodities, the things you need to survive in the material world. Five is the quintessence. You have established the trinity of thought, feeling and will, you have stabilised it on the square by freeing yourself from the external mother influence, and now you are going to handle the external world. The dot in the circle is the Sun, your life principle. That goes on the ring finger. Saturn on the middle finger, meaning time. “You have to remember time…later your organism will be dead, so remember time and don’t waste it.” Saturn is the devil and makes you forget infinity. Jupiter is expansion, God the Father. The Sun is Venus, love. This runs through all of the others. “…and the whole of it is based on energy, so Mars, which means energy, goes in the middle.” Those five are energy functions. Then the Moon, quarter, half and black (new). ”A total mnemonic on the five-pointed star.”
Six is the six-pointed star to remind us of the two worlds: one pointing up to the Infinite, one pointing down into the time-world. “A world inside our skin and a world outside…and the outer is projected by the inner.” The innermost deep will projects the external one. “The totality of all conceivables is conceived in minds that conceive them.” If we forget this and obey the external stimulus over our innermost will we are in trouble.
Seven means ‘spirit-even’.(draws a 7pointed star) Saturn, focus on the point; compression and expansion of Jupiter causes rotation, Mercury. This produces heat by friction, Mars, added together produce the Sun, which incandesces and produces Venus, love. The Moon is the 7th. In its phases it has the other 6. When we can do these seven simultaneously we have finished our work, but we cannot do it without each other’s help. “You cannot afford to reject anything whatever from your being…all must be assimilated, all must be affirmed, all must be held and confessed to be part of total, unific reality. When you have that you have seven, S-even, perfect temperament, perfect spiritual balance.” “You cannot get to the seventh without free communication with every other human being that will open you up to communicate with each other, exchange ideas. Somebody has always got something that you haven’t got that you need.”
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LOVE AND DEATH
LOVE AND DEATH
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday on 29.06.1975
Eugene begins by saying that to examine the idea of death he has to examine the opposite, because they are “mutually defining.” However, the opposite of death is not ‘life’ but ‘love’. The word ‘live’ refers to the individual (the ‘i’ signifies ‘individuation’) The word ‘love’ requires another being, two or more are needed. Death means ‘disintegration’, and in this sense, death of the physical body occurs when it disintegrates. But the D in ‘death’ signifies division and also a door. For the soul it is not an end but a door from one state of being to another.
In the nineteenth century we thought that matter was made of atoms. Now we know that there are no primary particles, just energies. Everything is energy, and energy is indestructible; it can only change frequency. Only what is structured can be destructured, destroyed. But it can be restricted.
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What is real is a continuum of power modalising i.e.producing apparent differentiations. “Reality is that which differs as a modality of that which does not differ.” To create is to ‘arc’, to put a binding line around a zone of the continuum. This zone then appears to be discrete, like a particle. The infinite ocean of power is creating, in its wave motions, intersection points, which appear as vortices within itself, just like in water. They appear as entities, but they are really behaviours of the Absolute, Sentient Power. “There are no entities whatever in total reality, other than illusory ones.” “Every part of your body is spinning ..and if they did not spin they would not exist…to exist and to rotate are the same thing.” The ASP feels Itself and feels Itself to move. If it moves in a wave-form, it feels, on the bend, a tension process. On the inside of the bend is compression, and on the out-side, strain. If it is bent into a circle then the outside is stretched and the inside compressed.The centre is positive and the outside, relatively negative. The positive is the positing of something. “In the act of compressing the energy you have taken energy from the environment to compress it.” If the Infinite Power posits a particle, or a complex of them, it creates a body i.e.brings into existence, into manifestation, something that was invisibly extended in the field of power but is now isolated from the surrounding field. So an intensification zone inside a field of power produces, apparently, an existential entity, posited it in the field and abstracted the power from round it. So the power contracts onto a centre, becomes aware of itself as an existent, felt entity, but round it is a feeling of an exhaustion of space. This appears as a void, a vacuum, a free space in which it can move. “So we have brought two things into being simultaneously. We have gained the existential reference point but we have lost being awareness round it.”
When we look at any being we are looking at a complex behaviour of power. A musician is performing very complex movements, but, in a strange way, he is dead to everything else that he could be doing! If you concentrate very hard on any one thing, you are dead to everything else. “You are divided from them and, for you, they don’t exist.” A new baby appears very much alive but “that same being has come down from an extended state of power, where it actually had a wider consciousness than it now has…to live in a physical body is to have a reduced consciousness.” The Absolute, Sentient Power has made for itself physical bodies, zones of contraction, to “make itself aware of its own extension.”
If we draw two circles A and B and overlap them, we can look at A and ignore B, and vice versa. We can also look at the overlap zone (He puts the Greek letter ‘psi’ in it to signify a zone of contested authority.) The circle could be a letter O, or a wedding ring, or a peephole,or anything. The mind has to interpret it and to say something about it. “Because the mind is a function of power and power is forever doing things…it never does nothing.” “Power, by its very nature, tends to formulate, tends to manifest.” If A concentrates on its own intention without reference to B, and B does the same then there is a dispute, a turbulence in the ‘psi’ zone. This could be a lover’s tiff or an international war. The consciousness that was focussed on A and on B can become focussed on the zone in-between and the dispute can become the most important thing, as in a war. This can occur between nations, in a family, but also within an individual human. “if that individual has more than one idea.” If an individual carries disparate ideas these can fight in the mind and cause a breakdown, first in the bio-field, then in organs and tissues leading to disease and ultimately disintegration, death. Similarly, a disparity of emotions or of wills can kill the body if not resolved. These can be dispersed throughout the body. “It is possible to have so many conflicts dispersed over the body, that you actually begin to disintegrate all over instead of in a particular organ.” This is the rationale of ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘forgive your enemies’, because if you don’t you have a disparity inside your own being. “Vibration destroys, therefore we have to cut down the disparities.”
How? We have to find “some mode of a binding concept to tie these two together.” This is love. Love is ‘working for the potentialities of all beings.’ This is a super-concept which can harmonise all of the disparate energies within us. We are all the descendants of many ancestors. Our protoplasm has inherited all of their disparate ideas, feelings and wills. This warring mass can kill us long before we would wish if we cannot bring peace into ourselves. We do this by turning the ‘i’ of ‘live’ into ‘love’. “I must live” must become “I will love…I will embrace all the disparities.” We do this by tolerance. This means control by understanding, not by force. We have to convert the ‘I’ of the ego into ‘O’, all of us. “Live becomes love if you allow all beings are pursuing the same goal, resec.”
He talks of the ‘near-death’ experience: before resuscitation starts there is a feeling of intense enjoyment. Then anger at the rescuers. We go through five stages of dying, living and loving. First is denial, refusal. We began in a state of bliss. The Infinite is a continuum of uninterrupted bliss, because there are no impedances. Consciousness is in all directions, but where two directions cross, there is an opposition of forces and a spin zone (forces in opposition produce rotation). This spin zone is a contraction and reduces the sense of bliss, so the immediate response is refusal. You try to hold it so that it does not spread i.e. you contract consciousness onto the very thing you don’t want. Individuation interrupts the bliss and the mere fact you focus on it piles in more energy to it. “The denial now becomes more important than the bliss.” Refusal of the vortex you have created increases into rage and produces a vibration (raja) “The more energy you pile into it, the more individuatedly you live.” “The more it vibrates, the more it gets out of control until you become aware that you cannot make that egoic zone obey you and you give up.” “What you have done is made a mistake.” “You are a self-defeating energy system. So you become depressed. You cannot win.”
Eventually you must accept that you cannot win and then “something peculiar happens.” The energy directed against the egoic vortex dies down and with it, the vibration. You begin to feel that you might enjoy yourself again. As this continues, you find yourself back in the continuum again. You have learned a lesson. Next time you will not focus on the individual spin because ‘consciousness is a catalyst’ and will reinforce the energy of it. This time you will just observe to see what happens. Your consciousness can now expand to observe other, individual zones and to see the relational possibilities between them. The consciousness is now transcendent awareness. It has let go of the focus on the egoic, contractive, self-defeating zone and expanded back into the field. (He suggests here that such an enlightened being can see possibilities for others that they cannot and direct them!) “The over-looking consciousness of the more sensitive being can feel the purposes (of other beings) and can introduce gradients of feeling into the field which those individuals will pick up as their own inclinations.”
Egoic living is really a kind of death because it isolates from interfunction with others. “Christianity is in Cosmos” it did not start 2000 years ago! The symbol of the cross in the circle is ancient, and was taught in every major religion. The vortical spin is the first point of individuation. Without the vortex there could be no pluralisations of appreciation of bliss. If we identify only with the egoic self we are dead to the Infinite beyond it, but if we refuse individuation we are dead by annihilation of the individual. We must do both. We must love.
The dot in the circle is the individual, the circle is the other beings, all centres of reference, all equally valid. There is an egoic stress on live, the dot, and love all around. There are three processes; “The lowest, egoic individuation, the highest, infinite bliss.”.. “and between the two…the zone of interfunction of living beings.”
“Then live, love, laugh will be three levels of the same power. ‘Laugh’ means the conjunction of powers disporting in the love relation of the living individuals.”
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THE LONG BODY
THE LONG BODY
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday on 29.06.1975
Eugene begins by saying that to examine the idea of death he has to examine the opposite, because they are “mutually defining.” However, the opposite of death is not ‘life’ but ‘love’. The word ‘live’ refers to the individual (the ‘i’ signifies ‘individuation’) The word ‘love’ requires another being, two or more are needed. Death means ‘disintegration’, and in this sense, death of the physical body occurs when it disintegrates. But the D in ‘death’ signifies division and also a door. For the soul it is not an end but a door from one state of being to another.
In the nineteenth century we thought that matter was made of atoms. Now we know that there are no primary particles, just energies. Everything is energy, and energy is indestructible; it can only change frequency. Only what is structured can be destructured, destroyed. But it can be restricted.
Read more . . .
We know that protoplasm is an excellent recording material, that records, not only the formal vibratory behaviour of ideas, but also of the emotional charges upon them. “We can all say E=MC2 without emotion, but if we say E=MC2 = Hiroshima, the equation becomes emotionally charged.” So we have two long bodies: a formal one and an emotionally charged one. By repression, we can inhibit our emotional responses to any experience which is why atrocities can happen. We can also remember emotional experiences without replaying their formal aspects so “ we can actually separate the two records and play ideas from experience and emotions from experience quite separately” “The form is not the emotion.” By an act of will we can separate the two long bodies and replay either without the other. Because we have initiative will we can choose to think about something without emoting about it and we can also emote strongly without looking at the reasons for doing so. By deep introversion we can do this into our parental records and back further. “We have millions of years of records inside us.” “95% of the rubbish that comes up…is ancestral.”
Many people feel anxious without knowing why. This is “Long Body anxiety.” In addition, because we share energy fields, when we are in close proximity to others, we can experience the anxieties of those around us. We can also have objective anxiety which has a definable cause, usually fear of something about to happen to us. Both can be present simultaneously. If we do not know about the long body we cannot solve the problems of defined and undefined anxieties. If we do not know the sources of our anxieties we cannot deal with them.
Moving to the next level of the Long Body; the bio-field. He puts the protoplasmic aspect on the little finger and the bio-field one on the ring finger. We know that the physical world is controlled by field forces and so is the chemistry of our physical bodies. Logically, these forces were there at the very beginnings of life in the primordial soup, so the bio-field long body goes right back to this. The bio-field is a bio-magnetic field and, just like the recordings on a magnetic tape, it records also. As it is a field, it has no clearly defined edges and “having no clearly defined edges, it has no clearly defined purpose.” “You actually have an emotive, inadequately defined, long body of bio-magnetic power controlling your chemistry, creating moods in you, producing happiness, misery, optimism, and until you know what it is and how to get hold of it you can do nothing about it.”
Reincarnation and rebirth ; two slightly different concepts. Reincarnation refers to the soul, rebirth to a set of tendencies, a pattern of desires. The Absolute, Sentient Power feels itself infinitely and we all share in this. Women feel it more than men. It is a feeling without edges, without definition, and it is of anxiety, ‘angst’. “It is a general background of protoplasm at its bio-magnetic level.” But before this cosmic level there was the chaos of the para-cosmic, and this also feeds into the cosmic: “If you had not got that egotistic body to hang on to and anchor, you would literally dissipate to infinity.”
Men are better than women at defending themselves against the anxiety coming from infinity by expanding their ego structures. They are ‘more existent’ than women i.e. they ‘stand out’ more from that infinite anxiety. That is why men pursue fame, and wealth and titles. A title is a refuge, an anchor. It says “I know who I am.”
“So now we have this long body that is at least as old as the universe that we know, plus the antecedents of that universe, which is a lonnnng body.”
In addition to the long bodies of protoplasm and bio-magnetic field, we have a mentational one that is equally as old. The Absolute, Sentient Power produces structures, geometries, forms and the totality of these makes an ‘ideational’ long body which contains also the memories of all the states of its evolution, formally recorded in the cosmic and para-cosmic field. Beyond the cosmos and permeating it absolutely, there is a field of ideas, and these forms are continuously moving and are sometimes seen in meditation. (And also in the D.T.’s!) This long body of ideas we place on the middle finger, along with Saturn to remind us that the middle finger deals with time and time is simply the eternal, moving relative to an observer.
Above this, we have the long body of noumena, a body of concepts. Here we change from a sequence of time to a spatial extension without time, a 3D sphere extending to infinity. And above this we have the long body of volition. “95% of what happens to us is not volitional at all.” “A stimulus comes and we react before we think about the nature of the situation.” We are conditioned by the totality of our ancestral records in our protoplasm; all our bio-magnetic preferences, all our ideations, all our conceptualisations, all our volitions, all our choosings. In Buddhism there is no idea of soul, no entity, only a pattern of desires (karma) which grasp at life and cause rebirth. (appetival self-formulation.) So in Buddhism , the long body is the totality of “all the thirst for life and hunger for experience that you have ever had and patterned by your own self-choices.” It is not an entity but it is an energy that captivates and limits itself. “Usually you are so happy with your egotistic self-reference because it has rescued you from the infinite anxiety, that you cling to it as a support for your consciousness to stabilise it, and you treat it as an entity when, in fact, it is a process.”
In the Christian tradition, we use the term ‘soul’ which suggests ‘entity’ but the Buddhistic view is more correct, which sees the soul as a process of energy. The Self=Atman = Brahman=Infinite, extended power. This is the real ‘Self’. “If you lift yourself up… progressively to the overseer one… till you identify pure consciousness without an edge then say ‘that is the Self’. You cannot say it is the “one,” because that circumscribes it. “So you just say it is the extended, the Brahman, the extended, sentient power.” “Infinite appetite has created itself lots of long bodies and there are no entities in the sense of private, self beings. The only true entity is infinity itself, a life process crucifying itself on forms to stabilise itself, to rescue itself from an absolute anxiety.”
“Christ is my anchor.” Anchor means ‘snake’, that is appetite, plus ‘chor’, which means hierarchy. Anchor means ‘I know my appetival power establishes a hierarchy in itself. I don’t go looking outside’.
“Every being in this room is an infinite sentient power that has generated for itself, internal to itself, a body of reference aimed at establishing security of tenure for a governing concept.” “It is uncomfortable because it throws total self-responsibility on us. Who can we blame? We have no grounds of complaint against husband, or wife, or children, or parents, or society or rotten government, or trade unions. We have no ground of complaint against anything, anywhere, because we are here, in the situation in which we have put ourselves.”
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ENLIGHTENMENT
ENLIGHTENMENT
Précis of a talk given at Parklands in 1974
Eugene compares Eastern and Western approaches to this. Because everybody’s grass seems greener, we tend to think of enlightenment as being somewhere other than where we are. Many have gone to the East, to India and China to seek it. However, in China, many have gone to the West to seek it, to India. The terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ do not refer to geography but to the human body. The East is the consciousness in the centre of our body, the West is the body itself, the physical world. The sun, the light of consciousness, rises in the East and shines to the West, the physical body. The Buddhistic doctrine of the ‘Pure Land’ refers to this being found in the West.
Since the Renaissance, we in the West, have taken the empirical approach to understanding ourselves. In the East the mystical, introvert discovery of the centre of consciousness has been the tradition. Consciousness depends on a containing periphery, an integument, a skin, which allows discrimination between outside and inside. The periphery is the demarcation line between consciousness inside and outside. It is the resistances of the boundaries within the body that gives rise to consciousness. Without this body of resistances we would not be conscious. The universal energy that flows through all bodies becomes conscious as it flows through resistances. Anything at all which has a periphery offers resistance to the universal energy and is therefore conscious, even an atom.
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To attain enlightenment we need the resistance of other humans to help us. Every society has developed a system of ideas to bind people together to give them an identity: family,tribal, national, international. This system of ideas has a philosophical expression, through the reason and a religious expression through faith. Religion requires a leap of faith to reach a conclusion, philosophy uses logic. Since the Renaissance we have been increasingly dominated by scientific research which tries to disprove the other two. The quick way to enlightenment is the religious one i.e. a leap of faith. Philosophical reasoning is slower. Empirical science is the slowest of all.
Religion gave us ‘morality’ a word which means to put a wall around, to constrain people, to increase the resistances needed for spiritual development. Its purpose has often been misunderstood. At a certain stage of our development, external constraints on our behaviour were necessary to keep us in order. Unlike the insect world, we do not have instincts to tell us what to do. There had to be a system of controls. Each individual has a mind of their own and an external force was needed to do this. The solution adopted by most societies was religion. The notion that an all-seeing God would watch over his creation and spot any wrongdoers was a good way of ensuring conformity to the rules.
About 600BC we see the emergence of philosophy and a set of binding concepts borrowed from religion, but now expressed through reason. One of the concepts invented was the notion of a “Happy Land” far away where a human would go to, after death, if they had led a good life. “The power of an idea that makes the idea acceptable is really the essential truth of the idea…people do not believe rubbish…they suspect it, but they do believe what is essentially true.” These ideas lasted, in various forms, such as Buddhism, until the Renaissance and the beginnings of science, and the notion of a ‘social contract’.
Our consciousness is a field of sentient power that can only become conscious when it meets a resistance. The resistances of the physical body are enhanced by living in groups with other people. The physical body is more than the material one. The word ‘physical’ does not mean quite the same as ‘material’. “Matter implies a repetitive, rotatory process that does not emerge, but the physical world implies an emergence from that material world.” In the physical body there is growth and emergence, not found in materiality. The material world is gross matter, dark and inert. The real physical body is a growing power. When we eat food we take in matter, we break it down into energy, which is distributed around our physical body. This body has a shape, a form, which is not made by the food we eat. This form is a product of our will. The body has its own intelligence e.g. a wound will be repaired by the body. When we put food into our body we clothe it, veil it, obscure it
with matter. But the physical self is also the spiritual self. It uses the food to grow and to maintain itself. The physical self is projected from the centre of consciousness and is that consciousness pushed out, so that our physical self is spirit. We do not have a physical body and a spirit body. It is one thing. Our consciousness spreads out to a certain distance, to the periphery, and then it adds to itself food, which it keeps on the periphery of its being. Our physicality is the expression of our centre of consciousness. We are as we are because we have so made ourselves with our will.
Enlightenment is possible by understanding the physical body. In answer to the question: “How do I gain it?” A sage might say, “Who is holding you in bondage?” “Who” means a field of sentient power. We are held in bondage by concepts, given to us by our educators by means of an alphabet “One of the most powerful weapons for binding people together…and only about 6000 years old.” With just a few alphabetical symbols we can produce an infinity of concepts to bind us. “You bind you when you accept a concept…either with a leap of faith, or by reasoning through it, or scientifically, by experiment.” It is serial thought that binds us because it takes individual thoughts from the total presentation of information available to us and in this way we build up knowledge. But the total information is wisdom and to take things out and serialise them is to descend from wisdom into knowledge and the fall is into bondage.
No-one is responsible for the condition of any human individual other than that individual.
Enlightenment results from the recognition that we are entirely self-precipitated, we create our own being. When we sit in meditation, we look into the mind and stay very alert. We discover that the essence of mind is creative, it is not blank it is not static. It is creative, but not serial. It is giving us simultaneous total presentation of the truth of being. The void is not blankness. There has been much misunderstanding of this. Many thinkers and writers have equated the idea of voidity with a blank mind. “When the real meaning of voidity is understood, then the ‘Pure Land’, the Buddha, the bliss, is all there simultaneously.”
We can redefine ourselves, re-create ourselves, moment to moment. We do not have to suffer from inertia. This is called ‘the forgiveness of sins’. It is much easier to forgive the errors of others than it is to forgive our own mistakes, but we can and must do so. “Self-forgiveness means ‘back in the moment’ back into the ‘here and now’.
“If you know that your physicality is your spirituality, you will not start looking outside your physicality for spirituality. What you will do is start spiritualising your physicality consciously. That is, realising that you are, actually, physically, spiritual. There is then no battle between Spirit and Flesh. The battle is between the erroneous ideas and the true ideas and you let the battle fight itself out, and you watch.”
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HISTOLYSIS
HISTOLYSIS
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 1.04.1979
Eugene begins with a definition: “the dissolution of the dividing walls which keep an organism in cellular condition.” Loosely, it is the clinical death of tissue. But “the process of histolysis means that all the cellular divisions which the one egg has made, have to be broken down.” He asks the audience to imagine that they could strip themselves of all cellular divisions, including skin, and allow their protoplasm to pool on the floor, “into one, colloidal mess.” He asks: “Would you like it?” Because you would not know who you were you. There would be no individuality.
He uses the example of the metamorphosis of the butterfly. (In ancient Greek, ‘psyche’ meant both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’.) because each can fly after the death of the physical body. The larval stage is primordial appetite, the larva is stuffing itself with food to get the energy it will need for its pupal stage. Pupal=pupil=learner. We are all primordial appetite learning how to become individuated beings. For this, we have to be patterned, we need internal structures. “If that gelatinous mess on the carpet…were the ultimate reality, there would be no possibility of it developing into the truly individuated form that it can and does become.” There has to be another level of being, transcending that colloidal phase. This is the ‘eidetic field’, a very clearly defined idea structure. There is a primordial power source for every being: “The Father,” the Infinite, Sentient Power. This Infinite energy field is eternal and self-stimulating. The finger of God comes into the field and makes a point. (Like Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam) In this way, the Field structuralises Itself. “Protoplasm is not fundamental, it is a structure, willed by this energy.”
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There are two kinds of reasoning: ‘a posteriori’, based on external sense percepts, the kind that scientists use, and ‘a priori’, which philosophers use because it deals with logic. ‘Logos’ is a Greek word meaning ‘word’ and and ‘ratio’, though not the ratio derived from the world of objects, which provides the kind of certainty that the scientist wants to discover for everything, including the human being. It tries to reduce the human to the level of the machine. The true Logos refers to the ‘lamda’; light, free energy, and the ‘gamma’; compacted energy. Our bones are gamma, our intelligence is lamda. “Between your intelligence and your bones there is a hierarchy, a series of grades of relative unfreedom, the gamma.” “We are all, ultimately, intelligence and intelligence is structured sentience.” This intelligence can, and does, change its mind. This change is done in an instant. All change is sudden and involves anxiety, ‘angst’. When a caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, it hides away from predators; it knows it is vulnerable and so is ‘anxious’. Any metamorphosis contains this anxiety. The word ‘morph’ means both ‘form’ and ‘sleep’. The person who wakes up in the morning is not the same one who went to sleep! The caterpillar reminds us that “only if we are busy are we safe from being interfered with. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” We have to be busy. “I must be about my Father’s business.” “If you allow yourself to become passive…they will turbulate you in the way that they determine.”
Since the beginning, a small group of men have controlled others by use of the tongue. (lingua=lingam=phallus=primordial power) Manipulation of the tongue determines thought. To liberate ourselves from the manipulation of others, we have to understand or terms fully. Words control ideas, emotions and actions. Until we can control our vocabulary, our actions are likely to be reactions to external stimuli.
