ENERGY

A talk given by Eugene Halliday, transcribed by,

and with arbitrary headings by John Bailey.

The drawings and tables aren’t originals, and all editor’s notes are in square brackets.

A statement was made last week concerning energy, most people not having enough of it to equilibrate their three centres, and having to rob the belly to pay the other two.

What are the further implications of this? Is not energy, by definition, a resultant of food breakdown and therefore freely available to all? Yet people vary tremendously in energy level.

Energy Force and Power

We’ll examine the statement, Is not energy by definition a resultant of food breakdown? but not within the definition of the term energy. Energy, by definition is simply power or force in work. Remember this erg is work. Energy is the in-working affirmation, a force working inside. It does not necessarily signify food or from-food, it signifies that the force is working inside. A force working inside. So that when a force goes round, closes itself and carries on inside, because it is inside, we call it energy.

If we apply power on a point we will call it a force. We will use the word power to signify all energies as forces without considering the particular mode of application. If we consider the power to be applied to a body we will call it a force. All change we will say is the product of the application of a force in some situation. But once the power has gone inside the system and is working within it, we then call it energy. So, it does not follow that energy, by definition, is a resultant of food breakdown, unless we define food in a very peculiar way.

If we like to remember the two aspects of Absolute Power:

1. a causal aspect of it, the initiator of change,

2. and the substantial aspect of it,

although it is the same thing, there is no other substance than power.

When we consider the substantial aspect of it we could call that Absolute food, if we wanted to. We would then mean that to absorb, to assimilate absolutely, would be to take in food from the Absolute level. This will tie up with the later part of the question. So energy just means that the power is to be considered as working within a given finite structure. We can talk about the energy inside the universe. We do not normally talk about absolute energies, because the Absolute has scrubbed out the boundaries and the concept of in and out is not normally applicable at the Absolute level.

Energy from Food

Assume, for a moment, that the energy we get comes from food in the narrow sense, then it is not freely available to all in the same quantities or in the same quality. We know for a fact that many peoples on earth today — say in China and certain places — the amount of food available is very small. They may get a handful of rice and consider themselves well paid to do so for the day’s work. Simultaneously, in another part of the globe, a man might be eating large amounts of steak and a variety of vegetables and so on, and stuffing himself ‘til he feels physically uncomfortable. So that in fact on the earth the same amounts and qualities of food are not available to all people. So even if we took it that energy equals food broken down, yet there is not the same amount or quality of food available.

Now, people vary tremendously in energy levels. We can see immediately, that if we restrict food to the narrow sense, that we would expect it to vary for two reasons. First of all the quantities and qualities of food taken in by different individuals varies, and secondly, the state of their body varies tremendously from person to person, and within any given person from day to day, and even from moment to moment. If somebody upsets you, annoys you, irritates you, they interfere with your digestive processes. [5:26]

Remember our very simple diagram of a man as a tube, with a control factor on the tube, the nervous system. If we put matter into the top end of this tube and let it go down, there are certain processes go on inside the tube. It’s squirted upon with various fluids, acids and so on, broken down and then assimilated through the walls. Now, if you are in a certain state you cannot digest food, you cannot break it down. Digest, you cannot analyse that earth, that’s the di analysis and the ge earth. To digest is to analyse the earth and break it down into its constituent forces.

If you get tremendously upset you find your stomach will contract, and you may over-secrete or under-secrete. And then after a time this may be forced out of the stomach, through your duodenum, along the tube until finally it may be excreted, without having been adequately digested. You know this can occur when a tremendous fright hits a human being or an animal. A tremendous fright can actually cause immediate diarrhoea, in which the whole of the intestine will be emptied, really as an unconscious preparation for flight, without carrying unnecessary loads ... and a very amusing sight it is, too. When it occurs, really the matter taken in there has been broken down prematurely, reduced to a fluid and expelled without taking it to its proper conclusion. So that there again we see that the same person can take a certain amount of food of a certain quality, and yet fail to get out of it what he got out of it under other conditions. [7:38]

So again, the energy level will vary from person to person. It varies every time your mood varies. You know that your feeling, particularly, influences your glandular activities, and this acts directly on centres in the body and alters your metabolism. And this may, in effect, make it quite impossible for you to get what is called the benefit out of your food.

Expenditure of Food Energy

Some people have tremendous appetites and stay thin. Some people don’t eat much at all and cannot reduce weight ... they are obviously getting energy sources, — those who are not reducing the weight — from somewhere and storing then up. Whilst the others who are getting large amounts of food and not putting on weight, are either not getting it out of the food, they are just letting it pass through without breaking it down properly, or if they are breaking it down and getting the energy, they are dispersing it as fast as they get it.

