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EVERY SPIRIT SEEKS A BODY
The text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval Audio 45.
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1Now this static thing, this sort of cellular paper, and if we don’t move it, it isn’t disturbing in any way. And what we are going to talk about tonight is under the heading, every spirit seeks a body and by a strange coincidence this particular diagram appeared ready-made. I was going to draw it actually and then I came in and found it. It saved me an awful lot of time. When this is still you can easily see that it is a lot of more or less, carelessly drawn circles and they are easy to assimilate because they are still. You look at it and you look at it and you look at it, you focus on different places and you come to a conclusion, it is the same all over. It represents the totality of geometry in ultimate reality. So, before there is any manifestation at all of the temporal order, this diagram is a very good representation of what it is like in what the physicists would call maximum entropy, the in-winding of all powers until they no longer manifest and what, in Indian Philosophy is called Pralaya, and in this Pralaya everything is in perfect equilibrium, everything is in its place and nothing is happening.
Now, supposing I just move this thing a little bit, like this, you immediately find that the eye has a problem of accommodating to the motion. Supposing this motion is accelerated and made a bit wider like this. What is the effect on the mind in trying to accommodate these little circles? Is it slightly confusing? Is it uncomfortable?
It makes me sick.
Good, a lady on the front row has been made sick already. And that is only the beginning. Now Ghreta is very good at accommodating things like this. She knows exactly the right thing to say, so let us think about this. Every Spirit Seeks a Body is a very old oral tradition. It is saying something about the nature of ultimate reality, about the nature of Godhead, about the nature of Spirit. It is saying that Spirit, which is an eternal, unavoidable, inevitable, necessary fact of being, cannot avoid its own self. It is sentient and it is power. When we say S we mean Sentience. When we say P we mean Power. When we say S we mean the subject, when we see P we will see the predicate. When you are doing your elementary grammar you will find you have to learn a subject and a predicate. The subject is what you are talking about, the predicate is what you are saying about it. Predicate means pira, dice, dicare, say something rationally. Predicate, to say something rational about a subject. S is the subject. The subject is pure sentience. P is the predicate, which is pure power.
When this power operates, it predicates, that is, it rationally formulates itself. Dicare, this word, means, take the C out and put a K which is an archaic form of the same thing, this dicare is from dike, dik and that means, I’ll inhibit it, I was going to say something not funny, a reference to a lady who is in our presence, dike (dice) means divide and fasten, divide and lock. So when you say dicare, you are actually, in the act of speaking dividing total reality and separating into categories in the act of formulating, and therefore, by the mere fact that you take an Absolute Continuum, ultimate reality, this Absolute Continuum is the All in All and there is nothing other than this continuum, and the best thing to say about it is nothing. But if you say nothing, most people in the time process miss the something that you might have said and they say, “Say something,” hence dicare. You speak, in the process you divide the ultimate reality by the words that you speak because the words have conceptual significance. They cut the mind into conceptual groups. So when we say dice (dikay) that means to rot, doesn’t it? This is not an accident, decay, (dice) to rot, to corrupt. Now you all know Lord Acton’s statement about power, “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As the Governor of the Bank of England, he knew perfectly well, that in the ground there was a lot of metal ore. This ore, taken out of the ground, processed in a certain way, cut into little bits, dice, (dikay) divided, locked in a mould is called coinage. By imparting significance to these bits of metal, men were persuaded to abandon an ox for a piece of metal with an ox stamped on it. This is a very important swap. They will beat their ploughshares into men if the men do not avoid the attack. The essential thing about coinage is that it is coinering. You all know your bowery, and to be in a coiner is to be jammed where you would rather not be, frustrated. Coinage places you in a very peculiar position. It gives you a tally stick, which allows you to look at a sign saying bull or cow or chicken.
If you go to Ireland for your holidays you will find all the money is stamped with something you can eat, from a horse to a shark, and when you look at it you can say, taking it out of your pocket, “I own a horse. I can’t ride on the coin, well not comfortably, but I can ride on a horse. And this represents as horse, therefore if I keep hold of it I’ve got a potential ride.” This is a very important thing.
Now all the little circles here represent coins and they are the product of dice, that is corruption of the continuum of ultimate reality. The ultimate reality we will call the Godhead, the source of the concept of God. Now, very intelligent people, who have thought very, very hard for many thousands of years about God, have defined God as a necessary hypothesis for keeping order. It is a very good definition. Without the concept of good, God is Good is an equation, you would not be able to keep order.
