DIALECTIC – a talk by Eugene Halliday -
Transcribed by Carol Wadeson & Alan Roberts August 2013
Online dictionary definitions of Dialectic:
1. The art or practice of arriving at the truth
by the exchange of logical arguments.
2a. The process, especially associated with Hegel,
of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory
antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis.
2b. Hegel's critical method for the investigation
of this process.
3a. The Marxian process of change through the
conflict of opposing forces, whereby a given contradiction is characterized by
a primary and a secondary aspect, the secondary succumbing to the primary,
which is then transformed into an aspect of a new contradiction. Often used in
the plural with a singular or plural verb.
3b. The Marxian critique of this process.
4.
dialectics (used with a sing. verb) A method of
argument or exposition that systematically weighs contradictory facts or ideas
with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions.
5. The contradiction between two conflicting
forces viewed as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.
Introduction:
Only the timeline has been added into the talk text and is shown inside square brackets.
Having decided not to insert headings into the transcript, for there are none in the talk proper, and for the benefit of those who may wish to use this text for group purposes, here is a brief outline of where you can find the subject matter:
Formulation [00.03] Gross Matter: Sight and the other senses of ‘misrepresentation’ [00.06] The Intellect: reason, opposites, philosophy and ultimate truth [00.10] Arithmetic, plane geometry, 2D & 3D geometry [00.19]
Wonderfully, and often humorously illustrated by his anecdotes: reason and ratio, the turn-around in the cave [00.04, 00.58] the parked car [00.18] Vibration/music [00.22] Japanese flower arrangements & Mudras [00.34] Intellect & gross matter, primitives/Duke of Edinburgh [00.36] Dragon Power & zeal, Isaac’s Dream [00.41] right & wrong, gown shop, canary tee-shirt [01.03]
The one man/existence [00.47] an easy life [00.54] through to his further questions: Who am I? [00.56] where am I going? [01.05] what is God? [01.10]
The overwhelming impression on me towards the end of this
talk is that all beings are equal, without question, which is somewhat odd
because
[00.00min] “The subject matter chosen to be talked about tonight is Dialectic. The young man who knows all about dialectic said to me it wasn’t enough to know all about it and he’d like to know more!
The funny thing is it is always possible to know more and we’ll see that if anyone thinks it’s not possible to know more when you know all there is to know, that person is an idolater. He has come to rest on a formulation of some kind and in so doing he has actually, by his identification with a finite formulation, stopped his own further evolution. The reason for that is that the ultimate reality is a power which is infinite and therefore capable of infinite modulations, of infinite creativity so that you are not seeking in the world to find the solution of a problem which is solvable because there is no finitude about that power. Whatever solution you may get is a solution only up to the moment of getting it. The infinite power which is the substratum of all that is, is capable of redesigning itself every moment and in fact does so, so that when scientists or philosophers come to the final conclusion, say like Newton or Einstein or in philosophy Hegel, when they come to the final solution, the universe changes its form, changes its mode of activity, so although that was a final solution up to the moment of its formulation, it is not any longer a final solution of the problem. [00.01]
You all know that rats, through being repeatedly poisoned, have learned how to subsist on poison. There is an infinite adaptability, things that can be killed by other things, if they’re killed often enough, learn to adapt to the killing energy and to survive in the middle of it and that is an example of the grossest possible level of the fact that the universe, being power, is infinitely adjustable. There is no final solution to a problem like: What is God? There is no final solution to the problem of philosophy: What is ultimate Substance? Any solution is for now. The word system means saviour for a time, SYS for saviour and TEM for time. That SYS root which occurs in the signal: Save our Souls (SOS) and in a Greek base meaning saviour, and in the Hebrew for horse SUS also the saviour because horse means hierarchical power issue, plus ten the basis of time, put together. [00.03]
Any system, no matter that it is necessarily applicable only up to the time of its formulation, it saves you from chaotic processes, only up to the time of its formulation. After that time it immediately becomes out of date.