Let’s have a look at the second way of getting rid of it. In a three part being you have urges, you have feelings and you have ideas, and if you’re lucky you have co-ordination. Supposing we break down a given quantity of food, X. It’s gone through the mouth, down the tube into the stomach, and it’s ready. Now, supposing we start energy expenditure. If we like we go and can run round the houses very fast for several hours, and in so doing we’re using up some of the energy. Also if we indulge ourselves in sport like swimming, or even in sexual activities, we get rid of tremendous amounts of energy. We can, if we try hard, get rid of them quicker than we can take them out of the food. In this way we can keep our weight down. So that we would expect a person extroverted and tremendously interested in energy expenditure to keep the body down to its minimum weight, and to have no superfluous fat on it. [9:49]

Supposing a person has a good digestion, and does not waste energy or expend energy faster than he takes it in, it will begin to deposit upon him the layers of tissue and he will get progressively fatter. All this fat can be broken down and re-used in an emergency as energy. In the same way that by muscle expenditure and sexual activities and so on, you can get rid of the energy, you can get rid of energy by emotional displays. You can get rid of energy very quickly by liking and disliking. Strong likes and strong dislikes will cause energy to go out.

You might have noticed the way boy pussycats will lose weight rapidly during the courting season, and you’ll find a similar thing goes on with young lovers in the human order. If the young boy gets his eye on a girl he will probably lose weight. And he is losing it because he is indulging in tremendous bursts of emotionalism. Now remember, energy is the name we use for force involved in a structure, working. But in e-motion we are concerned with out-motion, the E is EX. So emotion means out-motion. And when we are talking about forces and power and so on, we’re talking about motion.

If I wave my hand, I raise its temperature, and in so doing I start warming the atmosphere round it. So I am losing energy, that is power working my hand, by changing its form into radiation through heat. When I’m waving my hand a certain centre in my brain is also going up in temperature. This is quite easily measurable. So that if I am using any part of my body, I am radiating heat from it and that is motion, and I am feeling an out-going tendency. [11:52]

The psychological aspect that we call emotion is merely the corresponding psychic aspect of out-motion of force, which appears as radiation of heat, and so on. This I can do by very violent disliking. Envy can cut fat down very, very quickly. Any kind of emotional outgoing can take this tissue which is the, really, energy level as substance aspect of power.

Likewise when I go into the head, I can expend energy by thinking. If I think very, very hard on one particular subject, I raise the temperature of my brain in that place. As a matter of fact if you think very, very hard about certain things, and with sensitive thermometers on the scalp, you can measure the rise of temperature in the head in the corresponding part where you are doing your thinking. This means you are actually radiating again forces through the thinking process. Anybody who has seen the rate of loss of weight that can occur on a psychopath in a mental hospital, will understand that one of the quickest ways of losing weight is through excessive mental activity.

The funny thing about the mind is this: it can take a little thing like a pain, which to an animal would simply be a pain and that would be the end of it, and it can by reconsidering it and reflecting upon it and adding to it the concept of injustice ... it can magnify this pain beyond all proportion. And it can persuade the whole vehicle to respond to an original pain as if it were a million times bigger than it is, and in so doing to make the whole organism react in an attempt to fly away from this pain, this magnified pain. Tolstoy was aware of this when he said that the animals feel pain but they do not suffer. He meant by do not suffer in the sense that human beings do.

Human beings, with the aid of the concept of injustice, can elevate a little stamp on the toe, an accidental stamp on the toe, into a violent threat against one’s whole existence. You did it on purpose. I know what you are feeling about me, you always have, your mother did. Now this is magnifying the bang on the toe and at the same time using up tissue in the process. And if you have a sufficient number of in-laws to do it on, you can cut down many pounds in one day. This process of ex-moting, sending motion out of the body from the three levels, will cut down quite easily on tissue size. One of the best things to do for, say, a woman who wants to reduce her figure, is to start worrying like mad. Generally, people who get weight on, get it on because they’re not worrying enough. And the precondition for them reducing their weight is to start worrying. Sometimes you can get them to do it by worrying because they are too fat and if you can manage to worry them enough, they go down. But as soon as they’ve gone down, temperamentally they will be satisfied they are down and start putting it on again. So, it is a losing battle.

The third part [of the question] says, As energy can only be a modification of spirit, why cannot unlimited quantity be obtained by conjuring such energies from one’s own centre?

Well, it is why can one not? One can, providing you define which one. In the centre of every being there is an infinite supply. And that is the vibration with the same as the Absolute and it will supply you with infinite energy ... providing you let it. The thing that stops it is quite simple, a contingent relation with another being, focused on, not from the level of the immanent spirit, but from the turba, the turbulating action band of the being.

Now, the more the mind races, the more energy you expend, and the more food you need to replace the tissues you are losing. The mind races when you identify with serial thought processes. So that whatever comes from your centre and tries to express itself, if you immediately inside begin to doubt it and to try to stop it — to distrust it or to think it will get you in trouble with the police or any social institution — as soon as you do that you curl it inside, and instead of it going out and expressing itself, which is opening a door through which more will come, it just goes inside the being and serialises itself in thought processes and then gets very, very hot and radiates and wastes the energy that could have done something. [17:26]

There is actually an infinite supply, and the substantial aspect of that is the Bread of Heaven that you read about in the funny books. There was a wonderful remark by a priest the other night, who was asked, What is the effect of conversion to Christianity suddenly? Does it really modify your life and make you into a new man? And this priest replied, Well, it is said that Christ is the Bread of Heaven, but surely one cannot expect that one loaf will make much difference. I suppose he got ticked over that.