In the continuum there are vibrations and they are quite simple. There are only two motions possible. Think very carefully, the continuum is infinitely extended, therefore it cannot go anywhere. Imagine that, throughout Infinite Space, there is power but this power cannot go anywhere because it is already there. There is no ‘where’ where it is already not. Therefore it cannot move, hence, Aristotle, borrowing some initiatory doctrine that he got in the Eleusinian Mysteries said really we should call Him a Motionless Mover. He is Motionless and yet, somehow, mysteriously, there is movement. Now what kind of movement is there in this motionless Infinite Continuum S P, sentience and power, subject and predicate? The only motions possible are these two. It can contract and it can expand locally. It can’t do this infinitely, it is already there. What it can do is press onto centres and relax and press and relax, and press and relax. It cannot do anything else. And yet, out of these two basic motions, contractions and expansion all the motions of the time process, no matter how complicated, are derived.
Now let the circles here represent the peripheries of expansions and the centre in any given circle is the limit of contraction possibility. If I were to go over this and clutter it with dots, a dot in each circle, I would have represented what in yoga is called Akasha, the Infinite Ether. That is an AKASHA. This means Absolute lock leakage, absolute lock distribution. There is the Infinite Absolute. This Infinite Absolute contracts locally on points, it can’t do this with itself, infinitely, it can only do it finitely and when it does this it produces primary spheres like this. Each one of these little circles represents a sphere. Actually in the piece of material they are not on a flat plane, they are actually little globules with air in them which is very convenient.
The black thing is a portion of my dinner. How it got there I do not know because it has not been upstairs. It is not black it is red, the shadow is black.
Now inside each of these little circles, actually, on this, which has a definite thickness, you can feel the blobs. I could do the old magicians trick about this and say, “Can I have a volunteer? Will the lady on the first row, not too inconveniently, feel a blob for me? Is it a blob?
Yes.
You sir, is it a blob? Can you feel a blob, are there really blobs? Well, what I say three times is right. I have got three witnesses, that is one more than I need in Jewish Law, - apart from myself. You remember, Christ did a dirty trick on that because he said two witnesses establish something and I am one and God is the other. Quite useful that in argument. They are actually players, Donald. Actually, Donald had this made for me by a special process. It wasn’t found on the floor at all until it was put there deliberately to be found, and that is part of the mysteries of the universe, that everything that is posited is put there on purpose to be found, and I found it after having arranged for it to be deposited. In fact, the putting there was the founding of it.
Now we are going back. Inside each of these little cells there is a certain amount of air. Air is the symbol of intellect and of Spirit. The Latin Spiritus means air and air came to mean Spirit, which is amusing. The Greek equivalent, where it meant Spirit came to mean air. How that happened the scholars don’t know. What was originally Spirit came to mean mere air that you breathe. What was originally air that you breathe, came to mean Spirit. Why was that? Because some empirical experimenters got hold of some rather dull-witted men and laced their lips together and then bunged their noses up and said to them, “Can you think well without air?” They didn’t reply and, after some time, they no longer had chest heavings, so the experimenters had them removed and a fresh set brought in. This time they only laced part of the lips and this allowed them to reply, “It was difficult!” These were given a medal because they survived! You can actually give post mortem medals as well, which is a quite useful thing. A lot of the living ones worked very hard and dropped dead for a post mortem medal!
When we see these globules we are seeing a diagram of a peculiar process we will call encapsulation. Sometimes, medically they call it encystation. That sounds a bit filthy to me so I prefer encapsulation. A cist is a sort of little hole in something. The word kist is the same word, and that is a respectable northern word for the place where your grandmother used to keep her linen. The grandmother incidentally is an archetypal image in Jungian psychology for the original substance of all being and the universe itself is the supreme grandmother’s cist.
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one of these little zones can be considered to be a little cyst but
we are going to call it a zone of encapsulation because it is
captured by a simple process, contraction of this Sentient Power
locally. Remember the only reason it does this is because it cannot
cease to be what it is, it is infinitely extended so it cannot go
anywhere infinitely so it can do this trick of contracting finitely.