Now we are going to talk about dialectic and in the process we are going to point out the dialectic and here I have to make a plug for Hanukka’s philosophy class which a large number of people are not taking advantage of, probably because she’s only a little girl anyway she’s not six feet six and very imposing, she does happen to be fairly knowledgeable in a systemic way, that is, will save you for the time but in the process of studying historical philosophy the mind is furnished with evidences that every formulation that has been made historically has been transcended at the very point where it seems to the propounder of that systemic philosophy to be the last word whereby everybody can understand total reality. [00.04]
Now we are going to start with the fact given by Plato, actually outlined by Hanukka in her philosophy trials, of a process which Plato describes as coming from Socrates, his master, and this is the process whereby the quotation of Bernard Shaw’s of Plato can be comprehended. Shaw liked to quote about when philosophers are kings and kings philosophers, then we can expect some form of intelligent government. Now Plato gives the method whereby any man or any woman, remembering that god is a woman, can actually come to be a philosopher-king or a king-philosopher. And he outlines this process very clearly. He says, first of all, we have to come out of the cave. Now you all know the analogy of the cave were it is described that man sits as if in a cave, with his back to the light which is outside and this light is throwing shadows on a wall in front of the men in the cave, they are looking at these shadows and they are chained so they cannot turn their heads to see what is casting the shadows. So they study the shadows and the behaviour of the shadows, the relationships of the shadows, and all they are studying is shadows of realities that they cannot see because they can’t turn ‘round. [00.06]
Now, this idea of the turn-round runs through every major philosophy. When we look in the external world we tend to think that we are looking into an open situation and we forget that we have a skull here which is the cave in which we sit. That is to say our intelligence tends to sit inside the organism and to look out through its eyes and think that it is seeing reality with its eyes. Now we know it’s a physiological fact that with our eyes we do not see the external world at all, we see something quite different. What we see is a projection, just as from the magic lantern. On our retina, at the back of our eyes, we have retinal structures, rods and cones which are stimulated by energies that come from outside and when we look with our eyes open what we are actually looking at is an image, a shadow, on the retina. [00.07]
We tend, because we are teleological, that is purposive beings, to project through the eyes and to confer upon the images on the retina, an external existence and reality. That’s all the people in this room are on my retina and I am on your retina. You tend to project and think I am over here, and if I didn’t know any better I would tend to project and think all you people were out there and not on my retina, actually you look to me that you are on my retina and babies also see other people as on the retina, especially when they have some reason to withdraw from them. For instance parents might be pressurising the child, the child doesn’t like it and will suddenly say ‘Oh Mummy you’ve gone small’ what’s happened is that the child has withdrawn its projective energies and is looking directly at a very tiny image on the retina, which is reduced to the level of 2D. Think about that but on the retina the image has length and breadth but it has no depth so our belief that people have depth does not derive from our eyes, it derives from moving about and putting our arms ‘round things, embracing things. We build up our three dimensional sense by this process of grasping with our hands or putting our legs ‘round things. In any case to get 3D we must get hold of, somehow, the things which our eyes give to us as a two dimensional, not an object, a two dimensional image: the shadow pattern. The shadow which may be black and white or coloured, according to how you adjust the knobs on your TV. [00.10]
Now; what is the process whereby an ordinary man can come to be a philosopher-king or a king-philosopher according to Socrates? It is a very simple process; it consists first of all of recognising the necessity for coming out of the cave and to do that somehow he must learn to turn ‘round. Something must happen in you to say ‘I am looking at shadows, I’m projecting into an external world and I must learn to turn ‘round inside myself and instead of looking at that world which I project, in which my beloved or my enemy appears to be lurking, I must turn ‘round and go inside and look at myself, look at my zone of sentient power which is peculiarly my own, because I and I alone can go into it, in the same way as each individual here present can go into his own being by turning ‘round from the external sense stimulus pattern’. And each individual and each individual alone can do his own self looking at. [00.11]
We have to get out of the cave. So what is the first thing to do to convince us that we are in the cave? And the first thing is to recognise the peculiar quality of sense organ information. Now the eye is very obvious and the ear is very obvious, at misinforming us. The eye does it because if we ask our self the simple thing, say ‘what is the colour in this carpet?’ and then we say ‘oh it’s a bit dark I can’t see,’ ‘what colour is it now, dark blue?’ Supposing we flood it with light, does it become a lighter blue? Does it? And if I put an orange carpet on that blue, will the blue stay the same kind of blue or will it change? Every colour changes according to the situation which provides it with a background and according to the time of the day. When the sun is up, the sun illuminates it with certain colours and you all know a bit of elementary optics, you know perfectly well the colour you see is not the colour of the object. If that is a blue carpet and the opposite of blue is orange, then in order to shine its blue light into my eye it must be absorbing the orange colour. If it is a red carpet it must absorb green. The colour that comes to us is not the colour of the object but it’s opposite. So what is the real colour of the carpet? It is impossible to say, except that somehow, mysteriously, it must embrace all opposite colours. The real colour of the carpet is the blue that it gives to me and the orange it suppresses and if you put orange and blue together in that way you get a dark grey approximating to black. And if you wiz it round in separativity you will get white. What is the colour of the carpet? Is it orange, blue, put together mixed mechanically: black, put together dynamically and whirled: white? Unless you put all of these together which is the dialectical process, you cannot know. [00.14]