Discovering Something New

This bread, you remember our presentation before, the word read is in it. A house in which you read. If you read, that is if you differentiate your field of energy to its limit, then you are getting that bread. Every day you should know something new. If you are knowing something new you are breaking new ground, you are continuously breaking the bread and celebrating that famous mnemonic device. Not to read something new into your experience every day is not to partake of that br-ead.

There is an infinite power substance. The substantial aspect of that power is called the Bread of Heaven, and Heaven consists in power equilibrated. So it means that every being whatever is in immediate contact with an infinite supply of energy, but in order to get it they must demand it, humorously called, Claiming the Promise. If you don’t actually demand it you, are inhibiting its natural flow.

There is the infinite supply in the middle, it’s coming out. It wants to express itself. It wants to produce something new. Behold I make all things new. And if it makes something new, the moment you see it you become interested, and in that interest you draw from centre more of this energy. And as long as you are interested and reading something new, further energies come, and they will come as long as you can retain your interest. So that really, if you become very interested in a subject matter, even if it’s very, very late at night, you will find that you can go on. Sometimes, surprisingly for a very, very long time and then you wonder in the following morning what it was that kept you awake so long. The fact is that if you are interested and discovering new things you are drawing on the infinite supply of energy.

But if you can’t find something new in which you can interest yourself, then you shut down on this energy because that energy won’t come through unless you open a door. When it says, Behold I stand at the door, and knock. If any man will come in to me I will sup with him ... you must make a demand on it.

This is again the parable of the talents. You have a talent. Your talent may be only one inch big. If you develop it, it will become and inch and a half. You must find an interest, you must find the direction of your process of enlightenment and progressively each day, each hour, find something new. And as long as you find something new, interesting, in the line of your development — better not trivialities, better new principles — you are drawing on that infinite energy.

That’s shortly a reply to the last one.

D — Door

May I ask you about the term ‘limit’ which you applied to the ‘D’ at the end of ‘bread’? You referred to it as ‘limit’. I don’t follow this.

Well remember the origin of our letter D. It’s a half circle. And we take this half of a circle, and when you pronounce the letter D, you actually pronounce it by pressing your tongue firmly against a part of your palate, for the letter D. And it signifies both a limit and a door. In the Hebrew, the daleth itself means a door.

So Christ would pun and say, I am daleth, I am the letter D, I am the door. Because D is the principle of D-vision, vision of D, the analytical possibilities. But, wherever you do analyse, you have divided the total being, and in so doing have discovered a new limit. So that in every analytical process you are discovering limits.

Tools of Analysis

You remember in the Tao Te Ching, it tells you about a butcher who had an axe that remained very, very sharp and the prince was very surprised because he never sharpened it, and it was very, very sharp, and he’d been chopping for twenty years.

The prince says, How do you keep it so sharp without a stone?

And he said, Well I always look for the natural divisions. I use the thin end to cut through the flesh and I feel for the joint. So I never cut through a bone. I always look for the natural division.

Now if you look for the natural division, you are looking for, really, functional division. Let us give an example. Supposing we take a bone, the humerus, and there are a couple of bones down here, the radius and the ulna. Then your hand comes. Now if you get a sharp knife, you can insert the knife in here and you will find some ligatures, tendonous material, and you can cut that quite easily and you can cut round here and then quite suddenly the arm will fall in two. And your knife will not be blunt.

But another way of analysing is just to get a chopper and say, I’ll analyse this bone by chopping through it. And this mode of analysis by chopping through a limb was anciently, practised very, very often. It does tell you something, it tells you cross-sections. I’ve got a nice photograph of a cross-section of a greyhound that was made by freezing a greyhound and then sawing it in two. It actually gives the cross-section of the organs at the level of the saw-cut in perfect shape, so it does give information. That was the method a long time ago.

There’s another method of analysis using a hammer, but it tends to destroy the finer structures within. You can’t really study some of the better functions with a hammer. You may remember that Nietzsche, in philosophy said, I will philosophise with a hammer. And he meant to say that he would smash to fundamental elements the philosophy that had preceded him. He was not going to be dictated to by configurations of thought that had been piled one on top of the other, all of them determined by a concept which to him was essentially erroneous.

Parmenides and Heraclitus

Supposing we take the Parmenidian concept of the universe. According to Parmenides, the universe was a sphere, solid and having no space in it, and therefore incapable of motion, and therefore everything must remain as it is. And it was a finite sphere. It was fabricated by a mind that wanted things to remain exactly as they were.

