THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE

This is the text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday ISHVAL tape 51.

Track 1

What am I going to talk about tonight?

Divine hermaphrodite

Divine hermaphrodite. How many of you saw the film about sex changes in the Caribbean recently? How many? Let me see some hands. Yes, for years I have been saying, “When I was a little girl,” and people have been thinking I was joking. Of course, I was not, it is actually a truth that the type of life is a mono-cell like an ovum and that a sperm is a considerable further advance, you may now bow, gentlemen, further advanced form than the ovum in its primal state. We can take the ovum as a type of woman; we can take the sperm, wriggling and pushing around, as the type of man. That being so, as each life begins with the type of ovum, we have to say the analogy holds and we all begin as women, on earth, that is. And that means that we are stressed in certain ways, towards the earth, towards bulk, towards receptivity. The sperm is biased towards drive, penetration, initiation. But the sperm is only a developed ovum. It started life like an egg, like a female, and it acquired the tail by energy input devoted to externalisation. We could therefore say that the man is naturally extrovert and the woman is naturally introvert, that is, as far as life on earth is concerned.

But supposing we go back to the source of life, before the earth exists, before it is condensed as a solid globe, it is a part of the solar mass of incandescent energy. And before it was incandescent, the same energy was in the dark, it was not radiant. In physics at school you learned that matter has phases, solid, liquid, gaseous and the fourth one, incandescence. If you take a solid thing and heat it you can liquefy it. If you take the liquid and heat it you can turn it into a gas. If you take the molecules of gas and stimulate those, usually we do this electrically, the gas molecules will become so agitated they radiate light, they will become incandescent, which you will see in a fluorescent tube, with which you are all familiar. So we can say solids, liquids, gases, incandescence.

And then we must reverse this order because factually, the earth condensed from an earlier state. We can take it back. At one time the earth was more fluid than it now is. The atoms constituting it were sliding over each other. Before then they were dancing about , bouncing from each other like a gas, and earlier still they were incandescent, they were agitated. But earlier still they would be to what would be to us, darkness like the trapped dark of a Black Hole.

Track 2

So in terms of involution we should start with pure darkness, pure nescience, pure not knowingness and

then the energy that is there in the dark must, by self-agitation, because there is not anything other than it, nothing other than it to agitate it, so the primary agitation must be a self-agitation, it must make itself incandescent. It then becomes like a nebula that we see in the night sky, then this nebula then begins to turn, a spiral nebula and it goes from the form of the Crab into a form, say in Andromeda. And then it begins to condense itself to make suns and then to condense further to make planets. So the order of involution is from the invisible power, through visible power to rotating power, condensing through the stages – atmosphere, liquid, solid, down to our earth.

So if we like to imagine the power that constituted the world, before there was a solid earth, before there was a fluid earth, before there was a gaseous earth, before there was an incandescent, nebulous mass, there was an eternal darkness. And this is the view of the rabbis in the Book of Genesis, when it says, “And darkness was upon the face of the structuring of itself, deep.” Don’t think that the statements made in the Bible are rubbishy, primitive science. They are not. They are mythological statements and the myth comes out of very, very deep experience. The difference between a piece of logic, logo-logic and mythologic is this, the logo-logic is a vibration of the Infinite Field structuralising of itself, structuralizing itself so that, in fact, by its own vibration it constitutes itself as an eidetic field, that is, a field of ideas. But the ideas are not what we call today, mere ideas; they are vibrant forms of invisible power. They are structuring the universe.

There is an infinite, eidetic structured field before there is any visible evidence of it. What do we see there? In that primordial darkness we see that there must be that already hidden in potentiality, which later on comes to exist, comes to precipitate itself as the world we now know. So that we have to say, in that hidden darkness was the potential of becoming an incandescent nebula like the Crab Nebula; the potential of beginning to spin, like the Andromeda nebula; the potential of becoming condensed, like the millions of stars each one of which is like our own Sun; and the precipitation around each such centre of further condensations which we call planets. All these must have been hidden in that primordial darkness, at least as potentialities. Really heavy thought will tell you they are not mere potentialities at all; they are actualities at a very, very high frequency. That frequency we call Aleph, using a Hebrew letter because we have used that, or the Greek letters for something else. When we use a Hebrew letter in that way we are taking an idea that might have a scientific formulation, like alpha, but we are saying now we are lifting it back to its original position as a metaphysical proposition. And the Hebrew letter Aleph, א which my friend Michael Solomon always thinks I am joking when I say things like this, The Hebrew letter Aleph, which is said, in the lexicon, to mean an Ox, really means what an ox means. An ox is something that keeps the thing turning. If you draw the word OX, you will draw a circle and instead of putting the cross outside the circle, put it inside the circle and then you have done an elementary drawing of a wheel, haven’t you? One O, one X. Now that is the original form of that word It is simply a drawing of a wheel and it means to turn and to bear a load. So the word ox, the word Aleph, means Supreme, Infinite Bearer of all subsequent realities that might appear.

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Let us look at that and we can see that because all things come from it, that what we mean by potentiality must mean at that level, actuality, because it cannot pass from a condition of non-action to a condition of action, so that it must actually be a very, very peculiar type of action.

We say potentiality when we mean a power held in. We talk about a P D, a potential difference between the two ends of an electric wire with electrons flowing down it. That potential difference is an actuality. When we say potential we mean power held in, but it is only held in us from us, from our position as finite observers. At its own level it is not held in at all, it is activating itself and this is why the definition of God by good theologians, is the actus purus, pure actuality. God is not potentiality, God is actuality.But actuality at the top level is so very fine that very gross, dim-witted beings like us cannot actually see it. We have been demoted. We, ourselves, have been sent down from a condition of primordial darkness, of which the symbol is a Hebrew letter Ayin (ע), which means both an aye /eye, and a pure negation because it means an observer without anything to observe, pure consciousness with no object. Now we have been sent down from that condition. We use the word ‘down’ deliberately because it says, “D - own.” We have been divided from the Infinite in order to own the finite. To be ‘down’ is to be an owner of a limited area of activity. That is ‘down.’ Up, to the contrary, means power positing itself, power positing. That is a vov peh (ו פ), power positing itself is ‘up.’

We have been demoted, we have been sent down from primordial darkness, and darkness mysteriously, means ‘light’ hidden from lower levels of awareness. We have been made incandescent as a first stage from the darkness, shine, we look, we see. What do we see? We see phenomena. The word phenomena comes from a base pha, which simply means ‘to shine, to appear.’ From that primordial darkness the first step down w as light. .

Think about that, it is very interesting; the first step down is a step into light. Why is it a step down? Because in the light we see things; and in the moment of seeing we are in serious danger of falling further into identification. First there is the light, like the Crab Nebula. Then, if we are not careful, the light will catch us like a moth caught by a candle flame, and we will start rotating round the centre of the light to see what it is, and this is the passing from the condition of the Crab Nebula to the condition of the spiralling Andromeda. We start to rotate round any point of interest. And to do that we have gone down from primordial darkness, which is hidden omniscience, only hidden from us, not from itself., to itself it is a volitional actuality, to us it is a hypothetical possibility. Then we are sent down into the light. In the light, we see; in the seeing, we become interested; in the becoming interested we are verschwindeled, we are turned round, we are spun. We are made to spin on an axis and we pass from primordial nescience in the Infinite darkness of pure volition, into the light of eidetic structures that we call ideas, abstract ideas.

And we are then sent down further. As we spin, what do we do? We form suns. Each one of these suns is then a monadic centre of an individuated being, utterly self-determined because it is actually that darkness self-precipitated into a ball of fire like our sun.

And then we get sent down even further. We get sent down by condensation, by cooling, into the condition of the earth and that earth is our bodies. When we go down onto body identification we have hit bottom. When you tap yourself on the patella you are touching minerality. If it hurts when you do it, you can hurt yourself if you do it very hard yes that hurts a bit, if it hurts, that is one step above minerality, that is biological. That is your sensation possibility, which in the mineral, is held in very tightly; in the plant it is beginning to loosen; in the animal it is beginning to run about; in the man it is beginning to keep an account of its own activities.

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So we are all sent down in that way. And then, in a primordial sense, prime-ordial - first order sense of the biological, we find precipitated the mono-cell, the lowest from of life, roughly spherical but tremulous, undulating, able to distort itself, to put out a pseudopodium, a false foot, like an amoeba . An amoeba is a mono cell, very simple life which has, like all life has, a capacity for self-adjustment to its environment, a capacity for predatory activity. There was a marvellous nature film shown in which an amoeba flowed round two higher order animals, paramecium, and it engulfed two them at once. Did any of you see that marvellous film where an amoeba swallowed two paramecium simultaneously? What did the paramecium do?

Attack it.

No, no, they didn’t attack it, they attacked each other. They blamed each other for the trouble they had got into. Now isn’t that terribly human? And the paramecium, fighting together, beating each other’s brains out, attacking each other very fiercely; while they were fighting, were being slowly digested and they finished up as a sort of globule schlurb in the middle, not able to fight, and before they died they were just sulkingly disgusted with each other, letting each other down. And the amoeba had got the benefit of their quarrel. If they had got together, their heads together and said, “Let us attack this so and so, where is the nucleus? Gather together boys, club together, and both together attack the nucleus and eat it,” the amoeba would have been defeated. But they did not. Like human beings, because they are human beings in their early stages, sometimes they wonder whether we are in the early stages, naturally, they blame all other human beings for their own mistakes. Even in the deepest intimacy of the marriage bed, there is a tendency to blame the other person if cold air comes in at the bottom of the bed. Have you done that Gerhardt? You know why you have not done it; you have already got all the clothes spiralled round you., and Marghanita has gone in the next room haven’t you dear?

Well this is what tends to happen. We have been sent down but in our primary form we do not have the smart, wiggly-tailed sperm. That is a later evolute. Do you remember how we described how this activation occurred in the mono-cells? Can anybody tell me what we said how this primary differentiation occurred? What did we say about how this primary or shall I do a little drawing?

That is the surface of the sea (should have been in blue but it isn’t, ’cos it is the Red Sea), that is the ground of the sea (bed), this is the land side here, and there is the sun is shining The shiny Sun, and here are some mono-cells getting lots and lots of sunshine. And the whole of the sea is full of these mono-cells and in that totality we call it primordial soup, the very primal substance which required just a stroke of lightning to cause it to fall into cellular form. So there are cells all over. But down here, at the bottom, are some cells which do not get much solar stimulation; they are in the deep, dark bottom of the ocean. But over here there is a moon and the moon has a peculiar power to cause marine animals, just before the full moon, to come up to the top. It actually lifts water. That is how you get tides isn’t it? So that down in the depths here, the mono-cells that have no tails, once a month, feel a pull on them to come up. Would you believe that is the origin of menstruation? They have a tendency to come up when the moon is full and to go down when the moon goes away again. But, where the sun is shining, the energy input into those cells makes them very active. Now a spherical being, if it becomes very charged with energy starts jittering and then it feels it must do something about the jitters and it starts moving about. And as soon as it moves it elongates itself a little bit. That is how paramecium arose from the simple mono-cell, by simply elongating itself. And then, by further energy input, it made an economic device, a tail, which by lashing about it could flagellate itself, the origin of that weird human aberration, flagellation, it could whip itself about very vigorously and that was the very type of masculinity. And what do we see? In the moon cell we see a passivity and a waiting for the tidal effect to draw us up into activity at the surface, and in the sperm we see the dynamic irritant tendency to drive somewhere. Two basic characteristics, the passive, receptive of the moon, the active initiating of the sun that is all creating this primordial difference.

