WELCOME TO THE EUGENE HALLIDAY LIVERPOOL LECTURES

Egotism is a bad thing, and we can see why, because it is identification with a finite zone and therefore excludes the infinite resources of Infinite Power. The Freudian definition of the ‘ego-complex’ is simply a group of ideas derived from education and recorded in our brain. These ideas give the sense of a separate individual. As separate individuals, we are closed in and have closed out the Infinite, Sentient Power of the Absolute. “All religion has to do with a method of wiping out ‘B’ and reasserting ‘A’.” From A to B there is a ‘Fall’, from the Absolute into the relative, from the Infinite to the finite. A ‘fall’ is the same as ‘pall’, a covering, which gives the appearance of a finite; hiding the Spirit within.

An act can be ‘pure’ or ‘impure’. The act of walking can be a means of getting from one place to another and this would be an ‘impure’ act, because it is a means to an end. Walking for its own sake would be ‘pure’, as in Zen meditation. The identification is with the walking, and the psyche is doing the walking with it, rather then trying to get somewhere. ‘Absolute action’ such as this is referred to in Zen philosophy as ‘immediacy’. “It is not mediated because you have no other reason to do it; you simply do it. It is not a mechanical reaction to an external stimulus.”

Time is eternity expressing itself in a ‘here/now’, “and this ‘now’ is moving.” The Absolute cannot be static. The concept of static is derived from finite forces in opposition; they are blocking each other’s activity, tied down, locked-up. The Absolute is absolutely dynamic. “It is power and It is pure motion,” and that motion is all there is, “and therefore whatever appears in the time-process, serially, can only be aspects of eternality viewed from within it through closed zones; the closure of these zones being a function of the movement of the Absolute.” An infinity of such zones are continuously activated, but if we identify with any one of them, and then make an observation to another one, it will always give rise to the idea of serial presentation. We only experience the temporal, serial world by identifying as being within a finite, closed system. So if we do not identify with our gross, physical body our sense of time disappears. e.g. when we go to sleep our awareness of time lapses. If we wake up suddenly in the night, we do not know what time it is. “There is no sense of time unless you identify with a given, physical, observation point.”

“Inside each individual there is a centre of absolute validity because, each individual appearing in the time-process, is only a super-stress on an eternal, individuating form.” Eternity is appearing at any moment of time “in a peculiarly individuated way.” When we look at the letter B we see that the boundary of it can only be a super-stress. It cannot be valid in itself. It does not separate this finite, closed zone from other zones. We cannot remove it and leave a hole where it was; that is impossible. The finite zone is simply a function of the eternal. If we put A and B together, we have AB, meaning ‘Father’, the name of the God who has created everything. A, the Absolute, non-being, has created, inside Itself, B, a being. The purpose of breaking identification with the zone of individuation is not to eliminate it, “but to eliminate slavery to it.” When we go to sleep at night, we break identification with our body and when we wake up in the morning, we re-identify with it. In everyday life, this making and breaking of identification with the body is “mechanical and not under the control of the resident intelligence in that body, but it is possible for us to identify with the body and then let go of that identification.” We can come to see that, even though we are in the time-process, we are still an eternal being with a super-stress placed on ourself by our own will to identify. The being is always within the non-being. “In Him we live, move and have our being.” Every finite thing whatever is inside God, and God is inside nothing. The concept inside/outside cannot apply to the Absolute – because It is Infinite.

The letter ‘C’ means ‘closure’. In Hebrew, the letter for closure is ‘G’, gamma, and signifies the complete blocking of that zone. A is for the Absolute, B is a circle, a zone of finite being, and if we shade the circle we can call it ‘gamma’. To ‘gamma-up’ is to ‘block-up’. The hard G and the M means “to lock up the substance and press it together very hard.” There is now A for the Absolute, B for the binding process, “and G for the solidification of that which is bound.” This means we have an Absolute world, an idea world, and a gross, material world. The physical body is the G and around it there is a zone of form, idea, which is circumscribed but not ‘gamma’d-up’. This level of form is our idea level, and though separate from other forms, it can interpenetrate with them in a way that the gross body cannot. We can exchange ideas and fuse them together with ideas from other beings. We have a gross, material body, an individual form which has precipitated that body, and around it, the Absolute, bringing that individual form to exist.

Gross body, subtle or idea body, causal body. When we are awake and focused on the material body we are asleep to everything beyond it. “Those beings who are walking around in the material world believing they are awake in the material world are really asleep.” “And what for them constitutes a dream and deep sleep are really modes of serial presentation in the dream process, and simultaneous awareness, at the causal level, of all that appears in the time-process, in the gross world, as separated serially.” We have a causal body, precipitating a form body, a body of ideas, and then a gross body, all within the Absolute, represented by the paper.

We can imagine a gross, material particle, a small one, like an electron, or the biggest one we can conceive, the whole of the universe, as seen through the most powerful telescope, and all the matter that we can see would be a great sphere which, viewed from far enough away, would look like a single point. And round it there would be seen a field with a limiting factor round it, and this would correspond with the subtle form of it, and therefore the cosmic logos, and then beyond this is the Infinite, the Absolute Itself. In other words, the macrocosm of the Universe and the microcosm of our bodies are made in the same way.

He then suggests a yoga exercise: We start by observing the gross body, feel the mass inertia of it, its solidity, opaqueness, its ignorance. Then meditate on the space around it, which has precipitated this gross body. Staying centred, we move out from it and discover the sphere of ideas, and then leap out of this – and it can only be done by a leap – into the Absolute.

“Now this Absolute is the causal level of our being and is our own will. When we become aware of this in the exercise, starting in the gross body then going into the idea body, and then going beyond the idea body simply to feel that one is a being/power initiating these two spheres within itself – this confers what we call ‘initiative’, that is, freedom from reactivity. The power to stand perfectly still, and then, without waiting for a stimulus to come, starting a process immediately.” “And in this immediate start from nothing, breathing a pure, or Absolute act…”

Egotism is a bad thing, and we can see why, because it is identification with a finite zone and therefore excludes the infinite resources of Infinite Power. The Freudian definition of the ‘ego-complex’ is simply a group of ideas derived from education and recorded in our brain. These ideas give the sense of a separate individual. As separate individuals, we are closed in and have closed out the Infinite, Sentient Power of the Absolute. “All religion has to do with a method of wiping out ‘B’ and reasserting ‘A’.” From A to B there is a ‘Fall’, from the Absolute into the relative, from the Infinite to the finite. A ‘fall’ is the same as ‘pall’, a covering, which gives the appearance of a finite; hiding the Spirit within.

An act can be ‘pure’ or ‘impure’. The act of walking can be a means of getting from one place to another and this would be an ‘impure’ act, because it is a means to an end. Walking for its own sake would be ‘pure’, as in Zen meditation. The identification is with the walking, and the psyche is doing the walking with it, rather then trying to get somewhere. ‘Absolute action’ such as this is referred to in Zen philosophy as ‘immediacy’. “It is not mediated because you have no other reason to do it; you simply do it. It is not a mechanical reaction to an external stimulus.”

Time is eternity expressing itself in a ‘here/now’, “and this ‘now’ is moving.” The Absolute cannot be static. The concept of static is derived from finite forces in opposition; they are blocking each other’s activity, tied down, locked-up. The Absolute is absolutely dynamic. “It is power and It is pure motion,” and that motion is all there is, “and therefore whatever appears in the time-process, serially, can only be aspects of eternality viewed from within it through closed zones; the closure of these zones being a function of the movement of the Absolute.” An infinity of such zones are continuously activated, but if we identify with any one of them, and then make an observation to another one, it will always give rise to the idea of serial presentation. We only experience the temporal, serial world by identifying as being within a finite, closed system. So if we do not identify with our gross, physical body our sense of time disappears. e.g. when we go to sleep our awareness of time lapses. If we wake up suddenly in the night, we do not know what time it is. “There is no sense of time unless you identify with a given, physical, observation point.”

“Inside each individual there is a centre of absolute validity because, each individual appearing in the time-process, is only a super-stress on an eternal, individuating form.” Eternity is appearing at any moment of time “in a peculiarly individuated way.” When we look at the letter B we see that the boundary of it can only be a super-stress. It cannot be valid in itself. It does not separate this finite, closed zone from other zones. We cannot remove it and leave a hole where it was; that is impossible. The finite zone is simply a function of the eternal. If we put A and B together, we have AB, meaning ‘Father’, the name of the God who has created everything. A, the Absolute, non-being, has created, inside Itself, B, a being. The purpose of breaking identification with the zone of individuation is not to eliminate it, “but to eliminate slavery to it.” When we go to sleep at night, we break identification with our body and when we wake up in the morning, we re-identify with it. In everyday life, this making and breaking of identification with the body is “mechanical and not under the control of the resident intelligence in that body, but it is possible for us to identify with the body and then let go of that identification.” We can come to see that, even though we are in the time-process, we are still an eternal being with a super-stress placed on ourself by our own will to identify. The being is always within the non-being. “In Him we live, move and have our being.” Every finite thing whatever is inside God, and God is inside nothing. The concept inside/outside cannot apply to the Absolute – because It is Infinite.

The letter ‘C’ means ‘closure’. In Hebrew, the letter for closure is ‘G’, gamma, and signifies the complete blocking of that zone. A is for the Absolute, B is a circle, a zone of finite being, and if we shade the circle we can call it ‘gamma’. To ‘gamma-up’ is to ‘block-up’. The hard G and the M means “to lock up the substance and press it together very hard.” There is now A for the Absolute, B for the binding process, “and G for the solidification of that which is bound.” This means we have an Absolute world, an idea world, and a gross, material world. The physical body is the G and around it there is a zone of form, idea, which is circumscribed but not ‘gamma’d-up’. This level of form is our idea level, and though separate from other forms, it can interpenetrate with them in a way that the gross body cannot. We can exchange ideas and fuse them together with ideas from other beings. We have a gross, material body, an individual form which has precipitated that body, and around it, the Absolute, bringing that individual form to exist.

Gross body, subtle or idea body, causal body. When we are awake and focused on the material body we are asleep to everything beyond it. “Those beings who are walking around in the material world believing they are awake in the material world are really asleep.” “And what for them constitutes a dream and deep sleep are really modes of serial presentation in the dream process, and simultaneous awareness, at the causal level, of all that appears in the time-process, in the gross world, as separated serially.” We have a causal body, precipitating a form body, a body of ideas, and then a gross body, all within the Absolute, represented by the paper.

We can imagine a gross, material particle, a small one, like an electron, or the biggest one we can conceive, the whole of the universe, as seen through the most powerful telescope, and all the matter that we can see would be a great sphere which, viewed from far enough away, would look like a single point. And round it there would be seen a field with a limiting factor round it, and this would correspond with the subtle form of it, and therefore the cosmic logos, and then beyond this is the Infinite, the Absolute Itself. In other words, the macrocosm of the Universe and the microcosm of our bodies are made in the same way.

He then suggests a yoga exercise: We start by observing the gross body, feel the mass inertia of it, its solidity, opaqueness, its ignorance. Then meditate on the space around it, which has precipitated this gross body. Staying centred, we move out from it and discover the sphere of ideas, and then leap out of this – and it can only be done by a leap – into the Absolute.

“Now this Absolute is the causal level of our being and is our own will. When we become aware of this in the exercise, starting in the gross body then going into the idea body, and then going beyond the idea body simply to feel that one is a being/power initiating these two spheres within itself – this confers what we call ‘initiative’, that is, freedom from reactivity. The power to stand perfectly still, and then, without waiting for a stimulus to come, starting a process immediately.” “And in this immediate start from nothing, breathing a pure, or Absolute act…”

Egotism is a bad thing, and we can see why, because it is identification with a finite zone and therefore excludes the infinite resources of Infinite Power. The Freudian definition of the ‘ego-complex’ is simply a group of ideas derived from education and recorded in our brain. These ideas give the sense of a separate individual. As separate individuals, we are closed in and have closed out the Infinite, Sentient Power of the Absolute. “All religion has to do with a method of wiping out ‘B’ and reasserting ‘A’.” From A to B there is a ‘Fall’, from the Absolute into the relative, from the Infinite to the finite. A ‘fall’ is the same as ‘pall’, a covering, which gives the appearance of a finite; hiding the Spirit within.

An act can be ‘pure’ or ‘impure’. The act of walking can be a means of getting from one place to another and this would be an ‘impure’ act, because it is a means to an end. Walking for its own sake would be ‘pure’, as in Zen meditation. The identification is with the walking, and the psyche is doing the walking with it, rather then trying to get somewhere. ‘Absolute action’ such as this is referred to in Zen philosophy as ‘immediacy’. “It is not mediated because you have no other reason to do it; you simply do it. It is not a mechanical reaction to an external stimulus.”

Time is eternity expressing itself in a ‘here/now’, “and this ‘now’ is moving.” The Absolute cannot be static. The concept of static is derived from finite forces in opposition; they are blocking each other’s activity, tied down, locked-up. The Absolute is absolutely dynamic. “It is power and It is pure motion,” and that motion is all there is, “and therefore whatever appears in the time-process, serially, can only be aspects of eternality viewed from within it through closed zones; the closure of these zones being a function of the movement of the Absolute.” An infinity of such zones are continuously activated, but if we identify with any one of them, and then make an observation to another one, it will always give rise to the idea of serial presentation. We only experience the temporal, serial world by identifying as being within a finite, closed system. So if we do not identify with our gross, physical body our sense of time disappears. e.g. when we go to sleep our awareness of time lapses. If we wake up suddenly in the night, we do not know what time it is. “There is no sense of time unless you identify with a given, physical, observation point.”

“Inside each individual there is a centre of absolute validity because, each individual appearing in the time-process, is only a super-stress on an eternal, individuating form.” Eternity is appearing at any moment of time “in a peculiarly individuated way.” When we look at the letter B we see that the boundary of it can only be a super-stress. It cannot be valid in itself. It does not separate this finite, closed zone from other zones. We cannot remove it and leave a hole where it was; that is impossible. The finite zone is simply a function of the eternal. If we put A and B together, we have AB, meaning ‘Father’, the name of the God who has created everything. A, the Absolute, non-being, has created, inside Itself, B, a being. The purpose of breaking identification with the zone of individuation is not to eliminate it, “but to eliminate slavery to it.” When we go to sleep at night, we break identification with our body and when we wake up in the morning, we re-identify with it. In everyday life, this making and breaking of identification with the body is “mechanical and not under the control of the resident intelligence in that body, but it is possible for us to identify with the body and then let go of that identification.” We can come to see that, even though we are in the time-process, we are still an eternal being with a super-stress placed on ourself by our own will to identify. The being is always within the non-being. “In Him we live, move and have our being.” Every finite thing whatever is inside God, and God is inside nothing. The concept inside/outside cannot apply to the Absolute – because It is Infinite.

The letter ‘C’ means ‘closure’. In Hebrew, the letter for closure is ‘G’, gamma, and signifies the complete blocking of that zone. A is for the Absolute, B is a circle, a zone of finite being, and if we shade the circle we can call it ‘gamma’. To ‘gamma-up’ is to ‘block-up’. The hard G and the M means “to lock up the substance and press it together very hard.” There is now A for the Absolute, B for the binding process, “and G for the solidification of that which is bound.” This means we have an Absolute world, an idea world, and a gross, material world. The physical body is the G and around it there is a zone of form, idea, which is circumscribed but not ‘gamma’d-up’. This level of form is our idea level, and though separate from other forms, it can interpenetrate with them in a way that the gross body cannot. We can exchange ideas and fuse them together with ideas from other beings. We have a gross, material body, an individual form which has precipitated that body, and around it, the Absolute, bringing that individual form to exist.

Gross body, subtle or idea body, causal body. When we are awake and focused on the material body we are asleep to everything beyond it. “Those beings who are walking around in the material world believing they are awake in the material world are really asleep.” “And what for them constitutes a dream and deep sleep are really modes of serial presentation in the dream process, and simultaneous awareness, at the causal level, of all that appears in the time-process, in the gross world, as separated serially.” We have a causal body, precipitating a form body, a body of ideas, and then a gross body, all within the Absolute, represented by the paper.

We can imagine a gross, material particle, a small one, like an electron, or the biggest one we can conceive, the whole of the universe, as seen through the most powerful telescope, and all the matter that we can see would be a great sphere which, viewed from far enough away, would look like a single point. And round it there would be seen a field with a limiting factor round it, and this would correspond with the subtle form of it, and therefore the cosmic logos, and then beyond this is the Infinite, the Absolute Itself. In other words, the macrocosm of the Universe and the microcosm of our bodies are made in the same way.

He then suggests a yoga exercise: We start by observing the gross body, feel the mass inertia of it, its solidity, opaqueness, its ignorance. Then meditate on the space around it, which has precipitated this gross body. Staying centred, we move out from it and discover the sphere of ideas, and then leap out of this – and it can only be done by a leap – into the Absolute.

“Now this Absolute is the causal level of our being and is our own will. When we become aware of this in the exercise, starting in the gross body then going into the idea body, and then going beyond the idea body simply to feel that one is a being/power initiating these two spheres within itself – this confers what we call ‘initiative’, that is, freedom from reactivity. The power to stand perfectly still, and then, without waiting for a stimulus to come, starting a process immediately.” “And in this immediate start from nothing, breathing a pure, or Absolute act…”

For one substance to fuse with another, it must have some factor identical with it. If we take the string of a musical instrument, it has a fundamental vibration. If we press it half-way, it will vibrate an octave higher, at double the frequency. It now has half the wave-length. If we halve the length again, we will vibrate the string at four times the fundamental frequency. In the same way, if we imagine the diameter of the Universe as a string, then its unstressed vibration is the fundamental of the Universe. If we halve the length, then the vibration will be an octave higher, and if we halve it again, then an octave higher again. Theoretically, we could go on doing this until we can subdivide it no more and then we have reached the shortest wave in the Universe; a very tiny wave of very high frequency. (Schrodinger’s wavicle?) If we imagine that each partial of the fundamental is a new diameter of a sphere, then the first would have a diameter half that of the universe, the second would be one-quarter the size, and so on, down to the smallest sphere conceivable. All of these smaller spheres would resonate with the universal one because all have diameters which are partials of the original fundamental. However, they will not all assimilate with each other, “because of the relation between odd and even counts.” The initial cut gives two, then four, then eight, and so on, but none are divisible by three. Pythagoras said that the odd numbers are male and the even ones female. The balanced, even numbers, are passive to the odd ones which contain a stimulus. The numbers 1 and 2 are not like other numbers: 1+1= 2, and 2×1=2, so adding or multiplying these produces the same result. Also, 2+2=4, and 2×2=4, but when we get to 3 this does not work: 3+3=6, but 3×3=9. So the numbers 1 and 2 are different from the rest. ‘One’ is the big one, the whole one, and all else are parts. ‘Part’ means a rational cut, a pi-ra-t, and that pi-ratio is the function. The radius of a circle is a par-t. If we keep dividing a string by half then the notes sounded will be harmonious, but if we divide a string into 3 parts, we get a note in music which is called a ‘fifth’, though it is really a third of the string. This third will not vibrate harmoniously with a half; it cannot be assimilated. But if we take factors of odd and even numbers, we can arrive at one that can assimilate both odd and even, e.g. the number 12 is 3×4. In 12 we have a means of assimilating short frequencies derived from the third, and from the half. We can cut the half into quarters, eighths, sixteenths; and the third into sixths, twelfths, and so on. The smallest particle is a definite subdivision of the diameter of the Universe. So a human body, made of primary elements, vibrating at different wavelengths, is necessarily related to the planetary cycle, the solar cycle, the sidereal system and then to the whole Universe. All matter is a series of subdivisions, right down to the smallest sub-atomic particle, with its own frequency and wavelength. “The whole question of assimilation is therefore one of frequency.”

If we put together 2 saw blades, with teeth of exactly the same pitch, they will fit together. If the pitch is different, they cannot assimilate. If we take the six-pointed star and place it over the five-pointed one, only one of the points will be in phase. So we can assimilate through one sense only when we are concentrated and not through the others at the same time. Since “the question of assimilation is one of frequency, every particle of food, every drug, every chemical, is made of fundamental frequencies that must go into their own places somewhere along this diameter line of the Universe.”

‘Thinking’ is the serial presentation of forms in the mind. This means that we are imposed upon by the external world, since the sense world simply reflects what there is outside. If we work only at this level, we are slaves to our sense perceptions of what is outside of us. “Man’s freedom is within.” Every frequency has a definite chemical characteristic. We can use spectrum analysis of starlight to discover what chemicals are present in the star. An emotion is also a frequency and has a definite relationship with particular material substances. So eating certain foods can make us think and feel in a certain way. All of the partials, the subdivisions of that food, will vibrate inside us as well. This is the reason for the emphasis on diet in Yoga. Thoughts have a definite frequency with definite relations to the foods that we eat, and so do emotions; if we are in a certain mood we can assimilate certain foods. Sometimes we hear a man say he has been “put off his food” by a stimulus. This has activated something in the memory and altered his frequency so that he cannot assimilate that food at that time. New ideas can cause us to want different foods. Pregnant women often get cravings for foods they would not normally want. Body, mind, soul, spirit, all are different frequencies. Everything has its own beat and the top one is spirituality. Below that is the psychic one and then down to the lowest ones of gross matter. When we are interested in the same thing as someone else then we are using the same frequency. Unity of purpose is important in group work. If we all concentrate on the same thing then our minds beat in unison. “Because when you’ve got unity, you have power.” If our purpose is not singular, our power is dispersed and less effective. The same diet will not work for different people. This is also true for drugs and medicines. We all have different chemistries and will respond differently. Also, the same medicine will not affect the same person at different times.

How does an egg become a human? Because macrocosmic forces press on the egg and produce a man. The man is not in the egg but he gets in by pressing on it. Frequencies inside the egg cause it to grow in the direction of a man. Each nation has a definite, psychological tendency which produces a physical structure, like the high-bridge nose of the Jews. “Because the modeller of form is first feeling, then the function, then the ratification of the function in material.” Similarly with diseases, if a man feels ‘off-colour’ and wants to dodge work, he may work upon the feeling and gradually alter his substance to produce a malfunction. Over time, this can become organic break-down. Organic breakdown always starts with some functional disorder,which starts by some feeling to begin with. The more we can lift our feelings and be positive, the more unity will appear in the physical body.

The Zodiac is a device which can deal with the macrocosmos to help us to understand it. A circle can be cut into a hexagon. If we bisect the angle between these, we have the six-pointed star. If we bisect these again we have a twelve-fold division. Fire-Triad: If we draw a circle and put inside a triangle, standing on its base, we can put Aries at the top, Leo on the right, and Sagittarius on the left. This triad refers to the nervous energy of the human being. Air Triad: We now invert the triangle so that it is standing on a point. This point is Libra. Aquarius is on the left and Gemini on the right. This triad is to do with intellect, ideas, and breathing. Breathing is closely linked with thinking, with judgement. Ideas can make us excited, which accelerates our breathing. (The Greek word for ‘lungs’ is ‘phren’, meaning ‘mind’.) Water Triad: This triangle is tilted. Scorpio is bottom left, Pisces top left, and Cancer on the right. This triad is to do with feeling. Earth Triad: This one tilts the other way. Capricorn is on the left, Taurus top right, and Virgo bottom right. This triad is to do with the physical body, specifically the bone structures, which are closest to the mineral world. When we superimpose these triangles on each other, we have the circle of the Zodiac with Aries at the top. If we go round clock-wise, we have Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. The Zodiac is a psychosomatic device which tells about our body and mind. The Earth signs mean assimilation, absorption. Capricorn is the goat that has a ‘go-at’ anything. The ‘scapegoat’ is one who throws himself into a situation, gets into trouble, and pays the price – like Christ. Goats are the independent ones who like to do things on their own, to have a ‘go’ at something. The sheep are those who like to flock together. Those born in the earth triad are “pitched in the necessity of absorbing matter through food.” Taurus is to do with glandular secretions. Virgo has to do with the circulation of the food, to produce a balanced whole. If a man is in need of medicine then consideration of all these aspects means giving the right one to the right man, and at the right time. (As taught by Culpepper.) Resonances exist at all levels. We now know that there is a relation between plants and the planet Venus, and coffee growers in Brazil are largely influenced by the Venusian cycle. Also, we have known for a long time of the influence of the Moon on germination. Water Triad: This has to do with all the fluids in the body and so with feeling. Cancer is to do with all the fluids, Scorpio with particular ones. Pisces, like Virgo, is to do with circulation. In Cancer, the feeling-awareness is diffuse, Scorpio has gathered it together and is zealous. Pisces is emotional; feelings “whizz around and tend to fly out.” Whereas earth signs are to do with the gross body, the feeling signs of water are to do with the soul. Air Triad: Just as we take in gross matter (earth) and fluids (water) we also take in sense data. First we perceive, Libra, then we unify these percepts in the memory. Aquarius, the water carrier, is the retainer of form. Gemini means judgement, or evaluation. First we perceive, then we remember then we evaluate. This is the intellectual triad and has to do with breathing; it is closely connected to the heart. Fire Triad: The undifferentiated nervous energy is Aries, a quick mind and a tendency to dominate. Leo is the sign of the volitional, nervous energy, the unified will. Sagittarius alternates between them. 

He now explains the logic of all this, beginning with the Cardinal signs: Before creation, the Absolute is an undifferentiated whole. The nervous energy which enters a human being is likewise, undifferentiated. This is Aries. Undifferentiated feeling is Cancer. Undifferentiated perception is Libra, and undifferentiated absorption of food is Capricorn. “That’s all undifferentiated and that is prior to creation.” On a George Cross, Aries is at the top, Libra at the bottom, Capricorn on the left and Cancer on the right. When force enters into a human being, then it becomes differentiated. “It’s like pumping air into a balloon.” The air, once inside, is trapped and the molecules collide with each other, and with the skin of the balloon. They have now lost their free motion. “They are conditioned by the fact of existing.” Every stimulus that gets inside a human being goes to certain brain cells “and comes to a term inside the end of a nervous line.” It sets up a beat and the ripple starts back again. This is the unified state i.e. the energy has entered a finite system. He then goes on to the fixed signs. Going clockwise, the first differentiation of nervous energy is Leo. The energy is now fixed in a body. The undifferentiated perception of Libra is fixed into memory at Aquarius. The undifferentiated feeling of Cancer is fixed in zeal at Scorpio. A person in this position finds their whole life is driven from within by feeling. The undifferentiated food at Capricorn is broken down and put into glandular structures for distribution later, at Taurus. The mutable signs are so-called because they can change from undifferentiated or fixed. “This has to do with re-incarnation.” “It’s hard for these beings to be reasonable or undifferentiated, because they’ve only just gained their unity.” The logic is: whatever exists must first exist prior to creation, “which is its Cardinal’s hinge.” It is that upon which everything hinges. Then it must enter into a closed system, reverberate inside it, and then burst out again to regain its freedom. So energy comes in from Infinity, turns around, presses in towards the centre, then shoots out again. This process goes on in all living things, not just humans. Forces come in, wind up inside until the pressure is too great, and then come out again. This is obvious in the sexual urge but can be seen also in the growth of plants.Psychologists use the term ‘sublimation’ for the process whereby we can use our sexual energy to create other things than children. A work of art can use sexual energy by lifting it to a higher level. Infinite energies are coming in to us through food and cosmic radiations and these have to be expressed again in some way. We can see in the growth of a child how these energies are forcing the child to grow. Every offspring will go to a term for its type of being and then energies must start shooting out. A human cannot contain all those energies “unless God allows you to, and that can only be if you do with it what He wants you to do.” If we focus our mind on God then we can contain the energy and it changes its frequency to a higher level. A physical urge can thus be transmuted onto a higher ideational and emotional level, from the particular to the universal.

There are four organic systems in the body corresponding to the four triads: nervous energy, fire; breathing, air; feeling, water; and digestion, earth. There is also a psychological application: nervous disorders are related to wilfulness because the fire energy becomes will when it enters a finite being. Wilful people are often neurotic. Water people, though not Scorpio, are adaptable and do not tend to neurosis. They tend to enjoy themselves, to be hedonistic. They say that life is for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and if relations with others are harmonious then that is good enough. Air signs would not agree. They tend to judge everything and lack feeling. Thinking is analytic and so breaks us up but feeling renews the wholeness. Earth signs may exhibit ‘psycho-thymia’ and can be schizophrenic or cycloid. The Air sign intellectual tends towards schizophrenia whereas the earth sign tends to be alternately elated and depressed but always keeps his own personality. But the extreme cycloid type (manic/depressive) tends to feel suicidal at the bottom of the cycle but are most at risk of suicide when they are coming off the bottom, because they then have the energy to do it. To control this bi-polar tendency is very easy, mechanically, just do not allow yourself to become too elated and you will not be so depressed. The cycle is a wave-form and if the person lowers the peak on the up-cycle then this will reduce the wave below the median line. The ideal mental state is to stay as close as possible to the median line. This is not a static line; it is vibrating dynamically. Water signs tend to be easy-going and are therefore easy to get on with. They are not always the best people for themselves, because you cannot enjoy yourself all the time. Air signs can split into sub-ents; split personalities. They can have many interests yet not see the link factor between them. So different parts of the brain are involved in many discrete activities. The solution here is to find a link factor that ties them all together.

He talks of ball games: Football has 11 players in a team and so does cricket. A cricket pitch is 2 x 11 long. There are 3 stumps. Why? All ball games are symbolic; they are metaphors of activities of the will. Ball means will. B’all is the whole. ‘Bol’ is the Greek form of the Latin ‘vol’ in volition. Bol is a sphere, energy comes in and turns around. Ball games are will games and the whole point is to pass that ball through an arch of some kind. In rugby, this arch is an ‘H’, the Hebrew letter ‘Khet’. This is the sign of spirit. If we take the horizontal of the H as the diaphragm, then this is the bar.The footballer kicks below it, but the rugby man, who is training to be a gentleman, has to get the ball over the bar – he must aim the will above the diaphragm, not below it. This is a method of linking for schizophrenic types, linking the symbolism of such games. The ball is will, masculine, and the goal is feminine. It is what men aim at.

Having analysed the four triads we have to recognise that a human being has all four of them. So to deal with any individual they have to be put together, synthesised into the whole man. The primary stress will tend to link to all the others. The differences between all of us is simply a matter of stress. One of the twelve tends to be dominant until an external stimulus requires a shift to one or more of the others. Equilibration: Because we are looking for wholeness, we often find that the people we are most like, we like the least – because they have nothing to give us. People often marry someone on the other side of the wheel, “and when they have babies, they frequently bisect the angle between them. This is an attempt on the part of nature to equilibrate all the time.” In the same way, tall people often find short partners and fat people find thin ones. Some light-skinned people prefer dark-skinned partners. If nature did not do this then we would not have a human race but a number of different species. So in addition to the zodiacal influence we must add that of parents, nationality, climate, topography, etc. We come from Infinity, are “whipped” into the macro-cosmic sphere, then the sidereal one, the solar one, the earth one, the country, the historic period, the tradition, the family, the biology and the Zodiac! On top of all this we have external stimulation in the time-process to complicate things.

Planetary Influences: The sign for Jupiter means “all over each” i.e. expansion is dominating contraction. The sign for Saturn means “each over all” i.e. contraction is dominating expansion. Saturn is Chronos, time, and ‘time’ is ‘emit’ backwards, because the time-process depends on the emission of energy. Chronos, time, is the same as Satan, the Devil, in opposition with God the Father. They are both half-circles of a whole, represented in Christ. The sign for Christ is Hermes, Mercury, the Messiah. The horns in the sign symbolise the unbounded, the circle the bound, and the cross is the material principle. These can be transposed onto the physical body: the horns of power on a man’s head, the feeling in the chest, and the crucifixion of the sexual energy in the belly. This is the three-part man. So Saturn + Jupiter = Mercury, contraction and expansion in opposition always produce rotation. (An idea of Boehme’s that Newton borrowed.)

The Seven Days of the Week. 

Sunday, (Sun) Monday, (Moon) Tuesday, (Mars-Mardi) Wednesday, (Mercury-Mercredi) Thursday, (Jupiter-Thor-The Hammer) Friday, (Venus-Vendredi, the old Friga’s Day, Fruit Day, Pay Day) Saturday, (Saturn-Saturnalia). “Sunday is when you spend your time illuminating yourself, remembering the Lord on His Day.” On Monday we go back to work, counting, back to business. On Tuesday we make war on business rivals.(Mars). Mercury is the patron saint of business men so Wednesday is good for business. Thursday is getting late in the week requiring us to “hammer it” to get our quota. On Friday (Fruit Day) we get paid. On Saturday we “make whoopee,” just as the Ancients did. This pattern is followed in all of Europe and much of the rest of the world showing that there is an inherent logic to it. 

Contraction, Expansion, Rotation.

To create there has to be a contraction of what is in an extended state. This is Jupiter, God the Father. It contracts onto a point and that is the Devil, Saturn. This contraction is Self-will, ideation, individual value. As humans, we have to balance the Absolute with the individuatedness. i.e. we have to be ourself but remember that there are other beings as well. Contraction plus expansion causes rotation. Pleasure is passive, desire is active. The pure type of Venus woman is rare, the Mars type of man is much more common. The Moon aspect means the body as material; the Sun is the force acting upon it. The rotation considered internally, can be seen as passive (Venus), but considered as squirting out energy is active (Mars). Considered as occupying space we call it a body (Moon). Considered as its original force, Jupiter, we call it the Sun.

Four Systems in Three Phases in the Body.

We can reduce the 12 signs of the Zodiac into the four triads or four systems in the body: physical matter, fluids, air, nervous energy. These can be seen in three phases: the undifferentiated, before it gets into the body, Cardinal; the unified, when it gets in, Fixed; the alternating between the two, Mutable. The undifferentiated is an Absolute positive, the contraction of it into a unity is negative, and the third state of alternating is neutral. This movement, from the Absolute to the particular, we should try to reverse when we think. When we think, we think about a thing – but as soon as we think about it, we have to leave the thing itself in order to do so! (ab..out is ‘away from’) e.g. If we think about a pencil we think of graphite and where it comes from, wood, from trees, trees from nature, and so on, and we end up thinking cosmically. We should do this deliberately: force ourselves back from the particular to the universal to understand what it is. 

Will Power. 

If we do this on ourselves we come eventually to the Absolute. This force in us is our will but we cannot get at it “as long as the rota, the inertia, the habit of you, is using up all your energy. If you’re in the groove, if you’re a dead man, you can’t get the energy out of the groove to use it for another purpose.” (He suggests finding something we habitually do and stopping it for a week. If we can do so then we have will-power.)

Planets and the Body.

All the bony parts are Saturnine. All the airy parts are Jupiter. The fluids are Venus. The nervous energy belongs to Mars and the Sun. Without Saturn there would be no bodies (the whole world is in the grip of the Devil). God the Father is expansion, Jupiter, and therefore always at war with Saturn. Christ is the Messiah, Mercury, the mediator between God and the Devil. The sin in man keeps him separate but if we all gave it up the world would disappear! The ‘good’ is the whole, the Mercurial resolution of God and the Devil. In the sign of Mercury is the sign of the ‘unfallen’ man: he has pinned his sexual energies down below, he has his whole feeling, and he remembers his dual origin. This duality is God and the Devil. God is a creator but a creator is a finiter. We say that we don’t want finiting we want freedom – this is because we haven’t got it. “If we had it we’d want to be finited.” God/Devil, Jupiter/Saturn is the split of a prime whole, the All/Each split, the triumph of All over Each and Each over All. Hitler was the devil because he triumphed over the German people. In a communist, totalitarian state, the individual who disagrees is the devil.The Pharisees said of Christ, “he has a devil,” because he openly rebelled against their law. The governing bureaucracy will always define rebels as the evil ones but these individuals will always define the state as the evil one. The winner does the defining. But all the time it is a whole and we have to continually re-synthesise this. We are rooted in Saturn and Jupiter so we have to consciously ‘grab and let go’. We have to learn what to grab hold of and what to let go of. This is the resolution.

Fallen and Unfallen Man.

The Unfallen man has his horns on the top. “He is aware of the fundamental duality in man, that grab and let-go is his origin.” “He has in his feeling, compassion for all beings, and he knows that all beings are crucified on their physical bodies.” So he thinks dialectically, in pairs of opposites, he feels compassion for the whole thing and he knows that he, and everyone else, is pinned on a physical body. The Fallen man is “pinned in his brain on ideas.” He is an intellectualist, who thinks he can solve the universe by thinking logically. But logic cannot solve it because logic says that contraction and expansion are opposites and mutually exclusive. We have to think para-logically, dialectically. Energy is pouring in and out at the same moment. The fallen man is a scientist who thinks statistically. He can never deal with an individual, only with large numbers.

Tolerance and Guilt.

When the Mercurial man comes up against a dogmatic person he knows that underneath the dogma is a man who is uncertain, because when a man understands he has compassion and tolerance of others. By contrast, apparently tolerant people, like martyrs, are as hard as rock inside because they know they are right. (The ‘Founding Fathers’ were highly intolerant of others who believed differently. The English state was intolerant of them so they went to America and ruled with intolerance over those they found there…)

Paralogical Thinking.

Whatever you think of a person, remind yourself he is also the opposite at the same moment, “and state it to yourself.” “When you become fairly sensitive, you can state it to him too.” All men are everything simultaneously. Whatever a person says about themselves, we know that the opposite is also true. Everything springs out of ‘grab-and-let-go’ because, together, these produce rotation, which is being. This being is the passive aspect of the body, but the in-pouring of energy makes it squirt out, like Mars, and shows force. (All of this is an extension of the ‘Cross in the Circle’. He suggests equating them with the different signs of the Zodiac, and also, in Genesis 49, the blessings of Jacob to his sons, and the characteristics of each of the 12 tribes.) He re-states Nietzsche: the only cause of sorrow in a man is the realisation of personal impotence. And the only cause of joy in a man is the realisation that he can will. He said that, for a man, joy is “I will,” for a woman, joy is “he will.” (A statement about active/passive.)

Question: about the type of fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden.

The name of the fruit is not given in the Bible. Some say an apple, others a tomato, others a pomegranate. It simply means a plurality because of the seeds in it. The fig is also given for the same reason. “The idea is plurality in unity.” When God created Adam He said it was not good for man to be alone. (all-one, whole). So He took out the volitional aspect, leaving him with the intellectual aspect. The stimulus comes, the serpent, stimulates the will, the woman, “the will runs along and takes the intellect with it.” Hitler did the same thing in Germany by appealing to the women first.

The concrete and the universal.

“Take any concrete thing and universalise it.” He suggests that we deliberately trace the origin of something in the material world to its particular source in the earth, then to cosmos and back to force. “The Buddhists used simply a piece of clay.” Clay-earth-liquid-gas-incandescence-light. “That clay is only light – made dark.” It has become dark by compaction, “too much grab.” “Too little grab, you’ve got an ocean of light with nothing in it.” Somewhere between is the Mercurial resolution: “You have light/dark, a great relation, the possibility of value.” “The Mercury man is a fellow that knows the rooting of everything in this opposition and utilises it.” When Christ said, “work while it is light,” He was saying the same thing: work when nature is conspiring with you. This is the basis of agriculture. The ‘corn cycle’ represents Crucifixion in the winter and Resurrection in the Spring. “The whole thing is a cosmic cycle.”

World Soul.

The centripetal cosmic force is pressing onto the centre and trying to persuade us to generate physically. It wants us to have lots of babies, “Be fruitful and multiply.” “There’s another force, but it’s of a totally different frequency, calling out those people who are ready to come out. But at this period of macrocosmic history, the forces are still going in, because the object of the World Soul is to generate a plurality of free beings so that they can have relations of a very high order. But you can’t have a plurality of free beings without having a large number of bodies to serve as vehicles for training. And those bodies have got to be made. And free beings don’t like tying themselves down.” In Spring. “people are tricked into generating the physical bodies which will serve as vehicles of experience for souls to become free.”

Exercises on stopping thought.

“Stop the mind working at lower levels and the top levels will be seen, because they’re there.”

Example of using an image of a horse and cart. (Story of the M.O. of Strangeways and his wife doing this exercise.) Also, using a series of numbers, or the alphabet, any series can be used as a device. We listen to such a series and, when the speaker stops, we do not allow the mind to continue the series. “You should be able to stop any series in the mind; it’s just mechanics.”

Prayer.

There are three levels to prayer: audible, where you hear the words; inaudible, where you feel the reflex in the larynx; silent, where there is no reflex, yet there is still a form in the mind. “It’s a different level, a different frequency.” There is also a fourth kind where we “take the meaning of the prayer, contract all the words together and retain the significance without serial expression.” e.g. we can take the word ‘happiness’ and just feel it, forget the word.

Words.

“Every word is built of primary letters which exist eternally as forms. Every word, in every language, is an expression of a fundamental geometry of the universe which exists simultaneously.” Inside every word is another one. e.g. inside ‘word’ is ‘wor’, as in ‘worship’. “You can’t worship without words.” ‘Ord’ is the root of ‘order’. ‘Or’ is gold and gold = will. Will is hidden in the middle of every word and tells us there is something we can do. e.g. ‘Cat’ is Greek for ‘fix’; ‘catatonic’ is ‘fixation’.

Animal awareness.

He gives the example of a volcano in Mexico when the animals all left before it erupted.

Question 2: Why do beautiful women and handsome men get seriously ill and sometimes die quite young of diseases? If a person is considered beautiful or handsome by the standards of that society they receive adulation. This results in consciousness moving to the perimeter. The more a beautiful child is flattered, the more extroverted it becomes. This can result in a total unawareness of Immanent Spirit, of initiative, and it becomes totally dependent on the adulation stimuli of the environment. Such a being has no time to order its internal self which can become chaotic. When a person is admired in this way, other people in that society tend to expect certain behaviours of them. Very soon, the admired person finds they cannot live life as they would wish to do but instead conform to the expectations of their admirers. If they do not do so they tend to be rejected. (He gives the examples of Charlie Chaplin, who was rejected because of ‘unamerican activities’ and also Gracie Fields who was rejected because she chose to marry an Italian and run away to Capri.) This is true for all lovers – they expect the beloved to change in conformity with the expectations of the lover. The lover demands as well as gives. This is the reason why beautiful women and handsome men may become ill and die young. They have received adulation from outside and have then been required to conform to the expectations of their admirers “and this is very, very seldom in line with their spiritual development and so there’s an internal chaos.” Healthy plants and animals all seem to look beautiful, but where animals have become domesticated they also begin to be unbalanced. There are neurotic dogs who have acquired their neuroses from their owners. If we take anything not in contact with a human being, we see a natural unfolding. The inner spirit of the plant or animal is pressing out and growing according to its nature, and there is no question of neurosis. It is only in the human that we find inner conflict and breakdown. 

Question 3: How is it that sages, who have worked towards equilibration die of a particular disease and not simply old age?  Buddha and Christ both died because of a fight between the man and the environment. There was a prophecy when Gautama was born that he would be either a king or a spiritual giant, and his father wanted him to be a king. The early years of the Buddha’s life were spent in palaces, full of every sense pleasure. His father tried to extrovert his attention to stop him becoming spiritually enlightened. But there is a law: ‘constant stimulation is equal to no stimulation’ So subjecting him to all the temptations of the world only resulted in him rejecting them. He knew nothing of birth, old age, disease and death. One day he ventured out and saw a man diseased and was shocked and wanted to know why this was. This began his search for understanding. He left the pleasure dome and became an ascetic. One day, sitting under a Bo tree, a woman mistook him for a sage and brought him a bowl of milk. She wanted a blessing from him. At this, he became enlightened. He saw that wanting was the problem. He saw that he too, had wanted something in incarnating into the time world, he realised that wanting to get something out of the situation is the cause of rebirth. He gave it the name ‘Tanha’ meaning ‘thirst for existence’. The sage is a three-part man. If the stress is on the belly, as it was in Gautama’s early life, he must do one of two things to equilibrate himself. He must either stress his heart and his head as much as his belly, i.e. elevate them to the same level of activity, or he must rob the belly to pay the heart and the head.  The general tendency is to try to equilibrate by robbing the lower urges. “Now as soon as you try to rob any part of your body, that part of the body begins to hit back.” This is how the specific disease of a person pursuing equilibrium starts. If a man believes that escape from existence is a good thing, then he will have a negative attitude to the material world. The two chief appetites that keep us in the material world are food and sex. The head is saying, “you are no good down there, you keep me in being.” But if we stop feeding given centres in the body they do not cease to exist.  Every organ in the body has a special function and when it is functioning adequately, the cells in that part feel happy. But if we try to stop the function of any given part of the body by an intellectual command, we have declared war with one part on the other part. The specific locus of the disease depends upon the governing concept that the given sage has when he tries to attain freedom. If he believes the belly is his enemy then he will have trouble in the belly. If his stress is emotional relationships then he will have trouble in the heart and lungs. If he says, “reason is the enemy” then he is likely to have brain trouble. The three-part man is mirrored within the skull. The forebrain represents the thinker itself, the two hemispheres, the lungs in the chest, and the hind part, the belly. These will send messages to the part of the body that has been identified as the cause of the problem. “So if we are given the basic mythology, tradition and thought processes of anybody pursuing freedom…we can predict the kind of diseases that he will probably die from…simply because of that which has been traditionally defined as his enemy in the pursuit of freedom.”

Question 5. Can a soul grab a body which is balanced by ancestral labours and destroy it through its own unbalance? and,  Are the soul and body two separate, developing forces co-incident for a particular period of time?

In answering the first part of this question: “This rotates round the meaning of the word ‘own’, in its ‘own’ unbalance.” He reminds us that the protoplasm of every one of us is derived from, and identical with, the original protoplasm of the first human. “So that when you are talking about the soul, you are talking about the spirit, which is the intelligence itself, insofar as it is finited.” When a soul incarnates, it ingests food from the earth which is already characterised by cosmic forces that are condensed in the earth. “So the earth is actually a condensed zone of spiritual character.” So when we eat food we are ingesting, not only matter, but forms of energy already characterised. When we digest food these energy forms appear in us and we have to deal with them. So there is a sort of constant dialogue going on between the material part of our being and with these forces. The protoplasm is a material substance which is so refined chemically that it can respond to the movements of spirit. It represents a half-way house between spirit, life, and matter, death. “And the dialogue goes on between them in the zone of the protoplasm.” In this way, the human stands between the Absolute and inert matter and maintains an eternal balance between the two. “And this establishes a higher philosophical justification of Christianity than of any other religion…to evolve a being which, whilst embodying itself with inert matter, at the same time remains responsive to Absolute intelligence, he can continue eternally…maintaining the balance between Absolute Spirit and the inertia of matter.” Only a human being can do this. When the world was made it was a mass of inertia, “like a stone in the cosmic body, the original gall stone.” All of the anger potential of the Logos was locked into it. As creation continued, forces from outside began to invade the earth and release those energies which were drawn in at the Luciferan Fall. These are the “sheep” of the New Testament. Forces we ingest from food contain these ‘sheep’ impulses – the impulse to belong to something bigger than ourselves. There are other impulses, the “goats,” those that want to have a ‘go at’ being individuals, in their own terms. When Christ says, “there are sheep of other flocks” he is talking about those who don’t want to belong to God, but to other conceptual, materialistic groups. If we try to persuade these, even with kindness, to come out, they react with anger.  Anger is always evidence of the compaction of egotism. If you become angry it is because your centre of self-will has been crossed. If you can control anger then you can get out of the material world. “You can transcend the determinations of the external, physical stimulus.” To stop being angry is very easy to say and very hard to do , because man stands between two worlds: the material world, which is the centre of anger, and the Absolute.

“A human being, although he is born lower than the angels, when he reaches his ultimate term, is higher than the angels because he is going to comprehend all that all the angels comprehend whilst each hierarchy of angels is only going to comprehend itself and not the others.”

