Eugene
Halliday
Body Wisdom
So we are
going to talk about the wisdom in the body, wisdom is total information any
point of which thoroughly defined will define all the others anything less than
that maybe knowledge but it is not wisdom. There are 2 ways looking at the
search for knowledge, one is you might call the empirical way in which a man
goes outside his own consciousness and he looks at objects around him in the
world and he proceeds to examine them and cut them up, chop them, poison them
and so on, he derives what he calls knowledge from the examined structure. This is the empirical scientist approach, that is one
way, in that case the person doing the operation always feels much cleverer
than the object being examined, so you get a frog take its skull cap off and
take the brain to pieces you will always feel terribly, much more clever than
the frog, that’s one way. The empirical method whereby feeling very clever
proceeds to take things to bits because they are outside oneself and feels very
clever in taking things to bits, no doubt there is a large amount of cleverness
in taking things to bits, especially if you are taking them to bits with fine
knives, not hammers. You know one way of finding out what a person is crushing
them with a hammer and then sort out the chemistry and decide that is a human
being. The ancient Chinese way is to get a sharp knife and peel the way the
thing is made and only cut where it is possible to cut into tissue which is not
too hard, you don’t saw through bones for a cross section because that is much
too hard, you just go into the joints and cut into the soft tissues that hold
them altogether and then they fall apart. In that way you have???? And the way
the structure is held together in an articulated way. But then there is another
way of getting knowledge which is the exact opposite of that, instead of
feeling clever in taking the thing to pieces you actually feel that whatever
you discover about that thing was already in the thing. Think of the
difference, in one case you attack it from outside and you think that
everything you discover is a proof that you are clever, empirical scientific
approach. The other way for you to think that if you find anything that is in
anything mysteriously the thing you found was already in there, that quite
different cos then when you examine the brain of a frog, what astonishes you is
not your own cleverness but the cleverness of the intelligence that made the
brain of the frog. These are 2 ways are exactly opposite, one of them has been
used, especially since the Renaissance and Frances Hogg, as a method of lifting
the stock of human self imagery but the other way is very, very ancient indeed
and it consists of being in perpetual astonishment before the wonders inside
nature. Now the first way does not really reveal to you the innermost soul
of the being you are examining but the
second way does. If you look into the eye of your partner you will find
something there and it is already there waiting to be looked at, so instead of
thinking it would be quite clever to get a knife and take it to pieces, think
as you look at it the structure that I see in it already is the product of the
forces that produced this structure so
if we actually see a structure that is functioning as in a plant or an animal
what we do is say that the forces that produced that plant that animal must have
been such forces that produced that plant or animal, so if there is a joint in
the animal, say a hip joint and by means
of that joint a leg is articulated and the animal is able to go along in a
certain way what you see is that the energy that made the animal must somehow
have devised this joint. If we get this approach thoroughly clear in our mind
it is exactly the opposite to external empirical scientific methods of
examination we begin to grow in a different way. Suppose you looked at your
hand and you can see that you can saw the fingers off quite easily with a saw,
and think that you are very clever for inventing the saw, suppose you look at
your hand and then move a finger and feel what is happening when you do it and
you feel articulation, the jointedness, and you feel because you are jointed in
this way you can do certain things with it and then you think how did this hand
come into being not what can I do with this hand to reduce it to an inorganic
state break it down and test its chemistry what is the peculiar property of the
energy that produced this hand. Now you have all got a couple of these I have
one and a half most of you have got two..in this hand you see intelligence, you
see that it has grown itself in such a way that it can indicate, it can wave to
people, it can punch noses, it has a whole series of functions each one a
product of the energy that evolved into the hand William Blake believed that energy
if anything was god energy was god we can talk philosophically about power, about
omnipotence we can talk about the almightiness of god and we are still talking
about energy in a slightly more generalised way, when we use the word energy we
are talking about something that works, the erg in the word en..erg..y means work inner work affirming
is the meaning of the word energy that which affirms the work the function if
the being then we have to ask ourselves by what peculiar arrangements of itself
does this energy produce highly organised forms, structures which are able to
do extraordinary complicated activities. By what peculiar process does a place swimming
along, change its apparent colour to sand colour in one place, pebble colour in
another place, by what peculiar manipulations of its own energy does a
chameleon change colour. By what peculiar process in the mind of a man does
geometry arise, mathematics, logic, what is intuition, what is the meaning of
the word spirit, what is the meaning of the word matter all these terms refer
to the functions of the energy already manifest, showing itself in the
organism?