In the same way, if we have a window open there and an aeroplane goes by there, it is quite possible that we will hear the aeroplane which is south coming in through the north window. We can be mislead by our ears, in the same way if you get three bowls of water and you have a hot bowl and a cold bowl and a middle bowl that’s tepid, and you put your hands into the middle one and then take them out and put them in the two outer bowls, they will give you false messages. One will feel cooler; the other will feel hotter, according to its relation with this medium temperature. [00.15]
Our sense organs can and do deceive us and therefore, says Socrates, having decided we have got to get out of the cave, and that’s outside of the viewpoint of living in the skull, looking out at an imaginary projected world, we have to recognise first the utter unreliability of our sense organs, not for telling us about elementary things about whether the light says red or green, on the corner where the traffic is, because that is utilitarian and external but for telling us anything about ultimate truth, the sense organs cannot tell us anything about ultimate truth. So we decide if we cannot rely on our senses, what can we rely on? And Socrates says well move up from the sense organs and start to use your reason. The reason is going to lift you out of the tyranny of sense organ misrepresentation. The sense organ is not misrepresenting the thing that you see, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s a ghost it’s a real illusion and you adapt to it externally but it cannot tell you about ultimate reality and it cannot tell you about the chief dynamics of the universe. It cannot tell you about the mysteries of your will, it cannot tell you about the mysteries of the higher intellect and how it precipitates forms. [00.16]
So we have to learn to reason. This is the order: to get out of the cave first we must recognise the unreliability of the sense organs as means of knowing ultimate reality, next we must see that only by becoming reasonable shall we escape and then we say well what is reason? We must take the next step, reason is ratio, and ratio lands us immediately, in the next level of study: arithmetic, that is to say the application of a measuring unit, to the things we see. This is the order that Socrates gives to us. We have to get out of the cave so we must first learn to mistrust our senses then we must start to look for something trustworthy and that is the reason and the reason is that faculty that detects ratios and lifts us to the level of studying arithmetic. How do you know to which man you are married? To which woman you are married? Do you know that you have already, although probably non-reflexively, measured your husband? You know whether it’s a five foot husband or a six foot husband, don’t you? You are actually using arithmetic to where to go home to. Do you know the numbers of your car? Do you know the colour of it? If you do you might find your own car. [00.18]
Rather funnily I had an incident on one occasion that I went into a toy shop and it was a non-parking place, put my car there and went into the shop, rushed out, put the key in the car and it wouldn’t open. I rushed back into the shop and borrowed a screwdriver from the owner of the shop and got in and drove away and then noticed there was no ashtray in the car. It wasn’t my car; it was an identical car except it wasn’t the correct car. So I drove it back, and patted the lock, magically, then got in the other car and drove away. Now that’s a typical example of the kind of thing that can happen to you if you are rushing along trusting your sense organs the car was the same colour British grey, you know, or is it called racing green? It depends whether you’re drunk or sober at the time. I was sober, how did I do it? Its just devilry, that’s what it is. [00.19]
Now, arithmetic. That allows us to make elementary calculations like my wife’s pelvis is about so wide and that fellow’s wife’s pelvis is only this wide and all the time your mind is adding up like this you are moving up the evolutionary scale. And then you say ‘Right this is really good, I wonder if we can extend this?’ we will go and lift ourselves into a mathematical phase, and all the time your mind is adding up like this you are moving up the evolutionary scale and then you say ‘right this is really good I wonder if we can extend it?’ We will go and lift ourselves into a mathematical phase, higher than the most elementary arithmetic, and we would lift ourselves up and start studying plane geometry. And all the time your mind is adding up like this you are moving up the evolutionary scale and then you say ‘right this is really good I wonder if we can extend it? That’s a marvellous leap, a great raising of the soul, plane geometry. That means we look at the circle and its properties, and the triangle and the square, all manner of geometrical forms and we look in those geometrical forms for something that is absolutely invariable. Who knows any basic O’level geometry? What are the angles inside a triangle adding up to? Can anybody remember? Somebody remembers; I wish I could. Anyhow there it is, they add up and they always add up and the definition of a circle is a line which translating through space remains always exactly the same distance from a certain point and this line we call the periphery of a circle which is centred on a certain point. And the definition of a circle is utterly invariable but that definition does not refer to a gross material approximately circular piece of paper or wood it refers to an idea. [00.21]
So when we do plane geometry we have lifted ourselves out of the sense world into another world; the world of forms. Those forms are going to teach us how to be a philosopher-king. [00.21]