Now, first of all, it does this tentatively. That is it holds it
gently to see where it is worth doing and it produces a pattern like
this very carefully and this is the first movement impression. It is
not an expression because there is no outside of the Infinite. It is
the first impression. This impression takes place throughout infinite
space and it feels then that it has inside it, lots and lots of zones
of encapsulation. Now we can borrow a word and we can call them if we
like, ones or unities or monads is a very common word for it. Those
of you who have studied well, and there must be most of you I think,
Leibnitz’s Monadology, will recognise that the monad is nothing but
a zone of encapsulation and it is from this simple in- pression, the
pressing inwards throughout infinite space, that these monads are
produced. Now every human psyche is such a monad and has its origin
in this original Sentient Power and it cannot be destroyed, it cannot
be removed, it is there as an infinite eternal fact and its zone of
encapsulation has an infinite impression intent upon it. So that,
every human psyche has actually got infinite support round it holding
it in eternal being.
This means you can never cease to be what you are, absolutely. This is why you never need to fear the death of your physical body because that is not important any way, except locally and temporarily. The ultimate fact is that you are a zone of encapsulation. Now, having made all these zones, tentatively, just holding them in, gently, then, God tries a little trick. He tries to press in locally in one zone (like this) and leave another zone alone, and then He presses in a bit more in the other zone and leaves that alone and he keeps going like this. When He does this, there is an apparent, only apparent, movement from one point to another. If I squeeze the paper here and then I squeeze it here, if I do this very rapidly with an invisible hand, like the Infinite Sentient Power is, your mind will start rocking from side to side and there would arise in the mind an idea that a thing had moved from A to B and B to A, an oscillation would have been brought into being. If I were to squeeze the paper here and then here and then here and then here and then here with an invisible hand, which I haven’t got with me at the moment, if I did this, there would then appear to be a linear progression of a zone of contraction travelling through space. Now, such linear progressions of zones of compression are what you call physical bodies moving about. Your physical body and the body of your car, moving about is nothing but a linearly translating zone of compression and, in fact, the continuum has not changed its place.
You know that the waves on the ocean appear to be travelling along but they are not. The molecules of water in any zone are simply rising and falling in a cyclic movement, first in this zone, then in this zone, then in this. You get the appearance of a wave but, in fact, that wave is an illusion. It is simply caused by the timing of the uplift of the water in place one, its down fall, the uplift in place two, down fall, uplift in place three and so on. It is timing that gives rise to the concept of linear motion and change of position. And this is why, in Indian philosophy, you have the statement that all things of time and space are illusory. The word for illusion there is Maya, M A Y A. Now the base Ma means to measure and ya means to affirm. So maya means to affirm a measurement. We could say this is just a static pattern and we will say nothing more about it, and then we are not in trouble. But, if I say I will now try starting to find out the relation between this point, this point, this point and this point, I import into the diagram something from myself from my consciousness which I called a relation. I will try to find the relation between this and this. Where did I get the idea of relation from? Certainly not from the diagram, it is from my own intent to make a relation.
When a girl falls in love with a man or a man with a girl, or even an old lady with a boy, or a boy with a horse or whatever, there is an intent to make a relation and this relation is not in the situation, it is in the consciousness of the person. There are no relations in the whole of ultimate reality other than those imported into the situation by sentience positing them, S P, sentience posits the relation. Sentience defines and says I will find a relation. There isn’t one there but it will find one by the simple process of making one. So that, when two people look at each other and say, “Aha, we are in relation,” that is nothing but their will to relate and as long as that will to relate remains, they are in relation. Later on when one may think there is no relation. That means that person has stopped willing this fictitious thing called relation. Sometimes a person has willed a relation, A has willed a relation with B, B has willed it with A, at a certain crucial point, A, because B means a being and A means Absoluteness, decides that this relation is too meagre so A will stop looking for relation. B may then complain, “Now there is no relation. You are not relating to me any more.” A may reply, “There is no relation.” He does not say, “Oh, I have stopped positing the concept of relation with you,” he usually says, “there is no relation.” If he were strictly truthful he would say, “I have stopped positing relation.” For whatever fundamental deep motivations of the will, this relation exists only when it is posited by the Sentient Power.
Now we saw, this static thing is not confusing. If this were extended through Infinite Space, wherever you looked you found it still, you would not be puzzled by it. But if we go like this with it and start fiddling about with it we can cause some amount of difficulty in following the scansion of it and this can cause mental confusion. That is all that actually happens in confusion states in the mind and is a major cause of anxiety, the inability to detect the still pattern underlying the apparent linear activities of events.