We are
talking about the wisdom in the body and we have said that wisdom is not the
serially presented ideas but the totality of all ideas such that the definition
of any one of them presupposes all the others. Let’s think about that very
carefully whatever we examine we are going to say what does it do whatever it
is, what does it do? when we are talking about doing we are talking about
function, we are talking about the way
energy moves, the patterned way energy moves; now in our case, we have a firm
belief that we can actually move ourselves, now our pretended philosophers who
don’t believe we can do this, I open my hand I tell you, I warn you I am going
to close it now I have closed it-will
you do that with your own hand open it then close it, do you feel when you open
it you are opening it and that you are not being tricked by someone who is
opening it that you are opening it you are able to scratch your nose can you do
it ,have you been provoked to do it because I have said it or are you able to
inhibit it some inhibited it some say I am not going to be a fool I won’t
scratch my nose, I will do it and do it later there is a process going on inside
the human organism which is felt immediately by the human being to be freedom that is to say it is free to produce
a change and dome because there is form there already observe that word
freedom, free and dome the free means
unimpeded motion the dome means impedance so that when you have freedom what
you have is an impedance which somehow does not constrain your motion
absolutely, earlier today we are talking about the freedom of a man when he
falls of a cliff to change his mind in mid air put their arm out here and leg
out there and rotate his body so that he lands on his feet instead of his head ,whilst
you are under the influence of gravity you are nevertheless free to fall and
break your neck or break your legs first,
the peculiar nature of the freedom of man is this that in the midst of bondage he
is able to choose the way to which he
shall expose himself in this bondage situation, he is bound he is under
gravitational forces under electric forces, electro- magnetic forces, magnetic
forces, chemical forces he is right in the middle of lots of forces which
science will solemnly tell you are all bound forces all law conformable and yet mysteriously the human being is
absolutely convinced that he can choose between these different laws, just as
surely as there can be poison in a bottle
and you can decide to drink it or not drink it and if you drink it you
will be poisoned but you don’t have to, just as surely as you can stand on the
edge of a cliff and decide to jump or not jump but if you jump you will go
under the influence of gravity and fall and yet you don’t have to jump and this
immediate sense that you have, beyond argument beyond any argument that any
empirical scientist can offer you is that you feel this capacity for choice ... when
an empirical scientist does a lab experiment he does so without asking himself
whether he is free to do it , supposing a man believes like a mechanistic behaviourist
believes, that he is not free and that all his activities are conditioned by
stimuli when he finds himself in a lab with a dog strapped down and some
electrical apparatus to tickle it with, he doesn’t ask himself whether he is
free to do this he keeps his mind off that because if he begins to consider
that he might not do precisely this experiment, he is out to prove certain propositions to prove that all action
in the universe including biological action is conditioned and yet in the very
act of doing this experiment he has chosen a particular experiment to do rather
than another one, so there is our first point, we have inside us an immediate
awareness that we choose, no amount of argument by empirical scientists or
sceptics who can doubt their own freedom,
can possibly invalidate the fact that in the very moment of doubting the
statement there is freedom the person making that statement i doubt it is choosing to make that statement
because if you ask him why are you saying that he doesn’t say I doubt it
because I am a bundle of conditioned reflexes he starts arguing from certain
rational principles well because there is gravity there is chemical law there
is mechanical law he gives you a whole series of laws which he has discovered
in nature which are really inertias
which he has found in nature and on the
basis of these laws he then says therefore there is no freedom and this
therefore does not follow
So we are
now going to examine the human being and we are going to be surprised as if we
were talking to little babies if there are any little babies in i the audience
I am very, very, glad because they will comprehend it immediately as we say let
us examine the body and instead of feeling clever at what we discover feel
astonished at what we discover. Supposing I put my hand towards you like that
so the palm is facing you and tell you that there are 2 bones in my forearm
which are now parallel and if I turn my hand over like that they are now
crossed so they make a sort of slim X and I ask myself what is the purpose of
that why have I got these bones why have I got any bones at all this peculiar
energy which has made this organism has made it so it functions in a certain ways, my arms can bend
this way and it won’t bend backwards
that is not an accident it is simply because the energy in my body is
more interested in dragging things towards me than giving them away the ‘to me’
muscles in the body are stronger than the ‘to you’ muscles the taking muscles
are stronger than giving muscles.
Now we are
talking about the energy in the body the proper definition of any part will
define all the other part. We are talking about man, mankind man is from a word
meaning to evaluate and we talk about manual manipulation and we refer to
‘manus’ the hand. If we define the hand exactly we will define man also man means
an evaluator and one of the instruments of evaluation is the hand that whereby
we count, ladies count on their fingers don’t they ordinarily some of them some
geniuses can actually count with invisible fingers so everyone thinks they
count in another way they count on imaginary fingers some can actually do
algebra but behind everything we begin by count on our fingers when we run out
of fingers then we count on our toes then a very very primitive count would be
10 then 20 count everything we have got that separable and there is the basis
of our count. We are looking at energy that has already done something that has
grown in this way in order to function in this way so when we look at it we are
looking at an energy that fulfils functions by the way it organises itself ,now
if a thing fulfils a function from within itself we call it intelligence the
‘tell’ in intelligence means purpose ‘tellos’ is purpose intelligence means
essence that which binds a purpose in itself mean so if we say an energy produces
from inside itself a function which fulfils a purpose we are required to define
this energy as intelligence, if instead
of saying energy which means affirming work into something, we generalise it
more and more and finish up with the idea of power meaning that pushing
mysterious X that makes the globe rotate, that carries it round the sun, that
makes shoots come out of the ground in
spring then it’s a pusher in nature and this pusher we call power this power
when its involved in work we call energy
when it is applied in a particular situation to a particular object we call it
a force the ‘fo’ in force and the ‘po’ in power actually have the same origin
so when we say that which has within itself the capacity to function toward the
fulfilment of a purpose is intelligence and everywhere in living organisms we find fulfilment of purpose is there which
maintains life of a being we have to say
this energy this power is intelligent. now wisdom is concerned with the
totality of all the forms and their mutual implications so we have to say that
all functions everywhere are the behaviours of energy and we will use the word
power this pushing X this mysterious something that pushes everything around in
the universe we have to say that there is an infinite intelligent power, it is
intelligent because it fulfils a function. Then we can ask ourselves a further
question which a lot of scientific minds would say doesn’t ask that question
because we have no grounds to believe it. Is a man intelligent, yes because he
works towards the realisation of a purpose? Is the Earth intelligent well of