Track 5

Keep that in your mind and realise that every man and woman on the earth today, has actually proved, by its present existence a process of evolution from a primordial state before there was the cut into what we call male-female, a primordial non-differentiated field of energy which, as it began to form itself into globules without tails which we now call the feminine mode, became moon determined but those that were sun-attacked, sun-energised, they became, what we today call, male, and their residual traces inside human bodies are the ova and the sperms in the woman and the man. Now there is absolutely no difference whatever in the primordial life substance in which this polarity occurred and the polarisation occurred because we were sent down. We see this in the Genesis story, where Adam is made, in the image of God, male and female, but mysteriously, the woman was inside him. Because there was nobody to help him, and God said, “Well try the animals, will they help?” and he examined them all and said, “No, they won’t do.” Finally, God put him to sleep, this is that histolysis process we were talking about again, and, in the process of the sleeping of the primordial man, that is primordial, protoplasmic man, before differentiation as we now know him, there was abstracted from him that aspect which we now call, in its super-stressed form, femaleness. It was actual inside Adam. When it was taken out of Adam it was called ‘woman’ because it was taken out of man. It was called Eve because that word means ‘that which develops the life forms.’ But before it was taken out, it was called Lillith. Now Lillith is the very image of playing about inside oneself in an onanistic way, deriving whatever pleasures there are simply from an introvert process, no extroversion, a wholly introverted process in which is set up inside, the image of a relationship within, so that, that man, that Ad- am, Da-ma, that hidden male-female, was not yet a separated body. He was not sexed, He was not sectioned yet. Sex only means sectioned. The primordial type of life is not sectioned into male and female, it is simply a being wrapped up in its own process.

Now imagine that process. In it there is an awareness that one is a body, that’s a feminine thing, there is an awareness of sensations of pleasure, preference for pleasure, dislike of pain. Both of those are feminine. There is an awareness that one has a form, and that is masculine, that form will later be called the idea, and there is an awareness that one can take the initiative, one can change one’s form, one can extend, push out a pseudopodium, make an arm like an amoeba does. These four faculties, these four powers are inside this primordial being that is called in Genesis, Adam. Ad da, am ma. Hebrews reade this way and we read that way. So, when you see Ad-am, translate Da-ma. Dama is hidden inside. Later on, when St Paul was on the way to Da-ma-scus he had a kind of nightmare and he suddenly said, “My God, the whole thing is a clear as mud. We are Da-ma, Dama-sus.” The word means nightmare but it also means, ‘Father- and-mother-horse.’ Horse means salvation, obviously. The moment man had caught a horse and trained it; he had elevated himself above the animal. That is the figure of the Centaur in mythology, a man who has learned to control his own animality, he is a centaur, he is a cantor, who is permitted to sing down his nose in synagogue and frighten people at weddings, by his powerful nasal tone.

Da-ma is simultaneous, throughout the universe and before the universe exists in the hidden darkness of the Infinite is Da and Ma, hidden from us but not from himself. The hidden Da-ma is the capacity, Da, for self-division, self-activation, self-ideation, self-initiation. The Ma is the power of self-substantialisation, of feeling oneself as a substantial being.

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Now if you think of that kind of being, in the dark, infinitely self-aware of the terrific power of self-division, it can make any shape whatever, and it does so simultaneously., and it can substantialise itself, stand on itself, use itself as its own unders by simply precipitating on to centres. And when it precipitates on to centres, it make sub-stantia. It makes an under-standing for itself.

How does that being feel? That is the being that we call God Head in His hiddenness, hidden-ness not from Him, hidden-ness from us unless we do the same thing that He does. Now He does not do anything except examine Himself, examine His own precipitations of form, feel His own sub-stantialisation. He never looks outside Himself because there is no outside, because He is infinitely extended. He has no need of anything because there is not anything but Him, He is entirely self-sufficient.

Now how would you feel if you were infinitely self-sufficient? You could have a drive-in cinema show of your own by driving into yourself, showing yourself your own films; Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Tyrannical Power and all kinds of funny thing. You see them at will and immediately, no waiting. I had a friend, a barber named Mori and his notice outside the shop said, ‘Mori, No waiting!’ You could go in there and have your ears cut off any time of the day, without waiting ‘cos He was a very fast worker. Needless to say, he died about forty years of age through overwork; but he was a nice boy before he went, ever ready to please.

Now imagine the Infinite Godhead hidden in the dark is our source and we have been demoted, by the process, first of all of saying, He said that you know, “Let there be light,” and the moment light appeared, what happened? All the hidden actualities became phenomena, they became visual actualities and all looked round like this and said, “Good God, phenomena!” They were all phenomenologists in those days. Can you believe that, phenomenologists? And they all started screaming. The name of one of them was Sören Kierkegaarde and he started screaming, “Subjectivity is truth.” And the darkness said, “Wait a bit, wait a bit, wait till the eighteen-forties before you say that otherwise you won’t get the proper hearing, calm down,” so he calmed down. But the strain of calming down killed him at an early age too.

Now nothing comes out of a bucket that we don’t put into it in the first place. Nothing has come out of that Infinite Darkness except that which is in that Infinite Darkness and we are still in the infinite darkness, but the Infinite Darkness has played a trick on us, deliberately, for a very definite reason. And that reason is, that prior to this trick, the Infinite Darkness was an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, self-internalised Being, knowing itself absolutely and enjoying itself absolutely and it was enjoying itself so much that it said, “I wish there were some more creatures to enjoy this joy.” Now how could it make creatures to enjoy the joy without pluralizing? It could not. It had to say, “Either I have to remain on my own or I must go down to the ground and die, and then I will bring forth fruit, lots of me.” So He voted, not like the Knesset, who say funny things like, “We have, after long debate with our three party system, and have come to the decision that we should not make decisions about whether to give land back of the Arabs or not.” Leave it in suspense. God did not do that, He said, “I’ll risk it.” It is dangerous because He has got nothing to make this plurality of except himself. It is not dangerous to Him, you understand. He is O.K. It is dangerous to the bits that He makes because He can only make these bits out of Him. These bits, each one called a monad, a one off, the Lord of its own being, that is the ‘ad’ root, Adonai echad, he is the lord of himself, each one of those, and it is God that has pluralized Himself and made lots and lots and lots of gods. But it is very risky, because when you make gods out of God, each little god is like God, in every respect except one. That is, it is not in the dark, it is in the light, and in the process of precipitation, it has become separated off from the others.

It looks around and it sees phenomena, from its own centre, and it says from its own centre, “Those beings are moving about like monads, like I do. I wonder if they are gods or not? Then it finds some of them are very sleepy and they make a very good diet, the sleepy ones, because, one of these gods, by gobbling up other gods that are a bit dopey, can appropriate their energies to himself. All right, it is quite ethical. It is only God eating God, can’ t be a law against that, can there? So those who are a bit more awake than the others, start eating the dopey ones and defining them as food. Food actually means force, power, divided off from the Infinite for assimilation by a finite.

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Now in the process of this encapsulation, that makes out of Infinity the monad, we have a process which occurs and it looks like that. In the centre is the original precipitate, the true essential monad, the one of each. We could repeat this diagram an infinite number of times and that would constitute a diagram of the universe of monads and each one of us is one of those. The innermost part there is essential Will. The essential will of the being is the innermost part but that innermost has exactly the same capacities that the Infinite God has, the only difference is that now, he is now in appearance and the Invisible God is not in appearance. This one is phenomenal, it has shone, it has shown itself, it has come out from the Infinite darkness into self-presentation in the process of segregation and time. And then, as it is in the presence of an infinity of other monadic beings of the same order, we could start to drawing others. I won’t bother changing colour and it is surrounded by those and at this point here, the periphery there is an external stimulus, so we have an immediate opposition, a centre of volitional initiative, that is our very essence our very real beingness. Now because we intend to spread out, because we were infinite were we not, in the dark, so we have a deep ambition to get back to our infinity, so we tend to spread out, but so do all the others. And the result is there is a collision at a certain distance which we call the periphery of being. I did that brown to symbolise the Earth Body. Between your centre of initiative and your Earth Body perimeter, there, I hadn’t got any blue so I did it in green, but I know you will for give me, because green is about the middle colour in the spectrum anyway, there is your intellectual life. At the centre of your being is your volitional life, pure volition, no thought, immediate volition. You do immediately, without thought, something, and the first thing you do of course, is expand. But you are doing that inside an infinite field of other monadic expanders and all your energies going out, crash against the energies of other beings and it is this crashing on your periphery of other energies, that you call your skin surface. Your skin surface is only that distance from your initiating centre which has been imposed on you by other centres pushing out. So we have no limiting factors upon us other than the willed intention to limit us of other beings, which is fair play, considering our intention with them.

Now if we now say that the centre of initiative, by definition, is a primordial point because of the tail of the sperm, the drive, the wiggler, we have to say the centre of that being, in our analogy, is the male part of the being. It is the part that first formed, that is eidetic, that is the idea, and it is the part that first initiates. What it first initiates is form, idea. So the will’s first sphere around it is the sphere of ideation, a sphere of thought. And it pushes that thought out, as far as it can, and it collides with another being. And then in the collision, it spins. Did you see that a lovely microphotograph recently, of an ovum attacked by a very large number of sperms and as they drive at it the ovum began to spin, just like a Catherine Wheel. That is very good. Now, what was the purpose of the spin? From the mechanistic point of view the inequality of the spermal stimuli on it cause it to rotate because they were unequal attacks. From the metaphysical point of view, the spinning created a greater difficulty for the sperm to get in, so that only a very persistent, a very dedicated sperm would get into that ovum.

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There is your skin surface, and your physicality as such, the peripheral line, the brown one, the green one here represents your ideational structure and the red one in the middle is your volitional essential self. Your essential self ideates, by act of will it creates ideas. This is very important from a therapeutic point of view, because supposing somebody comes and hits you with a hammer and you get a local bruise. That is a destructive violent activity from outside your syst`em. That is O.K., because the moment you get hit a message comes from the initiative centre inside, “Just sort that lot out will you please and restore health.” The curative intention in any situation comes from inside the being, the destructive activities that come from external stimuli can only attack your body but they cannot, actually make your centre ill. That is very important therapeutically. The centre of a being cannot be made ill by an external attack. It does not matter what it is. If you put a man underneath a steamroller and flatten him, unless he himself says, “Oh diddums, poor me,” he will start repairing. He has the power to do so. He may have a reason for not doing so in case anybody asks him to do it again to prove that he did it the first time. That is one of the faults of living in the Twentieth Century, they always want you to do it again.

Now let’s think about this. If we call this the masculine, initiative, ideational being then the external being must be called feminine. It must be that which has been taken out from the centre of being. And in the middle here, we have an area, a mid-zone through which messages of initiative come from the centre to the periphery and from which, from the periphery to the centre pass the external stimuli. So, the mid-zone must be hermaphroditic. It must be able to take a message from outside from the physical body, from the feminine side and pass it through the mid-zone of ideational into the volitional. So in that mid-zone here we have around there ideation conditioned by substantial experience which we feel and emote about, but inside this ring we have ideation precipitated by volitional intention. Look how complicated that is. We have drawn three simple circles and already it is very complex. The middle one is initiative precipitating its next circle, ideation, pushing that as far as it can until it meets opposition, physical body. Your physical body, your ideational body, volitional body. In Indian philosophy your volitional body is called the causal body and the ideational body is the subtle body and your physical body is the gross body. But however we name it, in whatever system, we are up against a trinity.