The histolic process occurs, not just in the physical body, but also in its emotions and ideas. Our likes and dislikes are also structured, and, unless we learn to change them, we are bound by them. At first,these are given to us by parents, such as an acquired taste for certain foods. The historic process can be used to change anything, body, emotions, ideas, concepts, will, and “all involve anxiety at every level, because you might be interfered with.” The Universal Sentient Power is pushing everyone of us to individuate, whether we like it or not…”and it does not care what we suffer…if it kills you in the process…death is not very important anyway.” The most important is the original, energy field which is individuated long before the appearance of protoplasm. Each one of us is already an eternal monad and we are pushed to individuate, to become unique, “against another force called ‘mammon’.” If we serve mammon we are not going to change, we will simply continue to pursue comfort. “The opposite to eternal free initiative is perfect mechanism.” The energy involved in temptation must be matched by a greater energy towards freedom. “If you want anything you are not free.” “An act of will is not a want…it just wells up from the centre…and it doesn’t care about gross, material comfort.” “The same cosmic power is offering you freedom and tempting you, disguised as the devil, with eternal comfort.”
Examples of metamorphic changes: all produce anxiety. e.g. sperm: Why millions? Answer: “rivalry.” “If just one were released it couldn’t be bothered to try.” Football: The mass is there to make any single one of them deluded into thinking that because all of them are there, it must be important.” Birth: From being cocooned in a warm, dark, comfortable place to be thrust out into a world of bright lights, noise and cold air.” Huge anxiety in this change! Now it is on its own and that is very dangerous. “Being born is a dangerous time and yet you have to be born in order to be individuated.”
Mitosis in the egg is a kind of death. The sperm has to die in the egg for fertilisation. Puberty is another metamorphosis, so is the menopause, and, of course, so is death. With each change there is a reorientation. We can reorientate ourselves at any point in life but usually it occurs later in life because of other constraints, job, family etc.
For 6000 years governments have kept people in the dark about the nature of initiative
The word ‘Cain’ means ‘intelligence of God’. ‘Ab-el’ means ‘God is my Father’. Cain murdered Abel and we have all been taught that Cain was the bad boy, yet it had to be so because Abel knew he could rely on his father. It was too soon at the beginning of evolution for that to be useful to God. In the same way, the temptation by the serpent: “Adam could have carried on doing as he was told, but would he have individuated? No. “There would have been no opposition to God, only continual obedience.” Opposition is essential for individuation, otherwise,”you could be a very good boy…but you would not be an individuated good boy.” The Fall of Lucifer, and later of Adam, giving in to temptation, is a necessary part of the evolutionary process. We cannot defeat the Infinite in its attempt to individuate us. We can make ourselves miserable by trying not to be individuals, by trying to be a member of a group. You might have to say to your friends, “Sorry, but I am individuating at the moment.” But you probably won’t get invited out again.
We have all been trained by priests and scientists over time to be slaves. For the last six thousand years, at least, we have been ruled by men who understood that their power over us demanded that we obey them as rightful rulers. This principle still applies. We are “hammered into shape” by parents and educators which destroys our unique talents and makes us conform to their will. We have all learned to come ‘good’ boys and girls. Yet we know inside that this is not what we should be doing.
Like the larva, we are pure appetite. We knew this ‘in utero’ and have forgotten it. We take in food at the gross level and we take in ideas. Both are energy. When we have taken in enough we go to sleep, we enter a pupal phase each night. The energies within us fight and the best occasion for this is sleep. We can will ourselves to change each night in sleep. We know that the last thing ‘on our mind’ when we go to sleep can condition our waking state so that each night before we go to sleep we should say: “I am going to sleep to change my mind.” “I shall be another being in the morning. We should say this, believing it to be true. “Because it is.” We enter into that pupal stage, and during deep sleep the real ideas that we have absorbed can work within us. God is saying, “While you are asleep, I, the God of gods am modelling you in the way I will you to go towards individuation.” “Remember God is on your side when you do this.” It is a very powerful determinant, a re-orientation of consciousness. In the morning you are a new ‘per-son’, a new ‘through sounding’. “Every night that you go to sleep like that, your confidence increasing, you will have more work done for you by that Infinite Power than your empirical, external ego could ever do for you. The Infinite field knows the direction of your orientation, your empirical ego does not.”
Messages are running up and down the ‘Jacob’s ladder’ of your spinal column. Your empirical ego cannot determine them, but the moment you say: “OK I give in. Individuate me, because you know where I am going,” Then you can rest easily.
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INTEGRATION
INTEGRATION
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands
Eugene begins with a drawing of the human eye. “There is no depth in the retinal image.” He repeats this a number of times to fix it in our minds. He then uses the mnemonic of the hand, a “manual for remembering.” Body goes on the little finger, feeling (like/dislike) on the ring finger, mentation (serial thinking) on the middle finger, comprehension (simultaneous understanding) on the index finger, and initiative will on the thumb.
He repeats: “There is no depth in the retinal image.” So everything that appears to have depth must have come from another source. To integrate, we must start with a physical body. Without a body there would be simply a field of Infinite Sentience. This Infinite Field is ‘bliss’, ananda. This bliss is not ‘self-satisfied’, because it has not got a ‘self’ until there is a body, a reference centre. Having got a body, we must be able to feel, to like moving towards something, or to dislike, moving away from something. Because we have not one, but two feelings, we need something beyond feeling and this is ‘mentation’. The ‘men’ means measurement, so we can measure the amount of feeling of like/dislike. This measuring is always serial, and cannot solve a problem. “The purpose of mentation is not the solution of a problem…but the enumeration of the parts of the problem…the solution of a problem takes you up to another level.” This is ‘comprehension’, which is not serial but holds all the elements. (If we count the fingers of the hand, that is serial, but if we comprehend the many functions of the hand, that is simultaneous.)
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Finally, we need a will (initiative, beginning). To initiate is to start something. Once started, an action will continue from mass inertia. With initiative, we can interfere with a situation that we have comprehended. “The will can never operate unless there has been comprehension and all the energies of the body are brought into a state of stillness.” Without stillness, the body and mind are running on inertia, previously established motion, ‘in-er-tia’, ‘in-work-affirming’. This is the result of will, which set something to operate and then left this mass-moving force to continue. “The point of initiation is will, what is not initiation is not will.”
He relates the five functions of a whole being to the Indian caste system, where there are 4 divisions, plus the ‘outcastes’, the ‘untouchables’. (These are represented by the little finger, the physical body.) He then refers to a sixth being, who is outside of the system, he is an observer. Then there is a seven-man (spirit-even) who is aware that even the Yogi, (no. 6) is outside the system, but still reactive to it. No. 7 is outside and not reactive to it. It is the system that convinced no. 6 to become a Yogi, like the Buddha, and since there is a 7, there must be a relationship to the rest and this is no.8. Eighth means ‘reciprocal interrelation’, the reciprocal interpenetration of all beings. (ji-ji-muge)
Every stimulus coming to the body will stimulate each level: first the physical body, then the feeling, the mentation, the comprehension, and the will. This produces a reaction. But it also goes the other way: From the will comes a stimulus to the comprehension, from this to the mentation, to the feeling, and then a motor response from the body. Integrating these five functions is a problem for all humans but also all human groups and societies. Unless there is someone who can overlook the whole process, then there will be war. There must be an intelligence that comprehends it all.
He then introduces the idea of a snake. This is your spinal cord which has grown itself a brain.It therefore goes on your little finger, the body. The snake represents sensuous, self-satisfaction.SSS
On your ring finger you can write ‘dog’. The dog is a pack-animal and a symbol of cooperation with other beings. This is our ‘herd-instinct’ our sense of belonging. It is also the beginning of resentment, because, before mentation, all we have is like/dislike and sometimes we regress to an earlier state of being when someone does something we don’t like. (All psychopathology in humans is caused by this.) With ‘man’ comes mentation. The outer cortex of the brain is an evolutionary development and appears in man. Man is the creature that can and does invent neurosis. “And he does that by counting his resentments.” (re-feelings). We record our resentments and we keep files, under proper initials, all the things that cause resentment. We go over them and repeat them and give them a value. “That is a man’s function. We cannot be neurotic unless we are men, unless we count, and unless, specifically, we count our resentments.” Beyond the mentational cortex is the appearance of something else. He calls it the ‘counsellor’. This is the higher brain which can say to the neurotic “do not resent life…all you have to do is accept life.” Above the counsellor is the ‘Hard man’. He says that it is possible to rise above the need to be counselled. This is the ‘wilful man’.The evolutionary process in the universe is moving us through these stages and to get through “it will have to learn to be hard with itself.” We have to be able to say: “I will learn to pay the price of my own activities. I will harden myself. I will become self-determinant.” You cannot reach the higher level of consideration for everyone unless you reach the hard man stage first.
Evolution works by steps, not leaps. “The untrodden step will never forgive you.” The hard man is the warrior, from the caste system, he who “fights the good fight.” “Greater is he who conquers himself.” When the hard man has become hard enough, he can afford to be soft. To become illuminated you need to strike a light, and for that you need a flint. Then you can be soft again, but not as before, because you now have the memory of all the stages. Now you can balance hard and soft. Hardness is five, softness is six, and the balance is seven. “A man who knows how to be hard and soft can balance all these forces within himself and therefore can help to balance them in other people and bring them all into the eighth phase of reciprocal interpenetration.”
Beyond that is 9 which is 6 upside down, and the number of the magician. It is the ability to say ‘no’ to everything. (nein) ’No’ to the snake, the dog, the man, the counsellor, the warrior, being soft, being balanced. The number nine remains the same, whatever you do with it: 9×2=18 (8+1), 9×3=27 (2+7), 9×4=36 (3+9), 9×5=45 (9+5), 9×6=54 (5+4), 9×7=63 (6+3), 9×8=72 (7+2), 9×9=81 (8+1). “Nine is the number of the man who, no matter what he does, absolutely, is untouched by his own activity. He has gone beyond ‘karma’.” He suggests that ‘we’, the people in the room, are at the level of 5. i.e. we have the intention of will to do something “to attain through hardness to oneself (6) the possibility of being soft to everybody else (7) in order to get through that stage, to be able to be hard and soft simultaneously (8).”
At our very centre is ‘the worm that dieth not’. This is the snake (SSS) “This is the essence of…God the Father.” The translating energy of bliss, the Absolute, Sentient Power (ASP) This snake puts its tail in its mouth and circumscribes (ON), but ‘constant stimulation is no stimulation’ so it has to introduce into itself ‘tensions’. An intention is to curve and contract the energy “If you close the curve you then have an ideational content.” an idea in the mind or a definable feeling of like or dislike. This translating energy, ananda, by crossing with itself, creates intersections. It can now translate and it can rotate. It can go from AN to ON and back to AN. “The original spirit S creates phenomena P. There can be no P other than in the S and the S has produced the P by self-intentionality. The subject has written its own predicate.
“If we are to gain integration, we must first become conscious of the parts constituting our being, how the parting arose, the purpose of that parting.” “You cannot integrate what you don’t know about.” “By continual remembrance of this functional structure within the being…they begin to integrate.” “You needs must love the highest when you see it.” So that you cannot help liking your own efficiency better than you like your inefficiency, and your dislike of your inefficiency is the same thing as the driving power that moves you to evolve to your top level, number nine.”
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LAST JUDGEMENT
LAST JUDGEMENT
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 28.07.1985
Eugene begins by analysing the word ‘judgement’. The ‘Last Judgement’ is “that condition in which a being puts itself when, by affirmative power, it divides or analyses its own substantiality in its triple aspect of force, form, function; or will, idea and activity, and to count it, evaluate it, and then to nail oneself on that so that it is permanently fixated.” He says that every judgement is a ‘last one’ because we live in a moving present! Anyone can die, as they are judging something, either themselves or others, and that will be their last judgement. “Whether, after death, you are able to re-evaluate it or not is a very difficult problem.” He warns against making judgements as you are going to sleep. We go through a kind of death process every night when we go to sleep and our last judgement before doing so conditions the processes that go on in our unconscious whilst asleep and can determine the mood we wake up in. So it is a good idea to put ourselves in a good mood before going to sleep. Negative mind states “can poison your chemistry.”
Apart from accidental death, and the ‘death’ we go through every night, we can actually prepare ourselves by rehearsing. We can write down our assessment of ourselves, our friends, acquaintances and the world, and have this ready for when death comes. If we rehearse this then we can remember it at the time. This can also be done by a group of people analysing their lives together and making a group ‘last judgement’. Theoretically, this could be done by humanity!
There is also the judgement of God, as seen in Noah’s Flood. God said: “Fire next time,” so many think that destroying the earth by fire could be the ‘Last Judgement’. This has been used as a frightening concept, especially in the West, for a very long time.
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In Hinduism and Buddhism the universe comes and goes. This is seen as God breathing in and out. After each ‘outbreath’, or phase of manifestation, there is a ‘pralaya’, the quiet state when God makes His judgement on what has been before the creation starts again. This is the ‘last judgement’ for that cycle. In the same way, when we go to sleep at night, we review the day and enter a state of ‘pralaya’ in which we reflect on the judgements we made before going to sleep, and in the morning we start again.
Every night we go to sleep and during the deep, dreamless sleep phase, decisions are made about our future, according to the judgements we have already made. This is disturbing to us because the decisions are made when we are unconscious, so we do not know what we have decided. We might have decided to re-arrange our lives in ways we do not want when awake. “every night, when we go to sleep, the judgements we have made add up to a pattern, and that pattern determines our future,”
We could all be killed at any moment in a nuclear attack. The last judgement we make before this could be very important as we might not have time to reform ourselves.
The Lord’s Prayer says: “Lead us not into temptation.” We judge all the time in our waking life. We judge our own actions and we judge the actions of others in the light of our personal principles “and we do this all the time, generally unconsciously, but we pay the price of those judgements.” When we go to sleep at night we may make a “reformation promise” to improve. However, he says we are not trying to evolve, “you are trying to dodge trouble, and your higher Self says: “Aha, you want to dodge that trouble. I’ll give you another one.” Jesus was a good, Jewish, psychologist, so he bent the advice a bit in this prayer. You are already biased towards certain activities, so you say “Lead us not” and that reminds you…there is temptation, so you go on guard.”The talk becomes an exchange between Eugene and audience members, and the questions and answers from the audience are not clear enough to transcribe, so the rest of the talk is very one-sided with his responses not able to be matched accurately with the questions. Nevertheless, as always, there are ‘pearls of wisdom’ here:
The talk becomes an exchange between Eugene and audience members, and the questions and answers from the audience are not clear enough to transcribe, so the rest of the talk is very one-sided with his responses not able to be matched accurately with the questions. Nevertheless, as always, there are ‘pearls of wisdom’ here:
When you make a judgement, you don’t make it in a vacuum, you make it in the field of the universe, and the Universal Power reacts to your judgement. We are not alone.
When you go into a deep, dreamless sleep, do you know you exchange information with other, deep, dreamless sleepers and you are continuously, through the universal Field of Sentient Power, passing information to your enemies and misinformation to your supporters. So judgement itself is very dangerous, and the last judgement, the one you are caught with at death, is very, very dangerous.
In business, people keep secrets, about sources, markets, rivals etc. Instead of being in a low-level business, go for a higher one. Every time you give away all your information…a message goes through the field: “This fellow deserves promotion,” and he goes up. Right at the top you are “about My Father’s Business.” Then you have the absolute backing of the Absolute…because you have told the truth at lower levels. Intelligence is always pushing you higher.
There is no possibility of keeping a secret, it is bound to leak somewhere. This is a basis for making a judgement, to live our lives believing this to be true.
“Consciousness is a matter of interest, quickness is a matter of interest, so if you are interested enough, you will be conscious and quick…and produce the correct response.”
Do you know what sleep is for? Assimilating a lesson that you did not assimilate when you were awake. People lead their lives daily and they don’t take much notice of the lesson that is there. They are too busy.
Throughout the day how many times are we put under test and we are too busy to deal with it? But if we practise and solve every problem, then in sleep time, we reduce the need to re-examine it.
The best way to go to sleep is not to pray to be released from trouble, but just pray, and prayer means ‘work’ for enough light for your next step.
When you wake up in the morning you say: “I and the Absolute are not different.” But when you get out of bed you say: “I will now adjust myself to the material fact.”- and then remember you are both.
This is the J in ‘Judgement’, “I affirm that I have committed myself into a body.”
God does not make mistakes. God, as man, makes mistakes, by identifying with the finite condition of man, but that is not God.
If God can do it, I can do it. But He has got to be in my position when He does it, otherwise it is not fair play.
Right now, somewhere, your soul, your sentience remembers wholeness and knows it is not in that state now. That is called the Fall. There is an awareness of the wholeness of all being, all life, all worlds, they are all the same. They are the Supreme One, and you remember it, and that is called conscience, it niggles you when you do something inefficient or wrong, it doesn’t let you be quiet because you remember wholeness is the primary experience of all beings.
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LAST WORDS
LAST WORDS
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands 29.03.1987 Easter Sunday
Question: There is obviously a way to die properly?
E.H: He suggests that living and dying is a question of convenience and that we cannot fully die unless we are fully engaged in living. Wholly living and wholly dying go together. Most people are not fully in their bodies but instead are “dreaming” about situations they would rather be in and “you cannot die efficiently in the middle of a dream.” We have to be fully incarnate in the body before we can let go of it.
We all like to think we are a unity but we have inertias, ancestral influences, educational and government forces all making demands which we are not coping with during life and at death. We have to gather ourselves together and this is a constant battle. Most people feel rejected at some stage of their lives. We tend to view this negatively because we want acceptance from others. Yet, he says we should be grateful for this. “Instead of ‘woe is me’ we should say ‘good’, this rejection throws me back on me, and there is the ground of my individuation.”
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We can view death very differently if we remember that the entire universe is a living organism. When a physical body dies, the disintegration process is the source of new life for other organisms. Instead of thinking of it as a dead body we can see it as “a newly-occupied territory, filled with other bodies, bacteria, viruses, and so on.” Life goes on in different ways and nothing is wasted. He links this with the sacrament of the Eucharist: “There is only one living body, the body of God, and everyone is eating It…and drinking His wine, His spiritual life.” The ritual of the Eucharist in church is a reminder of this fact. Everything we eat and drink, every breath we take, is taken from the body of God. This is unavoidable, because there is nothing else!
Question about Christ’s body after the crucifixion.
The physical body is a mass of chemicals which looks like you. The physical body is not you. “You are a soul which has condensed a body in your image.” The body that we and others see is the result of the totality of our “intention to be and to communicate…it is borrowed from food.” “Your real self looks exactly like you, with your moods, your expressions..as far as ordinary chemistry can adjust itself to its vibrations.” When Christ died He changed the constitution of the chemistry of His physical body, raising its frequency. This is why He warned Mary not to touch Him after the resurrection; she would have been in danger from the difference. Even at our level we can change the vibrational rate of our physical bodies through diet and through our emotions. ‘Bad’ emotions, such as ‘the four nails’ of pride, covetousness, envy and anger, will lower the body’s frequency and make “a low-level, coarse body that cannot understand higher matters.” If we think of ourselves as modalities of Infinite Spirit our frequency changes, along with our body chemistry. He suggests that a man who is celibate for “three months minimum” will find that sparks will fly, literally, at his next sexual encounter, because of stored energy in his body creating a potential difference between him and his partner.
He says that some bodies do not corrupt so quickly at death, for the same reason, that the body chemistry has become refined. Others corrupt more quickly than normal because the person died in a bad temper, which “makes the chemistry of disintegration.” We should not worry about the gross, physical body but we should “attend to your real body, the form of you.” When we look in a mirror we should observe if we are happy, not with our physical appearance, but our expression. A bad expression produces bad chemistry. If we are not satisfied with our expression “that means you are not satisfied with you.” And, “If you are not satisfied with you at death…that is the way to a state called ‘hell’.” “What is worse than a disembodied spirit with no gross body but with a body of feelings and ideas which are totally unacceptable to the man that made them.” Often we are not aware of the expression we are showing. He gives an example of a child on a train having a tantrum. He recorded her for two minutes and then played it back to her. The child was immediately subdued to hear herself reflected back in this way. He gives another example of two babies looking in a mirror and kissing their own reflection, not that of the other baby “…the soul is eternal and knows itself intimately.”
Question: What is left of most beings after the second death?
“Scattering.” “There are only two processes of energy: scattering and gathering.” At the second death the erroneous ideas we have are scattered because they cannot logically hold together. “The second death is when you look at yourself and don’t like it, after the death of your body.” Our souls cannot be scattered because they are not made of parts, they are eternal. But what the soul can do is look at the disintegration of its mistaken ideas. The soul is “the Infinite in that place.”
He talks of gathering oneself intellectually. This would require an enormous amount of work to know everything. However, “there is a short way…whatever it is and whether you know it or not, love it. This is easy. Wherever it is and whatever it is, it is backed by the will of God, so I accept it.”
The whole universe is a function of the Absolute Power we call God. This power is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. God is everywhere and in everything. He knows everything, He is the absolute intelligence, so whatever He does must be the right action, always. So whatever happens we can, by an act of will, not only accept it, we can love it. “Why not make this quick, short leap of love…Divine love loves everything…anything, whatever you see.” He gives an example of a burglary at his house in which his psychographic drawings were stolen. We can love everything.
He denounces intellectualism as ‘Cainness’, ‘canniness’. “The history of science is the history of exploded hypotheses.” The pupil in the eye is so-called because it is a ‘learner’. “You are looking for power and the rationale of how to get it…it is a total waste of time.” Even most of the yogas are doing this. Only Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of love, has a beginning, a middle and an end which are the same. If we go for love then we don’t want dominion over anything. We should learn to have the same attitude to everyone else that God has. “Infinite voidity equals God.” VO is the will and ID is the idea, form, intellect. “Voidity is the perfect balance of non-manifest intelligent power.” We are all eternal forms in the mind of God, not created but “eternally what they are.” At this level we are in “absolute, mutual interpenetration” yet, at the same time, we are unique. We each have a unique vibration, as unique as a fingerprint, and therefore a unique sound, combining into “a vast symphony.” Prior to creation we are not aware of our uniqueness, we have no sense of being alone and isolated because we are “absolutely interpenetrating everybody.” The Infinite Power has an infinity of modalities within it and each one of us is such a modality, eternally. “That means we have nothing whatever to strive for…what we have got to do is stop egotistically striving to be so much taller than somebody else and hope everybody else will be as tall as we would like to be.” We should be interested in everything, affirm everything, love everything, “and what you call wisdom will be there with you, but not if you don’t love it.”
Question: Is this easier for women?
This is easier for women, because each sperm is a unique, individual, ideational structure, whereas the ovum is “an eternal, unspoilt, sentient sphere.” This makes it easier for the female to appreciate the wholeness of reality, while the intellectually stressed male finds this more difficult. “The woman has got to save the man.” This is why the rabbis said, ‘a man cannot get to heaven without a wife’. When God created, He posited a “sphere of substance.” This substance is female to the Spirit of God. The Spirit is pure initiative and cannot demonstrate Itself without a resistance. “The feminine aspect is resistant to male dominion to do males a favour.” A woman is never satisfied with her partner. “So she has to resist him and throw it back on him and that individuates him.” “That is a nice piece of dialectic because, when he is individuated, he won’t do as he is told!”
“The worst thing a human being can do is to try to fit in a statement to what it has already got, because it is being conditioned by the form of its own content and it can’t take the new statement and make it fit its patterns unless its pattern is already dialectically absolute. That is why you have to make that leap; leap, not intellectual step-by-step. A leap to love. You have to say, “I don’t understand it intellectually, but I do know this: it is a function of the Absolute, whatever it is, and as such has absolute justification and validity, and therefore lovable. Therefore I love it.” “That is the big leap.” It is called the ‘leap of faith’ because it cannot be done intellectually.” That is why the Japanese invented the Koan. Intellect cannot deal with it.