So the absolutely free urge goes from the belly to the head, from the centre to the perimeter, and in doing so precipitates a hard shell, the skull. Wherever there is a bone in the body it is Saturn triumphing. But because the power cannot go to the dead centre, right in the middle of the hardest thing is the softest thing, the brain. So trapped inside the Saturnine impression is Jupiter, and this is going to flash out when we increase the contraction of the Saturnine will. “That means we must concentrate very, very hard before we can ‘strike a light’. The whole purpose of contraction is to become aware of self, so it is the ground of egoic consciousness. The individual ego centre of every being is in opposition to the Father. “And yet, it is itself the Son.” When the incoming power contracts to the limit but is still pressing in, then at some point, it has to burst out again. This is the Holy Ghost and in the human we see this in the egressing of nervous impulses from the brain down the spinal column. Very high frequency energy drifts into the body centre, piles up inside it until it breaks out and flashes out to the perimeter but is then turned back on itself. This light can then illuminate the whole being. This is the light of God, and at this point, the whole sphere is the Messiah. When people are very egotistic, their understanding goes out completely and they become very dark inside. When Christ says, “If the light be single, the whole body is full of light.” Single means unity. When the eye is single then the whole body is full of light and that is the Messianic body. It can only be got in one way; we must concentrate. If we try to escape from pain, it is a regressive movement back into the No-Thing. We have to face the pain of existence and drive in to incandesce and produce the light body. We have to pursue ‘free-dome’; we must take the free and dome it. The free is our will, our body is the dome, which we have willed. Each one of us has willed a body, “which releases God from all our naughtiness.”

When the contraction goes to a certain degree of tension, it actually starts to sweat. (As Christ did in Gethsemane) And it cannot be done except by act of will; we have to contract very hard. Humans have reached flashpoint to a certain degree, but for most it is a twinkle, which comes and goes. “The thing is to make that little bright idea continuous – a one light. We must have one will and not be diverted. If the Saturnine impression is not sufficient to gain flashpoint, through fear of pain, but prefers egotism, the being cannot become enlightened. No religion in the world promises salvation without effort. We must have the will to drag everything into the centre: ideas are food, emotional relations are food, the things we eat are food, and so on. We have to drag in the energy from all levels that we can into the centre of our being. “There is nothing in the Universe that isn’t made in exactly the same way. There’s energy drifting into dark spaces in the interstellar regions. That energy piles up and makes a dark star. One day it piles up hard enough and it flashes and we have a nova. Suddenly, that’s a new star, but it isn’t a new star, it’s an old star incandesced. And there’s been untold millions of years drifting in of energy to that point. The same thing must go on for a planet, for the seed of a plant, of an animal, of a human being…there is only one process.”

In order to become Field-conscious  we must first have urged, suffered pain, avoided a pleasure, so that the energy of the urge climbs through the negative side and becomes ideation.

Khen: “You said you’d say something about the fact that the individual had willed himself body, released God from the responsibility.”

The paper represents the Absolute, Sentient Power. Any single part has the power to contract itself. Absolutely, throughout Infinity, there are an infinite number of such points that can be made. When a contraction is made it is at that point, and no other, and only that point can be responsible for the contraction there made. Each contraction point is a centre and each has responsibility for itself – in eternity. “Each being generates a Saturnine compression, a Jupiteran flight to escape, a dragging back of the Saturnine impression…the creation of a Mercurial wheel. Each being is therefore actually self-generated in eternity.” We are rotating spheres of being, grounded in three forms of activity: egotism, the attempt to escape pain, the dragging in of energies which threaten our egotism. “And this state, prior to incandescence, is experienced as ‘angst’, as anxiety.” He cites the existentialists Heideggar and Kierkegaard. The grounding in egotism and the attempt to escape from its results, produces the anxious turbulation most of us feel. This is seen most clearly in a very egotistic person who will become angry very quickly if insulted. Anger “is produced by the chemistry of egotism.” Every individual is responsible for itself, whether we know it or not. Also, we can vary in our response-ability. “Responsibility is the passive aspect of response-ability, which is active. As we become more conscious we become more response-able; we gain experience, “and the more painful it is, the better to us.” 

Questions: about evolution in different ages, of past civilisations, and about Christ’s parables.

The percentage of great men in any period is about the same. There is no such thing as the evolution of the average. Evolution is always of an individual who has made more self-analysis, driven onto his own centre and been harsh with himself. We cannot evolve passively, we can only do it actively, consciously. Christ called it, “taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.” i.e. effort of will. There are two main forces: Ancestral influences and celestial ones to do with the time of birth. e.g. “All people born in the sign of Aries at the zenith have a hard job first to accept any limitation whatever.” Every birth position has a specific problem to solve, quite independent of the ancestral problem. “The value of a congenital idiot to itself is very, very little. It’s almost like a vegetative process, non-reflexive. But that, to another person with some faculty to observe, is an object lesson and a spur to its own evolution.” (This in reply to a question from Khen).

Jacob Boehme: the man ‘regenerated in Christ’. For most Christians, their concept of the ‘new birth’ begins and ends with those two words. What it means they have no idea. Similarly, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. They don’t know what it means. They say, “It’s a mystery.” Father has got to mean something – it means ‘primary will’. Son has got to mean something – it means the mind generated by that will, the totality of formal content; the out-flowing energies that are going to make the actual world, is the Holy Spirit. “If you realise that, you know that where you’ve got your will, if you can get hold of it, you’ve got God the Father; where you’ve got real understanding you’ve got God the Son, and where something goes out of your will and understanding, flowing-out energy, you’ve got the Holy Spirit.” “There is a definite significance for every term in every major religion and it has a real, concrete significance of actual value.”

The sense life is entirely made of pain: the 5 senses are five ways of being hurt. Each sense is a kind of interference, and all interference is painful. The same with insults: If we can take the energy of the insult and disperse it through the mind then the energy of the insult has been captured and adds to us. The insulter, receiving no reaction, has lost some energy. “There is a mechanical principle underlying all these psychological things.” We can gain energy in this way all the time from other people’s attempts to belittle and undermine us. Criticisms, slurs, rude words, are all attempts of little, petty egos to reduce us. Once you realise that all stimuli are energy, you accept it and say, “This is energy, thank you very much, very kind of you.” “You are taking energy from the outside world, twirling it round, and because it’s an insult it makes you hot, but you are not going to retaliate, you’re going to keep it…and the hotter the better. You turn it inside, it incandesces and gives a light to you.” “You must be very careful, because if you don’t, and you inhibit the retaliation today, if you see him in three year’s time it’ll come out again, because it’s been waiting..”  “It will speak and tell him. But it’s not your policy to let it speak, because if it does you’ll lose it’s value.”

(It is now a sub-ent) So the best policy is not to retaliate and not to inhibit the retaliation, but accept the energy of the insult at the time it happens – and thank him!” 

What has no parts cannot disintegrate so the soul is immortal. The more subtle a compound the more resistant it is to disintegration, so deeply held beliefs are more resistant than superficial ones. The mind is a mediator between body and soul. “The mind function is to carry stimuli from the body and bring them up to the soul who will then give orders about them back to the material world.” He uses the example of an orange: The thick skin represents the material world, the pulp is the mind, and the hidden space in the seed represents the soul. This is the Immanent Spirit at the centre of every human. The energies flowing between this centre and Transcendent Spirit produce the field surrounding our physical and mental bodies, “and that field is causative.”

He dismisses the Western idea of evolution, “the idea that you can keep pulling things out of a bag that were never put into it.” This is again the idea of subject and predicate. Every seed produces a plant, every plant produces a seed, “in an infinite cycle.” The scientist only examines the “bottom point” of evolution, the gross matter, and he does not see the intelligence in it because it is obscured by the dynamic movement within, just as, if we shake our hand vigorously, it is impossible to count the fingers. The form of the hand is not changed by its movement, only the appearance. The vibrations of spirit become lower as we descend downwards through the soul, the intellect, the lower mind, the sense organs, down into the body. The scientist starts with the body and sees only its evolution, not the prior involution. (There is an amusing reference to the scientist, Julian Huxley.) “There is no motion whatever in the whole universe that is not cyclic. Rectilinear motion is an abstract idea. It does not exist.” “Organisation means intelligence. There is no organ, no working entity, other than an intelligent one.” Evolution presupposes involution and involution goes on all the time. He gives the example of the age of the dinosaurs and of quiescent phases revealed in the rock records, the ‘pralaya’ state of the Hindus. The Absolute is trying to make the “perfect vehicle” and so far its “best job” is the human being but “if this should turn out to be a lounge lizard it will have to be eliminated.” “If people could understand that the cause of all conflict down here is the search of the life-force for a perfect vehicle, and until it gets that perfect vehicle it’s going to destroy vehicles.” “When a perfect vehicle is made, it will be retained.” 

He then goes on to consider ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ by James Joyce. The word ‘Finnegan’ breaks down into “end no goose.” (fin=end, neg=no, gan=goose). The goose has long been a symbol of the soul because it is pure white, it migrates, and they follow one another, either walking or flying, just like souls following one another into bodies. Another image he uses is of a ‘Ferris’ wheel. As the boxes come to the bottom, souls get in and go round. All the boxes are full of souls and as each gets to the bottom, some get out and others get in. Inside the box souls are free to do as they like and they are free to go around again. Buddha said it was ‘Tanha’, ‘thirst for life’ that kept the wheel turning. Souls enter the wheel to gain experience, they feel they are missing something if they don’t, but eventually they have had enough and step off, having found the whole process unsatisfactory. Such a soul is now ‘evolved’. This ties in with Finnegan’s Wake, the idea of the soul entering into manifestation and then obscuring itself with its own activity, just like the hand waving. “Nothing obscures you except your own process.” Stimulation of the mind completely obscures the nature of reality, “and then you wonder who you are.” We forget our origins and become fascinated by what is in our minds. If the wheel were always pleasurable we would not want to step off but, fortunately for us, “the wheel is sometimes painful.” We put a negative, it climbs up into the head  and becomes “shining intelligence.” “Only out of the experience of pains can this soul, which has obscured itself, become aware of the foolishness of its self-obscuration.” When the soul regains its original wholeness, plus the memory of its experiences in the material world, it has become a reflexively, self-conscious being and ‘shall go no more out’. In Buddhist terms, the soul has gained Nirvana and will not reincarnate. This is the whole evolutionary process and the work of the soul is finished. 

St. Paul says, “first a physical body, then a spiritual body.” We are born as physical bodies and have to make our spiritual body from the experiences we have in the world. The contingent relation

of the gross body gives rise to thoughts in our subtle body of ideas. (The difference between thing and think.) When we think of an experience we have had we can recapture the quality of the thing experienced in the memory – but finer and less intense. The Bible tells us there are two deaths: the death of the physical body, and the ‘second death’ of the subtle body. The gross body usually dies first and most easily. Then the soul has only a body of ideas for a vehicle. If this body of ideas is not well-integrated, then it too will fall to bits. But if well-integrated then ‘it shall not be hurt of the second death’. Gurdjieff talked about “souls scrambling for bodies.” The subtle body will be discarded at some point when the soul has learned the lessons of it. Other souls may seize on it as a vehicle for themselves, “just like sperms trying to get into an ovum.” So the evolution that goes on in the thing body is paralleled in the think body. The subtle body, like the ovum, will open to the “most resonant knocker …and that soul has then got this body.”

In the same way that two sperms can fertilise an ovum to produce twins, so two souls that have a similar resonance, through working and relating together, can enter the same subtle body. “When that body is brought to the state of perfect integration, the soul has then in it the memory of the whole process.”

Question: about the causal and non-causal.

‘Causus’ means ‘to strike’, to apply a force and is therefore a dual concept: a force applied and something to apply it to. Cause is a term that cannot be applied to the Infinite. “Causation requires a finite object to be struck by a finite force.” So “The Absolute is entirely beyond causal relation.” “And when the soul itself becomes conscious of its infinity, the soul also goes beyond the causal relation and becomes itself the top cause.” Before this, the soul is caught in identification with the mind and body. A stimulus hits the body, produces an idea in the mind, and this catches the attention of the soul. As soon as we turn our attention to something we have allowed the soul to identify with that thing. If we choose to ignore the stimulus it will lapse from consciousness. This is why suffering is to be passive in relation to the stimulus – just to allow it. If we do something about it, become active, we do not suffer it in the same way. We can then discover the Oriental view of causality. The Western view of causality occurs in the subtle body, when one idea chases another. This is simply mechanics. The Oriental view is that the soul can say, “stop” to this process. We can all practise this, both in thinking and in feeling. If we feel an itch we do not have to respond to it and we can learn to control thoughts in the same way. “If you can control all the ideas and order them, integrate them into an intellectual concept, a cosmic logos, then the soul again becomes aware of its essential infinite origin…always the field going into the mind or the gross body, producing changes from the field.” We can make our field-awareness more conscious by practise: He suggests lying in a dark room and becoming aware of the furniture and walls by ‘feeling’ them.

In reply to another question he emphasises the importance of turning our experience into words. If we look at the word ‘word’ it has ‘or’ in the middle. This is gold, the supreme value. ‘A word is a zone of differentiating activity.” He shows how this analysis works in different languages. such analysis shows the Romans to be concerned with power, whereas the Greeks were concerned with reason. “Any word in any language will take you back to the fundamental concept of the nation using it.” In the same way, we can find the psychology of a people by language analysis. 

All mystics agree that the rational process must be transcended because it cannot help us towards unity. “The purpose of reasoning is to eliminate errors and…to give directives to the volition of the hearer…we make statements in order to bias the will towards unity.” Our will is already biased towards disintegration, “because millions of forces are acting upon it” from the external world. So we should look at a word and say, “does this help my unity, and if it doesn’t, I don’t want it.” Any idea that comes to us, if it doesn’t fit with the ones we have already integrated, then we should ignore it for now; it may fit later. The fundamental of all forms is a circle and if we can integrate our ideas fully then we will find that we have a ‘master concept’, the cross-in-the-circle. He explains how we can use this symbol in meditation and then let it act on us. “At a certain point it clicks. The whole process of discursive reasoning synthesises…the whole significance of the diagram springs into you.” He explains the benefit of not reacting to a stimulus but keeping the energy of it inside, forcing it into the centre and exploring it in terms of its meaning for us. We gain the energy of it by holding it in. To ‘realise’ is to see the differences in the similar, and the similarity in the difference. Every created thing is identical essentially, and yet no two appear alike. The differences are simply a matter of stress. “The differentiation is simply a mode of activity of the Absolute identity. There is no difference absolutely, essentially. We all manifest absolutely unique, but essentially there is no difference.”

The ‘fool’ and the wiseman are really the same. The man who is careful and makes no mistakes cannot improve. “When you make a mistake, if you examine it, it will turn you into a wise man.”

Question: about the astral body.

We know that forces radiating from the Sun and other stars is falling on earth all the time and appearing in us from the food we eat. The chemistry of this starlight produces both ideas and desire in us, which is why the foods we eat can affect our thinking, feeling and urging. Certain foods will help us to feel calm, others to feel energetic. Aphrodisiacs have been known since ancient times. If we want balance then we should eat a balanced diet. Ultimately, when our balance is perfected, we can eat anything.

Question: about homeopathy.

This relates to the previous point. Conventional medicine looks for a quick response but homeopathy is more gentle. The restoration of balance in the body is slower but safer. “It’s the same with the evolution of consciousness. If you give yourself big shocks, you become wiser quicker, but you may be very broken up in the process.”

Question: about the ‘Ferris Wheel’, and the similarity to the idea of the ‘Yod’ in the field.

“The soul is as big as your thumb.” The thumb is a ‘pusher’, ‘pouce’ in French. It is volition. “A  man’s soul is exactly as big as his willpower…and that’s the same as the ‘yod’ point, the point of initiation.” 

Question: about astrological symbology and the Cross in the circle.

He goes through the four triads and the cardinal, fixed and mutable signs. He says the Zodiac can be used “with very great accuracy” to map the major characteristics of a person’s behaviour and thinking. But “the only thing you cannot predict is the soul, simply because it has no parts. It is free and therefore not predictable…but as most people are not soul-conscious, but only mind or body conscious, they are predictable.” He gives the significance of the planets.

Question: about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

He deciphers the opening lines: ‘Awake! for morning in the Bowl of night…to  flight…noose of light’.

Questioner comments that he seems to write “both ways”: ‘Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’, but also of what is beyond death and of our origins. Eugene replies: “It’s dialectics.” Those who can’t see the truth, let them eat and drink because they’ll be dead tomorrow. Those who can see who ‘flung the stone’, they  can get out of it. “But not everybody can get out. If everybody got out at once the universe would disappear.”

Question: about the astral body again and something Gurdjieff had said about it being an expensive luxury.

“You can only get thought by suffering. There is no other way. Pleasure will not give it. Therefore, it’s expensive. And when you’ve got it, you have to throw it away. It’s a luxury, it’s not an essential.”

The soul does not need a body of thought, “but it thinks it does, up until the time it has integrated it.” “The ball of reason has got to be seized before you can throw it away.”

In the bible Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to bend the knee to an idol and were put in a fiery furnace. This is the furnace of spirit. Either you identify with a finite form or you go into the furnace of spirit. If you have the nerve to do this, you will find an angel is with you. This is your guardian angel. It is simply your own Self at the point of reflexive awareness. “You discover that you can subsist within the motion which is Absolute energy.”

The quintessence in Yoga is Akasha. This means the invisible which is behind the four states of matter we see in the world: solids, liquids, gases, incandescence. We see this in the layers around the earth itself; the solidity of the earth, the geosphere, the aqua sphere, the atmosphere and the ionosphere. Because these four change, they must be modalities of something that we do not see. This unseen is the fifth essence, the quintessence. Scientists are busy mapping the various energy fields around the earth and attempting to measure bio-magnetic fields further out. In between all the planets is that which has given rise to all of those fields. This mysterious force was there before the ones scientists are measuring and will be there after these fields are gone. This is Akasha. “The man who is aware of this is unformulated and Absolute. He does not bend the knee to any form at all. He bends the knee to No thing. His own being is initiative, it is energy, and he does not even bend the knee to himself.” Most people want security; even the priests are still under the canopy of heaven. But the quintessential being does not seek security because this is bondage. He wants to be free and to be secure means to be locked-up. 

The quickest way to the quintessential or reflexive level is just to give up the idea of individual security. Because it is the quickest way, it is also the hardest, because it requires a terrific amount of energy to make the leap. Climbing out from any level is not easy and often it is left to the children to do it. In every generation there is the possibility of upward social movement. 

The hardest level to climb above is the top one. In the Tarot pack the Tower card shows two figures falling. One is the Pope and the other is a King; “The powers spiritual and the powers temporal.” Coming from the sky is lightning. This is the unpredictability of finite existence. There is no real security in the time-process. Lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, drunk drivers, etc. “There is no guarantee whatever of continued existence for any formulated being.” The only immortal level is that of non-formulation, to identify with No thing and return to the Absolute. It is possible to break free at any level of the hierarchy. If a man can see that knee-bending is a function of universal spirit, he can be free in his act. “The general test of this is: are you doing it by inclination?” If so, you are not doing it freely. There is a bias in the body so you must test yourself on inclination. “If you can do without something completely then, and not before, are you doing it freely when you do it.” Anything we do by inclination is under cosmic law. “If the stimulus determines our behaviour we are in bondage.”

“You are free while you are still an individual, providing you see your individuality as pure spirit, pure energy. The form that is there is only energy formulating. There is no duality. There is no material world and a spiritual world elsewhere, waiting for you to abandon the material world to find it. It is here and now.” He holds a pencil in his hand and says that if we think it is a material object, we are deceived, but if we think of it as a modality of spirit, then it is a spiritual entity. It is all down to how we interpret the world. However we interpret the situation we are in determines how that situation acts upon us and how we react to it. 

We have to break identification all the time. The quickest way to heaven is to assume that we are already there; and then act as if we are there. “What do you do if you have already attained your Absoluteness? Ask yourself and then do it!” “We have to ask what would the Absolute do in any situation and then, overthrowing all inertias and fears, get up and go and do it, and at that moment you are free.” “Ask yourself what the Absolute would do and the answer is: anything! Then why are you doing this particular thing? That is inertia. Well, break it.” “It doesn’t matter what you do.” This is the shortest and the simplest way, but it is not easy because of the inertias. “When you realise that there is not anything other than inertias to overcome, then you spend your time overcoming inertias.” 

In Yoga it is said that this simple thing is so difficult we should spend all our time doing it. He gives the analogy of the silversmith who refines his silver by boiling it repeatedly and each time removing the scum that rises to the surface. Eventually, he has his pure silver. The mind is like this silversmith. The refined silver is the mind with the rubbish removed.

“All the rubbish that appears in the mind, appears for us at our level, serially. If we dare to watch our thoughts, without criticism, just look at them, we will be literally amazed at the profound rubbish that goes through the mind. Illogicalities, stupidities, resentments, hates, angers, sentimentalities, nothing but a continuous stream of entirely value-less stuff.” In Buddhism this is called ‘watching the monkey jump’. “Boiling the silver, boiling the mind, is the same thing as getting annoyed.” The heat this opposition generates in us boils the mind and brings the rubbish to the surface. “If you are smart, you will employ a boiler to annoy you. Without this annoyance, you cannot become aware of the parts of the mind that are really storing up this rubbish. ‘Opposition is true friendship’. Get someone to insult you and see how your mind reacts.” 

By slowing down the breathing we can find the rhythm which corresponds with the solar one. Then we are being fed by solar energy. When we accept that there is a proper rate of breathing which will produce calmness then we can cultivate this. If the breathing is shallow and irregular we cannot control the emotions. In yoga the ratio is 1:4:2. This is not a ratio that we can do accidentally. It forces us onto our volitional centre. If this rhythm dominates the individual one we have gained our end. Every centre we have is breathing at a certain rate, belly, lungs and head. We should begin with a count of four in and four out and hold it to make sure where that centre is. Then go to the 1:4:2 ratio and test ourself. We are to ignore any flashes – they are purely physiological.

Ancient Mystery Schools.  “The mysteries were actually ritual processes for inducing levels of consciousness not accessible to the ordinary five-sense mind.” To do this we must ‘exalt the will’, lift it up into a state of enthusiasm. ‘Enthusiasm’ is a word that means ‘God has come into me’. “The difference between an average person and a divine person is enthusiasm.” A divine person has a principle inside himself of continuous application. He takes the idea of the identity of the individual with the universal. He draws a small circle for the individual and around it a larger one for the universal. The inner circle is identical with the big one, in the sense that it has the same form, is centred, concentric, has a common centre, and the rhythm of each is correspondent.  “I now will that this little being, this little circle, shall breathe as from the macrocosmic level. If I deliberately do this I will induce in myself a very rapid increase in temperature, and that increase purges the body. It is a process of detoxification. The farther out I think that macrocosmic circle is, the slower my breathing will become.” (He then leads an exercise to demonstrate that visualising distance affects the rate of breathing. If we imagine breathing out to the planets, the solar system, the sidereal system and beyond, the breathing rate becomes slower and deeper with distance. “Because you are bringing your breathing into phase with these other rhythms.” He then suggests trying to do this in one second. It is impossible. “It takes time to imagine spatial distances.” He then suggests remembering some emotional situation in the past, letting the breathing correspond to this and then again visualising the sidereal system and noticing that as the breathing slows down and the imagination expands to the stars, you can no longer see any importance in that emotional situation. We cannot feel about a particular when we are breathing at the cosmic rate. “Herein lies the key to the effects of identification.” There is a breathing rate for every idea. He introduces a range of ideas and asks the audience to imagine these and to watch their breathing rates. Every time the image changes, the breathing changes. “Now you can see the importance in breath control. If you want immortality, you must have that which cannot be changed.” When we look at something interesting the breathing deepens, because it has more significance for us. Identification should always be with the universal and not the particular.

Conceptual Tyranny: If we draw a circle with a cross in it and follow the vertical from top to bottom, we find it takes less time than if we follow it from bottom to top. This shows that we are suffering from a flat-earth concept, a gravitational concept. It takes more energy to climb up than to fall down. So a concept can delay our reaction or accelerate it. “Now we are full of such conceptual beings. Those are sub-ents. They actually impose on us unless we actually break them.” He gives the example of a concept that many of us have of “best intention”- “be a good boy.” When an impulse from the belly rises up it cannot penetrate this concept, so it has no effect on our action. So if we want to be good then we have to penetrate the concept of good by breaking it down and spreading it over the whole system. We have to understand the nature of the concept of the good. Until then, reciting the word ‘good’ will have no effect. To transcend these little concepts in the brain we have to set up a bigger one, terrestrial, solar, sidereal etc. The little concept applied to the universal must fail, but the universal concept applied to the little one will overcome it. 

Secret, Sacred, Sacrum:  Secret lies behind the power of the state, sacred behind the power of the church, sacrum behind the power of the body. In the three-part man, the secret is in the head, the sacred in the chest, and the sacrum in the belly. The sac is a bag, the rum is the differentiation of eggs and sperms. Without sexuality we have no volition. “Sex is physiologically the vehicle of the universal purpose.” There is only one Absolute power which works through us according to the responsiveness, sensitivity and organisation of the vehicle. God always prefers the best. He has no favourites. “If your vehicle is any good, spirit will use it.” “Every human has come through the pelvic door and been inserted through the pelvic door. Before ejaculation of power at any level there must be a driving in and then it shoots out.” This is how the human has evolved. First, the physical body is made by the urge to reproduce. Experiences are packed into this body and eventually they erupt into liking and disliking. These build to a limit and then push through into the rational centre and we have the three-part man. By further effort it can go beyond those three levels but the process is the same: the build-up of energy and then pushing into the next level.

The Absolute has made the world as an object so that it can know itself. “It can know itself in different ways according to the different character of the objects precipitated.” So having made a sphere, the macrocosmos, it makes within itself another one, and so on. The sidereal forces in the first one hit on the solar forces and are reflected back and produce universal consciousness. The solar energies hit on the earth and return to the solar limit, producing solar consciousness. In the three-part man, the belly absorbs the material energies, the solar plexus the solar energies, and the head the sidereal ones. These three provide a point of reaction, an object, which can return frequencies at these three levels. In order to know our physical possibilities we have to have a physical world of objects to strike our body against. In the same way, we must find an emotional being to relate to, otherwise we can never know our emotional capacities. At the rational level we must find someone who has a rational mind such that he can respond at the rational level that we put out, to return the statement to us, so that we can find our rational level. There are other levels beyond these three but if we do not exhaust the possibilities at these three we cannot find them. If we do not exhaust these three we cannot evolve. “Because you have to become conscious of the physical, the emotional and the rational separately before you can coordinate them and use them simultaneously in an act – for which you need a reciprocating being able to function at those three levels.” If he doesn’t find one “he’s going to be disappointed because his evolution is going to be suspended until he finds one.”

“Remember nothing is permissible in the evolutionary path except that which is done by act of will, deliberately. Reaction, mechanical, is not allowed, because you cannot evolve mechanically. You must do everything deliberately, the physical level, the emotional level, the rational level, all must be made conscious and deliberate, otherwise it doesn’t count for evolution, and for it to be conscious, you must have a conscious, reciprocal point on which to act and which will act back on you.”

We can identify a further three-fold division within the three-part man: we can find the feeling and urge of an idea, the urge and idea value of the feeling, and the feeling and idea value of an urge. This gives us the number 9, the number of the magician. Knowing this, we can determine the direction either of our urge, our feeling, or our idea. (Or of some other being who does not yet know the rules.) If we say the word ‘urge’ it resonates in the belly. The word ‘idea’ resonates in the head. The word ‘feeling’ or ‘emotion’ resonates in the chest. That is, those words are a sonic stimulus. So by means of words we can cause consciousness to concentrate in the three different parts of the body. We can divide all reality up into ideas, feelings and urges and say: in the ideas, every philosophical system which is rational; in the feelings, every religious system; in the urges, every scientific system. The ‘ge’ in the ur-ge is earth; it means primary substance. Science attacks the earth, breaking it down to get at the original power. Science pursues urge but calls it ‘force’. It is concerned with causation. Religion is concerned with the relations between people. Philosophy deals with ideas. Ideas, being form, are necessarily concerned with ratio, with rationality. “So if we write down the vocabularies of all philosophers, and then of all religious teachings, and then of all scientific teachings, we will find stresses beginning to appear in the body.”

Question: What is the function of opposition in the development of a being?

Opposition in educating a child must be intelligently done. This “involves firing the right question at a child when it is about to do something. What you are opposing is a part of the child.” The child will tend to do things without thinking; “its impulse will operate straight through.” If we oppose the  urge, it will require the child to think. This forces the child into the head. Between the urge and the head will come feeling. “I like the impulse, I dislike thinking. How can I get my thinking to keep quiet and allow my urge?” (The belly always says “Yes,” the head always says “No”.) So the function of opposition is to balance the head and the belly. We always take the weaker side. We can imagine  placing the idea on the left side of a balance and the urge on the right and feeling across the top. If the urge starts to tilt the scale, we throw some weight on the idea to balance it. The will cannot act freely unless balanced. If there is an inclination to do something, then it is not freely willed. In this way we can feel exactly how much urge and how much rational control is needed in any situation. Opposition as an educational device is simply to balance the idea and the urge through feeling. The feeling evaluates both and from the balance comes free will. “The will is ‘free-from’, it’s not just free, it’s free from the opposites, the urge and the idea.”

Cosmic Reason Produces individual urges: An idea is a form and an urge is a translating force. One cannot become the other. A rotation force, a form, an idea, always encloses a zone but the translating motion of an urge does not. So the urge and the idea can never be brought into harmony “unless there is something internal to which both the idea and the urge subsist.” This is consciousness, represented by the white paper, which can move in both rotation and translation modes. It is conscious of both and is itself field-awareness, that is, feeling. So the feeling can tell us the difference between an idea and an urge. The difference is relative because both are power, and the only difference is their mode of activity. When an idea, which is a rotating power, is traversed by what it feels is a translating force, an urge, to the idea this feels like interference. But this apparently translating force is actually part of the arc of a larger circle. “Any force, the arc of which is greater than the one under consideration, is called an urge relative to the one under consideration, and the rotating one is called an idea relative to the larger one.” “All irrational urges are irrational and urges only for a being too small to understand the large circle from which that so-called urge derives.” “The Logos is the Supreme reason and if we represent it by a circle, round which we can draw no bigger, then we can see that for every small circle within the big one, the reason of the big one must appear as an urge in the small one. So the so-called ‘irrational’ urges of individuals are really Cosmic reasons. This is quite obvious in the case of the sexual urge.” The history of civilisation is the history of small circles; a man, his immediate family, tribe, nation etc. with progressive identification with ever larger units. But always, some persist in identifying with the smaller form and resist the move to larger ones. It has been suggested that a ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ is the ultimate concept for humanity but, “The ultimate concept for humanity cannot be less that the totality of all beings.” “Nothing less than Absolute identity is ultimate in the real sense.”

A baby has few ideas and is therefore incapable of assimilating the idea system of its parents, so the reasons the parents give cannot be interpreted rationally by the child. So the child must think the parents very unreasonable and full of urges to dominate. What is a simple, rational request to the parent, may be seen as a simple interference with the desire to dominate as its motive. This can be true for adults also; when a person with few ideas comes into contact with somebody with a bigger idea system. We must always remember to talk from consciousness to consciousness and to make it clear that we are not trying to upset the idea structures of the other but merely to indicate that there is another, rational structure. We must never dismiss another’s idea as rubbish, “that idea is perfect at its own level and the truth includes all ideas absolutely.” When we resist a truth from another being it is because there is already an established idea inside us and the incoming truth is seen as a threat to the body of that idea and is therefore resisted. This means we should be open to all ideas whatever. (There is some very good advice given on dealing with children telling lies, disobeying parents, etc.)

Understanding yourself as Macrocosmos.  They are identical. “The Macrocosmic reason is identical with the reason of yourself.” Your geometry is identical with that of the macrocosmos. If you understand yourself, you understand the macrocosmic Self. “If you understand a part of yourself, you are understanding a part of the cosmic process.” ‘Man is the measure of all things’. “Man is the epitome, the essence of all problems whatever, of the universe compacted and made into a microcosm.” Science tries to understand the external world but cannot explain the most fundamental aspects of man himself – such as feeling. “Feeling is not defined by science as existing at all.” For science, the psychic world does not exist. “For many psychologists, the spiritual world has no existence…simply because the external scientist is more concerned to examine the external world than he is to examine himself.” Medicine has progressed so that today we have holistic therapies but many of these do not consider ‘spirit’. “Now the whole man must include all whatever that exists inside the Macrocosmos, because the Macrocosmos is simply the externalisation of the processes of the inner man. We have no external universe, except as a projection of the internal processes of a man. ‘A being knows only the modifications of its own substance,’ and therefore what we call the external world is really the assumed external world which is a projection of the internal, formal activities of the observer of that world…to deal with the whole man is the same as to deal with the whole universe.”

Good, Better, Best. ‘Good’ is what satisfies the primary appetite, the gullet. ‘Better’ is when we have the law established in us. “But when our ideas are seen to be limited and circumscribed, we will become disappointed in them.” “‘Best’ is when you can crucify yourself and become the cause of your own form – you are a self-stimulating being.” So we go from ‘good’ to ‘better’ and then, “we must leap out of the Torah, into the unconditioned, because only the unconditioned is free.” “If we identify with the best, we transcend time, so that when the time-body, the ‘better’ has fulfilled its purpose, then we will still be the ‘best’ – still be free.” 

In Christian theology is the idea of ‘the Election of Grace’, of predestination. The man who wishes to have it must first realise that he already has it, and he must use it. “Grace is the free in himself.” 

This is the highest concept and frees all those beneath it. In the case of Einstein and others, the concepts given by education reach a point where they can go no further. This exhausts the thinker and when it is exhausted, it “falls through” and grace operates. A concept of which before he was unaware is now seen to be there and is related to the problem he was trying to solve. “Because it was the governing concept that set that problem for the human race.”  “He didn’t determine the problem, the problem determined him.” “Einstein’s unifield theory is very, very simple.” Mystics had seen it, logicians had seen it, philosophers had seen it, but in an age of science, “only scientists think correctly.” “It is the zeitgeist, the time-spirit, that determines the next problem for science, so they are entirely mechanical about that. Then, the higher force that suddenly presents itself when the rotating energy has cut a hole in the substance of that man, appears to him as grace.” This higher force goes right to the top – the big circle – and outside of this is only immediacy, spirit itself. That spirit penetrates all of man’s discoveries but “people at the level of the time-process can’t see further than the historic evolute allows them to.” (e.g. the speed of light is seen by scientists as a ‘top constant’. This will change…Some scientists are beginning to think that the speed of light may be the bottom energy of another universe above it, a subtle universe around the gross one, and a causal one beyond that!) “The Absolute Itself contains all these, and only the Infinite Absolute is free, absolutely. But all the others below it are free relatively, to the ones below, and they are bound to the ones above.”

For any being to gain freedom, “they must get hold of this idea of non-identification with finites. This repetition we hope, is boring, because what we want to do is bore a hole right through so that the whole bottom drops out and leaves the man free to dome himself.” Every child is conditioned by its education and by its environment. National identity is a good example. Conceptually, we are determined by it. We cannot be free except from something. We must free ourselves from all finite concepts. There is a hierarchy of these: on the lowest level are sense-percepts, the action of the five senses giving us data. On the next level, those data are grouped together to produce what are called ‘general ideas’. e.g. the general idea of ‘dog’ covers all breeds. In freeing ourselves, we have to determine free from what. “The more accurately you define it, the freer you will be from it.” But no concept, no matter how clearly defined, can ever be identical with consciousness, because consciousness, “ can always see beyond the edge.” At the feeling level of consciousness, there is an even greater danger of falling into identification. This “is why people in a romantic mood don’t like to have the situation defined.” If we define it, the emotion dies down. 

“The object of the exercises we do is to regain a feeling level, but not sub-intellectual. It must be over the intellect. It must discover that feeling is field-consciousness above the intellect.” This is the feeling level we should try to attain “because it is that higher feeling that enables you to choose the correct act in a lower situation.” “The hierarchical structure of the universe is such that it has a series of veils,” corresponding with the seven days of the week and the planets of the Zodiac. “These veils successively obscure the reality of the Absolute so that lower level functions will be carried on, and so that nobody from a lower level can break into a higher level prematurely.” These seven veils exist in the human being and are the seven ‘chakras’ identified in Yoga. They can be discovered “only by progressive non-identification. To get to a higher level safely, one must work on the lower level until the bottom falls out of it.” We all of us have to find out where we stand and ask ourselves if the values we are creating are the right ones for us, “or are they values of an inferior order imposed upon me by somebody else for their benefit?” 

“The only cause of sorrow is the realisation of individual, personal impotence.” We should accept that and penetrate to the meaning of it. If we become dejected it is because we cannot handle the situation: “I cannot handle the situation, therefore I am miserable.” We have to constantly remind ourselves that the work that must be done can only be done now, in us, here. The more we can do this then the more rapidly we can raise ourselves above the lower level. “It is done by energy being inserted from above.” We have to give up the pursuit of equilibrium as comfort and, instead of that, penetrate to the meaning of everything we do, in order to understand ourselves, to see what our potentialities are, to bring them into actuality, “to discover every aspect of your own being in every situation, to make that the aim.” We must use the mind to see if we can feel the relation between different elements. This will sharpen our field-consciousness and allow us to discover that the space between is actually full of form that we did not previously notice. “Betweenness is the key to relation,” so if we look for this e.g. between two terms, we can become identified, not with the terms, but with the field between them. This takes a great deal of practise to become effective. (Blind people are often very good at this.) (He suggests an exercise of lying in a darkened room and becoming aware of the objects in the room by ‘feeling them’.

“By concentrating on the gross, material world, we have fallen.” We have become unaware of, “a whole host of forces” that have lapsed from our consciousness and then been rediscovered by science over the last few thousand years. The ‘unifield’ that Einstein ‘discovered’ was actually experienced thousands of years ago by some individuals who saw that the place where a body is affects the field in that place: that there were “peculiar forces which are highly curved, where space concentrations occur.” Over millennia, religion has denied such experiences to ensure conformity and social stability. And, “once you focus people on the gross, material world, it then becomes their treasure.” (Where the heart is, there is the treasure also.) “As soon as you let go of the gross, material world, if you haven’t got reflexive, self-consciousness, you are at the mercy of the forces between the gross bodies.”  Therefore, gross materialism is a protection for non-conscious people.

It is more powerful to forgive than to seek revenge, because it releases more energy. When we revenge, we contract. But the energy of forgiveness operates freely, easily and more effectively, because it operates at a higher frequency.

Listener:It appears to me that you are putting yourself in constant danger by attempting to develop.

EH. “Well, we hope so!”  “To avoid danger, absolutely, the only safe way is to be dead.” 

Because life is change, which disturbs an equilibrium. So we should not identify with equilibrium, but identify instead with absolute dynamism. “There is nothing to be afraid of.” If we forgive a person who isn’t forgiving us, then the energy of revenge must start working within them. They will try to reduce us to their level of enmity. Forgiving them is a “filthy trick” because they will increase their animosity and provoke us further into reacting. If we lash out in response they will smile because they have won. They know that if we had maintained our forgiveness then, at some point, they would have to give in, “and they don’t want to because of their egotism.” So we have to persist in the forgiving, to concentrate on our forgiveness knowing that their behaviour is mechanical and determined by the situation. “For it is certain that if you don’t lose it, it will have to parley with you. And if you do lose it, it’ll jump on you.” “So you have your choice. It requires a terrific amount of patience. And a continuous regaining of the patience you just lost which you told yourself you were going to keep.”

In the ancient world, men looked to the sky for God. Simply because the material world was hard and unforgiving. They saw that things could not rise up from the ground by themselves, but in Spring the plants would start to grow as the sun strengthened. But there were some men who realised that there were also forces coming up from the earth, from inside themselves. These were the prophets. Most men are ‘men of matter’ i.e. they think the material world is all there is, even though there are forces enabling them to move about, think and feel. Other men, knowing this to be untrue, nevertheless encouraged this kind of thinking because it gave them power over the rest. Such men were often the kings and priests who liked to believe that they had the spirit in themselves but did not want the people beneath them to know, otherwise they could not be ordered about so easily. In this way, the church began – all churches. Church means ‘assembly’, and it is for those people who are not strong enough to stand alone. The prophets came and said to the kings that they were going to tell the people that they all had the same spirit inside as the king had – so they had to be killed off. Much later, some materialists, recognising the deception visited upon the many by the few, advocated the state. A commune in which the previous rulers had no power. The state means a static something. Those who advocated the overthrow of the kings promised a ‘stateless commune’. This idea was borrowed by the early Christians and yet these men were anti-Christian.  (Constantine embraced the Christian faith in order to produce a state again.) 

Inside us we all have Immanent Spirit, but veiled by the inertia of our physical bodies. Without the resistance of this body, that spirit could not “clarify” itself. “Now this process of forming intelligences  through matter is what we call the evolutionary process…and there can be no evolution without a previous involution.” We have to remember that our body and its inertia, are our best friends, providing we work to overcome them. If we don’t they are our worst enemies. Outside of us we have men wanting us to join organisations, trade unions, political parties, churches. The state organises itself a church and gets people to belong to it, in order to manipulate them. The established church is the ‘left arm’ of the state and the army is the right arm. Both operate through routines and rituals. If the meaning of religious rituals was explained to the faithful then they would become aware of Immanent Spirit and realise that every man is a temple of the living God. But if we become absorbed in the ritual we become like the jellyfish in the experiment mentioned. We will go on repeating and repeating and be tied up and circumscribed by the ritual. ‘Opposition is true friendship’ and our best friend is our body, our inertia – if we fight it. But there are other people trying to force us into identification with the body and with matter generally.

Inside each one of us there are sub-ents. One of these does not believe in Immanent Spirit or in Transcendent Spirit. Another one is so terrified that it will bend the knee to any kind of force whatever. This one will never say what it believes, if threatened. Another one is a dictator. This one likes to see people do what they are told. It would lock up those who do not. There is also a prophet in us. We only know about this one when we overcome inertia and become aware of initiative will. This one, when it speaks, will be attacked by the dictator sub-ent. If we learn to watch ourselves we will find that the body is zoned. In each part, the energies operate differently, for example, between the navel and the diaphragm, in the solar plexus region, is where we feel anger.

Macrocosmos and Microcosmos. Man as a microcosm contains sub-ents within himself, one-for-one in correspondence with all the principles of the macrocosmos. When St. Paul said, “We fight against principalities and powers and corruption in high places,” he was referring to the very centres in our own organism. These are the sub-ents in every one of us. And they are the same ones in all of us.

“Now as all the motions in infinity go to infinity, it means that no matter where you circumscribe the zone, there are always the forces of the Absolute traversing it, and therefore there are exactly the same sub-ents in every being. The only difference…some people know more about themselves than other people, because they’ve been in more stress situations.”

“There is no other method of waking up than putting yourself into a resistant situation.” In yoga there is only one rule about posture and that is the spine must be kept straight – not supported, but kept straight. The resistance generated in this posture, guarantees that we will not fall asleep, which we could easily do in a more relaxed position.

Spirit is absolutely non-dual. To create value it must do so within Itself. There is nothing other than Spirit so It cannot introduce anything from outside of Itself. The only way It can produce plurality, and therefore value, “is by complicating Itself,” which is the same thing as folding Itself. This is why, theologically, God is said to be ‘pure act’; there is nothing in Him that is static. “There is no entity whatever that is still or static, except to another entity so insensitive that it can’t see the motion that constitutes it.”

He explains the meaning of Troy, of Priam, Helen, Paris, and the Wooden Horse. “Every historical situation is simply a moment of development of the involving and the evolving Spirit…the introduction of Helen by Paris spelt the end of Troy, just in the same way as the introduction into a man’s mind of a prophetic statement that there is Immanent Spirit inside will profoundly upset the already conceptualised mind and force it to make a choice.”

“Owing to the fact that a definite amount of matter was precipitated, time is finite. So after a certain number of rotations there, there will be a release of energies. All those beings who choose for substance, and merely contingent relations which are external, will be on that earth when it incandesces. And it must incandesce because it is contracting. That means to say that the end of the earth will be by fire – by incandescence.” “Those beings identified with it are going to feel rather bad at the time it goes off…but if you’ve already gained non-identification with it and you have identified with your Immanent Spirit – which you know is essentially creative – you will not bother about the explosion of any particular planet in infinite space.” “Now that is the choice before us.”

Qabalistic Analysis: He draws the ‘Tree of Life’. At the top is ‘Ain-Soph’. ‘Ain’ is Hebrew, equivalent to ‘nothing’ but also to ‘eye’, the observer, consciousness itself. It never becomes a form and is therefore ‘no-thing’. ‘Soph’ is wisdom. So Ain-Soph means “the limitless wisdom of the ‘no-thing’,” which contains all conceivable form. So Ain-Soph is a top level concept relating together two totally different concepts: that of no-thing, Ain; and that of all forms whatever, Soph. “So the Ain-Soph signifies the dialectical opposition of all beings, lifted to its highest intellectual level.” ‘Being’ starts below that with the Crown, ‘Kether’. This is the ‘Macroprosopus’, the ‘Great Chief’, polarised as father and mother of the universe. In this top triad, the ‘Yod’ is the Father principle, the ‘Heh’ is the Mother principle, the field of receptive energy. “This contains all that there is which may manifest below.” i.e. the Ain-Soph is hidden in this supernal triangle, whose name is ‘Atziluth’, “expressed and polarised for consideration.” This is the Heaven world and is reflected in the material world below. (Rather like the six-pointed star, which has two triangles, one pointing upwards to God and the other down into the material world.) Below Atziluth is ‘Briah’, the world of intelligences, and below Briah is ‘Yetzirah’, the world of forms. Below these two is the world as we know it, ‘Malkuth’. The whole tree is called the ‘Sephirotic Tree’. (The plural ‘sephira’ is the same as ‘sphere’.) It is the Tree of Life that stands in the middle of Eden. The three levels in the Tree correspond with our three bodies: gross, subtle and causal. The gross body is Malkuth, the subtle body of ideas is Yetzirah, and the causal one is Briah, “the intelligences which initiate.” Above these is the Divine one of Atziluth. “As above, so below.” Everything is a reflection of the possibilities of Ain-Soph. The Tree “classifies the Universe in a convenient way.” If it “corresponds with reality, then it is opposite to the concept of Romanticism.” In history there is a “continuous interplay between the Romantic principle, in the sense of fiction, and the classic, in the sense of eternal form.” Classic thought is a heritage of the Greeks, as rational thinkers, and corresponds roughly with Plato’s sphere of ideas. The top concept for the Greeks was the ‘Logos’, and out of this one concept came the ratio of all things. Scientifically, the concept of the logos is valid: everything that exists is circumscribed, as a finite. Therefore, there is a ratio of parts to its wholeness, which we call its inherent logic. So that everything we can reduce to geometrical structures, which are inherent in the universe, we call classic. In opposition, romantic refers to the part of nature that does not want to be bothered with universal reason i.e. feeling. 

The Stoics believed the universe was logical and lived accordingly, and became strong individuals. Stoicism could not become popular as it was too hard for the populace.So it was never a serious threat to Christianity, which requires only faith. Christianity was a very convenient religion for the the Romans, because it unified large numbers of people in a way that Stoicism could not. The Stoics became very hard and lived by reason, a logical determinism. In opposition to them were people who believed that man was the centre and logic was a product of his thinking. Either idea, pushed to its conclusion, will turn into its opposite. If we take the idea of the logos then we can say that the logos has produced a world of supernal form and then imposed itself by Absolute will, through ideas into matter. Above that Logos is the Absolute Will. The Romans thought this was embodied in their divine emperors. Will and reason are two essential principles. In the three-part man we can see that something is needed to bridge between them. This is feeling, represented by the Jews. They are an emotional, feeling people jammed between reason and wilfulness. They had to leave their own centre and wander, and in their wanderings they were forced to accept ideas from other nations; ideas of reason and of will. They fuse these together. We know that the Greeks were defeated by the Romans. The Greeks inside us (reason) similarly must be defeated by the Romans (will). The heart is the centre of the circulatory system of the blood. As it goes around the body it goes through the Roman lands and the Greek lands, carrying certain chemicals. The chemistry in the head is different from that in the belly, so as the blood circulates, it carries these around. This is a similar role to that of the Jews in history. Just as the blood collects and then distributes chemicals throughout the body, the Jews collected ideas from all over the world, and were dispersed in order to collect them. They then had to gather these ideas together and present them as a world view. The ‘wandering Jew’ is that wandering bloodstream. Every nation will stress reason, will or feeling. Intermarriage over time, ensures that the three stresses are mixed. (After the fall of Troy, some of the people appear in Southern Italy, and some in Europe. Paris, who ran away from Helen, is now the name of the capital city of the most reason-stressed people of Europe, the French.) Historically, we have moved away from the Classic value of geometrical significance to a vaguer, less purely logical view approaching the Romantic, the more fictive. ‘Roman’ is still German and French for this fictive concept; ‘Romanza’ in Italian.