Let us keep that diagram in mind and think very carefully about it. We are all demoted, sent down from a primordial state of incandescence, preceded by an invisible, unknown, absolutely unimpeded, Infinite Self-will, which cannot be defeated because there is only itself. Whatever it wills comes to be because it wills it. There is no opposition unless it wills an opposition for itself. And the first thing it wills for itself is an idea. and the idea is called The Logos in the fourth gospel. It is called, by good intelligent mystics like Jacob Böhme, the anti-stroke to God the Father, because the volition itself is immediate. So that, whatever it brings to be by an immediate act of volition, will immediately vanish unless it immediately posits it again. So whatever it would do, as soon as created, would cease to be and would have to be reposited again. In Qabalah that is called the reign of the Edomite Kings. They make universes and they vanish. “I’m sure I made a universe a moment ago. Where has it gone? Never mind, make another.” And then one brilliant specimen leapt in and said, “I have got the secret! Make a form, make ideas, make ideation, make an eidetic structure. Will it and set up a mechanism to keep it going so that it is self-perpetuating.” And, that world is the world of Plato’s ideas, a world in which forms are willed to be self-perpetuating so that you don’t actually need to keep repositing them by special attention. It is like learning to drive the car. At first you have to pay attention, which foot to put on which pedal and this is the steering wheel and so on, and you condition your physical body to behave in a routine manner so that you can gradually learn to sit back and enjoy the scenery while you are going down the motorway at 120 and the speed limit is 70 with your eye on the mirrors for the cops.

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Now we can only do all these marvellous things because we have liberated ourselves by making mechanisms. We can’t liberate ourselves without mechanism. We can’t come up out of the mines and out of the sewers unless we mechanise them and computerise them. The whole advance of Cainish science is simply to release us for further creative activities.

Now, we are hermaphrodites, whether we like it or not, it is only a slight stress accent, a matter of a little bit of testosterone, a little bit of this or that hormone and you can develop a lovely bust if you wanted one, or, you could get rid of it, by a simple change of chemistry. Why so, because chemistry is precipitated volition? Every chemical is a will to formulate in a certain way and that is why drugs can work. That is why drugs can hallucinate you because they are actually, mysterious powers. We are all hermaphrodites but we are generally not aware of that.

Now what is the Divine Hermaphrodite? The Divine Hermaphrodite is the one that de-vines it, D.V. That is to say, he is aware, reflectively, that he has as much woman in his manhood as he has manhood in his womanhood. If he is aware of this and can actually control these dual functions in himself, then he is a Divine Hermaphrodite and he is like God. The whole object of evolution, funnily enough is to be just like God. That is not greedy, that is common sense. If God precipitates a world to pluralize gods, to make gods able to play with gods, then it is the duty of every reflexive being, to become as godlike as possible. But to become godlike, is to rediscover one’s fundamental, pre-polar being as will. Pure will which wills to section itself as male- female, positive-neg, giver -receiver. It wills this because it is the only way that it can make itself conscious of what it actually is. Without setting up a resistance you cannot test your own strength, your own intelligence.

When you get hold of yourself, one hand by another and press against yourself you feel more like you, don’t you? Do a simple exercise, just press against the side of your head and press back with your head against your hand and don’t you become aware that you have got neck muscles? Have you become aware that you have got neck muscles? If you have not you are being lazy. Were you aware that you had neck muscles before you did that or had they lapsed? They had lapsed. You have all kinds of things hidden in your underwear and elsewhere. You have got deltoids you see, and funny things, biceps and triceps, the latissimus dorsi and so on, marvellous mechanisms inside you never think about them. Do you ever think what a rotten thing it is to create a marvellous mechanism and then forget you have got it, like having a super car which you have worked all your life to afford to buy and you get it and you are so proud of it you put it in the garage, you are frightened of using it in case some idiot parks his car and scratches it so you don’t use it. You just think about it.

And then the garage burns down.

And the garage burns down, right? That would be a message from above if it did that.

Here we are, whether we like it or not, we are hermaphrodites. We become Divine Hermaphrodites only in one way by self-conscious reflexive awareness of the polarity of our own being, and in so doing, we have to make a decision. We cannot do it without making a decision. I mean we all agree that we are protoplasm. Do you agree that you have got as much girl in you as you have got boy? Do you like it?

No.

You don’t? Well you had better learn to like it. Because otherwise…

I’m doing my best.

You’re doing your best

Now the only reason a man does not like being a girl is because he is not yet a man. There is no other reason., do you know that? A terrible thought, that. Most men are only half way out of the pond, and the pond is woman. When you ponder on a thing you are being a woman. When you deliberately analyse it logically, then you are being a man, and if you take the conclusions of your logic to their conclusion you must affirm that the Alpha, the beginning and the Omega, the end are equally valid, because they are the same. There is no Omega, a final conclusion of evolution without an Alpha, a beginning, a Spirit that had this hidden in it and then precipitated it. If you once accept the conclusion, then all the men who are worried about the relative size of their genital organs, or whether they will function or not, if they stop worrying and say, “I am a man-woman, a woman-man and I will assert this to be a logical fact, and having asserted it I will say there is no difference whatever in ultimate value between being a little boy and a little girl.” Now can we affirm that absolutely? If so, we are Divine Hermaphrodites already. All we need is a bit of practice to prove it.

Track 10

Now the enemy is inertia. What is inertia? It is the previously established way in which a being has been working, nothing else. There is no mysterious power in the universe, called inertia, that comes and gets hold of you. There is only the way you have used yourself to date. That is all the inertia there is. So, to overthrow inertia, what do you have to do? Re-conceive yourself, give birth to yourself in a new idea, a new substance, a new feeling sensation, a new initiative. But, the old inertia says, “Oh, I’ve left it a bit late, why bother, better to die quietly and then, next time round,” because you see, the soul knows that it is immortal so it does not care if it does die when it has made a mess of something or when it has lost face. It will die and say, “Well, next time, I will do better.” And this is coddology because the same thing will happen again, because every time you do something, you have added a unit of inertia into your being. So, if you actually said, “I have made a mess of my life, I might as well die, I will fade away, everybody will be sorry and then the next time I meet them, they will treat me better.” That would be a first step journey of thousand miles, begins with first step, to a new inertia, the inertia of saying, every time you get born, “I think I will leave it until I have grown up and then I will go negative and die, and then I will try again.” You actually establish a cycle of failure with self-imagery as the determinant.

Now think what that means. The centre of our being is pure volition. Pure volition is initiative. It can do anything whatever. It has no inertia. It can do anything whatever, and if it thinks about it, it is not being purely initiative. What it can do is posit a thing to remind itself that it is really initiative. The thing that it posits to remind itself that is really initiative is the Logos. Logos, remember Logos, Lamda λ Gamma γ, Lamda is that light, that incandescence, that intelligence, your eidetic structure; Gamma is your physical body. When you look at the Logos word, tell yourself, “This Logos says my intelligence, my Lamda, my eidetic structure which I willed is the very, very coherence principle of the mineral matter of my body, which is Gamma.” There is no Gamma structure other than Lambda insight and that insight is willed.

What happens then?

We take our volition, pure volition and we will with it reflexively saying, “Whatever happens to me, I willed to put myself in that situation.

Now what happens?

While I was away I had to attend an exorcism of evil spirits and the woman who was possessed by the evil spirits, having had explained to her that there weren’t any evil spirits other than life-force frustrated, and having had it demonstrated to her that there weren’t because the evil spirits that were frightening her went away when she looked at them and would not come back, she then accused the gentleman who had been exorcising the evil spirits, of making her believe in evil spirits when they don’t exist and she told him off. And he said to me, “This is terrible. She is accusing me of misleading her. She is very, very annoyed with me.” And I said, “No, she isn’t annoyed with you at all. You must tell her that she is not annoyed with you. She is annoyed with herself for trusting you.” Now that is a key thought. Nobody is ever really annoyed with somebody else. They are annoyed with themselves for trusting the other person and they can’t bear the feeling of annoyance inside themselves, because they know it is true, so what do they do? That psychological trick, they project the annoyance outwards onto the nearest unfortunate target and say, “I am annoyed with you!” why? “Because I can’t bear being annoyed with me. I am a nice fellow, how can I be annoyed with me? I am intelligent, I have got initiative, I have got ideas, I have got sensitive feelings, and I have got real substantiality, so there can’t be anything wrong with me so there must be something wrong somewhere so it must be with you.” And that is called projection.

Track 11

Now it is a very good thing, projection, because it allows you, like every bad thing, it has got a good thing in it; it allows you to see outside yourself, in somebody else, objectified, that which you dare not look at inside yourself, because, inside yourself, from your red centre, from your pure volition, you know perfectly well that your intention originally was nothing but the highest. You never had any intention of doing anything but good did you to everything? You are going to make an orderly universe. You won’t notice you will be modest about it, you won’t tell everybody you are the boss, you will just do good everywhere. Your intention is pure and perfect. How then, can you be at fault? Answer, you can’t. It can only be that a wicked stimulus from outside has come in and invaded you and distorted your original plan. Sounds OK, except that the stimulus that came in, came from another being with the same good intention. And that is where you have to compromise with other people, because if you don’t, you will continuously project your own error of leaning on somebody on the outside instead of leaning on your own volitional centre. When you realise that you are, like Trevor who has reformed, in the last few minutes, and has decided that women are every bit as good as men, haven’t you? He is being modest now and does not want to shout “Yes,” he is just quietly inside admitting it and saying it is a bit rough. It is like being a doctor and spending God knows how many years at a university studying things that are quite out of date from a thirty-year old textbook. You don’t want to admit it do you Trevor? His eyebrows wiggled and he pursed his lips or his lips pursed and his eyebrows wiggled.

Trevor: Incorrect analysis.

Pardon.

Incorrect analysis

E.H.: Yes, on my part?

Yes.

Would you like to explain it to me?

Yes. I’m always prepared to have that presented to me.

Yes.

I’m always fascinated to feel the truth.

E.H. You can feel the truth. Well if you can feel the truth why was my analysis incorrect?

To be honest…. Funny thing that…. The simultaneity of Absolute serial…

Had it not got to be acceptable to you

Yes.

But hadn’t it got to be acceptable to you in the level at which you conceptualise yourself?

It’s in limbo.

You have gone back into the primordial darkness now, haven’t you!

How did I do that?

You won’t…

I can say what you all like, and I can say what you like.

But I am trying to twist you into? Well do you know that there is no education of beings with their bottoms in the pond except by trickery? Do you know that? No education whatever of beings with bottoms in ponds except by trickery because they are frightened of their bottoms drying up if you bring them into the air, so you have to pull their legs a bit to get them out. And that is why Jesus always spoke parables to people and then a double parable to the disciples. He said to the disciples, “To those who are without I speak only in parables but to you it is given to understand the Kingdom of Heaven.” That is so they could nod their heads, and before they knew what was happening they were teachers, weren’t they?

Comment: Should have had their bloody heads chopped off!

Just having their heads chopped off:

Right, can we try again Trevor? Have you now passed into the state where you can see and you are not going to be pushed into it by me doing tricks are you?

No I won’t

No. Can you?

If I admit to the proposition

Yes

And define what you say is necessary to thinking, then I have got to believe in it I am not willing to do that.

Ah …

I am not willing to do that

You’re not willing to do it

Except for inertia.