course not the earth is not intelligent but the earth is a precondition of organic
life on the earth and that organic life is purposeful? Now there is a purpose in the plant the
animal and man spring out of the earth and realising themselves on the earth,
standing upon the earth with the earth as their basis, with all their chemistry
derived from the earth which is a mass in the solar system, one time not solid
but diffuse throughout the solar system itself are we not compelled logically
to say that the power which produced a man on the earth is an intelligent power
if so then the solar nebula from which this planetary system derived was an
intelligent power we can then talk about solar intelligence, we can talk about
the whole solar system as an intelligent being and we can think about that
plasma that very, very, fine energy which at one time was an incandescent mass shaped roughly like the
solar system is now but the planets not yet cooled but the matter of the
planets remember matter is energy the energy of those planets not yet cooled
still a part OBVIOUSLY IN DYNAMIC interrelation with the whole field of solar
energy and it is moving towards producing intelligent beings one of whom was
man it is therefore an intelligent power a solar power producing man on earth
you can then see how in the ancient world those priest king scientists who
understood that fact quite clearly said they were sons of the sun they actually
called themselves solar beings and anybody who didn’t know that fact were sons
of the moon where the moon as you know hasn’t got any organic life on it doesn’t grow any plants or animals
or men and therefore symbolises a type of energy locked up not yet producing,
that it will produce in the future if you live long enough you will see you
have already seen the first steps to occupying it you can’t conceive that man are
not going to do something with it and use it grow things on it establish a life
pattern and so on but at the moment it is inert and it is phasic, it is periodic
and it is peculiarly related to moods on
the sea on earth so it is used as a symbol of a kind of life that is near as
you can get to it is mechanical considering
that all energy is intelligent at base now we see in the moon a sort of
turn of involution where the free intelligent power, the solar power has
brought itself down progressively condensing itself until it has immobilised
itself to the greatest degree and the moon symbolises therefore that
approximation to total immobility as near as we can get to it ,what we have
then is a large atom going round in an orbit and presenting the same face to the
earth continually , it cannot develop itself in the way that it might develop
itself if it had been a bit farther away had rotated on its axis, had its own
night and day, had an atmosphere, if it had had those things it might have
already grown some plants, some animals and so on but it hasn’t yet. It is one
sixth the mass of earth and its atmosphere such as it was, was robbed
from it because of its too close proximity to the earth but there we see 2 ways
now of thinking one is a way where we look externally at the thing and we are
pleased we can take it to pieces the other is one in which we look at it and we
identify with it and we say that all the brilliant arrangements and
articulations and organisations within these things are there for us to look at,
we didn’t put them there they are there, we discovered them there because they
are there and they are put there by an intelligent involving power and its greatest depths of involution is
represented by the moon with no organic life on it that we can see. Now the way
of the moon is the way of routine is the way of phasic changes conditioned by a
law obviously rotation of that body around the earth so that the way of the
moon, in yoga that is.... the way of the
ancestors and the way of the sun were 2 exactly opposite ways the way of the sun is the way of the affirmation
of freedom suriya the sun affirming free yama away suriyama is a way of
affirming freedom the other way is to be in a routine way of behaviour and to
believe you cannot get out of that routine a mechanistic behaviourist will
solemnly assure you that you cannot do anything unless you are stimulated and
you cannot do anything except react to the kind of stimulus you get in
accordance with the organism which you are already a product according to them,
of blind forces of evolution if you believe if you are conditioned in that way
your own belief will condition you. You will actually behave as if you are
enslaved by natural laws by gravity, by laws of electro- magnetic distribution
by laws of chemistry and so on. If you
believe it the idea that you are enslaved will enslave you ,you are then on the
way of the moon you are on the way of the ancestors the question of the moon
and ancestors was quite simple they said ancestors, fathers and mothers
generally wish children to obey them but if the children obey their ancestors
and as the ancestors have adjusted to a
certain kind of way of living we say
have learned and because they have learned it they think it is the way, if the
parents impose on the children and the children behave in the same way as their
parents then there will be an exact repetition from generation to generation of
a behaviour which in effect would mean mechanism so that way of the moon of that non growing thing which repeatedly goes
through certain phases, increasing and decreasing, was also called the way of
the ancestors ...fathers. Think of that very carefully now because when we look
inside the human being we see certain things which are there already for us to
see. Let’s look at our body throughout the whole of our body we see that we
have a stuff called loosely flesh..would call it protoplasm the original plastic
substance of life and then ask yourself why this protoplasm has gathered itself
together in this way, why has it bother to dress itself up in our hemisphere to
put clothes on it, why does it protect itself and we find this protoplasm is
full of purpose and we find if we trace it back to its beginnings as an egg
inside another piece of protoplasm called
mother this egg somehow mysteriously took a piece of protoplasm quite
small, barely visible to the naked eye and proceeded to develop itself, to
organise itself, to divide itself internally and every sub division that it
makes is functional, purpose fulfilling so we have to say that this protoplasm
is shot through and through with purpose and therefore with intelligence we
have to say the protoplasm of our body is a substance giving concrete evidence
of intelligent working energies. Now we observe another thing, if this
protoplasm had not got a bony structure inside it, would it not be using energy
more to sit out than it does now that it has a spine tell me if you got a spine
in you is it easier to sit up or harder... easier... so you have to say that
the bones in the body fulfil a special function they have been posited inside
the protoplasm by the proto intelligence which is all one with the solar intelligent
power, which is all one with the universal intelligent power which in religion
is called god and philosophers might call first cause and we have to say that
the bones have been posited inside that proto merely for economic reasons if I
have got a bone in my arm and I turn my hand up like that and my elbow won’t
bend backwards so I don’t tire in that part of my arm in holding it up as much
as I would if held it like that where gravity is pulling it down, you do that
with your arm, put an arm out bang somebody on the nose next to you, turn your
palm up and feel that your elbow joint is carrying the weight of that arm and
turn it over the other way and feel that dangle
feel how you expend energy to hold it up that way aren’t you saving
energy when you hold your palm up, think about the bones in your body as
economic methods of maintaining postures which would require a greater energy
expenditure if you hadn’t made those bones. And think that the power that was
originally in the universe that made the solar system, that cooled itself in
this zone and made the earth that in this zone organised plants, animals and
men this energy is still with us working in us now and it is intelligent so
that we are not in any way separated from the power of the universe that
created the star system, the solar system the planetary system organic life on
earth and us, we are still in contact with that power and that power is working
intelligently within us.