The next thing to do is to study, instead of plane geometry, three dimensional geometry, solid geometry, this will allow us to predict and study the behaviour of celestial bodies, of planets, of atomic particles and so on… We have lifted ourselves up from arithmetic, through a mathematical development, into the study of plane geometrical figures, and from plane geometrical figures into solid geometry but here Socrates warns us again, the solid three dimensional object refers to something existent in the gross material world and therefore it could be a trap. We could think that we had got somewhere now 3D so he said do not stop there, we must move up, so far we have developed through refining our sense of sight, now we must start refining our sense of hearing. So after that solid geometry we will start to study harmonics. [00.22]
A great science, harmonics… What are the relations of the frequencies that constitute sounds? Why is it that when Pythagoras fastened his string over a little piece of wood, over another piece of wood and then down and put a weight on the end of that wire, or string, or gut of a cat, or whatever, why is it that when we put a heavy weight on it the string goes tighter and the note that it gives forth when we pluck it goes higher? There is the relationship between high frequency and tension. The same string at low tension gives a low note and at a high tension gives a high note. We know today by physical experiments of ultrasonics that we can actually use very, very high frequencies like a surgeon’s knife. We can cut things to pieces with sound. Now you would not learn that by simply looking with your eye at things so when we come out of the study of three dimensional geometry, to the study of harmonics, we are learning something very, very peculiar and related to the fundamental structure and dynamics of the universe. [00.24]
You all know about Chladni figures, those are figures that are made by sand, you put sand onto a plain surface like plate-glass, and you get a violin bow and you bow it on the edge and the sand is shaken by the vibrations and makes a geometrical pattern. And you can change that pattern by dampening down the glass plate with your fingers in different positions or you can bow very lightly or very hard and you will get different geometrical patterns. And that teaches you that somehow the geometry of the universe is a phonic phenomenon. [00.24]
Sound structures the universe. This will be very important when you come to consider why it was said that God created the world by his word. That’s another way of saying infinite intelligent power vibrated itself, and that is its word. That is its logos, in the fourth gospel, it vibrated itself and the inter-relations of its vibrations have produced all the structures that we see in the world: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, the man, the superman, the angel, the cosmic intelligence in its first self precipitation; all the function of an infinite sentient power vibrating. The study of harmonics, then, carries us out of the visible world into the world where Shema Yisreal becomes operative here so listen, don’t just look, you’re looking at a two dimensional image, but when you hear, the image is not two dimensional. You’re whole being vibrates. When you listen to Bach or Mozart or Beethoven, do you hear two dimensionality or three? Does your body vibrate in a plane or does it vibrate in 3D? Have you ever noticed it? Does it vibrate you physically in your body, through your body? If it doesn’t then go and sit in the brass section of an orchestra during 1812. And you will feel, and as a matter of fact a friend of mine was made deaf from playing in an orchestra in the brass section because it was vibrating his ear drums and literally tearing them to pieces. The only virtue about that was that when he got home at night he had extreme difficulty in listening to the wife’s complaints. There is no disadvantage that has not got a corresponding advantage, if you know how to select it. [00.26]
Now Socrates said: ‘When you got to the study of harmonics you had only one more step to make then you had made your philosopher-king’. And that is to take the step, this harmonic, phonic, structural analysis of reality up to dialectic. Dialectic is a very marvellous concept, because it says that the whole pre-eminent structure of the universe, all the apparent differences are held together by a polarisation of a non-different power. [00.27]
The idea of monism, stepped up to the idea of Non-Dualism. All the ideas that we have, ideas in the intellect are in pairs of opposites. High – low, near – far, soft – hard, you cannot think intellectually without thinking in pairs of opposites. The intellect is a special instrument that abstracts from ultimate reality and presents you with pairs of opposites and when you have a pair of opposites you have something, the two terms of which, are absolutely equally valid. It is just as valid to be near as to be far, to be high as to be low, poverty is wealth and wealth is poverty, Lau Tsu said it in the sixth century in China, Buddha was saying it in India. Now the sudden outburst of inspiration in the sixth century BC that affected everybody and made suddenly in all the major civilisations in the world a revelation of dialectic, that is to say the identity of opposites, to define beauty is to define ugliness, to say that you love somebody is to hate them, because your love is bondage. To say that you hate somebody is marvellous because it allows you to keep your distance and be an individual, to be an individual is disgustingly dreadful because it destroys your connection with the absolute and every individual is seeking absolute power. So the study of dialectic is the top step whereby a person, having come out of the cave, becomes a philosopher-king or king-philosopher. [00.29]
Now let’s go back a little to the study of European
philosophy for a moment, and look at the philosophy of Heraclitus, of which we
have very few fragments, luckily, the few that we’ve got are troublesome
enough. He was called the Obscure Philosopher because he said ‘Opposites are
identical.’ If you go to
Now by fire he meant simply energy, fire was the symbol of
energy as air was the symbol of intellect; water was the symbol of feeling and
earth was the symbol of gross matter. He said ‘No man bathes twice in the same
river’. Everything is flowing, there is no stability, your marvellous Greek
temples will fall down. Can you imagine at the height of Athenian supremacy the
Greek government believing that their monuments would fall down and that some
comedian from