Except for inertia,

Yes. Which is a world which has caused me to have made the statement I have, about the thing which I have to do before I die , then I can walk forward and see an improvement.

E.H.: Within your then limitations? That is several seconds ago isn’t it. You must feel that now, within your present newly enlightened condition are you prepared to confess that women are just as valuable in the ultimate scheme of things as men?

Yes. And you really feel that is true don’t you.

Yes.

And, when you look backward at your earlier condition when you did not want to believe that, at that time was it because you did not believe that or because you did not want to believe it?

It was too painful.

Too painful. You did want to believe it, but you actually knew it was true even then didn’t you? But it was too painful to accept.

Track 12

Now this is the whole thing about getting out of the pond. Remember that we have been demoted from a condition of invisible volition, through visible ideational structures called minds and from there to solar plexus self-wills and then to planetary physical bodies, you’ve come down, and we have to climb back again in our awareness internally. So we must reverse the order of descent, mustn’t we? The meaning of the physical incarnation of God in Christ, is simply that every intelligence, to complete its own education, must come down, must be demoted and must initially agree with the demotion in the dark, before the incandescence of the universe, we are all actual monads there, we are all eternal spirits, fire spirits, seraphs, with God, hidden. And if we did not agree with Him sending us down we could, because we are of identical substance with God, refuse to go. So that we are down here means that we have acquiesced in the demotion, in the going down.

T: To what extent, I mean I can’t feel into … there is any sense in that except for one aspect of it, the logic of the darkness.

E.H: The logic of the darkness? But you can feel that can’t you?

Yes, of necessity it must be, because in it’s darkness the Sentience must have been there. Of its darkness, light became.

Right, yes, and you originate in that darkness, don’t you, yes, and the darkness is not made of parts is it?

Yes.

It is a continuum. And therefore, the particular, which has come to be you, in that state of primordial darkness, must be acquiescing in the descent into matter, because, it is not other than the continuum. The continuum can’t send itself down against its own will, but only with its own will.

That would be impossible without the stimulus.

Yes. That is the meaning of the Christian statement salvation is impossible without crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection. They are symbolic ways of expressing that psychological, spiritual truth. The Infinite Power, utterly and absolutely, infinitely self-determinant, cannot pluralise itself, cannot make beings to play with, without cutting itself actually, into bits, that is by act. But that does not affect its being a continuum, because an action is only a modality of the continuum. So, the original decision that you made then, in the dark, when you got in the light and were caught by phenomena and came down, progressively into the human body on earth, that original decision you deliberately forgot. Because if you did not forget it you would not be able to concentrate fully on the examination of the trials and tribulations of your life in the physical body, could you? So, mythologically you are said to drink the waters of Lethe, of forgetfulness before you incarnate again.

You are an eternal spirit incarnate in a visible body. You can be kicked and hacked and pinched by the people round about you can’t you?

Yes.

And, the Lower self does not like that fact, but it is your higher self that said you cannot complete your education unless you actually do go down and experience being kicked, being beaten, being thrashed, being crowned with thorns, and so on, you cannot be complete. You must know all things, must you not, ultimately, to be yourself? Otherwise, there is going to be a deficiency in you somewhere isn’t there?

Yes.

And you are going to say, “Oh there is something I don’t know about which that fellow knows about, so I must know about it.” But the only way we can know all things is by suffering all things. There is no other way. That says so logically. Now the next thing is, we have said it in the realm of logic, can we say it in the realm of the will? We have gone from the physical factor of being pinched and kicked, to the idea of being pinched and kicked and now, how about the will to be kicked and pinched?

That is all right.

Is it?

Yes.

There is a lady sitting next to you give her one of your fingers and tell her to give it a good bite. Give it a good bite! What is the matter with her? Bite to hurt. Does it taste horrible?

Just beginning to feel it then.

Yes, but what is the difference…. …..

I affirm

What is the difference to you handing your finger to her to bite and her, suddenly, without your permission, biting your finger?

Prior assent.

Prior assent, nothing else. But what happens to the quality of the sensation of if you got prior assent?

It’s a lot easier to bear.

It’s a lot easier to bear. Now isn’t that the whole key to life? Instead of waiting for them to kick you, say, “Anybody feel like kicking anybody today? Here I am.” The whole quality changes doesn’t it?

It does.

It does.

That is not kiddology.

No that is not kiddology, that is real, sound psychology isn’t it. Real, empirical psychology. But the moment you change your will and seize the initiative in that anticipatory act of self-sacrifice, you have totally immobilised the opposition. Now isn’t that nice, isn’t it simple?

Yes.

Track 13

Yes, it’s very, very simple, isn’t it complicated and the complicated simple?

Yes isn’t it simple?

Yes but it’s very, very complicated sitting here and well may this be being decided within the ultimate.

No it might not. The question is whether, if they agree with it logically. ..Do you agree with it logically as a proposition?

Some say heh, heh, and some say no, no, no. If you see the logic of it then your in that middle zone there, the intellective zone , to make it absolutely dynamic and super-powerful to collect what is called by the mystics, ‘Dragon Power’ you convert it to volition. You say I am actually willing to endure all things, so that like St Paul, “I don’t boast, not that kind of fellow, and if I did boast, I’d have more to boast about than you’ve got.”

G: The difference between putting a finger in a person’s mouth and asking a person to get hold of a person’s nutcrackers and asking them to squash your balls.

Not really. Have you tried both? No there isn’t really because as a matter of fact, if you actually offer those delectable morsels to her do you know that she has a deep biological respect for them, and she will say, “Oh don’t be silly.

I’m not talking about her, I’m talking about some other fellah.

Oh, a fellow! Why are you getting yourself mixed up with fellows suddenly? Fellows won’t jump on them either, no, not if you’ve got that much nerve and say, “Well we only jump on them to terrify you, but the blighter’s stolen a march on us.” Do you believe it?

No.

Alright, I’ll ask doctor Wadsworth. You lie down there Gerhardt and ask him if he has got the thing going.

Yes, but he has …. This is a different situation. If you have got somebody raving mad at you and threatening to squash your bloody balls.

But how do they get raging mad at you other than you being stupidly cocky?

I don’t know, people get bashed up, crowds come out from football matches that their team has lost and they just set on anybody without any provocation.

Yes, but haven’t they gone there in order to be justified in setting up anybody without provocation?

I’m talking about the bloke on the receiving end.

Ah, but they went there for the same reason

No, I’m talking about the passer by…

What’s he doing passing by a football ground any way? Very intelligent people see if there is a football match on, they don’t go that way in their cars, do they?

It would be a joke if they are getting some.

I’m suggesting, I’m put it to you Gerhardt, that you, yourself, that you yourself would not put yourself in the kind of position where that would be likely to happen.

I would be bloody terrified.

You are not truly scientific! To be scientific you must be totally disinterested and entirely objective and a sharp observer, with one eye co incident governance, and measure it. And if you did that you would lots of volunteers, wouldn’t you?

They would squash your balls wouldn’t they?

Yes look if you did it correctly with a scientific thing you could make a hundred thousand quid in the Daily Mirror immediately.

Who would it profit?

You’d manage without them.

See this basic nervousness in men because they are putting the accent in the wrong place

You see the particular commodities that Gerhardt is talking about are extrusions of will

(Laughing) That’s a lovely though that is.

They are just wills dangling about, waiting to be noticed. Did it ever occur to you why a man has those things which are supposed to be essential for existence dangling where , in a natural situation, they could be seen and admired?

They can be tested.

Tested, yes. Look at the etymology of that when you get home.

It’s all a question of daring to walk out isn’t it and show what you have got and see what happens.

Track 14

The whole thing in the Universe is this, that the Absolute, Intelligent Power, if it had not created a plurality of beings, of which we are some, would be languishing on its own, just looking at its own darkness to itself. Now that wasn’t good enough because when God said, “Let there be light,” He said, “And it was good.” He thought that light was good. He made it and he said it was good. That is a good definition. “Anything I make is good.”

When He has posited that Universe and pluralized in that way, what is His next thing to do with the phenomenal world, with the world of appeariential beings? The next thing is to do push them through every conceivable evolutionary possibility, of formal demonstration, of conflict, of everything else, until you have totally exhausted the possibilities of phenomenal existence. Try all things, hold fast the good is the operative thought.

Now, if you can actually affirm that as a jolly good idea, and I put it to you , it is quite easy too imagine, which would you rather be, wrapped in infinite darkness in perfect self-possession of no thing but infinite darkness, knowing yourself to be omnipotent, omniscient, in the dark, and no Universe, would you rather stay in that condition or would you like to phenomenalise yourself, pluralise yourself, temporalise your eternity, materialise your spirit and see what else you can do apart from languishing in the dark? Which do you do? You have come into the phenomenal world. At some point, you made a decision to do so otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Now are you regretting your decision?

Would that be an asset.?

It would appear so but if you examine yourself you will reverse that decision. You say, “I forgot that I sent myself down.”

But you have to be convinced of that. You can’t even make the next step until you are convinced of that.

Who is going to convince you?

You have to be convinced internally, don’t you?

Internally in the will, in the will. So it is entirely a matter of will whether you will or not convince yourself and it is a matter of will.

T: Why not of feeling as well?

E.H: Well a feeling is an assessment, isn’t it, yes? How do you assess, how do you asses whether you have willed or not?

By feeling that you have done so.

By feeling that you have done so

It becomes a fact because it’s working energy that manifests in results

In results. That is the outer circle, the external result, and in between there is an ideational process governing the structure of the manifestation.

Well, where does consciousness come in?

Consciousness, remember the word con-sci-ous-ness means you have analysed the content. Before con-sci-ous-ness there is Absolute Sentience, not yet cut up, not yet analysed. The SCI in con-sci-ous-ness means snip, snip, snip, cut into bits, like scissors. Before you cut it into bits, which is an intellectual act, not a substantial act, an intellectual act, before you make that act you are not con-scious, you are absolutely sentient. You are a pre-pluralised being essence but you are not conscious.

Now this consciousness has never been defined because …… so it will necessarily be an eternal noumenon, therefore is of the essence of will?

O.K., that is fine. It’s a nice analysis.

So then, if there is sentience prior to consciousness as you have defined, where is the condition of the analysis of tonight?

Which one?

Of the idea of the darkness as allied to minerality ?

Well it is quite simple really. Our sensation of light is produced by evolving a pair of optics.

You talk about the light of consciousness.

Yes but the light of consciousness, is it not true that a congenitally blind person does n’t have a sensation of light in the mind, so he does not talk about the light of consciousness, because that is a metaphor. He might talk about the sound of consciousness if he is not deaf, or the taste of it or the smell of it, yes? Because when you are talking about consciousness you are talking about the content. But there is not any content other than that which is willed. You will yourself your own content, yes? So the little circle in the middle, the red one, wills that green one, which is the ideational structure and then it wills to operate the ideational one in the material world as an ex-press-ion, a pressing out. But it is all a product of the will, and the will is the male and the external is the female and between the two is the hermaphroditic process where you admit that you have got an idea and you admit that you have got a feeling of being. Your feeling of beingness is female, your idea is masculine. You admit that you can initiate changes. That is masculine. You admit that you suffer the action of changes of other beings. That is feminine. And those four processes go on inside everyone but they don’t become conscious until you appoint for them a word to separate them from another content. So it is through the word that you make your analysis. Hence Logos, ratio, word and logic, the process of clarification of mental contents, through the word.

Track 15

The only enemy is inertia. There is no inertia other than previously established patterns of will.