And then
look at your nervous system those of you who have studied any nerves physiology
have been probably taught that the nerves communicate send messages from the
brain to different parts of the body is that right dr clover? In fact it isn’t
so something quite different before you had
a nervous system your protoplasm was able to send messages all over
itself wasn’t it, you know that because an amoeba can do it can’t it, has it
got a nervous system Dr. Clover not defined as such, not defined as such that
is very careful she is a bit canny perhaps 10 years ago she might have said definitely
certainly it has not she is a bit wary
now, it doesn’t show under the microscope no
not the ordinary sort and yet this amoeba which is only a mono cell
spreading itself out in search of food and delights carries messages all over
itself throughout its proto and this same proto has laid down the nervous system
why has it done it answer dr c ..why has it done it... economy ...yes as a
matter of fact once you have laid down a nerve track you can insert a little
bit of energy at the top end and it will go down without bothering and wiggle
your finger it is an economic method of separating out functions it is not
actually a method of communication at
all it is a method of non comm. to the other parts you don’t want to comm. because all the nerve lines are insulated so
that energy inserted at the top end does not leak out on the way down until it
comes to a particular term is that right...is there a doctor in the house
Trevor you know a lot about the nervous system don’t you something yes is the
nerve line insulated it has a sheath what is the function of that sheath it is
so the messages that go along the nerve so it doesn’t leak out sideways... yes ...and
this insulation was laid down by the intelligence that generated this protoplasm
so we have to say that just as the bones
are an economic method of saving energy so the nervous system is an economic
way of saving energy
More
specifically no remember you could use it more specifically before you had the
nervous system, all it’s done is enable you to lay a habit pattern so that you
don’t need to attend to them anymore, when you see a little baby trying to walk
he uses a lot of muscles that he doesn’t need in order to walk including
pulling its tongue out, rolling its eyes and so on grabbing at the air it
progressively eliminates those that do not conduce to walking and it leaves those that conduce to walking
connected up so the moment the idea I will walk comes in immediately there is a
programme directed by a nervous impulsation and walking occurs so the actual
separation out of the functions is already inherent in the protoplasm made by
that intelligent power, now that being so we are faced with a peculiar thing
and that is that the field of energy because when we are talking about living
substances as proto we know they are held together by a bio-magnetic fields
that field of energy must be already structured we can’t lay down these bones except
within a pattern we can’t lay down these nervous system except within a pattern,
think of those eggs lying comfortably within the mother waiting to be born you
are an empirical scientist you steal one in the night, put it under the
microscope you peer down it what do you find you don’t find any visible bones or
nervous system and yet if you treat it very carefully and incubate it and feed
it, it will grow them now where is the
pattern of the human being when physically we cannot see it in the physical
body of that protoplasmic egg..in the field..so the field itself must be
structured so when we are talking about this solar power this universal power
we are not talking about sloppy energy meandering about we are talking about a
power which is infinitely structured it has got its own structure which can be
the plan on which later it lays down a nervous system yes so we have to say
that the field of the infinite power is infinitely structured when we say
infinitely structured we mean that it contains every conceivable form whatever
you can imagine no matter how funny it is whether it is centaurs or millipedes,
elephants butterflies whatever it is that infinite field of power already has
within it the structure of that being
Now yoga
philosophy is a philosophy telling you a procedure and theoretical background
to enable you to become aware of this structure and to do so by means of your
body there is a nice little expression yoga bahoga yoga means conjoining with your source yoking
to the absolute power and bahoga means enjoy it. It actually means as you
become aware that your body is nothing but embodied intelligence, embodied
structure, embodied function as you become aware of it instead of thinking of
it as an alien thing, something that somehow you fell into, you will begin to
see that this body is intelligent, structural purposeful power, self
precipitated concreted as a body you will then begin to see what was meant by
many mystics of whom Blake was one, Jacob Bloomer another, Shakespeare another
to say that this body is spirit, there is a dualism made by certain
religionists of spirit and matter is false it is non dual, your body is spirit
because it is structured, because it is functional, think very carefully about
that because a lot of religion had a function in the ancient world of making
people behave who couldn’t understand at the then level that the fact that body
was spirit imagine people who thought that their body was a pleasure mechanism
that they could use and bind themselves into the body because of the pleasures
and they could not understand that this pleasure itself was a device of spirit
to ensure attendance to the body and they became so locked in the pleasures cycles
of the body that they couldn’t turn round and look at the source power you see
that because sometimes you have to account to strange statements made by
religious leaders in the ancient world which are quite untrue if taken at their
external significance namely the idea that there is a spirit world and the idea
that there is a material world and the idea that they these 2 worlds are at war
with each other, why St. Paul says that the spirit lusts against the flesh and
the flesh against the spirit and he sees a war in the numbers and he postulates
this, why because of identification.
How many of
you know the story of the god Indra getting into the body of a pig do we all
know it well if there is anyone who doesn’t know it we well have to tell the
story there was a great god named Indra very famous amongst the gods and he was
meandering about one day and he saw a pig and he thought what a wonderful
powerful animal so full of vitality and he descended into it to see what it was
like and he found it felt marvellous dashing about with tusks tearing up the
trees having a fine time and he became so delighted with this pig existence the
idea that he was Indra the great god, began to fade and he met a lady pig and
it faded even more and little piglets and it faded more he lost his divine vocabulary and all he
could do was grunt . Meanwhile the divine messenger was skating about and in
heaven there had been an alarm and this divine messenger said well actually he
is in a pig’s body and he has forgotten he is a god so all the gods went down
and began to talk to him and saying now Lord Indra come out of that pig’s body you
have been in there long enough heaven is falling apart the admin is really
going to pieces come back and he replied ‘snort’ so they thought this it is
ridiculous the fellow is identified now identification is the key to all misery
charming thought by what you may fall you may rise if you identify with an
object you go under the law governing that object but if you identify with free
spirit then you go under the law of free spirit so it’s either or, you identify
with the form or you identify with intelligence. anyhow Indra could only grunt so
they killed all his little piglets whereupon he snorted and grunted and got
very annoyed but he still remained piggy so then they killed his wife so he
snorted more and started to look for another wife he was apparently incurable so they killed him they ripped open the body
of the pig and they dragged him out and then he saw he was the god Indra and he
apologised for his rudery that is another god Rudra, and promised not to
identify with pigs anymore and they went back to heaven and the admin was put
in order. and that story is telling you something it is telling you that
intelligence can so concentrate on a purpose that it can lock itself in that
purpose completely and that when it does so effectively it functionally cuts
itself off, it can’t cut itself off substantially from its origins because
total original reality is a continuum and a continuum has no parts and what has
no parts cannot be cut but you can cut yourself off by identification with
function so if that women think that they are mothers of children and that they
are dependent upon men their thought that they are so would functionalise them so
that they behave ‘As if’ a woman said to me the other day with a sad face;
‘I have been
thinking about the lot of women in the world and I have realised that to be
born a woman is to be enslaved to men, to think when you wake in the morning
what shall I make for his breakfast, not what shall I make for my breakfast,
his breakfast, what socks should I lay out what shirt colour should I choose.