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ETERNITY AND TIME 1
ETERNITY AND TIME 1 AND 2
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Hallliday on 30.07.1978
This is the first part of this talk. Eugene begins with a definition of Faith: “The ability to put your foot down where nothing is, and in the act of putting it down, posit something to put it on.” He suggests that the blank sheet of cellophane on the OHP represents the Infinite, Sentient Power before creation. The audience can all have an idea in the mind of a point that could be made on the sheet, as he has. He is going to make a point on the cellophane and asks the audience to give him an instruction of where to draw it. He uses a red pen, to symbolise active energy, and makes the point. It is Sentient Power which has made the point, using him as a servant of the audience. A point is po in t, a ‘power in crucifixion’. “Because when power posits itself, and fixates itself, power is crucified.” The point now exists, ‘stands out’; before it was hidden in the Field. The word ‘foot’ also means ‘power fixated’ and the point posited is something on which we can put our foot. ‘Put’ is ‘pat’, as in ‘pater’, father. The Father is the power that posits the point, and the point posited is the form, the Son. This is the Father appearing in manifestation. The whole manifest universe is built from such points. Science calls them ‘energy quanta’. The word ‘faith’ and ‘foot’ and ‘put’ and ‘pat’ in ‘pater’ have the same meaning. “Faith is ‘putting power’.” In positing that point, all other possibilities contained within the Infinite Power Field were not selected; but could have been.There are an infinity of possibilities of other forms that could have been selected.
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The whole of infinite space is Sentient Power and that power, by self-focus, self-striking, can posit any form it chooses. “So we inhibit, we hold in potential, all the other forms that would cause us not to be able to see the point.” “The totality of all the mutually inhibiting forms that can be expressed is chaos, that is, the simultaneous, co-presentation of all conceivables.” Chaos is not total disorder, but “out of chaos we can draw order.”
He relates the idea of ‘faith’ to the great religions. Oriental religions, like Hinduism, are focused more on eternity than on time. But the three major ones that came out of the Arabian Desert, are more concerned with the end process of time, the Omega, the final goal. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three historical religions, are concerned with the “march of time,” with evolution and development. Eternity is the simultaneous presentation of all conceivables, time is the same, presented serially, sequentially, bit by bit. He suggests that the focus on eternity by Eastern religions “can have a very peculiar effect on the human psyche. It can actually produce colossal boredom.” The idea of an ‘eternal recurrence’ became unacceptable to world rulers. The historical religions all say there will be an end point to the time-process, an ultimate term to evolution. “We are moving from a state of relative unconsciousness to a state of total consciousness and complete, individual, self-determination.”
Prior to creation, the Infinite, Sentient Power is No-Thing. Nothing is yet manifest. Creation is ‘arcing’, circling, encapsulation. “The moment it creates, it finites, it makes a zone of finitude and that finitude is manifest, it can be counted.” Such a circle is a primitive symbol of God as “self-stimulating, self-precipitating, intelligent power,” the ‘ouroboros’, the ‘serpent with tail in mouth’. Each circle posited includes Sentient Power and excludes Sentient Power. Within each circle there can be further positings until it is filled up, but the centre of the circle remains empty because the power cannot stop moving, so the centre is always free, Sentient Power. Each one of us is such a circle, with free spirit at centre. This free spirit, Immanent Spirit, is our highest Self, the subject, the observer, within each one of us. The whole of the ‘action band’ between our free centre and our periphery, is subject to orders from the centre. Two such beings in contingent relation can interfere with each other and stop each other’s focus on centre. We can fall into identification with the external stimulus. This is the ‘Fall’. “The idea of the Fall, in all religions, is the idea of being fixated on the periphery of being to the point of forgetting one’s centrality of initiative.” “The peripheralisation of awareness results in identification with the external world, called the material world, and the fascinating, that is binding of consciousness, to the external stimulus situation.”
We rarely exhaust each experience before passing on to the next, whether a simple one-off experience or one that may last many years, and therefore, our action band fills up. We are always extroverting our attention into the world of experiences and then going back to centre, then out again, and so on. In this way we fill the action band between centre and periphery with our experiences. Outside us these experiences are events, inside they are states of emotion, feelings, impulses. Each time we extrovert our attention we make a judgment, and every time we go inside we make a judgment of our mental state in response to the external world. The ‘Last Judgment’ will be “I am self-responsible.” Until that time we tend to blame everybody else for our condition and our misfortunes. “At the Last Judgment you blame you.” This is the meaning of the symbol of the cross in the circle. The circle is our zone of influence, the vertical is our active initiative, the horizontal is our passivity to that active initiative. “We are a zone of Sentient Power, positively active, negatively passive to our own positivity.” “We make decisions, most of them stupid, and then we have to deal with them.” This symbol predates historical Christianity; it is the symbol of the Cosmic Logos. It is often seen placed behind the heads of saints because a saint is someone who has realised he is a “self-observing, crucified one.” “A saint is a person that knows he is the cause of his own condition and affirms it and accepts it.” The Last Judgment is the realisation of this, that we cannot blame anybody else for anything that happens to us. It is our reaction to events that is our business, not the events themselves. However, the “whole human race also has a cumulative Last Judgment and the whole universe of manifestation has a Last Judgment too.” After we have made the Last Judgment we are “freely, creatively, beings of initiative…we are able to create ourselves anew every instant.”
The three historical religions can be seen as representing the Holy Trinity; Judaism with God the Father, Christianity with God the Son, and Islam with the Holy Ghost. God the Father posits the world, God the Son redeems it. Islam says that every individual is equal before God. Every Muslim is equal to every other Muslim. “Now history is moving towards a condition where the whole human race is being brought into consciousness of their total self-responsibility.” This will be the result of the movement towards Armageddon, a nuclear holocaust. (An outcome which seemed very likely in the 1970’s and 1980’s.) The physical battle on earth will be preceded by a “war in Heaven,” a war of ideas. “The battle is a battle of concepts,” an ideological battle between materialistic Marxism and the free world.
Historically, we are moving towards a situation where all people will realise that they are self-responsible “And we are being pushed towards it by cosmic, evolutionary power, which we call God.” We cannot stop the earthly powers that prefer physical violence to intelligent solutions. (He uses the example of the fighting on the picket lines between the police and the miners, during the strike.) We can only stop the violence on the inside of each one of us. We cannot stop it in anyone else. “So it is our duty to each one of us, as an individual, to solve the problem of the Armageddon in us as individuals.”
In the bible a figure is given of one hundred and forty-four thousand that will be saved. This does not refer to people. This figure is twelve times twelve. Twelve is governmental perfection so the figure given refers to that perfection refined. “A hundred and forty-four thousand means that the impulses inside every individual, within the nervous system, are so clustered together, that in every individual who has that number, there is total self-control and transcendence of the need for a personal Armageddon.”
He asks: “Why can’t people take it seriously that we are going to be fried by the million? Do you know why? Fundamentally, we don’t believe in death.” “But our own development we must take seriously.”
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HIERARCHY IN BODY CENTRES 1
HIERACHY IN BODY CENTRES 1 AND 2
Eugene begins by saying he is going to carry on from where he left off last time, to expand on what was said then. He starts with the question of centres in the human being related to “certain organic structures in the body.”
Although it is usual to start with a definition of the subject matter, ‘sentience’ is undefinable. A synonym is ‘feeling’, which is the basis of all knowledge. Objects within sentience can be defined by the subject, but this subject is the observer, sentience itself. So sentience is the perceiving subject of phenomena. It is the consciousness, internal to which all objects appear. “When sentience analyses itself and verbalises its analytical process, sentience is then called ‘consciousness’. When sentience is on guard against a very wide field of possibilities, we call it ‘awareness’.” To become conscious we have “to cut reality into bits.” If we do not do this then we may be sentient, we may be aware, but we are not conscious.
To enable us to define and analyse the contents of our consciousness we have developed five senses. Of these, “Seeing is the tyrant because seeing gives you the defined edge whereby you are led to separate, from sentience, it’s content.” “Instead of looking for significance in sentience…we look for significance in the object.” (He writes S for ‘sentient being’ and P for ‘phenomena’, all things posited in sentience.) If we refer to sentience we can say nothing other than that it is infinite and that it is that in which all phenomena are posited. But of P we can say a great deal: “A primary particle pluralised, like a lot of little ball-bearings, and then arranged in patterns, constitutes the analysable universe.” “Ultimate reality is polarised as sentience and power.” Since we cannot say more of sentience he says he will concentrate on the “power positing the phenomena within it.” All phenomena are circumscribed, finite. The more we can circumscribe a situation, the more easily we can deal with it.
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“A human being has five senses in the head and a positor down below and he has a zone between into which S is infiltrating and P is infiltrating.” This in-between zone is “a zone of interference of S and P.” Psychologically, it is the zone of ‘affect’…of emotional play, the zone where you suffer emotionally from the necessity of choice.” “The head is lifted away from the body in order that it may be able to consider, analytically, whatever messages come to it from below.” So at the top we have reason and at the bottom impulse, and in between a zone of conflict. The head says “No” to the impulse which always says “Yes.” Between the head and the conflict zone is a mediating device, the larynx. The ‘No’ sayer, the Law, the ‘Nous’, he who knows, examines the conflict to sort it out. At the other end, a similar process goes on with the impulse being mediated by the solar plexus, which curbs the unrestrained impulse. Without these mediating zones the human race would disappear, either from impotence, if the head won, or from a complete lack of control if the impulse won. “This five-fold division has arisen because we have sentience.” All of these processes are balanced and have to be so for the human race to evolve.
(He now adds sub-divisions in his drawing to make a six-fold division.) The lowest is the sexual centre, the drive. The next is the navel “which guarantees you had parents and therefore makes you a family man, a herd animal.” Next, is the solar plexus ‘brain’ “which is instinctive and perfectly matched to the environment.” “Your solar plexus is infallible in its conclusions providing you are in the environment in which that solar plexus got its information.” “The heart is the centre of the whole being and is the supreme, evaluating centre of sentience.” Between this and the head is the larynx, the centre of verbalising analysis. Between the eyebrows is the command centre, individual. Right at the crown is the universal. This universal contains all the potentialities of all that are at the other end of the being. The attempt to posit children, new forms of being, is a potential in the universal. One is universal, cosmic, the other is individuated. The command centre is opposed to the navel, the herd instinct. i.e. your individual being is opposed to your belonging to a family, tribe, nation. Similarly, there is opposition between the verbalising centre of the larynx and the solar plexus. “Your verbal centre analyses what your solar plexus simultaneously comprehends.” “The heart is the pivotal centre for all these processes.” We can see in this way the processes of involution and evolution in the human being. Cosmic energies come through the crown centre and operate through the being to produce an individual. The individual reverses this process until he can “assert his cosmic origin and his cosmic intent to cooperate with all other beings who are cosmically determinant.”
The process of evolution began with the mono-cell, and the diffuse, unanalysed response to stimuli is something we have evolved from by a process of cell-division and by specialisation of function.
“Now protopathic response is no good and it is the biggest single enemy of the next step in human evolution.” Most people still belong to the herd, to a family. Christ and the Buddha were both examples of how we have to go beyond the instinctive intelligence which puts the family first and “become a reflexive being, self-determinant, consciously creating like the original, cosmic creator.” “Every point must become self-determinant because, logically, that which is not self-determinant is going to be determined by something outside itself.” “Evolution is going to wipe out every being that is not self-determinate because the aim of evolution is the creation of self-determinate, self-conscious reflexive beings.”
(He now discusses the different levels of being.) The gross, physical body has above it a force that organises and vitalises it, the ‘bio-field’. This field of force organises the mineral world. It is intimately connected with solar radiation and is able to pick up minerals from the earth, and in the air, to make an organised, vital body. Since the bio-field is also circumscribed, we can call it a ‘body’, a vital, organising body. When this leaves the physical body at death, the minerals of the physical body return to the places they came from. Beyond the bio-field we have an active, mobilising, ‘desire body’. This is the one that enables us to run about. (We don’t use it during sleep, though the bio-field maintains the physical body.) Above the desire body we have a ‘mental body’ which evaluates. This can calculate where to run to without actually running. A man who can use this body is superior to those beings who are not yet at this level. This mental body is the mentation process and can also be called the ‘empirical mind’. It can evaluate data from the three bodies below. Above this there is another mind, the subtle Buddhi mind, and is not determined by external stimulus. This mind can determine from within itself the pure logic of possibility. Buddha produced an intellectual analysis of a situation that did not yet exist. He was able to influence millions of people at the other levels. He knew kings who were at the mental level and he knew other men at all of the other levels. He had discovered that every process downwards was developed deliberately by a process of self-positing. He discovered the level of cosmic mind. “Now there is only one level beyond that and that level is itself the Infinite, the undefinable.”
The top triad is: Brahman, Buddha, Manas i.e. Free Spirit, cosmic mind, individual mentation. The four processes below: empirical mind, the desire body (mobility), bio-field and physical body, make up the lower, individual personality. “Until you integrate your personality, you cannot become spiritually illuminated.” Until you can do this “you are not yet ready for the higher triad.” When you are integrated, you have a personality, but you are still empirical. “his next step is to offer to cosmic service all his cleverness.” “If he decides to keep his cleverness for his own, defined, finite circle, he cannot move up.”(e.g. Hitler, Naploeon, Mussolini) The man who offers himself to cosmic service is transfigured. “At that moment, the whole of his being has all the divisions that were taken into it for evolutionary purposes, washed out. He becomes a unity.”
“The only being that can be of any real service (to God) is the being who has integrated his four levels…so that he constitutes a valid, unific offering…and then he is the prodigal son…he has integrated everything and he has given it up. Whatever he had done has enriched his sentience and this richness he offers to the Absolute.” “He will become that mysterious pearl that the whole field was bought for, referred to in the parable. Remember the pearl is grown out of irritation, The irritation of phenomena within sentience has caused the precipitation of beings who ultimately will become absolutely self-determinant.” “To recognise the efficiency/inefficiency of the levels of being, to recognise that all things have authority on what is below them and subservience to what is above them, except the top and the bottom. The Absolute has nothing above it and is self -determinant; the bottom has nothing below it and is totally enslaved, and in between these two there is a hierarchy of developing, evolving beings.”
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HIEROLOGY
HIEROLOGY
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 29.09.1968
The word ‘Hieros’ used to be used for a person who, today, we would call a ‘priest’. Yet the two terms mean very different things: It is “a change from consideration of power, as such, to reason.”
There are two ways of looking at human motivation. One is to assume that it should be based on reason, and the other is that it has no need to be rational “whenever it can get away with being irrational.” In the past, men of power could impose their will on others by brute force. There is no reason to believe this has changed. Only ‘mutually assured destruction’ prevents it. He thinks the present youth will become “fed up” with peace. They are as reactive as they always were and can swing from pacifism to becoming warlike very quickly. He refers to Mao Tse Tung and Kruschev and imagines a world after a third, world war; the world’s population halved, and the survivors living in scattered groups across the globe. (Nuclear war was looking very likely at the time.) He asks: “What is the function of the intelligence of those people, how much will they know about what to do?” What would be needed is a group of people, in every major area of each country, sufficiently intelligent to lead those groups and establish some sort of cooperative arrangements. (He asks for a show of hands to indicate if anyone believes nuclear war can be averted.) Those of us left will have a duty to lead the people who are left. (The rest of the talk is about the human condition and the use of power.)
A human being is a modality of energy. The body is an object of reference, and within it, the processes of thinking, feeling and willing, are also modalities of energy. In the human this energy can “determine its own course” because we have free will. He uses the letter H to represent a ladder. The symbol is ancient and means ‘Ultimate Power’ differentiated by its modalities. The universe is power and this power is a continuum, it has no parts. “Whatever it does, in any locality within itself, it is the sole authority for so doing.” All problems have solutions only in terms of power modality. “A person who has no power…is at the mercy of any other zone of modalising power.” The dexter side of the H represents power in its fullness, power that knows it cannot be beaten. (He writes ‘have’ on this side; on the other side, ‘have-not’). If we have power in thought, feeling and action, we are on the dexter side. If we are deficient in any of these, we are moving towards the sinister side. In politics, the right-hand side is Conservative, Labour on the left.
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The very first movement ever to occur in the Infinite, Sentient Power Field must have been arbitrary because there was nothing prior to it. But in the zones round it “something had happened.” A stimulus had been given to the zone round it. (He draws an arrow to represent movement and a spiral column around it to represent turbulence.) “Now this is the key to all hierarchy and all human influence, and angelic influence too, for that matter, within the Infinite, Continuum of Power.” “Initiative, and nothing but initiative, created the opposite of it. Initiative activity created subordination and passivity.” When any two humans meet, the one with greater initiative will dominate the other.
God came into existence by Self-initiation. This had to happen for God to become aware of Himself. In initiating a movement, He created a zone of turbulence around Him. This was the resistance He needed to show to Himself that He was an initiative power. “He creates the condition of His own Self-realisation.” But He subordinates the Field around Him to the level of a mere resistance provider. When initiative moves, it pushes into power and makes Itself aware, by the resistance it feels, a resistance it has created. “Now if it doesn’t like resistance, all it has to do is stop.” The Field of Power is sentient and so feels the movement of the initiator. It is aware of the movement and also that it did not initiate the movement it feels. It is therefore dependent for this feeling upon the initiator. But, if the Field were to seize the initiative and refuse to turbulate, refuse to offer resistance to the initiating force, then this force would be unaware that it had moved “and the initiation would have passed into the surrounding field, which would then have become the initiator.” “Now, factually, this battle goes on in the human race all the time…continuous, reciprocal interference is going on all the time.” This makes us more self-aware.
Historically, the dexter side of the ladder has been seen as male, the side of initiative, and the sinister side as female, the side of relative passivity. The initiators throughout history have created the kind of universe they wanted by educating the rest into passivity, using politics, education and, of course, religion. When the very first motion was initiated, it had no reason to do so; it’s movement was arbitrary. Once on the move, it can go to whatever distance it wills, but at a certain distance it stopped “and when it stopped it has made a statement and that statement is reason.” “Reason is the outward bound of the will.” (Blake) “This initial movement produced a sphere, by oscillating in all directions from its centre.” That sphere is a being, self-created by self-oscillation of Sentient Power. The being could be a sub-atomic particle or a universe. This was a finiting process in which Absolute, Sentient Power locked itself up, put itself in prison. “Because by so doing, it had a heightened sense of awareness and a joy in initiative.” We all as humans, can do the same. We can initiate from within ourselves and dominate others around us who are less powerful. If we meet someone with greater energy we should not complain but should sharpen our wits or learn to dodge, or increase our own area of power. St.Paul called this “strong meat, not fit for babies.”
“Africa has shown, in a few, short years, what the history of the human race has shown over twelve thousand years, namely that initiative is the sole determinant of what is going to happen.”
He draws the letter H, again, the glyph of power, but this time with three rungs. “We must seize the initiative in three ways: with a new idea, “a new, emotional attitude, a new value-judgement,” and we must use our will “to drive this form which we have evaluated as worthy of attention.” Once we have this we have to put it into operation i.e. to differentiate (R). This turns ‘might’ into ‘right’. We all have the ‘might’ but we have to change it into the ‘right’. “Hierology is the study of the sacred traditions of ancient peoples because it is concerned with the technique of the differentiation of power that turns might into right.” Power differentiates, it “corrupts”, which means breaking into bits. Christ said, “Except the seed falls to the ground and dies, it abides alone.” Unless we break into bits our ‘might’, our power, into the infinity of possibilities it contains, “then it will operate in a non-differentiated, protopathic, primitive manner.” When you do break it up you are “enlightening yourself.” “To become corrupt is to become enlightened.” The body of our mass energy has to be analysed by us…by a simple watchfulness of our own motivation, emotive attitude and idea. Other beings who are ahead of us in this will already have advantage over us. “In the same way that parents have over children.” Hieros means a being who understands this truth.
“Why does God allow suffering?” “Because It cannot stop it.” “He cannot stop Himself initiating something that He decides to initiate in another place.” Christ said, “Don’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.” Milton understood this. When God created Lucifer He circumscribed a zone of His own Being. Nothing outside of that zone could have authority over it. When Satan, Beelzebub, and any other being are created, they are zones of Infinite, Sentient Power, of God, “self-willed into being precisely what they are.” Satan cannot destroy Beelzebub. He can subordinate him to his greater power, but he cannot destroy him. Beelzebub is part of Infinite, Sentient Power, just like Satan. Not even God can remove power from Himself. “It cannot make any single zone within Itself agree with…what kind of world it shall be.” The larger circle of God can contract on any being to make it think a bit, but it cannot destroy it. Satan and Beelzebub were knocked down, but they did not cease to exist.
To the ancients, the ‘sacred’ was the zone of sexual, generative power. If we don’t understand sexual energy we are at its mercy. Whatever engrams our ancestors left to us will direct our sexual energy and get us into trouble. We are all enslaved by the fact of the universe, the earth, the nation, governments, education etc. We have to break free from all of these and become the free spirits we were before creation. The way out is to make friends with the warders! We must learn the rules of the jail and use them to our advantage. “This is the true hierarchical method for dealing with the universe.” “Every being is self-precipitated, and ultimate reality is a continuum of Sentient Power, so no-one whatever has any right to complain, no matter what happens to Him. If he is blown to bits in the physical world by nuclear weapons he has no valid ground of complaint…but if he knows that being blown to bits by nuclear bombs is a quick way out of the universal jail, if he is in the right state of mind, then he can accept this and write letters of appreciation about it to the press.”
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GOD AS PROJECTIONIST
GOD AS PROJECTIONIST
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 28.02.1982
Eugene introduces the analogy of the projectionist in the cinema. When we hear the word ‘God’ we should forget all we have been taught and just think “Generative, Intelligent Power.” The Universe we now know is entirely energy, power at work, and this power is sentient, it feels itself. We can prove this to ourselves quite easily by pressing a finger into any part. We immediately are aware of the pressure in our body at that point. This intelligent power has condensed into the entire universe and into all life-forms. Knowing that it is sentient means that we can talk to it. We can order a muscle to relax and/or to tense, and it will do so. (He invites the audience to prove this to themselves.) As we relax a muscle it lapses from our consciousness. Conversely, when we tighten a muscle, hard, we become very aware of it. Christ differentiated between the ‘quick’ and the ‘dead’. ‘Dead’ means inert, routine, asleep. “Matter is energy, energy is sentient, sentient energy is spirit, spirit is initiative.” So how, then, does inertia come about? “It’s a very simple solution.” “Spirit initiative re-posits itself deliberately like this: first, you make a fist, then let go; fist, let go; fist, let go” So first, you thump, to get your own way, then you get thumped by another of the same mind. The next thing is that we think. “Thinking is a direct product of frustrated will.”
Truth, Beauty, Goodness. “If you have a truth that you love, you will act on it. Have the truth, love it because it’s true, activate it because you love it.” “Truth is form, intellectual form. Beauty is your feeling, (liking/disliking), and Good refers to the will. “If it is true, love it, it is beautiful. If it is beautiful, will it, do it.”
Read more . . .
The very first movement ever to occur in the Infinite, Sentient Power Field must have been arbitrary because there was nothing prior to it. But in the zones round it “something had happened.” A stimulus had been given to the zone round it. (He draws an arrow to represent movement and a spiral column around it to represent turbulence.) “Now this is the key to all hierarchy and all human influence, and angelic influence too, for that matter, within the Infinite, Continuum of Power.” “Initiative, and nothing but initiative, created the opposite of it. Initiative activity created subordination and passivity.” When any two humans meet, the one with greater initiative will dominate the other.