The ‘Tree of Life’ diagram could be considered as a purely classic diagram, with its underlying geometry. There is a top triad, its reflection below, a movement to further objectification, and finally the concreting of it on the gross earth. If we imagine that in the supernal triangle there are waves reflecting from the sides, then inside there would be smaller triangles, all simultaneous. If we take one of these triangles and move it down into Briah, then it is now separate. If we move it down again into Yetzirah, then it becomes a separate, formative being. In Malkuth it has absorbed matter and has become a gross, material being. “And this is true, whether they are animal, vegetable or human.”

Fall of Adam: Ultimately, we do not have an essential relation with the gross, material world.We take material food and pack it into the egg, the embryo, and eventually an adult human, but the growth has been by pushing material food into it from outside. This cannot be our essence. Therefore we are in relation with, on earth, a material principle, “that’s really nothing to do with us.”   Prior to the Fall, Adam was not a gross, material being. He lived in the world of forms, in the subtle world. However, he began to absorb the stimulus value of the material world. (the serpent) It is through the substance of our bodies that we are subject to stimuli, and through which we fall. The reason side of our nature is not so easily stimulated in the absence of a material body. The stimulus from the material world rises into the world of forms, and then up into the world of intelligences where the will now goes down into the material world to investigate. This is the Fall. “Because once it has gone into there, its understanding, which in this world is the pure reflection of the celestial, is now tainted with the vibrations that come from below.” So Adam’s fundamental geometry has become distorted – he has become a Romantic. It is a matter of fact that a man’s thought processes can be disturbed by sights, sounds and smells that cloud his reasoning. He is turned from a classic, reflecting being to a romantic, earth-directed being.” Man stands between these two worlds. We can equate the ‘Golden Age’ to the supernal triad, the ‘Silver Age’ to the world of intelligences, the ‘Copper Age’ to the world of forms, and the ‘Iron Age’ to the physical world of action. We know that stimuli from the material world condition our thinking and therefore our subtle body. That this, in turn, determines the direction of activity of the physical body. Although we know this we also know that we are still subjected to it, through all kinds of advertising and propaganda. The world of forms mediates between the intelligence world and gross matter. By this we can begin to order the reactions that occur in the mind. “Even Romanticism, if ordered, will give birth to Classicism.” If we hear nonsense we know it is such because we have order within us, truth to serve as a standard.  The more Romantic someone becomes, the more they will refute themselves. The test is “Qui bono?” – ‘to whom the good?’  “The classic is the eternal geometrical form, the romantic is the private, terrestrial, influence and purpose.”

Reflexive, Self-consciousness: If we feel an itch on the back of our hand, we can say to ourself, “There is an itch.” We have defined ‘itch’. Then we can say, “I know there is an itch,” and then, “I know that I know there is an itch.” I have now carried my intelligence back to itself. This is the ‘bending back’ of consciousness upon itself, reflexion, so that it becomes its own object. “Then we have released ourselves from the tyranny of ideas, and from the stimulus of the gross, material world.” (On the diagram we have gone from the material world up to the supernal triad.)

Pain and Pleasure: When we feel a pain we should remind ourselves that the pain is not of the body. Pain is not material, it is a feeling. It is not the matter of the body that feels pain, the body is “simply the thing that serves as the point of reaction to a stimulus.” If we identify with the body then we define pain as belonging to it. When we dis-identify, as when under anaesthetic, we feel no pain. Pain means ‘point of negation’, the point in which we say, “I don’t want it.” In this, we all differ. Sadists and masochists define such stimuli differently. They do not refuse pain but accept it and define it as pleasurable. 

The Body of Light: Prior to the Fall, Adam was a being of light, in Yetzirah. The light was coming from him. (EH says he has himself seen men radiating light so strongly that the physical body could not be seen.) When Adam ate the fruit (gross matter) the light diminished in him because his frequency was lowered. His body was then opaque. Adam is thrown out of Eden, the land of non-judgement, “And the Tree of Life, which is in the midst of it, which could release him froths condition, is closed to him, ‘until the consummation of days’. After this, he had to dig in the material earth for food, no longer receiving it directly from cosmic radiations. “Light is still the stuff we feed on, only we get it the hard way.” The land of no judgement and the Tree of Life are within us. The ‘Angel with a fiery sword’ keeping us from it, is within us also. The brain, nervous system and spine are the centres where these are located. (break in recording.) The prescription relating to the Tree of Knowledge was telling us we should not think of good vs evil. We should think in terms of pairs of opposites. This dialectical thinking forces the mind back into a primary unity. (The basis of Zen.) Aristotelian logic says a thing is either good or bad, but we have to assert a pair of opposites: this thing is good/bad, bad/good, because it is! (In relation to something it’s good, in relation to something else it’s bad. What is good at a certain time will be bad at another time.) Medicines can cure some diseases but may have side effects which are worse. “The supernal correspondent of that bacterium will make itself a modified form. Because all forms exist forever in eternity, they will continuously re-invade all territories as fast as man pushes them out.” A good example of polar opposites can be seen in the Eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. Reasonable men, like Liebnitz and Spinoza were writing philosophies of life, “you couldn’t write a better and more unified system than Spinoza’s.” Yet, at the same time, there are Romantics, like Blake, painting the fairies he had seen. Humans are often polarised between inside and outside: One who has Classic characteristics on the outside can be a Romantic on the inside, and vice-versa. (EH says he knows many Classic scholars who are pro-Greek, fantastic, and all are homosexuals. He also knows some business men who are very Romantic on the outside but “hard as nails” on the inside. The ‘Ain-Soph’, the inimitable wisdom, appears in polar relation in us and we cannot escape it. What a man is doing on the outside, at that precise moment he is not doing on the inside; which is the meaning of Eden. Whenever we define a thing as bad, not to be done on the outside, we create a fantasy about it in the inside, the basis of all modern psychology. A prim person can be a “hotbed of fantasy” on the inside. (He mentions Samuel Butler’s ‘Way of all Flesh’ as an example of this.) Knowing this, we should stop all self-condemnation and stop all condemnation of others. But this also means we are not to condemn condemning! “The thing that you do consciously is always inverted unconsciously.” If we try to stop something it becomes inevitable. “The mere fact that we define it is to make it an enemy.” “Eden means don’t define it.” “The whole man can only be regained by completely abandoning all that type of definition and asserting our absolute prior unity behind all polarities.”

The Yugas and the Ages: The Golden Age is in the supernal world. (Atziluth) With the passage into the Silver Age, (Briah) entering the time-process, men began to make rules about what should be done. In the Age of Copper, (copulation age) where things are joined together by decisions from above (Yetzirah). Then the Iron Age of Malkuth. These ages exist simultaneously and eternally and are within us. Golden: where we are actually Edenic. Underneath is Silver, a period where we think and define; then Copper, where we want to join things together and separate them, “though God hasn’t done so, we do.” And then in the Iron Age of the gross world we apply these things. “And because the whole is one, yet all is power, and the essential nature of power is to move, there is a continuous flux from top to bottom.” These four Ages or Yugas follow each other in eternal succession. Each phase appears in the time-process as a ‘zeitgeist’, “a spirit of the time which determines exactly what people in general are going to do.”…”It follows that it is also possible that some few can do the contrary.” We should not condemn those millions heading the other way from us. We should not try to convert them. (The Tao says that fools are the instruments whereby the wise perfect themselves.) We should not be glad that millions of others are going the other way, but just accept that it is so, and because of them we are going our own way.

Question: “What makes us want to go back?” (home to God.)

“Events.” “If you always got your own way, you would never reflect.” God has eternity to wait in…eventually, we repent – and He was there all the time. As long as we judge ‘good’ and ‘bad’ we cannot reach the Edenic state again. All those things we had thought were ‘bad’ in our lives are the things that have caused us to turn back, so they were really ‘good’ things. As we drive out from our centre into the material world we do bad things, but these eventually send us back. When we go into the material world we go into slavery, more and more subject to stimuli from outside. Without ‘hard knocks’ we would never turn back. “A good bang on the head can make you think.”

Question: “Why is the word ‘celestial’ used for the East as well as for higher things?” 

There are two kinds of East, the geographical one and the Heavenly, or mystic East which is inside us. At our centre is the power pushing out; the yeast, the mystical Zion. In Jewish mysticism, a man should die in Palestine, the ‘pi-law stone’. It “means he must have a clear sense of the geometry, the classic mode, at death.” You must, at the point of death, have in your mind the pure geometry of the sphere. “The whole object is to live such a life that at the end of it, you can say, “this is the one that I will do again.” This is the target, the ‘pi-law stone’. This is dialectics again. The Arabs are nomads but now want a settled state. The Jews, who have always wanted that settled state, were dispersed all over the world, and though some have gone back, most have not. “Get that rule: to see this polar relation inside and out, above and below, all the time, is to drive yourself backwards from the material world.

Exercise: “When you go to bed at night, assert the absolute polarisation of the infinite in the finite, and suspend judgement. Say, ‘Eden is where I’d like to be’, and deliberately put yourself in that state of non-judgement.” All judgements of the lower mind are mechanical. It is bound to be against pain and for pleasure and therefore will praise those who have been nice to us and condemn those who haven’t. 

Pride: ‘Proud’ =tumescent=packed with energy. A man who is proud is ‘puffed up’ to the point where the energy is about to burst out. Energy drifts from the Field to a centre and packs in until it must shoot out again, (like lightning.) The best solution is to do something useful with the energy. In all cases it means: ‘I have more of it than you have’. Lucifer is the best example: the brightest, the most powerful, became overcharged and burst. Opposite to pride is humility. (Humous=earth) ‘Dust unto dust’. “It’s on the basis of the gross, material world that we stand in our humility…we have a gross body…let the proud man make that gross body behave first.” If we are humble outwardly, we are proud inwardly, and vice-versa. “When you become aware of it you release yourself from the pairs of opposites.” EH says: “the word that comes out of my mind is determined by you… not by me…A woman cannot feed a child unless there is a child to feed.”

We know that we have a physical body and we know also that we have a body of ideas. We know that we have a hand and we know that we have the idea of a hand that we can apply in the material world to move the hand. This body of ideas is the subtle body which informs the gross, material one. “It is obvious that if we have two different bodies and they are related together functionally, there must be a third behind them.” This is the causal body. A surgeon can perform an operation on a gross material body. In his mind he has an idea of how that body should be and if the actuality is different, he can operate to correct it so that the material body fits with the idea in his mind. “He looks with his consciousness at his idea, and at the gross body before him, and compares them.” So his consciousness is behind both his idea body and his own gross, material hand. The idea body is the same as Jung’s ‘archetypal world’. All form that can exist at the gross, material level, already exists as an idea. Our gross, physical body is smaller than the field that contains it. Just as the earth is smaller than the field around it. We can call the earth the geosphere and around it we have the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the pyrosphere, the ionosphere etc. All of these layers belong to the earth and stay with it as it travels around the Sun. These spheres are centred on their own precipitate, the earth. So too the human being, though not in the egg from which it grows, is in the field around the egg. The three-part man gives us an analytical device: “What am I complaining about?” “Is it material, is it rational, or is it simply a feeling?” If it is a feeling and we give it time and expression, and eliminate the other two, the feeling will gradually clarify itself. “It will tend to precipitate its own earth.”

He gives an analysis of the ‘Devil’ card and also those of the ‘World’ and the ‘High Priestess’. He explores the use of the prefix ‘un’, “not the simple negative that is pretended, it means ‘urge power”

The ‘unknown’ meaning is that which is hidden. So any man-made law can be challenged. To pretend otherwise is a “crime against the Holy Ghost.”

He analyses the ‘Magician’ who symbolises infinity and ‘reciprocal feeding’. To give is better than to receive because it opens doors inside us. To receive at the material level is simply to accrete matter; to give is to have our matter replaced by spirit. The mineral world grows by accretion from the outside. The organic world does the opposite: it absorbs, breaks down what it has ingested and pushes it to the outside, causing it to grow – incretion. So in this process, “we are passing from the material world to the organic world, which is the world of life…the life-force of spirit itself. The earth itself, as a mineral precipitate, is being progressively conquered by life.” It is being reduced to the level where the plants, the animals and man, can assimilate it. So matter becomes incarnate. In time, everything decays so that it can be used, absorbed and converted into an organic state. “The house that is used last longer than the house that is not used. Because, when it’s being used by you, you are actually feeding it with energy. And when you are not using it at all, the intelligent forces of the universe are determined to break it down.” The same thing happens with a stored motor car. If you feed a person with ideas or with feelings, you build them up. “If you were ill. what would you recommend as treatment for yourself in hospital?” Answer: two pretty nurses! Far more important than medication is simply emotional relationship. It is possible to get better by emotional attention, just as “it is possible to be killed by the deprivation of such.” 

The Unconscious: When in the waking state we are dependent on the five senses. In deep sleep they are not operating but there is consciousness of the Absolute, which is busy building us up when we are wearing ourselves out. In the unconscious state this force is moving onto damaged organs and repairing them. We cannot recall this in the waking state. Sometimes people have experiences when under anaesthetic but they try to remember these in terms of five-sense imagery, which doesn’t work. Similarly Huxley’s account of Mescalin use: he had to use five-sense imagery, which does not fit. To a blind man, the word ‘colour’ has no meaning. We cannot tell him because he has not got that sense organ. It is the same with the unconscious. It is a valid experience, just like sight, but it is not available to the five senses. Truth is a lie – because it is finite, laid down in law. The untruth is what Christ is talking about. The unmoral man is superior to the moral man. The act of unknowing is already within us, we just have to remove the obstacles. “The obstacles are this persistency of leaning on the external, stimulus world. You are already in it, only you can’t see it because of the interference.”   

The talk ends with questions and answers in which he explores taking responsibility for our thoughts and an exercise in interfering with the thought-process. Also, some further explanation of the unconscious, the difference between meditation and contemplation, and of the benefits of these.

If we take the paper as the Absolute, Sentient, Power, then when a ripple appears, it moves across the paper and if another ripple crosses it, then at the point of intersection a centre of rotation is created. Such a centre, “appears spontaneously in this unifield of life-force.” There is no effort, no self-opposition; simply one ripple has crossed another one. So when God created, prior to the earth, there is no super-stressing of any centre. All the forms that could exist in the gross, material world, now exist within this moving field. As yet there is no contra-action at the intersection points. “Now at this point, we are in ‘Heaven’, we are ‘paradise’, we are ‘beyond duality’, we are in the ‘celestial Eden’, we don’t judge and condemn, we just see an infinite number of forms, all very beautiful.” At some point, extra tension is introduced by some rotating forces pressing hard onto their centres. “In doing so they are inhibiting their own freedom but they are becoming more heightened in their awareness of themselves as finite objects.” The first centre to start this process of contraction is pulling in energy from its environment, and that includes other centres. It has no regard for the self-determination of these other centres. This is the ‘Luciferan Fall’. At a certain point, it cannot take any more. It becomes blocked, “Gamma’d up.” This is the generation of the mineral world. The process carries on with increasing pressure until, at a certain critical point, the whole thing incandesces. The light radiates from it and “radiates back to the source from which he stole it.” As the light escapes, there is precipitated in the centre little particles of matter, the earth. The same process happens at the human level. If governments try to weld the body of humanity into a social structure defined by just a few, and then coerce them with the police, army etc. eventually, there will be a revolt. This is simply mechanics. “The concept of society is finite in the minds of finite men, and it’s so finite that it can’t stand much energy for a long period and therefore, at a certain critical point, it breaks and we have a revolution on our hands.” This can be a big one, like the French or Russian, or something smaller as we have seen often in South America. All sorts of devices are introduced to stop these forces: political parties, trade unions, etc.The basic principle is always the same: “repressive forces acting on the life-field itself.” “The life-field is infinite and cannot be compressed into a finite zone without eventually incandescing and blowing apart the finite structures. In the microcosm of our bodies we must not do what we have seen done in societies. “If we don’t want an earthquake in our physical body, we mustn’t go through the processes of contra-action that the earth goes through to produce an earthquake.” The field is the causal world itself, the initiator of its own motions. The subtle world is the world of forms which the field introduces into itself by its vibrations. The gross, material world is created when some of these forms contract excessively. 

In the human this begins soon after birth. Potty training especially, creates resistance in the child and opposition. The spontaneous freedom of the baby is inhibited by the care-takers and the child reacts. “He now equates muscular effort with a sense of personal victory over an external being.” He becomes a little egotist. He learns to increase his nuisance value to gain more attention, to increase his individual power to defeat the external dictator. Later on in life, this early “analysis of what is needed, conditions everything he does.” So that when he is pursuing power later on, he contracts very hard in everything he does. He now has an erroneous idea that to get what you want you have to do the same things you learned as a small child. “He is now acting egotistically.” 

If we twist the paper, that part now becomes individuated, “and the peculiar mode of its twist we call its ‘character’.” This twisting action, this character, determines how this being sees the world.

All of the so-called ‘great leaders’, such as Napoleon or Hitler, in their self-twisting, were all seeing the world in their own, twisted, finite way. “ Automatically, in so doing, he is falsifying the reality of the situation.” To such a being this is reality. So he now tries to impose his twisted view of the world on everyone else. So when he designs his ideal social structure, he is bound to be wrong. “He is bound to make statements that can’t possibly fit that order of beings about which his peculiar twist knows nothing.” However, “He will try to gather into his centre – like Lucifer did – as many as he can, to foist his peculiar, bent view upon the world.” All his sense of effort is simply a contraction in the brain, “and the functions inside the head are impeded by this very effort.” All the great religions counsel against this: effortlessness, immediacy, spontaneity, all point to the same fact: “don’t contract your muscles when you are trying to produce a spiritual change.” The field of the life-force always acts spontaneously. We can only become aware of it in a perfectly relaxed state. The reward always comes by grace. We have to choose a direction to get the result, but we can never force the result to occur. 

“The opposite of holding in is not pushing out, it is letting go.” We may contract a muscle in order to locate a particular point in the body, say the point between the eyebrows, but having found the location we must let go of the contraction. “Now you cannot understand your own organism unless you remove the inhibiting factors from it.” Most of the diseases in the world are caused by “internal, contractive forces,” because contraction, contra-action, is contra-diction. Over time this creates hypertension, the build-up of toxins in the body and a slow degeneration. So we must relax “fully, without fear, everything in the body, we will then discover all sorts of previously inhibited tendencies manifesting.” The optimal relaxation state for the body is the “Aleph” tension, the tonic state. This is the unity principle, “a very fine, dynamic process that makes you aware that you exist,” but without effort. When we are relaxed in this way, not super-stressed, not ‘gamma’d-up’, then we become aware of our inner world in a way we were not previously aware of. Sometimes people feel fear when they do this exercise. This is because they have super-stressed an idea of who they are, which is now threatened. “You actually dare, in a perfectly relaxed state, to look at the thing that you were about to super-stress, only you don’t super-stress it…by doing the exercise in this way, you gradually become aware that you cannot cease to exist. There’s nothing you can do about your existence. You, the consciousness, are eternal…and the loss of this infinite awareness is simply by the concentration of super-stressing on a finite form.” Christ said that he came, “that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.” By super-stressing we know very few of life’s infinite potentialities.

The five sense organs are “super-stressed and insulated.” They are  “five modes of creating ignorance about the things they don’t deal with.” We have to relax and let go of them and then we can become more aware of things that we could not otherwise know about.

Question: about the twist in people and how many see the world in the same way.

There are factors that make the ‘twist’ very similar in people of the same nation, tribe and family, “because there is a mutually conditioning process.” If we go into a pub, and then another, and then another, we will hear the same conversations, fed by the TV and other media. “So the twists get more and more similar.” “Their concept of freedom is to disagree with what the government is saying – by saying the opposite.” They are talking about the topics dictated by the government, i.e. they are still conditioned. An un-twisted being, a free being, is utterly unpredictable. He is not confined to one society, or country, or time. We have to overcome our conditioning and let go of our determination to establish ourselves at the gross, material level. We can only do this by re-discovering our infinite source and we do this by letting go of what we have previously identified with. “Letting go of the process is terribly hard, and yet it’s the only way.”

“Saturn means contraction, tension, holding in; and Jupiter means relaxation, a return to the state prior to the contraction. And in that return, all the forms that you could possibly ever want to know about, all conceivables, all past history, all future history, and all present actuality, are all within this infinite field. And they are yours if you can let go of the individual stress.” 

He draws a circle on the paper and says, “let us assert that this circle represents the largest, conceivable circle whatever, the macro cosmos.” Because this circle encloses, it provides the original unity. Outside the circle is the Abyss, Abba, the Father, the Godhead. Inside the circle is God the Son, the Logos. Inside he now puts a smaller circle to represent the whole of humanity. ‘In Him we live, move and have our being’. Then he puts a smaller circle inside to represent the earth and puts a cross inside this circle to represent the fixation of material forces. He draws a radial line from the centre to the edge. This is the line man must travel, either towards the perimeter, to spirit, or towards the material earth. Outside the larger circle is spirit, inside is soul, the solo power. Spirit then goes inside the macrocosmos and rotates, and each rotation is an individual soul. The spirit in all souls is identical, yet each soul is separate, which gives rise to a plurality of souls. These souls are the cause of our bodies. Bodies are simply rotations of power. The only difference between one person and another is the way they actually rotate. The Spirit in us is identical but in each body there is a different mode of actuality, a different mode of activating itself. “And it is the way that this spirit, or the will of the person, (we can equate will with the spirit,) activates itself that enables you to know that this person is not that person…It is the content of actuality that determines the difference between people.” The actuality of a dog and the actuality of a cat are different. Both wave their tails but for very different reasons. Spirit, power, is never static. It is always on the move, infinitely and eternally, and therefore it is “pure actuality.” But with finite human beings, many of their possibilities are never actualised. We could say of someone that he could do much more, if only he had the confidence. “These actual differences between people, between nations, are the important differences on earth because it is in actual fact that the quarrels between human groups break out.”

In the human there are three kinds of acting: the act of the physical body, the act of emotion, and the act of reasoning. The physical body was once tiny but has grown, by accretion, through the intake of food. “And it always accretes to a person in the peculiar form of that person.” Every person manages to retain their own shape, even though we may all eat the same foods. So they must have another body, a body of shape or form. The Saxon word ‘shape’ and the Greek word ‘idea’ both imply circumscription. If we can draw a line around something, that line has a character we call the shape or form of the object. “And there is a form body, a body of form, which packs the food that we eat into the form that we recognise.” The yogis call this the ‘subtle body’. We also have an emotional body, a body of feeling flux. Mediums use this body a lot. This body is free from ideas and free from the gross, material body. These three bodies are not always operating together in harmony. A person may be doing something correctly, thinking correctly in order to do it, but at the same time, hating doing it. This results in a division in the will of the person and, over time, will result in neurosis.

Power comes into a human being in a number of ways: Spirit enters via the spinal axis, but matter enters us from food and so the actual tendencies from food are causing us to move in a material way. If we are only determined from down below, from food, then we are not different from an animal; but a human is human, not because he eats, but because he receives something other than the energies from food. “He receives an energy that comes from this free spirit, and as it enters his body, it is turned around and becomes the soul.” “There is no difference whatever between all the beings in the universe other than their actual behaviour.” And this is of three kinds: physical, emotional and mental. We need food to sustain the physical body but we also need idea food, ‘food for thought’. The idea beings in our mind are like physical beings and need to be fed. And just as we throw out waste from physical food, so erroneous ideas need to be discarded. We take in the idea, analyse it, see what fits and reject the rest. So too with feelings. There are only two: liking and disliking. Feelings of liking we take in and disliking we reject. If we like a person we assimilate something of their character, we ‘eat’ it. Sometimes, it may be a bad character, as a ‘lovable rogue’. If we dislike a person it doesn’t matter if he is very good at something, we don’t wish to assimilate anything from him. 

We can always say, ‘Yes’ or ‘no’ to any properly formulated question. If we analyse a situation, we can find something in it we like – we say ‘yes’, and something we don’t like – we say ‘no’. We must not be indifferent. (He refers to Christ’s warning to the Laodiceans.) Indifference is simply failure to analyse a situation. It is the feeling-awareness in us that Christ is talking about. In feeling is the mediation between the thinking, the idea, and the act. His teaching contrasts with earlier ones which stressed only the importance of behaviour. We see this also in Buddhism and ‘right action’. 

There are seven centres, chakras, in the spine. In the body there is a diaphragm which separates  the digestive region from the parts above it. It is like a firmament between two worlds: “a world in which terrible, digestive processes go on, to abstract energy from food, and another world in which you feel…and above there is a world in which you think.” If we carry our thoughts habitually down and forwards then the energy flows down and forwards. Most people carry their thoughts below the diaphragm, towards the appetites of food and sex. This is the ‘Fallen man’. “The cause of that fall is simply the contact with sources of stimulation, at the material body level. If we can drag that consciousness up again, we are raising the fallen man.” ‘Adam’ is the Hebrew for man so if we think of Adam “as humanity in general then the ‘fall of humanity’ is the lowering of consciousness by the stimulation of the lower parts of the body, the appetite centres, and the lower emotional centres.” These are the ones that seek pleasure/pains in the physical world. The higher ones are those that respond to truths – yes, to every truth, and no to every falsity. The higher one is universal compassion. We can divide the mind into higher and lower also. The lower part is stimulated from the five senses. This is ‘a posteriori’ – thinking after experience. The higher activity is ‘a priori’ – from primary definitions. It is concerned with universal truths which are experienced inside. 

It is our feeling-awareness that we must develop. If we ignore the ideas and behaviour of another person we can gain information that is more important. We can discover what they really like and dislike. If, in conversation, someone does not really mean what they are saying, we can feel this. “When you are determined to get your feeling right, it causes you to go into the thinking department in order to analyse the situation and see to what you will say ‘yes’ and to what you will say ‘no’. And this is the meaning of the salvation of the whole of creation by humanity. It is for human beings to reach the ideal and then turn back and save the rest of creation.”

He is asked a question about the origins of language to which he replies: “human beings did not make language.” All of the sounds humans can make pre-date all language.

He is asked about his psycho-graphic drawings, especially the one of Lao Tse, and gives the cryptic answer: “It is largely in communication with him that the true, definitional functions have been discussed.” He links this to the idea of time and eternity and explains the ‘evil’ appearance of their faces as indicating their prodigality before enlightenment.

“Every being that has ever existed always exists. The appearance in the time-process, the birth of that person through an egg and its development, is simply a process of actualisation in the gross, material world of an eternal actuality, which is the essence of that person. This is the meaning: ‘Become what thou art.’ Every person is eternal. If we can realise this it isn’t a question of a being coming to exist and then ceasing to exist, but an eternal being, appearing in the material world and disappearing from the material world, going back into eternality.  And in eternality there is no time-process whatever. Time is a product of rotation and of the passing of energies over each other, so that we are not going into the past, we are going into the eternal present. And that what we call serial time is merely the expression, in impulses, of eternal actuality.”   

However, as far as the technique is concerned for doing this, it is very simple. We simply have to stop serial thinking. “Chop it. If it’s serial, stop it. And don’t try to think why you should stop it, a psychological question. And don’t try to think how you can stop it, a mechanical question. Just stop it!” Serial thought is the enemy of the simultaneous mode.

In the three-part man, the belly is the urge centre which supplies us with energy. In the lower third of the belly is the sexual urge, in the middle part, the navel region, is the urge to belong, to family, tribe, nation etc. In the upper part is the food urge, in the stomach centre. These three centres  are neither rational nor feeling in their operations, but simply urges. At this level we do something regardless of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, or whether it is profitable or not. Urges have no reason. “It does what it does because it’s always done it, eternally and in the temporal process.”

“There is nothing in the instinctive urge department that is not the product of an accumulation of uncontrolled urges from the very foundation of the universe and working biologically through the whole evolutionary scale.” 

This urge department is full of ancestral directions. Whatever instincts we have in us come from here and are mostly ancient, having little relevance in a modern society. This is the source of Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ but is not the zone of field consciousness. Field-awareness cannot be gained in the time-process. “It can only be gained by getting out of the time-process,” because temporality is seriality. When we super-stress an idea we follow it with another idea, another super-stress. This hides from us everything which is not super-stressed. We know that the mind is full of inertias when we think serially in this way. If we say, ‘A B C’ then the mind tends to follow with ‘D E F’, because this is the way we learned the alphabet. If we want to skip about the alphabet, or to recite it backwards, we have to break this inertia. This shows that our mental process is conditioned by the order in which data are presented to us. This conditioning is equivalent to mental slavery. He suggests this is seen very clearly in the worlds of art and music. The greatest painters and musicians have produced works quite unlike what has gone before. “And then, after them, everybody else is conditioned.” He gives the example of Michelangelo producing works that conditioned those coming after him. Similarly, Beethoven in music. To think non-serially we must overcome the conditioning  we have learned throughout our lives, and beyond. We have all been indoctrinated with ways of thinking since we were born and we have also been conditioned protoplasmically, from our parents and earlier ancestors. This is not simply through the nucleus of the egg from which we came but from the surrounding protoplasm. The nucleus contains genetic information about eye colour, nose shape etc., but around it is also the protoplasm of the parents, grandparents, and so on. The engram pattern of each generation is passed on in this way. “We are born in the sin of Adam.” This ‘Sin of Adam’ is transmitted, not through the nucleus of the egg, but through the protoplasm surrounding it. The ‘Truth of Adam’ is in the nucleus, the nuclear intelligence that we all have at centre. If that intelligence were not interfered with then it would always produce the best possible forms from generation to generation, “a being at optimal level, functioning properly.” In the human, this is interfered with from our experiences in the world. So form can be transmitted both within the nucleus of the egg and in the protoplasm around the egg. “The mode in the nucleus is what makes humans human: there is no difference between Mozart and Irving Berlin, but there’s a tremendous difference in the protoplasmic surrounding substance.”

Marxists would deny the meaning of nuclear inheritance whereas Royalists would deny that the protoplasmic mode of inheritance could override ‘the blood’. Both are essential, but most of the world’s problems are not from the nucleus. The nucleus represents the eternal form of the being and the surrounding protoplasm represents the temporal, acquired pattern. “Eternity in the nucleus and time in the surrounding protoplasm.” “You are eternally a particular form of being. And this being has been thrown into the time-process by super-stressing.” Once in the time-process, we become subject to al kinds of inertias, family, tribal, social, etc. and we then proceed mechanically through the situations life presents to us, “each one determined by the preceding ones.” Even our mode of dying is determined in this way. To break these inertias we must become field-aware.

Question: This unstressing of the parts is really a kind of intuition?

E.H. “Yes.” “Intuition is really an in-break of awareness into eternality.”

Question: (indistinct) about feeling awareness and emotional flux.

Field-Awareness is not emotion, it is simply feeling of the field. “Field-awareness is the cause of, in the highest sense, all exquisite spiritual sensations.” If we increase our awareness, without super-stressing any element, we can become aware of another level of sensation. “You can get the most exquisite delight with the least energy expenditure…with Aleph pressure there is absolute bliss.” Increased field awareness is the only way that great men become great.

Question: Is the nuclear the same as the Immanent centre?

No. The nucleus is the individuated form of that centre. “The nucleus is responsible for the individual form but is not itself essential because it is form…All form is effect. The cause is in the will. The will works through the infinite form but is not the infinite form…The  nucleus is in the field. It is this field that is the cause, the nucleus is only a modality of the field…The man is in the field. The man in the field works through the nucleus by super-stressing into the time-process…The Absolute man within the field is called ‘Adam Kadmon’ in the Qabbalah.” 

In the Bible we are told that man is made ‘in the image of God’. Many animals emerge from the egg already adapted to their environment. They cannot evolve because they have specialised. Uniquely, man is entirely dependant on others for survival. “The purpose of this is to stop man setting prematurely in a form…His nuclear form is the same as his parents but he is holding back his development so that he can acquire protoplasmic records of the culture of the people he is born to. In so doing he can embody millions of generations formal experience…The longer you can delay growing up the better…because we’ve got, of serial time, quite a lot, but in eternity a greater amount still to decide what is our ultimate form. And we don’t want to get a form fixed in us that is not our optimal, ultimate form… Perfection cannot be attained…What we are looking for as human beings is infinite adaptability to all conceivable environments…We must be content to go on growing and growing in freedom, in awareness, in breaking serial thought, and becoming more and more aware of the simultaneous form of eternity…To grow in the direction of eternity is the proper growth for a human being…What we want is not to be adapted to any particular environment, merely like a fish or a bird. We don’t want that. What we want is infinite adaptability for all possible worlds, at all possible times. And we can only do this by refusing premature setting of our form in the temporal process.”

He then explores mental and physical development, starting with the egg. Every egg has a nucleus with forces working through it to develop it. Initially, the egg is protopathic: when a stimulus comes it causes a response. If several stimuli arrive together then confusion will result since the egg has not yet any means of analysing them. Before specific organs are set up inside the body, this protopathic level of response can only be unanalysed and confused. As the egg begins to divide and set up partitions within itself, then the possibility of analysing the stimuli is developed. The greater the number of divisions that occur in the developing embryo, the greater the degree of freedom there is from an automatic response to a stimulus. Eventually, a stimulus will be confined to a very small part of the organism, leaving the rest relatively free. As freedom grows, so does the mental level. Every cell that develops, “is a form and an emotional attitude.” i.e. every stimulus that it has received, “is charged with liking and disliking.” If this were the only process then every cell would be isolated from every other but then they could not coordinate their activities and so there has to be a means of coordinating them, and this is achieved by the growth of the nervous system and brain. If one cell is subjected to a painful stimulus then this can be communicated to all parts of the organism resulting in defensive and protective action to confine the pain as locally as possible.

Question: Can we, in fact, put information into a child, other than that which its physical level allows it to do?

We all come from an egg and have a protopathic background. This is our “primary feeling background,” and without it we could never learn to integrate the ideas and patterns which stimulate the various emotions in us. However, if this was all we had we would never expect the mental level of a child to be ahead of its physical capacity, because the physical body would have no complexities. The consciousness of such a child would remain unanalysed and confused and its physical and mental levels would be the same. But clearly, they are not. We know that a child’s mental level grows much faster than its physical one. This is because the brain is complex, grows faster than the rest of the body, and stimuli from the five senses reach different cells. These are coordinated and can respond to give the appearance of understanding, “but unless that information goes down into the body and is translated into physical action, the other levels of the body will not be in correspondence with the mental level.” So a child can learn to recite, parrot-fashion, the numbers one to ten without understanding their significance. However, if it uses its fingers to do this then it will understand. It is possible to put information into a child that it does not understand which can cause it to have a completely erroneous view of the world and a concept of itself which is completely false. e.g. telling a child with no legs that it is a champion runner may produce a mechanical response which recites this, even though it is manifestly untrue. No matter how good a concept might be, if it cannot result in a physical performance from the child it, “is so much poison.” It will produce a strain between the parts of the organism that deal with physical action and those that deal with intellection. “So if we try to educate a child beyond the level at which its body can respond to the ideas, we are really sowing the seeds of future trouble.” He suggests that this is a cause of the “great increase in schizophrenia and similar disorders today.”

We know that our prime drive comes from the food we eat and this will express itself in the child in physical activity. If the child experiences pleasure in activity, it will continue that activity, but if the activity is unsuccessful or painful, then the energy will go up into the head and produce thinking. “Now only that thought which grows out of individual failure in a physical situation is really valuable for that being.” In the earliest stages of life a child is protopathic, but gradually, through the pleasures and pains of experience, it begins to coordinate its three parts. 

A human being has a highly complex brain to coordinate the information from the five senses. In addition, he has forces coming into him which are not from the five senses. These are translating forces which may not become part of his being unless he becomes aware of them and causes them to rotate inside himself. These forces can be seen as “objectless motions” and the cause of anxiety. To conquer this we have to make an object so that the translating force turns round and objectifies itself. As we grow we learn to control anxiety in this way and in the process we become more and more complex and more integrated. However, the objects made in this way are also limitations on our freedom. The greatest anxiety for most people is that of non-being, of ceasing to be. Most people are terrified of this and cling to whatever objects they have made to rescue themselves. This is because of a mis-understanding of non-being, they think of it as ‘annihilation’. “When we go into infinity we have only gone back into that from which we started.” We all have to face the fact that we can look inside ourselves and find nothing – because we are already mostly space inside every atom of our being. Inside every cell there is anxiety and it is driving us about until we become conscious of it and accept it as “an eternal attribute of absolute power.” We don’t have to try to get rid of it but simply accept that it is a primary vibration which cannot be eliminated. It is a background to the very nature of being. When we do this we are choosing to identify, not with objective, external stimulation, but with the primary energy which is our source.We can do this in one of two ways: we can identify with infinity outside of ourselves, the Oriental way, or with the Immanent Spirit inside us, the way that Christ taught, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within’. Whilst choosing which of the three sources of energy we identify with does not mean we have to lose awareness of the other two. Our consciousness can be three-fold: transcendent, immanent, and of the objective, empirical world, simultaneously. “Now in this way we can avoid the anxiety and the fear of non-being and being simultaneously.” If we identify with the physical body primarily then we will remain in fear of ceasing to be, but if we choose Immanent Spirit we have nothing to fear. We can say, “I exist, even if this physical perimeter is broken down,” because we know that this Immanent centre is eternal and immortal. “The doctrine of the immortality of the soul arises from identification with this zone of Immanent Spirit.” If we identify with the Absolute Infinite, the Oriental way, then we do not expect immortality in any individual sense. “You can say that you are substantially eternal, but then not as an individual.” “So if you identify with the Infinite you lose your individuality but in so doing you escape the objective stress of finite existence.” 

He then shows how this understanding can be applied in educating children. We can explain the need for external restraints on the child’s behaviour – such as the walls around a playground, by relating it to the child’s experience of hurting itself and seeing blood. The skin is a retaining enclosure, just like the playground walls, and is there for the same reason – the protection of the child. “In this way, the internal form of the child will be the same as the form of the environment…the organism remains in correspondence with reality.”

“The fact that civilised people have largely become schizophrenic is caused by this fact, their mental level is far beyond their physical level…there is no correspondence between the records in the brain and their physical capacity, and the physical universe outside.” “They can only get into serious trouble.”   

There are two kinds of motion: rotation and translation; the ‘domed’ and the ‘free’. “Both together are ‘freedom’. If you have freedom you have so much free energy and so much domed energy.” The domed energy is your mass, inertia body. “A man of freedom is a man freely bound.” “It is his decision to bind himself for a time before he goes out again in another translation.” Every finite will observe his boundary from the inside and see it as a translating force because he cannot see the entire circumference. An observer at a distance will see him as bound, within a rotation band. “Now this solves the problem of the translation of force into matter. It solves the problem of how does force become matter and how does matter become force, by saying they do not.” If we look at the Andromeda Nebula in the sky, it looks like a system because we can see its edges. If we were inside it we would see it as a complex mode of translating forces. In the same way, if we want to understand a problem, sometimes we may have to stand outside of it to see it as a whole. When we are caught up in it we ‘cannot see the wood for the trees’.

“Anxiety is the primary tremor of the Absolute.” Anxiety is something we cannot get rid of, we have to accept it. Anxiety is objectless. People in a pathological state of anxiety try to find a cause for it. To blame something is to objectify. However, fear has an object. Fear defines its cause as an object, anxiety does not. To find an object to fear is the correct way to deal with anxiety. ‘Fear’ and ‘pir’ are the same word. “This pi-rational function, reason itself, is a function of fear.” The object can be attacked by reason. It can be attacked by energy, and is a focus for consciousness. As it penetrates into the meaning of the object, it assimilates the object into itself. Now the object has become ‘food for thought’. Once we know that we can make and break objects eternally, instead of being dependent on the object, we become dependent on ourselves, on our will.  “This essential will can make and break objects eternally…so it is the will on which you stand.” 

In the three-part man we place the ‘field’ in the heart region, and this field splits into three functions: field-awareness is retained in the heart region, the volition, which moves the field, is placed in the belly, and the other one rises into the head and becomes the idea. The idea is “simply the objectified will,” but the will centre itself, “is the energy that refuses to objectify itself.” It is “free energy left over for pushing about the objects that it is going to make.” “Once it understands this three-fold process in itself and sees it as a field behaviour, knowing that the field is infinite, the individual can identify himself with the Absolute, and then all motions are felt coming through the centre of the field of this being, and they are taken in, assimilated and pushed to the perimeter, and the being expands in authority and so on.”

Question: Is the field energy the same…that is used by the thinking process and the urgeful one?

The energy in each centre is the same. However, it does different things in different places and it does this by setting up resistances (barriers). The more resistances, the shorter the wavelength and the higher the frequency of vibration, so inside the head, where there are lots of resistances, the frequencies will be higher than in the belly. Yet it is the same energy source.

Question: Are those barriers under our control at all?

“That is a matter of individual development.” In human history there have been many attempts to control people by setting up a concept that a particular kind of organisation has power over them. We have seen this in religion, in political ideas, etc. “In the Fascist statement,” the collective “is an entity in its own right, with authority and power to force the individual to obey.” Collective individual behaviour can produce an apparent centre but this “has no authority over the individuals in it other than the authority vested in it by those individuals.” “So there’s no authority in a pope, or an archbishop, or a political dictator other than that vested in him by the belief of the individuals within that society of which he is a part.” “No dictator of a religious, philosophical, or a scientific order has any power or authority in himself over the others, other than that which he can wield by duping them to come off centre themselves.” If we did not have a centre we could not initiate and therefore we could not set up a representative. But if we do set up such a man e.g. Churchill during the war, “his power is no more than the power we will him to have because each one of us wants to win.” As soon as the threat was over he was dumped. Every individual is equal in eternity. But in the time-process, each individual “will get itself an essential character in the impact of the contingent relations.” Any being who has gained the essential, reflexive power can oppose any forms that are trying to dominate it, simply because it has the power to do so.  This power grows as there is awareness of the infinite supply of energy. We can defeat such attempts by analysis. They (the hidden persuaders) present us with an object, “we analyse it and turn it into food.” 

He explores the difference between ‘egoism’ and ‘egotism’. “It is absolutely justified for every being to strive to be itself.” This often results in a contingent stimulus. In striving to be oneself it is possible to crush another being who tries to stop our development. This is quite easy to do “by superior force, either physical force, emotional blackmail or superior logic. But it isn’t nice and it is fundamentally stupid for this reason…when a being is trying to develop, it cannot understand itself unless it can find a resistance.” “Remember, we cannot develop except in the presence of other beings, and these beings are an absolute necessity of our next stage. If we allow this, then all enmity disappears.” Christ says, “love your enemies.” This is because, “they are the means, and the only means, whereby you can become what you are. There is no other way.” 

“Once you understand that other people…opposing you, are feeding you…every time they judge you…they are doing you a favour. They are working for you.” “And if you know that fact, and you realise that you are not paying them to criticise you, they are doing it for free, so then you should be very, very grateful to them, and this gratitude going out, embraces them and says, “Don’t go away my dear critics, you are feeding my life.” Now as soon as you can do this in internal feeling, the whole quality of the relation changes. The enemy doesn’t know what to do with you. You are not taking it rightly. You are not sufficiently disturbed, you are not perturbed enough. Why aren’t you? There’s something wrong. Now this does a favour to the enemy. It makes the enemy reconsider the nature of the stimulus he sent out. And, after all, we don’t want the same stimulus sending out all the time because that wouldn’t develop us. We want a new one, and we can provoke a new one by taking the one that we have got in the appropriate manner.” 

Exercise: “Open your fingers and feel very carefully and you will feel vortical movement of air between your fingers. Your fingers are warm. They are acting on the air and the air is spinning between them. You can feel it. And that’s increasing your sensitivity…If you can increase your field-awareness you can actually detect that somebody is annoyed with you before they know it.” You can either move towards increased feeling, and become a sage, or towards greater contraction and become a “hammer man.” “If you want to define, i.e. turn a feeling into an idea, then find the opposite of it.” eg. to define ‘love’, we must go to its opposite ‘hate’. We have to “contra-act”, by this we become more aware. The intellect always works with pairs of ideas. e.g.. if we look at a circle and write ‘love’ on one side, the mind jumps to the other side and writes ‘hate’. This shows an essential dichotomy in the intellect: it always cuts itself into two. By building up our percepts into concepts, and then into super-concepts, and then a master-concept, “which is an idea that contains all.” This is the Cross in the Circle. This contains, “all the ideas that we can possibly discuss in this, or any other universe, because it contains the idea of limitation, circumscription, of activity and passivity, and their relations.” This is a ‘super-glyph’. This is “the orb that the queen holds.” We can split this glyph along the horizontal and vertical, and see in it two forces: Saturn, the force that causes creation, and Jupiter, the force that liberates from creation. Saturn is the creative force and equated with the devil, which, of course, is also God. To ‘create’ means ‘to lock up in order to eat’. “Most people are food, unconscious, for other beings…There’s a hierarchy of beings, and some people are conscious food, and don’t mind being eaten.” Christ said this at the last supper. He was saying, “when you move, you vibrate my tissue – and this is feeding me.”  Whatever you have faith in is food, regardless of what it is. “Food is simply what you respond to, what you assimilate.” What you assimilate depends on your will to ask for it. “Ask and ye shall receive.”

Saturn is the macrocosmic sphere. ‘Sat’ means ‘being’, and the ‘urn’ of being is the universe. Within Cosmos there are the opposite, centripetal forces of Saturn, and the centrifugal forces of Jupiter. Saturn is bondage and Jupiter is freedom. Saturn is the generator of time. Time is the product of beings rotating and measuring these rotations against reference points. The earth is going round its axis, it is orbiting the sun, the sun is travelling round another centre. Time is simply the measuring of these rotations against each other. So there is clock time, terrestrial time, solar time, sidereal time. Time is inside the atom, “because even an electron has spin on it.” Time is as big as any rotation we can find and as small. The balance between expansion and contraction produces, in humans, ‘temperament’. This depends on our evolution. The force pressing onto the centre and the force pressing away from the centre, produce a rotation. This is Mercury, the Messiah. One who can balance the limiting force and the salvation force is the Son of God. He has two keys: one of binding and one of loosing, and he gives these keys to those who study the meaning of Spirit, soul, body. Mercury also symbolises quickness, the mercurial nature. Christ often spoke of the ‘quick’ and the ‘dead’.

In the symbol of Mercury, the point where spirit and matter meet is the egoic-consciousness of the human being. The highest point of the contracted being is the Self. Above it are the horns, pointing to Infinity, and below, the cross, which belongs to matter. The material world begins as pure substance, analysed into matter. The Absolute acts upon it to produce a primary vibration. The intersection points of the overlapping of these vibrations become primary entities – “finer than any yet known to physicists.” These add up to the gross, material elements we find in the atomic scale. These add up to molecules, then compounds, then organic beings, and ultimately humans. “but it’s all being conducted in general, without regard for any single individual except insofar as he is a step nearer reflexive, self-consciousness.” That means, that if only two people on earth are moving towards ‘resec’ awareness of their origins, the Absolute “will wipe out the whole lot if necessary, to preserve that two, because it needs those centres of reciprocal relation.”

The tremendous value of the feeling life is that it can resolve the relation between the bound and the Infinite. The ‘fallen man’, the ‘belly man’, being rooted in matter, has a general action on him; “there is no care for him as an individual.” He is a doorway to a seed which might become ‘resec’ in a future generation. The man who has been hit hard enough will become more aware. He will become aware of principles that are “eternally in spirit.” To do this, a man must “tell himself, honestly, whether he likes or dislikes a given stimulus.” He must say, “yes” or “no”. “Now the rule is, to every properly-formulated question, the answer is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So if you can’t get the answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, you haven’t formulated your question properly. In order to do it you must break the situation down quite a lot.”

Even the most complicated feelings can be analysed into liking and disliking, plus an idea situation.

“Break down the situation, look at it, analyse the functional relationships between the entities in it, and you can then cut it down into liking and disliking…In infinity there is no difference whatever between any of us…the same infinity precipitates the finite…and it’s trying to lift them up to the level where they are aware of it. But because the supreme value to the Infinite is beings that are aware of it, by its nature cannot have regard for them as individuals if they are struggling away from that process…it does not punish them…they punish themselves by running away from it.”