‘ooohh’ very good, a good insight, the identification she had suddenly realised
the consciousness in her had suddenly realised that she was not merely a layer
out of socks, an over boiler of water and things, she was a genuine
intelligence in a body able to choose, having said that of course she laid out
his shirt but that was no longer mere blind identification that was intelligent
recognition of inter function that in case there was any rebellious spirits
down there my dear.
In the body
are evidences now let’s look at the body again, I am going to use the gong my dear
is that all right Joan I am going to say this gong can represent an egg the
kind of egg that Joan known as the gong once carried and delivered and has now
grown itself a headpiece a couple of arms and a couple of legs we were all once
such we were all once gong shaped.The word gong is interesting because there is
on in the middle and that means
serpent with tail in its mouth it means a self stimulating energy field on, an means a running serpent on means
a serpent with tail in mouth. now when you get hold of one of those on beings
as in Babylon when you get hold of one of these and encase it in matter hard g it is a gong so imagine it is an on that is a
certain amount of energy rotating within itself and this energy, if we tap it
in the centre here, gives forth a certain sound, how many genuine well trained
musicians are there in the audience here how many know about harmonics let’s keep it for the babies if I tap here
does it vibrate down here as well I can feel it with my finger look I hit it on
one point and all points vibrate, is that right Mr. Violinist, yes, if we touch
a continuum it in one part we touch all parts now imagine you are an egg and
you have become grossly embodied but you are not cut off from the infinite
power that precipitated the egg so this power vibration is still imparting
itself to the egg isn’t it so I will out of my humbleness of spirit will now
represent the infinite eternal power and I will give it a little tap when I tap
the gong the gong speaks now here is a problem for the free will merchants
could the gong keep quiet the answer is yes if you were reflexively self
conscious but in fact the gong likes singing that is the whole key to gong
work, you must remember that it is a big rule when you stimulate someone if
they reply it is because they were
waiting for the stimulus. all you married men know that it is possible for a
wife to shut down not to speak although they are quite capable of it you give
them a stimulus maybe on the periphery accidentally you turn over in bed and
stick you knee in the middle of her spine and a certain sound comes out BOOM as
a matter of fact this has caused some husbands to lie horizontally for the rest
of their lives, but those are only the timid ones and those recover after a few
hours some even retaliate immediately. Whatever we can assert of any part of
the continuum we can assert of every zone of the continuum so whatever we can
assert of this gong we can assert of our own being we have asserted that
because we are immediately aware of our purpose no amount of argument by an
external scientist can get us of the fact that we feel, immediately our freedom
to say don’t talk rubbish or go away or I agree with you quite, now can I have
my dinner. We can do any one of infinity of responses we know this because it
is immediate that it is non-mediated within us we also know that this continuum
of power is infinitely intelligent and yet it mysteriously here it is being a
gong and here it is being a human being and so on just think of all that energy
being human being and some energy being carpet and some is being stage and some
is being gong. Now we have said if you define any part of it adequately you
will define all of it, so let’s define this gong a little more is this gong
just something to take to pieces and saw it up to see what it is made of or
should we examine it functionally if you want to understand it we will
understand it better functionally won’t we?
So right now
we will test it for function if I tap it in the middle a certain sound comes out
and we said 2 ways of thinking if we
look at it from outside we think we are clever to have found something if we
look at it from the inside and be surprised at what’s already in it so if this
thing makes a noise when I tap it isn’t it because some intelligence designed
the gong to make that noise well some people will say o yes of course we are
human beings and we designed the gong deliberately to make that noise and then
foolishly but nobody designed me I just evolved blindly in the universal matter
now this is illogical if this gong had been designed by human int and the human
int in its whole structure had been designed by the power that made it then the
same int that designed the gong designed the human being and the function of
the gong to the human being and of the human being to the gong are reciprocal
so now we have a triangle up here is the point of entrance of the infinite
power down here is the body called human there is a body called gong if this
body of human now goes like this bong and
the gong sings back it is only at the will of the.... 54.50
that these 2 things occur the gong responds because it has been built to
respond and i respond gongs capacity to respond because I have been built built
to respond and i am also built to create a stimulus so that it will respond so i that I can discuss the response of the
gong on myself within the field of int power
Now you see that
the middle of the gong has a round part and the 2 funny signs there one
above and one below now we are going to say let the centre of the gong
represent the middle of your chest let this one represent your tummy and that
one your head when we say let them do
it, it means we are going to let them do it we are not going to stop them, let put
a line in to represent man why are we doing that we are doing it inside our
int and
we are doing it for our convenience in order to discuss certain things
now if i tap myself on the chest i feel that i am tapped if i hit myself bang on the chest a bit harder i feel
something mildly called pain if i were to hit myself very much harder i would
probably tend more in my cells to
react a bit and say don’t be a fool and get up and walk out
of striking distance if the energy in my chest reaches a certain level and
overflows to excessive energy input it will drop into my tummy and from there go into my thighs and i will
get up and go away
So we will
start stimulus in the feeling centre of the heart ,we will hit it a bit harder
and start spreading through the being dampen it a moment, imagine it goes down
we will call it the motor centre that makes you run about like a motor car,
goes into your legs if i then run into a wall in my panic getting away from
this blow and I beat up against the wall and the energy that is bong generated
by the impact rushes up the gong and goes into the head so centre, down, up is
the order ,first we feel, we are a field of sentient power then under excessive
stimulation, excessive meaning that that, that is so great we cannot
comfortably assimilate it, the energy first runs down into the motor centre to
get away from the excessive energy input
then if we run blindly and strike a wall
in our running , then the energy bounces back and goes into the head and
becomes thought and observe that in the human being the baby is feeling before
it has organised its motor centres that
egg in the mother before it has grown those legs and arms is already feeling,
it is sentient and then it begins to grow as the energy input from the food
from its mother comes in and there becomes more and more energy available the
energy begins to organise a motor centre and then later on when it has been
born for some time it will organise a thinking centre the feeling centre is organised first then the motor centre then the thinking
centre, first we feel, then we move then we think.