So what does it mean to us? We have to go back onto the centre of will. Now the tendency in the mind is to look for external stimuli for anything you do. That is only a product of a few millions of years of inertia. Once the penny drops, once you comprehend that really it is volition that has put us where we are. That volition has to be rediscovered. You go inside yourself. You go through your receptive feeling passivity to the external stimulus, your feminine nature and your dive inside yourself to your will.

And at that point a very peculiar thing occurs. It inverts the symbology. You have now become very feminine because if you define the feminine, you define the feminine as non-rational, don’t you?

Yes, that’s the pattern.

Yes, but that initiative is the same thing as non-rational isn’t it? So that the very thing that we started by saying, masculine initiative is feminine will isn’t it? We have turned the thing upside down. Can you see that it is justified? It is a fact that a masculine dominated society, technology, know-how, mathematics, geometry, logic, ideas, have stated and been stated to be to be masculine in origin and feeling and poetry and music and things, have been said to be feminine, but, if we examine them we find that they are all hermaphroditic. You can’t have a Mozart without feeling and you can’t have a Mozart symphony without good notation. The masculine and the feminine are actually, inextricably, not two at all. It is only a stress accent of verbal usage in the social structure, and by social I am not meaning merely on earth, but in the social structure of the Macrocosmos, that this apportioning of initiative and ideation to the male and feeling and substantiality to the female has been brought into effect. Only by that polarisation can we get the necessary tensions to make ourselves aware of our own being. And once we have begun to understand that, we begin to be very, very pleased at the opposition we get because all oppositions are there willed by that dark Absolute and agreed with by us as individual monads at our top level, our Hexonic level we agree with it. We cannot complete our evolution, we cannot attain out true selfhood, our real utter determination of the soul, freely, without this opposition.

And therefore, we have to say we have willed, like the dark willed the light, we have willed to impose upon ourselves, every conceivable kind of opposition that we experience and encounter. When we accept the theory of that, the theory is on that middle circle, then we have only one thing to do, make it volitional. Instead of merely nodding the head at the idea, will it. Instead of running away from opposition, seek it. As soon as the word gets around that you are looking for opposition, they won’t give it to you. They only give it to you if you don’t want it. If they think that you can assimilate it and deal with it, they won’t give it to you because it is feeding you, it is making you more powerful than they are and that they will not voluntarily do until they get to a very, very high level, where they do not care two hoots about power of any kind, because they have got it.

Now, how do you all feel there if you accept the first proposition? Have you got physical bodies please? Have you got ideational behaviour or do you think? Have you got ideas of any kind whatever, and have you got will? Right, now tell me which is prior, your physical body, your ideas or your will?

Will.

The will. Now if you remember that, is it not your duty to yourself, every moment, to go back on your centre and say, “I am willing this situation? I refuse to act mechanically to an external stimulus. I will my behaviour as from now and I will not to project on another person the responsibility for that willing.” Can you do it, can you feel it, O.K isn’t it? Is there anything left in the whole universe worth learning?

No? It is very the ground of all ethical systems, so let us go back to it and try, say, within the next half hour, just try to get hold and tri means three-fold, get hold of your body, get hold of your idea, feel it and then will it. Whatever you are doing say, “I am willing to say this,” not, “I am being trapped into saying it,” but, “I am willing to say it.” When you are drinking your coffee, will it, don’t do it mechanically. If you bite a bun, will the bite, don’t do it mechanically.

If everything you do is done in that way it is a perfect act, it can’t be otherwise, and when you do such an act reflexively, you are, at that very moment, a Divine Hermaphrodite, and, if the next moment you forget it, you are not a Divine Hermaphrodite, so that you have to continually re-posit yourself in that process.

THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE

Part Two

The second of two talks given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands. Ishval Audio 55

Track 1

We were talking about the hermaphroditic nature of the human being. We were pointing out that every man has passed, in the uterus through a phase of being female. And of course, he is glad to leave that behind. But, whenever we leave something behind to go towards something in front we tend to forget what we have left behind. And therefore, the man, going forward towards rationality and initiative, actually, historically, tended to forget that he had any feeling, any genuine compassion for the universe such as he observed manifest in his wife before they were married, and in this forward movement, in forgetting his other half, his physicality and his feeling, he actually reduced himself from the level of the whole being he hoped to become, to the level of half a being.

Now I want to talk particularly about this to the men because the men are more guilty in this respect than the women. The women have not really tried to go forwards at all, so we can’t blame them if they don’t get there. Lao Tse says, “He who does not declare his aim cannot be said to fail.”

The reason for this process, if you remember, do you remember the diagram we did of the flat sea and the sloping sea floor, and the fact that in the shallow water the cells got more sunlight and became more vigorous, self-impulsive and eventually grew tails and became the spermoid in type whereas the eggs that were in the depths of the sea, deprived of any sunlight, remained relatively passive and did not grow any tails. The ones who grew tails began to rush about doing what they called empirical research. At least, that is what they call it now. It is the same thing. It means prodding everything you meet that looks at all, weaker than you. In the process, sexual relationships arose, because the ones with the driving power of the tails, attacked the ones without the tail and in this attack, they proved their superiority, their superiority in attack. They did not prove their superiority in defence but they did in attack.

Now this is tremendously important for human relationships and specifically, in relationships between men and women, opposite poles, because progressively and particularly in an accelerated manner over the last two thousand years since Christianity burst on the world, the woman has been overthrown. There is a statement attributed to Christ, “I am come to destroy the works of woman.” We will see, shortly, what that meant. When we remember that at one time we lived in caves, in those days, to run, for safety, into the cave, was the most important thing for survival. So imagine a situation in which human society is dwelling in caves, and where going out into the open sunlight could be very dangerous. All kinds of large predators existed which endangered the life of man and to run into the cave and roll a stone over the front of the cave was terribly important. But, the cave was associated, protopathically, remember protopathically means ‘without sharp intellectual discrimination,’ all similar things are put together. So, a cave and the womb, the vagina and so on, were put together because they were vaguely similar. So to fly back to Mummy when you have hurt yourself, to fly into the cave to escape a tiger became equivalent. To go to Mummy for safety, to go to earth, to hide in the dark, dank cave away from the predators that prowl about in the sunlight was the mode of life in those days.

Track 2

Then there came another concept. And it arose through men, having to go out in the sunlight to hunt and to make sure they were not killed by predators, the men, who naturally, sexually, disliked each other, banded together. We know that they disliked each other by looking at the behaviour of stags or bull seals. There is no friendliness amongst males where the opposite sex is concerned. The whole of the animal world shows that fact. So that, when men got together, they got together against their biological nature. And that is tremendously important. We can equate biological nature with the female and the force that transcends biological nature with the male.

Now, imagine, when the men went out in the broad sunlight, they went out in bands so that whatever predator of whatever size they met, they could club together. Remember that is the origin of gentlemen’s clubs, they can club together any creature that singly they could not club. You will then understand the ethics of gentlemen’s clubs, and also what to expect if you meet a gentleman. If you enter into conflict with him in daily life or in business, you will be up against not the individual but what today, is called The Old Boy Network. That is to say, a group of other men like him, genital men, if you use your dictionary, gentlemen and genital man means the same, they will club together to maintain their individual freedom. Now this is a dialectical thing. In order to survive individually, the men realised that they had to deny their separate individuality and make themselves into a commune. And t he ground of this commune was logic, a thought that says certain things follow from certain deeds, and if you can accept that this will be invariable and a single man, fighting a large animal alone will probably lose, but a thousand men, fighting the same animal will probably win. Now that is logic. The men had to accept this logic because they couldn’t survive in the fight against the predators in the daylight without accepting it. So, that the male came to rely on logic, on analysis of the form of the situation, and then having made the analysis, to accept that they had made the analysis and, through trial and error, to find that the analytical method gave success, and therefore, to like logic, in the end, to love logic and make logic their God. That logic is the same logic referred to in the fourth Gospel as the Logos.

Now in the process, instead of flying into the cave for security, the men in the situation of danger, formed squares. They put themselves back to back to face the predators or the rival attackers of other tribes. You there see the whole principle of the difference between man and woman. In the cave-dwelling matriarchal periods, safety meant, run back to the cave. Run back to Mummy because she was in charge of the cave and have your wounds or whatever, assuaged in that cave, and that is why the pursuit of sexual intercourse by depressed men is still the method of attaining self-respect again. Every time a man feels defeated in life, in daily life, business life or any other kind of life, when he feels defeated, the defeat causes him to regress back to the early cave-dwelling period so that he tends to run towards the cave, and as there are not many of them around these days, he runs to the next equivalent, and that is the protopathically associated form, the woman, to try to get back into the original cave, the womb, if possible. When surrounded by the bulk of your mother it does not matter who kicks her to pieces as long as the kicks don’t penetrate to you in the womb. That is the best place to be. And this has left a very deep psychological tendency in the male, when lowered in resistance or survival capacity by events of any kind, to want to go towards a woman. And all the other men who have not been disturbed think it is a very bad sign when a man runs home to his mother or wife for solace.

But, in the process of extricating themselves from the cave, the men had to formulate a new religion. Remember, religion means, ‘binding back to a principle.’ The original principle behind all principles is Sentient Power. It is power, because you can’t explain cause except in terms of power, of force applied. And it is also sentience because it is only through sentience, through feeling, that we know anything whatever. So we have this unbreakable, dual polarity, Sentience and Power, together. They cannot be separated, you cannot be sentient other than a manifestation of power and you cannot be powerful in all departments unless you have sentience, awareness of the situation in which you wish to be powerful. So, Sentience and Power go together, S and P, the first two letters of the word Spirit, Sentience and Power, S.P.

Track 3

Now the Infinite Sentient Power is the Absolute source of all phenomena that we know about. You use A.S.P. for Absolute Sentient Power. Reduce it to a word if you like and say the Asp, think of the one that bit Cleopatra, it is the same one, it is a primordial energy, functioning long before formal restraint in a manner called bliss, the Nirvana of the Hindus, the Heaven of the Christians and Muslims and so on. Bliss, and bliss means uninterrupted, unimpeded motion of Sentient Power. Sentient Power moves towards self-projected goals and Sentient Power, if not impeded from them thoroughly enjoys itself and like God says, whatever it does, “Behold it is good.” It is only good because it has posited it and attained it. It would not be a good at all unless it first posited it and then attained what it has posited.

Now when the men found that they could actually survive in groups, they said, “Let us change the religion. The religion before men attained this group activity in the open air was called the religion of the Magna Mater, the great Mother, the Maha Ma, a supreme female figure, dwelling in the cave, to whom everybody went for security and advice. But when the men realised that they could actually survive in the open air, and, by fighting back to back could defeat anything, then they said we will now have a new God. So, instead of the dark, earth goddess as supreme object of worship, they said now we will worship the supreme god of the daylight sky. The name of that god was Zeus. That Greek Zeus and the Jaos of the Hindus, means ‘Glistening Ether.’

When, on a bright sunny day, you look up and there are no clouds, what you see is a glistening, and imagine that glistening extended to Infinity and that is the god, Zeus, the glistening ether. But, that same light is actually the very source, by a progressive series of condensations, of the life on earth. There is no matter that is not degenerated spirit. There is no spirit that is not light: there is no matter that is not dark.