Every sperm a man produces can make a child, and no two can be the same. Out of all these, most will not be going back to the Absolute. “And yet the supreme value to the Infinite is to gain some reciprocal centres that become aware of it.” A line of such beings is the line of the Messiah. There is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and eventually Jesus, the perfected ‘resec’ being, “the type that we have to become…Yet all the beings on earth are differentiated, which means that literally millions of people are not going along that line.” The Messiah line is the line of non-dual consciousness. Next to it are the kings of the world, who go towards monism. There is a spiritual monism which gives rise to a church with a pope on top, and a material monism which gives rise to Marxism, a hierarchy of material powers. Both are hierarchical and power-pursuers. 

“At the moment, the essential thing is to realise that either you are on that line or not, biologically… That is, there is a seed tendency in you, or not, to want to deal with every being absolutely, instead of relatively.” i.e.There is no difference whatever between beings. All the bodies we see are precipitates within cosmos and all must be treated in exactly the same way. “There can be no taking advantage of anybody whatever if you are on that line.” The monistic view, whether spiritual or material, sees that the mass of people cannot, without direction, organise themselves to make a better world and so the few with the right qualities must organise them and watch over them. These few believe in spirit because they know they have something the masses haven’t got, but they fail to recognise that the masses are also spiritual beings, “but veiled by inertia.” 

All of us are centres of absoluteness “and all our differences are the products of stimulations which have given rise in us to sub-ents.” We have a sub-ent that’s going to God, a super sub-ent, and lots of others…the super sub-ent inside knows that we are all precipitates of the one being. This is a super concept that is non-dual, “the highest metaphysics ever produced.”  All of us “are simply little vibrations in the Absolute, and to pretend that one set of vibrations is more valuable than the others is confusion.” The dissolution of the physical body does not destroy one tiniest bit of the motion vibrating in the Absolute. There are no other selves, there are only other bodies in the Self.  “We have to learn to recognise every sub-ent we have got, and we can only do so with our test one ( the super one). “This is the one we want…When we find that we are getting egotistic power impulses, we know that we are not very off the non-dual concept…Because we are beginning to affirm the monistic analysis – a hierarchy within ourselves…And we know then that all that’s left to do is to rub out that boundary and affirm exactly the same for every other being, who is just as perfect as ourselves.”

Good, Better, Best. ‘Good’ belongs to the gullet, to the belly. ‘Better’ is the good idea in the head. ‘Best’ is simply to be in feeling, sensitive to the whole process. “So we come back to this necessity for feeling, and that feeling contractions create ideas; that an expanded idea will give rise to a feeling; that if you analyse very carefully all the ideas you’ve got – and all the complex feelings, you will come down to very, very simple forms of liking and disliking.” We can view the physical body as three-in-one: a food body, in the belly; a feeling body of liking/disliking, in the chest; a body of ideas, in the head. We can view these as three ‘brains’, or ‘ruling centres’. The feeling body in the chest is also the ‘causal’ body, because we do not think unless we feel like thinking, and we do not eat unless we feel like eating. “So it is in this feeling process that the cause of our action arises.”

To link the food and idea bodies we must have feeling. The gross body is entirely urgeful. The sexual energy is entirely positive: it always says, “yes,” unless it is asleep. It never says “no.” Opposite is the pure negative of the head. The head is full of ideas created by the urge going into situations which have resulted in negative results. In the middle is the yes/no of the feeling. “But these differences were potential in the Field, so the Field is the causal one which has, by feeling awareness, mobilised itself as urge. Will is mobilised feeling. So the Field, which is balanced in a certain way, disturbs its balance in order to create. That produces this urge. The urge rushes in to experience. The reaction of the environment produces thought. So there is the cause.” The lower part of the urge is unconscious but the upper part is becoming aware of itself in the solar plexus. Also, the upper feeling is concerned with the lower idea. This is in the larynx. This gives five ‘brains’, five ruling centres. However, each of these intermediate ‘brains’ has a higher and lower function, making 7 ‘brains’. These are the 7 ‘chakras’ of Yoga. “To climb from one to the other you have to become aware.” The top of your head (Sahasrara) is where “your individuated idea becomes related to the Absolute.’ The lowest urge level is receiving universal, substantial impulses. At the moment of ejaculation, a man may feel he is being taken advantage of – and he is! The pain is his, but the pleasure “is the universal substance getting its own way.” All lower urges should be resisted, if only by five minutes, to feel what we are up against. Then try to feel what an idea is in terms of liking/dislking. If it is a complex idea, break it down.  “You may find 15 ‘yesses’ and 25 ‘noes’,” if we break it down to its fundamentals. When we do this we create that centre in the larynx. When we have these two centres working, then we can look again at the belly centre and see it for what it is – a universal energy pushing to reproduce. We cannot stop it so we should not try. But when we go the larynx centre and examine the idea then the urge becomes more under control. (The energy from below, goes up, changes frequency, and becomes thought.) This is the process: feel the urge, then the idea, then back to the sexual urge and say, “it is so,” “It is not mine.” and see that it is working through us. “Do not try to control it.” Then we go back up to the idea and try to see all individuals “as particularisations of the absolute idea.” Gradually, the energy will stop going into the substance and build up a spiritual awareness. Man is jammed between the universal urge and the absolute idea to force him into ‘resec’. We should keep our awareness in the higher part of the brain, this forms an awareness, even over the head. An aura of heat will be generated which others can feel, and some can see. We should always try to refine our feelings and define them; find their edges. “When you can verbalise what you feel, that’s the divine androgyne…And then you are entitled to wear the badge of Mercury on your lapel.”

All beings are held together in a contingent relation as a function of the Field. They are held in relation, “in order that they can be mutually stimulated and thereby informed.” As we become more informed about the nature of our own being, the need for a contingent relation decreases. If we accept this then we can penetrate to our centre and “feel the Field” between ourselves and others. If we feel very carefully, then we can overcome the feeling of strain by sensing what others are requiring from us. “We can actually go into relation with people who are, in a real sense, far below our integration level, and we can go into relation with them so that they will never suspect the difference. We can work at their level while they cannot work at our level and this requires an increase of sensitivity.” When we can do this then our consciousness is identified with the Field and we can feel what is needed to help others towards their own self-development. “We must necessarily become alone as we become progressively moving towards being all-one, that is, towards integration.” Because others are not doing this, initially there will be a feeling of strain, of separation from others, but this will cease as we become more aware of the Field between us. “And we can say that those feelings will eventually go.”

Question: Is there any way in which one can help oneself to remember past events and happenings?

There are two ways: One is ‘Pelmanism’, the association of ideas. The more efficient one is by increasing Field-Consciousness. The first is based on ‘similars’. Ideas which are similar resonate in the mind, so if we wish to remember something we can associate it with a similar thing which is easier to remember. The better way is to look for them inside the Sophic Sphere. This “is a world of forces travelling in a cyclic manner, and thus, in their intersections, producing all the forms that are possible in the universe.” All motions inside the Sophic Sphere are eternal and make a “perfect pattern” for every being. We do not make this pattern. It exists, “and we are stopping it from manifesting through the crash of the contingent relation of the finite, physical bodies.” This way of remembering past events is “to let go of the individual self and to dare to go out from the physical centre of reference and feel the processes going on inside.” Things will come into the mind that we have not thought about for a long time; but also things we never knew! We can remember things from other bodies because the Sophic Sphere contains all forms, eternally, of all beings, past, present and future. “So if you become sufficiently sensitive you can pick up the whole sphere by Field-consciousness. Christ said, ‘If I judge, my judgement is not right, but if I judge from the Father, then my judgement is right’. “Because it contains the whole, balanced process.” This method of remembering, by identification with the Sophic Sphere, is “the more efficient one.”

Question: In answer to a recent question, part of the reply given was an instruction to open oneself  to the reality of the situation. What is meant by this and how can it be achieved?

When a man identifies as a separate, individual being then the ‘reality of the situation’ for him is actually, “only one tiny little bit of it.” The whole situation is the whole Sophic Sphere, “so we have to open ourselves to the whole situation instead of being pinned on a particular.” Every ego-centred being believes that reality is what it perceives through its five senses but if it extends its awareness and brings into its field of consciousness more and more, then it can release itself from the particulars that it thought were real. To open ourselves to the ‘reality of the situation’ is to extend our consciousness to the whole Sophic Sphere of being. “And when we do so it always gives us greater control of the situation because now we have become aware of other factors which influence it.” When we feel we extend our awareness, but when we think we contract it. Since the second war there has been much greater global awareness because people feel more insecure, especially after the Hiroshima bomb.

Question: (referring to last week’s talk on the nature of fear…How did the Absolute recognise its aloneness as, prior to creation, there was no polarity?

“The Absolute did not recognise at all, but it felt immediately, without mediation, its own tremulations. But we do not want to equate our interpretation of fear with the experience of the Absolute of the same feeling.” Our experience of fear comes from contingent relation, but “the fear of the Absolute is considerably finer.” It is not what we understand by fear but one that allows us to anticipate troubles before they arrive in the time-process. Animals have it to a much greater extent than we do. (He gives the example of animals fleeing before a volcanic eruption in South America which killed thousands of people.) Humans, being ego-centred, are far less sensitive than animals.

He then considers the importance of sound and of music.  “It is a physical fact, and statistically verified, that if we take a lot of blind men who have very good ears, and a lot of deaf men with good eyes, we will find a marked psychological difference between them.” Blind men are understanding  and have compassion for others, but those who are deaf are “shot through” with suspicion at the motives of other people.  A blind man can hear all kinds of sounds coming from various places and distances. A deaf man must wait until something comes into his field of vision to be aware of it. So the amount of fear in a deaf man with good vision is greater than that of a blind man. This is why music has such power. The visual arts can give us only limited information about the world. The interpretation of a flat picture can only be superficial. If our only sense was sight we could understand very little of the universe. Sound, however, is not superficial but is a depth experience. A play on the radio has more depth than one on TV. Babies respond to sound, even in the womb, whereas they have to learn to coordinate sight with touch. Ultrasound can destroy life instantly. Ultra-light, whether ultra-violet or infra-red, takes longer. “Along the evolution of ultra-sound we are getting nearer and nearer to the very principle of unity in the universe as a formative force…Now this makes sound tremendously important for our evolution…Music does a very peculiar thing to us that visual imagery and pictures cannot do.” When we hear a sound, we hear it immediately on our perimeter, but we also experience it within ourselves, diminished in volume. So it is a three-dimensional experience which cannot occur with light waves falling on the retina. Sound operates directly on the feeling, while sight operates on the intellect. “Sound, then, has the power to put us into contact with the Absolute Field. The power of music to evoke situations is greater than that of sight.” The sense of smell can also do this. Smells we experienced as children can take us back decades to the event. But, as smell depends on particles going into the nose, it is still particular, in parts, “deeper than sight but not so deep as sound.” Touch depends entirely on the contact of surfaces. Touch can tell us very little except the resistance and texture of an object, its humidity, temperature, and so on. But it cannot give us any depth. “It is only sound that can give us the depth consciousness in our own being. This is the reason for chanting, especially the sound of “OM”. This is the fundamental idea behind all prayer and incantation.

Khen asks: This would suggest that listening to something is preferable to reading it. Listening to a lecture of this nature is far superior to reading it. “Far superior, because you know that the printed word is only second-hand spoken word and therefore you have still got to translate the printed word back into sound in your own head. And, in any case, there is something in the tone, tone of delivery of things, that is unrepresentable on the printed page.”

He then applies this to the second question about the Fall of Adam. All life begins as an ovum and grows by cell division. A mono-cell has very little external stimuli to give it experiences – it may have none at all. However, when cell division occurs there are now two identical cells and they can have a contingent relation. Also, they can have different experiences after separating. If now they come together again and fuse, then they contain more varied experience than they could have gained separately. This process goes on and the cells divide again on another axis and so mix up their experiences. This process can result in a great increase in the formal content of each cell. In a sperm cell this process is accelerated by cutting down the mass inertia of the being. So when the original mono-cell has divided then a change takes place in half of it. One half remains round but the other half contracts itself and grows a tail, which is then an impeller, and becomes a sperm. The large, round one, is a thousand times bigger than this. This egg has been inside the girl since before her birth but the sperm is being made continuously inside the boy and is informed by his daily experience. “Consequently, we can say, in its abstract form, that the fundamental difference between a man and a woman is the same as that between a sperm and an ovum…and the whole of the psychology of the two is conditioned by this.”… “The matriarchal world is concerned with establishing substance on earth, whereas the patriarchal world is concerned with positing form into substance.” At the level of the earth, the matriarchal function tends to dominate. It wants to tie form to substance. All mass inertias, all traditions, the world of matter, plants, animals and man, all come from this. All values to do with security and comfort mechanisms, derive from the matriarchal side. “It is your mother that wants to make you comfortable, not your father. Your father would like you to become educated and formally brilliant. Your mother is quite satisfied if you are a congenital idiot, as long as you stay at home.” There always has to be a tension between man and woman because both derive from Absolute Sentient Power. The egg and sperm are simply modal energies of spirit. “It drives the sperm into the egg in order to make a new earth. And it drives the sperms away in order to make a new heaven.” When a force enters a being it necessarily introduces form into it at the same time. “Therefore every force introduced into a being will produce formal behaviour within that being.” The egg in the woman is pure substance, it has no form within it. It has no content of consciousness. “Consciousness is there, but what it is aware of is nothing.” Every girl has a father and a grandfather and whatever form is in her has come this way. Her mother’s father also has contributed to whatever form she has in her. But there is no form within her from her mother. “The fact is, when you meet a developed egg, that is a girl, you are meeting something that has already been formed by a long line of male ancestors, and kept formless by a long line of female ancestors.” This is the ‘Tacit Conspiracy’. The sperm becomes a boy and the egg becomes a girl. The sperm, being full of form, thinks it is very clever. And the girl, being devoid of form, is a pure, receptive consciousness. She must think that he is the same because she does not know he has form. And he must think that she has form, although she hasn’t. “Then he must go and knock on her perimeter and there will arise in her form, and she will become conscious of form during the period of stimulation.” A woman is a mirror: when a force hits the surface it bounces back and the angle of incidence and reflection are the same. “That means, if you confront a girl and point a stimulus at her she will fire the reply back to you and the reply is simply your question inverted, this by law.” 

Every human being is a three-part being. The belly is substantial and therefore female. The head is the formative force and therefore male. A man can send rational statements to the belly and the belly can give replies but they do not talk on the same level. “The only way to resolve this is to become conscious of the zone of interplay between the two.” The belly department is a woman and every man has got one, and the brain department is a man and every woman has got one. The difference is in the amount of stress on each. In the man the sexual urge is constantly rising up and the formative power is constantly opposing this and the resolution is in the chest department of feeling. The sexual urge is singular in intent and cannot be converted by rational thinking. However, in between belly and head there is a contested zone. If we feel inside that zone we can feel the form towards which the urge is pushing. Although it is vague, it is pushing towards forms that it does not yet know about. The form in the head is compressed reactions from previous experiences from the urge pushing into situations. The form in the head does not have the power of the urge but it has logic. On its own it is powerless, though it knows what to do. In between the formless power and the powerless form is the zone of feeling and as we become aware of it we become equipped to formulate the urge and to empower the idea. “that is the ultimate aim of individual man.” 

“If a woman is positive in the reproductive centre below she is going to be positive towards child bearing, but she is negative in the thinking department. If the man is positive in the head he is negative in the will department. He will start trying to posit ideas in the mind of the woman and a flow will start, her negative mind will receive them. Then the energy will go down the spine and send a message to the positive department which then points to the negative in the man. The man is formulating the woman, and the woman is sexually orientated towards the man. If a man should go negative in the head then he will go positive in the sexual urge and start pushing towards the sexual department in the woman, which will then go negative. Her head will become positive and she will start giving the orders to him. Whenever a man feels negative he always becomes sexually orientated towards the woman and he is really trying to get back where he came from. The polarity is now reversed and she becomes the man for the time being. When a man becomes negative in the head he wants children, which are new bodies for himself. The woman sees this and knows she is a doorway to his future and so lays down conditions. (To the men: “Every time a negation arises in the mind, there will result a warming down below…and it will appear that the lady is beautiful.”  

He ends the talk with a short presentation of the three ‘Marys’, M1, M2 and M3. M1, ‘Miserable Mary’ represents the substance of the body, “not adequately stimulated by your initiative will.” It has not yet got the form in it to enlighten it. (“Like a woman on her own when there are no men about.”)

When a stimulus comes from outside it converts to M2. The substance begins to formulate “and all these forms are presented internal to consciousness and seem like tremendously interesting and exciting ideas.” To reach the next level, M3, it must find a force that is coming towards it, but then turns away. This means such a force must be interesting and valuable, “a target to be pursued.” If the force turns around and enters then the substance says it was not really that good and converts back to M2. “This is true of your will inside your own body here, if you’re a man.” If the force being pursued continuously dodges then the substance will continue to follow it and “will do anything whatever that that one dictates.” It is then called M3, ‘Malleable Mary’. “It is the substance which, in the presence of a very, very superior initiative power, will obey it in order to try to persuade it to go in.”

In creating finite beings, God has created the possibility of contingent relations between them. This relation provides the stimuli which obscure the message from Immanent Spirit. “So the external, stimulus situation plays the devil and creates all the evil that there is in the universe.” Why did God do this? He could have created beings who would not be knocked off centre by not allowing contingency (like matchsticks swirling in a stream). The reason is that the dynamism of the Absolute contains all the forms that are and ever could be in the universe, “as pure ripples of power equably balanced.” This is Plato’s world of ideas, a noumenal world.They are not yet existential, not phenomenal. To bring them into existence they must be super-stressed by the Absolute. This action precipitates them into the time-process. “It is this production of phenomena out of noumena that constitutes the Fall.” “There is an absolute totality of all conceivable forms in the initial Sentient Power of the Absolute.” Everything which appears in the time-process is eternally in the Absolute, and only appears when super-stressed. “Time is simply a super-stress placed on it to abstract a pattern.” That pattern requires stresses and strains: “the stress is the generation of a body and the strain is the generation of space. So the generation of a body is the same as the generation of space round it.” 

God could have made a world of non-contingent beings but what value would they have for God? “God wants men to understand God.” This requires a being that has been “through the mill and learnt to suffer and to generate compassion.” God wants to know Himself. He can only do this by reflexion, the back-bending process of a power on itself. The Absolute has a certain frequency, so high that a closed being is no barrier to it. The Aleph frequency can go right through it and yet can stimulate and modulate it. “But not in such a way that the closed zone can be aware, as an individual, of this Aleph.” “The Light shines in the darkness but the darkness comprehends it not.” The first sphere created, the Universe, the Logos, the Macrocosmos, the Word, is a god, but not the God. The Godhead, the Absolute, created it. Inside it God then created many smaller spheres: galaxies, solar systems, planets, man, and everything else.  If two human beings are in contingent relation, each has a centre of Immanent Spirit, and both will feel that they are the subject and that the other is an object. “This reduction to the level of object is only possible from this contingent stimulus situation.” Yet God has to exhaust all possibilities for Himself and man will be “higher than the angels” when he has completed his evolution.

The Sun is sending energy to the Earth constantly. This energy is taken up by plants, then animals, then man. This light is intelligent power, it is being captured by the Earth and the intelligence is coming in to man. By this process it is brought into a state of ‘suffering’. “Suffering completes the cycle of being of God who must know all things.” Men are potential gods “as to their acts to be developed, but they are actual gods in the Immanent Spirit in their own centre.” The sun’s energy is captured, and “in each case there is an increasing awareness of the source of the energy in the being…The plant dreams, the animal desires and rushes about, man evaluates, and the human becomes aware of his spiritual origin.” Man is ‘phototaxic’, he moves towards the light. “So the fact of the light orientation of the human being means that light is the source… and yet, if we are not deprived of the light first, we cannot truly evaluate the light.” God cannot know Himself unless He exhausts all possibilities, so He must set up resistances for Himself, finites. “If He refused to go to Hell, He would not be God…He would just be deficient in knowledge of what goes on in Hell.” 

By contingency we have choices: of pleasure, and of pain. Pleasure brings only an elementary level of learning. “The deepening of character…can only come by pain…It can only come by the entry into a closed situation, a resistance situation.” “Unless the Absolute finites beings within Itself, creates zones of resistance and then enters into them and conquers them, it has not completed its possibilities.” 

The appearance of Christ in the world has changed forever the human consciousness. We cannot escape His inherent logic. The Devil is the divider, “and centres divide from each other.” Every centre is a point of stress and the space between centres is strain. The stress part, the body, is under the dominion of the devil. “In between two centres there is a zone where the pull is equal in both directions. This is a point of equilibrium and a point of choice.” At that point we can stand still and choose which one to incline towards. Whichever we choose will lead to another such zone and another choice. Whenever we feel an inclination this is leading us to a centre and is therefore a temptation, and then we suffer. In order to be free we must be able to stand at the point of equilibrium. If we constantly follow our inclinations then, like the Prodigal Son, we return to equilibrium. “When the inclination carries you, you are subject to temptation…suffer pain, come back to equilibrium and carry on again.” In the Lord’s Prayer it says, “Lead us not into temptation.” “We appeal to God not to drive us into temporal situations, which we know as being painful…Which makes again, God and the Devil to be identical.” 

“His worship is perfect freedom” means that, ultimately, to worship the free God, one must stop inclining towards centres of stress…And when all the beings…have completed their education, then the super-stress is taken off the time-process and there ‘is time no more’, and then all the forms of all the beings that ever were in the time-process continue their eternal existence with the qualifying difference that they retain with them the memories of their temporal experiences as characterisations, making it worth their while to have been out in the first place.”

‘Good’ means to will to a certain limit and ‘evil’ is anti-live. Yet, even in our own body, we have chemicals which are anti-life. e.g. the acid in our stomachs. Such things in the wrong place would be highly destructive but in the right place they are life-enhancing. “They make it possible to sharpen up the awareness of existence without destroying it. This means that the anti-life chemistry can be used as a sharpener of the awareness of life itself.” i.e. life must be a balance and evil (anti-live) has to be embraced. This is why God said to Adam, “Do not separate the Good and Evil.” “Realise that Good and Evil are both valid substances, each one with its own function and that it is entirely a matter of balancing the forces of Good and the forces of Evil.”

When God creates He circumscribes a zone of Himself. Inside and outside this circumscription is identical: Transcendent and Immanent Spirit. The Immanent Spirit in man is what he calls his intelligence, his consciousness. If a man operates from this centre, instead of attending to the external stimulus, then he cannot make a mistake because that centre will always give him, “the pure response for any situation in which he may find himself.” When Christ says, “Be ye perfect,” He is referring to this possibility. This is the ideal for any being.  

We can see evidence for this developing from centre in the simple process of budding. An egg becomes an embryo in this way. The forces inside can be watched progressively: buds are pushed out which become limbs, more buds become fingers, and so on. We see the same in the plant world, especially in trees in Springtime. When a being develops from centre in this way, its development is necessarily perfect. However, the consciousness of the creative centre is clouded by contingent stimulation. It can disappear altogether when the contingent stimulation dominates completely. The clouding of consciousness by the external stimulus has reduced our awareness to that of the five sense organs. Most people are empirical materialists and do not believe in a creative centre, only in contingent relations. They see only the gross, material centre of a cloud of energy which is not seen. They see physical bodies but not the energy fields around them. If we look carefully we can see heat auras and even bio-field energies. The halos seen around the heads of saints are yet another, higher energy. Adam’s fall was from an awareness of these finer energies to only those of the gross, material world. Christ, by His death, redeemed this fallen state of man. He showed how we can all become angelic beings, unified within ourselves, the “divine hermaphrodite.” 

God said of man, “The serpent shall bite him in the heel.” The ‘heel’ is the gross physical body. The stimulus will bite the physical body so the man who understands this can use his body as his ‘vehicle of experience’ in order to evolve, he can, “crucify himself deliberately.” i.e. place himself in situations that will rapidly develop him because they are chosen as painful or unpleasant. “There is no way for a human being to develop other than by conscious, deliberate affirmation of an unpleasant situation.” It is only through suffering external stimuli that we will be driven to find our individual centre. We have to accept that there is a hierarchy in the universe. All beings, created in the continuum of Absolute Power that is God, are essentially identical. Yet, in the time-process, “they are all unequal in development and those who are tardy in developing will try to impede the accelerating development of other beings.” 

“The power that appears from the Divine and generates the whole universe after the Fall, has entered down and gone into the male organ.” This “particular strange instrument” is the symbol of the presence of divine creativity now embodied in every man. This power can be used, not only in generating children, but can be turned upwards to illuminate the intelligence. “There is no illumination other than through this strange device.” But, “If this power in the time-process is allowed to suffer from the external stimulus it cannot convert. That is to say, as long as the male power of initiative is not exercised as initiative but is triggered off by the external stimulus presented by the contemporary Eve, then that power cannot convert itself and illuminate the being in whom it has objectified itself. It will continue to lead him into the next lesson over and over again until he can extricate himself.” However, if a man uses this power for initiative, “then it is very potent magic.” It is this power that has raised the human race. Sexual relations were given to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden, “as an inferior magic to the first one that they would have had had they not disobeyed.”  “So the male organ now has the peculiar function of raising humanity very slowly, with minute steps, through the time-process, and apart from the proper use of this magic, there is no elevation for the human race.” The sperms that are produced in a man are a chemical parallel of his development level, of his ideas and  his initiative. These, together with the feeling and conative drive of his wife, are transmitted to the child, “so that the child is always better than the parent in some respects.” Each new generation takes a step forward towards the evolutionary term. “Finally, there will arise a child that will be so full of the formal information of the ancestral errors that it will comprehend the meaning of universal error and suddenly turn it over.” Jesus Christ was the first man, historically, to reach this level “of penetrating to the meaning of the whole error from Adam up to His own time.” The parable of the Prodigal Son is saying the same thing. When there are no errors left to make, then we can return. “The thing that led you into trouble was your own motive in going out.” After the Adamic Fall there was a clouding of consciousness, “and from that moment there was no way of getting back to the consciousness of the Infinite other than by the time-process of going the whole hog in the error until…there are no more errors to make. And now it is time to turn and think again and return to my inner development centre which will develop me from within now because the external world has nothing to offer me whatever except the occasion of the repetition of errors already committed.”

‘Existence’ means ‘out of six’ and implies a wheel. Only forces in opposition can create a rotating structure and a rotating structure is a finite entity, an electron, an atom, a molecule, etc. All existence is made by forces opposing each other and in the act of opposing they are negating each other. “Existence is the realm of negation.” To end an existence is to restate the Absolute positive which created it. The Absolute presses onto a centre by the simple contraction of its own Field. This creates an existential individual, but it is a negation. If we then negate this negation, we get back to the Absolute positive. ‘I will choose one from a thousand’ means we choose one, which “is the Absolute positive, which negates the negation of the finite.” For us as humans, this means that if we find possessiveness within us – for anything – we should let it go. Christ said, “If you are prepared to lose your life, you will find it.” We should follow the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Action without regard to the fruits of action’. i.e. we do not seek our individual reward for anything. All values have to do with volition, with will. “There are no values other than those willed.” Paul says, “Love and do what you will.” Love in this sense is ‘agape’ – ‘willing for the development of the potentialities of being’, then whatever we do is right and has Absolute backing. Paul says of Jesus, “There is no ‘No’ in Him. He is wholly ‘Yes’. The name ‘Jesus’ means to affirm even the negation. This is hard for us because it means that, to improve, we have to do the opposite to what we feel that we want to do. This is because we always incline towards the pleasant, never towards the difficult. We have to look for an inclination within ourselves and stop it. If we can do this we can become free. When we choose the one, the Absolute positive, we can no longer identify with the finite. We see it as a negation and we cross the negation off. “In negating the negation we posit the original positive, the Absolute, the only ultimately Real.”

(Eugene skips over the second statement told to Thomas, but returns to it later)

The third thing Jesus said to Thomas was: “Blessed is the lion which man will eat that the lion may become man, and cursed is the man whom the lion will eat, that the lion will become man.” The ‘lion’ here symbolises universal appetite. The ‘lion’ is the Absolute that brings to be the time-process. “It creates time as a serial, ensphering form and then it proceeds to eat time and all its products.” “Blessed is the lion that man will eat that the lion may become man.” This means that if a man can understand this idea of the universal appetite, he can constrain it, to involve it into himself. That Absolute appetite will gain in the man that can do it, “it will gain an awareness of Itself as an absolute drive or appetite… In so doing, it will evaluate itself in the man (man means evaluator) who will eat that lion. But if this universal appetite gets into a man and proceeds to eat him, so he is, as we say, ‘eaten up with ambition’ then that man is cursed, because the appetite will become the man. i.e. the man will be swallowed up by the appetite.” The ‘lion’ eats him and not the man the lion. Man has the initiative. He can get hold of the appetite in himself and evaluate it. He knows that it will eat him unless he can bring himself to eat it. But if the appetite gets hold of him and through him proceeds to eat up the world, he becomes a mechanism of appetite and goes about eating things up. In the process, he is a doorway for this non-individuated appetite. He has now lost the initiative and is entirely subject to that appetite. It will destroy him, eat him up. Whereas, if he can get hold of it, turn it around and cause it to reflect upon itself, about its ultimate purpose, then he turns it into form. “If the appetite can get hold of itself reflexively, it will not destroy its own vehicle.” But if it cannot, then it will “consume the body that it is trying to use as a vehicle.” 

In the riddle of Samson and the Lion it says, “out of the eater came forth meat.” The ‘eater’ is the Absolute appetite and the ‘meat’ is the substance, that is, the generation of the sphere created by that appetite. “This is the ‘me-at’, the objective form of ‘I’, me crucified in this place…So the Absolute appetite, the Will of the Godhead, is coming in to make a universe and the big ball that He makes is the Logos. The ‘eating’ of this is the entry into it and the digestion of it into smaller and smaller bits.” “There is a cycle of power: involution, matter, digestion, back to power again.” “So blessed is the man who can eat the lion and cursed is the man whom the lion eats.”

The second thing Christ told Thomas was three words. When the others asked what these were, Thomas replied: “If I tell you one of the words He said to me, you will bring stones to cast at me and fire will go forth from the stones and destroy you.” Why? Because they already knew these things but had not realised them. (Eugene clearly knows what they are but will not say, for the same reason.) Every baby knows these things but education covers them over. It learns to accept a false philosophy, false morality, and “brakes on its will.” This is necessary because the baby is not ‘resec’ and never will be unless it is impeded. The three words relate to idea, feeling, and will. If Thomas had told them the three words they would have realised that they had not eaten the lion but had, in fact, been eaten by it. 

The disciples were simple, illiterate men who Christ had chosen deliberately. “He has chosen them simple, because if they are simple, out of sheer economy, it will save Him the job of brain-washing…they have so little mental furniture, so little critical ability, these ideas will make their own way in the substance of the minds of these men.” These were men who had undergone great hardships to follow Him and they were hoping that they would reap a reward in Heaven for doing so. If Thomas had told them these three words, “they would suddenly see that the whole of their private purposes, the reason for which they followed Him, was doomed to inevitable defeat.”

The three words are “a rule to end all rules” but they can only be assimilated by a person who is willing “to be free with all the responsibilities that being free confers.” He has to assume full responsibility for himself no matter what. He must be able to say, “the price I pay is worth it…If he cannot say this, he should not be told.” 

(There is a question about the relation of the name of the society, IHS, to this talk.)

“Absolute awareness equals absolute responsibility.” These three words should never be spoken to a person who does not already know them. This can be felt. “It is a secret that must never be communicated until it becomes unnecessary to communicate it.” “They are so potent because, as soon as they are stated they are recognised as true.” We have always known their truth but have been deceived by parents and other educators. “The safest way to say it is this: “If you have at heart the absolute benefit of the will to develop the full potentialities of all beings in the universe, then it is quite permissible, in the light of that will, to do whatever that will says you should do at the moment, and there is no other rule.”

Question: Whilst it is said that sleep is the biggest enemy of Yoga, can this also apply to the work we should be doing? 

Sleep is the biggest enemy of yoga, but sleep is not simply “going to bed and closing your eyes.” “Sleep means becoming unaware of a…situation even when you are awake, so-called.” Stimuli are arriving constantly through the eyes and ears and being interpreted mechanically most of the time. So when the mind is mechanical we are asleep. Mostly, we do not discriminate in the mind, the incoming stimuli from the memories they stimulate. If we allow our memory to superimpose on the extant situation, then the mind is adulterated and we are asleep. This occurs in the dream state and also in the waking state if we are not fully awake. We have two environments: the extant one before us, and another one in our memory. If we do not separate these, then we are in the confused state that we experience in dreams; the two environments are “fused together,” and most of our thinking is like this. “If we do not discriminate clearly between different forms, there arises a hybrid form and the result is confusion…The elements fuse together which should be kept separate.”  The significance of geometrical forms in the mind can be changed by associations from the memory. e.g. A drawing of two, identical triangles can be changed by inverting one and adding lines, outside of them, to represent arms and legs. One will now appear female and the other male. This interpretation is from the memory. All we are looking at is lines on the paper. This is what is meant by being asleep. “We have to learn to see exactly what is.” 

Question: to do with ‘a handful of conscious men controlling world situations. Do these men have the power to interfere in what happens?

 “A handful of men have always determined the general, mass movement of humanity.” He describes the ‘Cult of Mithras’, which said that men must fight and conquer. William the Conqueror, Constantine, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini were all Hetmen. (Khetmen). These were all men who had an individual will to power. So were the Roman emperors and when the empire was threatened on all sides and unity needed, then Constantine chose Christianity as a means of achieving this. Mithraism could not do this, even though Constantine was himself a follower before  his ‘conversion’. Mithraic leaders are ‘Khetmen,’ “they are not the men who run esoteric schools of a spiritual order.” There is a hierarchy of men: The mass of humanity are the Quophmen, whose primary focus is the belly appetite, the lower urges. Above them are the Kaphmen, the thinking men who are used by the Hetmen to control those beneath them. We are all at different levels of evolution: at the Q level we have to learn to control our lower urges. ‘Q’ signifies sexual activity. A ‘Quophman’ is a “copper man,” the sign of Venus and copulation. To transcend this level we need reason, the rationale which governs it. “When you don’t like being a merely reproductive device for the Absolute energy, and you begin to reason about it, you climb out of the Quoph level onto the Kaph level.” From here a man can understand why the Absolute has arranged things in this way and discover that it is not enough just to reason about it, it must be ordered, and someone has to do this. He can then move up to the Hetman level where he now has a choice: he can pursue an individual will to power, as all the great, historical figures have done, or become a ‘Higher Hetman’, a ‘Superman’, in Nietzsche’s terms. A Hetman is only a higher man relative to a lower one, but a ‘Higher Hetman’, a ‘Superman’, is not concerned with ruling over others for his own ends, but now has an idea that the whole process can be lifted up to a higher level and all the individuals can be elevated. With this realisation, he now moves towards the Universal. When he is identified with the Universal, then the energies from the Absolute come through into his mind. He can then operate at all levels. Up to this point, everything he has done is a means to an end but at the Absolute level there is only one end and it is working simultaneously at all levels. We cannot control what we are identified with. To control ‘Q’ we must rise to ‘K’, to control our reason, we must rise to will. This will appears as the individual will to power and to transcend this means climbing up to the Universal Will, beyond which is the non-dual Absolute.

The focus of the talk now changes to examine the interpenetration of spheres. He draws two circles, A and B, to represent two beings, and the centre of A is on the perimeter of B, and the centre of B is on the perimeter of A. At the centre of every being is the greatest amount of individuation and as both centres are propagating, as we move from one centre to the other we are traversing a space with ripples from both centres. If we identify with this space then we are identifying with AB. If we want to understand A then we must identify with A only; if with B then with B only. Wherever there is a centre of impulse there is a unique individual, but as soon as we move away from that centre we are in a contested zone, “full of emotions from other centres.” Each individual human being has such a centre and a perimeter. Our most obvious perimeter is our skin, so inside our skin is a unique individual. But our skin is not the limit of our propagating energies. Our skin only separates us from other, similar bodies. Our energy fields overlap and interpenetrate and we are both inside larger circles, right up to the Absolute. “Whether you are separate or not is nothing but identification.” “I am mine own executioner,” means that we impose on ourselves our own limitations by identifying with given levels of being.” If we identify with the physical body then we feel we are separate from other bodies. Lovers may try to overcome this feeling of separation by fusing their bodies together but this can only be for a short time and then they must again be separate. If we exchange ideas then we know there must be a subtle world transcending the limitations of the physical body. This means that we can fuse two minds together, but again only for a time. Above this level of unity is that of the will. We can identify with the will of another being, regardless of what they do or think. Mothers do this with their children. If her boy turns out to be a ‘bad boy’, the mother will still identify with him because he is her boy. This is the will to retain unity in spite of physical separation and without unity of idea.

The will, which is the cause is not dual. Wherever there is a membrane in the body we can say there is a centre. In the three-part man there is one at the diaphragm and another at the larynx. We can identify with any one of the three centres, separated out, and, if we do so, “we find definite, individuated tendencies to action, to feeling, to function and they change as we change our identification.” We can strengthen these centres, as the esoteric Hetmen have taught us. They set up tests for themselves of three orders: urge, feeling and thinking. (The origin of school exams.) We can see this strongly in the game of rugby, where the urge is pushed to the limit, it changes into feeling and often results in tears on the pitch. Little boys demonstrate this when they attempt to lift a heavy object but find it too heavy, yet feel they should be able to lift it and may burst into tears in the attempt. Similarly, the mind can be trained in rigid, cold logic and when we have trained both our urge and our logic to the point of emotional breakdown, “you then have an idea of your limits and you can work to extend those limits intelligently, but only again by effort.” Our feeling will tell us when both have reached their term. The only possible abuse of an exercise is by the unintelligent application of it. He suggests that we take any physical act and do it for longer than we think we can, to see at what point, “you start to become dithery in the emotions.” We should set a target and fulfil it. If it is too easily achieved then we should set a harder one. We should keep on doing this, extending the target, and we will discover the limits of the three functions in the body. “In the process you will be separating out…the three functions of pure logic, your aesthetic sense and your body action.” When we do this we can then create a fourth coordinator. We have a bull in the belly, a lion in the heart, an eagle in the head, and the coordinator is the man. “Those are the four parts of the Sphinx.” “When you have got your bull, lion, eagle throughly separated, then they are coordinated, and the man’s face appears on the sphinx. But that cannot be done while the three functions are confused.”

Question: about creation.

The original, Saturnine impulse, “occurred simultaneously throughout the whole of eternality, and if it had not done so, it could never have done.” Because there is no outside to the Infinite, so there could be no prior impulse. The essential character of the Absolute is motion. “That motion is impulsive throughout, and creation is a method of identification.” We tend to focus on the gross body, to identify with it. We have to remain aware of the transcendent forces coming in to us, all the time. He draws a circle, “look at it very carefully, you will find that your attention is running round it. Try and stop it…hold the mind in suspense so that your attention does not run round it.” That tendency is in the mind, not on the paper. “Nevertheless, the attention, that peculiar tendency of consciousness, which as Spirit is essentially dynamic, to make that which is not actually rotating, rotate, but the rotation is only apparent.” Similarly, an electron, “has no being of its own at all…it’s a function in a field.” A wave on the sea is just an appearance, a construct. “Now all the motion in the world is constructed in the same way.” A moment of transcendence, as can happen with certain drugs, allows us to see everything as it is – because the identification has been broken. 

He draws a diagram to replicate the kind that Leonardo used to do: an anatomical sketch of a man’s fore-arm. At each joint he draws a circle to show the rotations; of the humerus with the scapula, the elbow joint, the wrist. “Now imagine all the possible positions of that arm. Now they co-exist simultaneously in eternity, and by a shift of attention, it appears that some of them have been selected and made manifest in time, but that is merely putting a stress from here, to here, to here, and so on.” So it is really a shift of stress identification. “And remember…there is not something other than Spirit making this identification. There isn’t anything other than Spirit to make it…in the identification, it super-stresses, out of its total possibilities, the particulars that it feels like super-stressing, and they then appear as gross, material facts.” 

He mentions the ‘Humphrey Davy’ experiment in which Davy inhaled nitrous oxide and suddenly saw all the students as vortices of energy. He could not believe in gross matter after that experience. He talks of a psychiatrist and a neurologist being interviewed on TV. They had with them four patients who had been diagnosed as mentally ill but were now ‘cured’ after electric shock treatment. One girl said that she had been religious and sometimes heard the voice of God in her. After the treatment she did not hear the voice of God anymore and so was not now religious. The girl was very sad about this but accepted that she was ‘cured’. Another lady had a lovely monkey on her back – which electricity removed. “That’s a great pity, it might have been a very nice sort of monkey…she could have got it to do jobs for her.” Like an old man he knew, a yogi, who identified with the lion from the Tarot pack, “and didn’t complain about it to a psychiatrist.” He had trained this lion to go to the door to see who was there and to come back and tell him, so that if it was somebody he did not want to see, he did not open it.

The essential quality of protoplasm is ‘irritability’. A stimulus comes in, is recorded by the protoplasm, and causes a movement, towards pleasure; or away from it, if painful. In animals, this is called ‘taxism’. The same tendency in plants is called ‘tropism’. When we see something of interest, we tend to turn our eyes towards it. This is ‘tropistic’ behaviour. If we run towards it, that is ‘taxic’ behaviour. Using only these two terms we can “explain the behaviour of any being, no matter how complicated.” But all beings are simply functions of Absolute, Sentient Power, and because the Absolute is a continuum, “it is throughout itself absolutely identical, dynamically. Any part can vibrate in any way whatsoever and no part has the power to dictate the motion of another part.” “Every being is ultimately self-determined…So there is no question here of any fatalistic over ruling of any being by any other being whatsoever.” But, because it is a continuum the vibration from any one centre travels through that continuum and can be felt by all other centres. No centre can stop another centre from initiating a motion. And no centre can prevent interference from other centres. So if A is vibrating strongly and B doesn’t like it, B can move away. But the behaviour of each centre is its own, and its response to other centres is also its own. e.g. If a parent smacks a small child, the child cannot prevent this but it can bawl loudly enough to affect the parental behaviour. 

Every being has the possibility of controlling its own response to the stimulus from another. The stimulus coming to any being conditions the response of that being and so each being is patterned by this process in a different way. If a being can make itself transparent to such a stimulus then it will pass right through with no effect. It is only the conditioned response to such a stimulus that causes a patterning of the memory and a behavioural response. The purpose of yoga, the ideal, is absolute transparency to the stimulus situation. This does not mean rejecting the stimulus, because that would cause conditioning also. It means observing the stimulus and allowing it to pass through. “You don’t respond and you don’t reject.” We actually have the power to inhibit the response, to be aware  of what it means and to make no comment as it goes through.” 

When a person has willed to have lots of experiences and responded to lots of different situations then he knows a lot about many different things. Another person might have decided to become opaque to as many stimuli as possible and not allow them in. “Now it is the totality of the individual responses in each person that constitutes the destiny of that person.” He distinguishes between fate and destiny: Destiny is where you are going from within; fate is what happens to you from without. But they are related: if a man decides he wants a quiet life as his destiny, he is at the mercy of bigger beings who don’t. Such beings will impose on lesser ones and so can prevent him achieving his destiny of a quiet life.

To believe in fate is a form of self-hypnosis. We have chosen an idea, of fate, and imposed it upon ourselves and the universe. In doing so we paralyse our free initiative by our own effort. Fatalists such as Schopenhauer and Freud were really talking about themselves but trying to persuade us to agree with them. Freud thought that “the purpose of life is pleasure and you can’t get it, therefore you might as well be a pessimist.” Nietzsche thought the purpose of life was simply to overcome any difficulty and that a man reaps the fate imposed on himself by choosing his own destiny. 

We can see the hierarchy in mankind as a historical process and can learn from the lesson given by the amoeba. We know that an amoeba has pseudopodia. Each one pushes out and acts independently of the others, though all are part of the same protoplasm. In the same way, the primary protoplasm of the human race has spread out, away from its origins, and after a period of time has divided itself and moved away and grown itself new little extensions. Each extension has encountered a new environment and some were richer in stimulus value than others. The many different environments that humans encountered dictated the behaviour of the different populations. “No mysterious fate did this.” The simple spreading out of life, in different stimulus situations, resulted in all the different kinds of people that are now on earth. The nomadic, Arab peoples show in their thought, art and poetry that there is illusion in the world, as there are mirages in the desert. This did not happen in Europe. Rather, we have developed an objective view of the world: houses, architecture, art, came out of practicality. In the East, in India especially, we find subjectivity, the idea that somehow the observer is connected to the cause of things. So Hinduism and Buddhism are concerned with the development of the subject, rather than the environment.

All of these differences are caused by environmental constraints, yet humans are still humans. Certain races, certain families, certain individuals within families, become more informed by their complex environments than do their brothers and sisters. Some moved in one direction, others in a different direction. “It’s just the fortunes of war.” The being with the greater complexity has the power to push around those with less. Now the being “who just complains about this and does nothing about it, is merely imposing a concept of injustice upon himself.” The more complex being has simply been in more difficult environments. It is not helpful to blame our ancestors for this, but the more complex being, “by the continuity of protoplasm, is simply the extended finger of that primary choice that the ancestors made.” “If anyone is complaining about injustice, they have only one remedy, and that is to study, historically, the sources of the power of the more powerful lot.” 

“We must study the history of influence.” We find that the answer is will. This is the primary drive behind all progress. But will on its own cannot achieve, reason and feeling are needed also. However, we cannot say that any one can exist alone, all three are needed together with the coordinating function of the spinal cord. And, most important of all, the Field from which they derive. “At the top of every hierarchy there is an invisible power.” Every man is an hierarch. Sometimes, our feet hurt, but the brain says, “keep walking,” because it has an idea of something it wants to see, such as an exhibition. Inside the body a group of cells get badly treated by orders from the brain and eventually they surround themselves by cell division and a cancer is produced. Every kind of reaction in the body illustrates this hierarchy; if we run, our heart beats faster, it did not want to, it was compelled. There is “ a supreme lack of consideration in individuals for the living cells in their own organism.” If we cannot be just to our own organism, it is unfair to complain about the injustice of others. “The whole universe is an orderly system…there is a hierarchy of powers…You cannot expect the sun to stop because you forgot your hat.”

The slave trade was not fate. The people who were captured were less alert than the men who captured them. The men who traded them were more alert still. We should not now be surprised at racial tensions. “This isn’t fate…this is the automatic result of the conflict of life with itself.” “There is no fate whatever dictating to human beings or any other beings absolutely what is going to happen to them from outside.” If we realise this fact we won’t waste energy complaining about anything whatever. If we don’t like something we should study how to do it, if we want to. If we don’t want to, we should not complain and not bother about it. “Don’t complain that you are about 6000 years behind him in learning…Intensive study of the principles can make that time up.” “What has been haphazardly acquired over a few thousand years can be very concisely acquired over a few thousand minutes, where the will and the direction of the intelligence is really established.”  

He differentiates respons-ibility and respons-ability. Respons-ability is the ability to respond adequately to a stimulus, but respons-ibility, “is that which is defined by somebody from above.” e.g. a judge in a courtroom may hold a man respons-ible for his actions. “Respons-ibility is defined from above by one man about another man who has no ability to respond.” He gives the example of Moses as a respons-able man bringing to the people the Ten Commandments to make them respons-ible. He talks of the respons-ability of a man for telling truth to another. People often get into trouble by listening to truth because every stimulus meets a force from Immanent Spirit inside them. The meeting of these two forces produces a rotation of energy, which is an idea. If the idea is a complex one, made from many such encounters of forces, it is a concept. Who is responsible for this concept? The man who spoke the idea or the one receiving it? The most often repeated concept for any child is its name. This is repeated endlessly by parents and others as the child grows until around it is formed an ego-complex of ideas. This is set up in the action band between the Immanent Spirit and the perimeter of the being. It is not a true centre, like the Immanent one, but a complex of ideas referring to the name of that child. Every further stimulus is tracked into this ego complex which mechanically interprets it and adds it to the ‘sense of self’ of the child. In this way, the individuality of the child is developed. Over time, a line of least resistance from the sense organs into this ego group of ideas is developed. Whenever such a person is attacked then it is from this ego complex that the violent reaction will come. Such a being is not defending his Immanent Spirit because the whole accent of him has shifted from this true centre into the conceptual one of the ego – from a faulty education and bad parenting. We are all in this way, made “eccentric” i.e. ‘off-centre’, and therefore our action is bound to be impaired. It is now not free action but a mechanical structure. Our reaction to stimuli is now entirely mechanical and confined to the environment we have grown up in. (He gives the example of a Bantu man being “let loose” in London. He will not have an adequate reaction to the “blonde ladies of Leicester Square” and will end up in trouble.) 