I knew a man
once and he was in a mental hospital and periodically he was hallucinating but
only when he began to run, he had a peculiar anger and pattern such that when
he began to run he immediately hallucinated and he saw open green fields in
front of him and he ran this was in a north Manchester mental hospital and he
ran so fast that he crashed into a wall and knocked himself out now he
represented that perfectly, I feel then I move and I crash into a wall and I
think. Usually he had somebody with him so that he didn’t break into a run but
he illustrated perfectly this order, feeling then starting to move,
accelerating triggered off, hallucinate, crash, thought.
Now we are
going to say something from Buddhist psychology and that is that your mind,
your thinking part of yourself in your head, is an organ of fear it has been
produced by crashing into obstacles there are 5 main kinds of obstacles,
physical bodies like walls and things, emotional walls that means that
emotional energy from other people refusing your emotional advance ,mental
energy presenting you with ideas that disagree with yours governing contracts
world views that totally disagree with yours and initiatives that totally
disagree with yours that’s 5 ways of being thrown back on yourself and made to
think. Now we are looking at the wisdom in the body whether it is the body of a
gong (1.47) or the body of this human being. Now you know what the Doppler
effect is don’t you, when a car or a train is rushing towards you the pitch of
the note, the sound of that engine alters, when it is rushing away from you it
alters again in the one case it rises in the other case it falls, it is to do
with the compression of the waves in the one case and the dragging out of the
waves in the other case supposing I swing this gong like this as its swinging
it is coming towards you and going away from you, I will just give it a little
tap ...bang ... can you hear the alteration of pitch? If I swing it a lot more ...BANG...
did you feel a compression in your ears as it came towards you, could you feel
that or weren’t you watching; feel in your ears and see if you can’t feel that
the waves coming at you compress as the gong swings towards you and this
compression reduces as it swings away... BANG... did you feel it, with a bit of
practice you can feel things like that quite easily, you feel a sort of threat
as it swings towards you and this reduces as it swings away from you it
actually says yes something that says moi it is definitely giving you a
different sound cos it is altering the pitch isn’t it? now as this is suspended
here at the top the swing at the bottom is greater isn’t it so the Doppler
effect is greater at the bottom there...bang...can you hear that....up here at
the top the swing is much less. Isn’t it Now The swing the response to a
stimulus is much greater down here in the appetite part than in the head why
because the human being unlike the animal is we have a concept that we are
human don’t we and doesn’t this concept inhibit us aren’t we really suspended
like this gong tightening up here and loose here and don’t we wear belts and bikinis
and things to control ourselves in the
lower regions because of the tendency to
swing there is more hip swinging then head swinging, let’s get a volunteer who
can walk down there to prove a point and keep her hips absolutely still and
sway her head. Is there a volunteer?
I’ll
volunteer, OK, I knew it was going to be you...thank you very much, a very
cooperative girl I want you to keep the hips absolutely dead level remember
they are ruled by Libra and absolutely parallel...and I want your head to loll
from side to side as if it was born in Africa, will you walk now please, ...laughter...
always take the lady’s glasses off before anything basic, right, get it going, you can’t do it, no, it is
against nature dear, it is against nature you have been doing it the other way
for so many thousands of years you are in quite a habit really...in Gurdjieff
school he would deliberately try to make people do that, to do something they
can’t do, to teach them something about their organism, the leg goes with the head,
it’s weird isn’t it really, It is a very weird feeling actually, very weird
Another
exercise is to be a woman and deliberately set out to tell the objective truth
about something; you have exactly the same difficulty like a man has tremendous
difficulty in trying to feel what his wife means as opposed to what she is
verbally presenting
So here we
are the greatest amount of swing is down here, and that means that we are more
urgeful in the lower part of the body in the head we are tightened up we are more
inhibited, so these 2 apparently quite different things really are being
governed by a very similar law, so the one is determined to be inorganic and
the other organic but they are both working and organic means working they are working in the same way, but this
body is more floppy about it than this body
but the same law is operative in both so we are saying the intelligence in the universe that has
produced the solar system, the planetary system, organic life on earth, and mineral
forms earth who has produced a form called man which is highly functional and
he has produced things like gongs and all of these are purposefully related
together so intimately that if you define the function of anyone of them fully
then you define the others, you couldn’t define an earth worm without the blackbird
that pulls it out of the ground, we call this ecology today don’t we, cosmic ecology all the forms are linked
together in Japanese zen it is kikimogi....the absolute reciprocal
interpenetration of all beings.
So now let
us look a bit closer we have in our legs the spokes of 2 wheels the spokes are
jointed so we that we can ride over rough ground if we had just ordinary rigid
type wheels of a certain diameter we could ride over certain ground alright but
we couldn’t ride over very variable ground could we, we have actually taken
what could have been wheels we have abstracted the levers, the spokes
articulated them in a certain way and made our legs so we that we can go over
very, very uneven ground
And the same
with our arms we have inbuilt the bones into them and the nerve lines into them
so that we can establish habitual patterns of response so we don’t need to
think about what we are doing or when we are walking along or doing an ordinary
routine job for every function that we can establish a habit pattern we release
our consciousness to attend to something else more important.