The earth, as a compacted mass of energy, millions and millions of years ago was not so compacted. It was expanded, it was a gas and it was vibrating and it was luminous. It was a gas in a state of incandescence. It was the god Zeus. Now the men, when they worshipped this god of light, also worshipped the god of consciousness, the god of perception, the god of wide-open eyes. Those of you who have seen Indian Drama, who have watched the Hindus playing their dramas of gods and demons, they will notice a very peculiar thing about them you don’t find much in Western theatre and that is the tendency to display their eyeballs. What they are saying is, this means light, this means I am conscious, this means I know, and some of the fiercest demons have the biggest eyeballs, and they keep their eyelids up, they must know.”

Now Schopenhauer once said that the greatest value of a human being is to attain individuality, free individual consciousness. But, unfortunately, this same individuated consciousness is the biggest crime there is. That was a dialectical statement. The greatest supreme good of human kind is to become a free conscious, wide-eyed, open individual and in that very moment it commits the greatest crime. Against what? Against human solidarity as a community, with rules. Now there has been a pact, an unconscious pact originally, but progressively refined by philosophy to become a conscious fact, the social contract. Whether they did it on paper first is irrelevant the fact is men came to realise that in the commune they could solve a problem that they could not solve individually. And yet, mysteriously, in the moment of getting together to solve it, they destroyed the only thing that they had that was worth having. The only thing that humanity has that is worth having is spontaneity, is life, immediate response to a situation without calculation. But, if you respond immediately to a situation, can you have a society? And, a lot of thinkers have said, “No, you cannot have a society, because, if everybody is free and spontaneous, they are also unpredictable.” But a society is based on a routine process. To run a society, to keep the sewers under the road instead of over them, you must have a procedure and you must maintain that procedure, and you must get up in a morning at a certain time and go to a certain place and think certain thoughts and perform certain actions. And if you do that then you are a socialised human being, but, in the process you have lost the reason for doing it, because the real reason for getting together was to make life better, to make life freer, to make life more intelligent.

But what we actually find, in the history of social groupings, is that societies have been rules by oligarchs, that is, by a handful of men who somehow have become corrupted. Power corrupts. They have become corrupted so that instead of remembering the ultimate goal, namely freedom, perfect, intelligent co-operation inter-function, they have said, “All these beings who are subject to our educational commands, can be used as if they were oxen.” Now that is a very important idea. The oligarchs have said all these beings, who are potentially human, can be kept at a sub-human level with the appropriate methods of indoctrination, and then we can be free, we can be human, but only at the expense of most human beings being analysed, reduced to the level of an intensive farm with locked up chickens and locked up pigs and cattle.

Track 4

You know, from the last war, what it was fought about, that this is true. Nazi Germany wished to eliminate anyone with any individuality. The most individual people in Germany at the time were Jews, therefore, they had to go, and at the same time, to reduce everybody except the top oligarchs, to the level of oxen who will not argue, who will accept, absolutely, the commands, the dictates of the Führer. Now that historic, repeated tendency in the name of solidarity of effort, necessary for success proved in the ancient world, by the overcoming of big predators and very weighty animals like the mammoth and the bison and, in the name of that success, to say, “We know how to plan better than most people and therefore we will plan.” But then they fell into planning for their own advantage and not for the advantage of the whole community. Animal Farm was written specially to show you exactly the process, and the man who wrote it was very depressed at his own experiences in the police force and in politics and in journalism, because he saw it was actually happening.

Now it is a male thing that brought life out of the cave and by combining, logically, to become more efficient, to set up a system of social government called Principle, and this principle was logic. And this principle was put up in the place of immediate, spontaneous movement because you can’t have a man who has promised, if you meet a big predator, to stay with you and strike with you, if, when he sees the sabre-toothed tiger coming, he changes his mind and deserts the pack, so there have to be rules. And then some people, actually think clearer than others and because of that, those people who do not think so clearly said to the clearer thinkers, “Tell us what to do.” And some of the clearer thinkers did and some of them did not, and those that were very near to them soon learned to kill off the very clear thinkers and to take over the authority that they had, rather like you saw in Iran where a religious organisation displaced the authority of power and yet immediately starts doing similar things to the kind of things it was supposed to be condemning. Now this happens in every country of the world wherever men are thinking, logically, on insufficient data. That is tremendously important.

Now when the males took themselves out of the cave, they didn’t want to have anything whatever to do with female dominance. So, they decided to make for themselves special organisations. Survivors of such organisations today are bodies like the Freemasons, in which ladies are not members but men are, and they go through mysterious rites and principles and they commit to memory procedures of social relationships and they are supposed to be oath-bound to obey the principles that they have given lip-service to. When they dissociated themselves from the female on the outside, from the dominion of the grandmother figure, the Great Ma, when they dissociated from her they had to dissociate also, from the same inside their own minds. As they dissociated from the women outside, they said, “If any of the men suspect us of having feminine characteristics, they won’t trust us. So we will have to eliminate the feminine characteristics in ourselves.” And basically those characteristics are two. First, a pre-occupation with immediate emotional response, because you know, at least, those of you who are married know perfectly well, that immediate emotional response, is a property of woman, but immediate emotional response might mean that instead of going to fight the tiger you go and have a drink by the stream instead, because the immediate emotional response, corresponding with Kierkegaard’s first aesthetic phase, is exactly the same in the woman and in the baby. The baby wants what it wants when it wants it and so does the female side of the human being. Now, when the men realised that if they were detected to have any feminine component inside them at all, their fellow men would not trust them, they began to conceal their feminine characteristics from their companions. Then the oligarchs devised exercises which survived in military square- bashing today, exercises to kill any tendency to feel, any tendency to be immediate, any tendency to break out of the logical necessity of the situation.

If you go in the army, you go under oath don’t you? And you abandon your right to be a free-thinking individual. You go under orders, and that is very masculine. If you examine the history of Persian Mithraism, you will find that the whole history of military technique requires that the male warrior shall not feel. It is very difficult if you get a baby on the end of your bayonet to keep it on the end of the bayonet and not drop it through sensitivity unless you train yourself hard. But when you are doing bayonet practice, what do you do? You are taught to pull horrible faces, to make horrible noises and to attack. You practise on a stuffed dummy but you are practising to stick it in a real person. You cannot do this if you have got any sensitivity., and you cannot even put your foot on a fly without cringing, if you have got any sensitivity. So the great militarists of the ancient world, set up a lot of rules whereby the male should divorce himself absolutely for the two feminine characteristics; one, spontaneous feeling, immediate emotive response, and, two, wanting to preserve the physical body. You see, you can’t be a good soldier if you protect your body in a battle, can you? You know how to play chess, ‘toujours l’attack.’ If you play a defensive game you can’t win. You must go out to the enemy and you must kill the enemy before he kills you. You mustn’t sit there smoking your cigarette substitute cheroots in the trenches, wondering whether that fellow was coming over in the middle of the night. You must go out and find him. You must kill him by that most marvellous of all inventions of the militarists, initiative.

Track 5

Now this totally divorced the male from sensitivity of feeling and compassion so that it was absolutely disgusting if you had any feeling for anybody. You can’t go and kill a pregnant woman with sensitivity. It’s not possible to do it. I know a woman who was beaten when she was pregnant, in Germany, with a rubber truncheon, on the stomach, just to show that she was an inferior being, by a man trained and conditioned to do so. Now we know that in Germany today there are not any men who would confess a tendency to do that but we also know that human protoplasm records all experiences in itself and whatever we have had ancestors performing in the past is recorded in us today and could occur again. And, all this dissociation from trying to preserve your physical body and having compassion was a necessity of a militarist society that was destined to conquer the world.

So there we see a man, throwing out of himself the feminine components of his own being rather than admit to fellow men, that he might become emotional in the middle of a battle. You don’t want men breaking down emotionally and screaming hysterically and rushing away if you are under attack, and any of you who have been in the armed forces know what happens if you do run in the wrong direction, like Spike Milligan, with coward’s legs carrying him away, although he himself was very brave. You can be shot by one of your own officers for doing that, and that is a very good ancient, Mithraic, military principle.

Now when the man who had decided he was going to eliminate the feminine component from his being, succeeded in doing so, his success was only this, that he hid it from his conscious mind but he had not actually, thrown out of his protoplasm his own feminine component because that is impossible. He could still feel it. We know this because on the battlefield, if you shoot a man he shouts, “Mother.” You know the one word ‘Mother,’ first word of the infant, last word of the brave, you know that one, don’t you? lovely song, “Prize her while she is living, No truer friend than Mother from the cradle to the grave.” And that actually happens, in war, that men scream for their Mummies! When they get blown to bits, all the bits are shouting, “Mummy, gather me together, like you did when I was playing and tripped and fell on my own ball.”

What are you laughing at? That was singular.

Now here we see we cannot free from anything that we really are essentially, substantially, but we can, under pressure from fellow men, pretend that we have got rid of it, and then what do we become, we become heroes. We become men, and we become logical machines, we have no stupid sentimental compassion or such-like things. We are reliable, we are not like women. We don’t have weaknesses, we don’t menstruate, we are not unreliable, there is a whole host of horrible things that we don’t do if we are men. But, when they have thrown this man out, in their imagination, what happens inside them, they are deprived of their own sensitivity and their own physicality.

Track 6

It is rather interesting, that a large number of famous militarists were also queers. In throwing the woman out of themselves they became homosexuals. If you have read Lawrence of Arabia’s account of how that can arise amongst military men together, you will see a very good description of the process. When men decide they have got no woman on the inside, they feel cut off from their female components. They have got no feeling; they have got no compassion. Now there is the thing in psychology that every one knows about. If you don’t want to admit that you have got something on the inside you throw it out and pretend to see it in somebody else on the outside. And therefore, the males who have admitted this process of masculinisation, this militarisation, in themselves, these same men, have, inside themselves, hidden in their unconscious, an ideal female, very compassionate, very gentle, very considerate and very physical, very sensuous, because you know, when you develop your intellect, you destroy your sensuality. But then you miss your sensuality, because if you have no sensuality, you cannot enjoy the world, not any of it. Not the smell of a rose or the flight of a bird, or the movement of a cloud. You cannot enjoy anything if you are merely an intellectual machine because enjoyment is, essentially, sensuous.

So, what do the males do? They throw out their own hidden feminine nature and they look around for it on the outside. And as soon as they see any appearance of compassion which feels remotely like the kind of compassion that they have internally suppressed, then they say, “Ah, that is it,” and, as soon as they see sensuality outside themselves, they say, “that also is it.” So, if they see these combined in one woman, good physique, obviously sensuously rhythmical and voice compassion, they think that is it. But what they don’t know is all they have done is project their own hidden femaleness onto an external being. Now their own hidden femaleness of course, being their own, is perfect. “How could anything my own not be perfect. Impossible! Therefore, if I project my hidden femaleness onto some other creature, that creature has to be perfect! And if she is not perfect, she is going to be in trouble because I shall have to make her perfect. I shall have to complain about every imperfection and by imperfection, I mean everything that does not correspond with my hidden femaleness.” Now probably, I don’t know whether you confess it, fellows, but probably, you know that this is true, that you feel, outside, when you look at a woman, that you measure her for sensuality and compassion. If she has got beauty as well, physically, that is sort of, a bonus, because even very horrible women, physically shaped, I mean, if they have got compassion and sensuality, they can earn a very, very good living. Whether their nose is this way or this way it does not really matter very much. But if it happens that it is correspondent with the Greek ideal as well, you count that extra.