It was in absolute antithesis to the Heraclitean concept that all is fire, all is dialectical energy, creating forms and dissolving them again — the doctrine of eternal flux. These two concepts were opposite. But the Heraclitean one did not survive socially, because it is anti-social. It isn’t a comfortable idea to think that your most treasured structures are shortly going to be burned, and that it doesn’t matter if they are. So all the security lovers plumbed for the Parmenidean Sphere. But there were also some others fighting against them and these two concepts of the free flux of energy and the static universe of form, fought over the years, and finally Nietzsche got fed up with it and started philosophising with a hammer and he smashed this sphere to bits. He wasn’t trying to preserve anything. And he smashed every concept that he could find in a work called the Umwertung aller Werte, which means whatever it is, say the opposite and you might make sense of it. [26:51]

Now if you smash them all down you come back to a primary fact of a flux of experience which you can call life. He is one of the life philosophers, and he observed that in the human economy the impulse appears as will, and that this will had a very peculiar function because it was a thing that could refute itself and yet remain itself. It was a thing that was power, and that this power formulated itself, this translating thing could turn round, and having turned round and built a form within it, it could then break it up in bits and go on again. And he saw that this Parmenidean sphere and this Heraclitean flux of energy could be asserted simultaneously in the formula, this is life.

Every structure then made was made for a time, for a purpose, and as soon as it had been realised, it was time to smash it up. That it was a product of will, and the will made the form, and then the will smashed it up, because it had seen through its relations internally. In other words, it had exhausted its interest. When the interest was exhausted, it could no longer call upon the Immanent Spirit because it had lost interest. So the message is smash it up and go on again. And this smashing up and going on is transcendence. Now the will is the only thing that can come in freely, bind itself, then smash up its own created bondage, and then transcend itself again.

And he then brought up the concept of life to include the idea of a will that precipitates objects and then breaks them and transcends them. The will is a peculiar kind of Sentient Power which is continuously transcending its own creations. And he saw this as an eternal thing and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence springs out of this. He said, if you make a perfect form, you’ve made merely a geometrical structure and you will understand that you have made it. At some point in time you must exhaust it because it is finite, because it is made. Therefore even though it is perfect, it becomes for you valueless, because you know what is in it. It is not new to you any more. It then becomes time to break it. You break it and release the energy that was in it, and that same energy, that involved will, now evolved, transcends the formula, regains its freedom and courses on.

Translating and Rotating Energy

This requires a readiness never to rest eternally. You can rest temporarily and finitely, but only to get your breath back for another go. Simply we could graph it. There are two ways of moving — the translation and rotation. There is your structure in the rotation, and there is the translation, which is free. That is free and that is domed. Both together are freedom. If you have freedom you have so much free energy and so much domed energy, and the domed energy is what you call your mass inertic body. Mass inertia is force establishing itself by rotating. So a man of freedom is a man who is free and bound, and he is bound freely. It is his free decision to bind himself for a time before he goes out again in another translation. [30:53]

Now how do we line this up with our own diagram of the vibrations of the Absolute as circles? We’ve said we can cover the paper complete with circles, and this completely covered paper would have circles, each one of which was initiated as a ripple from a centre. Now at every centre there is an intersection of ripples and each intersection is the creation of a point of reference. So, we can draw ourselves a little ‘i’ at every section point. Every section point is a little reference which makes an observer. If we like to cover the whole paper with circles and make the intersection points into little observers, we can do. Now when we do this, we can look from inside any given system with a narrow angle of vision, to the limit, and when we do, the force we see is a translation. But, if we get another observer outside the system over here, he still belongs in another circle because of the paper. He, by his angle of vision and his increased distance can accomplish the whole orbit of the ripple system and so for him that is not a translating energy, it is a rotating energy and as such is a body.

Now this solves the problem of the translation of force into matter. It solves the problem of how does force become matter and how does matter become force, by saying they do not.

For if you view from inside the system with a narrow angle of vision, you will think that you are seeing radiating or translating energies. But if you get to a certain distance and look at it you will think you are seeing matter. Thus, if we get a photograph of the Andromeda Nebula in the sky, from our distance we can call it a mass of incandescent gases and so on, but if we were to precipitate ourselves inside it and look at it, you wouldn’t be able to see its edges, and to us it would be a highly complex behaviour of radiating forces. [33:28]

So in the same way, if we want to puzzle somebody, we should get them to take up a position inside the system so that all the forces will be of too wide an arc to be accomplished. And if we want them to understand it, we should get them to go to a sufficient distance so that they can comprehend the object presented. It is all a question of whether we look at it from inside the system or from outside.

Imagine a surgeon with a body on the table in front of him. He looks upon it as an object. He’s got his knives ready, the anaesthetist is there, and he can cut. He can see from outside the system, and because he’s outside he can behave objectively. Meanwhile the anaesthetic has not taken, the anaesthetist has got his foot on the pipe and the poor subject on the table is on the inside of the system and is very, very subjective, not objective. You can see in this, that the way to conquer certain states is by deliberate objectification.