Heraclitus was right. Now his name means the key to the hierarchy of powers and the name he gave to this mysterious energy, which he symbolised as fire, was Logos. He introduces the term logos and we have pointed out before, that word logos, is made of lambda and gamma and a couple of circles; two ‘o’s and an‘s’ for the issuance of the relation between what is symbolised by lambda and what is symbolised by gamma. Lambda means light, intelligence and the nouminal world. Gamma means dark, ignorance, the phenomenal world, the gross world that we see. There is a circle representing Lambda, Lo Lambda, lone, the nouminal world, the world of pure intellectual with no grossness in it at all. There is another world, the goa, the gamma world and these two the Lambda intellectual, pure intellectual, not empirical, rationalised, pure intellectual, the lo and grossness: the go, in their interrelations produce an issuant and that issuance itself is most strongly apparent in man. [00.33]
Between the numeral world and the gross world man lives and his peculiar problem is how to relate these two. Because the Lambda, the light, the intelligence, and the gross material body in which it is invested, are in the human being so bound together that we cannot remove one without the other. If we destroy the physical body, the manifestation of the intelligence that was there resident, has vanished and if we destroy the intelligence what we have is a lump of matter with no sense. [00.34]
Man has this peculiar position of being between Lambda / Gamma. Between heaven; that is Lambda, light and intelligence and earth; gross matter. Man is the middle term between heaven and earth. When you are doing flower arrangement in Japanese Zen, you have to learn to do a vertical stem for heaven, a horizontal one for earth and a diagonal one for man and you arrange your twigs on the little plants to represent the relation of these three marvellous powers: the heaven power, the earth power, the man power. Now dialectic says that heaven and earth which are opposites; are mysteriously identical. Heaven; that is intelligent power, and earth; that is gross matter, are not in any way different. Our gross physical body is nothing but our self precipitated intelligence. Our intelligence is nothing at all but the information that our gross physical activities have given us and that’s why when they were showing a little last place on earth, Tibetan Monastery on the television, they showed a young boy being taught the importance of the Mudra. He was taught to go like this, and to do this, and to do this. Mudras; gestures to the hand, and his teacher said ‘Its no good learning merely intellectually, it’s got to get into your body. You must make the appropriate Mudra.’ The gesture, the gross physical application, like a young Jewish scholar, gabbling away over his books, he is bending his body to put stress on the body, to get into the body the information. Because if he sat very still and read his book and did not identify with what he’d read it would vanish so it could never become operative. [00.36]
So dialectic is telling us this marvellous thing, if we are
able to see heaven, that is intelligence and intelligence is its self-operative
power and gross material physical body-ness as identical, then we have got the
condition of the philosopher-king and the king-philosopher; there is the
process. Now this dialectical thing, was seen by Heraclites and about the same
period in
That’s the judgement of a people who are not dialectical. They have seen outside themselves, a marvellously accomplished fellow who tears about in Concord and of whom they have received a nice photograph which shows he is very handsome and obviously intelligent, and they have not said to themselves ‘We have each of us inside us an identical Duke of Edinburgh.’ Each one of those naked little primitives in his bikini is fully equipped with all the intelligence of the absolute sentient power inside him, only he’s been diverted into external situations by the hammering of stimuli from outside, from his physical environment and therefore when he sees Prince Phillip, who is manifestly handsome and intelligent as we all know he is, but when they see him there astonished but the test is quite simple, unless they had inside them that which can recognise the godhead in that prince, if they didn’t have it inside themselves how would they know that he’s a superior being? [00.39]
They must have inside themselves this very superiority which they predict outside themselves. It is predicted quite simply because energy which you derive from food tends to leak outward. It carries itself outwards into the physical world; and again this carrying out of the energy from within yourself, the displaying of your intelligence externally and so on, that is again like being in the cave, the occasion of the necessity for the turn-around. You have to say that whatever that energy in you goes out toward, it goes out looking for something. It goes out seeking, it goes out yearning, it has sehnsucht; that lovely German word means yearning but it’s made out of two words, to see: sehn and to seek: suchen. So: to see and to seek in one word. Where you are seeing it? You are seeing it in your noumental intelligence. Where are you seeking it, if you are not careful, in the external world, sehnsucht says I know there is something I can see and it’s perfect, the perfect relation, the perfect wife, the perfect husband. Then it projects it outside itself and wanders about in the world, its called the wanderer phase, then it wanders in the world looking for this thing which is really inside itself. Charity begins at home. Lao Tsu said, ‘While you’re far away what is near at hand?’ [00.41]
- BREAK -
There’s an interesting little story about a young man that
had a dream and his name was Isaac and he lived in
Now what does it mean ‘under your stove’? Not under the
bridge, a bridge connects two different worlds doesn’t it? Two sides of the
river, two sides of a chasm, a bridge. But the stove symbolises the heat in
your own being, the zeal of your own being. Do you know that all great men have
suffered from the same thing? : zeal. Even Jesus had zeal when he flogged the
money-changers out of the temple. Without zeal you can’t get anywhere of any
importance. Your stove is your zeal. In