So here we have the representation, an infinite number of zones of encapsulation, each zone is a monad, a one being divided from other beings, it is only divided by the function of the compression, nothing else. When you focus you divide yourself from the environment. If you know you do this that is quite alright, if you don’t know it and you believe that this division is a real division in itself apart from your will to make it so then you will have fallen. This is the Fall. The Fall in the Bible, the Fall in all major religions means no more than the attribution to one of those zones of encapsulation of a self-existence so that it becomes dissociated from the rest of the infinite total reality.
So let us remember that diagram. It represents the Infinite Sentient Power with an infinity of sentient points posited by the sentience within itself and each one of these is a monad or individuated being, which, at certain stages of involution, in-pressing, become recognisable as human psyches.
We will take that diagram away and we will try
another one. How about that one? Now if I say to you t
hat
is a static picture, and I have another one here exactly the same,
also static and I put that one on top, now there is a static pattern.
These are called moiré patterns, from the Virgin Moira. It is a
better pronunciation than the anglicised version, Mary, actually, it
is rather more archaic and phonetically more accurate because in
using an O in it we have suggested a sphere of encapsulation.
Now you see what happens if I move one static picture over another
like this, there is apparent movement. Is that movement real or is it
a construct in your mind? Is it difficult to accomplish it? Do you
all really see motion or do you think you do? I think most of you
will admit, assuming you are awake, sometimes people go to sleep,
that there is an appearance of motion and yet I will ask again.
Madam, would you mind...? Is the pattern, sir, moving? Is it a still
picture or is it a secret movie?
No it is a still picture.
It is a still picture. It is a very simple thing, sleight of hand.
There is another one and this is rather simpler to deal with. It is quite simple, you can analyse that one immediately. It is lines radiating from a centre or lines from a periphery driving in towards the centre. Observe that. You can please yourself whether you swear by Almighty God this is lines drawn from a centre outwards or from a periphery inwards! I have another one here, the same. All close your eyes please. No cheating. Ann you are cheating. Close your eyes. Keep your eyes closed a moment because I don’t want to upset you with this. I am trying, keep your eyes closed, to make them congruent. Can’t quite do it but it will do. Open your eyes now. Can you see apparent shading there, can you see a pair of kidneys lying on either side of a spine? More or less, yes? Now, both of these diagrams are identical, and if I just move one of them as if I were making a local zone tremble, that is contract-expand alternately, slight oscillation and I go like this, look, do you see the spider in the web there? Now where has that pattern come from?
Intersection.
Mmm, intersection, or from the intersection or from your interpretation?
Interpretation of the intersection.
Interpretation of what? Intersection. There is a sheet of perspex here and a sheet here. They are not intersecting are they? It is superimposition. It isn’t intersection, it was an interpretation that it was intersection and it isn’t intersection at all. It is superimposition.
Now when you talk about intersect, as you define it, don’t you mean don’t you mean that forces or lines actually come into contact with each other?
Yes.
One is going north/south the other east/west and that they go through this central point. This you call intersection. If they don’t you call it a near miss. This is superimposition but John said intersection because in his profession he has to know about mathematics and electronics and all kinds of things therefore he has recognised a diagram of intersections on one of the functions of superimposed moiré patterns. But he said intersections and it isn’t. It is super-imposition and misinterpretation.
Now, what is this movement. You see, I am not moving this top sheet in any sense in a circular way. I am putting a finger on it and pushing it straight across like that. As I am pushing it across, what is happening to the pattern?
It bends.
It is not producing a sensation as if something was being pushed across. In the direction in which I am pushing it, it is exfoliating a pattern, apparently and it has produced a new form here, this sort of crossy form and that does not exist, and we can make that one apparently move round. This is another illusion. Now supposing we go like this and I ask you to follow it. Keep count now. Every time it goes round shout, one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight. What is happening? It is a bit difficult to keep up with isn’t it?
Supposing I get another one that we had before, which is a different pattern and I put that one on as well. Now that is quite complicated. It is a rather subtle process but if I were to move, assistance from gentleman in the audience or lady, volunteer lady, we’ll have the lady as well. Now, we will have three vibratory movements. I will perform one, Ghreta the other and Fred the other. Will you please move that one Fred and you, and, you wiggle that one and I will do the other. First I will take this off. There are two, move at random, go rather slower so that the unfortunate mind of man, untrained, can see that there are actually patterns appearing and disappearing. Now while that is going on I will put this one on. Can you see a spiralline movement appearing in the middle? Almost a vortex going down. Now imagine this process is very interesting. We are going to define this.