God came into existence by Self-initiation. This had to happen for God to become aware of Himself. In initiating a movement, He created a zone of turbulence around Him. This was the resistance He needed to show to Himself that He was an initiative power. “He creates the condition of His own Self-realisation.” But He subordinates the Field around Him to the level of a mere resistance provider. When initiative moves, it pushes into power and makes Itself aware, by the resistance it feels, a resistance it has created. “Now if it doesn’t like resistance, all it has to do is stop.” The Field of Power is sentient and so feels the movement of the initiator. It is aware of the movement and also that it did not initiate the movement it feels. It is therefore dependent for this feeling upon the initiator. But, if the Field were to seize the initiative and refuse to turbulate, refuse to offer resistance to the initiating force, then this force would be unaware that it had moved “and the initiation would have passed into the surrounding field, which would then have become the initiator.” “Now, factually, this battle goes on in the human race all the time…continuous, reciprocal interference is going on all the time.” This makes us more self-aware.
Historically, the dexter side of the ladder has been seen as male, the side of initiative, and the sinister side as female, the side of relative passivity. The initiators throughout history have created the kind of universe they wanted by educating the rest into passivity, using politics, education and, of course, religion. When the very first motion was initiated, it had no reason to do so; it’s movement was arbitrary. Once on the move, it can go to whatever distance it wills, but at a certain distance it stopped “and when it stopped it has made a statement and that statement is reason.” “Reason is the outward bound of the will.” (Blake) “This initial movement produced a sphere, by oscillating in all directions from its centre.” That sphere is a being, self-created by self-oscillation of Sentient Power. The being could be a sub-atomic particle or a universe. This was a finiting process in which Absolute, Sentient Power locked itself up, put itself in prison. “Because by so doing, it had a heightened sense of awareness and a joy in initiative.” We all as humans, can do the same. We can initiate from within ourselves and dominate others around us who are less powerful. If we meet someone with greater energy we should not complain but should sharpen our wits or learn to dodge, or increase our own area of power. St.Paul called this “strong meat, not fit for babies.”
“Africa has shown, in a few, short years, what the history of the human race has shown over twelve thousand years, namely that initiative is the sole determinant of what is going to happen.”
He draws the letter H, again, the glyph of power, but this time with three rungs. “We must seize the initiative in three ways: with a new idea, “a new, emotional attitude, a new value-judgement,” and we must use our will “to drive this form which we have evaluated as worthy of attention.” Once we have this we have to put it into operation i.e. to differentiate (R). This turns ‘might’ into ‘right’. We all have the ‘might’ but we have to change it into the ‘right’. “Hierology is the study of the sacred traditions of ancient peoples because it is concerned with the technique of the differentiation of power that turns might into right.” Power differentiates, it “corrupts”, which means breaking into bits. Christ said, “Except the seed falls to the ground and dies, it abides alone.” Unless we break into bits our ‘might’, our power, into the infinity of possibilities it contains, “then it will operate in a non-differentiated, protopathic, primitive manner.” When you do break it up you are “enlightening yourself.” “To become corrupt is to become enlightened.” The body of our mass energy has to be analysed by us…by a simple watchfulness of our own motivation, emotive attitude and idea. Other beings who are ahead of us in this will already have advantage over us. “In the same way that parents have over children.” Hieros means a being who understands this truth.
“Why does God allow suffering?” “Because It cannot stop it.” “He cannot stop Himself initiating something that He decides to initiate in another place.” Christ said, “Don’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.” Milton understood this. When God created Lucifer He circumscribed a zone of His own Being. Nothing outside of that zone could have authority over it. When Satan, Beelzebub, and any other being are created, they are zones of Infinite, Sentient Power, of God, “self-willed into being precisely what they are.” Satan cannot destroy Beelzebub. He can subordinate him to his greater power, but he cannot destroy him. Beelzebub is part of Infinite, Sentient Power, just like Satan. Not even God can remove power from Himself. “It cannot make any single zone within Itself agree with…what kind of world it shall be.” The larger circle of God can contract on any being to make it think a bit, but it cannot destroy it. Satan and Beelzebub were knocked down, but they did not cease to exist.
To the ancients, the ‘sacred’ was the zone of sexual, generative power. If we don’t understand sexual energy we are at its mercy. Whatever engrams our ancestors left to us will direct our sexual energy and get us into trouble. We are all enslaved by the fact of the universe, the earth, the nation, governments, education etc. We have to break free from all of these and become the free spirits we were before creation. The way out is to make friends with the warders! We must learn the rules of the jail and use them to our advantage. “This is the true hierarchical method for dealing with the universe.” “Every being is self-precipitated, and ultimate reality is a continuum of Sentient Power, so no-one whatever has any right to complain, no matter what happens to Him. If he is blown to bits in the physical world by nuclear weapons he has no valid ground of complaint…but if he knows that being blown to bits by nuclear bombs is a quick way out of the universal jail, if he is in the right state of mind, then he can accept this and write letters of appreciation about it to the press.”
The DOWNLOAD button below will allow you to download the mp3 sound file to your device. To download the Transcript click the ‘Transcript’ button.
INERTIA
INERTIA
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 5.10.1980
Eugene says inertia is: “The biggest enemy and friend of the human race.” And he is going to show why that is so. He waves the paper to represent the Absolute, Sentient Power in motion – though ASP is, of course, in 3D, an Infinite continuum. When power contracts onto a centre it posits and when it releases that contraction, that centre ceases to be. Each point posited is a dot, a contraction of power. Human consciousness looking at a lot of dots, tries to tie them together into a shape. But the shapes are the product of our consciousness. They have no reality.
He introduces the word “ergon” to mean a ‘unit of energy at work’. It is the “least amount of energy capable of producing a zone of a rotating force.” It is a primordial amount of energy and it is sentient. It is much finer than protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks or leptons. These ergons are psychic as well as physical forces. “They are psycho-somatic, primordial energies, feeling them selves, initiating their own activities.”
Each point is an in-tension of the Infinite. In-tension physically, is the same as in-tention psychologically. The Infinite, Sentient Power has an infinite number of dots, ergons, in it and every one is an entity in its own right. Each one knows itself and feels itself. We can read patterns, as in an inkblot test, by our intention to feel, hope and fear. We project these into that 3D continuum.
He gives an image of capturing a zone of dots by using a number 6, with the tail of the 6 in the Infinite. The circle of the 6 captures a “fantastical number” of ergons. Each one can know, feel and initiate its own action. Although captured, its will is undiminished. The word ‘concept’ means ‘to capture and hold together.’ To conceptualise is to seize hold of some of these ergons and then define them within the captured zone. When you capture a zone in a concept, it is not passive, it is an entity that can think, feel, and will. “The tiniest little particle, the tiniest virus that infects you, is a little entity with think, feel, will as essential qualities.”
Read more . . .
A human being comes from infinity and captures a zone, the fertilised ovum. In so doing “it has captured the totality of the inheritance of both parents and then it has to deal with what it has captured.” Every breath we take captures enormous numbers of ergons, of bacteria and viruses, and we have to deal with them. Whatever we do we are acting upon ergons in the field and they are acting upon us. It is a constant battle. If the ergons you breathe in, or eat, win this battle, you get a disease. If you win they die. “It is impossible for any single individual to live except at the expense of the death of another being.”
All war between nations is a battle for getting the raw materials needed. All raw material is power, energy. We know that in all international matters there is a fight going on. In peace time, this is by diplomacy and at other times by war. Inside each nation we find the same, different political parties, pressure groups, etc. Within families we find the same competition. We could see each family member as a dot, each wanting their own way. The same is true of each individual; no individual has the power to control all the energies captured inside his skin. Each person has captured a zone of ergons, of primordial, psychosomatic intelligences and they have not liked being captured.
“God made man for Himself. He looks through man at the universe, and through man interferes with it.” (He then presents a ‘manual of power’ based on the human hand) “Inertia means the amount of energy put into a thing which establishes that that thing exists.” “The amount of energy, the number of energy quanta, put into your being constitutes your mass inertia.” Inside ourselves “we have the total ancestral inertia of the race from which we are derived.” Our protoplasm is riddled right through with ancestral impulses over millions of years right back to the “original differentiating field life power.” So the work done within us is the work of our total ancestry, right back to the Infinite.
“Is it impossible for us? No,..because all we have to is break identification with it.” “Now the only thing that makes any being identify with any situation, is its own intention to modify it, nothing else.” At centre, we have will, we have a governing concept, we have a physical body. We have to reflect back on the will and tell ourselves we are willing to do it, whatever it is, we can rescue ourselves from the concept and from the temporal expression of the concept. “This is a reflexive act.” You take the temporal situation you are in and you remind yourself that you chose to posit yourself in it in order to interfere with it, to modify it. And you did this by an act of will, you chose it. You then go back through the concept into the will. This is the number 9, 6 reversed. Six means ‘yes’ and nine mean no (nein). “If I introvert my attention from the temporal world, contemplate the governing concept that I have, which I think is worth foisting on the world, and then remember that I generated it by an act of will, then I can let go of it because I attribute no reality to it except the reality that I have posited in it in order to interfere with the world.”
This is the ‘annihilation of the self’, ‘self’ is only a definition. Having annihilated it, “you are back again in the Infinite Field of Power that made the definition.” If you remain in the Infinite, that is Nirvana. However, the moment you think of this you cause a panic in the ergons in your being. This is because you are their doorway from infinity into the time-process. Only through you can they gain full expression. “By incarnating in the human being, they gain a kind of expression that they cannot gain in the life of the animal, plant, bacterium, virus, or whatever it is.” It is only in the human being that these psychosomatic entities, these ergons, can actually complete their evolution.”
The totality of the human race is really one big being, Adam Kadmon, the universal man. All humanity, past, present and future make up this cosmic man. We are all little ergons inside him. We have exactly the same relation to this cosmic man as all the cells of our body have to us. The phagocytes in our blood do not know that we exist, yet they are working for us. Likewise, each human being is working for the cosmic man.
We are full of impulses from millions of ancestors who want their own way from us. This is where temptations come from. We all like to think that we are beings with free will but we are simply intersections of force of the Infinite. We know that the atom is almost all space so we have no actual existence. It is simply tension in the feeling of being that makes us think we exist. If someone gives us a push we tend to resist, but only because of inertia. This is the inertia of our total ancestry. It is not who we are.
There is an infinity of little beings inside us who want their own way. One tiny group identifies with the name we were given. We cling to it to keep ourselves in being. The rest of our organism goes on breathing, digesting, desiring etc. and none of these has anything to do with the little ego attached to the name. They have no regard for their host. Their only concern is for their own survival, and this depends on the continued existence of the host. We provide a permanent reference point for them.
Before we arrived in the world we “were already a field of sentient power with enough intelligence, thought, feeling and will to seize a fertilised ovum and appropriate it.” The first birth is from the mother in a physical body in the time-process. If we do not destroy the whole concept of who we think we are, we cannot enter the second birth. The second birth is out of the illusion of the self-concept that we have learned. “What I really am is a free, spiritual will who has been tricked into a definition.” I must now “take it to pieces by an analytical self-examination” “Now the whole of the inertia…recorded in your protoplasm is going to try to stop you doing it.” This is the ‘Good Fight’.
The ego concept has had an enormous amount of energy pushed into it. Initially by parents and educators emphasising the given name and the civilising process. Behind all this is the ancestral ergons all the way back . This is the inertia that must be overcome. How? By giving in! We are fighting Infinite Power from our little,finite, ego-structure. We cannot win. There is only God. He has created a finite world and a finite human being through which to enjoy his creation. Only the human can know this. We are the ‘special agents’ of God. But the inertia of the universe is designed by God to ‘nail us down’ at the materialistic level to “teach us that we are impotent.” “We cannot get to divine consciousness without going through anti-divine consciousness.” “The sum total of the derived wisdom of the human race… is the omega of the universe. The Alpha is the Infinite Itself and the omega is nothing but that Alpha self-realised in a human being.”
“Now everything that has happened, including the very worst thing that has ever happened to the human race, is a good thing, because of the evolution of consciousness from facing the evil. So there are no absolute evils. Every evil is a good disguised.” When you know that you are nothing but a nothing, an illusion of an intersection point of forces, when the reality is infinite forces…you say “What next?”
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FREEDOM
FREEDOM
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands on 24/6/1984
Eugene begins by examining the word ‘Freedom’ and drawing a diagram to illustrate. Before creation there was Infinite Light, the pure consciousness of Absolute, Sentient Power. Creation presupposes a shut down of the amount of light, into a finite. In order to produce an object the light must focus. (fo-cus means force-striking). The Infinite Field must focus onto a point, a reference centre. This is an in-ten sion of power (intention). “All form presupposes a positing of a point of reference.” This point is the first form. The moment a point is posited the space around it is now relatively empty. So within our consciousness we make a zone, and at the centre of this is our point of focus. Around this focus, the zone is of less focus, a field of awareness.
The primal man, Cosmic Man, Adam Kadmon, “is a being with an idea, a feeling of that idea, a drive from centre, from heart, and a field around the drive.” We have an idea, we feel it, and then we push the idea into practice.The idea has now become a driving force and this has made a vortex around it and this is the origin of time. “Time is nothing but driving forces pushing through infinite space.” When the dot is posited, it is a contraction of the Infinite. The value of the human individual is precisely this “that infinity is introjecting its own representative in the individual centre of consciousness. That is, the developed human intelligence is a god, that is a precipitate of Infinite intelligent power.” Around this precipitate is a periphery, a limiting factor that stops the centre expanding to infinity thus ensuring that we keep a personality. Between the centre and the periphery the space is not empty but is a zone of action. “The space is power attenuated, held to avoid it condensing the whole of infinity upon that point.” “Now our awareness that we exist as individual human beings is there only when we reflect and we bend back consciousness.” If we become aware of an external object and forget ourselves as centre, then we identify with the object. But if we return our consciousness to centre then we retain individuation and come to know the higher Self.
Read more . . .
We live inside the action band and continuously refer back to centre; this is our mental process. Because we continuously re-posit in this way we know we are alive. “To be is to have a gross body, the periphery, and a centre of initiation. We are beings of creative initiative, bound in a world.” Our free initiative “wells up” from our centre and is reflected back from our periphery. This periphery is the ‘dome’ to our free spirit. The Immanent Spirit at our centre knows what it is doing but at the periphery it meets contingent stimuli from other beings. The closer to the periphery it gets, the greater the inertia it meets. “The skin surface is a spinning inertia which maintains the being of the body.” This is our ‘dome’ which holds in the life.
Between our centre and periphery is the action band and this can look both ways: inwards towards initiative or outwards towards contingent stimuli. This creates indecision in us. Our free spirit is domed by being in a physical body, but without the body it could not be an individual. This creates ambiguity in us. “Freedom means a contradiction between pure, absolute initiative and total subjection to interference from without by other beings and to balance these two powers is real freedom.” We have to learn to use our initiative, whilst allowing others to use theirs. This requires self-control and without it, we cannot have freedom.
“Now every single individual being from a virus, microbe, to the human, are all determined from centre or periphery at any moment, they are either initiating or they are inert.” We must remember that, as humans, our centre of reference is in the heart; we must have feeling compassion for all other beings. We should never think that another being is merely a body of matter. Everything in creation is power, is energy and therefore is sentient. “If you don’t balance your power with your intelligence you cannot be happy; if you do balance it you cannot help being happy.” This means that we must love each other, as Christ told us, and in doing so, we have to use our intelligence. Every person with whom we interrelate will be at different levels of understanding and we have to recognise this. We must love them “in a hierarchical manner” that is, “with due regard to their actual powers of assimilation.” If we do not do this then we are “deficient in the way of relation.”
“The application of hierarchical powers requires ‘noblesse oblige’.” If we are strong, we should be merciful. “Strength does not mean unkindness, force, it means understanding, entering in and allowing.” We all have different powers of assimilation so “The deeper you go down into matter, the dimmer the consciousness and the less capacity for assimilating the meaning of hierarchy, so the one who understands, or believes he understands hierarchy, is under the law ‘noblesse oblige’.”
We must always make allowances for others, not to abuse them or take advantage of them but “to help to enlighten them, gradually lift them up.”
“Now this is out task as human beings. The animals do not have this problem. It is the human being, and not another being, that has to get hold of this opposition and unite above and below together in his own being, and he does it by hammering thought, feeling, and will onto the idea of truth.”
We all have infinite potential but do not realise it. This creates anxiety in us which can resemble the biblical ‘Hell’. But, “There is not a place called Hell. There is a condition of self-realisation of impotence through the non-operation, the non-actualisation, of one’s own, inner potential”
Freedom is not a simple lack of restraint. ’His worship is perfect freedom’. “The free spirit gives you the idea but you must dome it.” We have to take this idea and see that it is unique and fundamental to ourself as an individual and then apply all of the power of our three-fold nature to actualising it. We have to think, feel and will our unique contribution to cosmos until it becomes established within the periphery of our body.
“The focussed mind of the intelligent being can do anything with absolute success, but not if he forgets the idea, not if he does not emote about the idea, not if he does not drive the idea, not if he does not make the idea tangible in a physical body. That is the meaning of the incarnation of God. The incarnation is meaningful to a human individual only for the individual who incarnates what we have just said”…. “How do we feel about that? Do we like it? Some say it is a bit of a responsibility. I make my life, I design my mind, I design my feeling, I design my will, I design my body. I design everything about me and it is my responsibility.” “Do I like it? Hard work. Who likes hard work?”
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EXISTENCE OF GOD
EXISTENCE OF GOD
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday on 27.01.1985 at Parklands
Eugene begins with the observation that church leaders seem to be doubtful about a possible proof for the existence of God, along with doubts about many of the articles of faith previously held.
To prove is to probe and we cannot probe anything outside ourselves without probing inside. Our sense organs tell us there is an external world and we know that we have an internal world more or less correspondent with it. Some thinkers have put forward a philosophy of dualism between mind and matter, or sometimes spirit and body. Body is tangible, occupying space, and mind is intangible and does not. He calls this naive dualism. Dualism means two causes of reality and the two are alien, no points of correspondence. In a dualism, two beings, being alien, could not interact, yet our minds and bodies do; we can think about what we are doing. Therefore, mind and body must be 2 aspects of one ultimate fact. Dualism is impossible.
The Infinite, Sentient Power we call God, is simultaneous power, form, function. He suggests using the hand as a mnemonic for this. The thumb represents the power (will), the index finger, form, or idea, and the middle finger, function. If a power can interact with form, i.e. will with idea, then they cannot, ultimately, be different. “If this power and idea can go into actuality (function) then actuality is not different from power-form or formulated power.” When we define God, we say He is omnipotent, on the thumb, omniscient on the index finger, and omnipresent on the middle finger. “So when human beings are talking about a God worthy of the respect of human beings, that God must have whatever the human being has but raised to Infinity.” Man has, in finite degrees, power, intelligence and the ability to do things. i.e. power, form, function. Also, our will can interact with the wills of other humans, with animals and with plants, so our will must be able to interact with that of God. Likewise our reason must be correspondent with the intelligence of God and our ability to act must also correspond to the act of creation of the universe. So in all three we can say that we have a correspondence with God.
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Sceptics may say that man has designed the concept of a God based on his own characteristics. However, everything that man has is derivative from something before him. Every man has derived from his parents, and they from their parents, and so backwards through time. Logically, we have all originally derived from the original source of the universe.
Light has always been, in every religion, a symbol of consciousness. “The power whereby we can see what is.” It is the power by which we can see both form and function and we know these things because we are conscious. We know that our bodies must be derivative from the primordial powers that condensed as the earth. At every level we derive from prior power, form, function, of that Infinite Power, form, function which produced the stars, the planets, our earth, and everything else. Ourselves and our source cannot be dual. We are modalities of that Supreme Infinite Power we call God. Each of us is an in-pressing, an impression of God. Jesus said, “Is it not written that ye are gods?” We are all little gods. However, we are only actual gods “If we remember that we are willed, self-determinant, intelligent, self-activators.” If we forget, and allow a contingent stimulus to drag us outside our centre, “we lose, in act, our divinity.” “We become enslaved by the contingent stimulus, and that is called the ‘The Fall’.” (He gives the example of how many women changed their hairstyles to look like Princess Diana.)
This identification with another is one danger, the other is to be so identified with ourselves that we forget other beings and God also. This is the ‘Demonic’. In its extreme form it is called ‘solipsism’. An atheist is a man who does not believe in something he cannot describe or define yet, in not believing, he has to objectify God as a thing not to be believed in! The fact that we can see stars in the sky means our awareness field must be at least as big as the universe we can see, and the fact we can see the darkness beyond means our awareness must be bigger than the universe we can see. Everybody knows if they had a good night’s sleep or not. How? because whatever is awake during the daytime is still there at night.
There is no substance other than the light of consciousness, (substancia), that which stands underneath all we know. The substance of God is Infinite Power, Infinite Form, Infinite Function. What we are is power, form, function, but limited, by one thing only: our identification. Nevertheless, the substance of man is the same as that of God. “If we are God we have the imperative, the moral, the ethical duty, to take care of all creatures.” This is a responsibility we cannot dodge. The atheist is trying to dodge it. He does not want the responsibility and to be a god is to be responsible.
The word ‘one’, ‘ein’, ‘une’, ‘uno’, we spell ‘one’ with three letters to remind us that one is power, form, function. We cannot have a one which is not a triplicity. (There is a wide-ranging account following involving the Caballah, and the origins of these ideas from many sources.)
Our physical bodies are a compaction of spirit, and just as our bodies are chemically different so our spirit is rationally different. Our will, our intellect and our self-activation are all derived from Infinite Power, Infinite Intelligence and Infinite Self-activation. The more we realise this the more “we grow in divinity as we absorb this fact.” “If you doubt your divine origin you weaken yourself, so all atheists are weaker than true understanders of divinity.” We can choose to be weak or strong, intelligent or stupid, a creature of initiative or one entirely dependent on an external stimulus. “All the arguments in religion are caused by somebody trying to be monistic and deciding everybody else’s religion is wrong, whereas with non-dualism they are alright.” To change from one religion to another shows that a man has understood neither because they are all varied expressions of the same.
The law is; don’t revenge yourself. Instead ask: “How did I get myself into this situation?” Only my own stupidity could make it possible for another person to injure me. Wherever I am I put myself there. “Nobody is responsible for anything that happens to us, we and we alone are responsible, each one of us individually, for everything that happens to us.” We are all self-precipitated into the time-process. All our experiences are for our education.
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EVOLUTION
EVOLUTION
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands
This talk follows the one on Involution given the previous week. Eugene begins by restating the mnemonic of the hand: Thumb is Will, first finger is intellect, but now divided into two parts; upper and lower, middle finger is the preferred response, also divided into upper and lower, third finger bio-field, and little finger, physical body. The will is the initiative, and therefore prior to everything else. The intellect is of two kinds: the higher mind which can consider the highest ideas, such as truth, the cosmic or logos mind; and the lower mind, based on individual, empirical experience of the physical body. “The intellect has one face upwards into the Infinite and one face downwards into the mineralised, physical world.”
The preferred response level can be similarly divided: the higher desires are for those ideas from the higher mind, such as the desire to obey cosmic logic (truth). The lower desire nature is conditioned by the physical body and the emotions. This level is sometimes called the ‘astral plane’ because the desires in us are really converted sunlight, or starlight. This is sentient, living energy which appears in us, and in all living creatures, as ‘desire’. When vectored outwards into the world it is for those ideas of the lower mind which are conditioned by the senses. When vectored upward into the higher mind, the desire is for the ideas of the higher mind, such as truth, logic, God.
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Whereas the desire level is conditioned by its object, either down in the body or upwards to the cosmic intellect, the will is pure initiative and unconditioned. It vibrates at a higher frequency than any level below it. Each of the seven levels can be seen as a veil to the one below. (In the Bible, the 7 veils of Salome indicate this.) ‘Salome’ means ‘Spirit has tied Itself into the substance’ the same meaning as ‘Shalom’.
All form veils itself and all function veils ultimate cause. The Absolute Itself is not veiled, other than by its functions, and therefore contains all veils within Itself. To initiate is to begin and is the start of the unveiling of what has been willed in. He demonstrates this by knocking loudly on the table to illustrate one type of veiling of consciousness. It is difficult to be conscious of something beyond when our senses are bombarded by loud noises. i.e. sense organ input can obliterate the consciousness of anything beyond itself. This is the lowest veil, the physical body and its emotions.