When a person who is aware of Immanent Spirit tries to teach another about it and of the mistake of thinking of the ego complex as its centre, the recipient of the new stimulus is going to have difficulty in accepting this truth. There will be an internal fight between the two centres. Every time a stimulus reinforces the new concept of Immanent Spirit, the ego centre will tremble, producing anxiety in the person. This new truth acts as a disintegrating force on the earlier concept of the egoic self. Disintegration is death and the egoic centre will start to feel depressed and this feeling will spread through the whole being. If the being identifies with the depression it may become suicidal. But the thing in him that wants to die is the ego centre. If the man listens to the voice inside saying, “I want to die,” he may hear that the voice is not his own. It is inevitable that the ego must die. If we know this and affirm it then we can live from the real Self, the Immanent Spirit. Whenever a being with a strong ego centre hears a truth from the Immanent centre of another, it will seize upon it because it promises to confer power. However, this person will soon discover that this power cannot be used for its own egoic ends, but it is too late; “the thing is in.” The teaching has introduced the concept that he too has an Immanent centre. This leads to a fight between the two centres. The more the egoic centre struggles against it, the more concepts are generated between them and one must emerge the winner. If an unprepared person is taught about Immanent Spirit and realises he cannot win against it, he may experience profound despair because his egoic centre is dying and with it, his identification of himself. Therefore it is necessary to proceed with caution and introduce the concept of ‘the observer is not the observed’ before going further. This gives him a new security in his centre and he can then gradually come to shift his identification from the ego complex to his true centre. So a man must become aware of Immanent Spirit as a possibility before the dismantling of the ego. “You have to be given another limb to stand on before one is cut away.”

In answer to a question he returns to the difference between ‘respons-ible’ and ‘respons-able’. We cannot ask “Who is respons-able?” Because this is really a statement, not a question. ‘Who’ is the Absolute Power operating through us so every conscious being is respons-able. Christ demonstrated His respons-ability when He said: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” i.e those who arranged His execution were merely respons-ible. The ‘who’, the observer, consciousness and respons-able are synonyms. 

The egoic centre is clearly stronger in some people than in others. If it becomes what the psychologists call “fully integrated” then it will be difficult to break and the more difficult it is the greater the suffering for the man. He gives the examples of Napoleon and Genghis Khan who tried to dominate the world situation. A being so identified with his egoic centre is going to suffer terribly at death when that centre disintegrates. It is therefore better for us to have a smaller ego which is disintegrated before the death of the physical body. The man who gives a teaching to a little ego, as in a child, is respons-able because he can see that a falsely integrated sense of self will cause more suffering to that being ultimately. A statement of truth can break up a little ego and cause only little suffering, a temporary disorder followed by a reassessment and re-integration within the true centre of Immanent Spirit. A man who can do this is respons-able. Any other man who has not reached this level cannot judge the respons-ability of such a man, just as in a court of law the judge is respons-able but the accused is defined by him as respons-ible for his actions. The question of respons-abilty is an existential one and can only be assessed in a real-life situation. Is one parent more respons-able than the other in instructing the child? This is a matter for each parent to decide because we never get problems in general – only in particular situations. When we say to somebody, “You are responsible,” what we are really doing is exhorting them to better behaviour. This may result in better action and a ‘sense of responsibility’, but it may also result in the opposite!

 All initiative is respons-ability, whereas reaction, as defined by the judge, is respons-ibility.

An idea is a spiritual force, a form or shape, and can integrate with another one; it has a desire to do so, because it is sentient. Ideas combine in the head to form patterns. This is a mechanical process and occurs without our conscious volition. i.e. When we are thinking we are not usually controlling the pattern of our thoughts, though we may assume so. Every idea is a finite and a doorway for spirit but spirit is conditioned by each idea it enters through; it takes the shape of that idea. So if we already have a pattern of ideas in our mind then spirit entering will be shaped by that pattern. “So that we cannot know what Infinite Spirit would have us do in fact if we are already identified with a finite form which has its own purpose, its own direction.” When we pray, we filter incoming spirit so that what comes through is determined by our purposes. (Be careful what you pray for!) If we have a concept of God, then we impose this concept on God, so that whatever comes through this concept is filtered by it. “The purpose of talking about non-duality is to get rid of all these forms and to allow the Infinite to speak for Itself.” 

Every idea conditions our behaviour. If we had only one idea we would behave continuously in the same way. Ideas within the mind wrestle with each other and we are passive to this conflict. (This can most easily be seen in someone who is mentally disordered.) Such a person can be unpredictable in their behaviour as one idea dominates for a while and then a different idea takes over.

The contested zone within us can link together the primal drive and the idea. Sometimes we may worry because the urge to do something and the idea of what ought to be done are not congruent. If we concentrate on an idea completely, the urge to do something about it will diminish. When you concentrate on an urge you will fail to see the form in it. But if you concentrate on the contested zone in the chest region, you will discover that the idea and the urge are co-present and you can see the meaning of the idea in relation to the urge. An idea is an amount of energy with certain preferences which will translate into action. “In other words, the ideas are conditioning factors of human behaviour.”

He contrasts Communism and ‘Moral Rearmament’ and says they are two identical forces, one pretending to be superior to the other. Morality is still at the material level, not the spiritual. Those who supported the notion of moral rearmament wanted a compliant, reliable workforce and not spiritually free beings who might choose not to turn up for work! “In order to defeat any structure whatever, by the law of equal and opposite action, reaction, you must have an entity at the same level.” i.e. they need to be on the battlefield on the day to fight for the cause; spiritually free people are not so predictable! The total unpredictability of spirit is hated by materialistic powers. (You cannot serve two masters) Spirit is immediate “It listeth where it will.”

He calls the three-part man ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’. At Infinity, all three are simultaneous, but in the finite world they are separated out. He puts Harry in the centre but leaves his audience to identify where to put the other two! He draws three circles to show that, as the ripples go out from the centre of one of them their diameter increases until all diameters from all circles become superimposed on each other. At Infinity they are simultaneous, so with God, action, thinking and feeling are absolutely simultaneous. “Things that are identical at Infinity precipitate differences at their centres.” 

He asks the audience to imagine the largest sphere possible, pulsing and sending ripples towards its centre. As they travel they begin to separate and the closer they come to the centre, the more separated they become. “So the whole field of an individual man precipitates within itself…patterns of behaviour that appear internally separately.” We can transcend this separation only by breaking identification with the physical body and travelling outwards into the field.

When we are tired the tendency is to go to sleep. If we can break through this, by an act of will, which cannot tire, then we get a “second wind.” We can go on and get a “third wind” also. We then discover another level of energy. If you go to sleep you miss it. Serial thinking tires the brain but if you can push through the resistance then suddenly, there is a “flick” and you become aware of a non-serial presentation of a “big idea” which illuminates the mind and you become very awake again. This is a “master concept” from which the serial ideas were derived.

If thinking, feeling and urging were limited to their centres in us then we would not have the problems we do. But usually, when a feeling arises then a thought process is stimulated. e.g. if you feel pleased, all pleasant things in the mind begin to resonate and trigger a lot of ideas. Most of these ideas will have nothing to do with the external, stimulus situation. (They are fantasy, spreading out, like a fan, from the point of stimulation.) e.g. if we get an urge to reproduce. If that urge is seen for what it is, then there is no harm in it, but the chemistry from the reproductive organs spreads through the body and rouses in the mind, images of pleasant partners. These are focussed onto an external being, a “love object,” who may be completely unsuitable. (Love is blind) Pleasant images can also be based on ancestral ones. (Jung’s archetypal energies). 

Each individual has Immanent Spirit at its centre, Transcendent Spirit external to its skin and, in between, an ‘action band’ full of memories of experiences that that protoplasm has ever had. When a stimulus comes, it strikes the action band and resonates with any part that can do so. The individual, however, is identified with only a tiny part of the action band that he has known about since birth and he tries to interpret the stimulus from that little bit. This amount of data is insufficient and so he is imposed upon by the energy of the totality of his ancestors. Every idea has a feeling tone and is pleasant or not in relation to another idea. If two ideas fit together they are seen as pleasant. However, because a man has put a super-stress on certain ideas from the limited experience he has had since his birth, when a stimulus comes, he will like the part of it which resonates pleasantly with his experience and not the part which doesn’t. In moving towards the pleasant part, he carries with him his ‘unconscious’, the totality of his ancestors, many of whom won’t like what he is doing. This is why so many New Year resolutions get broken; they are made by only a small part of his being! “This is the kind of mechanical process that goes on until we learn to see that, where the energies are in the physical body in their separateness, triggers off the ancestral parts of the action band related to that given part of the organism, we cannot begin to control it.”

In each part of the body there are cells dedicated to certain functions. Each centre of the body is the home of an idea. e.g. in the sexual organs is the command “to be fruitful and fill the earth.” In the head is the message “and subdue it.” “Each part of the body has a commandment given to it by spirit.” And this command is given continuously and eternally. Every organ is a “temple of the living spirit.” This is the cause of the plurality of gods in Hinduism and other ancient religions.

Unifying the whole Being. We don’t have to become free of ancestral influences. The important thing is to find what we are good at and put all our energies into that. The other influences will die from lack of attention. We have to make an idea very clear, untouched by urge or feeling, then it becomes a guide for both. The urge must be under control so that the full force of the will is available when the idea is clear enough to use it. Similarly with feeling;a pure absolute compassion should not be obscured by idea or urge. When we have it we must use the idea to direct it and the will to drive it. (Faithful in little, faithful in much). When we make a promise to ourselves, it comes from a tiny place in us and yet we want to make a big promise (as with our New Year resolutions). It is better to begin with little promises to ourselves that we have a good chance of keeping. We start small and then we can move to bigger ones. “The importance of it is actually to be able to say, “I will do it.”

Biological Time exercises. This is a harmonic of time related to cosmic time and can help us to transcend the individual. It is within all of us. “Try…telling telling yourself that you will touch a simple thing, like a button, in one hour from now. Look at the clock and see what time it is, and then don’t think about it.” “Assumption is the key to it.” Just assume it will happen. It will. When you become convinced of biological time you will become aware that there is a certain kind of rhythm, just as a hibernating animal knows. Assumption is an aspect of magic. “you have to be absolutely sure that what you are going to do is going to be done.” You don’t think about it. “The mind is the organ of fear.” (It interferes).  

Question: What is the difference between assumption,belief and faith?

Answer: Belief is what you love. Faith is the energy you use to lay a path in a given direction. With assumption you take up infinite force, you do not lay a path at all. In faith you are expecting a result, but in assumption you suggest, as in hypnosis. You set up a resonance. You define positively what you expect – and it happens! 

Identification: You can assume and think at the same time because they are different departments. e.g. you can wonder if your assumption is correct! “You can believe, that means to say you would love the thing to happen. You can assume that it will happen and simultaneously wonder whether the whole thing is bunk. Because your mind can think anything that’s ever been put into it by the whole of your ancestors and you.” “It is to stop the interference of these different things that the analytical process is so important, to see that they do not interfere. This is the real use of intellect. Not to gain transcendence, but to separate that which should be separated.”

Adulteration: “Your idea must not be allowed to interfere with anything that is not idea. Thinking must not be allowed to stop assumption. It must not be allowed to stop feeling. It must not be allowed to stop urge.” (Thou shalt not commit adultery.) “To adulterate is to add something to it so that you spoil it’s ultimate nature.” Thinking must be thinking. Feeling must be feeling. Urging must be urging. 

The individual as a victim of principles: There are certain forces in the action band that are completely against man freeing himself.The spirit that urges us to reproduce is not at all interested in us gaining freedom; only in reproduction. Another spirit is interested in ordering the world. You must stop it. Each spirit manifests a certain process. “The individual man is a constellation of such principles and a victim of them until he becomes aware of them, and is rescued by the spirit of coordination.”

The Infinity of excuses: Mostly, we do not achieve our aims because excuses are provided by Infinite Spirit. There is always a be-cause from Infinity telling you that your aim is incorrect because you have duties to do. We are all imposed upon by duty. This is illogical. There is a fundamental opposition between the command of spirit, to become reflexively self-conscious, and the requirements of an integrated social community which are trying to keep everyone at the same level. Christ said: “If you do not leave your mother and father, you cannot get into the kingdom.” It is a hard saying. 

At the level of thinking, we can have ideas of how things work and of why they do. At the level of how we may simply be deficient in knowledge e.g. if a machine breaks down we may not know how to fix it, we can be impotent because of a lack of information. At another level, the thinking process can refute itself. We could have two ideas about something, gained from different sources and which are inconsistent, and thereby immobilise the thinking process. We are then impotent in thought, not through a lack of information, but through self-refutation of the idea system itself. 

On the fourth level of coordination, the spine, we can have impotence also. This would be “the failure of power to bring into relation the thinking, feeling and willing functions of the body…Its general cause is sheer lack of speed of perception.” eg alcohol can slow this process and lead to a car accident. 

Potency depends primarily on food in the belly. As long as the belly is supplying energy to the will then we have to decide the direction in which we are going to point our will. The energy of the will is essentially positive and always prefers to say “Yes” to a situation. It will not become negative unless something opposes it. When this happens the will piles up behind the resistance. It turbulates and raises its temperature and we experience this psychologically as frustration. If the will is not impeded in this way, it just keeps moving and enjoying itself. “This will is sentient power. As power it is producing the changes, as sentience it is aware that it is doing so.” This unimpeded movement of the will is what we mean by ‘bliss’, and is what the Buddhists call ‘ananda’. “It is also love, because it is moving simply to develop itself, to propagate itself in infinite space.” If it is impeded and the impedance is not very strong, the amount of turbulence created is not very high, but if the obstacle is too strong for the will to overcome then the turbulence and heat generated will be very high and we experience this as hate. “Hate is love deprived of its fulfilment in action.”

This is why there are rules about diet in certain religions. Each kind of food is an objectification of certain kinds of sentient power. “When we break it down we are releasing energies of similar qualities to the energies which precipitated themselves into that material form.” Each kind of food has a definite psychological correspondence. “All the drugs used in mental disorders…are based on this fact.” “They act act on the sensorium simply by reversing the objectified process of spirit…back into the original state that was before it was condensed.” 

If the energy of the will was never impeded then it would continue perpetually and never formulate itself. However, as it translates it “occasionally crosses over itself and makes a rotating zone.” This is necessarily an ordered zone, a ‘rota’. “There is no orderly system other than a recurrent system, a rotating system of force.” “The mass inertia is simply the amount of energy working in that zone.” “Energy is the same as inertia.” When power rotates it makes a ‘dome’. “The zone of dome is the zone of order.” To ‘dome’ is to restrict free spirit. To those inside, a dome means security, protection. It makes life more predictable. Civilisation is based on doming, on dom(e)ains. Cities grow larger and free space lessens.

Chaotic power is the free, translating motion. It is ‘in-power’ (‘im’ potent = ‘in’ potent.) It is not rotating and therefore not subjecting itself to recurrent behaviour. ‘Order’ is ‘rota’ and means to do something over and over again, until expectancy results. “This expectancy, psychologically, is the same thing as inertia, physically.” It is repetitive and bound. The essence of the Infinite is neither: it is free, chaotic, in-power, impotence. 

In religion and philosophy, early thinkers looked for patterns, for rhythms in nature, for recurrent cycles. They became able to predict these cycles and used this knowledge to claim greater powers, and therefore greater authority, than they possessed. In this way they became the priests and rulers over others. Early civilisations used knowledge of the seasons to begin agriculture and to settle down and build cities. Alongside were the ‘free’ men, the hunter-gatherers and nomads. “The ones who settled down developed a hierarchical view based on form…on social structure.” Whereas the nomads had “a hierarchy of immediate power.” “Each one can be considered to be impotent outside its own field.” 

Any finite system has its origin in the Infinite. In positing this zone of order it has negated its free state so every finite is a negation. “If we rub out this positive negation we are negating a negation…two negatives make a positive…The positive Absolute is that which is Infinite and therefore is not posited in the finite sense at all.” We can demonstrate this by pouring water from a tap into a bowl. The water leaves the tap in a free, translating motion but is forced to rotate in the bowl because the perimeter of the bowl is a circle. A circle must include and exclude. The power inside is limited by the perimeter, but so is the power outside. i.e. both are equally ‘im-potent’. Impotence can mean that the power is held inside but it can also mean that there is no power held inside. He gives the example of heating an empty tin can and then putting on the cap and watching it implode as it cools down. This kind of impotence is like the one in us caused by a lack of energy, either from lack of food or sleep. The kind where the energy is held in can be because of “excessive restraint” on the being, as when we could do something, we have the energy, but something is stopping us, “an inhibiting factor.” This could be an internal factor, or an external social pressure. The impotence of deficiency, or of restraint, can exist at all three levels. We have to observe ourselves carefully to know if our impotence is due to lack or external restrictions. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” If we are successful at something we may find ourselves in a job for life. So there may be a purpose in the kind of impotence that comes from an inhibiting factor. 

(At this point Eugene is asked a question about language and the rest of the talk is given over to this.) Letters were originally drawings of things, plants and animals, parts of man, and they symbolised a kind of function. ’N’ in the Egyptian, symbolised ripples on water. ‘M’ was bound energy, mass. ‘A’, the ‘Aleph’ in Hebrew, represented the Absolute. ‘B’ was bondage, the bound, the dome. Originally, this letter was drawn as a circle, and then later, the line put through to represent a house. ‘B’ means ‘beginning’. ‘A’ is prior to this and represents the eternal. The letter ‘E’, originally ‘Heh’ in Hebrew, is the universal Field, as opposed to the Infinite Absolute. For the Absolute we can draw nothing, but for the universal Field we can draw a circle and put nothing in it. This is the mark of the high priest or pontiff, who claims to know about the Absolute. “I am the voice of the boundary.” The letter ‘H’, or ‘Khet’, is a ladder, originally with three rungs. It had a variety of uses, both horizontally, for penning sheep, and also vertically as a ladder. It symbolised ambition, hierarchical forces under the dominion, not of the universal, but of the ‘H’ men, the ‘Hetmen’ or headmen who could order about everyone below their level. These are ‘K’, ‘Kaph’ men, the clerks, clergymen, the book keepers, who could write. They took orders from the ‘H’ men. They became the scribes and monks who had authority only over those below them, the ‘Q’ men, whose main interest was sex and who often needed alcohol to help them. “Alcohol, of course, comes from the Absolute.. ‘al’ means God, the ‘co’ means to relate, and the ‘hol’ means back again into chaos.”

“When we are considering the question of potence and influence we should, in fact, remember to view it both from inside and outside the limiting dome.”  

If we make a trichotomy and look for the three elements of urge, feeling and idea then, instead of being a single tension, it becomes three tensions with a space between. This space is freedom. If we merely observe the tension we won’t alter it, in fact, we will feed it with energy, but if we cut into the tension with this analysis then it will change. We can then tackle each element by again breaking it into three and continuing our analysis. This will cause the energy of the tension to be dispersed throughout the whole of our being without having to express any of it to another, finite individual. “But in the act of doing so, you will have altered your tension relation in the Absolute with that other being, so that other being will be aware, by feeling, that something has changed, without knowing what.”

Eugene then moves on to a question about the use of the plural word for God in Genesis: ‘And the Lord God said, “Behold the man is become one of us.” This is the royal ‘We’. Kings say “we” because they are aware that they are full of sub-ents, yet these do not destroy their unity. The king is saying that ‘us’ thinking, feeling and willing are in agreement. The whole human race derives from one, cosmic egg which has divided itself internally. “As all the divisions are internal to itself, they in no way destroy its unity.” God is three persons in one and so the plural form is quite correct. He is a God of urge, feeling and ideation. We, as finite human beings, also have these three aspects and can become reflexively self-conscious and identify with God. Our three parts do not destroy our sense of unity, and a man who has attained ‘resec’ is entitled to use the royal ‘we’. 

(He suggests an exercise using the eye (I). When we turn, say, the right eye outwards to the corner, we feel an urge to do something, but when we turn it inwards, towards the nose, we become aware of a tendency to think.)

The question also asks about God denying man the ‘Tree of Life’, now that he “is become one of us.” Eugene says: “The answer is very simple, he had become finite.” God, in denying to man the Tree of Life, is trying “to save humanity from a terrible thing.” If man, a finite being, were to live forever, he would be tied to the same physical body, the same vehicle, forever. Therefore, “it is appointed to man once to die.” Otherwise, man would be “condemned to an eternal recurrence of the same formal behaviour.” As long as the body is healthy and strong then there is a tendency to remain in identification with it, but as it begins to fail and weaken then forces invade this body “to release the intelligence locked up in the identification process from that body.” 

Question about God and persons.

“The gods of mythologies are functions.” All religious pantheons are similar in this respect. All the gods of all religions are simply the expressions of particular functions. In the same way, each man has a different content in his awareness. A man who studies mathematics has a different formal content than one who studies biology. They share an awareness but the content of each is different giving rise to a different person. We all share the one intelligence, but this functions differently in each person according to their formal content. There is a hierarchy of persons. A person who is well-integrated can use the royal ‘We’ to command another person who sees himself as ‘I’. Human beings are the highest creatures in the universe. “Inside the human being there is a leopard and a toad and a bat, and so on…they are sub-entities of the human being and you can command them to behave in a certain way. They cannot say ‘we’ like we can.”

In the Tao Te Ching it states: “God has no favourites…He always prefers the best.” “If you are striving to represent it, it will work through you.” “God is no respecter of persons…He is quite prepared to bang together a lot of persons if they are no good to make one person that is good.” 

This is the reason for inter racial mixing and marriages, to balance their different qualities. Over time, some races have become more developed in ideation, some in feeling, and some in urging.

(Ham, Shem and Japhet) Opposites tend to attract. “The whole object is to re-establish the equilibrated being.”

Question: Is there a possibility that after a cataclysm they will divide out again?

Very unlikely. “No being ever voluntarily relinquishes power, once gained.” European music has been forever changed by the inclusion of jazz rhythms, “so it won’t let go of it.”

He goes back to the three-fold analysis and use of ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, and how these relate to the feeling of inner tension. When people say ‘I’ they are referring to a conceptual entity, an ego. A baby does not begin life this way. A baby has not yet learned to think, it just is. It has no self-concept. As it grows it learns to think from the experiences of pains caused by the frustration of its will. These pains are negations which produce ideas. Soon, it starts to separate pleasures from pains and will begin to identify with the pleasures, and the continuous repetition of the name it is given will be associated with these. “The name written is on a conceptual group of ideas. It is not written on the observer. To write that name on the observer is the work for a grown man to do, for an adult mind to do deliberately.” When we feel a tension inside, it is the ‘I’ of the ego that feels this tension. This ego-self has no permanence beyond the physical body. It dissolves at the death of the body. The observer, however, is the true ‘I’ (eye), the true Self, the soul, which is immortal. If we feel tension then it can only be of the conceptual ‘I’. If we identify with this egoic ‘I’ then we will suffer because we are under the law governing that conceptual group. But if we identify with the true ‘I’, the observer, then we can see that the inner tension is internal to that conceptual group. When we identify with the observer, the all-seeing ‘I’ (eye), we can look back at the little ‘I’, the ego, “the one our friends know about.” We can look at the tension internal to that little ‘I’ and at its relations with other little ‘I’s. “From the big ‘I’ you will know where to insert a new force.”

Christ says, “If the eye be single then the whole body is full of light.” The single eye is the observer, the absolute eye, and “it means that your purpose is not plural.” We can then act absolutely. Acting relatively is using things as a means to an end. In the relative act we do not act immediately. We are acting “mediately, with a mediator.” We are doing A for B or B for C. In the Absolute act we do only A, because it is worth doing, immediately. (He gives the example of a surgeon using an anaesthetic for the benefit of the patient, not just so that the patient will keep still, which would be a relative act.) “You should always feel for that in a situation. What particular act is worth doing for itself, as opposed to being a mere means to another act.” A businessman being polite in order to get business is not acting absolutely. Many of us were taught as children to chew our food thoroughly to avoid indigestion. This is a relative act. Chewing because we enjoy chewing is an absolute act. Acting absolutely is the same thing as continual remembrance, “because you cannot do it unless you are reflexively self-conscious.” When Christ warned us about buying and selling He was saying the same thing. It is mediation. God does not make atoms in order to make molecules. “He makes all the atoms because atoms are good, and He makes all the molecules with those atoms, because molecules are good, not because they are good for atoms but because they are good for molecules.”

Statement about science.

Science is concerned with investigating manifest forms. “A manifest form is not an explanation of life and never can become so.” Scientists study only the effects and not the power behind these things. They cannot study causes. “Science is not concerned with the Infinite, it is concerned with measurables and therefore with finites.” Science can make good use of its findings, such as electricity, without understanding what it is. “The will centre in a human being is identical with the Absolute…if I can get control of my causal self, my will, then I am doing something forever denied to science.”  “Faithful in little, faithful in much.” “Find out what you really do when you contract your hand to close it…Find out in your brain what you really do in order to find a forgotten subject.”

Question: about strange phenomena occurring during an exercise.

This is to be expected and nothing to worry about. “Perfect love casts out fear.” “If you really love the subject matter you won’t be afraid of any of the phenomena arising in the study of it. You will be delighted.” All such phenomena are from within, “I will not be afraid because it cannot do me any harm. It is mine. It is myself. I am studying myself.”

“All the things you have ever liked in the past, all the things you have ever feared in the past have established certain resistances, electrically, and certain chemical states too, inside the organism. You should never be afraid no matter how horrible the phenomena because they are only you. They are not other than you. You should not be frightened of losing yourself, even if the little individuated concept of yourself is disintegrated.”

Creation is any kind of circumscription that is imposed on a definite amount of substance. e.g. a sculptor creating a shape from a block of stone. But ‘voking’, whether ‘ evoking’ or ‘invoking’ or ‘provoking’, implies a pre-existing being. If we set up the idea of a triangle in our mind we will start to see triangles outside of ourselves. The triangles outside of us are ‘invoked’ by the one in our mind. We can reverse this by inserting the idea of a triangle into someone else’s mind and then setting up a triangle outside. The outer one will cause a response from the inner one. This is ‘evocation’. This is the idea behind the Pavlovian response. ‘Brainwashing’ uses the same mechanism. A man is put into a dark room and deprived of his familiar stimuli and eventually his mind will fall into a level of equilibration, as any closed system must, then a new idea can be inserted into him. 

Question: Can the expression, ‘Exaltation of the Will’ be more clearly understood by reference to Harmonics?

‘Exaltation of the Will’ implies lifting up the will to higher levels. Harmonics are the notes related to a given fundamental. If a string is subdivided, it will produce ‘upper partials’. The subdivisions are smaller than the fundamental and produce higher notes, but ‘harmonics’ refers to any notes that resonate with the original and can be below the fundamental. ‘Exaltation of the Will’ means transcending any particular thing that is occupying our attention by lifting it to higher levels. In music, the melodic line often occupies the top place because the mind of man is ‘phototaxic’, it moves towards the light. “There is an anti-gravity something in man and the gravity force represents to him bondage, inertia and death.” So very low notes are unattractive to the human ear but the higher notes can be also. The piccolo sounds at 2,700 cycles per second. Much above this frequency becomes painful to us. Nevertheless, within our range of hearing we prefer the higher notes. So too with our eyes, although we move towards the light, it can become too intense and painful. We live in a narrow band of frequencies; not just humans, but all organic life. To exalt the will, “we take out of a particular idea, which is really a partial of some fundamental, and we consider the ideas related to it.” Every idea has its own frequency and certain ideas relate harmoniously together, just like musical notes. The greatest musicians understood this and when we listen to them we feel it in ourselves. Similarly, the inventors of flight had to understand the aerofoil and the laws of nature which govern it. So to grow in power we must obey the law.  A smaller part of a string is like a little idea in the mind, and is related to the fundamental, the whole mind, in a certain way. To exalt the will is to turn it from the little idea to the fundamental idea of the individual, and then to the Universal, and then to the Absolute. The more we can “understand this law and obey it, the more we will rise above all the little laws that the big law controls.” 

The big law is the Absolute and inside us we have Immanent Spirit. Between the two is the action band. If we can place our awareness in Spirit then the lower vibrations of the action band cannot disturb us. All our problems are inside the action band, so if we identify with Spirit they do not exist. We can transcend any problem by breaking identification with whatever is in the action band, body and mind, and identifying instead with Spirit. “The cause of any problem is identification with the finite…There is no other problem.” We can see this because one man’s problem is not a problem to another man in the same situation. He gives the example of a reporter going to an earthquake scene to get a story. To the person trapped in the rubble the problem is very different and he does not see getting the story as a problem. The situation is the same but the two men do not identify in the same way. Each individual tends to identify with the ideas he already has. “The enemy is the continuous presentation of ideas with which you are already familiar.” To hear a new idea you have to reject an old one. Someone who is not feeling very well can be made to feel worse by being told they do not look well. i.e. the two ideas resonate. The words ‘well’, and ‘whole’ and ‘hale’ and ‘heal’ are all the same word. They mean to be linked to the source of power in oneself, which is Immanent Spirit. 

He suggests that we can think of Immanent Spirit as the ‘Garden of Eden’ of Genesis: the ‘fiery sword’ which keeps us from getting back into Eden. We have to constantly go to the perimeter of our being until “we become convinced that the game is not worth the candle..that it is really time to go back.” We have to exhaust the meaning of the perimeter stimulation, as did the Prodigal Son. It is no good cherry-picking the pleasant parts of the perimeter, we have to be wholehearted to get back to paradise. Nietzsche said, “If a man misses a step, it will never forgive him.” In the act of facing the step we transcend it. 

On the surface of our being, our perimeter, we may exhibit socially acceptable behaviour which is not altogether genuine. On the inside we may have a similar relationship with Immanent Spirit – our conscience. We show a facade to other people outside and a facade to Spirit inside. On the outside we may distrust other people. On the inside we make excuses to ourselves about our external behaviour. So we can experience isolation of two kinds. We may talk more about the external isolation, but the real problem is the isolation from Self. Between the two is the action band, the ‘angst’ of the ‘zorga’. “As long as the individual is identified as the reference point in consciousness then there must be anxiety and worry about one’s life.” We must become sincere on the inside, then the outside will follow. 

The contingent relation must necessarily be an isolating one since it is between two finites. Two finites cannot interpenetrate so physical intimacy cannot produce this. Penetration of one being by another can occur only at the psychic and spiritual levels of feeling and initiative. Material bodies are simply modalities of a field. If we identify with the Field and not the body we can then share intimacy. We are then ‘in love’. Love is a feeling. “That is the psychic level.” The spiritual level is higher than the psychic and refers to the form of the field. At this level “you become aware of the fundamental vibrations running through all beings as form, as idea…You intuit each other’s formal content…You intuit each other’s ideas…We are transmitting ideas, not through contingent physical relation but directly through the non-dual spirit.” So above the material level are the psychic, the feeling, and the spiritual one. It is these that have brought the bodies together because both are at a certain evolutionary level and need their next lesson. “So all the relationships at the physical level of beings are actually precipitated by spiritual form and felt in the zone of the body because the body is not fine enough to perceive immediately, the Spirit, they are felt as feeling inclinations that bring the two bodies together.”

Question about psychic law: there are easy periods and difficult ones. Should one struggle against the difficult periods or retire and observe how one is affected?

“The perimeter of a finite being is not just a continuous even line, it is a vibration.” It is a wavy line, and we go up and down in our mental state. We can be depressed and elated, usually cyclically. People who are cycloid in their moods do this. They become very elated and then very depressed. They go above and below to exactly the same height. In depression they can do nothing so suicides tend to occur as they are just starting to rise up again. It is why people often die during the night when energy levels are lowest. We cannot go lower than we can go higher above the median line, so the rule is to deliberately pull down on the elation so that it does not go too high. Then we cannot fall too low beneath the line. If we do this continually then we will stay very close to the median at all times. When a mother says, “Stop laughing now, you’ll be crying in a minute,” it is a very old rule derived from spiritual fact, “and the necessary behaviour of energy,” i.e. cyclic. Many people who have bouts of depression think these times are worth it because of the wonderful feelings they have and the creativity that comes with elation. e.g. Dostoevsky. What they do not realise is that the median line is not still, it is vibrating, it is spirit. It is a fine vibration that contains within it all of the big vibrations packed into a small portion of that line. Someone who is aware of this can anticipate the elation/depression cycles and has then the power to act freely and able to initiate without being determined by the elation/depression stimulus. Spirit cannot be elated or depressed: it is infinite and omnipresent. So elation and depression can only refer to the finite. Elation results from a stimulus pressing out and depression from a stimulus pressing in. The one from outside presses in and depresses our perimeter. Spirit presses back and we experience elation and the creativity of spirit that goes with it. We can attain these higher levels by not responding to the external stimulus.

The external stimulus pressing in and the Spirit pressing out produces a response like a sine wave. “If we take the median line and make ourselves perfectly still, we do not respond.” Instead, we expand our feeling. “You send your feeling beyond the limiting factor of the body of the other person…and you send your spirit, the formal content of the Field also…Your spirit enables you to understand formally what he is about and your feeling enables you to act on his feeling.” By spiritual and psychic identification with others we can disarm them from aggressing against us. “It is a psychic and spiritual judo.” 

“So we see that this is tremendously important to understand this spiritual and psychic transcendence of the physical relation. We know why these difficult periods exist simply because of the cyclic nature of existence itself. To exist is to be a circle of energy and every one of those circles is built in this pulsating manner and therefore there are ups and downs in it, with appearances of expansion and contraction in every being.”

“Let us consider the whole thing. The whole structure of the universe has, identical with the structure of any individual, and both illustrated by the elementary fact of circumscription, which encloses one area and excludes infinity, that the forces that go in cannot go to the dead centre, within the zone of Immanent Spirit. That between Immanent Spirit and Transcendent Spirit is the wheel of existence, the wheel of fortune, that the wheel of fortune has a vibrating perimeter and as the events on it go up and down, there are swings and roundabouts and whether you are on one or the other it makes no difference ultimately because you go through a definite number of swings and roundabouts and they exactly balance each other.”

We are now familiar with the idea of bio-rhythms, such as the menstrual cycle, but we also have rhythms of feeling and thought which are much finer. However, there are frequencies far higher than these and the highest and finest must be the Aleph, the fundamental frequency of the Absolute. We can therefore think of the Universe as light precipitated into gross matter. It is an immense number and variety of modulations of the Aleph carrier wave. The urge in man has to be lifted up, to change its phase and be raised to higher and higher frequencies until it becomes spiritual.

All through man’s evolution he has considered space but it is only in the last one thousand years that we have considered time. This corresponds with the discovery and introduction of music. Of all the arts, music is the only one that is concerned with time. When a note is played it sounds itself, but when we play notes together, or in a sequence, we hear sounds that are not from any individual note. This is because behind them is the fundamental Aleph “on which they all hang.” This is why music penetrates into us. It goes into the depths of our being unlike other art forms which rely on the eye and are relatively superficial. “So that when we hear music…our soul is stretched and compressed…and in this way we are led to become aware of our relationship with the Aleph frequency.” The reason we can feel “the dynamic movement of tones” is because the Aleph is vibrating underneath them all. 

All the great religions have used music in their services and he suggests that it is the removal of music which has led to their decline. Some of the most sublime music has been written specifically to affect the souls of the congregation. “Our organisms are…themselves harmonic complexes which are disequilibria of the Absolute…we exist as individuals only because we are in disequilibrium…and this has to be embraced…it is the meaning of the crucifixion.”

The Absolute is in perfect equilibrium, is seamless and dynamic. If we focus on any part of it we abstract from it only a portion and if we identify with that abstraction our disequilibrium is increased. Every time we identify with a finite our awareness of the Absolute is necessarily reduced to a much lower level. “Now our only way back is through music in its original sense…the whole harmonic structure of the Absolute.”

J.S. Bach is the best known Western musician who understood this and his music has affected philosophy. Somehow in Bach’s music there is significance that is not able to be put into words that correspond with the gross, material world. Words of value do not relate to gross, material space but to dynamism; they are to do with tensions. “Every moment of time is inducing a new tension situation,” and every tension must produce both stresses and strains. These are functions of time. Man has conquered the globe and completed his exploration of space. To extend this now into further exploration of space beyond the earth shows he “is suffering from inertia.”  Also, the exploration of ‘outer space’ is impossible for man unless he conquers time because the life-span of a man is too short to travel very far. So far, man has only considered this problem in terms of extending the human life-span but some philosophers are now beginning to explore the problem of time as something to be studied for itself. The past cannot be explored by thought and neither can the future. We exist only in the ‘now’ but the ‘now’ itself is non-existential. We can glimpse it in the “betweeness” of musical tones when our consciousness is aware of a motion between them. This we call ‘meaning’, and all good music has this characteristic.

Time is the essence of music. “If we can squeeze the moment of ‘now’ down to its infinitesimal, then the whole concept of time disappears and the ‘now’ becomes the doorway into eternality.” Music can carry our consciousness into meaning. Whereas the visual arts always refer to something other than themselves, as in a painting or a sculpture, “music does not point to anything whatever.” Music points the other way, away from the things of this world. It has nothing of gross matter in it.  In the stresses and strains that it sets up in us, music forces us “inwards and upwards towards that essential non-duality of Spirit.”  Music can create in us different emotional states, “and in the highest music, into psychic and spiritual significances that cannot be obtained in any other way.” The true realm of music is in the Infinite, Sentient Power Field. “Its motion is celestial music.”

It is by the condensation of this Field that all matter is created. The Field does this by the use of “time signatures” just as we find in music. It is the stress placed on the individual notes that gives us musical patterns and creates different emotional responses in us. This same grouping of impulses, “is the cause of the structure of crystals, the generation of the mineral world, the organic world, right up to the production of concepts.” Primary units of the Aleph frequency are grouped together into crystalline structures. Just as metronome time kills rhythm in music, a uniform pattern of impulses would not provide the variation we find in the natural world, “and yet, metronome time is underneath all the time.” It is by going slightly off-beat that the stress occurs. “And out of this come all the complex structures that you can see under a microscope…and out of these…comes organic life…and out of these comes patterns of the thought process…so that thought itself is essentially and fundamentally, harmonic geometry.” 

Behind all the primary grouping of impulses is the Aleph. Every individual being is such a grouping. In man, the individualisation has been stressed excessively, resulting in the ‘Fall’. To redeem ourselves we have to recognise this process and choose whether to continue our downward movement into the material world or to ‘repent’ and go the other way. “Every individual man is already a harmonic structure. He can please himself whether he tries to isolate himself, condense himself, lower his frequency, and thus blind himself to causative processes above him. Or whether to …elevate himself progressively towards Aleph level.” 

This is a matter of choice for every man but, “You cannot begin to want to do it until you’ve gone down far enough. The Prodigal can’t want to go home until he’s been feeding with the pigs long enough.” The point when this happens in an individual man’s life is the beginning of the journey back to his source.  “The fact you want to turn around is evidence you have been down…You cannot turn around until you have hit the bottom.” 

“And when you are brought to the level of impotence, when you know you are no good at the lower end, and not before, you stop striving. At the moment you stop striving there is an input of Spirit. But you can’t stop that striving until you’ve really blocked yourself. Your primary egotism will want to make a success from the bottom end. That’s a pre-condition of it. That’s another aspect of humility. Unless you realise, as a finite, you cannot do it. And you sit down in black despair, because you’ve tried your best, and failed, you cannot open yourself to Spirit, because egotism wants to do it from the bottom end.” 

Whenever we think of a thing or person we get a feeling of liking/disliking. This may be very vague, but as soon as we focus on it we have started to, “spin feeling into forming.” We have begun to define our feeling, to circumscribe it. We must continue to analyse the situation until we come down to “a formal fact.” We carry this analysis right to the limit and, “suddenly the fact breaks and  out flashes the light, right through the whole process and the result is understanding of the reason why this vague feeling was there.” This is the “magical process.” He draws the face of a man and asks the audience if they like the face or not. We should examine each part of it in turn and as we make this analysis we begin to see why we had a vague feeling of like/dislike. A very different face would produce very different responses. He then draws two triangles, one inverted. He adds arms and legs and heads and immediately we feel differently about them because the one with the broader base represents the female form, and the one with the broader width at the top, the male.  Triangles are simple forms from which all beings derive. “They predate humanity. They occur as primary vibrations in the substance…so they are associated in the depths of consciousness with primary experiences.” We should learn to analyse our feelings and our urges so that they become less vague. As the forms become clearer we can understand them better. When we analyse an urge we take power from it. If we take the sexual urge and ask ourselves, “what is the precise nature of this urge?” We find that we are attracted to various shapes: fat, thin, tall, short etc. then more specific – which particulars produce most response? Blonde, brunette, straight hair, curly hair, long hair, short hair, etc. Whatever is being willed, we should clarify it. This is causing the will to become idea and the idea to become empowered.

Exercise: We look at the hand – the visual image is the form, the idea. Now, we feel inside it. Feel the independence of the fingers. Feeling has generated this separateness of the fingers. Every new growth comes out of a bud – like a tree. From the embryo come buds, two of these become arms and then five little buds come on the end of each. “And all the time, the feeling to differentiate is pressing out.” The feeling, at first vague, produces a vague form and then gets a bud. Then it pushes further out and gets more differentiated as it goes. This process, at the subtle level, is idea, but becomes a gross body using the energy from the food supplied by the mother. “There is nothing in the gross body which is formed, which doesn’t precede the gross world – and is formulated by – the feeling.” When eating, we should notice the feeling, because the food being eaten will fuel that feeling and change the constitution of the body. There is more diversity in man than in any other animal. This means there is more spiritual energy in him. “Spirit always grows and as it grows it splits…It is always trying to differentiate all the time…Nevertheless, there is a bounding line.” Everything has a shape and all the shapes pre-existed vaguely in the Field. “and is simply sharpened up, becoming idea by compression, by the will applying itself to define.” 

Question: about the formation of habitual behaviour and the mechanics of the nervous system.

He restates this as: “how do we know, when we don’t know what we have already knit, what we should knit next?…The answer is that you don’t know, particularly, what you should do at all, but you do know generally and universally.” The nervous system is far too complex for us to interfere at the particular level, but we can get our “Universal propositions right and allow these to infiltrate.” If we put our governing concept in the centre of the fore-brain and keep re-stating it, it will release energies that will permeate through the nervous system and “sort it out.”  “This concept is the ‘leaven which leavens the whole loaf’.” The ‘whole loaf’ is the body. So to get out of false ideas, we do not spend time with the particulars but with the Universal. We can choose to identify with a finite, created being like the body, or the solar system, or the Universe – or with the true ‘I’, the One that made everything. “The fact of circumscription remains the same.” We can identify from within a finite being and passive to what happens, or active by identification with the Absolute. Awareness is a matter of degree: all gardeners are aware of solar forces but city dwellers may not be so aware. In ancient times, the priest-kings understood that the earth was not the centre of the Universe but taught the people the opposite. “This made people materialistic and geocentric and tied down their imagination to the earth.” We must choose to be active and not passive to every situation. ‘Seek first the Kingdom and all things will be added to you’…You must so engram the Universal on you that in every particular situation you see only the Universal. Then in any situation, without rehearsing, you have already got a measuring stick…Whatever you do, it must be a conscious decision if you are going to force this convergence of will and idea.” 

Question: of prayer and of personal contact with God.

Prayer to God means reduction of the interference from the external world of sense stimuli. “Any external stimulus whatever, hitting one of your five senses, turns the attention into the realm of the external, physical stimulus, and thereby lowers your vibration.” The top vibration is the Aleph frequency of the Absolute Godhead. Below that is the “Heh” frequency of the Macrocosmic God, “Khet” is the powerful man on earth – like Napoleon, “Kaf” is an intellectual working for the “Khet” man, and “Quoph” is “a funny fellow who talks out of the back of his head.”  ‘Quoph’ is the sexually-determined impulse that can interfere with our ‘Kaf’, our intellective power, that can interfere with out “Khet”, our will to power over others. “If you cut out these three interferences, then there remains this very fine frequency of God in you, and you are then in contact…That frequency is there all the time but it gets obscured by these three other frequencies imposed upon it.” As we grow older we pass through various phases: At puberty, the ‘Quoph’ stimulus is so strong that meditation on God is almost impossible. After a while, a boy might go to university and become an intellectual and become a ‘Kaf’ man. Later, he may go on to seek power over ‘mere intellectuals’, go into business and/or politics, and become a ‘Khet’ man. This level is the hardest to deal with because of the energy required to subdue it. The sexual stimulus is the easiest because the urge tends to wane as we grow older and always immediately after expression. The intellective stimulus disappears during sleep, but it is difficult to control the mind when awake. Nevertheless, “You cannot adequately pray to God unless you can stop these three…it just won’t go there because it is just a matter of frequency.” If any human wishes to have power over others and yet ignores the Universal, then that man is showing his ignorance. “The Universal Being has all the other beings under its control.” If we can  clear the interferences then we can relate to God because at our centre we are one with Him in Spirit. God is Spirit, and Spirit, “blows where it lists,” and the individual has no control over it. To get to the Aleph pressure we must go through the ‘Heh’ pressure. “No man comes to the Father except through me.” Until we become aware of the Christ Logos, we cannot become aware of the Transcendent beyond it, the Absolute.

So, “In dealing with the nervous system we must not try to deal with particulars, because we cannot possibly know what particulars require attention…if you try to interfere with any particular habit…you will cause counterbalancing activities in the rest of the organism.” For instance, a drug can treat a symptom but if the cause is not treated then the symptom will appear somewhere else. “Most people, with a materialistic training, actually do not believe that their bodies are shot through with cosmic frequencies of intelligences higher than their own.” Christ says, “Pray believing.” i.e. believe you have already received. “You believe and you start a process.” This happens immediately. So in praying to God we have to cut off the external interference from the sexual impulse, the intellective impulse, and the will to power over others. The Cosmic Consciousness lies behind them. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man will open I will come in and sup with him.” So if we believe, we open the door and immediately, the flow starts. Materialists who do not believe in God, are entirely ignorant of the power passing through them. “If you do not believe in a being higher than yourself, and that being exists, then you are passive to its influence over you…your only defence against Universal Truth is to assimilate it, otherwise it will push you about…If you assimilate it then it cannot disturb you.”

Every idea has around it a feeling but every idea is complex and therefore the feeling around it must be also. The complexity is that there are a number of likings/dislikings around every idea. We have to analyse the idea until we reduce it to a simple ‘Yes/No’. Therefore, we should adopt a control concept which will condition the liking/disliking pattern to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to every lesser idea. The Cross in the Circle, the concept of the Cosmic Christ, is the best. “When it is properly understood, it will save, salve, wash away, all the faulty patterns.” We can set up that master concept in the head until it determines activity. “When it does so, it will sort out the nervous system and when it does it will guarantee that any prayer and contact with the Universal is substantiated, made real, and produce results.” “That concept has been passed down from the Macrocosmic Self, from God, passed down through a long line of traditions until we receive it.”  The ‘Khet’ man with the will to power has an erroneous concept to dominate others. He is being driven by phallic energy. The concept he has is fed from all others outside. The concept of the Cosmic Christ defeats all external ones. “Watch all situations that you get into and deliberately verbalise, “who is being active? Who is being passive? and at what level? Urgefully, emotionally, rationally, “Talk to yourself in that way until you get an ‘organ of thought’ working for you.” “The other fellow will not know what you are doing.” If he has the will to dominate he is very insensitive and cannot possibly become aware of your internal processes.”

The will to dominate is very powerful and as we increase in understanding it can strengthen. We have to add ‘Mercy’ to it in order to go beyond it. We must not dominate others, even when we can.

The adoption of the master concept does not kill off all other ideas – it just sends them to their proper place. Nothing is destroyed. If our top concept is erroneous then we are completely governed by it, e.g. the will to power.

Question: Why do the interferences of this world seem so much stronger and can overlay..,?

“Every created being is a power that has contracted in order to create itself. So there is a drift into the centre of power from the Absolute…but once it has gone into the centre, it must express itself. So from the individual point of view, the natural flow of energy is to extrovert…it must flow outwards   otherwise it is not going to get the experience; and that outward flow is what brings it into contact with the interference…But when it can turn back from the zone of interference, it has gained reflexive self-consciousness.” “Mercy is that power which lifts you out of a situation…and lets you integrate. It takes you out of the ‘strain’ of existence and releases you from the mechanics of it.” “It is called Mercy because the person lifted out did not deserve it. It is not Merit on his part. He was lifted out by somebody already outside. So unless there is somebody on the outside then there is no mercy. Now we know there is Mercy Absolute because the Absolute cannot be circumscribed, and therefore we know that there is Absolute Mercy. It will lift us ultimately right out of the microcosmic field in consciousness, out of the machinery of existence.”