Perfection, Fear and Creation

Let’s have a look at the general concept now, of a very, very old Indian idea which said, Once upon a time god was on in his own and there was none other. And while he was on his own he started to get very anxious, and in this anxiety which he had, he saw a way of conquering the anxiety. He said, I am alone, therefore I must make something for myself¹. Remember this make root again means your substance has to be locked [m = substance; k = lock], which means quite simply you have to rotate some forces, and these forces viewed from an appropriate distance will constitute an object.

It says, God so loved the world, that He gave His Son². Why did God love the world if God, in His infinity, was perfect? Why should he bother to make a world if He was already perfect? Well, the expression, If He was, past tense, already perfect, is really the application of temporal concepts to something that is non-temporal. Factually we’ve never seen an object yet that does not exist inside space, and the space itself, as we’ve said before — like vacuum and emptiness, void — means power considered to be at leisure.

Anxiety and Fear

Imagine this paper to represent the Absolute, and the paper vibrates. It isn’t circulating yet. It’s just vibrating. This is this top level vibration and it is infinitely propagating because it isn’t rotating, and this infinite propagation is like a shimmer or tremor through the Absolute. Now this tremor through the Absolute is primary anxiety. So we will see the meaning of the existentialist position in this ... that anxiety is something we cannot get rid of, we have to accept it. Anxiety is the primary tremor of the Absolute.

Now what to do with it. If we look at people in a pathological state of anxiety, we find that they are always trying to find a cause for this anxiety ... that is they are blaming something for it. And to blame something is to focus, to objectify. Now we say that anxiety is objectless. But fear has an object. The difference between anxiety and fear is simply that anxiety does not define its cause but fear does define its cause as an object. We find that in order to stabilise themselves, people in anxiety states try to find something to blame for their state, and this itself is generally considered, medically, to be a bad thing or a naughtiness on the part of the patient, is really a self defence and a life necessity.

When the Absolute Anxiety experienced itself, it then set up an object to fear. Remember fear and pir are the same word. This pi-rational function, reason itself, is a function of fear, and reason is the same thing as formal awareness. So that fear is the mode of conquering objectless anxiety by setting up an object. And the object set up can then be rationalised.

Now, as soon as you can make an object within your psychic state — which would have been prior to the object anxiety — you have reduced anxiety down to a focal point where it becomes fear, and in the act of becoming fear it has created an object. Now that object can be attacked. It can be attacked by rational processes, it can be attacked by energy and it is a focus for consciousness. Consciousness can stand upon it and attack the object. And when it attacks the object and penetrates into it, as it penetrates into the meaning of the object, it assimilates the object into itself.

Now the object has become food for thought, and every object that has been precipitated by fear out of a previous objectless anxiety — being subject to rational attack and force attack — is a mode of focusing the consciousness and solving the Absolute anxiety by precipitating an object of fear. [39:51]

In the attack on the feared object ... is the process of the world. Every individual is backed by Absolute anxiety, and has objectified some of it as fear, and in this process of objectification has saved itself from absolute annihilation by substituting for the absolute threat of annihilation — anxiety — a particular threat against his physical existence. This allows him to focus on his objective body, to analyse its structure, and at each point where he discovers something new he grows in security.

And you know that the universe is expanding, and the universe, and that the world that God made, He loved, because it constituted an object for Him. And into the universe comes the Absolute Energy through its internal supply, spreads out, pushes against the limiting factor, the rib, and expands the universe. Thus the objective universe is growing at the expense of infinite space. And in so doing an object is presented which enables objectless anxiety to be converted into objective fear, and this fear to constitute reason, and the totality of this reason to constitute the Logos, the Word of the Gospel of John. So God has solved this peculiar problem of Absolute Anxiety by objectifying the world and then inserting His energy inside it, progressively to analyse it, to penetrate it, to understand it, and then to assimilate it. And in so doing, in the act of analysis, He rescues Himself from the objectless anxiety.

Edomite Kingdoms

You remember when we were dealing with an ancient Hebrew myth about the Edomitish kings, we said that before the world was made, there were some kings and they were called Edom, and the particular letter in the Hebrew used here signifies that we are not going to do that. Edom means we are not going to dome, we refuse to objectify. And they made continuous fantastic structures which melted as soon as they were made. And that is fantasy. And in that fantasy is the Absolute Anxiety ... it is chaos.

Objectification

To defeat this Absolute anxiety, this substratum of the being itself, we compress it down, drive it into a centre and make it into an object, and then rationalise it and then proceed to assimilate the meaning of it. And it then has become the original one meat ball that was made — the me-at, the objectified observer — and in the creation of this objective world was the possibility of self-understanding for the Absolute.

Remember the Absolute Power translating infinitely could never reflect upon itself. Reflection implies turning back. And turning, here, creates an object. So, in the act of turning upon itself, again Nietzsche points this fact out when he says, behold every spirit and power strives to turn back on itself to catch itself, because in so doing it becomes objective, and in becoming objective it becomes clear and sees what it is, and penetrating through its form, in its vision, it conquers the undefinable.