The next veil is the bio-field, the life-process itself. It is this bio-field that keeps the body alive when in deep sleep. It is normally outside of our consciousness, and bio-field functions can veil it, often inconveniently! The next veil is that of the lower preferred response. To animals, this is the only one possible. It is vectored outwards into the world and veils completely the awareness of the animal from considering its spiritual origins. In man it is still a very thick veil. It focuses us on the body of another and the ancestors rush out to greet the external situation. It is the response to pleasure, to comfort, “to all things nice.” “It is the biggest, single obstacle to humanity today.” The next veil is that of the higher, preferred response.This is a veil for the person who wants to be good – but does not know what ‘good’ is. It is vectored upwards, but riddled with half-formulated notions of beauty and truth. It is a veil for many religious people. The next veil is that of the lower intellect, the mind of the empirical scientist. It is vectored down into the world and hides the possibility of a higher level of understanding. It is vectored away from the will. The next is that of the higher intellect. It is still a veil because it is still aimed at definable forms, such as truth, logic, pure mathematics, etc. Such high ideas cannot order life and produce Utopia. (He cites the examples of Plato and Confucius.) The top veil is that of the will itself. Here, the Ultimate Power makes a starting point. This point is the intention of the will but still a veil. The way through this veil is not to initiate anything whatever! The initiative itself keeps you in being from moment to moment by repositing itself. To reach the Absolute the initiative itself must be killed, but you must initiate this too! You must command yourself to be still, and then let go of being still! At this level you still exist, but not by act of will. You are because you are.
He then goes through the seven levels again, highlighting their particular problems. He talks of ‘personal magnetism’ and ‘bio-magnetic personalities’ (levels 2 and 3). The fourth veil, that of the higher preferred response, is very dangerous. Those for whom this veil is a special danger are those who believe that God is good. They will be rewarded for good deeds. This breeds a sense of injustice. But justice cannot occur in the time-process. Justice is a balance of forces, and such a balance cannot exist in time, since only when forces are unequal can motion take place. Time involves motion. If justice were possible in the time-world then everything would stop! At this level, people who want to be good suffer from this injustice without understanding why it happens. i.e. The desire to be good is manifestly not succeeding. Injustices can only be remedied outside the time-process. All beings mutually interpenetrate in the eternal. All gifts are equal and there is perfect balance and justice. Once you accept the impossibility of justice in the time-process then the apparent injustices can be used for self-development. The lower intellect uses the five senses to focus on material bodies. The scientist mistakenly believes he can arrive at ultimate truths and keep himself out of the experiment. He thinks he is an objective observer. Everything he does is aimed at controlling the physical world, at power. He seeks power so as to manipulate the world and other people. But there is no difference, in principle, between what the scientist does and the lay man. We are all empirical scientists playing tricks on people in the laboratory of the world in order to gain power over them, to get our own way. In ethical terms, “we are all as guilty as the atom bomb scientists.”
The higher intellect has produced enormous conceit, seen in Europe in the Stoics, who believed that it was possible to know cosmic reason and then obey it. This involved inhibiting all responses below this level. Their entire behaviour thus became conditioned by cosmic, logical principles. e.g. it is illogical to grieve or to feel anything. This caused scorn and contempt for everyone at a lower level. (The yogic ascetic is similar.) Each veil has a particular virtue, if you remember to use it, and a particular vice. And the higher you go, the worse the vice becomes. The top level is initiative, which is unconditioned and at the centre of our being. It can move without any stimulus at all, and can be motivated by good will or bad. The man who is perfectly free will run the risk of treating the whole universe “as a joke.” This is the thinnest veil, but also the worst. This is the supreme vice. Such a being could go through the universe, at will, causing all kinds of nuisance because there is no higher authority, at this level, to be answerable to. Initiative will has no superior powers and is, therefore, not responsible – though it is very response-able.
He talks of the Bible, saying that it is written entirely in code. He tells the story of Herod and John the Baptist. The name ‘Herod” symbolises the will to power. Herodias, his wife, is the affective, driving force of Herod’s will. John the Baptist symbolises the intellect involved in the physical world, though not in pursuit of power over others, rather as an investigative ability. He symbolises the intellect engaged in studying the substantial world in order to understand its nature, without any ulterior motive. Hernias influences Herod to become a god on earth. She cannot achieve her end unless she beheads John the Baptist. i.e. unless you strike out the intellective principle in yourself, then your individual will to power and dominion over others cannot work unhindered. In the bible story, when John was beheaded, the disciples all became highly active and started to rush about making converts. This means that when the will to power (Herod), aided by the emotional stimulus, (Herodias), actually kills the intellective principle in him (John), then every other, higher part of his being becomes highly active and rushes about. In the individual human being, the will to dominate must kill the intellectual investigation, and when this is done, then the higher intellect becomes operative. Thus the will to power is ultimately self-defeating. (Herod went mad.)
John the Baptist is a cousin of Jesus, born to an older woman whose name means ‘Let there be lots of work in that house.’ (Her old age represents ancestral influences.) Jesus is born from a young virgin i.e. a new possibility. Mary, his mother, represents your own substance, purified of the will to dominion over others.
When you know that form and function are veils, you can see through them, yet retain them. When all seven veils are removed, through insight, it is permissible to put them on again. We all have these seven veils, but some are more veiled than others. “I take a veil off only to put it on again.” – to ‘re-veil’ (reveal). The Book of Revelation does this: it re-veils truth in symbols. If all veils were removed you would be back in the Absolute and not existential. In the act of trying to penetrate a veil you discover its meaning and put it on again. You put it on again so that anyone who comes along, looking for the truth behind the veil, will not be able to see it until they have developed so far that when they are able to take it off, they will put it back on again.
The whole universe is nothing but a series of veils. If you were to expose the naked truth, you would not be there to see it! To evolve, we must take off the veils by investigating them. Starting with the physical body, the ‘knock’ level of the senses, we must investigate experientially each veil. We do this by becoming thoroughly aware of the veil at that level, and then “switching off” the awareness. You cannot give up something until you know thoroughly what it is. You become aware of the level “and feel into it totally” and then switch off suddenly. The veil then collapses at this level. This is John the Baptist work.
At the top level, it means recognising that you have chosen everything you have ever done, including your own birth. Thoroughly enjoying the free initiative will you have at this level, and the ability to will anything at all, you deliberately switch off the will and do nothing. At this point you enter the Absolute; the seventh veil is removed. The Absolute then puts the veils back on again, and you know thereafter that you do not exist on any level – only the Absolute does, in form – and all identification with anything, at any level, is gone. The Absolute has it all.
Involution is the veiling process, the descent of Spirit into matter. Removing the veils is evolution, evolving.
He talks of the ancient idea of the sky as a dark, indigo curtain, hiding the illimitable light of the Absolute. But through ‘holes’ in this curtain, the illimitable light shines. This meant that there was a veiling process, represented by indigo, veiling a light beyond the reach of the sense organs. This is a ‘dark light’ which squeezes itself onto points, and through these points to make, what we call stars. Stars are “step-down transformers” of an Absolute Power. Everything we call desire or thought, in the animal or human, is nothing but the embodied function of such celestial light squeezed into the time-process.
The final veil cannot be removed by an individual. It is a veil to the Absolute also, willing itself as a veil; like a projector screen. Without the screen, no pictures – and the Absolute likes pictures too. On Its side, the Absolute knows what the veil is for: to “cut down” on its Infinite light and filter it through the compression of stars and project it into the time-process – for its own enjoyment.
Exercise: Go into a dark room and sit with your eyes open. Soon, you will see in the retina, your individual screen, your memories. Then, you will see the memories of all the ancestors. Then cosmic ones. Finally, the Absolute Itself. You project into that pitch blackness, from the depths of your being, your total content – from every lifetime. After this, you will recognise the veiling process in others. You will never want the truth from anyone after that because you know it is a veil, and if you are going to be offered a veil then one is as good as any other. You will also put on your own veil; out of respect for others. The less you demand truth, the more you can have it – and always veiled.
“The ultimate is seen in that triad of letters AMN, Amen. A is the Absolute, M is the substantial aspect of the same which veils it, and N is the relative motion which arises as a result of the action of the Absolute on its own veil.” “So when you say “Amen to that”…what you are really saying…is that you affirm, absolutely, whatever is happening in the existential situation…that you do not wish to escape from it because you know that what you are affirming is the Absolute Being which is your very own substance. You are the Absolute A, you are the substance M, and you are the functional interplay of these two N, and then you will say ‘Amen’ to your own being, absolutely.”
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NO-MIND
NO-MIND
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands
This is a talk on Personal Integration. Scholars in the past have split the examination of knowledge into three parts: ontological, concerned with the things that are sensed; logical, concerned with the thoughts that we have about these things, or the ‘thinks’ of the things; and the third has been humorously called ‘moral’. Moral means how to keep the walls up in any system whatever, including a human being.i.e. “that which enables one to hold oneself together.” Eugene draws a hand as a mnemonic and places these on the fingers: ontological on the little finger, logical on the index finger, the ‘action upon the thing’ on the ring finger, the will on the thumb, and the ‘word’ on the middle finger, because the word is the mediator. “The word is the sound symbol which you use an act of will to signify a thing upon which you intend to act in some manner, formally, to change the situation.” This gives five operations: a will to think of a word, to control an action on a body. In ancient times, the ‘will’ and the ‘word’ were kept as sacred, religious concepts and not advertised
“In the beginning was the word.” In Genesis: “And God said:” “The word ‘light’ signified to the Ancients…understanding, comprehension, seeing reality as it is.”
(He now draws the hand as an animal, walking, the head represented by the extended, middle finger, the ‘word’.) The word is the ‘logos’, which means ‘ratio’ and dialectical structures because it contains L, ‘lambda’ and G, ‘gamma’. Lambda =intelligence=light and gamma means the content of that intelligence. There is Absolute subject, pure consciousness (S) and the predicate is always implied in the subject (S=Pnth) but (S=Pnth+S) Why? Because the predicate can never exhaust the subject. “Because when we predicate, when we say something rationally, we abstract from total reality.” Total reality is always more than we can abstract from it.
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The word (middle finger) is the leader. “Unless we have a word to name things and their parts, we cannot control them. And we cannot control ourselves in relation to things that we cannot control.” “If we get hold of infinity…we get hold of nothing instead of something…pure, conscious power is no-thing…but is that in which all finites occur.” “So that, in this animal which we are,(the one in the drawing)…we have the palm, from which the five spring out, as number 6, the coordinator.” In ‘Revelation’ 666 is the number of man, but also the beast and ‘six’ means ‘existence’. Our 5 senses, together with our common sense, constitute the six-fold being, the Beast.
Without the word we cannot control our volition, our ideas, our actions. Pre-articulate infants show this. They live, biologically, from within, instinctively from the life-force. But they cannot know, reflexively, what they are doing until they have a vocabulary. The word is fundamental to self-control and understanding. We cannot integrate our being “unless we have words to do with the very principle of integration.” “The will is pure if it is positing one thing only, then the thing that it posits is exactly correspondent with the will.”e.g. If we will the idea of a circle, then we have pure correspondence.
(He asks the audience to give him the name of an animal. The reply is ‘cat’, also ‘donkey’.) ‘Cat’: If we think of a cat, we all get the same ideas of ‘catness’, the essence of cat, regardless of its colour, size or breed. With ‘donkey’ the essence is stubbornness, regardless of other features. So the word ‘cat’ and the word ‘donkey’ allow us to think about certain qualities. “The more we know about the essence of words, the more probability we have of being able to control ourselves.” We all spend time selecting words for persuading, pushing, frightening, etc. The word is the most economical tool we have. We can control the actions of others with it. But if we are tied down too tightly to one meaning of a term, we can be manipulated by it. Politicians, advertisers, salesmen all know this.
With geometric shapes we can have perfect correspondence between the will and the idea. e.g. a circle, a triangle. But when we try to get that same correspondence between the will and a ‘thing’, we cannot. e.g. If we try to make an equilateral triangle, using compasses and a straight edge, we cannot obtain a perfect result. i.e. there is a non-correspondence between the idea of perfection and the gross, material fact. “The idea of perfection, as defined by the will is perfect, and the word ‘perfect’ means ‘pi-ra fact’, means rational, geometrical, but in the material world, its degree of perfection is not that of the pure idea.” The nearest we can get is the ‘ideal’.
Question from audience member about Christ and his disciples
“Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The moment energy is encapsulated, ensphered to make a being, a monad, that being is free “because there is nothing to make it of other than free spirit.” So whatever it wills, can anybody stop it? “No, because in the very act of encapsulating it, the Will of God, the Infinite, has been to posit a sphere of intelligent power, and that is an individual self, a monad, which is utterly, absolutely, self-determined in its encapsulation to be the authority for its own being and all it does.”
Question from audience member about the earth as a sphere.
The earth itself is not a perfect sphere but an “oblate spheroid” because it is turning, and this pulls the poles in as the equator is expanded. A perfect sphere cannot exist in the material world. We can only define a perfect form in an idea, such as Plato’s ‘noumenal world’. We can name perfection but we cannot make it in the gross world. “You can approximate to it for ‘pi-ra-ctical purposes, but because of the inertia of time and matter, you cannot make that perfect form that you can define.” The sun, also, is an oblate spheroid since it turns on its axis and also goes around another star. So in its forward motion it is flattened, and its back-end is dragged out, like a hen’s egg. Boehme said the sun was the God for the time/matter world. “It is a step-down transformer from Infinity to make it bearable to us to survive under its influence.”
He then calls on a member of the audience, who has been working with mantras, to demonstrate the power of the word-sound ‘cat’. The effect of ‘ker-ah-ter’ is to sharpen the mind. When we hear the same process applied to the word ‘donkey’ we can hear the obstinacy that the animal is renowned for. (Eugene then goes on to explain the origin of the word ‘larynx’, and its significance.)
He says that civilisation has killed the ‘natural man’ but that this is necessary for ‘resurrection.’ “No death, no resurrection.” “What civilisation does for you is inhibit you so hard that you are forced to choose to be free.” The baby starts life as a free being and lives spontaneously, but civilisation imposes on it and sets up impedances which force the child, progressively, towards reflexive, self-consciousness. (He continues his analysis of the word ‘larynx’ to show this.)
In the Cabalistic ‘Tree of Life’ the larynx is never drawn as a sphere, because it is a ‘non-sphere’. This is because it has negative terms: like the term ’non-sphere’. From the word in the larynx we can talk of non-things: no-thing, in-finite, in-effable, un-speakable etc. It can say things which negate the positives and yet are meaningful. If we say ‘unspeakable’ we are talking about something that cannot be talked about. This is because we know that, inside us, things that we cannot voice. When you try to express a meaning, you find that you cannot. Can we know anything whatever that is clearly beyond argument?
There are two kinds of words: the word of God and the word of man. We know that sound and form are “indestructibly together,” as demonstrated by the Chladni figures. The word of God is “a vibratory behaviour of the field of power, structures the forms of reality in the world.” e.g the crystal, the snowflake. Man can bend or misuse a word to mean anything he likes but the word of God, as we find in a mantra, the sound structure which represents exactly the form. So the word of God is true because there is perfect correspondence between the Absolute Will and that word. There is another kind of truth, in the correspondence between the intention of the word and the deed based upon it. (As in the example sounded of the words ‘cat’ and ‘donkey’.) Another truth is of the deed acting upon a material thing e.g. to sharpen a chisel you have to know the exact angle to hold it against the oilstone. The word here is the angle. So how many kinds of truth are there? Clearly, there are more than the three of ontological, logical and moral.
To integrate a living being, we have a physical body, a will, which may be acting to form a body. If it does, it must have been inspired to do so, either by the Absolute, the ancestors, or by the perceptions occurring in itself. For the latter, it needs a word to mediate, and that word must have significance for both the form and the action.(deed). “The word reminds you of the idea and the word allows you to control the parts of the deed that you apply to the gross material. i.e. the five aspects represented by the hand, and the sixth one, the coordinator, the field of intelligent power.
If we remember these five, and the field, then we can bring in powers by which we can do things.”
How do we get integration? By remembering the word ‘integration’- all of these six aspects.
The word ‘still’ does not mean ‘static’, it does not mean doing nothing. It means “self-crucifixtion of one who knows how to tie himself up in his intellect (idea) and will.” This means being highly active on the inside. “You balance all the opposite tendencies inside you – the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ and the conflict between them. To integrate, to become one, you have to control yourself within the act so that what you are doing, you are not doing, you are saying “yes/no” to the same thing.”
(He then describes two physical exercises to do this: one using an arm, the other, the whole body.)
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NUCLEAR WAR
NUCLEAR WAR
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday in 1984
Eugene starts with a diagram to represent involution. (This is a large V standing in a square.) The square represents us, in the material world. As the Absolute Spirit (Apeiron) descends, it gets progressively more dense. (The ‘den’ in dense means judgement, and spirit, as it descends, increases the number of judgements we make inside ourselves.) Above the V is Infinite: ‘Apeiron’. Its first definition is the circle of the macrocosmos. Inside this it posits smaller circles, some of which are us. The Hebrew word ‘Torah’ is the same as the Sanskrit ‘Dharma’. Both mean ‘The Law’
The ideational world is full of form and all the forms are reciprocally interpenetrating. (He draws a hexagon to illustrate.) Man is a microcosm of the Universe and his mind also is full of interpenetrating ideas, continuously interfering with each other. (When we try to define an idea we can only do so by using words; which belong to other ideas.) These forms in the mind are felt; we make value-judgements of liking/disliking; in yoga (bahoga).
(He draws the diagram again and this time puts a circle at the top of the right-arm of the V to represent ‘ideation’ and a second circle lower down, to represent ‘bahoga’.) “Ideation, the energies of the ideas, are now looked upon by the Apeiron Itself…as sources of possible enjoyment.” When we like something we tend to move towards it and when we dislike something we tend to move away from it; we act on this basis. So he now adds a third circle, close to the base of the V to represent ‘activation’, the will to act on the basis of ‘like/dislike’. All of this right-arm of the V represents ‘involution’. The fourth stage of involution is the embodiment of the process, through ideation, feeling and will, into the material world.
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This fourth level, at the base of the V, is incarnation. Every human consciousness is created in this way. We are all Apeiron in physical bodies. We have to climb back to our origin, but within the physical body. To evolve, we must “substitute for physical, mechanical reactivity, an act of will. And in that act of will, we have to will to feel like and dislike, and that is called ‘compassion’. In order to climb back to the Absolute, we have to will, to feel, to ideate again.” The fourth level. of material embodiment, is a dangerous place, because we tend to identify with what we think of as the ‘self’ and exclude others. In this exclusion, we reduce our omniscience to only finite knowledge. “At the level of reciprocal interpenetration, dharmic ideation, you are actually a participant in omniscience.”
At level four we can become materialistic and forget our source. If we identify only with the material world, we become mechanical. Our response then becomes reactive to stimuli from outside. If we continue in this way, we descend further into the ‘abyss’. We may now be full of knowledge of the material world, like the empirical scientist, but without understanding, without wisdom. “If you become an absolute materialist, believing in discrete, atom particles, granularity, dust, then you will not be able to turn back, because you have identified.” So we have to make a choice.
From level four we have to will to return to our source. This turning is a ‘metanoia’, a change of mind. We have to integrate with our will, our compassion, and pure, universal ideation. “…and you find yourself not different from the Apeiron.” “You as an individual are a modality of that boundless, infinite source of all being.”
(He now redraws the diagram as a series of concentric rings,) At the centre is ‘sthula’, the physical body, together with ‘kama’, the desire nature, and ‘manas’, the ordinary, time-mind. Around these, but also permeating them, are ‘buddhi’, intellect, and ’atma’, spirit, which together are equivalent to the Greek ‘logos’, ‘cosmic reason’. Around all of these is ‘Brahman’ and, beyond all, the ‘Para-Brahman’. (He draws a mnemonic of the hand and labels it: little finger-sthula, ring finger-kama, middle finger-manas, first finger-buddha, thumb-atma.)
The atma, buddhi, manas, and kama are all inside the physical body. The atom and buddhi are eternal and cannot be lost. They are two aspects of the one fact of ultimate power. “The individual being is encased in an ovoid aura of power and your identification is over the whole of that ovoid form, that ‘golden egg’ of being in which we have a smaller one, and then a smaller one, down to the physical body level.”
It is possible to focus our consciousness on any object we choose. (He gives the example of a catatonic standing for 17 hours looking at his finger.) It is possible to focus on an idea and to become trapped by it; e.g . Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito. Anyone can become mono-ideistic and be “trapped by their own desire, kama, locking on their appetite.” The idea is: “I will be superior.” “I will be powerful.” This identification is the key to freedom or bondage. “If we identify with a finite, no matter what it is, for finite gain…we are on the downward path to the abyss.” We must “remember that we are eternally crucified on what we are. Even God cannot get rid of God.”
We are crucified on the Truth and there is no escape in the long run. ‘Atma’: the ‘at’ means exactly this: crucified on the Truth. The ‘ma’ means an appetival activity. The ‘atma’ represents a duality: “a will to form and a will to appetival passion”. ‘Buddhi’ means to ‘wake up’. It means that “when you express yourself in any way whatever, by gestures, words, emotions, thoughts…you are committed to counter-attack from the rest of the Universe.” When we speak we utter, not just our own thoughts, but those of others and of ancestors. There is no way you can stop others attacking you. If we realise that the ‘atma’ and the ‘buddhi’ are eternal, then it is the ‘buddhi’ that re-incarnates. “The one that knows that his is crucifixion on form is his own appetival will to self-formulation,… cannot fall.” “But the moment identification occurs with anything less than that…we fall from the ‘buddhi’ into the ‘manas’.”
The manasic process is male but the kama process is female. Every human has both, as they have both ‘atma’ and ‘buddhi’, but to the extent that a man recognises only ‘manas’ and ‘kama’, he is destined for the abyss. The most successful business men are those who can focus on the ‘manas’ most strongly. If they admit anything of the ‘atma/buddhi’ they could not be so successful. Their wives identify strongly with the desire for furs and the high-life; yet neither can be fulfilled; his life will end and with it his empire. Her need is for relation and he is not able to give that fully. Not many people can focus so intently on the pursuit of material wealth, and the fame that goes with it, but some do.
It is also possible to identify primarily with the body, as some congenital idiots do. The body has an intelligence of its own: falling flat on your face is very difficult to do, invariably, the arms fly out to prevent it. The body likes equilibrium. The processes of respiration, circulation, digestion, excretion are all carried on with no intervention from the person inhabiting the body. The body operates itself and defends itself.
We could all be related in perfect harmony with each other, but we are not. Why not? The answer lies in identification with finites, usually our ego. If we are identified with materiality, then we will worry about nuclear war. If we remember the ‘atma/buddhi’ and focus on that, we will be alright. If we remember the diagram we will go straight into our centre and “…they will see light equals intelligence eternal inside themselves.” “It begins with the will to compassion and co-ideation with everybody…it means mutual helpfulness.” “If you commit yourself now, and I mean now, in this instant, to a reciprocal, intelligent, inter-relation with all the beings you know, in mutual helpfulness and compassion now, then you are ready for that bomb.” “Always, every instant, there is a choice: do I believe I am a spiritual intelligence or not? Am I a material body made of bits or not? It is either/or.”
“You do not need to fear anything except your own tendency to identify with finitude. That is the only fear you need have, and that’s called ‘the Fear of the Lord.’ Because, if you identify with yourself as separate, then you have sowed the possibility of your separation, you are falling into granularity, into bits.”