Now let us
think about this very carefully, supposing I say I start with feeling and then
I ask Mark, Mark Hunter, a question if I want to be a unity of intent, of purpose,
of intelligence and if I know that I start as a feeling being, is it very
sensible for me to abandon my feeling and pursue unity without it..no ..so if I
actually start from feeling and my thinking is nothing but the result of my
feeling in particular situations then it is very wrong of me, very illogical to
try to resolve a problem merely by thinking without feeling, right, so I must
learn to stimulate my own feeling; now how do I do this if I am a human being,
a human being is a peculiar being in that he has evolved in himself an
instrument whereby he is able remind himself about things in a way that animals
cannot do and that instrument is vocabulary then to say you have a system of
words and when you recite those words they remind you of certain basic functions
we talked about yoga and bahoga, now bahoga is enjoyment and yoga is conjunction
with the infinite power from which we are derived so if we put them both
together it says enjoy your function now to enjoy it you must feel it mustn’t
you, if you don’t feel it but you merely think it you don’t enjoy it so if you
are going to do both if you are going to destroy the false dualism that the spirit is the
enemy of the body you will have to begin to enjoy your function whatever it is
If it is
worth doing it enjoy it if isn’t worth, don’t do it and the question of whether
a thing is worth doing depends on your level of development enjoyment because
what is worth doing for an earthworm isn’t quite the same thing as , an eagle a
dormouse an elephant they are all different functions they are travelling at
different rates, they have different age lengths different functional patterns
and so on
But in all
cases these living beings are all sentient so in the Bhagvad Ghita you have a great
sentence to remind you
Worship is
continual remembrance now when you hear a phrase like that make a note of it
and tell yourself that you are going to start remembering those things that are
worth remembering, what does worship mean it means worth shape, worship is the
shape of worth, value, importances.
Make a
hierarchy of importances and remember that hierarchy what is the first thing to
be remembered the first thing with which you started, sentience
Firstly you
say I am a feeling being, before anything else I feel, that is going a little
further back than Descartes he thought that because he thought he existed if he
had gone a little further and felt that he felt that he existed he would have
been better off because then he would not have identified with intellectual
propositions but he would have
identified with feeling and feeling having no edges he would have gone back
into the infinite because the peculiar thing about feeling is although it has a
centre it has no edges think of this, when I tap the centre of this gong the
vibrations spread out round the gong to the periphery there but you can hear
them over there can’t you so the vibrations must have hit the air particles here
and travelled along the air and hit you in the ear drums and so on so although
it has started in the centre it goes to infinity doesn’t it think of that fact
supposing 3 days later you happen to be talk to somebody about this gong being
struck in a certain way could you have been talking to somebody in that way if
the gong hadn’t been struck no in other words the striking of that gong actually
conditions not only people in this room not only now here but in every subsequent
now here in which those persons may find themselves so if in 6 years you
remember that gong then that gong is remembering you remember means make again
a member of the whole power.
Worship is
continual remembrance, what are you to remember you are to remember that you
are sentient power with no edges you are infinite sentient power that is rule 1
remember that you are infinite sentient power from that derives the rule 2 ahimsa, absolute
harmlessness to all beings because if you are sentient if the continuum is
sentient on what grounds can you inflict damage, pain, destruction on another part of the same
continuum which actually represents your centre of sentience it would be quite
illogical for you to harm the zones of that being which is actually yourself, the infinite sentient power is
focused on your body and if you think that you are separate from another being, like you might think you are
separate from that gong, you are deceived, you are not separate from the gong because
if you were when I struck it you wouldn’t hear it, yourselves wouldn’t vibrate
with it in the same way when that gong is struck sound comes to you in the same
way that the vibrations of that gong any physicist in the house electro
specialist electronic engineers and so
on
Is it not
true that when this vibrates there is compression of the molecules of the atoms,
is it not true there is jumping of the orbits of the electrons, is it not true
that there is a regeneration of the electromagnetic waves, course it is,
therefore is it not true that not only do you receive you hear a message from
the gong in your ear but you receive a message from the gong in your bodies
Supposing
that you all put your fingers in your ears, and see what happens make yourself as
deaf as possible, I want you to see if any other parts of your body other than
your ears, gets some kind of vibratory ...BANG... was that experience totally
unknown to you, did you get it through the ears or did you find you got it somewhere
else as well, yesterday when a couple of people were sitting on the stage with
me and I hit the gong a certain number of times in a certain position and the
stage began to vibrate quite markedly, is that right Joan, did you have a
witness, and it wasn’t me, no, so there
was actual haptic experience from the
vibration of the gong, so that same thing actually stimulates your sense of smell, your sense of sight, it
stimulates the whole sensori and if your identification with a particular organ
over a number of years, has apparently cut you off from the other senses so
that you haven’t got a synaesthetic
experience but you are merely focused on one particular sense that is only the
way you have focused it is not the way you are necessarily conditioned you can actually extend your
sensitivity so in the same way that when we strike the gong you listen and you
also feel physical vibrations and if you are very sensitive you will also get a
sense of smell in a certain nose inside here and a sense of taste in the taste
buds in your mouth so in the same way whenever you look at something and when the
light strikes an object and bounces off that object onto you, you don’t only
see it at a certain level of your awareness your other senses also reverberate
to it so that you actually become aware
of certain information that may be relatively vague but is definitely
there and the totality of all these
different incoming stimuli we call the atmosphere of a place or the
general temperament of a human being.