Remember what we said about human beings magnifying pains and by a process of self-pity, envy and a variety of other deadlies thrown in, it manages to reflect pain over and over and over again until it grows beyond all proportions and may destroy the objective state of the being. If we confine ourself to objective fact — that does not mean gross material fact only, it means to any clearly definable fact — in the act of that clear definition we transcend it.

Remember that when the will comes in and makes a zone of activity and binds it and works within it, when it has finished working within it so that it’s carved a part — D-vided, seen the differences within — when it has finished that, that is the consummation of days and that particular sphere has fulfilled its purpose. The being has now gained reflexive self-conscious objective awareness. Remember the oriental saying that the supreme object is the same for all sages, because the supreme object they see is the same object.

The Will, Knowing Itself

What they are seeing is the will, which has turned in, created a sphere of being — domed itself — and then gone inside its own being and carved its own being into little bits, and in making it into those little bits it has chambered itself. In my Father’s house there are many mansions, and in each chamber it has a particular function.

When all the functions are analysed out it then knows itself, and when it knows itself totally then its work is finished. It has gained an objective reference, and this objective reference frees it from the objectless anxiety of the infinite. And yet this object itself which has been created is food, precipitated by the eater. The riddle of Samson, Out of the eater, that is, the Absolute itself, came forth the meat³” -ball, the objective world. Then the energy penetrates into the meat-ball and divides it up and then assimilates it and then disperses it again, and disperses it into the eater. And it has now assimilated the meaning of objectification. Now it knows how to conquer fear and anxiety, namely by objectification. Once it has completed the objectifying process and then dissolved the object actively instead of negatively, it then stands not in the object but in its own will. [47:10]

And this is what Nietzsche was doing. If you know that you can make and break objects eternally, instead of being dependent on the object you become dependent on yourself, your essence will. This essential Will can make and break objects eternally. The object itself is only the Will objectifying itself and there is nothing in the object to stand upon other than the Will behaving objectively. So it is the Will upon which y

If we now look at the three part man again, we will see that we start off with the field — we’ll centre that in the heart — and this field splits into three functions, one of them specialises in the retention of the field awareness, the other one mobilises the field and becomes volition, the other one rises and becomes idea. Now the idea is simply the objectified will but the will centre is the energy that refuses to objectify itself because it want to push around the objects. It’s free energy left over for pushing about the objects that it is going to make. [48:30]

The whole field awareness of this being then, includes the awareness that it is a field of power, that this power can concentrate within itself on centres, and that it can, when concentrating, either initiate changes — go in new directions — or it can compress itself into forms, which it retains. Once it understands this threefold process in itself and sees it as a field behaviour, knowing that the field is infinite, the individual can identify himself with the Absolute ... with the paper. And then, all motions of the paper are felt coming through the centre of the field of this being and they are taken in, assimilated and pushed to the perimeter, and the being expands in authority and so on.

Is the field energy transformed for use in the different centres or is it the same energy that is used by the thinking process and the urgeful process?

It’s the same energy using the word same in its proper significance. This same — you could read that as a German word if you like — same means seed, it means the source. It means spiritual activity substantialising the field ... that is the non-different source of all. So it is the same and yet it is different. Although it has got one source, it d-fferentiates itself. It does different things in different places and it does it simply by setting up a series of resistances. [50:46]

Supposing we set up two walls in the bath at a two feet distance. We drop a pebble in the bath here and the ripples go out in both directions and hit the walls and then return to centre. They take a certain length of time and they travel a certain distance, so they have a wave length and a frequency.

Now supposing we put these barriers a little nearer so that when the pebble is dropped, the wave goes out and hits the barriers and returns in only half the time. Now the wave length is half as long as it was, and the frequency is twice what it was. It is the same energy, yet it is functioning differently because we have set up different systems of barriers.

So, in the same way, inside the head, where we have a lot of barriers specially set up for a certain purpose, we can knock up the frequency and at the same time decrease the wavelength, but it’s the same energy. Now according to the number of barriers we set up inside, so we alter the frequency of the wavelength and the function ... which is always, fundamentally the same thing. It is always spirit activating itself, substantiating itself within that field. [52:10]

Are those barriers under our control at all?

Existentialist Philosophy

That is a matter of individual development. Some people can control parts of them; some people can turn tears on at will, without an emotion to go with them. Some people can demonstrate all kinds of different functions of the body at will. This is always a matter of individual development. We might assimilate modern existentialist philosophy here while we are on this point of whether it can be done or not. The problem in existentialist philosophy is stated shortly in this way. Does the essence precede the existence or does the existence precede the essence?

If your essence precedes your existence, your character is eternally fixed. You start fixed.

B

When we draw our diagram of the overlapping circles we will prove that both of these propositions are true and that modern existentialism, like every other philosophy, is not the last word ... it’s just a particular word that has been neglected before.