Ultimate Reality is not made of parts. We call it a continuum because it is partless. You cannot separate it in any way. All discrete particles are an illusion and the reality is a continuum. Now, a continuum has all its qualities throughout itself in every way, absolutely so that whatever we can affirm in one zone of a continuum we must affirm in all zones, and for convenience, we have three pieces here of transparent material with static patterns on, and they represent…
By keeping yourself still?
Yes.
Oh yes, it is a very good practice actually.
It is only because we chase it.
It is only because you chase it that you get confused. If you actually sit still and let it do its jump, at a certain critical point you suddenly see that there is nothing there, that the motion sense vanishes. All you can see is some fool idiotically manipulating static patterns. They suddenly become static and this is the same thing as spiritual release from time-space problems. You suddenly see the thing is of no moment. Moment means ‘point of orientation.’ You don’t orientate towards it, you stand still, then there is no problem.
A continuum has its qualities throughout itself absolutely. Here is a plane representing a plane of the continuum, the other two are planes of the continuum and, whatever I can assert of this one, I must assert of the other two and of an infinity of these throughout infinite space. So, if this one can make itself oscillate, contract-expand, vibrate so can the other two, and, there is nothing over-riding. This is the most important concept in the whole of Yoga and all major religions. There is nothing over-riding the continuum. There is no Big Boss beyond the continuum. The Godhead is one aspect of it. The God is already a definition within the continuum, a hypothesis assumed in order to function in certain ways, but this hypothesis is a reality in the consciousness of the person positing the hypothesis. This is tremendously important. There is no over-riding control above the continuum. The continuum is the only control, and, any plane in the continuum can do what any other plane can do, therefore, one of these (Ghreta your assistance, please) would you move that plane for me: when Ghreta is moving that and there are patterns appearing up there which are entirely illusory, we have a demonstration of the arbitrary movement of a plane of the continuum, a plane or level of the continuum. It is moving itself. She arbitrarily stopped you see. The continuum has no over-riding control over Ghreta. If I were to try to hypnotise Ghreta and say you have a profound duty to keep this thing moving, and I managed to convince her that she had, I would be a finite over-riding control over a finite zone of ignorance, but she stopped again without my saying so, which evidences to me this proposition. Within the continuum, any zone of the continuum can do what it will. It can interpret what is said, it does not have to believe what is said, it can make it a convenience to pretend to believe or to believe for whatever purpose of its own it had. So I didn’t even need to ask her then. She sensitively understood that another plane of the same continuum, namely myself, was about to demonstrate something therefore she moved to participate, I do the same here and now, as we are going like this, we, without prior rehearsal, No rehearsal Ghreta?
No, none.
Cross your heart.
Cross my heart, no rehearsal.
No rehearsal?
No rehearsal.
Cut your throat and hope to die?
In due course.
In due course, right, now without prior consultation as to the mode of movement, Ghreta and I are arbitrarily moving our planes of being and there is therefore appearing an unpredictable, incalculable result, a pattern. And this is a product of two entirely arbitrary wills represented by two separate pieces of thin Perspex. Yes? So, here we are producing a very pretty pattern spontaneously and immediately, we don’t need to rehearse, we don’t need to bring ourselves into conformity, whatever we do in the spirit of immediacy will produce something interesting, and, providing there are no egotistic persons that think that we ought to manipulate them in a certain way according to their will, then we are alright and it can be enjoyed. Now, if there are any persons that think that we ought not to do this, then they are egotistically and arbitrary, in their will, to interfere with our, entirely arbitrary function of funny pattern making.
Now this is tremendously important because it is the basis of the freedom of the spirit. It means every human psyche is a self-encapsulated zone of free spirit. It means that every human being is fundamentally, essentially, sensory free. It does not matter who he is, what he is, he is fundamentally free and he is entirely arbitrary in his choice. Whatever he brings up from the centre of his being is purely arbitrary. Right, we will now try to remember the title of what we are talking about. Ghreta what are we talking about? What is the title of our talk?
Spirits and bodies.
Spirits and bodies, every spirit seeks a body. Now let us see why this is true. More assistance, arbitrarily given please, Brenda. You didn’t complain when I called you Brenda!
No, it is rather interesting.
Why was that?
I don’t know.
I will tell you why, because the heat of this thing has warmed you up.
Yes.
Oh, really.