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PHILOSOPHERS STONE
PHILOSOPHERS STONE
Précis of a talk given at Parklands 25.05.1986
Eugene begins by asking how long has talk of this been going on? He suggests approaching it from the idea of ‘stone’, S means ‘Spirit’, T means ‘fixation’ or ‘crucifixion’. N means both ‘negation’ and ‘intelligence’. “The fundamental idea in ‘ST one’ is that all matter is really spirit, self-fixated and when this stone is discovered it will confer immortality on the owner.” He then asks the audience: “What is mortality?” (There follows an interchange of ideas with members.) He defines the word ‘philosopher’: lover of ‘soph’, of wisdom. ‘Soph’ reversed is ‘phos’ which means ‘light’. So ‘soph’ actually means “the word ‘light’ turned around and back to its source.”i.e. “reflexive awareness.” We all know lots of things but can we say that we know that we know them? To be reflexively aware we have to be able to say that we can will, what we feel, what we know. To be reflexive is to be able to say: “I don’t only know it, I know that I know it, I don’t only will it, I will that I will it. That is the highest function of any conscious being; to be reflexive.”
The phonetics of ‘stone’ tell us that Spirit has crucified Itself and in the process, negated Itself. i.e. set up a self-resistance. If Spirit did not do this It would be a Field of awareness with nothing in it; objectless. As humans, we are able to “capture” an object in our field of awareness. The word ‘percept’ means: “rational capture” and a concept is a group of these. “Sentience gets hold of Itself
…and moulds Itself into a form which we call ‘conceptual essence’.” All of our control ideas are concepts which we have moulded with our will to attain formal control of a situation. Without concepts there is merely a field with nothing in it. This is difficult for us to imagine because we have a body, and that body is central to our field of awareness. Our body is the “condensation of an intent to exist.” If we lose this intent then the body diminishes and we can fade away and die.
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“The Philosopher’s Stone is You.” Each individual is a zone of Sentient Power and we can choose to do something or nothing, according to our intent. “The Philosopher’s Stone confers immortality in this way: to be a human being, as opposed to animal, is to be able to formulate, that is, to structure the content of consciousness with ideas.” To have ideas is to structure consciousness. Without this structure we cannot relate to each other, or to the larger universe. As babies, our awareness is not yet structured. It is vague because we do not yet have a vocabulary to structure that awareness. “The ‘ware’ …means we are actually…vulnerable.”
He demonstrates with a member of the audience that a sharp rap on the knuckles makes us more aware. We become sharper, more focussed. When this happens a second time then we are “pre-
pared” – “rationally paired.” We have an image of a blow about to arrive and then one arrives and the image is “paired” with the blow, before it happens. This indicates a “degree of reflexion.” “Now a state of field-awareness is where a zone of Sentient Power has not been hurt hard enough for it to prepare itself for the shock.” A state of awareness is less vulnerable when it becomes a state of preparedness. Prior to creation, the Infinite, Sentient Power was a Field without preparation. This was a state of “generalised anxiety” when the Field could feel danger but not yet define what that danger was. When we “prepare” we set up an image in our field of awareness; we pay “attention” and this sets up a “tension” in the field. It precipitates a form in that field. At the grossest end this is a physical body, less gross is an idea, but both are “condensations of energy.” Any energy input, a stimulus, can shock us if we have not experienced it before and prepared ourselves for it. Our centre of reference, our body, can be suddenly shocked in this way, even destroyed. Our field of awareness around this centre, this “locus” must also fear disintegration. (He gives the example of a small boy flattened by a steam roller.)
Jesus, and a very few others, have demonstrated that our field of awareness can survive the death of the physical body. Our bodies provide a resistance to finer energies. We know today that there is no such thing as ‘matter’. Everything is energy in vibration at different rates and manifesting in different ways. When we press our thumb and finger together, the resistance we feel is actually the resistance of electrons spinning in the atomic make-up of our bodies. “The resistance you feel…is the resistance of the forces of repulsive electrons.” and these energies come into us from the food we eat. The fact that we can break down food and store its energy inside us in the form of our bodies, shows that we have a form of our own, a form not made of food but made of our energy field. We can hold a hand in the air and feel the hand without touching it. We are feeling the energy in the hand, the ‘prana’, the ‘life-force’, which we take in from food and convert into our own energy field. We take in food, break it down, and subject it to our will to supply us as a mass of energy.
i.e. we destroy the forms of the food we eat and convert them to our form. If this form, this field of energy, is reflexive and self-conscious and prepared for shocks, then it is invulnerable, not able to be disintegrated. This ‘invulnerability’ is the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’.
He then explores 6 different philosophies about ultimate reality. He arranges 3 materialistic ones on the points of a downward facing triangle and 3 spiritual ones one a triangle pointing upwards and superimposes them to give a six-pointed star. All these ideas are contradictory and people have gone to war over them in the last 2000 years and may do so again: “The Americans think the Russians are wicked atheists and themselves “enlightened, compassionate Christians.” This difference of ideas could result in nuclear war. Now to get a harmonious disintegration-resistant body of ideas, you must have some idea that embraces all the other ideas.” Some philosophers have suggested “eclecticism” i.e. taking the best ideas from each religion and combining them into “one, magnificent super-religion.” Unfortunately, the world is not that simple. The world is energy and all energies fight for survival.
He takes the word ‘AYN’ a Hebrew word meaning ‘Absolute Observer’ and also ‘supreme negation of ignorance.’ A means ‘Absolute,’ Y means ‘Yes’, N means ‘No’. The Absolute can affirm or negate Itself. “Every observer…has this power of agreeing or disagreeing with anything whatever in his field of awareness.” If we can integrate our ideas then we can assemble an idea body that can survive the physical body. This would be a body of ideas that would be ‘immortal’, unbreakable. The Bible says that those who comprehend this “shall not be hurt of the second death.” This ‘second death’ is the death of the body of ideas which has served as a reference centre during life. The aim is: “to make all our ideas so self-consistent with each other that if we know one we know them all.” Referring to the six-pointed star: “We always have a pair of opposites.” The triangle pointing down, the material one, is inertia, the one pointing upwards, the spiritual one, is initiative. Factually, they disagree. Yet, we must be able to “take a pair of opposites, like initiative and inertia, and hold them together.”
He gives the example of learning to drive a car. At first we are not in control but eventually the nervous system is conditioned to drive so that we can perform other tasks at the same time. i.e. the inertia now built into our nervous system can do the driving and leave us free to initiate a new route to drive, when we will to do so. “Inertia in a person might destroy their initiative or the initiative might take to pieces the inertia unnecessarily.” (e.g. Luddites smashing machines.)
To resist disintegration we must control 2 enemies: initiative and inertia. Inertia is an enemy if we don’t know we have it and initiative is an enemy if it scorns inertia. “We don’t want change for the sake of change.” Our energy has two possibilities: initiative – change it, and inertia – maintain it. Because energy is sentient it can intelligently decide which to do at any given moment. You can decide to keep or get rid of an idea, at will.
“Interest is energy convergence, interest is life dedicating itself to perpetuation.” i.e. If we are interested in life we are likely to want to have more of it. We are the cause of our existence and where we are now is because of choices prior made. We cannot blame anyone else.
The field of Sentient Power is pure Spirit, initiative, but it can set up a system of formal inertias. Our physical body is an example. We are self-generated. Our body of ideas is the living being and our physical body is the inertic attachment through which it operates.
How do we make our being into a Philosopher’s Stone? Answer: “Tell yourself only the truth.” “Do not allow self-deception.” “The body of total resistance to disintegration is the body of truth, where truth means formal, absolute, self-consistency.” “If you tell yourself a truth and find another truth that fits with it, you are building your Philosopher’s Stone.” We are “purna,” a Hindu word. ‘Pur’ means “structuralising power” and ‘na’ is “sensuous, enjoying power,” “and what you are enjoying is your own structure made by you to your own specification.” To build our Philosopher’s Stone we shift from ‘awareness’, a general sense of vulnerability, to ‘consciousness’. Con-sci-ous-ness. Con-sci – with analysis, ous – being, ness – essence. “The essence of being, analytically perfected and held together.” We have to face the pain of telling ourselves the truth about ourselves and our inner motives. We are then building our Philosopher’s Stone body “on the rock of absolutely consistent truth. This requires thorough self-knowledge. We must resist all disintegration and reassemble ourselves.” We know this is possible because every cell in our bodies is constantly breaking down, dying and being repaired. If we want the repair process we simply will to continue to exist. This is “structuralising.” We keep the “pur’ and throw away the “na,” the sensuousness. It is not easy to do, of course. The “na” will keep resisting the attempts of “pur” to control it.
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PEARL OF GREAT PRICE
PEARL OF GREAT PRICE
Précis of a talk given at Parklands 23.02.1986
Eugene begins by asking David about tonight’s topic. David replies with the title but Eugene changes it to ‘Peril of Great Price’. The oyster is an ancient joke about a woman: you have to swallow it (her) whole, you cannot chew (analyse) it. An oyster is soft-bodied, with little structure, but a hard case round it. “The hard case is a defence that any woman has against external structure.” Inside the shell is a very sensitive being, able to sense changes in moon phases. (Many marine creatures come to the surface just before full-moon.) Women are similar: “They are very sensitive to universal force-fields and they are hard, or case-hardened, against external imposition of strict logic.” The pearl in the oyster is a product of irritation from a well-defined form, usually a grain of sand. If a man knows how to irritate a woman with a well-defined idea, she will produce a ‘pearl of great price’; a pearl of wisdom. This is not easy, and a man must study a woman closely to discover what is most irritating to her! Women are not ‘irrational’, which means ‘bad reason’, but non-rational. “They do not commit themselves to obey the strictures of logic.”
“Everything you do know is in your consciousness. What is not in your consciousness, you do not know.” Also, you must focus within it. “If you do not focus, you do not know.” But when you focus on a finite, you un-focus upon the Infinite. The purpose of contemplation is to expand the focus. i.e. to expand consciousness. When you do this you expand your ‘power to be’. “Consciousness and Power are fundamentally identical.” “Power is feminine and consciousness is masculine.” The male has forgotten that ideas are powers; when we think, we are handling power. If we forget this, we become identified with the idea and trapped by it. e.g. if you are thinking of a triangle, you cannot consider the meaning of a square.
Read more . . .
He then shows that racism is not only between people of different skin colour, but is also vertical: people in positions of power discriminate against those they consider beneath them in the social hierarchy. Similarly, the divisions of time are also divisions of power e.g. As the sun rises in the sky we become more aware of its power and have to protect ourselves from it. The divisions of time into the seasons, months, moon phases and times of day, are similarly divisions of power. The significance of this is that when people become habituated to a certain way of thinking, they take this as the basis for reality “and they cling to that thought process as security.” If someone comes along and contradicts this way of thinking they are in peril. e.g. Galileo, Bruno, Christ. The ‘ear’ in ‘pearl’ is the ‘peril’. You will hear, in the human voice, evidence of hierarchical beliefs. “People are fonder of certain words than of others.” The pearl in the oyster is its defence against the irritant. The concept in the human mind is similar; it is built up to defend the sensuous side, the soft-bodied ness, of the human being against interruption.
The right-brain is biased towards pleasure and non-rational pursuits, such as art, music etc. whilst the left-brain is biased towards reason. So the left is like a man and the right is like a woman. “And the right-side will defend itself against reason when you try to insert a rational proposition into the pleasure-loving half of your mind.” The conceptual structure of a person can be shattered by a contradictory word. Their ‘pearl’ is their defence system in the world; to many it is their ‘God’. In defending it they are worshipping their defence system, and will think they are doing God a favour by killing you. Words are not arbitrary; “the name of a thing and the form of a thing go together.” e.g. The German ‘hund’ is not the same as the English ‘dog’. (One ‘hounds’ you and the other ‘dogs’ your footsteps; these are different functions.) “Every name has a corresponding form in this manner.”
Universal energy equals Infinite force. “If you move a little bit of it, you are moving against the resistance of the Infinite Power.” e.g. If you hit yourself on the head with your fist: “you feel the power in your hand and the reactive power in the resistant skull.” (Newton’s First Law.) This is ‘karma’. Without the ‘r’ ‘kama’ means ‘desire’, also called ‘cupid’. (‘Ma’ is the feminine ‘want’ and ‘ka’ is the controlling action.) When we desire we start a process of reaction and turn ‘kama’ into ‘karma’. As soon as you start an action, you start the opposition to that action; “because if you identify with the finite…you start an infinite response.” To identify with a finite is to be a self-crucified one – a ‘st one’. ‘Purpose’ means to set up an idea in the mind for realisation later; ‘pro-positum’ “You have started an infinite reaction to your positing intent.” “When you focus your attention on anything less than the Infinite, you have committed yourself to a finite activity that must defeat you in the future.” “When you focus on a finite purpose, you finite your identification and therefore go under the law of that identification.” He gives a familiar mnemonic: little finger – physical body, ring finger – feelings, middle finger – mentation, index finger – conceptual, thumb – will. The ‘One’ beyond that is pure consciousness. The energy throughout (Shakti) is identical and so is the consciousness of that energy (Shiva).
Intellectuals like to think that ideas do not move power, that they are a form without a force. To think in this way is to think abstractly. “We draw away the concept of power from the concept of form.” We are then at the mercy of the idea, we cannot do any thing about it. To think in this way is to ignore the right-brain power. It is the equivalent to “a man murdering his wife…allowing the intellect to murder the power.” It takes a very long time to grow a pearl in an oyster and a pearl does not always result. “You might irritate a woman all your life and get no pearl…you have not had the right irritant.”
Every being is unique. No two forms in the universe are identical and neither are emotional fields, mentational processes, conceptual power, volitional power. And, although consciousness is consciousness, “the forms and functions of it vary with the positions, velocity, and so on…down to the smallest sub-atomic vibration.” So we cannot ever have perfect agreement between two men about anything, and the gap between a man and a woman must be even greater. We can only hope for absolute tolerance of each other. The only agreement can be that we disagree.
The origin of the intellect is power. Male reason is backed by female power. Will creates intellect, as an instrument. “There is no intellect unless you focus your will.” (He gives the image of a pine-cone, round at one end, the feminine, wilful part, and sharp at the other, the focussed, male intellect.) “Every zone within Infinite, Sentient Power is uniquely wilful, intellectual, temporal, calculating, emotively responsive and physically precipitate.”
We have to learn humility. A human being stands half-way between God and the inert, mineral world. We are the only animal that can meditate on our origin. We can choose to go up to the “Supreme Enlightenment” or down to Hell. We have to listen; literally. We have a centre in the head that can resonate with the Absolute. We must listen for the P’ear’l. We are all cells of the Cosmic Body, the Body of God. Only the human has evolved to the level at which it can articulate its position and formulate an “intention of divinisation.” To do this we have to break inertias. These are the ‘seven deadlies’. Foremost of these is pride: the identification as a finite being, wanting our own way and believing we can get it. The second is covetousness, wishing for things we haven’t got; this turns to envy of others who have them. Then comes anger at a world that does not allow us to become what we think we should. If that fails, then gluttony, the attempt to eat the world to defeat it. If that won’t work then, perhaps, lust might, immersion in sexual activity. And if that fails then we go to sleep; sloth and torpor.
To give up our self-image is a kind of death and here is the ‘peril’. We have to “smash” our self-image by our own efforts; this is the ‘great price’ we must pay. “That is what Jesus was doing in Gethsemane.” We have to concentrate very hard and focus energy “like a bullet” to shoot at our own self-image. As we grow older we tend to lose power and interest in the world. If we lose interest we stop drawing in energy from the Infinite Field and we fade into death. Jesus said: “Work while it is light, because the night comes when no man can work.”
“The oyster, and the softness of it, means a woman, but the softness is a disguise for Absolute Power…its weapon is sulking, moaning and nagging, and unless a man can take those three weapons, he is going to crumble.” We have to learn to believe that we don’t need a self-image to survive. “You are an eternal being, backed by the Infinite, serving the Infinite’s purpose, and you do not need to fight to survive.”
“Now to believe it, you must have sufficient energy to oppose your ancestral inertias that have been trying, for thousands of years, to build that self-image.”
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THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE I
THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE II
THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE I AND II
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 25.05.1979
Eugene starts with the source of life, “Before the earth exists.” Before creation began there was only darkness. Then there was light – incandescence. This condensed into gas, then water, then earth. (The states of ‘matter’ we all learned in school). So involution was from the dark, self-agitation of its energy to make itself incandescent, like the Crab nebula we see in the night sky. Then it begins to turn into a spiral nebula, like the Andromeda Galaxy. Then it condenses to form stars and then condenses further to form planets. All these forms were hidden in that primordial darkness, not as mere potentialities, but as actualities at very, very high frequency. (The one he calls Aleph).
The end of involution is the mineral world which we see in the rocks and in the bones of our bodies. “When we go down into body identification, we have hit bottom.” The journey back begins with the mono-cell. All life began as mono-cells in the primordial seas. Some of these, being in shallow water, and energised by the sun, became very active. Others, in deeper water, without the sun, became more passive but rose upwards at full moon and sank back down as the moon waned.This difference in the mono-cells is the beginning of sexual differentiation in humans and is seen in the different sex cells we have today: the energetic sperm and the passive, moon-influenced, ovum.
In spite of external appearances, we are all hermaphrodites, being essentially identical in origin. It is only a slight, chemical difference which results in a baby being either male or female. Sexual chemistry is “precipitated volition.” This is why drugs can work; because they are chemicals with “a will to formulate in a certain way.”
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The Divine Hermaphrodite is the one who “de-vines” this, one who knows it. To be aware of this and to control both functions in oneself is to be a Divine Hermaphrodite and to be like God. The whole object of evolution is to be like God. To become like God is to rediscover our “fundamental, pre-polar being as will.” We are the will of God to know himself. The resistances created by the sexual polarity are essential because “without setting up a resistance you cannot test your own strength, your own intelligence.” To become Divine Hermaphrodites, we must become self-consciously, reflexively aware of both poles of being inside us.
“Now the only reason a man does not like being a girl is because he is not yet a man.” The enemy is inertia; the previously established way in which an individual has been working. The centre of our being is pure volition, initiative, it has no inertia. It can do anything, and if it thinks about it, it is not being purely initiative. Initiative is immediate. We must take our volition and say, “Whatever happens to me, I willed to put myself into that situation.” We are all very good at projecting onto others what we cannot accept is in ourselves. e.g. if we are angry with someone because we trusted them and they let us down we should really be angry with ourselves for trusting them, but mostly we are not! (But, it allows us to see, outside in someone else, that which we dare not look at inside ourselves.)
Since we are of identical substance with God, we must have agreed to incarnate on the earth. We could have refused! Since we acquiesced in this we have to accept whatever is needed for our education in order to return. We have chosen to forget our original decision to come down into the physical world so as to concentrate fully on the examination of the trials and tribulations of life in the physical body. Assenting to suffering makes it easier to bear than resisting it. You say “I am actually willing to endure all things.”
(There follows a lengthy exchange with two audience members who object to what is being said.)
The polarisation of male/female is there to give us the opposition we need to evolve. “We have willed to impose upon ourselves every conceivable kind of opposition that we experience and encounter,” We have only one thing to do: make it volitional. i.e. don’t just think about it, seek the opposition, do not run away from it. It is your duty to yourself to say, “I am willing this situation. I refuse to act mechanically to an external stimulus. I will my behaviour as from now and I will not project onto another person the responsibility for that willing.” “If everything you do is done in that way, it is a perfect act, it can’t be otherwise, and when you do such an act, reflexively, you are, at that moment, a Divine Hermaphrodite.”
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THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE (2)
Précis of a talk given at Parklands on 24.06.1979
Every man has passed, ‘in utero’, through a phase of being female as an egg. Having left that phase behind he has forgotten his physicality and compassion in favour of rationality and initiative.
In doing so, he has reduced himself to the level of half a being.
Originally we lived in caves and to run back to the safety of the cave was essential for survival. To early man, the cave was equivalent to the womb, to run for safety back to mummy. This made very good sense when there were dangerous animals lurking in the forest. From this kind of life arose the concept of banding together with other men for safety. Men, naturally, disliked each other. We know this from the behaviour of stags and bull seals. There is no friendliness amongst males where the opposite sex is concerned. Men got together against their biological nature. Biological nature we associate with the female and the force that transcends this with the male. So the men clubbed together (the origin of gentlemen’s clubs) for safety to defeat a large animal and other bands of men. So now, instead of running back to the cave, men formed squares, ie they fought back to back. However, the protopathic memory of the cave era is still stored in the minds of men who still run home to a woman for solace when they feel defeated or depressed.
This leap forward by men changed the nature of religion. In the cave-dwelling era, religion was matriarchal.The new power of men resulted in patriarchy. It also resulted in more communal forms of living and eventually to the idea of a social contract i.e. a society in which people agreed to rules to ensure the common good. However what happened in fact was that certain men, a bit brighter than the rest, got together with others who were similar and early societies were ruled by oligarchs. These were men who could see that they would have a better life for themselves by persuading the masses to do the work for them.
We saw this most recently in Nazi Germany where a few cunning men rose to power and reduced the rest to a sub-human condition of subordination. The most individual people in Germany at the time were the Jews and so they had to be eliminated. This process of the leaders increasing their dominance at the expense of the masses they had vowed to represent, was captured in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ at the time. When men left the security of the cave they formed organisations for men. Survivors of such organisations can be seen today in the Freemasons and Gentlemen’s clubs. The feminine nature still in man had to be suppressed and not allowed expression. Men now had to conceal from other men such qualities as emotional response and physicality. We see this most clearly in the military; square bashing and exercises to instil obedience and duty. Any tendency to feel, to be immediate, to act on initiative, had to be killed off, to make a man who would take orders from a ‘superior’ being and sacrifice his life if needed. (In the army you go under oath and abandon your right to be a free-thinking individual.) The result of military training is that men lost the two most important female characteristics: emotional feeling and concern for the body. However, these are only lost from the conscious mind. Protopathically we still remember that we had these qualities. (It was observed during war, how often soldiers would cry for their mothers when wounded or afraid.)
We cannot be free from anything that we are essentially, but we can, under pressure from other men, appear to have done so. Curiously, many famous militarists were also homosexual; in throwing out the woman they became so. When men have lost their hidden, feminine nature, they look for it on the outside. What they project onto a suitable female is actually the perfect female they had inside themselves. Being their own idea of femaleness it must be perfect but the actual woman cannot match this and so the man will spend a great deal of time in the relationship trying to perfect her. Most men’s ideal woman is their mother so a woman who approximates to this may often be chosen for a partner. Such a marriage is not destined to be blissful. A woman’s response to her logical male is often to throw a tantrum, which does not work to correct him, because, along with the plates, she throws out compassion and sensuality in his eyes. Her best strategy is to be a nun and and a prostitute! We are looking for perfect inter-function and this means seeing reality. A man must not project his ideal onto a woman he is with. He must find out what she really is. A real relationship is one of four beings: 2 in the male and 2 in the female. We have to discover all four in both. This, in principle, should be simple, but simple does not mean easy, because of inertia. “We have been millions of years evolving and we have made millions and millions of ancestral errors and these errors are all engraved in our protoplasm as emotive tendencies, fears, hopes, they are all there, and they make it difficult for us to live the simple life that we could live.”
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RAISING THE CORPSE
RAISING THE CORPSE
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 31.10.1982
The talk begins with Eugene saying that he has been asked a question about the Tibetan idea of raising the dead, and he describes the technique of raising an actual corpse! This is the first, literal level of interpreting the question, but there are three others. The second, “allegorical way” is about raising something that is not as lively as it ought to be. The third way is the “homiletic” level of lecturing a crowd about raising their level of appreciation of life, and the fourth level in which the corpse is oneself. This last one is the one he is going to talk about. It is the one spoken of by Christ as the “quick” and the “dead.” ‘Dead’ means suffering from inertia and to become ‘quick’ we have to raise our level. Essential to this is learning to ‘hold our tongue’. The tongue articulates whatever is in our mind and often this is the result of inertia. We must learn to control the tongue and make our organism congruent with consciousness. To do this we have to rescue ourselves from the habitual process and become capable of using initiative.