It has been stated for a long time that there is control and that these little circles inside here had better do as they are told; that that particular circle, the big circle which binds the others is just a circle initiated from a centre, here, and each one of these is just as valid a centre, as centre, as the big one. And further, if it increases its beat per second —which it can do because it is in the Absolute substance and is not other than it — then it can make its own ripples spread out like this, and embrace the one that was trying to embrace itself. But this depends on individual effort, and individual effort is a possibility.

Now when these circles are drawn — we find this diagram over the Vatican chairs very often you know — there’s a circle round it to keep them in order, and this is already the imposition of a concept of power and control by some individuals for their own ends. They are pretending that a collectivity has a will of its own, and that this collectivity is not the will of individuals pushing other individuals about, but that the collectivity is a genuine entity with authority over the individuals within that collectivity.

It is against this that existentialism kicks. The Church and some other power organisations have pretended that the individual has no significance except within the collective, and that the collective, in the fascist statement, is a genuine entity in its own right, with authority and power to force the individual to obey. [55:42]

Centrality

Now if you look at this diagram, we find that the circle that we have drawn round it has not actually got a centre in the middle, but it was a circle that we arbitrarily drew round three others. I put a dot in this one down here to show that it might pretend that it had a centre, but there wasn’t really a centre, but the centre itself is a creation of these three, or these six that we make, which in their overlappings and their apparent coincidence at the perimeters reflect motions that they have initiated, back to a centre. They create a centre by their collective individual behaviour. But the centre has no authority over the individuals other than the authority vested in the centre by the individuals. So there’s no authority in a pope, or an archbishop or a scientific dictator of the coming century, other than that vested in him by the belief of the individuals within the society of which he is a part. No dictator of a religious, philosophical or a scientific order has any power or authority in himself over the others, other than that which he can wield by duping them into coming off centre themselves.

Now, centrality is the essential part of the definition of an individual self. If we haven’t got a centre we could not initiate, and if we could not initiate we could not set up a representative. But if we do set up a representative — like a gentleman that could talk persuasively and nonsensically, like Churchill during the war, we will fight in the bathroom, or whatever it was — if we do set up such a man, his power is no more than the power we will him to have because each one of us wants to win. And the moment the situation has disappeared, evaporated — the tension situation, the threat — then as individuals we don’t need him. At that moment we start thinking about something else, and at that moment his apparent power dissipates. He tries valiantly, by much writing and broadcasting and popping, to remind us of the debt, but there is no debt and he knows it. He was created by the need under threat of many, many, many individuals ... and he jumped on the bandwagon of the moment. [58:30]

If we recognise then, that every circle in infinity, in the Absolute, is valid to itself, it exists before it has stressed within itself any particular character. Now if we say by this essence we mean its characteristic differentiating form — that by which know it to be different from others — then we could say that if we want to posit a temporal order — and this is arbitrary — we say, here is a given individual and he is the same as another individual in eternity. So they exist but they are not distinguishable. They are all circles interacting, intersecting. You can’t tell one from another. If I cut these three out and then turn the paper round you can make any one of them top at will by rotating the paper. They’re all circles and that is all there is to it.

But in the time process, this existent will get itself an essential character in the impact of the contingent relation. And this essential character is being created after its existence is formed. This is the existentialist position.

So that any one of these circles, if it has the energy to do so, like Kierkegaard had, it can rail against the Danish church. It can rail against the misrepresentation of Christian pure individualism, the right of the individual to be central to himself. If that existent being has gained the essential reflexive power, then it can rail against any forms that try to dominate it. It can rail against social structures, philosophical concepts, religious ideas and so on ... simply because it has the power to do so. And this power it has gained by continuously calling upon its inner resources.

So the growth of centrality is the same thing as the growth of the awareness of the infinite supply ... the infinite spirit within. To become aware of one’s centrality is to become superior to the contingent stimulus. We take no notice of the stimulus if we know that we too can initiate stimuli. Somebody is trying to knock us off centre with the hidden persuaders penetrating our substance, and we are replying to the hidden persuaders by analysis. They present us with an object, we analyse it and turn it into food. They are trying to turn us into food.

Egoism and Egotism

Now we’ve said before there is a difference between egoism and egotism. It isn’t often defined clearly in a dictionary but some do. If we put the T in it, it means that the being is crucified in the concept of the ego. But if we take the T out, it is simply a statement that the ego exists as a central being in its own right.

Now let’s look at the conatus concept. We call the belly-urge department, technically, conation because of the Latin, conatus, according to how posh you want to be. Now it means a striving of a being to be itself: so that there is nothing in a being other than his conatus ... whatever it is striving to be, that it is. And it is nothing other than its striving to be. So whatever it is peculiarly is no more than its peculiar way of striving to be. This resides in the belly.