Yes, that is a hint to the boys. Now the reason why every spirit seeks a body is this, because, in this world of arbitrary fiddlings about, these monads find that they are constantly being interfered with, you see. Let me see now, will you try to make a pattern that looks like a spider please? That is not bad is it? Now, supposing that is your will to make such a pattern. But, I am an interfering busybody and the one thing I don’t like is any body succeeding in anything.
It is a damn good spider.
Yes, so I go like this.
My spider is still there, it’s underneath.
I say it is not, I deny it.
No, I can see it.
You can see it, you know why? If I bring a newborn baby in and say, “Is that a spider?” it will go, “Goo,” you see, because the baby is interested in goo, not spiders. You are seeing the spider arbitrarily and on purpose.
Yes.
To gain your point.
Yes, but you put that on top to gain your point.
To gain my point, exactly. Now this is the reality of human relationship.
Yes.
Each monad has a determination to make a certain pattern. Do you know, I can even allow you to see your spider if I centre this a bit.
I don’t think it would matter where you put it, it would still be there.
I wonder, I’ll bring a friend of mine in.
It is still there.
Still there, is it? Very interesting, very interesting. This illustrates exactly what we mean by suggestion. You see most human beings dislike profoundly earwigs, snakes, spiders, all manner of creepy crawly things because human beings have nine orifices which they think are their own and other creatures are not yet convinced and these humans are determined that nothing shall get in without permission. Therefore they are scared of spiders, snakes.
But I am not.
Bet you.
No I am not.
I bet I can prove it.
All right.
How much money have you got in the bank?
All right, it will do.
It will have to.
Are you quite sure that you can win?
Am I quite sure that I can win? Yes.
And I can’t frighten you with a spider?
No and you can’t frighten me with a spider, not even a beautiful tarantula. Whatever it is called
If you fulfil the conditions of the test I give you with the spider.
O.k. yes.
Are you sure?
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes. Do you mind giving a public demonstration?
I positively don’t dislike spiders. I like them.
Yes, but supposing I say to fulfil the conditions of the bet you must first denude yourself,
Yes.
Is that all right?
I suppose ........... That is not quite fair, ......but that is a female statement.
That is a male statement.
That does not prove anything.
Women don’t believe in rationality and fairness anyway.
No, well.
You meant it was a dirty feminine trick.
I don’t see the connection between being nude and being afraid of spiders.
That is the next step. I will then conjure, from your archaic, archetypal reactions to spiders long ago, and especially tarantulas.
Yes, they are nice and long and hairy.
(Sings) They are nice and long and hairy. Did you write that or did I remember it from another world? I won’t steal your money. Actually I know very well I can do it.
With a spider, even in private.
Do you know I really doubt that.
Oh, O.K. We will settle this bet on another occasion.
I want it in cash not a bouncing cheque.
I’m not sure whether I not making myself into a prostitute? Right, now can you see any spiders on that diagram?
No.
Sure? If I put another diagram identical on top of it, can you guess what it will do?
Make circles.
Will it make circles? Any guesses?
Monsters?
Well I put that on there, yes?
Become three dimensional
Now supposing I rotate it a little bit like this.
Starfishes. Sunflower petals.
You couldn’t really guess that could you? Not unless you had fiddled about a bit, secretly beforehand. It would be difficult and yet somebody wondered whether a spider might appear that was a psychological trick wasn’t it, really, to get a straight-line pattern that doesn’t look like spiders and then look as if a spider might appear? And then somebody says maybe he has got a spider there, and we are not quite sure about this pattern. Right? There is that tendency in the mind. The cause of that is that we have been through many universes and had many horrible experiences so fundamentally; we trust nothing, which is a very good thing.
Yes.
The reason for that is that there are comedians in the world who go about saying strange things. So when we have two planes or two levels or two monads of the Infinite Sentient Power and they are arbitrary, we have no guarantee whatever of the resultant pattern of their interplay because of the arbitrariness of their own motions. This is of tremendous significance, because if you wish to be free, and everybody does wish to be free, even though they are rather lazy about the pursuit of the freedom, because they doubt its ultimate possibility, yet, freedom is an essential of Sentient Power. And therefore every being really wishes to be free and because of that it is necessary to remember that pure arbitrariness is inside every sentient being. So that, whatever is being said to you is put to you fundamentally arbitrarily for your fundamentally arbitrary consideration or rejection. What I am saying is arbitrary. What I am saying is for your consideration. It may be for you to refuse it; it may be for you to consider it. Which ever you do, you are fundamentally doing it arbitrarily because you are moving towards the freedom you once had and threw away. And the reason you threw it away was because you had a pattern.