We often find ourselves saying things we don’t mean and much of what we say is mechanical repetition of things learned from parents and others. All quarrels between people and nations are conducted by words and mostly these are reactive and not acts of free-willed initiative. To ‘raise the dead’ we must become aware of our thinking, our feelings, our volition and our physical reactivity. We must become conscious of all of these and control our organism so that it conforms to our will.
This is the key to human relations. Most marriages that fail do so because of a lack of control of what comes out of the mouth, which is mostly habitual and ancestral. Our protoplasm is “a recording instrument of tremendous sensitivity” and has remembered thoughts, feelings, impulses, and memories of activities and can replay all of these through the tongue. The Bible says: “If you can control the tongue, you can control the whole body.”
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We know that we are, essentially, appetival, and the tongue has been developed, over millions of years, to articulate what we want and don’t want. We have developed a vocabulary of two parts: one constructive and helpful, and the other destructive and unhelpful. These stored records appear on the tongue instantaneously as a reaction to a stimulus, so most of what is articulated is a repetition of these. The ancestral experiences stored in these records have been gained over millennia and so we have words to react to any experience in the present. We have to inhibit this tendency and learn to ‘hold our tongue’, to become conscious of the forces within us trying to express themselves. We have to become the “authors of our own activities.” “We are responsible, not only for our own actions, but for our reactions to other people’s actions.” i.e. Our reaction is always ours. To achieve this, we must be in the ‘here and now’. We can never blame anyone else for what we do, and say, and think. Our ancestry is our ancestry and no one else’s. When we ‘hold the tongue’ we find energy piling up inside us fighting our attempt to do this. We should notice this but not give way to it.
He draws a letter ‘A’ to symbolise Absolute consciousness. From the point of origin at the top is a split into 2 parts: intellection and volition. The cross bar is the link factor implicit in the point of origin. The Egyptians added a beak at the apex and talons at the feet to represent a vulture or eagle, to symbolise the high-flying intellect. The same letter upside-down in Hebrew means an ‘ox’. If we overlap the two it gives us the six-pointed star. The ‘A’ with the apex at the top signifies that “your consciousness is spiritual,” when below, as in the ox, it means your consciousness is “materialised.” Materialists think that all information comes to us from the 5 senses, so the mind is totally conditioned by the material world. If this were so, we would be slaves to external stimuli, but if we put the apex at the top and place ourselves in Spirit, then we know that we have free initiative within us and do not need to rely on external stimuli. We can use the same symbol on its side to represent the observing eye of consciousness. So this symbol can represent a spiritualised being, like an eagle, or an enslaved one, like an ox, or the observer who sees both the others. The eagle is a predator and the ox, as a beast of the ground, can be seen as prey. So the symbol shows both predator and prey, and the observer, who identifies with neither. “He is too intelligent and too awake, and in alchemical doctrines he would be simply called “the artist.” ‘Art’, ‘Torah’ and ‘Rota’ all are the same word and mean ‘law’. “The law is observation. The law is: Consciousness is a catalyst.” To converge consciousness is to converge power. This is why ‘one-pointedness’ is so important in Yoga. “When the mind comes to a point, it precipitates.”
He analyses the word ‘author’ and shows, diagrammatically, how the word can be built from the significances of each letter. Each one of us is an author, a zone of encapsulation of Spirit. Inside that zone, spirit is called ‘soul’. i.e. Each soul is an encapsulation of free, initiative spirit. So each one of us is “individually, absolutely, self-responsible” because we are the Absolute, individuating.
Everything in the universe vibrates and vibration is contraction and expansion alternating. Each contraction is contra-action. The free energy contracts onto a point, and thereby contradicts its Absoluteness. This movement is a focussing of that energy, an intention which produces an in-tension of itself. The Infinite has now produced a finite. This point is a focus within Infinity. This positing of a finite point creates opposition, contradiction. This point is a finite but is a modality of the intention of the Infinite. “The Infinite, extended Sentient Power is positing a point and the point posited is finite and is a resistance point to the Infinite.” We can say that the point posited is a fixation of free energy; the energy is fixed or crucified on that point. The lesson we can learn from this is that “if you push you generate opposition, now this is the key to successful relationships: don’t push.” It is the crucifixion of the energy on a point that causes us to forget our origin. That point signifies ‘form’. “As the power intends inwards it makes a form, and if you are not careful you will fall into identification with the form you have precipitated.” This is “the horrible fact that you, the Absolute, have trapped you in a formal precipitate of yours and unless you can remember your Absoluteness again, there is no salvation.” “You have precipitated you: no one else can be blamed.” (There is a question here asking “what is interest?”
“In-ter-est means that you are crucified in the being and that you have gone in to an earth (in terra) made by you in order to rest.” (e.g.The expected security of the marital relation.) Our interest is posited by our will but we tend to forget this and find other things to be interested in.
We are both sentience and power, but they are not the same. “Sentience is that whereby we know that we know, and power is that whereby we initiate the changes in what we know.” But we don’t have to initiate changes. We can hold in the power. It is then ‘potential’, ‘held-in’ power. We can be aware that we can do all kinds of things and yet not do them. We can sit perfectly still and know that we could move our body in many ways, and not do so. This is perfectly normal and yet can be the basis of all insanity, because we may feel that we can do all manner of things that we cannot actualise. When we are aware of the possible division between sentience and power there is a danger of identifying with either one to the exclusion of the other. Traditionally, in the west, we have viewed sentience as female and power as male. However, precision in sentience has given rise to science, a masculine aspect. Analysis of the world has been seen as a male characteristic but it can lead to female dissatisfaction and rebellion on the part of the woman who can use her power to defeat the man. So the polarisation of sentience and power can occur in any individual at any time.
Each of us is an author with the internal contradiction between our sentience and power. The Absolute is infinitely extended but the power must be focussed to make a point of interest; yet there isn’t one until It generates one. This is the explanation of ‘young love’ where the couple ‘fall in love’. The ideal ‘resting place’ is chosen and idealised to be the perfect spot to rest.
The Absolute is the Father and against the father the son is always wrong. i.e. the finite being, if he goes against Infinite Law cannot win. Although we are of the Absolute, we cannot have Absolute authority, only relative authority in our own domain. We can only have absolute control over our little bit. This ‘little bit’ is our ‘talent’ “a potential lent to you for application.” For these we have total responsibility.
Energy comes into us from solar radiation via the food we eat. This energy is sentient and will push us around until we learn to control it. This goes back to “biting the tongue.” If we cannot control our tongue then it will be energised and can get us into trouble. We have to assume authority over it and learn to control the energy within us. We know that our bodies have been grown by cosmic forces from conception to make us as we are. All the processes have been done for us by God. At some point we have to take responsibility for our growth and take over the work on our organism. When we can do this we can say with Christ: “My Father works and I work.” We are then moving in the right direction. The Absolute has brought us into being and is pushing us through evolution to the point when we can take over the responsibility for ourselves. We find the divinity inside ourselves, our Higher Self, and take control of the energy in us and how we use it and, therefore, of the tongue. This ensures that we will never use the tongue to make harmful or destructive remarks to others. We will always work towards higher levels of cooperation.
“The Author is the Absolute Power driving Itself into time-matter to provide Itself with the resistance whereby it will educate Itself about Its possibilities, and about the contributions It can make, by Its own personal efforts, to the further evolution of universal life.”
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REAL LOVE
REAL LOVE
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 30.11.1980
Eugene begins by stating that he has been asked to talk about Creativity, Naiveness, Inhibition, Secrecy and Real, Actual Love. (“As if there is another kind.”) He defines Love as: “Working for the development of the potentialities of all beings.” He then defines ‘potentialities’. ‘Potential’ means ‘power held in’ and only power can hold power into a centre. If it does not then power will go out. Infinite Power makes a point, a centre, in order to finite Itself, to know Itself. To ‘be’ symbolises a sphere. We can flatten this sphere into a circle and see it in two dimensions. When a sphere rotates, this is what it actually does, like our solar system, which began as a sphere. There is no non-energy and all energy is sentient, so energy which is not bound in a sphere is “in continuous, chaotic motion,” and we feel this as the ‘background anxiety’ discussed by depth psychologists. He explains the ‘Big Bang’ theory of astronomy. When Infinite energy presses onto a point, then eventually, that point will explode. This is how our universe came into being.
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Creativity. From the root ‘kra’ to ‘arc,’ to encapsulate. Infinite Power comes in and condenses onto centres. Since this power is intelligent, when it presses onto a point, it allows that point to press back a certain distance and the limit of this is the integument of the encapsulation. In our case, this is our skin. All beings can be represented by a circle with a dot in the centre in this way. At our centre we have Infinite Power and our skin is our boundary, the circle around us. Similarly, the earth has concentric spheres around it: the atmosphere, the ionosphere etc. all at different heights above the earth. All of these are produced by energies pressing in from Infinity, and the earth reacting to those energies. The solar and sidereal systems can be viewed in the same way. Every skin is the product of pressures from outside and from inside, balancing. This is the ‘firmament’ of the Bible, the ‘heaved up’ place, ‘Heaven’. As humans we live in a world in which our bodies are balanced between internal and external pressures. The diagram of the circle with the dot at centre is the key diagram to all religions and all philosophies because it says: “Creation is arcing, encircling.”
We are precipitates of Infinite, Sentient Power. We are modalities of It, of the Godhead: “We have no Self separate from that Infinite Power.” This Power has pressed in to make each one of us; we are points of reference for It and therefore, we are self-determinant. “It is Itself Infinity, pressed in to that point.” “Each dot is no more, and no less valid than the Infinite which precipitated it.” So why is the world in such a mess? It is because every one of us is absolutely self-determined and therefore can go its own way, ignoring other centres. We can will to agree with each other, and to disagree. We all want to impose ourselves on others and to extend the limits of our zone of power, to extend our space. We see this very clearly in the natural world in the behaviour of animals. And we are made in the same way. We all want more than we have of everything we deem desirable, both material things and living space. The conflicts that arise from this are opposite to ‘Real Love’.
“Real love helps every being, including itself, to extend and express its potentials, but it does not try to restrict the potentials of other beings.” On earth we are in a finite situation so all resources are limited. If we take more than we need it is at the expense of others.
Naivety. A naive being is one that functions like Eve in the ‘Garden’ in the presence of the serpent ‘Na’. The serpent represents the sensual life, a life of wishing and wanting and pleasure, “without the restraints of solid logic.” Eve was deceived into thinking that the apple would confer power, like God. This shows the absence of logic: A finite can only hope to control finite power, not infinite power. Our five sense organs provide very limited data and if we rely on these, as Eve did, then we are being naive. Fortunately, we have another sense, a sixth sense, which, “when perfectly, quietly balanced will tell us the intentions of the Infinite Power that created us.” If we don’t listen, and simply rely on our five senses, we will make mistakes, because we have “insufficient data.”
This is the mistake of some scientists who think that, as man extends his understanding of the world and his power, he will one day be supreme in the universe. Many think that God is no longer needed as an explanation of natural disasters, as our forebears did. We all have a tendency to use power when we have it, because it fascinates us. We are fascinated by new-found powers, as in Hiroshima. We know that already the militarists have weaponry far in excess of the destructive power of atomic bombs. They can now use electro-magnetic devices and lasers to destroy entire populations. The world’s super-powers are constantly trying to develop more powerful weapons to assert their superiority, so nation is in conflict with nation. Every individual, if he is aware of the power he has, must assume that others have the same power and could use it against him. He therefore lives in fear of attack. In this state a being cannot love, only defend.
We have forgotten that our highest intelligence is deep inside us. This has occurred because of the way we live, in close proximity to many other people. Our attention has become “extroverted onto our skin surface.” Today, we tend to think that we are not in contact with each other unless we are physically touching. But because we are modalities of Infinite Power we are in contact through the ideas that pass between us. Ideas are energised by feelings and these energies fill the spaces between us.Our relation may be invisible but it is nevertheless real. Between our bodies is a field of sentient power. We all exist within this field. We live in an “ocean of power;” “we are little wave clusters of that ocean.” When we move we disturb that ocean and when it moves it disturbs us.
Inhibition. Once we understand and realise this, that individual attempts to dominate others are doomed to failure, then we have to make a “metanoia” a total change. When we realise that we cannot pursue egotistic aims and win, then we begin to listen to the Intelligence that dwells at the centre of everyone of us. This is “Emmanuel,” God in us. This centre is three-fold: truth, goodness, and beauty. When a stimulus comes from another we have to remember that the other also has Emmanuel at his centre. We can observe if the stimulus is coming from that centre or from a peripheral identification with external power. If someone tries to force us to do something against our will then that person is automatically wrong, even if what he wants us to do is right. The truth, the rightness, the beauty is inside everyone of us and so needs no compulsion. Similarly, we must be prepared to allow others to go their own way. We can discuss with them their reasons but we must never try to order them to obey a truth we have discovered in ourselves. If we do so we are automatically wrong. We must never try to coerce the will of another if something we know is rejected by them. Every person must come to this truth, this beauty, this goodness, inside themselves, in their own time. The diagram of the cross in the circle, with the dot at the centre, is “all there is.” We can add to it by drawing further geometry inside it but essentially, it is the whole truth, and is the identical truth for all. Everything that we can find within us, is also in every other. Therefore, “we can never win a battle against another individual.” (He describes the treatment of prisoners in ‘Strangeways’ prison in Manchester and asks how can such treatment reform the inmates.) “We cannot cure people of bad behaviour, of violence, of unintelligence, by beating them up and locking them up.” The solution to such things lies inside that diagram, and when we know this we inhibit the stupidities that we formerly committed. The modification of our behaviour cannot be through egotistic efforts of trying to be better than we are. The way to do it is to see through all illusions to the reality that every other individual is “exactly as cunning, as ambitious, as envious, as greedy, as subtle, as we are.” Everybody else is just like us on the inside and will interpret our actions as we interpret theirs. “You look at the realities and you stop messing about.” You stop trying to interfere with other people and you just watch. “And in that watching you stop pressing them and they feel that you are not pressing them in the space between.” He suggests this is very worth remembering in the marital situation. A marriage contract is a ‘contra-act’, a fight. But once the partners realise that the other is identical inside then “the truth automatically acts through you.”
We should remember that we have evolved over millennia. The “worm that die’th not” is still inside us. The evolution of our brains has resulted from millions of years of recording painful experiences, originally from food, and later from interactions with other aspects of our environments and with each other. However, the basic appetival impulse is still within us and can still direct our behaviour. We can inhibit it with our minds but if we do this unwisely it can lead to neuroses and even psychosis. “They only arise from the introduction of contradictions into a primordial, appetival being.” We may like to feel we have transcended appetite but if we have an appetite for truth, we haven’t! “There are no activities of the living being that are not, fundamentally, unalterably, appetival.” And appetite is, basically, for two things: food and sex. He asks: “So what are we going to do about it?” The only way is ‘metanoia,’ a complete “change of attitude to reality.” We are all modalities of Infinite, Sentient Power, whether we like it or not. We cannot escape relation with others, and we must give up the idea of succeeding. “That is metanoia.” We give up the idea of egotistic success and begin to cooperate with all others. That Infinite, Sentient Power has made us for Its own enjoyment. “God made us for Himself.”
“The Infinite has made us to enjoy our inter-relations with each other because the joy that we feel, because reality is a continuum, is felt by that Infinite Power as Its own joy.”
“And when It does not like what we do, It hits back at us. It has the whip hand over all creatures.”
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REFLEXIVITY
REFLEXIVITY
The Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday on 01.05.1983
The question Eugene addresses is the meaning of the term ‘reflexivity’. He draws a circle and then another round it, then two more, making four concentric rings, but says he should really draw seven. He draws a horizontal line passing through the centre and writes ‘H’ for ‘Hierarchy’ above the line and ‘M’ for Matter below it. The Hierarchy is based on initiative, the Matter on inertia. He numbers the circles 1-7 from both the top and the bottom, so that the number 4 is in the centre, whichever way we count, up or down. Number 1 he labels ‘Will’, no. 2 is ‘Love’, and 3 is ‘Act’. 4 is not labelled. Will initiates every act and whatever is willed it loves to will and whatever we love we tend to activate. So whatever in life we do, we do it because we will to do it. “If you initiate something, and then you charge it with love, it automatically goes into action.” The circles represent our world inside and outside, and the ‘Fall’ has been from inside to the world of outside things. The will, essentially central, has moved to the periphery of being to examine the material world – as in the Fall of Adam. The ‘fallen man’ believes there is nothing higher than himself. His intelligence in the head is his and he is identified with his physical body. Most men think that their reproductive potency is also theirs. “Now the belief that that power belongs to the man on whom it is only an appendage is a product of the Fall.” There is a will in this organ and therefore there must be love also, but it is the love of the Absolute to reproduce its creations, not that of the man. “The man who thinks, ‘I must chase that and I must reproduce through it’, is actually being used as a tool by the Absolute Will.”
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He links the Trinity of Christianity with that of Hinduism. God the Father is Shiva, the Absolute Will. God the Son is Vishnu, the Love function, and the Holy Spirit is Brahma, the active principle. Shiva is characterised by ‘ananda’, bliss, because his will cannot be impeded. From the Absolute Will, a love of activation occurred and this generated the objective world. The Vishnu world is the world of preservation and contains ‘jnana’, consciousnesses. Brahma is the world of ‘it-ness’. Vishnu is the world of Martin Buber’s ‘I-Thou’. Both are polarisations of the Shiva. The characteristic of Shiva is bliss-motion, motion absolute, not to be confused with the motion of material bodies, which is an ‘M’ function, “trying to break out of inertia into free creativity…We would all like to have initiative and do marvellous deeds, but inertia stops us.” As finite beings we have bodies and these bodies are useful to us as centres of reference. We all have an instinct to preserve them, so if the body is threatened in any way, as by a car coming at us, we tend to dodge. This impulse to preserve our bodies comes from God.
The Absolute has made a universe, starting with primary particles and building up into atoms, and then larger and larger structures. Each particle is a centre of will and “it has bound itself with love to be.” Every soul is a spiritual monad, a pure consciousness, which operates through a material body. The beings created by this activity are crucified, fixated, in the realm of ‘Sat’ or ‘Satan’, “and that is the unconscious part of your process.” It is the chemistry of the physical body. But suffusing that body is the ‘Chit’ function of pure consciousness. This consciousness can turn two ways: inwards, to know itself as consciousness, or outwards, into the body and the material world. Both consciousness and body are polarisations of the Absolute. Shiva polarises as Vishnu and Brahma, just as God the Father polarises as God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. i.e. the will polarises as love and activity. The thing we love is the thing we will try to activate. At the level of the Absolute, this is the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. At this level there is “a hierarchy of powers in pure consciousness.” At the level of the earth stands the three-part man, with his three levels of action, feeling and will. The fallen man thinks his head is the highest power because he does not believe in anything above him. However, between the two is a fourth position, and this remains the same whether we count from the top or bottom of the drawing.
The fallen man is under an illusion that his potency is his, his feelings are his, and his intellect is his, and that he has control over them. (Ignoring the fact that the sperms within him are made beyond any power he has. Just as the woman does not have the ability to make the eggs she is born with.) It does not occur to him that when he succeeds in action it is a tiny precipitate of the Infinite Will operating through him, or that what he loves is a directive from the Absolute Love, or that his thinking is a process of the Universal, Creative Mind. This man is being imposed on by the Absolute in all three ways but does not realise this. The solution lies at position 4 on the diagram: our consciousness can look both ways. Upwards on the diagram is looking into our own centre. Downwards is to our periphery and the material world beyond. At position 4 we can become aware that our thinking, feeling and action are being conducted by laws over which we have no control. e.g. at the level of thinking we cannot think that a triangle has other than 3 sides, or that a square has other than four. These are “laws of intellective motion” which control our thinking process. We suffer such ideas because they are imposed on us.
The top level of the diagram is our innermost Self. It is the will, the initiator. This will is who we essentially are and we can choose to use it or not. Essentially, we are identical with Shiva, with God the Father. Immediately below is Vishnu, God the Son, the God of Love which causes the activation of the Holy Spirit, Brahma, in us. e.g. When a man decides to paint a picture, his will is to paint the picture, his love selects from all possibilities an object. He then acts according to the dictates of that which he loves, and begins to paint. This will is not something we possess, it is what we essentially are. Each one of us is a quantum of will, and when we initiate, something happens. Our feelings and our actions are the result of what we will for ourselves. Historically, those who have seen this have used it to rule over others. If everyone knew that they were centres of free will then they could not be controlled so easily. All societies have mechanisms, religious and educational systems to ensure that babies, who know that they are such centres, grow up no longer believing it because they become conditioned by such mechanisms. So most people are imposed upon by society, which conceals from them that they are centres of pure will. There is a rule called the “Moral Law” which we all must obey. We are not to step outside of the position in society allotted to us. Victorian morality was a good example of this, with its notions of ‘the poor’; some deserving, others not. Thousands of years of mis-understanding have resulted in all societies ensuring that the people in them are subject to social conditioning. Even modern psychology does not recognise initiative but sees only reaction to external stimuli as the cause of all psychological states. It admits of ‘wishing’ and ‘wanting’, but not of ‘willing’. However, a simple exercise can demonstrate to us that this view is wrong. Everything we see in the world is factually an image on the retina of the eye, and this image stimulates a memory which causes us to recognise the things we see. This “field of recognition” or memory, allows us to sit in that fourth position on the diagram, between the view of man as fallen and unfallen. Always, the image we have in our consciousness is actually on the retina. “If you sit on the retina, you are already halfway to pure subjectivity…you are moving backwards towards the centre of will inside you.” When we do this we can feel a loss of external objectivity. Our centre of will is our true being and we will outwards from that centre to the retina. If we go out beyond the retina, it is “with nothing but the will to see an object externally.” i.e. we make the outside world objective, “by our intention to have an objective world of things to manipulate.” If we practise “retinal sitting” in this way, we find that our awareness is of two kinds: our bodies are objective, like all other physical bodies, but our awareness of this fact is subjective. This awareness keeps the memory of the image and relates it to a present percept. The energy in the optic centre in the brain creates the image that we see, and that creation has “come out of our love for objectivity.” If we regard the objective world we see as independent of our will to see it, we have fallen into identification with it. In the process of this fall we have become enslaved by what we believe is real. This ‘falling’ is very easily done: we simply “look with interest.”
We know that the image on the retina has only two dimensions: height and width. This retinal image has no depth. The depth is superimposed by the visual cortex in the brain. If we can move behind the retina, we go to the centre of the will to focus. This releases us from the illusion of an objective world of things. “The art of Yoga means to conjoin, to yoke, to get the innermost world, the Shiva world, and the outermost, the physical body of man, to be simultaneously co-present in the fourth level consciousness that can look both ways.” We can try this in many ways. We can listen to a sound and ask ourselves where we are hearing it. Is it ‘out there’ or inside my head? Am I remembering it, recognising the sound? Everything we have heard is stored in memory and when we hear a sound in the present what we experience is the re-stimulation of a memory. “There is no outside to the Infinite Field of Consciousness.” It is impossible to know the unconscious, because to ‘know’ is already to be conscious. The ‘unconscious’ is simply a word; it does not exist. Rather, “consciousness has degrees of sharpness of focus.” Wherever there is an impedanceto the Absolute Will, caused by a creation within the Absolute Consciousness, then the awareness is sharpened and becomes individuated. Human beings are such impedances. We are all aware of this in ourselves from situations when we felt danger. We immediately became more alert, more vital. “If you wish to wake up and vitalise, you have to find doors that are too narrow to go through, and then go through them.” To understand this and get back to the source power, which is pure initiative, we have to abandon the idea that the egoic individual has created itself. We have to accept that we are that same power, God, in actuality. The word ‘Muslim’ means ‘one who accepts’. We have to accept that whatever we are doing, or feeling, or thinking, it is God doing these things in the place of us, in a way peculiar to us. If we accept this, then we can never do anything stupid – only if we forget it. In the fallen state, what we think is our will is a ‘wish’ or a ‘want’, a desire, a reaction to a stimulus. Real will is initiative, unconditioned, “and is nothing but the Absolute God inside the incarnate being.” We can then attempt anything we will.