All philosophies and ancient religions see the universe as a tree, coming from a primary seed, and differentiating as it grows in all directions. As with everything, there is a dual aspect to this: as we go along the branches to the twigs we are increasing the number of alternatives (choices) but also getting further from the base. We should return to base periodically to see what is the root choice that we have made. Christ said, “Except the seed falls to the ground and die, it abides alone.” To ‘die’ is to divide. So we must ‘die’ in order to live, we must divide in order to increase value. (Die, Dio, Dieu, all mean God.) “The best divider is the vibrator.” Inside us we have a nuclear centre already differentiated by genetic inheritance. Around it is a tension band that keeps the nucleus separate from the outside protoplasm. Inside that nucleus is the psyche, or soul. Between the nucleus and the perimeter of the protoplasm, is our body which, like all protoplasm, has the quality called ‘irritability’. (The double ‘R’ tells us this has to do with vibration.) This is the ability to vibrate and to retain the impressions of the vibration and is therefore the basis of memory. The protoplasm has a level of limitation. When a stimulus comes in, the ripples spread through it and are reflected back to their point of origin. If the amount of energy coming in becomes too great or too rapid then the protoplasm cannot assimilate them quickly enough. There are now motions coming in and going out, and at some point, the protoplasm will break down. We can destroy a body simply by vibrating it. This can be done with radio waves but it can also happen with ideas. Every concept in the  mind has within it a number of percepts. Many percepts which are similar in some way will form themselves into a concept. A concept is “a highly differentiated zone of patterned energy,” and because it is a finite it has a definite limit to the amount of energy it can assimilate. A good logician could make us feel very uncomfortable by inserting an idea which unbalances our pet idea. That is, if we are identified with the idea then we are in passive relation to the incoming energy and we will suffer. We should learn to do this! to expose our most cherished ideas to an attacker. We should start by writing it down and then analyse it logically. “This is a function of the letter ‘R’ and you are going to differentiate it.” (He gives the example of a pet idea that somewhere in the world is our ‘other half’ waiting for us to come together.) Every being is a hermaphrodite; all beings are whole beings. “The ground of being is not…that you are half a being, looking for your other half. It is a state that you are a whole being looking for your other half. You have been super-stressed on one aspect of your being and it is your duty to find the other aspect inside yourself.” We are all spirit. We have substantiated ourselves, taken on a body as male or female. We are all the same essentially, and there is no reason why we should relate to A rather then B. The relating factor is free-will, and not shape of nose, legs, etc. “Your first duty is to marry the spirit and substance of your own being.” Everyone who has ever got married is “up a gum tree.” What we should do is perfect the relation between the poles of our own being before we enter into a relation with someone else. Otherwise we may well find, “the misery of an incomplete and unsatisfactory relation.” Any pet idea we have, we should dare to expose, “because if you don’t, you are not growing up.” Any cherished concept must be wrong because it is super-stressed and therefore finite and, “there can be no question of a finite super-stress allowing a complete and totally harmonious relation.” There can be no absolutely good idea. The Absolute is non-dual which means that God and the Devil are two mutually defining concepts. “If you remove the Devil you have dispensed with the God as you have defined Him.” “This means absolute, total acceptance of all things whatever.” ( He quotes Jacob Boehme: “The worst is as good as the best.”) 

The original motion patterns of the Infinite, occurring in all directions simultaneously and intersecting, produced the “Absolute Light” which some mystics have experienced. This was also chaos. This Infinite Power, “operating infinitely in all directions, adds up to nescience, to not knowing, to nothing.” There is no order in it. To create order, the “limiting factor” of circumscription was needed. This is the Universe, the Logos, the Son of God. Prior to creation, The God, “which no man has seen,” the Father, was an absolute potential of all possibilities. With creation came ‘the word’, the one-ly begotten, one-ly generated. This is the Logos, the second God, God the Son, and the only God which can be an object for a worshipper. “And that God Himself worships God, not as an object, namely His Father, who is no object at all…He worships Him by being Himself…Christ worships God by daring to be Christ.” The Absolute has willed for Itself an orderly structure and the only way It can do it is by being Itself as the “Super-order.” “Therefore the rule follows that every derivative being praises God only when it is truly itself…To praise God, to worship God, means to personally raise oneself to one’s optimum.” It is our duty to discover who we really are, “and having discovered it, to insist on being it…to do other than that and to allow anything whatever to interfere with it is called adultery. Adultery means adding to a being that which is not proper to that being.” When Christ says that a man who looks at a woman with desire is committing adultery, this is what He means. He is not being himself: he has gone off-centre, thinking that she can add something to him that he needs. It has nothing to do with the physical sex act. His adultery is in thinking that he needs something external to himself. A true hermit can be in the world because his hermitage is everywhere. Conversely, a monk in the cloister, may be thinking about what is going on outside the walls. A being knows only the motions of its own substance, so if we were absolutely pure, we would not know that we were pure! “All the adulterating elements inside us are good for us because they remind us of our potential purity and cause us to keep it as a value.” If we have purity, we don’t know until we lose it, “until it is spoiled, spotted.” Awareness of the spots forces us back into purity. (The Chinese symbol of Tai Chi is the white with a black spot and black with a white spot to remind us of this.) This is in Isaiah and all statements about the Messiah. “this most perfect being was ‘despised and rejected by men’.” (Had He appeared in all His splendour He would have been ‘mobbed’ by fans in the way that pop stars are today.) To avoid all this and keep Himself pure, He presents Himself as an ordinary man so that He can be “despised and rejected.”

When we use the letter ‘R’ we are differentiating, analysing something to bits. “In so doing, we are striking at the root of any concept whatever, and we shall feel uncomfortable.” But, “The function of our relation with other beings is to differentiate very carefully so that we know where other peoples’ tender spots are, in order to avoid doing to them precisely that which we are trying to do to ourselves.” “That is the real value of the understanding that the letter ‘R’ means power to differentiate and therefore to rule.” “One can only rule oneself when one accepts the total differentiation of all the possibilities of one’s own being. Every being is ultimately a sphere and therefore the absolute potentialities of all beings are identical. Therefore, you can afford to analyse yourself completely and not bother with anybody else because you have a complete universe inside yourself, which means quite literally that you never need to see another human being ever again.”

“If we like we can all go away to separate desert islands and carry on there using nothing other than a little vibrator and we will sort ourselves out much more efficiently in less time than we are likely to do mixing with other people and waiting for them to stimulate us in the way we would like to be stimulated in order to improve.”     

Below Free Spirit and Logos “we descend into contingent form,” which is governed by only statistical laws, ones that can change, such as ideas. At the next level down is desire, pushing us towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant. This level too is determined, though not so mechanically as the level of ideas above it. We see this clearly in animals but also in plants, where the roots move towards the moisture and the leaves towards the light. The demarcation line between the vegetable and mineral worlds is the “line of death.” The mineral world is inert, unable to develop from inside itself. It is ‘dome’ without the ‘free’. Above that line there is increasing freedom as we move up the levels to that of the Logos faculty in the cosmic-minded man. (He suggests making a diagram to register our level of interest in different subjects: e.g. if we have no interest in physics and science then we are apathetic (not feeling). We are on the line between the living and the dead, and “the dead get buried by the living…Wherever you don’t know something you are passive to a being who does.” The basic rule is: “Either you learn to push yourself about or you will be pushed about by another being…there is no middle course in this world.” We can use this diagram for all subjects. Most people are ‘dead’ in most subjects! We tend to find excuses for this..”haven’t had time”…”don’t see the relevance” etc. 

We may draw a line between animal and man but there is overlap; some animals use primitive tools and have a small vocabulary of sounds. However, above the empirical man we can draw a very important line. Below this line every being is dependant on stimuli. The mineral, vegetable, animal and empirical man levels all require external stimuli to make them move. The empirical man “is no better than the billiard ball, he is just more complicated.” However, the cosmic man can contemplate the necessary relations of all things. He does not need external stimuli. (He suggests lying down in a dark room and becoming very aware. We will hear sounds and see images, feel sensations, all from inside ourselves, with no external stimulation. We can be reminded of our ancestry, and not just the human part.) “If you want to know what happens at the necessary level, you must study the necessary laws of motion.” Motion is either open or closed, translating like that of the Absolute or closed in rotation. When motion is translating it cannot make anything and it is unspotted, immaculate. The Absolute, being sentient, knows this and knows that it can have no value. When the motion closed upon itself, “It found for itself an object but restricted the amount of force involved in the closure…This is the beginning of dialectics; if you do a thing you will simultaneously do the opposite.” (eg the politician, seeking power, will also get the responsibility that goes with it.) As we move up the levels from mineral to cosmic we gain more power but we also gain more responsibility. More freedom=more power=more responsibility. 

Each level is passive to the ones above: the mineral to all the higher levels, the vegetable to the four above, the animal to the three above, empirical man to cosmic man and the Absolute, and the cosmic man to the Absolute only. In the same way, each level is active to the ones below. Although raising the level increases responsibility, not raising it increases passivity and slavery to other beings on the way up. “Either you stay at the bottom and let everybody kick you about or you climb up…At every level there is warfare. Only the Absolute runs through the lot and supports them all.”

He suggests that Eastern religion is guilty of bad logic: Sages and saints who have attained the level of the Absolute have become disinterested in the finite and therefore passive to the empirical men from the West who overthrew and subjected them. The aim should be to become a cosmic being, one step below the Absolute “the first finited being, the necessary logical being.” At that level. “the feeling for searching for something is fulfilled…you then feel quite happy with necessary truths, with necessary laws of motion.” “God is in His Heaven and all’s right with the world,’ because all motions of the world are necessary.” The empirical man goes under the law of accident, he does not know enough, he does not know the necessary laws of motion and therefore has no security…So he runs about rapidly, piling up data in the attempt to get that security.” 

Below him we come to the pursuit of pleasure level, that of the animal (the average man on a Saturday night!) At the next level desire disappears and you wait for something to happen, like a vegetable. Below this is the catatonic state where a being becomes unresponsive to stimuli, like a stone. “All these states exist inside us.” The empirical man can be knocked into any one of the lower levels by a stimulus hitting him. The difference between him and an animal is due to his vocabulary but he is still driven by stimuli from his sense data. Necessary knowledge means all the things we are supposed to know about, such as the laws of motion. In mechanics it is about stresses and strains, in electronics it is about electro-magnetic fields, waveforms, frequencies and radiation. In psychology this would mean knowing the laws which govern feeling states of the soul. “When you have all your subjects raised to the level of the necessary, all you have to do is throw them all away, enter into the Absolute and become unspotted.” 

The Absolute has produced the Universe by involving Itself and passing out again. “When the energy comes in, the fact of it turning round creates necessarily…a rotation of motion which cannot stop, cannot go to the dead centre.” The incoming energy cannot reach it. It can drive in only so far then it has to come out again. The energy piles in, packs itself very tightly, then shoots out again. “The part that is winding in is female, the part that is shooting out is male…this means that every being is a hermaphrodite…and therefore the state of woman is prior to the state of man.” (Every child starts off as a female in utero.)The Absolute translating power is male, the rotation is female. Power, once gained, is never abandoned. The aggressiveness of the male will not be given up to become passive. The passivity of the female, however, makes her determined to take in energy and increase her power. “Every being is pursuing self-determination …this is a necessary motion of the Absolute.” Finite centres can never overthrow it. “It continuously moves into centres formed, piles them with energy to shoot out fresh energies…to make new beings, each unique.” There are no beings in the whole universe that are identical. “Every being is peculiarly itself in its peculiar configuration and therefore is absolutely justified by the Absolute in existing in and for its own development…And from the relations of all these unique beings, the whole process of universal evolution is enhanced and made more valuable.”

If something is needed it must be necessary. i.e. it must have an essence. If we consider a saw blade, the essence of the cutting edge is that it is toothed. The essence of the upper edge is that it is plain. If we think of value, then we are thinking of getting something out of it. For instance, the value of a pencil is that it can make marks on paper; this capacity is in its substance. To discover value, we must evaluate, and we can do so only if we have two of something. If the saw has no teeth it is useless. “Remove all differences whatever, and the whole universe has disappeared.” So to evaluate requires duality, so we can call the toothed edge of the saw the Lucifer side,or the intellectual side. This is the side of value. The plain edge we might call sentiency or field-awareness, but it has no differences and therefore no value.

He draws another circle with Immanent Spirit at the centre, then the idling zone, the zone of body and mind, and, at the perimeter, teeth, as on a circular saw. These teeth are the ‘fer’ in Lucifer. ‘Luci’ = light and ‘fer = fire. The ‘Luci’ is the same as Immanent Spirit. “This is the great secret about the Devil: that the Devil and God are fundamentally identical.” From the central Immanent Spirit arises the light which radiates (Luci). The teeth are the ‘fer’, or friction, the zone where another touches it. “So really, Lucifer refers to the whole process.” “Between the light and the fire, consciousness and energy, the universe itself rotates.” Another name for the Devil is ‘Beelzebub’, which means ‘Lord of the Flies.’ All of the petty irritations along the saw teeth are called ‘flies’. The Devil is the lord of these because he is the lord of every kind of stimulation on our perimeter. Another of the Devil’s titles is ‘Satan’. This ’S’ means the serpent, the ’T’ the cross on which he’s fixed, and the continuity principle ’N’. “He is the ‘self-crucified one, because he does it on himself.” The Devil was defined, historically, to keep people in order, by church and by state, to control them. In the Eighteenth century it was written ‘Divel’, as the Irish still say it. ‘Div’ is God, and ‘el’ is God. The ‘div’ is also to ‘divide’; the toothed side of our perimeter. “So the Devil/Divel is God.”

To see value, we must see differences, and we can only do this against a background of sameness. This sameness is the underlying potential in all of us. Outside of this is the actual. The actuality is on the outside and the potential is on the inside. We take some of our potentials and actualise them. This results in further stimuli coming to us which we take in and stow inside our potential until we want to use them. We can see the same logical relation between the two edges of the saw blade: without the continuous metal between them, neither could exist. So both are two aspects of the same substance, the plain side without value, the toothed side having value, and “we see those values against this plain background.” We need a plain background to see the differences (as with the camouflage colouring of animals). So what we call value rests on a fundamental sameness, the substantial ground, and an actual differentiation, which is the value that we seek. It does not matter if we call it Satan, or Devil or any other name, “We are talking always about this sameness of the universe, our source, and the differential side of our nature that makes it possible to have a conversation…there is no conversation in the continuous.”

“The whole world is in the grip of the Devil.” ‘Created’ means ‘locked-up’. (the ‘kra’ root is the same as ‘arc’.) “The universe is a modal operation inside Absolute Sentiency.” Its essential attributes are: Being (sat) Awareness (chit) Motion (ananda- a serpent running). “You cannot remove one.” 

When we draw a circle, we enclose a portion of the Absolute, Sentient Power. What is inside the circle still has the same three qualities. What is now inside (Immanent Spirit), is aware of its perimeter, is aware of the finite, is aware of what is beyond the perimeter. The Transcendent Spirit is aware of the finite inside Itself. Every person (pira-son) has these same three qualities. “The physical universe is a system of resistances inside an awareness being.” ie it is a person. Christ-Logos, the universal being, is both God and Devil to all opinionated, orthodox system makers, because he breaks them down – after building them up for the time they are useful. When the Roman Empire fell, there was no authority to replace it, so Augustine, “a tremendously ambitious and powerful man, intelligent and ambitious – Luci and Fer,” began to define the ‘City of God.’ The Church became valid, as a unifying principle, and remained so until other centres were sufficiently organised to oppose it, but, ‘The Spirit bloweth where it listeth’, and “So it blew into Luther and Henry.” (VIII). “The Spirit blows into a form and animates it, and then it leaves it.” The whole universe is both God and the Devil. “It’s the God, the Good, the Supreme Good, to all beings who are prepared to let go of a thing when its utility is finished. It is the Devil to all the people who want to hang on to a thing when its time has gone.” People who are autonomous don’t go to church, “they are a church.” Each one of us is “a temple.” Every man who fully understands the meaning of the Cross in the Circle is himself “a priest.” 

When it says, ‘God is not mocked’ it means that “every little finite being is inside this infinite ocean of awareness…if you do something it doesn’t like, you can’t win…it just shuffles you into your next lesson….there’s nowhere you can move to negatively…without precipitating yourself into an equivalent lesson.” This is the meaning of ‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap’. We have to penetrate to the meaning of words. We think either in words or in visual images but both are forms in the mind. The letters and words we use were originally drawings of actual objects. The aspirate letter H is the symbol of breath. “In the universe, the most subtle is the most important, and the most gross is the least important, for intelligent people. And for unintelligent people, the opposite.” (Eg the breath in the body is far more important to our being alive than a thighbone.) Yet most people are focused on the gross, material world, rather than the more subtle, finer energies behind it.

He then goes on to tell the story of Socrates and the challenge he presented to the Greek state. Also, the story of Joseph in Egypt. Joseph is still one of the chief study figures, “if you do a history of economy..because he actually fabricated the whole system of land stealing, coinage fabrication.” The talk then shifts to an analysis of the ideas of Carl Jung. He presents a diagram he has prepared showing Jung’s analysis of the psyche. (This is excellently represented in the transcript.) He explains the terms Jung used and points out the mistakes that Jung made, eg the ego-centre: “Jung didn’t realise…it isn’t the same thing for two minutes together, because it is only a complex of ideas which change all the time.” Also, the ‘individual’ in Jung’s diagram: “really, this is the truly individuated, immortal body round that Immanent Spirit…and that is the body that has to be perfected.” The ego does not know about this one, “so you’re preparing an immortal body, very often unconsciously.”

The rest of the talk is given to questions covering many topics: Insanity, Anger, Self-Honesty, Hypnotic Suggestion, Abstract and Biological time, Ancestral Perception, Reincarnation, Sleep, Forms of Power, The symbolism of the Planets, The Atomic Scale. Necessity of Concrete Thinking:

“The whole mind has been educated, deliberately, that you cannot think except in abstract terms…when you think truly, concretely and absolutely, then there is no external authority for you…because you’ve got that same light – the light that lights every man that comes into the world – and is equally valid in everyone. To release us from this conditioning process we need real, concrete thinking. The concrete whole is a continuum…simultaneous…there is merely a shift of attention.”

Question: Is not self-development more important than making children?

“It is the duty of a human being to understand itself.” A human being is a sphinx: which has the wings of an eagle (intellect), the body partly of bull, (reproductive capacity) and of a lion, (courage, the heart,) and the face of a man. These are the four beasts of the Apocalypse and the four symbols of the gospels put together in one being. It is a man who has these three parts. We have to understand these four aspects of ourselves and bring them into consciousness so that we can manipulate them properly. If we can do this then we are better equipped to breed and raise children, so the question is mistaken: the two possibilities are not either/or. If we want to breed good children we have to develop ourselves. If we do so, we are better equipped to produce better children.

Question: Are the sexes coming together and is there more transgender occurring?

 Yes! and it always was! These are not modern problems, it’s just that the publication of it goes in cycles. Homosexuality and transgender issues were there in the Ancient world. Also, before the Renaissance, and “it is not confined to the human being. This problem is found in the animal world…and in the plant world.” No two finites can be equal in all respects: some men are more feminine than others and some women more masculine. Every being is polarised in itself. Every being is a hermaphrodite. Every being initially is masculine because the ‘b’ of binding creates a form, a circumscription, a soul. Yet, it is passive to any new stimuli entering and therefore female to it. The awareness of itself is female but the perception of form within it is male. Prior to any external stimulus, each being has wisdom. The Sophic sphere is the total form of a being which, prior to the disturbance of its equilibrium by an external stimulus, is in perfect balance. No form is more important than any other. When an external stimulus comes in, its character causes a resonance within that sphere such that some forms resonate with it more than others. This causes the appearance of knowledge, a super-stress which separates some formal element of the wisdom. “Wisdom is the total formal content of a soul, and knowledge is any formal portion of that, super-stressed in such a way that it stands out from the rest of it.” All souls are female to God because Infinite Spirit cannot be excluded from anywhere. Therefore, there cannot exist a being which is not conditioned by God. All finites are brought to be by Infinity and are subjected to its motions throughout the whole of their existence.

Question: Does woman have double the work of man to do?

“Yes, of course she does.” Because he is already full of form and she isn’t. (Theoretically.) In fact, most women today are nearly as fully formed as men, and many far more so, which means that a lot of men are relatively female to them, especially in the West. Women in some Eastern countries are still relatively unformulated compared to their menfolk. But in the West women have caught up and often overtaken the men. “The whole question of sexual polarity must be considered as relative.” “Women do not have to do double the work of men, they have to do exactly the same.”

Question: Does the initial Spirit absorb a character, dependent upon the time-life of the form? Does the Absolute absorb the initial Spirit as a separate entity?

“There is no possibility whatever of any form ever coming into existence, except that that form already eternally exists…all forms are going on inside it, eternally.” The Absolute is pure dynamism and all forms are “in perfect equilibrium, mutually interpenetrating and yet perfectly defined, each one being uniquely itself and yet the whole thing held in a seamless power.” Each form “represents no more than a tremulation of a seamless Absolute…the limiting factor is simply the zone of tremulation…But there never was an eternity when these did not exist…there are plenty of times when they do not exist”. e.g. William the Conqueror does not exist in time any more. “But William was in eternity, is now in eternity,” and was super-stressed in the time-process. “Now this is the whole secret behind the proper understanding of incarnation, reincarnation, resurrection, ascension, and so on.” Whenever a super-stress is put on an eternal form, it comes out of equilibrium, out of eternity, out of Heaven, and falls out of its context. Every individual human being is so super-stressed on coming into the contingent world. “But what has been super-stressed is an eternal, unique being.” 

Question: What happens at the death of the form of man? Does the complicated Spirit return to the Transcendent to become form again?

“We as existent beings, by the fact of our existence, evidence super-stress…that super-stress has brought us out from the background of the eternal, equilibrated wisdom and made us stand out.” “In the Absolute… although all beings are unique, they do not know it.” Existence creates value. The super-stressing of an individual is a fall, a pall, a covering on the eternal relation and the generation of time for that individual.  At the death of the body, the super-stress is taken off and the being lapses back into the Absolute, but with a memory of its existence in the time-process. “It is now aware that although it is a member of the ‘seamless garment’ …it is nevertheless, uniquely itself…and can make an individual contribution…raising the level of values within this Field.” But, “all these values are in and of the Absolute…and therefore what is said about the emergence of values in the individual, is not other than the value of the Absolute in, for, and of Itself.” 

Question: Does the initial Spirit absorb a character dependent upon the time-life of the form? 

In eternity we do not suffer. In existence, we necessarily do so because of all other beings and the stimuli from them. In eternity we are transparent, in existence we are opaque and are “groaning and travailing to be delivered from vanity.” At the existent level of the super-stress, “every man is for himself.” If we can re-find our eternal equilibrium. “we shall consider ourselves saved, salvated, washed free of the individuating, super-stress factors.” Baptism symbolises this re-immersion into the “Infinite Ocean of the Seamless Absolute.”

Question: Does the Absolute absorb the initial Spirit as a separate entity?

Buddha refused to answer questions about life after death as “not edifying.” Probably this was because the level of understanding of his disciples was such that his answer would have been misunderstood. But “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” This voice has gone unheard by those of the ‘Southern School’ of Buddhism, as it has been by the Greek Stoics, who considered ‘the people’ as too sentimental, not sufficiently rational. We see the same attitude in some modern philosophers who consider that those who do not rationalise are inferior. They consider that reason is the “sum total of reality,” but, “the ‘L’ in ‘Real’ signifies the seamless garment, and when we are feeling instead of rationalising, we are one with that seamless being.” We have a feeling inside us that “is a deep awareness of a non-rational unity, something beyond reason.” People have prayed to this for help. “Now feeling always seeks an object.” It is feminine relative to the masculine rationalising, which creates the ‘opacity’ referred to previously. By praying to the Absolute, the people opened themselves to it, “and a stimulus came in and a non-rational thing occurred in them which they called a product of faith.” The rational powers, governments of all kinds, have always tried to stop this faith and have tried providing the objects that the people could worship e.g. the Romans “borrowed gods from all over the world…so that people would orientate around them, and thus the state would not totter.” However, the objects that the people were given did not work. Over the last 2000 years we have seen the persecution of the faithful and the setting up of finite gods; communism is an obvious one. “The biggest object we’ve got in the world today is probably the concept of the welfare state.” Through satisfying man’s material needs he can be treated merely as a physical and mental being…”and by so doing they can circumscribe him within the state.” The state is the enemy, the Leviathan, the whale that swallowed Jonah, the Beast of the Revelation. “That is the thing that Christ is absolutely against, the finiting of Spirit…the holding within that defined system, of beings that essentially belong in Infinity.” “We can see then a great fight going on between powers of eternity and powers of time. The time powers are always circumscribing, time is a rotation system, and they are always trying to establish and constrict all the sub-rotations, or individual beings within, to stop those beings transcending the position at which they stand.”

Today, the priests are the scientists who are the ones who know what is really good for us. Governments make use of them to further their own interests. In Revelation there is a reference to ‘brands on the forehead and on the hand’, i.e. to thinking and working to the time-process. When you do this (only) “then you are a subject of the Beast and Chronos-Saturn is devouring you.” In the face of the death of your physical body, “having thrown away the concept of your eternality you will have nothing.” Materialists, such as Marxists, have tried to pretend to human beings that there is no other god but evolving time. “Now this is called the ‘Big Lie’. And it is called the ‘Old Serpent’ because the time-process is helical.” All spinning things are worming their way through Infinite space, “And this whole process of helical progression …is severing itself from the eternal seamlessness.” However, “after a certain number of revolutions of the time-process, knowledge adds up to wisdom…and when that happens then suddenly the time-process is finished.” Revelation says: ‘there will be time no more’. “And instead there will be a becoming conscious again, a re-awakening to the eternal identity of all beings within this seamless whole.” “When we are pursuing ‘resec’ we are bending back into eternity out of the the time-process.” “Every time you act from an external stimulus you are under the dominion of the Beast…because your action is being dictated to you …from another being…but if you go into your own centre, you are free from time…and from that centre you can release energies from eternity into the time-process.” 

Comment: If you release energies from inside yourself, you are an enemy of the state.

“Every being is an enemy of the state, the static, as soon as you become dynamic.” The Church, established by the state, is the ‘left arm’ of the Beast. “You can’t afford to have temporal expediency and at the same time, eternal values.”  Christ said, ‘If you are at war with yourself in that way, how can your house stand?’ If we know that ‘His worship is perfect freedom’, we cannot identify with a state which contradicts this.

“Remember, Spirit is the highest frequency and the most powerful force there is, whereas gross matter is very low level, very long wave, low frequency stuff, inertic. The victory is bound to go ultimately to Spirit because Spirit has the power. But that same eternity has released this worm for a time, times and a half-time, in order to fulfil this separation, out of consciousnesses in the Absolute equilibrium, not to increase abstractly the perfection of the Absolute, for that is impossible, but to confer a benefit upon the individuals within the Absolute who do not know of that perfection consciously until they have been precipitated into the time-process and then rescued from it again.”

(He refers to a picture he has.) In the Ancient world, humans were often depicted with animal heads to represent certain ideas. In the picture there is a goddess, Ma’at, the goddess of justice. The root ‘ma’ is of ‘man’ and also ‘to measure’. ‘M’ is the substance and ‘a’ is the activity of that substance. If we want to measure or count something, we have to measure or count its activity. When substance acts it does so in waves of vibration and so we have to count these waves. If we draw two waves, the crests of which are co-incident, we say they are ‘identical’. The ‘dent’ in identity means ‘tooth’, and if each one of those teeth corresponds with another tooth then we can say they are identical.  So if we take a form in the mind and another in the world and they correspond exactly, we can say there is an identification between them. Justice requires a balance and this involves weighing two things. In order to weigh something we have to count and we cannot do so unless there is form. Ma’at is an androgyne with a stress on the female i.e. the will dominates the form. The ‘t’ in her name represents the principle of the  ‘bound’ but also of balance. “Ma’at is the very principle of substantial activity measuring itself, and this, properly understood, means that you are your own executioner…Every time you open your mouth you put your foot in it, means every time you formulate you have to take the consequences of the formulation.” 

The goddess is shown weighing the soul of man in her scales. On one side is a human heart and in the other pan is a feather. The heart of man is our feeling centre, the part where we cannot deceive ourselves. It is the place of our deepest motive, if we dare to look at it. The Greek word for mind, ‘phren’ referred to the chest, heart and lungs. It is here where our judgement is. It is where we say ‘yes’ and ’no’, ‘I like it/I don’t like it’. The kind of judgement that is in the head is simply elementary arithmetic: 1=1 is simply a statement of equivalence but preference belongs in the heart region. When we look inside ourselves at our likes and dislikes we can easily be mistaken. We have to refine our feelings so that the slightest pressure on either side of the scales of liking/disliking is felt. “If we want to become absolutely conscious, we must become more and more sensitive in the feeling.” If we sit next to someone who is feeling agitated, we can feel their agitation, because their energy field is vibrating and ours will vibrate in the same way. “This is the basis of all mediumship, the increase of sensitivity.” If we feel very carefully, we can feel the air moving around our body. Even if there are no draughts, the heat of the body will cause movements in the air around us, and we can become aware of this. This increase is sensitivity is essential if we are to take control of our lives. 

We are all responsible for what happens to us and we determine our own destiny or fate. “Destiny is where you are going to from within, and fate is what happens to you from without, but fate and destiny are like the obverse and reverse of a coin. If you weren’t going somewhere from within, nothing could happen to you from without, because it’s the going from within that exposes you in definite situations.” 

He asks the audience if they feel happy or not with 1=1. The responses are inconclusive. He says we cannot have an idea without a corresponding feeling. “Because an idea is a precipitate within a field and the awareness of that field is feeling. Field consciousness is feeling.” We have to refine our feeling and become more sensitive. He then changes the equation to 1 white man = 1 black man. Again, how do we feel about it? He changes it again to 1 Hindu = 1 Chinese. The black/white equation has more significance. This is to do with identification. “Black men a short time ago made a lot of money for Liverpool by being slaves.” This kind of emotional knowledge is underneath our general awareness and conditions us. 

The emotional value of words is important because they condition our destiny and our fate. We know that our peripheral vision is better at detecting slight movements than if we look at something directly, and in the same way, we have to become aware of the slight, vague feelings we have about word forms and turn the full force of our logic onto them to discover why we are caught by them. We know that the words ‘law’, ‘lie’, and ‘lay’ are all from the same root. As soon as we regard something as static, as fixed, we know it cannot be true. “The essential qualities of the Absolute are dynamic…The idea of static is the idea of two forces in opposition, pinning something for a time.” So there can be no security in any formulated concept. He suggests we should test our feeling reactions to words and to anything we see in people, such as face-shapes. “Try to find out your reaction in feeling to it.” “If you feel very very finely, you will be able to define accurately what you’re feeling…this is judging yourself with a feather.” And we must remember that, “Every established definition that you have is going to hit back at the substance and commit you to some situation.” 

He draws an eye: “Here’s the point looking at you, and the edge of it is sensitive to moving things and the centre of it to static things…all the moving ones here are very difficult to see with the middle part. And that middle part is like your conscious, logical mind. And the rest of it, the edge of it, is like the so-called unconscious mind, which is nevertheless reacting to things on the perimeter of consciousness.” We cannot think without a form, and we cannot judge a form without liking or disliking it. (He draws a vertical line and then a horizontal one and asks the audience how they feel about them.) The vertical gives us a better feeling than the horizontal because of association. “When we are vertical, we are generally awake…when we are horizontal we are …off guard.” There is an insecurity in lying down. We are more vulnerable. The vertical feels more dignified. If we put the two lines together and make a cross, the feeling we get is very different. If we look at two lines crossing, the eye is always drawn to the intersection point. Similarly, we tend to focus on our body rather then the much more expanded spirit. “Every spirit seeks a body,” the Infinite is preferring to objectify its own capacities. “So an Infinite potential becomes a finite actual.” Out of the millions of likings and dislikings we have we are conditioning our own substance to respond to stimuli in a definite manner. We have to feel these things in order to be able to evaluate our own inner motive. “So that the fate of the soul, the fate of the owner of that feeling, is determined by the increase of sensitivity.”

(There now follows a lengthy section on the significance of the symbols in the picture he is using.) 

He now does an exercise in sensitivity with a volunteer, to stand and face each person in turn, to move to the right or left, according to the feeling coming up inside. “This feeling is infallible.” “Inside the body of every human being there is a feeling centre…which is the true genius.” He then asks him to feel the attitudes of the others towards him. “The body is very, very wise.” Nietzsche called it “Body Wisdom.” “The body is very, very old…The egg which became your body is as old as the Universe itself.” “The formal content of that egg…existed in Eternity as an original form – called ‘your original face’.”  “When a feeling comes up you must trust it…if you distrust it you will interfere with it,” and you will kill it. 

“So the pre-condition of calling upon this inner genius, this which is resident in the heart, which is being evaluated with the feather, is to increase the sensitivity…and the only way…is by moving the body and feeling inside little inclinations…in different parts of the body, and in the body as a whole. The body is very, very ancient. The forms in the body, hidden in the germ plasm, are tremendously ancient. They go right beyond time into Eternity, and they are seeking expression now, in every one of us.”

No two finite beings can be identical in energy content or character, so in any given field, each being is superior to another being. We can observe that different individuals have different functional values, as with the hammer and the screwdriver, but we should not think that any particular value is more important than any other. We can observe that values are relative and that some things work more efficiently than others, but we don’t want them to be more valuable than they already are. We must leave it to the Macrocosmic Self to stress each being as it intends to. If we attach ourselves to some things then, necessarily, we are detaching ourselves from some other things. “You cannot make a particular friend without making a particular enemy of all the things that are incompatible with that thing…all things to all men “ cannot attach itself to any particular.  

Love is work to develop the potentialities of a being. However, we must be careful how this is approached. Sometimes we may observe someone who we think we can help by raising their awareness level. This could be coming from a standpoint of attachment to what we think should be done to help. We see this where parents force their children through exams by ‘cramming’. This may not be in the child’s best interests. Any individual idea of success is unlikely to be co-incident with the Macrocosmic aim for that child. 

Another kind of attachment is the attachment of value to an object by the observer. This can be done both from an individual standpoint and from a cosmic one. (He gives the example of a runaway child being caught by a social worker and about to be taken into a ‘home for wandering boys’ when a being, more aware of cosmic intentions, whispers into the boy’s ear and he runs away again. These are very different. The first is operating from social values, the second from cosmic ones. Both are modes of attachment. The second is absolutely justified and the first only relatively justified. A young child has nothing yet to resist incoming concepts and so must accept them. This is the reason for Christ’s warning about anyone abusing a child should have “a millstone around his neck and be cast into the depths.” We cannot know the cosmic intention for any being, and a child is especially vulnerable to our mistaken ones.

Jesus, in the Thomas Gospel, says, “Be ye passers by.” This is a reference to the time-world. Boehme says something similar: Inside we have a serpent, Boehme calls it ‘the old worm’,or ‘worm bag’, (the gullet). It has a hole at each end and a rippling movement passes food through. This rippling, passing matter through, is like the time-process. We enter, grow, assimilate energies, grow in understanding, and then pass from it again. So we can draw a parallel between the digestive process of the body and the time-process. And this is another kind of attachment; “the attachment of a being to itself.” He uses this idea of in-taking and out-throwing to explain the creation of the arteries and veins in the body. “All the hollows in the body…are zones of fear, fear of being caught.” “The forces in the body start flying out from a thing they don’t like, and that is an attempt to de-tach from an undesirable.”

He then says, “Let’s take a personal angle.” A man who is evolving will, at some point, wonder if he should stay attached in the marital relation, because he will discover that the stimulus to marry and have children was not, after all, his individual choice but the forces of reproduction working through him. He thinks he has a duty to his wife but, if he is honest with himself, he will know that, as he is thinking of leaving her, from the corner of his eye he has seen another one, he thinks more suited to his emerging state. He gives an example from Anatole France of a monk who decides to rescue a beautiful prostitute but arrives too late and she is already in her coffin. He grabs her body and the nuns chase him away. “Really, he was attached to two things at once; the idea of saving things for Spirit and the idea of putting his name on the one that was worth saving.” 

Idea and initiative are male and the feeling and the want are female. A man must never expect idea/initiative from the female, (or from the female side of himself). He must never expect reason. He must never expect logic. (This is the Tacit Conspiracy) A woman can, of course, give him a reason, but it is always a reason she has borrowed from another man – ex-boyfriends, father, grandfather etc. This is why a woman is never wrong: her reasons are from other men and no two men can ever agree. No man will give way to another.

If a man becomes free, he will have to use his initiative, or nothing will happen. He will have to penetrate beyond the sense organs, through the common sense, and into the pure intellect. The individuality, the ego consciousness, is a construct caused by messages from the five senses and the energies of the Logos. We know that the lower mind, the manas, is mechanical, but at our centre, is the Immanent Spirit, the free. “And nothing can constrain the free to act at all…either it acts from itself or it will not act.” The man who attains this must now behave as if he is attached, even though he knows he isn’t. “This is what the Bhagavad Gita is about: how to behave as if you have attached yourself when in fact you haven’t.” Every time you see something that needs doing, your Logos will tell you how best to do it. When you achieve freedom you must do something with it or you will just vegetate.

Question about group work: “If we don’t work individually, we cannot do so collectively.” To grow individually, we have to kill the egoic self. However, as Gurdjieff found, we must have something to “dig in” in order to evolve. “All the body is really food for our nuclear intelligence.” We need opposition to challenge us. “When we have been shaken enough, then, from the centre, will occur a reaction.” Our centre of Immanent Spirit must shine into every aspect of us, “then that which is outside starts corrupting.” When we have destroyed the attachments inside ourselves then we will have sufficient awareness of the work to be able to see how our work overlaps with that of others.

Question about taste: There is ‘good taste’, such as we see in social conventions, but there is better taste,- to do with cosmic law. This is the ability to assimilate the behaviour of all societies. “Best taste is when you are free. Because then you know exactly what Spirit calls ‘taste’.”

Question about harmony: “again, a question of individual assimilation.” The thing is to be able to assimilate more and more, “until you can assimilate the totality of all possible sounds…when discords can be played at the right level of intensity, they are exactly right and delightful…It’s the totality of those discords, at their proper intensities, that constitutes that wonderful fundamental… the discord is salt on the dinner…but you don’t want too much, and it must be at the right intensity.”

Serial thinking takes time and, the more information there is to consider, the longer it takes. So our reaction time is always behind the fact. We all say and do things which we later regret. This is because sometimes a stimulus comes in and runs down into the appetite centres “which are more immediate than the intellective ones.” (These develop in the baby before the intellect.) We know that if somebody shouts suddenly we tend to jump out of the way without thinking about it. But as soon as we begin to think about something, we interfere with it. (He gives the example of trying to think of the movements involved in going down the stairs whilst doing it. You will fall.) “The organism can respond immediately, from field-awareness…and the stimulus comes frequently through the Field.” So our analysis of a situation must always lag behind the actual situation. To overcome this we have to remember the governing concept: ‘The Observer is not the observed’. Spirit is Power and Sentiency…”its action, its embodiment, and its awareness, are not separate”…these are the three aspects of the Trinity of Christianity and the Three Bodies of Buddhism. However, Spirit can know nothing other than Itself, so If It does nothing, It can know nothing. When It moves, It experiences moving. If we take the paper as this Power and roll it up then any experiences on the paper are now ‘involved’. This ‘involved’ state, the ‘in-willed’ state, is what is meant by the word ‘same’, which means, in German, ‘seed’. (S – Spirit, A-energy, M-substantialising itself, E-in a Field. If we flatten the paper and write on it A-B-C, and then roll it up so that each letter is on a different turn of the paper, then we can see that what appears serially on the flat paper is now rolled up and immediately felt by the paper as involved. If we now flatten the paper again, the Field is evolved. We can do the same thing by folding the paper backwards and forwards. This ‘complicates’ it. (‘complication’ means ‘with folds’.) To make it simple (same-ply) we flatten the paper again. “So we can experience, simultaneously, different levels of being, and by ‘levels of being’ we mean these ‘folds’ of being, by simply learning to focus through the Field, instead of being dictated to by a contingent, external stimulus.” 

(He draws two circles) These represent two beings with their perimeters in contact. Each is therefore a stimulus to the other. This stimulus energy, if focused upon, causes an externalisation of consciousness to the perimeter of the being. This part of the being has no understanding whatever. At the point of contact, the two beings are in the least possible contact and so the physical relation, “is the least possible kind of relation for any two beings.” The Immanent Spirit is coming from the centre of each being but it is progressively veiled by the disturbance from the perimeter the closer it gets to that perimeter. “If you go into your centre, the contingent stimulus cannot touch you at all.” Just outside the band of Immanent Spirit the stimulus can be felt, though much diminished. At some point there is a band between the two at which they are equal in strength. Below this band the Spirit is victorious and above it, the stimulus is winning. In the outer band above it, we can place the 5 senses. Where Spirit balances the power from outside, “there is a zone where the contingent stimuli of the five senses can be observed and drawn into relation with Spirit’s creative movement. This is the zone where an artist stands when he is controlling his pencil or paintbrush.” If he is focused on the underside of the band he is being creative, but if not, then he is simply copying. 

In our social relations there will be occasions when what is coming up from our centre is not acceptable to someone on the outside. It will be deemed, by them, to be anti-social. So everything inside us that is creative can be repressed  by the energies of social concepts we have adopted. As we go inside, we are less and less serial and more and more simultaneous in our awareness. However, we should not make the mistake of some mystics who have withdrawn inside and forgotten about the physical body. We should be absolutely aware and not just internally aware. This analysis goes deeper than orthodox psychology. The ‘subconscious’ does not deal with Spirit spreading out and being stopped by social consciousness. It is really just the biological forces of the individual meeting with the social ones – and both are in the outer band. “The whole of the Freudian analysis is based on 5 sense data. Carl Jung allowed that there is another zone, deeper than the individual, that he calls the ‘collective unconscious’, but this is still only from the ancestors of the individual and is therefore still biological.” Jung saw that individual protoplasm was the same as that handed down from the ancestors from his dream analysis, but he did not see behind this, “the fact of the essential creativity of the Absolute” 

The serial process is always behind the reaction time. We see this very clearly as a man ages and his reaction times are getting slower and, at some point, he stops driving because he is becoming dangerous to himself and to others. How to break it: ‘The Observer is not the observed’. “The paper is not the waving of the paper.” If we identify with the paper we can be still, even though it is moving, but if we identify with the motion we cannot keep still. “If I wave the paper… Watch the edge of the paper waving and you can become identified with the motion. Now take it off the edge – which is a definition- and put it onto the paper again. The movement is now peripheral. You are aware that it is moving but you are not identified with it, therefore you are free from it.” So we can identify with the paper when it is moving, without identifying with the motion. We can be aware of the motion without it determining our activities. The paper is the Sentient Power, the motions we observe, as the created universe, are simply motions of it. 

He now asks the audience to do an exercise. They are to wave their hand in the air, slowly at first, and then faster, and watch the sensations in the mind while trying to follow it. Then to shift attention from the movement to the feeling of the hand. The movement now lapses from consciousness but the feeling of the hand remains. We can feel the hand and we are not confused by the motion, but if we focus on the motion and forget the hand, we become confused. In the same way, if we focus on Sentient Power then no matter how furiously Its motions vibrate we are not confused. If we focus on the motions we become dizzy. In waving the hand, we do not get any more information by following its motions, we get less, because we get confused. Sentient Power “will always do better than the confused individual will do with the same data.” To get free from serial thought we say, ‘the observer is not the observed’. The paper is not the motion of the paper, but the motion is of the paper. We have to identify with Sentient Power and not its motions. “We break identification with the motion but the motion does not, thereby cease.” The attempt to make it cease is a mistake: to flatten the waves in the mind simply produces stupor. If we still the five sense mind we will become aware that Spirit is still creating, because its essential nature is motion. “We feel its motions but we know that they are not motions of contingent stimuli.” The paper can wave or not wave: the difference is in the word ‘not’. A piece of string going along can be seen as non-creative. But if it makes knots as it goes then it is being creative. If there are ‘knots’ in us, these are negations of Spirit rotating at that point. If we identify with the knot we forget the power that tied it. “the slave is the master self-enslaved.” The paper can feel its waving more than its paperness, or its paperness more than its waving. If the latter, the man is a sage. If the former, it is an ordinary man. “For that is the only difference.” “To feel the ‘paperness’ is to be Field-conscious throughout.” To look at the edge is to serialise consciousness “and to bind oneself with the form of the presentation, and forget one’s own Sentient Power.”

Question: about inhibiting a stimulus and its continuance.

If we try to inhibit our reaction to a stimulus we are still identified with it. We have to become transparent so that any stimuli pass right through. If we remember, ‘the observer is not the observed’, we will not bother to inhibit but, instead dissociate, and allow the energy of the stimulus to go right through. If we are identified with the paper, why care about the motion? When a man insults us, he is not really insulting us, because he knows nothing about us. The motion coming from him is just a motion of the paper. “We have to remember that it is the Absolute operating through other people that is the source of our insults and other stimuli.”  All causation is of the Absolute. “The individual, as such, can do nothing…Once that is fully grasped you cannot be insulted.” “The paper is insulting everybody.” Why? in order to break identification. “ “We never attribute causal power to another being.”

Every time we do this we are an-alys-ing the zone and creating more free space. This space is the ground of clairvoyance, telepathy and magic. The being is considered insane because he is unintegrated and acting through the individual zones within himself. “But in relation to the space that he has discovered in himself, he is literally, super-conscious.” If he could shift the focus of his consciousness and Will into the space between, then “the unintegrated idea-complexes would begin to find their own places by resonance,” and he could have a spontaneous cure. He would experience what yogis are seeking, by sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, contemplation, “the free space which constitutes his absolute, essential being and the ground of his freedom.”

He describes the case of the schizophrene who coined the terms in the title. This man thought there were two kinds of beings: those who were pushed about, ‘things’ by others, more powerful, ‘operators’. This man heard voices telling him to do things which he knew were not his own.In relation to those voices he was a ‘thing’. When he was able to break free of an idea  complex and identify with the free space, he would say things which, because he was labelled ‘insane’ were taken as evidence of this. If we analyse our internal content and go on cutting into it, we reduce it to smaller and smaller bits and eventually to energy quanta, which can then disperse into the Field. “Carried to its ultimate term this would lead to Absolute consciousness…The people who have had the greatest experiences of cosmic consciousness have frequently been defined as psychopaths, or as schizophrenes.” People who see visions are usually prescribed medication of some kind.

Question: “Using logical terms of reference, can one find, in one word, a subject and a predicate?”

“Yes.  As soon as you’ve defined a word you’ve necessarily found a subject and a predicate.  ‘Word’ means ‘a power ordering’,” W=power, (subject), ORD = ordering, (predicate). If we don’t know the meaning of a word we are passive to it; we would be a ‘thing’ and not an ‘operator’. The name ‘Jesus’ is said to be ‘the most excellent name’ because it signifies saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ simultaneously, the affirmation of a negation. The word ‘man’ means to evaluate: MA= to measure, N= the motion, the continuance of the measurement. He measures by naming, (‘nam’ is the reverse of ‘man’.) Man must have a measure of length, weight and time. He must name things to apply his measures to. The word ‘right’, as used in the New Testament, means ‘being’. “A being is right when it is being itself.” The right of a stone is simply to be where it lies. The right of a plant is to grow from that stone, to absorb it and to push out. “The right of an animal is to run about. The right of a man is to evaluate. The right of a human is to become aware of his power and reflexively conscious. And the right of a divine being is to become cosmically aware…These are the orders. They are different levels of being.” Without the correct term we cannot move up from the level of being imposed on us.  Without words we could remember very little. Before we had language, any frightening thing would have to be repeated to arouse fear in us, for example, an earthquake. Without words we could only be frightened by situations identical with ones that frightened us before. But with words we can make associations in the mind without an external stimulus i.e. the memory of the earthquake, can now frighten us. We can even be afraid of things that don’t exist by giving them scary names, such as ‘vampire’. Pavlov demonstrated such conditioning with his dogs and men generally are “bundles of conditioned reflexes.” If incoming stimuli contain just one element that reminds us of a previous, painful situation then we will react as to the original, painful stimulus. This is the ground of all propaganda, religious injunctions, state orders etc. Without words, none of this would be possible. “Insofar as a man has not got all his vocabulary adequately defined, he is passive to the effects of that vocabulary on his being.”  If “we are inadequate in our definition, then our response is deficient.” 