So young Isaac knows that when he dreamed he was really dreaming about his own stove, his own heat, under which lay this buried treasure. Every treasure inside a being is nothing but the zeal, the power, of that same being that is creatively capable of modelling, structuralising, its own being into an existential monument of self design which will continuously change and grow and become like a magical castle. You read about them in fairy stories, you go looking for a certain castle and you see that, you go up to the castle again and you have a meal, you come out, that was very nice, you go away and you come back and it isn’t that castle its another one. There is always this mysterious faculty of change in the fairy story. A fairy story is really a deep intuition that has been written down to try to fix it by some intelligent person who intends to use it as a pneumonic. So Lao Tsu and Buddha, Heraclitus, laid the foundations of the study of this dialectical process which turns philosophers into kings and kings into philosophers, if you follow the appropriate developmental stages. [00.47]
If we take a big jump forwards into modern times we come to Hegel, who sees this same thing, this same logos, this same dialectical principle, and produced the perfect system and rounded it off like many others had, this is the final word, there is no philosophy beyond Hegel and then on his death-bed he says ‘Only one man understood me; and he misunderstood me. Now lots of scholars think he was referring to something wondering ‘Who was the one man?’ The one man was Hegel and, meanwhile, a very obscure little shoemaker Jacob Boehme, had solved that problem in the seventeenth century, OK, had comprehended all that was meant by the dialectical process. [00.48]
Now here’s the rub; if it is true that all opposites of the intellectual formative power are equally valid then no-one is justified in excluding anything. You can’t divide the world into rich and poor because the poor are rich and the rich are poor. What are the poor rich in? ; Experiences that the rich know nothing about. What are the rich impoverished in? Lack of experience, they have none of the experiences of how to make-do and mend with nearly nothing. Poverty: the mark of the fakir in Islam. To recognise, no human being exists, that’s an absolute basic tenet of Islam you do not exist, you think you do and especially if you are European you think you do, you’re taught to exist but you don’t. You see, exist means stand out and you can’t stand out because you are actually a modality inside an infinite power. How can you stand out? It’s something quite different, instead of being existent, if you want to be what you think you mean by existent you have to become insistent. You have to stand in yourself. [00.49]
So there are two kinds of people: one; the many, the other; the few. The many try to exist to stand out, to be clever, to show off, to demonstrate abilities somehow and the few don’t, they get on with their internal insistence because insistence is true and existence is false; and yet the whole of European philosophy has lorded, has sung the praises of individual existence and it culminated in the marvellous works of Kierkegaard where the individual and existence are stated as an aim. Now he knew perfectly well that by existence he meant insistence and he also knew that it was terribly dangerous. I am going to say a very funny thing, it has always been known to the head governments of all major civilisations that existence is false and only insistence is true. We have said it before, we will say it again; we will quote Socrates: ‘If it were not for hewers of wood and drawers of water, we would not have time to think about philosophy.’ There must be somebody hewing wood, drawing water, if there is to be time because prior to hewers of wood and drawers of water, that is slaves, every man had to go out daily and find his food and if he didn’t live on the equator, where in those forests you put your hand out when you wake in the morning and there is your food. You don’t need to study agriculture there, everything is available and consequently those peoples near the equatorial belt have never developed. They are still exactly as they were a quarter of a million years ago because their whole environment conspires to make life easy. To provide them with the food they need. So what do they do when they are not actually eating or sleeping? they’re amusing themselves. Their favourite sport is sexual relations, probably because it’s the best sport, being one up on swimming, if you remember, because swimming exercises every muscle in your body except one and the other takes account of the odd member. This total exercise of equatorial peoples kept them where they were. I’m saying a quarter of a million years ago, to keep it within the bounds of modern theory, if I were to tell the truth I would extend it considerably further back, for millions upon millions of years humanoid types, where there was food available without having to study agriculture, were they could reach out their hand and get it, they never developed. [00.52]
Now if we move away from there up towards what is called the culture band which runs about forty five degrees, that is half way between the pole and the equator; and a little on either side so this includes North Africa, Egypt and as far as, say, Germany, parts of Poland and so on, a band called the culture band where instead of your food being available, you had to go out and find it; and because the food was not terribly plentiful, very often you had to hunt for it. And because the weather was not very nice you had to protect yourselves with a proper architectural structure. So that agriculture and architecture and violent physical exercise appeared on that culture band to those peoples; and those are the peoples who because of the challenge of their environment, because of the taxation of their body energies in that special way, they are the people that eventually where able to go and invade all the other territories. They could invade the equatorial belt. They could invade the poles. They had built themselves in on the North Pole and on the South Pole. They could never have done that if they’d not been challenged. [00.54]
Now everybody wants an easy life. Who has it easiest? The
man that wakes up in the morning; reaches his hand out to get his fruit, on the
equatorial belt which has always been there and he hears the noise of what? a
mechanical devise cutting the forests down. We know that forests are devastated
all over the world by what we call Caucasian Developmental Technology.