There we
are, worship is continual remembrance, we start with feeling, if we remind
ourselves first we feel and only if we file feeling energy in beyond a certain
level will that feeling energy go down into the motor centre and when that
feeling energy is piled in so that it overflows we change its name and we call
it emotion e motion out motion it has gone out of the feeling centre and to the
motor centre which is moving you so there is a peculiar thing you so there in
the pursuit of real self control first you have to recognise that you feel and
then you have to recognise that you can reinforce your feelings by feedback and
build them up you can say this man has insulted me and say it half a dozen
times and work yourself up into an emotionally over charged condition the
energy will run down into the motor centres and you will rush out and kick him
or do something
First feel
overflow is emotion and into the motor centres action and that emotion overflow
is mediating between the feeling assessment centre and the motor response itself
so we have got a mediator we have one there and a tummy there and between it we
have got a little mediator they actually give us 3 different notes and
with a bit of practice and with closed
eyes we can actually hear which part of the gong is being struck first you feel
then you reinforce the feelings pile them up tell yourself funny stories how
many years have I lived with this idiot that I should put up with this any
longer and so on this is feedback and you can keep feeding back the energy into
your this being until finally it overflows into emotional it rushes into the
motor centre and you hit him with the rice pudding and go off and visit your
mother in law out of sheer revenge and drink all her favourite banana wine or
something feel overcharged feeling emotion motor centre when the motor centre
drives it to hit against a wall and bounces back into the head and it bouncing
back up to the head it passed through another mediating centre the larynx there
that’s a very important thing, a mediating centre between feeling and thinking
the larynx and that larynx is very, very ,concerned with your speech isn’t it
we call it a voice box and it means that when the thinking energy having
bounced up to the top of your head comes back into the body it comes back charged
with thought processes which are factually word processes it verbalises and we
started with one gong and we have now got 5 centres haven’t we? quite logically in the same way we have a
feeling centre we pack the energy into it overflows it goes down into the tummy
we crash into the wall it bounces into the head the head feedback that info
don’t do that again and in the process involves the larynx so we examine that
larynx we find a very marvellous instrument fantastically designed and we have
to think to ourselves this box is designed for controlling air in such a way
that we can determine how many puffs per second come out to determine the pitch
or a scream and we have it coordinated with a tongue that can wiggle up and
down and articulate the sound and all this function is within the being waiting
to be discovered and put there by purposeful intelligence
so then we
have 5 things to remember first we feel then by feedback we can recite our
feelings to ourselves I am injured, I am
injured, I am injured, this shouldn’t happen to a dog and it is happening to me,
how terrible and you pile it up and it overflows that is emotion goes in the
motor centres and you rush along and kick your toe against the end of the staircase
and now you have got trouble, a big fat toe you have to think what to do about
it when you are thinking you are actually using words you invent words in order
to control thought symbolically and you send these down through the larynx and
you shout out instructions back into the feeling centre and off you go again so
you have this peculiar process feeling, overflow emotions, motor response back
in the head thinking, articulation back into the feeling centre.
Worship is
continual remembrance if you were to take all the words out of your vocabulary
and begin to define them the first thing you would observe is that you cannot define a word you’ve got without
using other words and this shows you the reciprocal relation of thought you
cannot define a word like some dictionaries do like cabbage see cabbage from
the old English cabbage or something ...refer to cabbage again same place same
page and it says see cabbage funny there are some dictionaries like that, have
you got one they are rather cheap those dictionaries they are called handy
pockets dictionary they tell you nothing but there are some other dictionary
that tell you the origin of words some dictionary are not too bad like Wilde’s
Universal English dictionary which we generally
recommend for beginners then of course you have some rather fuller
dictionary with many volumes which give you the date of the intro of the word,
who used it and what it represented
But when you
try to define a word are forced to define some other a word you use another
word to define this one and then you have to define the other words and you
cannot define a word with only one word because to define a word you have to
use a sentence and every sentence has a subject and a predicate so you have
already got at least 2 and then you have to define those and immediately you are
off with a tremendous spreading out of words
now as each word represents an idea in your
mind it follows that you can’t define a word except in terms of some other
words you can’t define an idea except in
terms of some other ideas and as every idea you have has been evolved in a concrete living situation you haven’t got a
single idea in your vocabulary a single word that has not that is not emotively charged in
some degree so that when you try to define a word an idea your forced also to
define an emotional pattern but every emotional pattern tends to go into the
motor centre and produce action so that any single word when you start to define it will lead you
through overflow into emotion into activity any word will liberate energy and
move you and then you will be in trouble and you will think again now because
of this fact about words and ideas because a word is only an orderly par and an
idea is only a form in a field of sentience if you are to balance yourself dynamically in a living
way as all the words presuppose each other the only way you can liberate
yourself from any given emotive tendency that would carry you into action is
that the moment you hear that word you are immediately to define its opposite
with the same amount of energy so if a man says forward chaps you shout
backwards un...chaps if you do this internally you stabilise your being if you
do not do it you cannot stabilise your being its rather interesting either or
either you balance your ideas equals forms with emotional charges or you will go
into activity on an unbalance the moment
there is no balance in the universe other than the balance of opposing forces
there is not a balance of no forces and there is no static balance if you are
painting a picture and you are talking about balance you have to put a form
here, a form here and a form here and so on there is a law of diagonal balance
that you could use if you don’t use energies in opposition there is no balance
that means there is no balance yourself unless you set up deliberately set up
the contrary idea of the one that has just hit you so if somebody says severity
you must say mercy to yourself if someone says mercy you must say severity
otherwise you will fall into mercy it is essential to balance quite consciously
worship is continuous remembrance worship is worth shape the shape of value and
your value ultimately is determined by the degree of intelligent self control
you have got. So there we have now worship is continual remembrance from which
we remember we are a feeling being a zone in an infinite sentient field and
because it is sentient it feels and because it is infinite it means we are not
separate from each other and because we are not separate rule 2 ahimsa
harmlessness comes out of it, then we go onto our 5, we feel, we emote, we
motorise, or activate, we crash into obstacles, we think, we verbalise, back to
feel and to be aware of that fact and watch the cycle whatever somebody saying to you immediately think what is the opposite
of that and say it to yourself and recognise all opposites presuppose each
other, all opposite ideas are equally valid the good the bad the high the low
the near the far are all equally valid and your balance of being depends upon the
realisation of this opposition immediately this comes you feed in the contrary
stimulus and in that fact you are balanced unless you are balanced you are not
free if you balance we know that because of the word libra balance a pair of
scales if you have exactly equal weights in the scales you can choose to review
both or you can operate both and you can operate either but if you are not
balanced your energy overflows the emotion is going in the motor centre and
making you behave in a certain way.
so your
first duty in the pursuit of freedom is to remember to remember worship is
continual remembrance, second ahimsa and then thirdly, feel, emote motor crash
think verbalise back to centre of feeling, if you don’t verbalise what’s
happened you will not be able to respond accurately to the next stimulus feel
emote motorise crash think verbalise state what has happened back to feeling
centre re evaluate do those 5 and you
will come into balance it requires practice and first of all practice in
remembering get a post card write on it worship is continual remembrance or for
economy’s sake you can write the initial letters of that wicr do you know what
wicr is it is the old name for an anglo- saxon parliament it means quick
differentiation