A man, although more evolved than the stone, the plant and the animal, is still enslaved by the mechanical processes in him called ‘counting.’ “Now a human is supposed to break out of this slavery…He must not only evaluate, he must get control of his own will…He must be able to drive himself towards a painful thing, away from a pleasant thing.” He is not fully human until he can do this all the time. “When the counting becomes a means of expression of the will we can call it human.” To do this, we have to break inertias in us. ‘Inertia’ means affirmation (ia) of the work (ert) in being. The energy quanta in a stone go round and round, existing without change. “The change from ‘inertia’ to ‘exertia’ requires the appearance of consciousness.” We cannot change inertia until we recognise it,  “as a will working at some point.” If we find inertia in us then it is because we have willed it. “There is no inertia…other than the working of the pre-established will… ‘I am mine own executioner’.” i.e. I have willed myself into this condition. We can only become conscious of this by our vocabulary. Machines can count, like man, but they do not know what they are doing. To be reflexively capable of interfering with this process is the first step to becoming human. Once we realise that the serial mind is the problem, then we begin to awaken. “If you don’t know how stupid it is then you won’t try to stop it.” The frequent repetition of ‘I’ and ‘my’ shows us its mechanicality. When we say ‘I’, we should think of it as ‘eye’, the observing consciousness. “When you say ‘I’ to signify pure consciousness in this way, then you transcend the limitations of your name.” Our name is an impedance. When we categorise and force an identity on people, we reduce them to the level of machines, we dehumanise them. Governments do this all the time, and there is a modern trend towards cybernetics, the human use of human beings. “But all of this depends on vocabulary…without an adequate system of symbols, you cannot manipulate your own reactions, and so symbology is the key to the whole thing.”  One of the chief methods of propaganda is the use of synonyms to divert us. They give us a term which is equivalent to another term – “only it isn’t.” “Those who know the name-forms are, in effect, duping the rest by the misuse of vocabulary. So we cannot too strongly stress the need for a continuous return to the dictionary.”

He takes an old example of the use of vocabulary – the division of the human race into goats and sheep (operators and things.) Sheep are flock animals, goats are independently-minded. (They ‘go-at’ things). ‘The body can never be saved, the Self was never lost’. The gross body cannot be saved but the Self is pure consciousness and cannot be destroyed. The sheep is identified with the flock, the goat is not. “There’s nothing but identification differentiating man into sheep and goats.” The body is a sheep, the will is a goat, that is, we are non-dual. “That which is is a sheep-goat.” This is shown in Christ, “who is the scapegoat and the sacrificial lamb.” “The objective world cannot move unless the Field moves it. So the external, objective world is a sheep, but looks like a goat, whereas the invisible Field, that nobody can feel at all…which feels harmless as a lamb, is, in actual fact, the goat that is pushing everything about.” We see this polarity very clearly in the male/female. Absolute Power, the Field, is female, but considered as formal behaviour, it is male. Yet the behaviour is only an effect of the Field. But, “there are no ideas that are not powers, and no powers that are not forms…so all existential beings are male/female.” Inside every man is a woman, and inside every woman is a man.

If we have two cog wheels that fit together then the teeth of one will fit into the spaces between the teeth of the other. “Again, this is a polar relation…the attraction of similars is the attraction of similar shapes but of positive and negative values.” i.e. one tooth, positive, sticks into a space, negative. So as long as the pitch of the teeth is the same for both cog wheels then they mesh together.

When an undulation starts in the Field, then from that point radial forces will issue. Such a force, male, “is carving in the Field an appropriate shape for itself.” The Field could, of course, inhibit this motion, because the Field is all there is. But if it does so then only turbulence would result. The Field can enjoy two kinds of motion simultaneously: a finite thrust within itself and a finite penetration. “So from the male point of view, there is a delight in ability to push and a terrible, basic fear that one might be absorbed by the Field into which one is pushing.” The female has a similar dual experience: delight in the sensation of being penetrated but fearful that it might not be able to contain what is being put in. “We have taken the opposite concept from the geometrical fact of the circle and the sphere and we have now applied it metaphorically to any kind of relation in which there is formal identity, plus the idea that one is giving and the other is taking.”

Formal identity comes from the visual sense: a form is anything which can be circumscribed. When we see an object we are aware of its edges. Our other senses do not have this sharpness of definition. “You cannot smell the edge of the perfume of a rose.” Similarly, we cannot taste or hear  the edges of things and the sense of touch “gives you only resistances, in varying degrees…when you press against something you have no sensation of a circumscribing line.” So our sense of form, of idea, of shape is a visual one. As such, it is two-dimensional only; It has no depth. Three dimensions needs both a visual image and a memory of the pressure of touch. When we feel into the body we have a general sensitivity in all directions. “It is not two-dimensional, it is three-dimensional, but edgeless…the edge comes from the eye.” Ideas, being only two-dimensional, are not aware of feeling or of drive. Christ said, “Not by taking thought can you add an inch to your stature.” That is, manipulating ideas cannot move us forward. To evolve we need motivation and this comes from the will not the idea. But we cannot will unless first we feel. “First you feel, and then you mobilise the feeling, and this is will.”

Will is primary drive and can be traced back to a Persian word ‘mughli’, from which we get ‘magic’ and ‘image’, also ‘magus’, who is a magician. He is a man who can activate his substantial power, his appetite, and precipitate that appetite into the gross world. “His appetite is his field of awareness.” This appetite is the ‘universal wolf’ of Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’. “Belly power is the ground of it all…the heart centre is the centre of the Field, but the belly is the centre of mobilisation of the Field.” ‘M’ represents the substance of all reality, the Sentient Field. Matter is a modality of this Field. This fits well with Einstein’s ‘Unifield Theory’, which states that matter is simply the condensation zone of lines of force. “Where there are many lines close together, that is a gross, material object, and where the forces are attenuated, that is so-called space.” So there is a polarisation between the Field and the point of condensation. This point is simply a contraction of the Field in that place. “So there is no centre inside a human being until he concentrates his Field energy.” This is why a woman tends less to formulation than a man. The sperm is a thousand times smaller than the egg in the woman, yet has the same amount of energy in it, condensed to mobilise it. The woman is the recipient Field and so is infinite. The man is finited “in order to become formed, and he is formulated in order to stimulate the Field.” (He suggests an exercise: The men are to lie down and relax and imagine the body spreading outwards to contain the room, the town, the country, the earth, the solar system, the sidereal system, the Universe, and beyond. “You can feel what it means to be extended, to be in strain waiting for a stress… to come and animate the Field.” The women are to concentrate very hard in the space between the eyebrows, “and you try to force your consciousness onto a point…and to stay there without moving…when you do so you experience what it is like to be a pure male.” Between these two extremes, there is a continuous flow of polarising energies, to the centre and away to the perimeter, then back to centre. “The more we can become aware of the opposition in the Infinite Field and the finite, static point, the greater the degree of mobility appears in the Field…this is the same thing as creativity.”

When we think of the Logos we can imagine this continuous flow of energies from perimeter to centre and back, “bringing to be the sphere of form.” This is the Sophic Sphere in which all forms are simultaneously presented. If we could stand back and see the whole sphere we would see its geometry but when we are inside it we focus on one of the lines going from the centre to the perimeter and then, “You have finited your awareness to a line of serially presented forms. And this line is time.” By widening our awareness we become wiser, “And when you can hold the whole sphere of formal possibilities simultaneously, then you are wise cosmically and your work is finished.” Again there is a polarisation of Eternity and time. If we can become aware of the law of polarity we can generate within us the power of the imagination. “It means the power to formulate living tissue to become the objectified image of one’s own ideal.” i.e. we have the power to become the kind of being that we idealise. The ‘ideal’ is the idea that works for us. “If you embody this ideal,  

by making the body act as if it were so, then the body becomes characterised by the form of the ideal, and the being then becomes such a being as he has willed to become.” “The fact is that you are precipitated into existence unfinished, and you may become anything…And as the physical body is constrained into the form of the ideal, so it becomes substantially exactly what that ideal is.” The errors we have made constitute our own, individual character. But, if assimilated, they have a great value. We are all prodigals, but if we go consciously towards any experience, “determined to characterise yourself in the process,” we cannot fail. If our aim is to get experience, “then you will certainly get it.”

The Absolute, Sentient Power has two aspects: Sentiency, (awareness, feelingness) and Power, (cause of motion.) These are polarised and cannot be telescoped into one. We can concentrate upon our feeling and upon our power. “We can mobilise the power without feeling, without sensitivity, crudely, cruelly, if we want to. We can also increase our sensitivity without increasing our power. “It is no use for us to increase our sensitivity to the Absolute level unless we have the power to do something about it…The power without the sensitivity would also be useless, because it would be utterly crude, unaware of what it was doing…So we have to say that sentiency and power are the polarised aspects of the Absolute, both of which must be developed simultaneously if either is to reach its optimal value.” 

Each generation inherits the problems created by their parents. The protoplasm that created the environment is now the child of the parents who created it. So there can be no injustice. The very tissue that is now suffering the situation is the same tissue that caused it. We can all sit down quietly and decide which of the competing ideas in us we choose to follow. If we are confused then it can only be because there is pleasure in remaining so. Something in our environment of confusion is keeping us there. We vacillate from moment to moment. But we still have choice. If we calm the mind and feel for a direction, we will find it. 

‘Man’ means ‘evaluator’ and clearly, some men are more efficient than others. Blake saw a man in a grain of sand i.e. a definite amount of sentient substance. We can agree with him because even a grain of sand will respond differently to different stimuli – heat, pressure etc. So there is no-thing in the Universe that we cannot call a man. Nothing is absolutely, inanimate matter, “Because the Absolute is Power-Sentience.” The tiniest thing is Sentient Power. “Any point of evaluation is ‘man’, but ‘Human’ is more.” H-Spirit, U-urging, Man-being.  Apes are not human. They do not have an awareness of spirit operating in them. To be ‘humane’ is something more again. It means to have an awareness of the unity of all men. The word ‘humanity’ feels warmer than mankind’. The ‘H’ letter gives pleasure e.g. ‘home’, ‘hume’. There is “a sonic resonance in you which produces a certain feeling. Human is warmer than man.” 

Good and Evil: God commanded Adam not to choose between Good and Evil. But we have done so ever since. We have become dualists. Theologians have always had a problem accounting for evil. ‘Evil’ is the reverse of ‘live’. If we define live as all those things we like and evil all those things we do not like, then we are repeating the mistake Adam made. We have to defend the good from the evil and this is the cause of all conflict between people. But the Absolute is not dual. All those 

things we do not like are included in it. “So the attempt to segregate the ‘good’ is the first step towards death, towards immobility, and finite block.” Yet all of this comes out of the mistake made by Adam and continuing through the protoplasm of each succeeding generation, “a degeneration.”  (We can imagine this as a triangle going down from Adam, his descendants becoming more and more numerous.) “under the domination of Cain, it’s being analysed and broken up.” This analytical process must reach its term.  As the collapse proceeds, some men become aware of this process – the prophets. They prophesy that the elements analysed out in the Fall will be brought together again and precipitate at the end of the process in the ‘last Adam’ – the Christ. Paul saw his own analysis to destroy the Christian concept reach its term – and then saw the process inverting itself, in the incarnation of the Messiah. From Christ we see another triangle coming in, “a growth of individual responsibility, the overthrow of tribal inertias, and so on…and the spreading out again, slowly through the centuries, the master concepts made clear in the incarnation.” Now, every man can become reflexively self-conscious.

Question: about planetary influences and the Zodiac.

“The real influence on the human being…is all the constituent motions from all parts of the solar system…and it isn’t the material body (of the planet) as such, that is giving the influence, but the Field that has precipitated that body that is giving the influence…It’s the whole Field that influences us, but the planets can actually tell us where the centre of agitation is at any given moment.” We are presently in the process of learning how to control the influence of the planets, and may, in the future, be controlling them – by space exploration and conquest. When Christ appeared, the complete subordination to traditional paths had paralysed everyone. The analysis had reached its term and he provided a new synthesis. “Is it not written, ye are Gods?” i.e. you must now act from your own, individual centres. 

Question:  Is it the accumulation of negativity in men that produces the negative results from 

incestuous relations which didn’t occur in the Adam, commencement  of the system?

“Shortly,Yes.” If a being does not seize the initiative it is shaped by external influences. These are always negative because they convince the inner centre that it has no power over them. When a painful stimulus comes in, the organism contracts to try to isolate the pain. This zone of pain lapses into unconsciousness. We mostly do not know what we have excluded, because it is painful, we don’t want to know. After a number of such stimuli have been “walled off” in the body, then the being has “ a totally false conception of its own character.” If these zones are removed then the being becomes aware again that it has power over them – it regains unific control. As long as we have zones of pain we dare not look at, we are heading towards schizophrenia. When these zones are released they are often very noisy. “And the only enemy, really, is this negative…the imposition from outside, of something we did not want to accept.  And we did not want to accept it because Adam did not want to accept it.  And he is the original protoplasm still persisting in our being…and still not liking painful situations.” 

The talk ends with questions about Hercules slaying his wife and two sons, and how this relates to the Eve/Cain relationship. Eugene’s answer ties in the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ of Babylonia, the prodigal son, the Ramayana, the twelve disciples, and the mythic stresses of nations!

He draws diagrams to represent the Fallen man and the Unfallen man. In the Unfallen man, the horns represent both Jupiter and Saturn, the inherent duality of the Absolute, and are placed above, meaning the man is aware of the dialectical opposition inherent in existence. His wholeness is in his feeling, “and down below on the body, he knows that he is pinned, crucified.” This is the sign of Mercury. The Fallen man is crucified in the head, because he thinks his ideas are valid, that things are either A, or not A. “He doesn’t know that they are both and neither.” So his horns are below and symbolise the generative aspect. In the Unfallen man, the forces enter into the body and then pass back to Infinity. But in the fallen man, “the forces always come from the earth, through the sexual nature, through the emotions, up to the head, and condition the thoughts by the chemical stimuli from the generative organs.” Most of this stimuli from below is ancestral. The man who is fed from below in this way is on the “path of the ancestors,” the ‘pitriyana’. The man who knows he is fed from Infinity, is on the “path of the sun, the suryana, “the way of the free being.” The Unfallen man is unlikely to become ill, though he can “stick his neck out,” like Christ, and be got at, but he is in control of the situation. However, the Fallen man can become ill in three ways: from the urge, from the feeling, and from the head. The urge from below, in its pure form, (not possible) will never become ill unless it is stopped. In a wild, primitive state, it would never become ill, but simply tired. It will go on until it tires and then carry on after a rest. Without thought or feeling to interfere with the urge, the only thing that could stop it would have to come from outside. So if another being stops him he will “get mad” and hit out. And because there is no thought he will simply keep on hitting out. He says that epilepsy is caused in this way, by the thwarting of energies coming up from below. In the case of an existential being, the blockage mostly comes from inside. The prime urge is not interested in pleasure or pain. (The sexual urge is already pleasure/pain, the two are inseparable, a dialectical experience of the Absolute.) “What it is interested in is energy expenditure. And it doesn’t care to what length it goes to get that.” But in the emotional centre there can be an attempt to inhibit the urge when it becomes painful. The result can be an emotional outburst, draining off some of the urge energy. The result can be screams of delight or horror; as we see in babies and young children. There is also the possibility of the intellect centre inhibiting the urge, without the feeling centre being involved. A man who has forced down his feelings to near zero will have memories of previous urges and his reactions. The result can be fantasy. Again, this is an abstraction. Most existential beings have three parts, not two. An energy in the urge department is the primary cause of trouble “because the person with no urges at all isn’t very troublesome to other people.” So an actual person will have urges, feelings of liking/disliking, and ideas in the head about them. In general, women will tend to have problems in the belly, because this is the centre most stressed, while a man will tend to have problems in the head and nervous system. 

To value something is to put a stress on it. When we do this we concentrate energies on that zone and cut down the free flow of forces there – causing poor circulation. One of the chief diseases in humans is constipation. This is the primary urge grabbing onto a situation in a reflex manner. The free flow of energies is blocked and the result can be auto-intoxication of the body in many ways. Similarly, hypochondriacs worry about feeling not well and contract, cutting down the free circulation of energies. Often this is the result of covetousness. So the Saturnine contraction is the cause of all physical problems.

All the form in us is derived from the form seekers in our ancestry, on the male side. All the ideas we have at birth are from the male ancestors, on both parents’ sides. Our wilfulness and feeling are from our mother’s female ancestors. So there are diseases of the egg and diseases of the sperm. One end of the body is concerned with absorption, the other with form. Form is collected from the five senses and stored in the brain which produces chemical changes which affect the sperms produced throughout a man’s life. A baby girl is born with every egg already inside her but a man only starts producing sperms at puberty. He continuously makes new ones and the chemistry of them depends on his evolutionary level, the amount of experience he has. The children of men who are older tend to be more serious than the children of younger men, because usually the father is more mature and more balanced.

We can anticipate future health problems and avoid them. We can pursue a life-enhancing diet and behaviour and avoid their opposites. If we lose the will to live, we contract over the whole organism, cut down on the circulation and commit slow suicide. The Saturnine diseases can be of contraction in any of the three parts. In the pelvic region, it produces uteral problems in women, and bladder and kidney problems in men. The Jupiteran ones in this department cause expansion of the region – hips and buttocks in women, and of the belly in men. We can also have Mercurial diseases which derive from the conflict between head and belly. These are often circulatory disorders. An urge comes up from the sexual department and the head orders it down. The result is turbulation, though not in the gross, physical body. It starts like a stitch, just under the heart. It is caused by a fight between the two energies. Sometimes, we want to do something but are not allowed to, at work, for example. The result can be churning of energies which can result in increased blood pressure. The only difference between a healthy rotation and an unhealthy one is the relative stress on expansion or contraction.

There are also Martial diseases. These are of conscious desire and are related to anger. When our will is frustrated, we can become angry and these energies can compound others already mentioned. Anger could not exist without Saturnine contraction and Jupiteran expansion – the contraction can burst out, both in behaviour and by breaking the walls of arteries. Opposite to the Mars energy of anger is that of the passivity of Venus. This can lead to anaemia, caused by low oxygen levels and low iron content in the blood. It is more likely in women. “Her passivity is a challenge to men and she knows it.” Her circulation is poor and so she hopes for a man who will do it for her. Iron relates to Mars and copper to Venus. Her pallidly will attract fiery, red-headed men.

Whereas the martial type is a man of desire, there can also be a solar type who is a man of will who will oppose any suggestion given to him. There is also a lunar type related to Venus. This man is endlessly eager to please and “very hard to get rid of.”

His analysis has given seven processes of three pairs and an odd one. The primary pair is Saturn and Jupiter producing the rotation of the Mercurial Wheel which can give rise to the “fiery, desire energy” of Mars, when the stress is on Saturn, and the languid response of Venus, when the stress is on Jupiter. The third pair is the Sun and Moon. The Sun being says, “I will do it from myself,” and the Moon being who says, “I will you to do it to me.” The odd one represents the whole process and is Mercury itself. He arranges the three pairs into the Solomonic Star, which is also the Messiah. “He is the Logos, the ratio of all beings.” He is “all things to all men.” The balance of all these forces is health. All diseases will have circulatory symptoms. “The circulation is one of the things that goes wrong, no matter what else is wrong…because the circulation is the circulation of the whole Field, which is prior to all the oppositions within it.”

He says there is no point in trying to identify how particular organs are affected, because “the chemistry of the blood is quite different in different parts of the body, because different organs are pouring different substances into it.” So it is better to get the fundamentals right. Many diseases are self-inflicted, “to stop behaviours which would lead to difficult situations – like work!”

Question: about detachment. 

He explains the concept of ‘Vairagya’ in Yoga. It is usually translated as ‘indifference’, but this is not correct. “It’s a clear, conscious awareness that it’s going to take you somewhere you don’t want to go.” It is “that state you attain when you know that you prefer freedom to bondage.” Any stimulus can cause a state of unbalance, and then the energies cannot flow freely. This distorts the form of the being and “the ideal form is the perfect sphere…and the subtle form…in the perfectly balanced person, is a sphere.” When we become interested in something there is a flow of energy towards it which distorts our form.

There follows a section on how different parts of the body are intimately connected and how many conditions in the lower parts are reflected in the face and head. Symptoms appearing in one part may have their origins in a very different place. “The body is folded over in a very mysterious way.”

There now follows a lengthy and detailed section on the signs of the Zodiac relating each sign to physical symptoms. He puts them all on a drawing of the body and says that next week he will do a fuller diagram to include sidereal, solar, terrestrial, topographic, climatic, national, and family hereditaments “which all complicate the matter.” Nevertheless, knowledge of the ‘machine’, the body, is essential to control it, just like a car.

“Grace is getting something you haven’t yet worked for.” Intuition teaches us – if we let it. There are thousands of people having breakdowns because they take no notice of it. “It is not in line with their private purpose.” Focusing on particulars loses awareness of the all. We have to lift ourselves out from accident so that we choose what happens to us. This is destiny – our destination. We have to control ourselves consciously. Freud’s analysis was wrong because he was talking about unconscious repression. If we deliberately hold an idea in consciousness and deny it expression, this is totally different from inhibiting something we are not aware of. We do not act in the street as we might do at home, not because of the fear of the law, but because we recognise that some behaviours are not appropriate in public. We must do this with full awareness i.e. we must not push down from consciousness those things we don’t like. And what is down there already, we should raise up to examine. This creates the internal order of the Unfallen man. The Fallen man does not have this, but is chaotic. To get unity we have to see the necessary relation between differences. Difference is ‘de-facere’, ‘doing two’. If we spin a disc, the centre is moving more slowly than the perimeter, and yet no part of the disc is moving relative to any other part. The disc is only spinning relative to its environment. “This is the identity of opposites.” “So the soul is entirely still in itself…if you take the real as being the absolutely permanent, then motion is an illusion.” The non-real is the appearance, “and the pi-ra in appearance means this rotation.” At the centre of the disc must be a space. “Space is the precondition for motion.” Condensation (body) and attenuation (space) of substance, are the same essentially.

The ‘tabula rasa’ is a fiction. If a child knew nothing from birth it could not be taught. A child learns by ‘re-cognising’. If a child is smacked then ancestral memories of such smacks are re-stimulated. 

Girls like to play with dolls whereas most boys prefer train sets. These preferences are already in each child. If there were no formulation already within us we could not be stimulated and learn.

Three-dimensional space is an abstraction, so is one-dimensional space which appears when light radiates from a single point; because ‘di-mension’ is ‘two measures’. He suggests taking a box of plaster of Paris and filling it with more plaster of the same consistency. Is it now a box or a block? “This is dialectical opposition: things are and they are not simultaneously.” All else is abstraction.

“Yes.” The Infinite Power is a seamless continuum so a movement in any part must, necessarily, alter all parts. Even his drawing on the paper must create a vibration which extends to Infinity. Only the resistance of other centres vibrating will stop it. Every centre is interfering with every other. The nearer we go to any given centre, the greater the interference by that centre. In the Tao Te Ching it says, ‘the tip of  pine needle and a mountain are the same size’, because each is propagating to Infinity. “It’s a statement about the dynamics of form within a continuum of power.” Any idea then can be extended to Infinity. “We can then collapse from Infinity all the forms that there are, back onto a point.” Any circle can contain all forms within it. (Each one of us is really a circle distorted.) Jacob Boehme said that “he who understands that diagram, understands everything.” – meaning the cross in the circle. The circumscription is the limiting factor “that brings all beings whatever into being.” The vertical is the actualising, penetrating force, and the horizontal is the passive or receiving force. Every being is symbolised in this glyph. Even an electron has a vertical and a horizontal, “and an equator, because it’s got spin.” So an electron, the earth, the solar system, are all identical. The human has an axis, the spine, with a north and south pole. Electrical currents going down the spine produce a field around it. This field acts, because it is spinning, like a centrifugal force, and the fact that the arteries and the veins in the body are hollow is because they have been made by such a spinning force. This force, being centrifugal, flying away from a centre, indicates fear of something at the centre. All the hollows in the body, whether of man or animals or plants, are such centres of fear. This is what we call LIFE. In existential philosophy we find the idea of ‘Ur-angst’, or ‘pre-rational fear’. It is believed that this is the very ground of life – a fear that drives all the force in the Universe through space. There is nothing other than Spirit. It is sentient, intelligent, dynamic, and when it moves, it moves from a negative to a positive, producing a flow from an undesirable to a desirable. Existentialism may be modern, but this is identical to the view of Hindu philosophy that God became aware He was alone and a tremulation went through Him in all directions. This primary tremulation is this same fear, the ‘ur-angst,’ which is behind everything. 

The top frequency of the Absolute is so high that materialists deny it. The gross, material world operates at very slow frequencies, so slow we don’t feel them, and therefore we feel secure. (The Japanese manage to feel secure between earthquakes!) “The slow beat of the earth has been specially produced to stand as a basis of security and for the elimination of fear.” (The word ‘fear’ means that the original force of the Field is actively differentiating.) F= Field force, ea=actively, R=differentiating.) We experience any differentiation in us as apprehension, discomfort, fear, and try to make things that don’t change. But “non-changing is pure fiction…Everything… changes and the non-changing is a construct by insensitive beings who have willed insensitivity for security purposes.” The top frequency of the Universe, the Aleph, is so fast that, were it not stopped in some way, the result would be the annihilation of everything. It is made to curve and therefore to rotate and block itself. The zone then created can be blocked in and made apparently solid. All finites are created in this way. As humans, we try to make ourselves secure, but security is bondage. All the mystics have known this. The slower the frequency, the more security there is for the ignorant individual. e.g. it takes 25,000 years for the earth to move through the houses of the Zodiac, and we ignore this because our life-spans are so short. We exist on a long wave, forgetting that any little vortex spinning on this long wave can be interfered with by a higher frequency. On the surface of the sea we can see little vortices. These vortical spins are like human beings. We cannot know, because of our small scale, the whole cycle of the long wave we are on so we cannot see the changes coming. “We are SMUG – Spirit-mug.” Higher frequencies can interfere with us and we will not know the cause. “He will undergo changes which are induced in him just by another level of being which he, being finited, and identified with the long wave, cannot possibly comprehend.” We are all sub-ents of the universal body, determined in our thought processes by higher frequencies. We are de-pendent, hanging from, those forces above us. To attain absolute consciousness we have to embrace fear. Fear is an essential part of us and we must not try to get rid of it. If we can do this then we will not get identified with a system but will move the other way. 

Exercise: Select an idea that causes fear in you and, “When you are experiencing fear, you are actually lifting yourself off the lower wave…it is a sign that you are becoming more sensitive…fear is the positive movement of spirit and the guarantee of creativity. It is not a thing to be dodged.” ‘The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord’. “To get the fear of the Lord is the pre-condition to evolving into Spirit.” “What we want to do is fear intelligently and not fear rubbish.” e.g. ‘red tape’, bureaucracy. “We should fear Spirit Aleph.” “The whole of the Bible is nothing else but a book telling you how to be afraid of God and not man’s fictions.”

We must not judge. When we condemn something in another we must necessarily condemn it in ourselves because we could not know that thing in the other unless we recognised it in us. Most mental diseases are caused in this way- by condemnation of parts of others, either consciously or not. When we condemn, we contract, we oppose ourself and set up walls inside the mind. “These must partition the being and eventually destroy it.” When Christ said, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” … “He is making a statement of psychological and spiritual law.”

Under stress, most of life’s preservative actions spring out of fear. Fear is quicker than security and it is only when our security is threatened that we become quicker. “There is a real psychological value in entering into fear situations without any attempt to remove the fear.” We should try to penetrate to the meaning of it,“because that is Spirit.” Fear is gaining access to higher frequencies. It is the ‘fear of fear’ that damages, rather than fear itself. Fear itself is protective. Above the fear is another one, a higher one, a more spiritual one. Fear determines what happens in our life and as we transcend it, another one turns up. This is karma. Bravery is similar to fear, but bound. It has ‘b’ and ‘rave’. “You get a finited being and compact him more than he wills, he will start raving.” He will overheat and experience that as rage and break out. “It isn’t really worth a medal…that’s a device to encourage people to rave.” “Bravery.. is.. fear induced from outside by pressure.” ‘Courage’ has two aspects: The lowest is cou-rage, “or sexual annoyance when somebody pinches your girl, and cour-age, when you climb up to a mature heart…But the cou-rage is more common.”

Delinquents: They are not born that way but made so, “from outside, by artificial restrictions.”

The body is a microcosm. It contains every other person in it. “and you know this is a fact in your consciousness because everything you know is in your consciousness. Then to act upon any being outside your physical body is still to act within your consciousness, and therefore to act on a content of your consciousness, and therefore to condemn an external, is to condemn an internal of your consciousness, and therefore to segregate parts of yourself.” 

(A related question is asked about the declaration of an aim.) To declare is to formulate and therefore to finite. It is to identify with a finite and therefore to dis-identify with the Absolute. Underneath we must be aware that the Immanent Spirit within us can never be satisfied with the fulfilment of that aim. Therefore, there must be a preparation inside to transcend that aim, once fulfilled, and to do something else. So as soon as we declare an aim we have declared its opposite and must eventually see this. So any will that declares itself dominant over others will be shown to be wrong. Every dictator has found this. Finite forces can clash and one can win – but only for a time. If we declare an aim for a certain time – say, where we want to get to in three years – then at the end of three years we abandon the aim, then we are safe from inertia. But the tendency is, once that aim is achieved, we restate it and carry on doing something we regard as success. In fact, we are simply allowing our inertia to rule us. Many wealthy men do this, and others who are successful in any walk of life, may do the same. The aims we declare are conditioned by our education and culture. So someone born in an African tribe will have different aims than someone born in Britain, but the same principle applies. However, in Infinity, we would not declare aims at all, we would simply radiate away. “It is the reflected energy from a limiting factor in the environment that determines the so-called declaration of aim,” i.e. the reflected energy from other finites.

Any finite is a self-stimulating system. This is the meaning of inertia, the ‘in-working’. In doing so it has finited the object of consciousness for itself and must be passive to the translating forces of the Infinite. But if these forces enter into a finite zone they must become rotatory also. They must become ordered. So, for example, the food that we eat must be digested and turned into circulatory forces inside us. “The internal energies inside any closed system must become passive to the closure.” So the inertic system, in its rotation, imposes order on the forces within, yet remains passive to the forces outside from Infinite Spirit. “Of myself as a finite individual, I can do nothing, because I have circumscribed nothing. I am zero.” The whole process of inner formulation inside us depends upon external stimulus factors. If we identify as finite systems then we go under the law of the definition of finite systems. If, however, we accept that all is Spirit, and that, at centre, we are essentially Spirit, then we can transcend our finite identity and identify ourselves instead with Spirit – with Absolute, Sentient Power. We can accept our gross bodies as a limiting factor, relatively, to distinguish it from other, finite objects and beings.  At the same time, we can be aware of other forces than the gross body, radiating from it, even at a very low level: heat, electrical and magnetic movements are transcending the physical body all the time. As soon as we become aware of these, we can also become aware of other field-forces from other gross bodies. 

Every circle must start with a centre – a point posited. This centre controls the circle. But what if the centre is travelling? Then the circle could never be completed. It could never be enclosed and therefore never finited. This would give rise to a transcendent awareness. e.g. a centre is a control so if we take an idea and define it, then that definition becomes the binding line around it. However, if we take that idea, begin to define it and then shift the idea, then the perimeter will shift with it. In this way we can transcend the idea we started with. e.g. If we take the idea of ‘democracy’- ‘Government of the people, for the people, by the people.’ But what is government? What is meant by ‘people’? When we do this we split the terms. In analysing the terms, their definition changes and so our perimeter boundary around the central idea must change also. When we do this we find that every idea has, within it, a contradictory idea. e.g. ‘demos’ means the people who need control and ‘cracy’ means that control, so the idea of ‘democracy’ refutes itself. Every idea posited as central can be defined in this way because every idea contains its own refutation, so the centre we posit is continuously shifting, so every idea can be transcended. No matter what definition we start with, the act of clarifying it will expose a self-contradiction within it. “When a centre broadcasts to a limit, the limiting factor that reflects back its energies, is the same thing as contradiction,” and without it, “there could be no awareness in the finite…Declaration is only possible where energy is sent out or reflected back…every declaration is evidence of contradiction.” But not to declare an aim is the same thing as not to identify with finity. “If he doesn’t identify with his finity, he will become that which he is before identification…that is to say, not different from Absolute Spirit.” 

We should learn to ignore motions reflected back to us, to refuse to accept any definition given to us. We must ignore the responses of others to our actions. We can learn something about our own nature by seeing how other people react to it but, “you should never accept this reaction as ultimate.” What is being said about us is being said as much about the other person. “He who does not declare his aim cannot be said to fail.”  (Tao Te Ching) To aim is to posit a substantial point and to aim our energy to act on that point. This is to finite our consciousness by identification with the finite situation. This places us under the law. The more we focus on an aim, the less universal we must become. We see this clearly in animals: every animal that has grown a special means of defence has finited itself and gone under this law. They are now inertic beings focused in a defined way. Their means of defence is often the reason for them being hunted, and their weapons hung as trophies.

When a human is born it is the most defenceless of all animals. “If you can dare to be defenceless, somebody will take care of you…that is the lesson of the baby.” If we can regain this defencelessness yet retain our awareness of the fact, “then we’ve got the Kingdom of Heaven.” Heaven is the definition of the Infinite – the Macrocosmos. If a being does not accept the definition of itself as ultimate, “the fact that it is circumscribed presupposes something beyond the circumscription.” Then he takes his awareness outside of the limitations of his body. He will come across other beings with limitations they accept. If he has the power not to accept his own limitations then he also has the power not to accept the limitations imposed on him by another’s definition. Having transcended his own definition, “he actually transcends all the limiting factors of all other beings…this means there are no closed doors for him.” The self-definitions of two people coming together in marriage will inevitably be transcended by both.

There now follows an excellent analysis of why male and female were created differently in Adam.

The ‘thorn in his side’ is the guarantee of human evolution. Without the external will of the woman pushing him, the man would never transcend his own definitions of himself. Eventually, he will discover the unformulated will inside himself – “yearning for Infinity.”

There follows a question about Adam’s naming of the animals. Eugene says that the names originally given expressed the nature of each animal and plant. The essence of each being was sounded in the name. Sound is much deeper in our consciousness than the other senses, because “it is the formative principle of the Universe.” Every created thing has its own sound. Every bell sounds a different tone because, “it is saying what it is.” So with every animal and plant: “If you were to reduce its frequencies to the audio level, then you would hear the true name of that thing.” 

Young children can respond to a stimulus without the additional memories, because they are receiving it into an unconditioned sensorium (innocence). In fact, the protoplasm of the child is already configured by the records of ancestors, but the child will not yet be aware of this.  He suggests that if two beings came together who had identical ideational content, (an impossibility) there could be no mutual stimulation. These beings would be “useless to each other.” In reality,the stimulus from one being will be unassimilable to a second one. When this happens, the being will experience the stimulus as an irritation, something that it has not yet suffered. (To suffer means to be in passive relation to) It now has a choice: it can either choose to assimilate the stimulus, to expand its awareness, or run away from it and stay as it was. If it continues to do this with all irritant stimuli it will remain ignorant. If it wants to evolve it must will into situations that present it with new forms. These will be experienced as irritations but the being must suffer them to grow. Over time, the protoplasm of the being will adjust to and accommodate these stimuli which then become part of its character. Knowing this, we can choose to enter into painful situations in order to evolve. “We accept everything that comes to us and out of what comes we build for ourselves a structure.” In answer to the first part of the question: “Resentment is the same thing as sending things back where they came from. You don’t want them.” “As soon as one becomes aware that this assimilation of all forces is a necessity for the gaining of immortality, then one stops resenting…One deliberately assimilates.” So, no ‘eye for an eye’ or ‘tooth for a tooth’. Instead, we take the stimulus and say, “Thank you. I needed that.” (internally!) Other people are then working for us for nothing. In this way we can employ everyone who is rude to us at no expense!

On the second part of the question, on making others reflect on their behaviour- we don’t! We want them to keep on irritating us. “This is very important…If we do not see their utility to us,we will continue to resent them.” Their stimulations are energy to us, moving us towards the wisdom we seek. “There is only a finite amount of energy available for this reformation…charity begins at home, and so does evolution…find out what it is that makes you jump. Keep it quiet. If you don’t shut up you will lose the energy that you need to characterise yourself.”  We should learn to know that the person annoying us is feeding us, have the courage to allow them to do so, and to keep silent and not respond defensively.

The Pearl and the Oyster: The oyster is the Godhead, the Absolute. The pearl is the Macrocosmos – the irritant inside God. Just like a grain of sand in the oyster, it presents Infinity with a problem: It gives Itself a point of reaction. The reaction pressing out and the force pressing in, creates the firmament, the Heaven. This is the demarcation line between the Absolute and the existential Logos, or worshipped God. We are all little gods but don’t know it. If we look inside, we discover two things: we are power, – we can initiate change, and we are sentient, – we know that we can initiate change. We are sentient power. We can therefore claim to be identical with the Logos God, with Christ. Christ requires us to be as much as He is – not less. We must posit our power and sentience in the Now. We must try to grasp the whole, the gestalt, to see differences and similarities, simultaneously, in the travelling Now. This is the pearl. (He now gives an analysis of Ali Baba and of Hamlet.) “The whole drama of Hamlet is simply, like every other drama, the self-presented problem of the Absolute, precipitated as an irritant within Itself.”

Question: For what purpose did God create man?

The dynamic Absolute had to take its power to its opposing term – the static. Every material particle is “power from Infinity, pressing onto a centre and, in self-opposition, creating with one blow, a finite, a static, and an irritant, and a problem.” All these precipitated points have to be brought together and integrated. All the primary points, electrons, protons etc, have to be gathered together into atoms, molecules, compounds, organic substances, living organisms and finally into humans. “Finally, in the wonderful, higher reaches of the human race…it becomes aware of its own source.” The aware human is the vehicle through which God can return, reflexively, to Himself. “Such a human is a true, incarnate God.” Man is created for the glorification of God. Humans have a process, conducted by God, within them. This is Grace. The individualised concept of oneself cannot do it. It is an evolutionary process to the point where God in man is aware that he is God. All of this is so that God can know Himself – through us. Christ has shown us the way – how to become reflexive centres of that Absolute Power.

To evolve, we have to learn to accept the irritant stimuli from others – whether we like them or not. Sometimes, there are aspects of a person that we do like and other aspects we don’t. We must not ignore the ones we don’t like. (Many couples do this, for the sake of the relationship.) We have to learn to assimilate everything. To remind ourselves to do this we may need “a sheriff’s badge,” a symbol. Any symbol can be used, a mantra, a mandala, a yantra. Where is the stimulus hitting us?-idea level, feeling level? Is it affecting our male stress? female stress? etc. We must Analyse it and verbalise the process. He suggests using the symbol of the two interlaced triangles. One is male, the other female. They join together on a central point, the heart. The female one has its base on the earth, the male has its base in the Logos, the intellect. These are two parts of any existential being that has a material body and an intellect equipped with rational form. The female triangle, being rooted in the earth, is materialistic and wilful. Because of this, she is vectored towards Heaven with her ideation and her feeling. The man has his base in the intellect and his inclining sides are his feeling and his will. We can now bind this symbol with a circle and assert that this is a human being. He now suggests a meditation that can be done using this symbol. We can analyse it and discover its meaning for us. The male and female elements, pure feeling and pure intellection, “put together and lifted to their highest level mean cosmic consciousness.” We should first look at the symbol and gain its ‘gestalt’, the pre-analytic whole. Then we must analyse all the parts of the symbol, then synthesise them into a whole. That is the meditational process. Then we hold it, contemplate it, in the samadhi of the Yogis, the seed state. This symbol is very ancient. “Into that symbol, as Jung discovered, forces from the collective unconscious of the race are pouring…but it’s far deeper than that…it is the dynamism of the Infinite Itself which is configuring Itself there as a symbol…that symbol is powerful, because that symbol is true.” Real security is in the recognition of the infinity of our sentience and power, “and in the lack of any necessity whatever to defend that which we are not. Namely, the finite, compressed image of our own activity. That image “is not the ultimate cause. The ultimate cause is the Sentient Power Itself.”

One of the easiest animals to hypnotise is the rabbit. It has no reflexive power of its own. Simply stroking it can do this. The technique is more complicated in the human, but in principle is the same. The mind is fixated around an object and the hypnotised person is reduced to the level of a rabbit because the human qualities of rationality and reflexiveness have been put out of commission. This person is now less of a human being.

Some self-help books recommend ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’; the idea is that the unconscious mind cannot refuse a suggestion. The thing that normally does so is our critical faculty, so if this is put out of commission, the unconscious will seize the suggestion and act upon it. Generally, hypnotism is not to be recommended because it reduces us to a less than human level.

 If the ‘Field’, our feeling-awareness, is presented with an idea, it automatically precipitates on it because the Field is seeking manifestation. “Every spirit seeks a body.” In mediaeval times, they used to consider the ‘anima mundi’ as a field of sentiency which, if presented with an idea, would work to produce it. i.e. the Soul of Nature responds to a stimulus by trying to bring it to be. Our own field of awareness, which is identical to this, does not discriminate between positive and negative states. In a strange way we can say: “The ‘Soul of the World’ is always hypnotised.” i.e. “Passive to the being that can throw in an initiating idea.” So the Field-awareness we all share, “is in a perpetual state of hypnosis and passivity, waiting for a stimulus.” 

‘Self-hypnosis’ is a contradiction: it would require us to keep one part active, and non-hypnotised, to give the other part the necessary suggestion. i.e. we would have to be simultaneously subject and object. “Self-half-hypnosis would be more like it.” 

There is a state between deep sleep and waking that we call the ‘dream state’. Between ordinary, waking consciousness and sleep there is an intermediary state; also, between coming out of the dream and being fully awake. Here is: “the possibility of acting upon the dreaming substance.” This is like the hypnotist acting upon his subject, or the Spirit of God acting upon the Soul of the World. So, when going to sleep, if we can insert an idea into the dream fantasy before it takes hold, this idea passes into the Field which must start modelling on that idea and try to substantiate it into the body. So before going to sleep, we should try to retain a positive idea we want to insert into the dream. When we wake in the morning, immediately we go back into the dream and do the same. These are the best times for working on our body conditions; between waking and dreaming.

We have two aspects: thinking and feeling. Our rational thinking says: “I know that I know.” It controls the objective part of us. Feeling is subjective and is the aspect “that receives the suggestions from the rational, conscious part of the mind.” When we contemplate we have to raise ourselves up to a certain level, consciously, by setting up an object that is worthy of our prolonged attention. (He suggests an image of the ‘first-turn’ of Spirit to make the macrocosmos.) This is the ‘Anima Mundi’ and also the ‘Collective Unconscious’ of Jung. This is an enclosure of pure sentiency, with nothing yet in it. The Absolute Sentient Power has created this, and is now both inside and outside, but as yet, formless. Spirit then goes inside and makes sub-rotations: it posits.This “po-sitting” is the locating of power, and can only be done by rotating. Each zone which is created is a zone of limitation, of negation. This is the law of the dialectic: a positing must produce a negation. God has an infinity of possibilities and to realise them must actualise them in manifestation. So there must be a tendency in God to create: “to produce substantialised versions of Its potentialities.” If the infinite possibilities of Spirit are not circumscribed, they are chaotic: “So It posits negations in order to separate out all Its potentials.” “So that each can stand on its own, in its pure form.” The ultimate aim of Spirit is to make, inside the macrocosmos; “some individuated forms with exactly the same powers that It has absolutely, only here relatively.” All such forms are identical, essentially, yet experience themselves as separate. The linking factor is the Field of Sentiency Itself, which links every form to every other. “So it is through the feeling that we become conscious of the transcendence of form.” However, we do not want to lose our form, we want to have the best of both the feeling world and the ideational world. “The object is to make every human individual so aware of its own origin….that it becomes conscious of identical powers with the Absolute…The way to do so lies through proper definition, and then by increasing sensitivity. So that you can simultaneously feel and define what you feel.” In the state of hypnosis we can feel but not define the feeling. In contemplation, we take an object worthy of attention, such as the Supreme Object: the whole concept of the circumscription of power, and then meditate on the reason why that occurs. It then becomes possible for us to work on ourselves. In doing so, we have to keep in mind that, “God is Love.” Our highest concept necessarily requires this definition: “a power working for the development of the potentialities of being.” In contemplation we are trying to contact the source-power from which we came. We want to come into a full awareness of what it means. We contemplate the ‘Soul of the World’ and the Spirit animating it; that we are kept in being by It right now. 

If that power stopped for one moment, the entire Universe would disintegrate immediately. “Nature, unaided, fails.” i.e. Nature, unaided, can never reach ‘resec’. “Nature is very careful about the type, and very careless about the individual.” The human race must survive because, ultimately, ‘resec’ beings are produced. But the majority of mankind, though called ‘human’ are not regarded by Nature as worth saving. When a man reaches a certain level he begins to have a ‘destiny’, instead of simply suffering ‘fate’. “Fate is what is imposed on you from outside, destiny is where you are going, consciously, from inside.” When an individual human being becomes aware of this, and it appears to him to be possibly true, then he begins to put his will into it. “Know the Truth and the Truth will make you free.” Those who are working towards that ‘resec’ awareness of the purposes of Spirit, and who conceive themselves as Its vehicles, are called the “Elect.”

In contemplation, it is the Universal contemplating Itself; through the man. When we are contemplating our own source, it is our source contemplating Itself. “It is the Source in Self-contemplation.” When an individual realises this, then he will not try to hang on to his individual purposes. “He who tries to preserve his life will lose it.” If we try to hang on, in the finite sense, we have immediately limited our capacity. “It is better to give than to receive.” “Spirit has no regard for the thing that tries to rotate on its own and doesn’t want help from God.”

The word ‘contemplate’ means ‘to lay in the same time with’. So when we contemplate, we resonate with the frequencies of the Absolute. “Whatever happens in It, happens in us.” So when we bring ourselves, by conscious reflexion, upon the real meaning of Spirit and Soul. At that moment we vibrate exactly in unison with It, and it is at that point we are not different. It is that point to which Christ referred when He said: “I and My Father are One.” When He said: “My Father is greater than I.” He was referring to the Godhead, the Absolute. Yet the resonance is identical, they are one functionality. All the beings inside the Logos, who believe themselves to be separate, are “hypnotised” i.e. asleep. The waking state is when we are most asleep responding only to stimuli from the five senses. All our actions are reflex ones. We are conditioned to think we are limited, by parents and other educators. i.e. we are hypnotised by others, who are themselves asleep. We “fall” by the definitions imposed on us but we can “rise again” by changing our self-definition. We can re-define ourselves as “source beings.”

Question about Gurdjieff’s batteries and Yoga Chakras.

Eugene switches to a different question concerning these. “A battery is a storage house for energies.” Humans have three: the head, heart and belly, with a connecting rod between them; the spine. 

Belly: If all the energy is focussed here and none wasted in emotional relations or philosophical thinking, then the energy would pile up and be released periodically in sexual emissions. i.e. “charging and discharging.” Sexual energy is very powerful and non-individuated. It uses us. We can equate it with God the Father, theologically.

Heart: We can store emotional energy by not expressing it. For example, by not telling someone we like them, when we do, and by not telling them when we don’t. The quality of the energy here is different from that in the belly; it has a peculiar beat in it. This can sometimes be heard in the voice. (He gives the example of Judy Garland whose voice was distinctive in that it wavered when singing.) This is caused by a discharge of energy in two directions at once: “I like it” to the belly, and “I don’t like it” to the head.

Head: Ideas left unexpressed pile up also, and they work at three different frequencies. Stimuli from our five senses feed the lower mind, which operates at relatively low frequencies. The higher mind is fed from above, by far higher frequencies. In the same way, the emotions derived from the five senses are lower than the emotion of compassion, which comes from above. Our three ‘batteries’ are being continually charged by a continuous “drift” into us from the Absolute. The build-up inside demands expression in action. “The Absolute, Sentient Power is determined to manifest formally, so wherever there is a definition, it drifts through the walls of that container…and then changes its frequency once inside.” And then “shoots out” into the lower level of action. 