The dialectical principal of the identity of opposites is validated the moment you start seriously studying history. Now that imposes a very heavy burden on us as individuals. If we hear about dialectical principle then we have to say to ourselves: ‘How do I stand in relation to it?’ For instance, in Islam, and remember the Old Testament is about God, the New Testament is about the Son of God and Islam is about the Holy Ghost. God the father posited the Old Testament, the Son enlightened the New Testament and Mohammed was the vehicle for the statement of the Holy Spirit. And the statement there in Islam is this: Don’t waste your time saying ‘Who am I?’ say ‘Where am I going.’ [00.56]
You feel the dynamic difference? Who am I? What am I? : Am I a sole, am I a spirit? You sit down and do nothing but think about who you are. You will demonstrate who you are; you are a being that wastes its time speculating about who. Now there is only one who, an absolute who, and that is that infinite sentient power that we call God. Part of His name is who, the other part of his name is He. If you take the tetragameton, the four letter word, the first rude word ever, is the name of God and that is the word translated as Jehovah but if you write it in the Hebrew form it goes Yod-He-Vov-He. If you then cut it in half as it was designed to be and read it out … remembering that the Hebrew deliberately turned it ‘round to fool people, you then read he-who and he-who is Hebrew for she-he and again the lady is first. [00.57]
The field is there ontologically prior, not temporally because this is before time. The field is the basis of those peculiar mobilisings that we call formal structures. And since the field means the female, the formal structure’s the male, then the female is ontologically, not temporally, prior to the precipitants of form which we call male. [00.58]
Now imagine this situation, we are required, if we accept the dialectical principle of the identity of opposites, that when we look at anything whatever, like looking at the blue carpet well say that it’s orange as well, and black, and white, when we look at another human being, if it looks female we have to say yes it’s a woman type man and if we look at a so called male we have to say it’s a man type woman. And we are to get rid of every criticism of anything whatever that we have ever had and this is coming out of the cave. This is the great turn-‘round. This is the great transformation of the self from a state of slavery to the external world, an involuntary slavery that we kick against, towards a new kind of slavery the slavery of Abdullah. That is to say, of a servant of the field because that word means servant of the field. You have to think of yourself in this way. If it is true, the dialectic is true, that pairs of opposites are identical, then the existent as Lao Tsu says and the non-existent are the same in all but name; and therefore our finitude is infinite and infinity, that being that religion prefers as God, is finite in every individual human being. That God is incarnate and man is in God and this throws a tremendous burden because you are not allowed to reject anything. Everything that comes to you, no matter what it is, is to be accepted; and that is what Islam means. Expectance; in the New Testament its about Jesus who occurs in the Koran saying my father’s works, that’s the power of the intellect and I work, that is Jesus of Nazareth the individual, worked and I elect to work in that same way. And in the same way Mohammed or Moses, anybody with any sense at all of dialectical significance says ‘I am the modality of the infinite and the infinite is mobilising as me and therefore I am absolutely responsible for mySelf (and myself has a capital s).’ And the self with the little s, the empirical ego, has been imposed on our physical body by external stimuli in a physical environment. [01.00]
Now how many of us can actually say ‘I have no enemies that are not friends’ and mean it, no friends that are not enemies. Have you ever been let down by somebody? They helped you towards individuation. Have you ever been treated kindly by someone? They did you a disservice. They encouraged your dependency. Everything that you have to say must be said in a pair of opposites. [01.01]
Some years ago a man came to see me and he was obsessed with the idea that he might be doing wrong instead of right and that some things were bad and some where good. I asked him for a week, just one week, to do an experiment, every time he used the word bad he should say ‘good-bad’. Every time he used the word good he should say ‘bad-good’ and he should think about it. All the things that men pursue in civilisation are bad-goods, good-bads. The tendency through pleasure-pain is to equate the good with pleasant and the bad with the unpleasant but the pleasant lulls you into a no-developmental state of somnambulism and the unpleasant wakes you up to evolve. So everything that happens to you has to be affirmed, everything, there are no exceptions. Can we do it? It throws on us a tremendously heavy strain. [01.02]
Many, many people in the world today think World War Three
is inevitable. A large section of the Labour Party gave a big demonstration,
didn’t they? Against