Track 7

Think about this very carefully. The men started the rot, the women haven’t moved. The men have gone wrong, they have divorced themselves from their own feminine components and then they have projected them onto any woman who looks remotely like their ideal, and unfortunately, most of the ideals of men are their mothers. If your mother had big blue eyes and moments of kindness you go round looking for big eyes of blue and moments of kindness, and you call it your ideal. Now unless men are prepared to stop this process of projecting their own hidden female as an ideal upon their woman partner, you notice I said men, plural, on their woman partner, because there is only one woman in the world, really; if they will not stop that projection, they can never attain happiness with that person. It is utterly impossible, if you impose an alien ideal on another being, and then require it to conform to your definition. Socrates knew that, and therefore he knew that it had nothing to do really, with the woman whether there was a successful relation or not, it had to do with the clarity of the man recognising exactly what had happened.

Now what do we find then? What have the women done when they have absolutely remained static over millions of years whilst men have been groping towards something? What were the men looking for? They were looking for, historically, concerted action to defeat large animals and predators. They found it. In the process, they had to eliminate, for the time being, during the hunt, their tendencies not to wish to be hurt, their tendencies to preserve their physical bodies against attack and their compassion. Having done so successfully, what did they historically do with the women? Once they had come out of the cave and begun to worship the god of daylight, the women, who were hoping that they would go back in the cave, occasionally, used to call them, you know, saying, “Oh Ronald, this is where you used to come you know, when the big teddy bear came. You always ran in the cave didn’t you?” “Ah,” he said, “I’ve got lots of pals,” you see. The women made a little mistake because remember they were not logical. They were spontaneous, feeling beings and they didn’t work out, step by step, that the men had actually made a gain by inventing a Masonic Lodge to go to, two or three times a week. They made the error of trying to advise men to go backwards to regress into the cave. Instead of saying, “O.K., men, go forwards, go into the sunlight, kill all the predators, make the earth fit for us women to walk in safely, and you have our blessing.” They tried to bait them back into the cave. But, if any one of those men they’d actually baited to the point when he did not turn up for an appointment to fight a grizzly bear he was in disrepute and he was called feminine and he was disallowed in the gang.

The women made the mistake of trying, by means of advice and suggestion and if this failed, they began to do what any being does if, non-rationally, it tries a method that fails, they fell into tantrums. You know what tantrums are, tantrums are releasing energy from your central nervous stores in all directions simultaneously in the body so that every muscle you have got vibrates and contracts and you jibber and you shake about and you look absolutely horribly terrifying, because you are using everything you have got. Now how did that arise logically? Because having failed, calmly, with a little wheedle, the woman, being non-rational, that is, not committed to the logical process that the male had adopted for his group hunting activity, being non-rational, she could not persuade herself to go serially through all the possible steps so she just released all the energy into her being and had a tantrum. Now this tantrum then became a sort of mark, a supreme mark of the female nature, women have tantrums. It was a technique, and it still survives. It does not work because it does two opposite things at the same time. Remember what man has done. He has thrown out of himself, in his imagination, his feminine components, and those are, physical sensuality and compassion. Now, when a woman is having tantrums and throwing the dinner on the new wallpaper and so on, and scowling and screaming, her sensuous desirability vanishes and manifestly, she is not in a state of compassion. So, the only two things she has got have been thrown away. Now unless we become conscious of this fact, ladies, we cannot win. The only way we can win with men is by compassion, (I said ‘we’ then didn’t I?) the only way we can win with men is by compassion and sensuality. Isn’t that nice? That is the nun and the prostitute.

Track 8

Now let’s be very, very sure. I want a show of hands. It will be fewer if I put it in one way round. How many men of you have got the nerve to tell me honestly, that you really believe that you have got no feminine components inside you, namely, compassion and delight in sensuality? Show me your hands. Hannukah, of course, yes, she is philosophically trained., cos she is using a very special significance of the word ‘man’ there. She is simply meaning a not sexual entity at all. She is meaning anything that counts at all. So we will ignore her. No other man put his hand up, and I know, deep down inside that you know it is perfectly true. You have a hidden well of compassion and an even deeper well of sensuality.

Question: Eugene, I have heard you say compassion is a quality of the male and very unlikely to be found in the female?

E.H.: You have also heard me utter that word, most fearsomely listened to by Ghreta, ‘dialectic.’

Yes it is.

Now the word ‘compassion’ actually means, ‘suffering with ’ doesn’t it? What is meant there is, when a man has compassion it is because he has become enlightened and knows, perfectly well, that if he does not suffer consciously with the opponent he can’t win the game. And his compassion is rational, it is worked out compassion. “I can’t win with this screaming, tantrum-filled creature by simply screaming back at her the logic of the situation. So, what I would do, I would put my arms around her. That is compassion. I will suffer her tantrum with her. I might even lie on the floor with her and drum my heels as well. But compassion there has a very special sense. Male compassion is the compassion inspired by logic, whereas female compassion is the compassion of immediate aesthetics, the immediate feeling life without any rational dictatorship.

Question: Can they both be said to have the same meaning if you use the same word?

E.H.: Yes because there is a thing called contextual criticism about terms isn’t there? Scholastics of the Middle Ages would have told you about a universe of reference. When you take a word, that word has to be in a context and if it is not in a context, it has no meaning whatever. So we have to put it in one. And, because, particularly with the human race, we have been polarised by this comic deceit into apparent males, apparent females, we have two universes of reference for every term we have got. So if you talk about the high spiritedness of a woman and the high spiritedness of a man, it does not feel the same. Say, “He is a very high spirited fellow,” and what kind of image do you get? And then say, “She is a very high spirited woman,” and what kind of image do you get? You see, the context colours the meaning of the term. Never forget your universe of discourse or your frame of reference or the field in which you are trying to apply the term you are using. We know it is very difficult to remember everything all the time. The best way to do it is forget everything all the time and start afresh now and re-evaluate every situation now and then you won’t have a preconception of what it is all about now, will you?

Let us do that as a simple exercise, now. Let us say this. Supposing we will not say what kind of beings we are. Let us throw out the term human to begin with. We are not human, we are mounds of flesh and bones and so on, sitting on things, don’t bother to call them chairs, and there are processes going on inside. Now, I am going to ask you, is there a unific entity in charge of that mass of chemical compounds, the flesh body? Have you all got absolute certainty that resident in that mound of flesh there is an entity, a being conducting the processes of that mound of flesh? Do you feel that there is?

I can feel it?

Who said that? You said that with your eyes closed, I saw you. Now open your eyes. Do you feel that there is an entity in charge? And I said do you feel, not do you rationalise.

Answer: I feel that there is something holding me together.

E.H.: Ah! But is it an entity?

By that do you mean something on its own?

E.H.: Yes, something entirely self-dependent only?

Answer: No.

E.H.:No. You would have been a very bad Buddhist if you had said, “Yes,” there, wouldn’t you? . What holds the waves together on the ocean?

Answer: The ocean.

E.H.: The ocean. It is no good one little wave saying, “I am holding myself up here.” It is not true. It is not even actually a wave, is it? It is an intellectual construct of an observer to say it’s a wave. Merely the water there is a bit higher than it is there . Then that higher bit is now there instead of there, then there instead of there and you talk about the movement of the wave. But there is not one. It is a construct of the intellect of man. Nevertheless, the whole ocean holds together all these waves. And in the same way the organisms, the mounds of flesh sitting on the chairs in this room, are held together by Absolute Sentient Power, and that means a very interesting, simple thing every one of these organisms is a modality of that Sentient Power. It is not an entity, it is not a self-dependent separate being in its own right. It has no rights.

Comment: A drop of water in the ocean.

E.H.: It is not even a drop, is it?

Comment: Well it feels itself to be.

E.H.: Does it? When did you have your last conversation with the drops of water? You see you have added a human concept, ‘drop of water. I’ll ask you this, when there is what you call a drop of water, namely rain, falling through the air, is it an entity, is it self-dependent, self-originating? Is it also the same when it was up there a hundred feet and down here? Or, has it evaporated a bit or gone cold a little bit, or gained or lost?

Answer: It is slightly different.

E.H.: It is slightly different. In some way it must be different. It is the same as to its absolute substantiality, the power of reality, but it is absolutely different every moment. This is the meaning of the statement in all the major religions, “The universe does not exist except as a concept in the mind of man,” yes? But there is a process. Heraclitus talked about that, and Hannukah is an expert on that as well on what it constitutes to be a man. All flows Panta rheis there is no static entity, there is no separativity, you can’t even put your foot in the same bath water twice, can you because, factually, the whole so-called universe, uni- verse, ‘one turn,’ is a construct of the intellect of man. It is not anything else.

The reality is an infinite ocean of Sentient Power and this power has produced this peculiar polarity that we call male-femaleness by a very simple device. You remember Hannukah, Parmenides and his Infinite Sphere, an apparent contradiction. When that Infinity presses onto a centre, there is not anything there other than the intent to press, there is no change, no change whatever in that Infinite Field of Sentient Power but the intention. It hasn’t changed the essential nature of Sentient Power; it hasn’t changed the essence of substance. All it has done is intended, like you might intend to look at your finger like that and take your finger away and do that. When you do that you are intending and that intention generates in consciousness, that is in the Sentient Power itself, a point of reference, and that point of reference is the first male. A simple point is the first male. But the moment you get such a point of intention like that, just like your eye has inside it a particular point on the retina which gives you very, very sharp vision, but is insensitive to motion, whilst around it is a zone with a sensitivity to motion but it is not in sharp focus. Can you see the origin of man and woman there? Sharp focus static, male; yes, non-sharp focus, dynamic, female, interesting. Its origin is in that power itself. We are men and women, and some lucky ones, both of them. That is to be aware that you are actually able to sharply focus something, like I am looking at the end of David’s nose, now, sharply. When I do that his toes are relatively out of focus. And if one twitches, my peripheral awareness will let me know. Like a few moments ago, his lady wife had a rotating foot like this whilst she was considering certain propositions. Is that right Claire? We are, actually, doing two things simultaneously. We are focussing on that which catches our interest, focus means fo-cus, ‘power-strike,’ and at the same time we are keeping our infinite peripheral awareness in case an enemy, or, a loveable friend should appear over the horizon. We have always got these two things, a peripheral awareness of motion and a sharp central clear point of focus. Sharp, clear focus is masculine and an aura around that sharp focus, a sensitivity to motion and emotion is feminine.

Track 9

Now unless we gain thorough consciousness of these simultaneously, we cannot, not ever come to what we are looking for. We are looking for perfect inter-function. To get perfect inter-function we must see reality as it is. Man must stop projecting his ideal female nature onto the woman to whom he relates and he must start examining that woman to see what she is as opposed to what he would like her to be. Now we know by the law of Sentient Power that when it moves it always moves to uniqueness. That is, every person is unique and wills to be unique like the Absolute, and every person is perfect. But that person is not a separated, finite, self-dependent entity. It is a modality of the total cosmic function.

And when you don’t project your hidden feminine nature outside yourself onto another woman but you generally observe and start to study that other being and compare that other being which you think is a woman with your own hidden femaleness and note the differences and the similarities, and you have as much care for that external woman as you didn’t have for your internal woman when you threw her out. Now then you have the possibility of a real relationship, a relationship of four beings, a being, male, of initiative and intellection, and female, feeling, compassion and physicality, sensuality, four components are there. Most people, in their relations don’t need four components at all. They deny two of the components in their own being, and then try to manipulate the external being using only two components and therefore failing to contact the hidden two components of the other person. Because inside every woman, as inside a man, there is the opposite pole, inside every woman there is a hidden man. That is to say, inside a woman there is a logic that she won’t use and initiative that she won’t use. Why not?