Line of David

Eugene then explains how Christ came to incarnate as a reflexively self-conscious being, “out of the House of David” through his Abrahamic lineage.

Subsidiary centres

He goes back to the three centres and shows how we can make each the centre of a circle, then draws another circle centred on their intersection points. This gives 5 circles and 7 points. (The chakras.) The top one, the ‘Crown’ centre, belongs to the “original spirit,” the bottom one, the ‘Muladhara’, to the first positing of the primary substance. The primary substance is produced by the intersection points of primary waves crossing each other, producing zones of spin. The ‘creator’ is the ‘crater’, the mixing bowl in which these spin zones are modelled into the primary substance of the material world. This process is continuous and produces the Universe we know. Every ‘thing’ starts as a ‘no-thing’. It comes in as energy, turbulates and becomes established as a being. When its interest is exhausted, it stops releasing energy, so no more can come in, and the being shrinks. (We see this in some old people.)

Amen

‘A’ is Aleph, the transcendent force in the heart. ‘M’ is the primary substance in the belly, ’N’ is the formulation of that substance in the head. We never do a thing unless we feel like doing it. When we do we concentrate and produce the primary substance. Then we modulate it and produce form within it. So in the creative process we circumscribe a zone of feeling which begins to turbulate, finite and formulate.  So the Field plus substance produces form. God created man to subdue the earth. Before the precipitation of the gross material, there was another, finer material, and the precipitation of the gross world was the Fall, (also the Pall, the covering-up of potentialities.) All these potentialities have to be released.

Goats and Sheep

Two impulses in particular were locked up and have to be released, the sheep and the goats. The ‘goats’ are the origin of all the forces of the mineral world, plants, animals and man; all the forces towards finiting, that were there at the creation of the world. The ‘sheep’ were the ones just standing around, watching. We can find both tendencies inside us: the tendency sometimes to be a 

goat and go our own way, and at other times, to follow God. The fact that we can find both proves that we are neither. So we have to define ourselves; which one are we. There is a “great secret” in this: it is the “strong meat” that  St. Paul talks about. (Nietzche’s ‘dynamite’.) Do we want to be a goat? That depends upon how hard we have been knocked. Each one thinks it’s a goat when it wants its own way. When it gets badly knocked, it thinks it’s a sheep. Man is capable of developing free initiative: we can all be “Boojums” not “Snarks” (Lewis Carroll). We are all potentially divine, potentially “resec.” It is upon our own self-concept that our feeling will precipitate and determine our future. We sow the seeds of our own reward or destruction. The process is always the same: from the ‘A’ to the ‘M’ and then to the ’N’.

Question on Fantasy and Mechanicality

“When we are walking, energy drifts into the centres of the lower part of the body.” When we are walking, “the intellectual control centre is being temporarily starved.” This allows fantasies to rise into the mind. (Lots of writers claim to get ideas when they are walking, rather than sitting.) Often good ideas arrive this way. Walking is largely a reflex action. We don’t have to think about it, so the mind is free to wander.

Compassion. Tolstoy discovered that a person will accept a truth that hurts, only if you feel compassion for them. “If you can get all three parts of yourself operating simultaneously, in full consciousness, then you are really being ‘human’ in that moment…This will raise the temperature because you will have to fly from each centre to the next and back again.” This will not exhaust us, because we are being purified. “We are never tried more than power will be given to us to deal with the situation…You will never in the whole of your life, be tried beyond your endurance.” It is an influx of Infinite power that comes in to make “resec” beings – so we can’t be exhausted. “But if you think you are doing it as a finite, you have defined yourself as a battery and you will define yourself as needing recharging.” Our field is that part of the Field defined by our activities. “As you are thinking about yourself in a certain way, you are circumscribing yourself. You are tying a rope around your neck or you are untying one.”

Nietzsche said that the fact that people had no bad habits was the indication of “colossal wars to come.” He could see that people were bottling up aggressions instead of talking them out. Had the ‘Junkers’, the war-lords, acknowledged that Spirit would never allow any one finite to dictate to the whole, they would have talked to other leaders, because nobody can win against the Infinite. The war-lords of the present world still believe, like Hitler did, that unintelligent forces have produced human beings and that the cleverest of these can dominate the world. “If the war-lords saw that Infinity feeds them all, then they would abandon it and talk over the table. They are not going to do so.” 

The Logos God appears in man as pure intellect. “The Light that lights every man that comes into the world.” John the Baptist signifies the lower mind immersed in material existence. When we are absolutely truthful, clear and logical, we participate in the Logos-mind, the mind of Christ. The moment we start finiting and bending events for our material purposes, we sink to the level of John the Baptist. ‘Substance’ signifies the finite, so even the Macrocosmic sphere is substance, because it is circumscribed. As soon as we move into existence, into the finite, we have left paradise, (which means ‘beyond duality’) we have left Eden, (which means ‘no judgement’) and moved into the land of judgement. Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden into the temporal world, out of the Infinite Field and into bodies. They became identified with the material world. “The time-process is a product of the rotation of primary forces producing object-consciousness.” That is, centrings of condensing energy producing zones of identification with subsequent loss of the Infinite consciousness.

Question: about Universal appetite and if the Absolute has ‘hunger’ can it be omnipotent?

If appetite equals hunger, equals lack, how can we talk of ‘universal appetite’? Can creation spring from hunger? “Yes”. Hunger and appetite do not mean the same for the Absolute as they do for man. Appetite is simply the movement to create objects. “The word ‘hunger’ means power is moving into the earth and breaking it up, differentiating it.” We are told “God hungers after righteousness in man.” This does not indicate a lack in God, but in man. There is a deficiency in the human race because they have not yet reached their optimal development. He gives the example of nerve fibres growing in the developing baby. The Field already contains the blueprint for the completed body. There are electro-chemical gradients in the human body along which the nerves grow. These gradients are already in the Field. “This Field contains all the perfections that will become in the human being.” But before they have developed, we say that the being is deficient in them. “But the deficiency is not in the Field, it is in the gross. material world.” There is no lack of anything in the Field. So the ‘hunger’ in God is not a deficiency, it is a Will. “It is a potency in God to push to perfection…to make deficient creatures efficient, to lift their function.” 

Christ upset some people at the time by saying they should eat his body and drink his blood. They thought He was talking about cannibalism, “and of course, He was, but not in the gross, material sense. He was talking about cosmic cannibalism.” He was talking about the Logos body with which He was identified. We are eating the Body of Christ whenever we partake of truth, beauty, goodness. These ideas are spiritual food. Ideas of truth, feelings of beauty, goodness of will. When we assimilate these, we have eaten of the Cosmic Body. When we feel beauty we have received 

the flow of energies from this Cosmic Body – a flow of blood. When we have goodwill we have shared in the Father-Power that sustains the Logos.

Question: Does the subtle body have spatial occupancy. If so at what point does it become causal?

The ‘ace’ in ‘space’ is Spirit. When it posits, it does so in points. Each point is a place. It posits and ties up a certain amount of energy; “That is a place.” “As the subtle body is concerned with form…we can say it exists spatially, but we have to distinguish between gross, material space and subtle space.” We can draw a circle on the paper (gross) or in our minds (subtle). He illustrates this by reference to a magnet. The magnet has a gross, spatial existence. The field around it occupies a definite amount of space, but not at the gross level – this is a subtle space. “The peculiar thing about this space at the subtle level is that it is polarised in a way that gross, material bodies do not appear to be.” Most bodies do not exhibit attraction and repulsion for each other. However, we know that bio-magnetic fields exist. “They are more subtle than iron magnetism, but they are measurable…We know that what we call space between gross, material bodies is actually full of field-forces which are too subtle for the organs of the gross body to apprehend.”

Causal Body: This is the point of initiation of mobilising of the Field. (From ‘causus’, to strike.) Whereas the subtle body is the form of the Field. “The causal body is that level of being where changes are initiated.” Around the gross body is a field of form, the subtle body, and around this, “a body not considered as formal but considered as pressing in upon this to induce change.” (He suggests an exercise to become aware of this.) “This causal body is pure, sentient power…it is experienced immediately.” The gross body and the subtle body we experience mediately, but, “the causal body has no mediation…so when you inhibit consciously a tendency to action, you are becoming aware of the causal body.”  “When you can mobilise yourself, deliberately, in the absence of stimulation, then you are immediately aware of the causal body. To become aware of the  causal body is to become aware, of course, of the source of all power of the causal.” Within the Infinite Field each centre of precipitation is a causal body in its own right. “Within this causal sphere, It precipitates a subtle body…This is the body you take with you when you die, the body you had before you were born.” 

The causal body, being a precipitate of the Infinite, is itself a finite. However, “there is no division whatever, in any essential sense, between the causal body of any individual who is causally aware, and the Infinite Field of the Godhead. This means that where you become aware of yourself as a causal being…whatever you will to mobilise will be carried into effect by the Field.” “Where we become aware of our causal self, and we do this by pure feeling, we are becoming aware of the Infinite, Sentient Power in the place where we are…This is the non-dual fact, that this Infinite, Sentient Power, when It focuses, the part that is focusing is self-focused. So that every being that exists is ultimately responsible for existing because he is self-focused.” Even suicide cannot get us out of this responsibility because we are, essentially, causal beings, and our focus on the gross body, “is only one of the focuses you have as potentials…You still have infinite potentials and focal points in your subtle body and these are just as binding as the gross, material ones…In fact, it was only because they were binding, that the gross material came into existence as a super-stress upon the already formal existence.”

We have to reverse the process of the Fall. (He suggests an exercise here.) To do this, “we have to  realise the gross, material body is circumscribed, limited, deficient, recognise it as a centre of reference but no more…realise that the subtle body…is just as binding as the gross body…realise that it has no power if we remove the causal initiative from it. It is simply a grid of form. Then move into the feeling, out of the physical body, out of the idea, into the feeling. Centre in feeling…the centre is where you focus. When you become aware of this Field you become aware that you can actually move your hand…the more you try to find out how you move it, the more mysterious it is.” “If you try to get hold of your will, you can’t…it is not a ‘what’, it is a ‘who’, it is Sentient Power.”

He now switches to consider the concepts of theism and pantheism. “A pantheist believes that all nature is God and God is nature. That there is no God beyond nature…The theist says that all nature is formed, and therefore finite, and God absolutely and infinitely transcends nature, whilst   

being the author of nature.” The pantheist does not accept a transcendent God beyond the natural world, but if this were true then the natural world would be entirely mechanical. Evolution indicates that there is transcendence. Nature is na-tora, a wheel. “No matter how big we make the wheel, there is always something beyond it.” We become progressively freer by understanding higher and higher concepts. When we are object-identified, like a small child, our actions are deficient and very limited. As we become aware of other spheres of possibilities, concepts, then we begin to transcend the mechanical processes that have held us in bondage. If we can gain a bigger one than the one we have then we can move into a higher realm of function. We can, like the Stoics did, gain a concept of the Cosmic Logos, then we can be “reasonable”, but to transcend reason we have to go further. The Logos is finite and we can go beyond into the Infinite. If we have this concept of the Edenic, non-dual paradise beyond form, we can centre in the Field and realise that this Field is our own being and transcends all forms. “When we feel that we can actually move, without inclination, then we are at the causal level and we take our destiny into our own hands…we transcend all limiting factors whatever.”

Question: How is it that if you transcend the concepts that you have just gone through, that are coming to me say, as formal vibrations and yet they transcend the formal, vibrational level?

“How is it that when you throw a pebble in a pool the result is ripples? Imagine that the pebble represents an impulse of will.” When you are disturbed by a stimulus, it animates all the existing ideas you have already, “and therefore you reduce to thinking even the word ‘will’.” In the mnemonic field, your memory, the stimulus vibrates and concepts appear in the mind. “In other words, the pebble does not ripple, but the pool ripples when it is hit. That is the nature of the pool.”

Question: Do you include in the memory field the memory of all the concepts that you are not aware of?

“Oh Yes. Within that mnemic field you could include cosmic wisdom.” “Each organ interprets whatever happens to it within its own formal capacity.” When thinking arises, it does so because the whole structure is vibrated by the stimulus. The motion of the stimulus produces resonances from within and you are presented with a series of concepts. You have to see these as superficial and feel your own reaction to the stimulus. “Feel what it is that mobilises within you, inhibit it, and where you are not moving, make it move.” Whether you are inclined to say yes or no to a stimulus you deliberately inhibit it to place yourself at the causal level. You have to learn to stop reactions. “You have to feel yourself as you are responding. Then, to become free, you must learn to stand still so that your mnemic field cannot move unless you say so.” Instead of nodding or shaking your head you inhibit both and allow the stimulus to come in and find its own place while you watch it. “In this process you become gradually aware that you are a field of power…that sentient power is your very nature, not form, not gross body.” You now have the power to assent or dissent to the stimulus independently of whether your organism says yes or no. This contradiction is self-realisation. “When you can affirm such contradictions…then you get onto the causal level where you contradict deliberately, instead of mechanically.” You then feel you have the power to mobilise the Field. “This Field is simply a zone of influence within the Infinite, Sentient Power. The only thing that stops me mobilising all of it is my own identification with finite and particular ambitions.” To identify with the Field, we must realise that acting and thinking cannot do it; we have to feel. We  have to stop the logical, cyclic processes of thought. “Stop it. you will not cease to exist. You won’t understand less, you will understand more. The rationalising cycle in here (the head) really obscures the reality of will.”

“All terms are the product of primary phonetic facts…you cannot alter the pitch of a vowel, no matter what you do.” The form (idea) is an aspect of the sound, “you can’t have the sound without the form.” Form is the way power behaves, “and the whole Universe is a formal structure.” The Absolute Power moves in different kinds of motion and each kind is simply a modality of this power. “Power behaving in a certain way is what we mean by form. When the power behaves continuously in the same formal manner, we say there is an existing being.” (People can recognise us because our bodies keep the same appearance over time, changing only slowly.) The same power is formulating itself as idea, so if we use the wrong idea, we are referring to the wrong power. The will cannot be focused without a form so to do anything we must have an idea. To be successful the idea must be a correct one. Children learn by trial and error that some ideas do not work in practice – building card houses that fall down, for example. “There is a real relation between the form and the way power is behaving,” and if we can get hold of the right form then we can manipulate the power. “Truth” is the formal aspect of the Universe, and, “shall make you free.” “What it makes you free from, is the erroneous ideas that previously gave you faulty directions.” Truth is the Logos, the form of the Absolute reality. The ‘Divine Being’ has three aspects: Truth, Goodness, Beauty. Truth in Form, Goodness in Will, Beauty in Feeling.

Most human responses to stimuli are reactive, like the knee-jerk reflex, mechanical. It is possible to ‘be’ without being intelligent, and most stimuli do not reach the intelligence level. The gross, material body can act as a billiard ball does when struck with a cue; it just reacts. Sometimes, we may hear a spoken word and react immediately to it without thought. This is a similar process again to the knee-jerk – reactive. When we do this we lose the energy that is given to us in the word. We must instead allow the word to find its own level within us. We have to contain it, let it go down to the feeling centre. We can then say, “Yes” or “No” and allow the energy into thought and/or action. We are all going somewhere – we ‘like’ certain things and ‘dislike’ others – this is our orientation. When we are orientated towards that which we worship, the source to which we wish to return, then we can pass everything down to our will centre, “where it starts manipulating our drive forces, and carries us along in that direction.” The commonest type of reaction is for people to hear a stimulus and then react to it on the tongue without analysing it in all its parts. A less common reaction is to bring it down to the feeling level, without analysis, and become confused. “It is rare for a thing to be clarified at the feeling level and then carried into unity in the will centre.” But if it is, then it becomes involved into the germ-plasm. Future children will have that modification in them. The reason that most children do not inherit the mental and emotional content of the parents is because they have not pushed them into the will centres.” “The will centre is the one that acts immediately, models the germ-plasm form – the ‘logos spermatikos’.” “Every time a form is digested, ruminated upon, felt, pushed into the will centre, it will appear in a subsequent generation.” 

In this way, the two ancestral lines of Mary and Joseph formed the ‘line of the Messiah’.  “The Messiah is a biological fact, as well as a Cosmic fact.” When it is said by the Hindus that they are derived from Brahmins, these are the sons of Abraham, originally. “Abraham sends some of his people into India very early on to become princes in that place…these Brahmins are the Abrahamics who went through the Northwest Passage into India and took the same doctrine.” The sacred books of the Hindus are the Vedas, and it is said by the Brahmins that things can exist in the material world only because they exist as words in the Vedas. Christians say the same thing in the Bible: the Logos God of the Gospel of John. “It is only because things exist as form, which is a modality of power, that they can become objectified in the gross world later on as material beings.” FORM – F=P, the Power, O is the Spirit organising Itself, circumscribing, R is differentiating, M is substantiating. “Wherever there is a circumscription, there is the FORR and when this becomes substantiated it is Form.” “The vibrations beating about inside the Macrocosmic being…are the Logos.” Because it is a circle, all logic is ‘tautologic’. i.e. all definition is cyclic. 

The name ‘Jesus’ is significant: it means ‘yes’ and ‘no’, “Let your yay be yay…”  If we analyse our situation and say ‘yes’ or ’no’ to each element, then technically, we have the ‘mind of Christ’. (This is separating the sheep from the goats.) His other name, Immanuel (Emanuel) means the ‘counting out’ of God. “Immanuel (‘God with us’) is quite a legitimate name to give to a man who says “yes” and “no.” God is with us when we do this. In the Bible, Egypt always symbolised the land of materialism, and when the Jews were in Egypt they became materialistic – so they had to leave. ‘Moses’ means ‘taken out of the waters’. The waters symbolise materiality, Egypt itself. He is put on the water in a little ark of rushes, like Noah was put on the waters, “because the Universe itself is a big ark inside an illimitable ocean.” ‘Noah’ is the noetic principle, meaning intellect. Moses takes the Jews out of Egypt and leads them to Palestine, ‘pi-law stone’. (The pi-law is the great law of the rotation.) This means he is taking them into the higher reason of the Cosmic Logos. The Jewish symbol for this is the two, interlaced triangles, the’Star of David’. 

The Universe is a logical structure. The Greeks knew that ‘to think’ is ‘to formulate’, and that the formulation of the whole universe is the thinking of God. We perceive this as serial thinking. But with God, all ideas are simultaneously presented in ‘The Eternal thought of God.’ God sees all the relations of all ideas simultaneously – this is ‘wisdom’. “Serial thought processes cannot give the truth, they can only give partials.” “Truth is the form of the Absolute Reality = Wisdom.” So any partial truth is false. If we call a horse a dog, that is a lie, yet both are true. So a lie is simply a false conjunction. “In order to exist at all, a thing must be ‘true’, so if a lie exists, the parts of it must be true, and only the relations are false.” When someone tells us a lie it is actually a partial truth. So we need not worry about a lie because if we let it go into its own place it will be true. If we can say to ourselves, “the parts are true,” then there can be no lies. So, “to get the real value out of language, we have to interpret the word in its real context, and this we can only do by the Universal Language, a true symbology which is always in perfect correspondence with the Universe.”

If the white paper represents Absolute consciousness, and a mark on the paper a form, the form rests upon Absolute consciousness. If God’s intelligence did not exist there could be no form. “The form, in no sense, interrupts God’s essentiality.” Everything in the Universe we can detect with our senses are plays of form and they cannot interfere with the Absolute consciousness which is God. “So the shortest way to God is to rub out all the forms.” What remains is Absolute consciousness. If we identify with the form and forget the paper, then we will fascinate ourselves on the ‘wheel of existence’. This is the world that Christ, “was not of.” “Rulership is in the consciousness, and what is being ruled is the form.” “If we become under the dominion of the idea, we become slaves.” We know that people in general, can be disturbed by simply “rattling their eardrums.” Advertising and propaganda clearly demonstrate this. “This is an external determination, and it can only occur where those people are conscious of the form, but not of their consciousness.” People are 

identified with forms and an attack on the form is an attack on the individual, so people in families can fight all the time but if one is attacked from outside then family identity is restored. Similarly with nations going to war – and even Christianity, if it is attacked! 

It was out of Jesus that Christ arose. He said his “time was not yet come,” because he wasn’t ready, but eventually, his body was brought to a condition of greater response capacity – to the Macrocosmic being. When perfected, then it was time for the crucifixion. He was 33. This number corresponds with the number of vertebrae in the spine. Christ had to be “raised up,” (like the serpent on the cross in the Old Testament.) Christ says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man shall be lifted up.” i.e. our individuation must be lifted up onto the cosmic cross to become macrocosmically conscious like Him. “Because all men are striving for power.” We “all must love the highest when we see it.” When we see the possibility of freedom, we must move towards it. But we have to move at our own speed. This is why Christ spoke in parables so they would not understand His meaning prematurely and be frightened off. (The Upanishads and the Vedas are all synthesised and crystallised in the New Testament.)

So we can only think by means of form and we can only manipulate form by saying what we are doing. Therefore, we must use words. “W-ord is the entity that orders.” When we put our words in order, then our minds are ordered. “So we must get hold of the universal symbology, that pre-Babel language of the human race.” Understanding requires clarity and this means a proper use of terms. Boehme was well aware of this, and so was Lewis Carroll. Dictators understand how to use language to condition our reflexes by propaganda – they can paralyse our volitional centres. By application of the truth we can regain our volitional unity – which is identical with Absolute Will. Christ can say, “I and my Father are One,” because His form is simply the way the Absolute Power moves – like the white paper waving. All forms are vibrations of the Absolute Power. We are all separate forms of one consciousness. All form is simply a modality, a behaviour, of the Absolute. Religious ritual is form embedded in words. They are words of power. “Religious education, as in the Roman Catholic Church, is indoctrination – but with a high purpose, to condition the minds of the young.” Religious believers without ritual, such as extreme Puritans, (we could add Islamic terrorists) tend to be, “fanatic and destructive.”

When we think, we have to use the right words. First we hear, then we think, then we push it down to the feeling centre and break it into bits. We throw away all those we say, “no” to, and affirm the “yes” ones. This orientates the will and projects into the material world, the substantial reality. We should never say, “no” to rubbish from others. It may be right for them – like manure on roses. “Devote to the “yesses” and unify the will. That will take you on a definite life course, and you will discover in the process, that the manure has utility.” “We want more life, more abundant life, more intelligence, more will power. Anything that moves us the other way is an evil and a sin.” – that is all they mean. We must be honest with ourselves and start from where we are. ‘Universal compassion’ means nothing if we do not love our immediate neighbour. “The tendency is…to want to know more…about bigger, metaphysical problems.” “Because it relieves us of the necessity for immediate work on ourselves.” We have to take an idea, feel it, will it into action. Like riding a bicycle, we must substantialise it in our being. We have to crucify ourselves in daily living. “You cannot go to Heaven until you have been ‘down’ properly.” like the Prodigal Son. “So really, we do not want to know anything about levels we cannot apply.” ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’.  We should write down key words, like ‘God’, ‘Soul’, ‘immortality’, “and really get to know what they mean.” 

“Any ‘work’ we have to do should be done on earth, as individuals. We should put our forms in consistent shape and then we are building immortality in the logical consistency of our minds.” “When the Truth has really got you…nobody can shake it. If we find rubbish in another, remember it is still a part of truth, it has a utility. When it occurs we should say, “It has happened to me, therefore I need it.” When I accept it and penetrate to its understanding, I have changed my being level. “Because what we want to do is become immune to external determination.” “We should penetrate…right through to the essential white paper behind the black mark, and that is our “Self” and relate only to that. And call all the rest, all formal behaviour, superficial.”  

The Russians are Marxists, and therefore materialists. They want an explanation of the Universe that does not require religion. This is the opposite of what the Mediaeval Church tried to do. They suppressed science as an explanation, maintaining that there was only one law, that of God, and they, the Church, had a monopoly on it. i.e. what they said must be obeyed. Those who disagreed, such as Galileo and Bruno, paid the price. The Church originally had no doctrine, because Christ did not leave one. He simply overturned the old law of the Ten Commandments with two new rules: “Love God, and your neighbour as yourself.” This was not what the men interested in power wanted. The Roman state tried to eradicate the early Christians by ‘throwing them to the lions’ but this only made martyrs of them and encouraged others to believe, so in the fourth century, the emperor Constantine converted to the new religion in order to control it. Some have said that Christianity was then replaced by Churchianity. The stress on freedom was now replaced by a stress on reason, and this was borrowed from the Greeks, especially the Stoics, with their doctrine of a Cosmic Logos. (Absolute reason). Aristotle was adopted as the authority for all thinkers and what was not in Aristotle did not exist. 

Man is essentially free spirit and his ultimate aim is to regain it. It was lost in the Fall of Adam as a result of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. To know good and evil is to separate two essential elements of all that exists. e.g. honey is good to drink and hydrochloric acid is not. Yet this acid is an essential part of us. All things which exist must be necessary. “If a thing were totally invalid, it could not exist…and therefore, if a thing exists…it must be good.” (for something). Similarly, we say the flower of the rose is good but the thorn is bad. But from the point of view of the rose the thorn is good because it deters us from picking the flowers. “There is no such thing as an existential being which is, of itself, evil. It cannot be evil, it cannot be opposed to its own life.” (‘Evil’ is ‘Live’ reversed.) So evil must be relative, it cannot be absolute. However, all ‘good’ is not relative, because there is an Absolute Good, but no absolute evil. Within the Absolute Good there are relative goods e.g. a screwdriver is better for screws than a hammer.

The exercise given to the Russian girl by the scientists is using what they know of electrical impulses and the nervous system. When we try to move a finger we do so by feeling inclined to do so. i.e. a feeling is the originator. It is not yet a nervous impulse from the brain – that comes later. 

Feeling is ‘Field-awareness’. When the feeling is mobilised we call it e-motion, out-going of the Field. We can feel inclined to bend the finger and, at the same time, feel not to bend it. This is the state of the cataleptic person. The inclination to bend the finger is a feeling state in the bio-field and it creates a gradient which the will of the person uses to send the nervous impulse from the brain to the finger. So when we will to bend a finger we increase the feeling of inclination to the point where the finger starts to bend. We can control this inclination by our will. This is how the girl was trained.

Karl Marx was a nineteenth century materialist who believed in an atomistic Universe, that the ultimate reality was materiality and that therefore social evolution was a mechanical process also. He thought this would inevitably lead to the ‘stateless commune’. The state would ‘wither away’. His followers have tried to apply his thinking in every area of human behaviour. It appears possible because the body is, in fact, very like a machine: the skeleton is a system of levers; bodily functions can be explained in terms of chemical processes; nervous impulses can be seen as electrical ones. Unfortunately for them, they could not explain choice in this way. Even Marxists can choose – to be a Marxist, for example! They developed techniques of ‘brainwashing’ to show the mechanicality of brain functioning but found there were some who were not susceptible to it. They then turned their attention to the bio-magnetic fields, discovered after Marx, without success.  They could demonstrate and measure magnetic fields but bio-magnetic ones proved more elusive. Then in California, “last year” (1961/62?) scientists succeeded in doing so. Clearly, as measuring instruments become more refined, they will detect finer and finer frequencies. If we accept that the bio-field can release a nervous impulse that can act upon a gross material muscle cell, then there must be something else, at a higher frequency, that is causing the bio-field to move. This something is, of course, the will that moves the bio-field. We can see this in the case of a child who doesn’t want to go to school. The child can make itself physically sick, run a temperature, etc. until school is finished for the day and then make a miraculous recovery! This demonstrates that even body processes, which are thought of as beyond our control, such as digestion, can be interfered with by a person wishing to do so. We can call this higher level field the ‘psycho-field’. But this ‘wish power’ is the wish of an individual i.e. the psycho-field is still individuated.

All individuals are modalities of the Absolute, Sentient Power – the Pneuma-Field of Spirit. The goal of all great religions and Yoga is to pass from the lowest level of the gross material, through the bio-field, (which Yogis call the ‘prana-field’) from this to the psychic field and from this to the spiritual field, where individual limitations are transcended. The Russian girl has been taught that wishing is a kind of power and that it does not have to contract a muscle. She can now switch the locomotive on and off, make it run and stop, just by wishing, by mobilising the bio-magnetic field. That she has learned to do this overthrows all of the materialist philosophy of Marxism. (Dialectically, which is appropriate!) Materialism had been pushed to its term but now this was a possible new foundation for a scientist, aware of the bio-field, to start a new dominion over the masses. “The problem is always the same because of ‘LIFE’ – The Law of the Inequality of Finite Existence. Some are more efficient than others and tend to become centres of worship for them. This will corrupt the leader who will encourage their dependence. (Freud and Jung?) We must beware of ‘idols’ – so-called because these are ‘idle’ and “cannot work beyond a certain limited field of application.” The free Spirit, somehow mysteriously locked-up within a physical body, strives again to be free, but this striving can only arise strongly when the vehicle with which it is identified, is thwarted, is being defeated. To become free we must lean on no finite form, no idea, emotion or impulse. We must “scrub out” all these, knowing they are self-precipitated. Even will, if it is towards a finite, must be reduced to zero. All must be returned to the Field, the essence power which originally contracted it. Everything is a contraction of the Field. To return to the Field is simply to remove all contractions from the Field. We can then return to the Absolute Sentient Power from which we came. “If you try to preserve your life you will lose it…You find it again because it cannot be lost. But you find it within the context of Infinite Sentient Power which gives it significance and confers upon it the very consciousness and power it needs to fulfil itself…To return consciousness to itself is the meaning of ‘Reflexive Self-consciousness’. It is the reason we exist.” 

The shout of gained power is from little to big, ‘i-o’, the oldest name for God. Read Hebraica, ‘o-i’, it means diminishing in power. To define a single letter we have to use a word that contains that letter, “and the rest of the letters in that same word are added to that primary concept.” e.g. ‘urge’ is ‘ur-geh’, meaning a power differentiating, ‘ur’, and the old form of ‘earth’, ‘ge’, as in geology, geometry. We see the ‘G’ in the Yorkshire ‘gamma’d-up’, meaning ‘blocked solid’. “When you say “G”, you feel as if you have ‘got to’.” The ‘eh’ at the end really means ‘field’. In the word ‘urge’, the going power is really in the first letter ‘U’. ‘U’ and ‘V’ are really the same letter. Originally, it was a drawing of the male, genital organ and symbolised ‘push-power’. Differentiation has been added and the gamma’d-up earth and the field thereof are all added to this primary one of “power-going-somewhere…So to explain ‘U’ we have to use another word, ‘urge’ and then cross off all the other parts.” It is the ‘going power’. We see the same ‘oo’ in the word ‘power’, but turned into ‘Oh’. In French, it is retained in ‘pouvoir’- ‘to see power’. The French are rationalists and so must be able to see the ‘pou’. In the word ‘word’ there is a double ‘U’ (W). This means “power stressed.” The ancients would stress a word by repeating it, for example, if they really wanted you to go they would keep repeating the word “go.” The double ‘U’ (W) is power intensified. It turns around to make an ‘O’ and then vibrates – and this is what the word ‘word’ means. The ‘D’ function is the ‘dividing’ function, “and it occurs spontaneously if the amount of energy put into a thing is so great that it disrupts the form. So ‘worddd’ means, ‘a power, self-ensphering, self-differentiating, self-dividing’.” So it means “the very, very principle of a power that can order.” If we take ‘Uoo’, ‘Rrr’ ‘Ur’, we get a primary going and differentiation. ‘Ur’of the Chaldees, where Abraham lived. This later changed to ‘Or’ and became ‘Orrr’ in ‘origin’. The prefix ‘ur’ in German, means ‘primitive’ or ‘ancient’, as in ‘urmensch’, a primitive man, or ‘ursache’, a primitive thing. ‘Ursa’ is a bear, a shaggy energy, not yet compacted to a sharp point. In ‘ur’ the power has not yet closed but in ‘or’, as in ‘origin’, it has. 

To define a word is to circumscribe. What we define is the limit of the application of terms. Things themselves are already defined. A change of vowels can change the significance of a word. If we take ‘K’ we can shout or whisper it, but we can’t whisper ‘G’. To make ‘G’ out of ‘K’ we have to put tone on it. If we take the word ‘kad’, we have a sign that means closure but not material closure, rather intellectual, conceptual closure. The ‘A’ or ‘Aleph’ or ‘Alpha’ means ‘Absolute energy unclosed’. ‘B’ means ‘closure of the first order’. ‘D’ is the symbol of division – the vision of ‘D’. “A D-ivine being is simply a being that can see the differences between things.” If we can see where one thing ends and another begins, then we have ‘divining power’ – we can see the D-ifferences. So a divine being is one who can ‘see the difference’. If we change ‘kad’ to ‘cod’, we could mean a fish or ‘to pull someone’s leg.’ If we voice it then C becomes G and we have ‘God’. ‘Cad’ means ‘closure, with some energy and a division force’. ‘God’ means ‘that power which creates this earth, circumscribes it and divides it’. In the myth of Cadmus, the ‘mus’ is the ‘mouse’. (‘Moses’ means ‘taken out of the waters’ i.e. materiality.) The issuing Spirit which saves us from materiality is ‘Moses’ and ‘mus’. Cadmus is credited with the invention of the alphabet. He saves us from materiality by locking up the free energies in each letter. In the myth a dragon is killed and the teeth of the dragon are sown in the ground and spring up in the form of warriors, who fight until only five are left. The dragon is our ‘ur’ energy. When we knock it to the ground we force this energy into a physical body. From this body spring up the five sense organs. We know that the earliest alphabet used sounds to signify animals and plants. Each had a definite, symbolic value because it functioned in a certain way. e.g. if a lion signifies courage, then the drawing of a lion could represent this. The drawing of an arm could represent ‘executive power’. So any word can signify a sphere of influence which differentiates it from others. So by understanding the correct significance of a word i.e. where to apply it and the limits of its application, we can order our whole being. 

When we look inside ourselves we find that we can split the body, functionally, wherever we find a dividing point. e.g. the neck is a ‘nexus’, a joining thing. It separates the head from the body, functionally. The head is the control centre. Stimuli cannot reach it without control. The head is the ‘spirit-eater’, ‘eat’ and ‘ead’ are the same. In the head we find ideas. ‘Dea’ is a goddess,’i’-precision, ’d’-division, ‘ea’-earth, but subtle not gross. ‘Idea’ means ‘by point division to formulate this substance’. So, “in the Spirit-eater, are formal, dividing activities of that field energy which is the Absolute substance.” In the belly, forces that have entered as food are simply pushing about. This urge level is blind – without direction. As these energies fly about they impact and contract. This contraction is the generation of an idea. Every contraction is a ‘point of refusal’, a ‘p-ain’. So every idea is really a point of pain. (In Buddhism, the mind is called ‘the organ of fear’ for this reason.) If these energies were not obstructed they could never make anything: MAK means substance ‘M’, energy ‘A’, ‘K’ stopped. To make something is to stop the energy. Without such an obstacle, the energy would simply “search without finding.” (Boehme). To create value we have to rotate some power to provide an obstacle. Every rotation creates an obstacle – inside and out. It is opaque to energy trying to get in and also to get out. Inside energies become ideas. So every idea is a circle of contracted ‘ur’ energy. If we were omnipotent, we would not bother to think, so ideas are the evidence of our loss of field-consciousness. So by concentrating on our five senses, we reduce our field-awareness. If we isolate a single idea clearly in the mind, so that we don’t feel it, at that moment it becomes meaningless. (He cites the example of Bertrand Russell who could produce very clear ideas but devoid of feeling and therefore meaningless.) Similarly, Marxist theory is ideologically clear, but the isolated jots of matter no longer mean anything. To get the significance of each dot we have to posit it and then withdraw from it and regain the field-consciousness which generated it. Field-awareness = femaleness. Idea-awareness = maleness. So as we move from female to male we find a loss of feeling power in the attempt to gain clarity of idea. If a man loses his female side his ideas will have no meaning. “He who can become a man and yet remain a woman has finished his work.” (Tao Te Ching.) The pursuit of idea puts man out of relation with the woman in himself and therefore with the woman outside as well. For every idea we have, “we should learn to walk backwards and rediscover the generating field state which caused it.” If we can remove the field-awareness from two points they can have no relation and therefore no meaning. With field-awareness we can feel that both are vibrating and therefore have meaning. “Meaning is in the Field and nowhere else.” Mean is substance ‘M’, ‘E’ the Field, ‘A’ the energy, ’N’ the motion. “Substantial Field energy moving.” So to find meaning we have to increase the feeling of our substance.

Splitting a word is like splitting the atom: energies are released. Every time we split a word we gain some energy. In the head we have ideas, in the belly we have blind urge. Between the two we have feeling. Feeling mediates. All the contents of consciousness we can consider are form, as power, and the awareness of the relation between them is feeling. These are coordinated by the spine, the ‘spinner’, that knits them together. If a man allows his consciousness to fall down into the ‘belly land’, he is a ‘fallen man’. A balanced man, an ‘unfallen man’ does not allow his consciousness to fall below the diaphragm. “He is quite happy to allow the urge to come up here, to meet it with the idea,” and to resolve the relation in the chest. The ‘Fall’ is always downwards and forwards, to the soft, fleshy parts of the body. To increase our control we have to raise it up the spine to the head.

When we analyse an idea we discover further ideas. When we feel around an idea, we discover the field that generated it. When we come to the ‘U’ level, we discover the motive behind the idea. We say the word ‘how’ refers to the mechanics, the mode of doing something, and ‘why’ refers to the psychological motive at the back of it, “which is always the affirmation of some spiritual power.”

Question: If pain is associated with the formation of an idea, what about ideas that are pleasurable?

“You don’t have an idea associated with pleasure, prior to having the pleasure taken off you.” i.e. the pain of the loss of pleasure is what formulates the idea of pleasure. “It’s the interference that sharpens it, and contracts it and makes it into an idea…the only thing we have clear ideas about are pains.” (He suggests as an exercise that we should try to define ‘pleasure’.)

He then compares the structure of the universe, and of the beings within it, with the physical eye. The “gamma’d up” is condensed in the centre, and is black. Here is the pupil, the learner. The “causal” is the white of the eye-ball, the ‘B-all’, and the striations of the iris corresponds with the “subtle” body of ideas. If we mix all the colours we can on a palette, we get black, the colour of the static. If we paint the same colours onto a disc and spin it, we get white, the colour of the dynamic mixing. Yet the colours are the same. So the gross body, static, is the gamma’d up vibrations of the dynamic white, which is the all. With the death of the body, the energies that were coming in and condensing as matter, simply go back to the all. The universal is the white, the particular is the black. “When you disintegrate the particular, all you have done is restate the original, universal condition of it.” 

These three states of being, the causal, the subtle and the gross, give rise to three modes of stimulation: On the gross body by a physical blow; on the subtle body by a new idea; and on the causal by an insult, which hits upon the will. If someone says we are weak, this hits, not the body, nor the mind, but the very self-centre. In the first we defend our physical body, in the second we defend an idea, but in the third we defend our very being. The so-called ‘waking state’ is actually the opposite. (The ‘K’ shows the body ‘I’ being hit with a force ‘<‘, to make ‘K’. A ‘wack’.) The dream state corresponds with the state when our ideas are hit. Our awareness shifts from the physical body to the world of ideas. In deep sleep, the individual remembers nothing. Yet, this is the most important. This is when the physical body is repaired from the damages of the waking state. A person can be killed by sleep-deprivation. Something is going on in deep sleep that the individual does not know about, which is an essential of life. This is the state of the ‘unified will’. There must be a unity behind the three states tying them together, a fourth state which lies behind all three. There is no word for this fourth state in English, but in Sanskrit it is ‘Twriya’. (affirmation, ‘ya’ of the Law, ‘Twr’.) This is the law of the essential cycle of the three states. To reach this fourth state is the goal of Yoga: the simultaneous presentation of all three states in consciousness. 

Modern psychoanalysis can take a person away from the gross body into the dream state of ideas, but it cannot reach beyond into the pure will. This is because the will is not synthetic, it has no parts. “It is the original prior unity before you ever thought.” The body is easily destroyed by physical damage, the ideas can be destroyed by logic, but the will is indestructible, it is eternal.  We can put the will centre inside the subtle body and the physical body on the outside – or we can reverse this order. Both are legitimate. When Christ said, “The kingdom of Heaven is within,” He didn’t say it wasn’t without. But it is easier to go within so that we don’t get distracted by the external stimuli. “Because the general flow of the nervous energy in your body in this period of human evolution is into the five senses.” So we can see other people, not just as gross bodies, but as centres of ideas and initiative will. When we feel for the ideas in another person and we can also feel for their motive and we will know if they like us or not. If we wish to change their dislike of us, the only way to convert their will is to go along with them until they become receptive to a new  idea. The new idea can then captivate their will and cause them to change direction. “You can’t catch a will unless you send it in the direction it wants to go.” Our established direction is largely the result of ancestral inclinations, our will is already biased from birth in this way. We know this because we all have had a similar elementary education but we are all very different in our inclinations.  “If you balance yourself in your will, you can see in which direction another man is going…don’t get ideas about it, just feel it. (This is ‘psyching’.) “Just feel the motive.” People can refuse to understand ideas if the acceptance of them might undermine their will to certain others, or to behaviour they enjoy.

Zodiacal Man: He draws a circle of the Zodiac and draws a man bent over backwards around it. Each sign corresponds to different parts of the body, and the diseases to which each part is prone. (Though he warns of over-simplification.) We are all indebted to Universal Will and we cannot break it. This Will causes us to go in a certain direction, whether we like it or not. If we go with it, our lives will be harmonious. If we “kick against the pricks,” as Paul says, we will have a hard time because we are inferior to it. (Inferior means ‘inside it’, ‘doing inside’). “And the inferior has to do ultimately what the Universal wants it to do.” So there are a great many complex forces at work upon us: ancestral engrams, cosmic radiations, and the Universal Will conditioning the whole process. The solution of any problem cannot be simple. Freudian analysis eventually decided that the original problem underlying all others, was the birth trauma. However, there is a shock pre-natally – the shock to the egg by the penetrating sperm. “But that is only one of countless shocks that the same germ plasm has suffered through the ancestors.” The body can be analysed, the mind also, but not the will. This is, ‘The Ring Pass Not’ of magic. The psychologist  cannot enter here. A being who has willed to be ill is not susceptible to help from doctors. (Usually, the reason for this direction of the will is to control those around the patient, such as family members.) To cure such a person means we have to capture the will, and this can only be done by introducing an idea that will be adopted and then the person can will to get better.

Around the Zodiac, each sign passes through three phases: Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable.

Fire Signs. Aries: “It feels that it knows all there is.” It feels omniscient but has not separated any of it and therefore knows nothing. Two disorders come from this: “thwarted omniscience” it feels it has the power to do anything but without the right technique and equipment it is actually powerless. It tends to ally itself to others who have these as extensions of its will. (eg Hitler needed Goebbels, Goering and Hess.) Aries energy is not always destructive. e.g. Shakespeare. The 

primary energy of Aries has to devote itself to a particular in the fixed sign of Leo, the position of pioneers. They always want to be the first. The problem is, that having got there, they always want to go somewhere else. In the mutable sign of Sagittarius, they “shoot arrows at every target.”

Air Signs. Libra: the opposite Cardinal sign to Aries. It is the sign of the unanalysed perception of ideas. Here the stress is on knowledge of many things, but none taken in isolation. In the fixed sign of Aquarius ideas are pushed into the memory to be worked upon serially. In the mutable sign of Gemini these ideas are compared. The tendency in Gemini is to the disintegration of the mind. Nietzsche was typical. A mind full of detailed knowledge, so rich that he disintegrated. He hadn’t the power to keep it all together. Schizophrenia is likely. Bodily, nervous rashes around the waist. (Where the man bent round the Zodiac touches this sign.)

Earth Signs. Capricorn: concerned with absorption of food. Likes the burden of responsibility and is a good manager. Often feels indispensable. Drives onto things to absorb them. Likes to pull out the meanings of things to find their significances. If this is not achieved then the person become diffuse like its opposite. The fixed sign is Taurus and the mutable is Virgo.

Water Signs. Cancer: “Is a Field-consciousness spreading itself out to become aware.” Has none of the formal content of Libra, none of the feeling of omnipotence of Aries, “but just displayed throughout the universe as feeling awareness waiting for something to happen.” When nothing does happen it turns to its opposite and waits for an object to appear to give it a centre on which it can rest. And if it finds one it passes into the fixed sign of Scorpio, the sign of attachment, and won’t let go. Has a tendency to produce stones in the body. These are precipitated onto feeling centres where the person lacks security or the objective stimulus it feels it needs. Although a feeling, water sign, instead of being diffuse, it is concentrated on an object. In the Cardinal sign of Cancer, the feeling is diffuse, there is a vagueness of mind, an inability to define what is wrong. 

When it moves to Scorpio then it becomes attached to an object and has a clear idea of what it wants. In the mutable phase of Pisces it discovers that the object to which it has become attached, disappoints. It then starts looking for other objects i.e. it scatters its feelings. The feeling that has concentrated in Scorpio now flies into bits.

For each sign, the Cardinal phase is undifferentiated. This becomes so in the Fixed position, the committed phase, and the physical and mental breakdowns occur in the Mutable phase. Each individual goes through the three phases for each of his four parts. The breakdowns are most likely to occur in the best parts of the man because these are the parts most stressed. 

We have a vocabulary for the three parts of the man. The rational: we can understand a thing and say we know all about it, but this is only one aspect. We have to also feel the significance of what we know and be able to execute what is indicated by the knowledge we have. A person can become very clever on a topic and not be able to act on that knowledge. The opposite would be to use only wilful words – Saxon words. (mostly rude!) These fly into the centre at the back of the brain and produce an immediate reaction in the muscles. To talk, ‘out of the back of one’s head’ means, “not from your intellectual centres,” which are in the forebrain. We can also talk about things with romantic associations – the two zones in the mid-brain of ‘I like it/I don’t like it’. This gives us a vocabulary of three parts corresponding to the three parts of the brain. He suggests an exercise in which we can watch ourselves to see how we react to different words. “Ask yourself, did that hit me in the rational centre, the romantic one, or the urgeful one? (We can sometimes see which part is hit in others by noticing which part of the head they scratch.) 

The three-part man is represented throughout the body: We have five fingers, two bones in the forearm and a single bone in the upper arm. This pattern is repeated in the legs. We have five senses in the head, two lungs, one belly. Similarly, this three-part pattern is found in all of nature. Longer fingers and toes indicate a ‘pushing out’ into the world and an active mind. “Symptoms on the fingertips belong in the fore-brain, the next joint the mid-brain, the lower joint in the hind-brain, and the same with the toes.” We see this simple trinity repeated throughout nature. The five-fold createdness of the universe, the ‘panchikarana’ of the yogis, is expressed from inside the egg, pushing out into the world. We can see the same expression in beetles – and we did not descend from them! The farther away from the body the limbs grow, and the fingers and toes lengthen, “the more the nervous energy of the Absolute is pushing itself into the world, the greater its danger…So the very thing that gives you the greatest sensitivity is also the thing that endangers you the most.” Sometimes, babies are born without hands and feet, nothing beyond the elbow and knee, and sometimes without a neck i.e. not pushing out into the world. Such babies, “are never unhealthy,” because they are in no danger. They are usually very happy. They are so rudimentary that they have no problem. “Because a p/roblem is a pi-rational structure and they didn’t bother to make one.” We know that our hair can ‘stand on end’ when frightened. This is because the field around us expands to let us look bigger to frighten an attacker. This is the subtle body enlarging to draw out the physical body. He talks of the boy with the tendency to ‘birdness’. (Others in the audience provide examples from their own experience of such children.)

Questions: about word association.

Eugene talks of the learned, linear process determining our thinking. We cannot recite the alphabet backwards without learning to do so. Also, free association of ideas and how this can be used in propaganda. People often misconstrue the meaning of words – sometimes deliberately, to lead an argument in another direction. He takes the word ‘astronomy’ as an example. To the early Greeks, astronomy meant “the study of the law governing every kind of rotation, of which the motion of the stars in the sky were examples.” Socrates warned against using this as a demonstration of the law because stars ‘wobble’. He was talking about absolute motion – the Spirit Law. “So it’s our circle with a cross in it again, as the type of all planetary, solar, or sidereal motions.”