Supposing I get blown to bits now by something going overhead carrying eighty-one people going on holiday and it comes through the ceiling and kills me and the particles of my body go phhh and spread out isn’t that an interesting phenomenon? If you are on the centre at the time, I’m quite serious. If you watch a thing like that and you get blown to pieces you can reassemble your self and if you identified with it you start crying ‘Oh my poor body, it’s torn to pieces’. You are then negating your own creativity. Now Islam means this: total acceptance of whatever happens to you when and where it happens especially designed by the infinite sentient power, by divine intelligence for you; Madam. You know when you go into a Jewish gown shop and you ask to try on that little dress on the slim figure in the window and you weigh fourteen stone, well the sales lady who is of the correct persuasion, she gives you another dress with a little talk to explain, she might even give you, if you are very slim, a large dress, stand you in front of the mirror and clutch the back of it to pull it tight and always the same thing ‘Its you Madam’ and believe it. If you believe the dialectical principle that all opposites are identical, fundamentally, then you have to say ‘I can wear a canary tea shirt without destroying my soul and in-spite severe criticism from old conservatives. There is no problem about God and this is absolutely basically Zen, to the Muslim mind there is no problem with God, ‘Do you know why there is no problem with God?’ because God is infinite. [01.05]
Now all problems are definable, the essence of a problem is that you can define it and if you can define it you can sort it out and if you can sort it out you can solve it. But God is not finite, and therefore he’s not a problem. Now if he’s no problem what do you do about it? Do you think about it? No because that’s how you solve problems. The one thing you must not do about that infinite, sentient power which no-one has ever seen, nor can ever see because the essence of infinity is its invisibility. You either believe it or you don’t; and you do that by act of will and to do it you mustn’t say ‘Who am I?’ You must say ‘Where am I going?’ Now think of the dynamic of the orientation that occurs in your soul if you say ’I really prefer to believe that this my organism is a precipitate of infinite, sentient power, internal to which I live and move and have my being but I have no life and being other than this, that this infinite is willing to posit me here and now and then to impose on me with millions of other likewise precipitated forms. I have to accept them. Now my total ancestral inertias of the negative order and all my miss-education by a competitive civilised society the inertias of those will fight this truth. This truth says that every human being is a marvellous being because it’s exactly between heaven and earth; between infinite intelligent power and gross inertia. And because it stands between the two, the human being, and only the human being, no other being, you’ve got to stand in the middle of those two, only the human being can actually solve the problem of existence because only he combines this infinite intelligence and this gross body inertia. [01.08]
The human being is a machine and it’s mysterious and it’s a marvellous being. To recognise that and then deliberately say ‘I like it, I am going to get it’ Not who am I, I don’t care. I am going to get heaven and earth together this human being is going to pull down the lambda and lift up the gamma, and it says in the Bible the valleys shall be exalted and the mountains shall be brought low. Bring down your brilliant insights of the intellect into the gross world and lift up your gross world into the zone of your brilliant insights and then by the dialectical opposition of the tension between those two, the power that comes in between those poles becomes truly individuated. Not existent but insistent. You can insist on your viewpoint as a unique divinely positive being, with absolute validity. With eternal justification because the moment you are sincere with yourself, with your own peculiar situation which in your heaven and your earth, that is in your conceptual insight. And your gross physical application, when you, with full sincerity, can say I have gathered together, I have brought my heaven down, I have lifted my physical body up and I have welded them together in the middle you have no further need of any justification whatever outside the zone of your own being. [01.10]
Now it sounds like hard work. It’s simple because it’s simply this: the infinite field of power has precipitated an infinite number of centres of reference, some of which we are. Its as simple as that. If the centres of reference forget that they are such precipitants they wonder in the world of sense stimuli and get lost and die; and they loose their references. But if they remember, daily, that they are precipitants of this infinite sentient power, they cannot be lost; and the big fight is against the inertias of bad education and negative ancestral inertias which try to pretend to you that that is not true. But internally you know it is true but when you come into the big fight, the one that Mohammed called the large battle, that Allahu Akbar, that the fight, the fight inside your own being against your own inertias, if you solve that fight you can solve the whole problem of being and you will know there is no problem with solving God because there is no difference between the highest centre of your intelligence, the lowest centre of your physical incarnation and the infinite divinity that precipitates you. In which case you become an eternally advancing, ever developing and ever self transcending divinely self precipitated being. [01.11]
Creativity and immediacy are the marks of spirit.”