You know, in Buddhism there is a theory called the Doctrine of the Bodhisattva. Now a Bodhisattva is a being who refuses salvation for himself until everyone else has been saved. Now this also, just like the origin of male-femaleness in the original Sentient Power, so there is this Bodhisattva. That is to say, that if there is only universal power making the universe and there is Infinite Power beyond the universe, pressing in to the universe to pluralize it, animate it, dynamise it, make it unique in all its expressions, in that Bodhisattva we have nothing but the expression of the Absolute Intent and knowledge that there isn’t anything other than itself. If anything is going to be saved, it must be that the Infinite saves itself, because we are only modalities of the Infinite, and if it does not save us, it hasn’t saved itself because we are modalities. If that sea doesn’t calm its waves then the sea is not calm, is it? So, if we are not educated as human beings to become aware of the realities of ultimate Sentient Power and what it can do, if we are not educated to become aware of that and to co-operate with it, we make a mess we make a mess in this very, very cosmos which is precipitated by that power. So, we make God, which is the short name of that Sentient Power, we make God unhappy by mucking about and it is that that required the incarnation into the human being, that Spirit, that consciousness, that intelligence, must descend and must educate the human race to stop it mucking about because until it can behave in that four-fold manner, which is the true reflection of the Absolute’s four aspects, until it can do that, then universal unrest is unavoidable. What we call collective, social anxiety is a minute portion of cosmic anxiety, and what we call cosmic anxiety is just the biggest sphere of Infinite Anxiety, and that anxiety is determined to come down in every one of us and educate us whether we like it or not, because if we are not educated properly in that cosmic principle, we annoy God.

Now some people would think that was a heresy. How can we annoy God? The answer is simple, we can and we do because that same Absolute is all there is and its essential qualities are sentience and power. That means to say, wherever it is in every one of its modalities, it is able to initiate changes, it is able to build; it is able to destroy, so that we actually have the power to disturb the universe. Not only do we have the Americans, going and defecating and urinating on the moon but they will do this throughout infinite space in the future unless they are properly educated. It won’t be a question of just be a case of reclaiming Thames sewage water to make it relatively fit to drink providing you have not drunk decent water in the Lake District. It means that if you wanted to go for your holiday to one of the attendant moons of Saturn, when you got there, you would find somebody had left a blooming potato crisp bag there and spoiled the scenery. Now until we educate people to take their rubbish away with them when they have gone on a picnic, the universe is not really fit to live in, and therefore that Universal Power aims to educate the human race. And for the human race, at this moment of evolution, it requires today, that men shall confess that they are as much woman as they are man and that women, who have always known that they are as much man as they are woman, should start using their initiative and their intelligence instead of tantrums.

Track 10

If we get hold of this clearly, we will find that it is a very, very simple cosmos we live in. But remember, simple does not mean easy, because of inertia. What is inertia? It is the amount of energy put into a behaviour pattern over all the time past. And we have been millions of years evolving and we have made millions and millions of ancestral errors, and those errors are all engraved in our protoplasm as emotive tendencies, fears, hopes, they are all there, and they make it difficult for us to live the simple life that we could live. In the simple life, you can actually afford to tell the truth to anybody. But, could you afford to tell the truth to everybody in business? Could you afford to tell which group of shares you intended to buy, to all your pals, without them jumping and buying them a bit earlier? Don’t you actually find yourself being a little careful about letting out what you call, useful information?

You say you tell the truth but not the whole truth.

You are saying it is the way you have been brought up in a competitive society; you have been trained to tell lies and to varnish them. We know that everybody does it. It is some bit of hard logic. Any capacity that we have got whatever is a derivative of that universal power, isn’t it? We can’t evolve other than that which the power allows us to evolve. Only that which it is potentially, can we become actually. But we are intelligent, are we not? So, it must be, fundamentally, intelligent, and as we are only modalities, it must know our purposes and it has the peculiar power, in the Bible it is called ‘The Curse’, a peculiar power, that when two beings are in a certain kind of relation it can actually bring them closer together by simply removing energy from between them and that creates what is called, a ‘line of least resistance,’ and they then move together and believe that they are following their own inclination, but they have actually been manipulated by the Field for their education. How do you like that? Interesting.

Now the male mind….

It must be the Field that is doing it

The Field has the whip hand, absolutely. If anybody has any other purpose than the Field has, the Field, being eternal and infinite, can afford to let them have it, in both senses of the word. It can let them fulfil their all their purpose and it can say, “Oh by the way, logically implied in that was this.” It does not need to beat anybody up. It does what Jesus says, “It goes in the Way.” And it goes two miles for one. You want to do something, it will let you and it will make a slight incline for you to run down so that you do it rather more thoroughly than you intended, because its sole purpose is the creation of a dialectical being of two opposites, namely sharp focus, so-called masculine, intelligence, wide-eyed and alert and infinite feeling awareness, and both of these, reflexively. Intellective reflexion and emotional reflexion and these to be so interwoven that you cannot separate them out.

Track 11

Can you say something in relation to what you are saying is the essential commitment is to oneself , that is the dialectic in order to not have dependency on others…’

Well I know that sometimes, you know, when you are writing, Bill, and when you are talking to me, you say I mean big S, not little S, yes, and when you said “self” then, were you thinking clearly whether you meant big S or little S.

No, I wasn’t thinking.

Now re-formulate your question and tell me which S you are going to use. Big S is Infinite Sentient Power itself, little S is finite self identified with a finite ego structure. Not the little one.

Not the little one, well in that case you cannot differentiate between yourself and the other person.

Couldn’t you ask that question?.

Not unless you are identified with the ego.

What you tend to do…… when you are writing and when you are talking to me, you say I mean Big S not little s. When you said ‘self’ were you thinking clearly about whether you meant big or little S? Reformulate your question and decide which S you are going to use. Big S is Infinite Sentient Power itself; little s is sentience identified with a finite ego structure. You are not using the little one? Well, in that case, you cannot differentiate between yourself and the other person.

The word individuated, the word ‘individual’ means in a state of dividuation and therefore, necessarily identified with formal structures. And therefore, if you identify with the egotism, you cannot be an individual and identify with your individuality to the exclusion of another individual without being little S, ego-identified.

So that is the duping in the marriage commitment.

No the duping in the marriage commitment is that you had a woman inside you, suppressed, and you saw somebody walking down the road, and you thought, “Good God, there she goes!” and instead of saying, “there I go as I imagine myself.” You see The dupe is that the Field says, “Here is another bloke that needs educating,” in your case he is a Roman that wants his empire knocking to pieces, so show him a Viking, isn’t it? Very clever, and if you identify with capital S you must know that that Viking and that Roman, are in no sense different. They are logical pre-suppositions. Builders of empires, tearers down of empires, they are identical. That is why Heraclitus is called the ‘Obscure,’ the ‘Scottish Thinker.’

I’m not clear about what you are saying about not-different.

Well they are not different, are they not all Sentient Power?

Yes the statement of difference is the differentiation.

When you go for a walk and you lift one leg off the floor to stand on the other one, and then you put that one down and lift the other one up, is there any difference between standing on one leg and standing on the other in order to walk?

Yes.

What’s the difference?

Quite a different feeling.

Is it? Do you know why?

Because your brain is parted down the middle, right? and one hemisphere is concerned with rationality and self-defence, and the other is the free, yes? So it is only because you have been conditioned on the left side to small S that there is a difference. That is an intellectual difference. It is a fabrication, it is not a real difference, it is not an essential difference, it is a fabricated pseudo-difference.

So that really, in existence, existentially there is no reality of reality of reality.

Oh fine, I like that, yes. That is the meaning of there is no God other than God. You can’t have a God that is other than God, you can’t have a Sentient Power that is not Sentient Power and that is absolutely the only real.

What about the difference between transcendence and reincarnation

We had this a bit earlier today. When you say ‘reincarnation,’ technically you mean to go again into a fleshly body,

Did you say incarnation or reincarnation?

Yes you see, the ‘carn’ means your body of flesh. Just translate that will you? Say your sentence again and ask what the difference is with being in a fleshly body and the other.

The word transcendence means you are not manifested

No, with transcendence you are not identified with the fleshly body you are using, but you have one, yes? And the essential off it is this; the fleshly body is a modality of the Sentient Power which is transcendent. There is no difference between transcendence and fleshly body. That is why a good Zen exponent, when he is asked by a student of fifty years study, he says, “Please tell me what ultimate reality is?” and he says, “That banana.”

There is no difference between them?

That is why Heraclitus said you do and do not put your foot in the same river, because the differences are intellectual fabrication where the intellect has abstracted itself from its wholeness in order to do this clever logical trick of ganging up to defeat the predators. Now it is essential, when you say ‘self’ that you remind yourself, which self, at any given second, you are talking about, the finited identified social ego-structure or the Absolute Infinite Sentient Power.

Track 12

There is no difference of race, colour or creed in the Absolute.

We have to own the past differentiated from the ego self as being a part of oneself identified with one’s name as a personally individuated self because we talk about the past withidentification with an individual name.

Yes the, you see, identification is the key. You are given a name as a baby in order to be a convenience to your parents and to society at large, and the things that they say to you, they say by repeating that name over and over and over again so a certain group of socially conditioned ideas become connected with that name, and that’ s your lowest social ego-structure, but your individuality is bigger than that. Say in the psychology of Carl Jung, he would say that you individuality, the psyche, is actually much larger than you ego.

Still not the big S?

Still not the big S, no, because there is no individuality as self-dependent self-originated. Everything is infinite and absolute.

What is the individuated self?

E.H.: Do you mean the identified or the individuated self?

The individuated self

The individuated self is that closed, relative group of experience elements recorded in the bio field, the energy of your body, which is itself, the binding sphere in which your little social ego, centred on your name, is built. If the baby hadn’t got an individuality in the first place, it would not respond when you called it a name.

So it is a mediator between the Supreme Self and the ego?

E.H.: That is very good Chinese philosophy. In China you have three fundamental elements, Heaven, Earth and Man and Man is the mediator between Heaven and Earth. Heaven is Yang, intelligence, light, purposeful, initiative male. Yin is not intelligent, because intelligent, the telos means purposefully directed towards a goal which she is not, she is wide open, so she is not intelligent, and she is dark and she is mysterious and she is not separated out from the collective unconscious of the whole universe.

The same thing as saying only one woman.

E.H.: The same thing as saying only one woman, but you see this polarisation occurs by absolute sanction of that Absolute Sentient Power which is willing the man and the woman, and mysteriously, the woman is in fact the official figure whereby the man becomes himself reflexive.

Are there not weak and strong men?

Are there not weak and strong men? What do mean do you mean physically? Yes, I know some women that can beat a man to pieces.

Woman has the strength whereby when she senses …

Do you mean strong sensuality? No? Do you know there are some women, that through social conditioning are more inhibited than others, but a good fiddler can get the same tune from any old fiddle, even the cheapest plywood. It is only social imposition that creates these apparent differences. You will be surprised what luscious opportunities walk about that men do not know are like that. I knew one very wise old psychiatrist who said, “I make it a rule, when I am given a spinster aged seventy not to alert her to the possibilities because it is a bit late.” Yes, yes, what he meant to say was, in the day, because he was busy and he had a very compassionate heart, that man. He once threw a coin to a welfare worker who was not pretty, in the spirit of Socrates.

Would you like to retire and consider your verdict?