When Spinoza examined this term he decided to define it as this striving of a thing to be what it is and he was then led, quite philologically correctly, to the belief that a thing is no more than its own conation. If you have the conatus to think, then you think. If you have it to feel, you feel. If you have it to push blindly forward then you push blindly forward. So whatever you use your drive for, you will become that thing. There is no being other than the will to be and there’s no specialised being other than the will to specialise. And this conatus is identical with the striving in an individual to be individual. So it is the same as the individual will to be itself.

Now, because this is an essential characteristic of the Absolute, it is absolutely justified for every being to strive to be itself. And therefore when we find two beings striving to be themselves, part of their striving to be themselves is transcending the level they are already at, and this attempt to transcend their present level frequently results in a contingent stimulus.

Now, again, we must not be abstract. At the existential level, either of these stimulating the other, either of them can react in a way determined by itself. Though it is centrally established, it remembers the rule; somebody is trying to stop my development. Some body is trying to stop my development. But I’m not a body, I am an internal spirit, I am the immanence, I am the infinite supply, so I am not going to be stopped, I am expanding.

Now when he does this, he could drive the other being out of existence if the other being hadn’t got his control concept. And this driving the other being out of existence is very, very naughty ... using the word naughty technically. It brings the other being to naught, and this is very irreligious. It is very unkind and because of this tendency of a developing being to ride another being out of existence, then egoism as a philosophy got into disrepute and was called egotism.

Now because this egotism got into disrepute, the word self got into disrepute and to talk about selfishness, to say that a person is selfish, is a terrible thing these days. And yet — as one philosopher pointed out — if you have moral indignation, you have to be a self to have it. So there can’t be something fundamentally wrong with the self.

We can expand on the gross material level by smashing other gross bodies out of existence.

We can expand emotionally by not allowing another person to express his emotions.

We can expand rationally by crushing another man’s ideas to the ground.

It’s quite easy to do it by superior force, either physical force, emotional blackmail or superior logic. But it isn’t nice and it is fundamentally stupid for this reason. When a being is trying to develop, it cannot understand itself unless it can find a resistance. If it doesn’t get a return force striking against its expanding perimeter it cannot reverberate inside itself, and this reverberation is the object it contemplates.

Every being, in order to develop, must exist inside an environment. And this environment is simply other beings trying to do the same. If any given being, under the belief that he was pursuing power, had sufficient power and cunning to destroy all other beings and did so, at the moment of his success he would have defeated himself, because immediately he would have reached the term of his development. Because he cannot develop further in the absence of the external opposition. For this reason and for no other, purely as a political utilitarianism, it is very stupid to eliminate the rest of the beings in the universe.

Sportsmanship

Therefore when we come to test ourselves physically, we should test ourselves against an opponent — this is the ground of sportsmanship — in such a way that we don’t completely destroy him. There’s something stupid in a boxing match if a man already beaten, and through his conatus, his primary striving, is carrying on fighting with both eyes closed, and he is just asking for a brain haemorrhage. If the referee doesn’t stop the fight, people get vexed ... except one or two ladies in the audience. But the fight should be stopped, because once the point has been proved, it is stupid to go on further and destroy unnecessarily the objective resistance needed to prove yourself.

In exactly the same way, in an emotional conflict, as soon as you have shown yourself emotionally slightly better than the other person, there’s no necessity to go on and do the whole of Shakespeare.

In the same way, in the matter of logic, once the point is gained you can afford to drop it immediately. Whereas inertia tells you physically to bash the man out of existence, to emote all over the place so there is no room for him, and once you have gained the logical victory to write it down in your notebook and keep sending it to him for a Christmas card every year. [1:08:54]

Remember, we cannot develop except in the presence of other beings and these beings are an absolute necessity of our next stage. If we allow this then all enmity disappears.

Love Your Enemies

Let us look at Christ’s words in the light of this. He says, Love your enemies⁴. It sounds mad. If you think your enemies are trying to eliminate you, you are not wrong. But that’s because they are ignorant, they don’t understand that you are necessary to their objectification. They are a bit confused. But if you understand that they are absolutely necessary for your development you can afford to love them because they are the means, and the only means, whereby you can become what you are. There is no other way.

Once you understand that other people in opposition, other people opposing you are feeding you, they are your din-din every time they damn-damn you, every time they judge you, every time they state anything about you at all; they are doing you a favour. They are working for you. You should be paying them in hard cash, really.

And if you know that fact, and you realise you are not paying them to criticise you, they are doing it free, so then you should be very, very grateful to them and this gratitude going out embraces them and says, Don’t go away my dear critics, you are feeding my life.

Now as soon as you can do this in internal feeling, the whole quality of the relation changes. The enemy doesn’t know what to do with you. You are not taking it rightly, you are not sufficiently disturbed, you are not perturbed enough. Why aren’t you? There’s something wrong. Now this does a favour to the enemy, it makes the enemy reconsider the nature of the stimulus he sent out. And after all we don’t want the same stimulus sending out all the time because that wouldn’t develop us. We want a new one, and we can provoke a new one by taking the one that we have got in the appropriate manner.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ End ~~~~~~~~~~~~