When we say ‘I’ we must remember we mean “the very centre of reflexivity of self-sentient awareness.” If we stand in position 4 and look both ways, we see that they reflect each other. “The incarnate Self is reflecting the Absolute, and the Absolute is throwing back the message from the incarnate Self, back into the time-process to keep it going.” “If you have got it, nobody outside you is your boss. You are, and you are intelligent. You are not reactive…you know that stimuli are there to trap you into further slavery.” If we could live this way, there could not be conflict between peoples. Just as the cells in the body do not fight each other but cooperate for the good of the whole. Fallen man thinks he has enemies and that he must fight them to survive. In reality, there are no other people, only God incarnate in other bodies. How can we have enemies? Only by forgetting this fact. The whole universe is ‘Maya’, illusion, because it exists as a projection of the will. ‘Maya’ means ‘affirm appetite’. Our substantial activity is simply an act of will. “We are all here in bodies by general agreement.” If we were not greedy for something, we could not be deceived. “Reality is nothing but the multitude of wills that there be something…We are conniving with each other to keep the universe going.” We cannot believe in anything except our own will to believe. “You are the living God, sitting on a chair, in a body. The boys has been introjected, thrown in towards a centre, from the Absolute and the Absolute is in charge. And whatever you do, or feel, or think, is by Divine permission.” “How do we feel about it?” “Do we like it?”
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REINCARNATION
REINCARNATION
Précis of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday 20.01.1977
Eugene is asked the question: does the same spirit or soul reconstitute again?
He answers by saying that there are various views which can only be resolved “by returning to very abstract principles of mathematics.” He firstly, defines ‘soul’ as “an encapsulated zone of Sentient Power.” As such, it could “reincarnate into many different situations.” Each situation would result in that soul becoming characterised by its experiences. Such a soul would be able to recognise itself if it were able to assemble the same pattern of responses that it had before. He gives the example of a person suffering amnesia after concussion. “Now if you forget any of your characterising structures can it be said that you are the same soul? And does it matter if you are, if you cannot remember it?” He gives the example of an Aries who can go through an incarnation and arrive back in the next world knowing no more than it had when entering.
“The question of reincarnation is really this: Has a given zone of Sentient Power sufficient formal, reflexive, self-knowledge to be able to identify himself if he does reincarnate?” If not, then reincarnation is useless. We have all been reincarnated many times but if we have not learned the lessons and remembered them we will keep repeating “the same stupid things over and over again and not learning the lesson.” “It is not enough to be a soul, you have to be a structured soul.” “You have to know that you are you, otherwise reincarnation is meaningless.”
We can choose to become a different person from the one we presently are. We can change our name, change our outlook, and create a different internal structure than the one we had imposed upon us by our parents and educators. Which is now the real soul? If we choose to create a structure of ideas within us and unify this at death, then we can take it through the Bardo and choose our next life rationally and deliberately, rather than accidentally on a pleasure/pain basis. In this way we can continue to develop our ideas in a life which will provide the best opportunity for us. If you can gather yourself together at death “and define yourself as you will to be, that definition…will persist between death and rebirth so that you can be reborn again as you.”
He then ties in this idea with another question about the development of women. He says that all through history the role of women has been primarily that of wives and mothers. According to the ancient Greeks, only men could survive death, because men could be self-determinant, but women, at death, simply dissipated back into space. This was because they had devoted themselves to nurturing and raising children. “They did not bother to structure their consciousness.”
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To survive the death of the physical body we must have our ideas integrated and structured. It is “inconceivable” that a person who is disintegrated can suddenly become integrated at death. We have to work to do this during a life-time. We have to design a structure that will not simply “volatilise” at death, one that is inherently consistent, that will resist disintegration. This is the meaning of ‘Christ my Anchor’ or the ‘Body of Buddha’. We must have a body of ideas “so structured with pure logic that it cannot disintegrate.” Such an idea body is then immortal and will survive the death of the physical body, no matter when or how that should happen. Historically, women have not done this because of their identification with the roles of wives and mothers. They have been content to see their contribution to the nurturing and raising of their children as sufficient as a sacrifice for the sake of the future. “The evolution of the human race depends upon the sacrificial act of the woman.” Because a human body is needed for the soul to evolve. She has not bothered to integrate herself but devoted herself to producing and nurturing future bodies. This has been “a divinely appointed instinct.” The purpose of evolution is the development of the human race to full, reflexive, self-consciousness and woman’s role in this has been one of sacrifice to this end. This has, in recent times, changed enormously, “We are half-way out of the pond.” The traditional roles of men and women are being increasingly questioned and many women are no longer adopting that of simply wife and mother. (Eugene is writing this in 1977, before the start of the age of Aquarius. He predicts that in Capricorn, which follows Aquarius, the “whole human race will be aware of its own, reflexive, self-determination.) At the moment (1977) We are only half-way.
God’s command in the Bible to man was “be fruitful, fill the earth and subdue it.” The first part of this has been fulfilled so we are now in the phase of subduing it. Our physical body is our ‘earth’ which must be subdued. It is full of impulses and we must control it with our will. “One must learn to structure oneself from within.” We do this by choosing. Every choice made changes our metabolism, not just our physical body but our emotional body and our body of ideas. We should not passively accept choices made for us from outside, but actively choose what we do. “In that act of choosing, you are structuralising your soul.” So when we choose, we should choose that which endures for ever, the necessary choice. When we choose of necessity, ‘ye needs must love the highest when ye see it’. Such a choice “necessarily structures you permanently for eternal endurance.” This is what Christ meant when he was asked what He was going to do about women, He answered “Turn them into men.” He meant that they would become self-determinant, like men, and no longer passive suppliers of more human bodies. We all of us, women now as well as men, have to “sit down at the drawing board” and “design from within the kind of being that I will be in all eternity.” A being self-defined in this way cannot be affected by the death of the physical body and can choose whether to incarnate or not, “when and where, and for what purpose.”
He links this to the meaning of the Eucharist. When Christ said, “This is my Body,” He was referring to cosmic structure, “This is my blood,” to the life-force flowing through that body. If we dedicate the life-force within us to the structure of cosmic truth, “we cannot go wrong.”
Women are proving daily that they can compete equally with men and many are dedicating themselves to self-development “for the benefit of the collective, for the benefit of the totality of the universe.” We see this in every area of life. He urges women not to waste their energies in protest about equal rights but instead, to use that energy in positive self-definition of what they want to be eternally, “and it is a very simple test.” All you have to say to yourself is whatever character you already have, would you like to be stuck with it for all eternity? Stand in front of a mirror and say:
“This I will for all eternity. I will to be absolutely self-responsible, so that I, in being self-responsible, can dedicate myself to a cause, should one appear worthy of such a self-dedicated person.” “If you have that kind of dedication, you can guarantee a structured soul…able to determine its own re-entry into the time-process whenever the time-process should require its presence.”
The Buddha’s teaching of the non-persistence of the soul was aimed at the people of his day who had not reached this level. He was speaking to people with, as yet, no permanent reference. He was teaching them to give up the thirst for pleasure, which was the cause of rebirth. He taught that such thirsting was a trap and should be given up. This is why he did not answer questions about the persistence of the soul and the afterlife.
Question about defences
He discusses the benefits of being shocked as a means of sharpening our awareness. There is, “tremendous value in shock.” We should learn to see those who shock us as our friends and not our enemies. Normally, when someone shocks us we view them in a hostile manner but we should shock ourselves, because we can do so more quickly and efficiently. In this way, we stay friends with everyone! If we defend ourselves all the time, we can build up our defences and identify with them. We are then in Hell. But at the centre of our being we have Immanent Spirit and this can never be defended or attacked, and it will eventually rescue us. “Nobody is stronger than that centre…and when you have been in hell long enough…that centre will operate,” to release you.
Our soul is a “tabula rasa.” The only marks on it are those it wills to be there. Also, we have “an ink eraser, and you rub out all the definitions of yourself that you have ever made and make new ones. Knowing this, we can reincarnate in the same body as often as we will to, “because you know you do reincarnate every morning when you wake up.” We can design for ourselves, before we go to sleep “the kind of work that you would like to do while you are asleep to make yourself wake up a different person.” “Person’ means ‘through-sounding’, it means structure.” “A soul has a personality and the personality is the way the logic of that soul is structured…so you can actually design for yourself a personality worth having through which the energy of this soul will sound into action.”
“The universe is a structure of will and all the values so far accepted by the human race, imposed upon them by educational, religious, political structures, have been, so far, for the convenience of the imposers. But working behind all temporal imposers, there is a Supreme Imposer, the Absolute, who uses these temporal imposers as resistances to provoke you into individuation, to find yourself and to model yourself, in any way you decide. But remember, final warning, design for yourself that form which you will affirm in all eternity and don’t waste time on defining anything else…do care whether you are able, reflexively, to will your own condition, your own thought, emotion and action.”
If we are sincere in this we cannot be wrong. He ends by asking the audience to name one thing that they would like to have as a permanent possession in all eternity. The answers are: Freedom, Self-will, Intelligence, Love, Integrity, Self-responsibility, Creativity. “Aren’t we clever? You see we all know the answers, don’t we? They come welling up from inside. Why? Because we are absolutely, fundamentally, rooted in Eternal Spirit, so we will all come to the same conclusions.”
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A REMINDER
A REMINDER
Eugene starts by saying that he is going to outline the work done so far: “what it means to exist, to be a being, and not to exist.” He draws a circle with a ’T’ around the periphery and writes ‘IN’ inside the circle and ‘A’ outside, for the Absolute. The circle represents a being and the ’T’ is the intersection of forces inside and outside the circle.
There are two movements in the world, always present, but growing in opposition: atheism and religion. The religious idea can immediately be seen as superior because it does not disallow the finite, whereas atheism disallows the Infinite. Religion is the earliest approach to understanding the world and our origins. It has been the relation holding people together in all cultures. Out of the thinking about the ground of religion, some cultures developed philosophy and then, later, scepticism and science. We can place these in the three-part man: religion in the heart, the feeling centre, philosophy in the head, the rationalising centre, and science in the belly, its ‘probing’ represented by the male organ. These three approaches are very apparent today: those who ‘feel’ the oneness of humanity, those who try to find a rational ground for relating, and those scientists who do not trust the philosophers and refuse to accept religious ideas, and hope to understand the world through empirical investigation.
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ut no amount of scientific (k)nowledge can add up to wisdom. Scientific knowledge changes with new discoveries, whereas wisdom is a whole experience encompassing everything that can be known. When physical changes occur then people who are identified with the physical are forced to change their mental attitudes as events change. e.g. with the loss of the British Empire, many Christians, being identified with the political situation, lost faith. The same thing has been seen with all previous empires: Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman. The truths of each empire disappeared with the empire and were replaced with new ones. However, the fact that each was replaced shows that, behind all the appearances of religions, the people felt that there was a greater ‘something’ behind the changes. Many early religions saw the manifestation of this ‘something’ in Pantheism. i.e. God in everything manifesting in a plurality of gods; the ‘One’ expressing Itself through the energies attached to different natural forms, such as rivers and mountains.
Today, Eugene suggests, we see a “double movement:” one, towards science and science fiction, which seeks more and more knowledge, but also one towards a “hidden world” not available to science, appearing on TV and in films as in “horror films,” and interest in magic and depth psychology. Both of these movements are “a real experience inside the human soul.” “We feel, we search physically, and we think about what we feel when we search.”
The Absolute has been represented differently in different religions. In Judaism, God is intimately concerned with the human race and calls upon us: “to do things, to behave properly, to reform, as if human beings could do so.” Islam says that only God can act, so that “even if you bend your finger, it is really God bending it.” All is in the hands of God. The Christian position, like the Old Testament one, says that God requires man to act, but that he needs help to do so, and focusses on the historical figure of Jesus as the type to follow.
Eugene says that all of his talks are based on the simple proposition that “all energy is sentient, all energy feels itself.” The Infinite, Sentient, Power is what is meant by the God of all major religions. The idea of ‘Power’ explains all that science means by ‘causation’, energy behaving in different ways. But we know that we can feel also; we have sentience, and so do animals. “So that sentience is the peculiar property of that, which appears in its other pole, as power.” “Then power, the ability to push, and sentience, the ability to know that you are pushing, are a sufficient explanation of anything whatever.”
Sentience means feeling and what we are feeling is not nothing. If we feel inside our bodies what we feel is the resistance to power inside us. The pulsing of the blood is felt by the resistance of arteries and veins. It is the overcoming of this resistance that we can feel. Sentience means there must be a movement and a resistance to it. Without movement, there could be no opposition and we would not be aware that we existed, we would be non-sentient. “So that, in fact, your very knowledge of whatever kind, and your wisdom of whatever kind, your very awareness of your existence, depends upon the fact that power is moving and being resisted in the place of your organism.” “The resistances that power posits are simply to make power aware of itself formally and functionally.”
Every encapsulation of power is a zone isolated from every other. As such, it is a “sacred place of work” and each individual is such a place. The Infinite, Sentient Power has closed Itself in such a zone and individuated itself. Each individual has work to do that cannot be done by anyone else. “So from the very moment there is encapsulation trapping a power within, there is the birth of absolute, individual responsibility for what happens inside that sphere.”
The reason that men and women are made differently is that God, who made man “in His own image, male and female,” can experience His own power pushing and receiving: “the sexual function is, in reality, a divine function at the physiological level.”
We have no justification for thinking there is a dualism in the Absolute. There are a multiplicity of expressions of power which itself is not multiple. The word ‘multiple’ means ‘many-folded’. The Power has folded Itself, and folded across Itself, and appears as a plurality. It is only the behaviour of Power that creates this appearance.
When we come into encapsulation there is the possibility of striking against each other in the contingent relation. i.e. mutual interference. We tend to regard the ‘interferer’ as ‘bad’ and this is the beginning of ‘evil’. But both are empowered by the same Absolute. If we remember this we will not react against another being who threatens to ‘interfere’ with us but will understand that we can adjust ourselves to accommodate the behaviour of another. (Like moving out of the way of a badly-driven car; we do not wait for the collision if we can avoid it.) We have to remember that individuation confers upon us responsibilities as well as rights. We tend to identify as individuals and forget that the same power is operating in all of us. The only difference is in how that power is being used by each individual.
Contingent stimulation is intended by the Absolute to produce changes of power, form and function in each one of us. If we can remember that this is for our ‘enlightenment’ then we would see it as a good thing. It has been designed for the evolution of consciousness. Until we appreciate this then our identification with the finite deludes us into thinking we are separate, isolated beings. We are in bondage. All religions teach that ‘salvation’ is release from this bondage; from ‘illusion’. “If you forget that you are an infinite being, and that other beings are also infinite, in the moment of your forgetting, you enter into a relation of collision and instead of cooperative collision, with mutual enlightenment, you have resentment and a refusal to learn the lesson of the collision.”
All religions worship the one God, because there is only one God: the triplicity of Power, Form, Function. Power is the Ultimate Cause and is therefore first. But power without a form to contain it cannot manifest, so the creation of form must come next. Once in form, these forms must be activated; this is function. Power, form, function require a fourth: an awareness of their relationship. This is sentience and without it there would be no purpose to the trinity. What is this purpose? “Joy: the affirmation of the situation to which you assent.” We must know how much power we have, how much intellectual understanding (form), and how much function; what we can do. When we are thoroughly aware that we are power, that we are self-forming and self-interfunctionning, then we are necessarily enjoying ourselves. Every time we enter a new situation we must affirm that we are in it and explore its possibilities. We must be interested in it. “Interest is only directed sentience and direction means form, and that sentience, when it is directed, mobilises power.” “When you are interested, God is interested.” “As soon as you become interested in something, energy flows from Infinity to your being and the amount of life you have inside you increases with your interest.”
We have been experimenting in the time-process for millions of years and the results of these experiments are embodied within us, though we have forgotten many of them. e.g. the index finger is used for pointing by all peoples on the earth. Pointing with any other finger does not ‘feel’ right and others would not understand. This is because each finger has a different form and function, and only the index finger is formed for pointing. We cannot enjoy what we don’t know we have got. Through repetition over millions of years, many bodily functions have lapsed from our consciousness. If we forget that our three parts are related through sentience, then we are not living in every part of ourselves. We are “dead in our sins.” The more we can use our organism and all its parts the more we become aware that we are power, form, function in all our parts.
We must remember to keep our three parts in balance. e.g. We may become angry at another person. If we identify with the anger then we lose our sentience of where that anger comes from and we allow it to carry us along. We see this very clearly in the various schisms that have occurred in all religions. Always, these have been caused by some identifying with an idea and then attacking those who have identified differently. Religious persecution has always been by one religious group on another, and always the cause is the same: identification by an individual and then a group around an idea, forgetting that the source-power is infinite and in all ideas, as in everything else.
This fundamental fact confers upon us all absolute responsibility for what we do. The power within us, Emmanuel, knows what is right for us to do. “Whatever we do, if we do it in full consciousness, prepared to pay the price, knowing that it is power, it is form, it is function, it is sentience, and, affirming in joy, that is, affirming the situation in which we find ourselves, in the moment of that affirmation, the act is necessarily a perfect act.”
The most important thing is our intent. Whatever happens to us, every accident, every contingency from things outside of us, cannot damage us as souls if our intention is good. We are all inheritors from millions of ancestors whose experiences are engrammed within us. These are alien to us but produce “tendencies instinctive, impulsive, behavioural” but “We are not called to account for the errors of our ancestors…only if, in full consciousness, we agree with their behaviour.” If our intention is perfect, then our action is perfect. In the same way, we must not condemn other peoples’ erroneous activities since we cannot know what ancestral influences are at work in them. “It is only your intention that counts in the final assessment of your relations with each other.”
“Sentient Power is all there is. Sentient Power functions as the universe of all beings.”
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SENSUM TO DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS
SENSUM TO DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS
Précis of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands 27.04.1986
Eugene begins by explaining how the title of the talk came about. He then analyses the word ‘stimulus’ because anything we know is a product of one. ’S’ means ‘Spirit’, ’T’ means ‘crucifixion’. So ‘ST’ means ‘Spirit crossing Itself and providing itself with its own stimulus’. ‘I’ means ‘individuation’. ‘STI’ means a ‘self-crucifying individual’. ‘M’ means ‘substance’, ‘U’ means ‘drive’, ‘L’ means ‘binding’, ‘U’ means ‘drive’, ’S’ means ‘issuance’, ‘mulus’ means a root, a root issuance. “Stimulus means a behaviour of a root power, so substantialised by crossing itself, it initiates changes within itself, by this same, self-crossing.” The stimulus situation is the Infinite, the extended Sentient Power, ‘Brahman’. So a stimulus can never be external to an object; though science assumes it is.
‘Sensum’ is Sentient Power in its triplicity: force, form function.(Drive, or willing, thinking, feeling.)
The ‘M’ at the end of ‘sensum’ implies an inner focussing of sentience upon itself. This is ‘substantialisation’. ‘Substantial’ means ‘understanding’. “To understand, the Infinite must make a sphere by pressing in and pressing into that sphere very hard and then the sphere becomes a substance.” This process results in all of the physical structures of our bodies. “So the sensum is the immediate product of a stimulus.” “The stimulus situation is infinite and a sensum is anywhere whatever within the Infinite that there is a substantialisation of the stimulus presented to it by itself.”
Substantialisation is the process of self-limitation of Sentient Power. Prior to its internal focussing there is no limit. Spirit presses into a centre and can contract onto the centre until a limit is reached and then it must burst out again. This is the ‘Yud’ point in Hebrew, the primary point, the beginning of time. “There is a sensum for every point of the total stimulus situation.”
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Prior to rationalisation, a sensum has no form; it is just pure sentience. Rationalisation is the inevitable consequence of a primary rotation of energy, the circle and a radius. “The individual consciousness is the only impedance to the will of the Absolute.”
“The sensum is a feeling with a degree of affective charge.” i.e. liking and disliking but without definition, a vague feeling. When defined, it becomes a ‘percept’, a term meaning ‘rational capture’. The sensum becomes controlled when we can rationalise it and locate its cause. If we can focus sharply onto a feeling then we have a percept. We can find one form acting upon another form: “like posterior descends onto drawing pin.” The percept saves us from the vagueness of the sensum. To gain deliberate control we must increase perception and every percept is a capturing of a sensum in order to fix it and define its relation with other sensa or other percepts.
Perception allows categorisation. We see this in plants, whereby plants recognise each other in the process of fertilisation. i.e. there must be a recognition of form. We see it more clearly in animals; males know which are females, and vice-versa. We see it more clearly still in a rational human being. If we had only one percept it could control a sensum situation, but it might not cover a host of sensa. So we need to make a lot of percepts then group them together to form a concept. “Concept means capturing a group of percepts.” Finding out what is similar about them and then giving them a title to cover these similarities. e.g. People can be conceptualised as ‘animal’ rather than ‘vegetable’ or ‘mineral’. The concept ‘rational animal’ narrows the concept to ‘man’.
Concepts give us choice. One percept would give us no choice, so the greater number of percepts we have, and concepts, give us more choice. When we can choose “we enter into the next phase: volition.” Volition means willing. The will initiates ‘choosing’ i.e. rejecting one thing for another. Volition increases with the increasing number of concepts it has to control. Volition is not mechanically determined. It can choose from a wide variety of concepts, and therefore, percepts and sensa, from the total stimulus situation.
Volition is a “very, very high concept” and 95% of mankind know nothing of it. For most men, the word ‘will’ means ‘wishing’, ‘wanting’, ‘desiring’. But wanting means ‘lacking’, wishing means ‘dissipating’, and desiring means ‘from an intent of fatherhood’, and all these arise “from a stimulus hitting the being and producing a sensum which is grasped and becomes a percept, grouped with concepts, and because the percept is formulated it is just like a machine.” Every idea, correctly defined, is like a cog wheel fitting into another one, and therefore entirely mechanical. If we identify with ideas then we are mechanical; we have formal responses to formal stimuli.
To become free, we have to lift up the percept to the level of concept “and then free ourselves from the concept in order to choose, from the concept, that percept and that sensa and that stimulus, what we will focus on.
Volition comes from the ‘conscious self’: “Consciousness is a catalyst.” The ‘conscious self’ is the total stimulus situation. When you believe you are such you are free from the memory of prior volitions, free from concepts, percepts, sense, stimuli. You are conscious of them all but not ruled by them. You have free choice. Beyond this is the ‘Divine Consciousness Itself’. Pure consciousness without limitation – the original Absolute from which everything else derives.
Knowing these higher levels is not the same as realising them. We may see, intellectually, the possibility that these things are true, but to realise them we have to ‘RL’ them. ‘R’ means to discriminate all the parts and ‘L’ means to hold them all together within our being. We are a triplicity of force, form and function: force is the power that constitutes us, the form that force has assumed, and the function of that form under the impulse of that force. We must not only know this but feel a love that we know it. If we can love what we know, then we can volitionally substantialise it and make it real. “Real means the ruling power of self-law.”
When we can do this we find that the sensum, stimulus, percept, concept, volition and consciousness are all parts of the Absolute acting on and in itself. “Now that is the goal of man.”
To ‘realise’ is to be in control of oneself on 3 levels: intellectually, substantially, actively. A ‘real’ being is when will, feeling and ideation are identical. These 3 are not separate. They are 3 aspects which the Absolute sets up inside itself to control its force, form and function, but in no way separably. Intellect and feeling are qualitatively different. We can think of an idea and feel the quality of it but the feeling can never be the idea. This is why there is such misunderstanding between men and women. The male intellect cannot feel what a woman feels. Yet intellect and feeling are in the same being are not separable. They live together in one body and cannot be separated. A man can feel hurt if his intellect is insulted. A woman can accept an idea from a man but she loves the function of being informed more than the form received and so can forget the idea immediately in order to be informed again. i.e. it is the relationship she enjoys more than