Now we have used this expression before, you have inside you a preferred response pattern from before time, from your eternal monadic self, a preferred response pattern, and whenever you go into action you try to precipitate a pattern of events. You were about to say something.
Yes. You said, “Before you came into time you had a preferred pattern.” How did you get a preferred pattern?
Back to stage one. The preferred pattern is there.
Pre - ferred means rationally born(e). Now ratio is nothing but tura, that means encapsulation, rotation, circumscription. Those little things there, allow you, with your sentience, to group them, by looking at them, without moving them you can look at them and you can decide to see them in threes or in straight lines going this way, or straight lines going that way and you can build deliberately by counting. Look at one and you will count the six round it, yes?
Yes, yep.
So there is a pattern there,
Yes, oh yes.
And you select a pattern with consciousness before time begins. Time is when it starts to move, like this.
Nothing, this is entirely arbitrary. John the Baptist says of Christ, “This is He who, coming after me in the time process, was preferred before me in eternity.” That means, if you look at this in a certain way, you will see Jesus Christ and if look at it in another way you will see John the Baptist, or Adolf Hitler, or Mao Tse Tung or Zammenhof, or anybody else you care to name. They are all there in a pattern because, if we were to super stress some of these, make them a little more intense, we could draw, in particle form, that is, dot patterns, like stippling, any form of any being that could come into the time process, and it is the sentience that sees this and has inside itself, an arbitrary will, which is peculiarly its own. What it sees there, it seizes, like this, and in that moment it has committed itself. Now every self-will, every encapsulated sentient power, has a peculiar characteristic, and that is, when it wills something, it doesn’t like to let go of its own will. You may have noticed this if you are arguing with somebody and they lose the argument, they turn it round so that what you are saying, they meant.
Yes.
This is a very important thing, because they cannot afford to lose their own preferred response pattern. This is of tremendous importance. So, pre-ferred in eternity. Each monad in eternity, and remember they are all there and they are all going like this, tentatively, wondering whether to condense and they are feeling, “What pattern is worthy of my condensation?” and the one that they decide on is their number one preferred response and is their fundamental characteristic and because they have started from there they will be stuck with this original choice throughout all time.
Yes, “They shall not go out until they have paid the uttermost far-thing,” you have got to go right on to the end of the line because of this profound monadic intent to be proved right in your original preferred response declaration, yes? That is why human beings find it extraordinarily difficult to give up, even manifestly, demonstratedly inefficient activities.
And already, if they are sure enough to see this in themselves, can’t they stand back from the lot and say I’m not kidding myself?
Within the infinite possibility, there must be some of those, but we know that in the time process on earth they are very, very rare. And we know in dealing with human beings there are very, very few people who even contemplate the idea of not being right in the chosen way. The ability to not be right is very, very important. This week’s deliberate mistake. Any Muslim carpet-maker, makes a deliberate mistake in his carpet. He does this on purpose because of two reasons. The exoteric, told to the populace is this; they put a deliberate mistake in the carpet because God might get mad at us if we did it right. He is the only perfect and the Lord thy God is a jealous God. You make a flawless carpet, He will get mad and stamp His black feet on it, because you know God has a black aspect as well as a white aspect and He will put His black feet on your new, white, perfectly- designed carpet. Therefore, put a little error in and God will go “Humph humph, just a mortal and won’t jump on it. That is the exoteric reason. The internal reason is this and it is entirely magical. You make a mistake to put the other fellow off-guard. See?
To get out?
To put the other fellow off-guard, see?
And he can get out...
Track 9
Gene, will you say something here about the difficulties in relationships when arbitrary wills individuate themselves?
Well, individuated will is also arbitrary but it is a will to individuate is arbitrary and the individuated level is quite alright provided you don’t identify with it to the level of forgetting that you are entirely arbitrary. When you commit yourself to and individuated declaration of purpose, if you put a lot of energy into it, you can actually forget that that purpose is designed by you and get a funny idea that this purpose is not designed by you but is what is called a true, good, beautiful, correct, spiritually highest, it is ethical, it is moral, it is all sorts of things, except this, arbitrary.
Now you said, to get out, and that is rather amusing. It depends how you are thinking about it. If you think about it carefully, get out of what? Get out of the identification? Yes? That is all right. But, if you are out of the identification, you are back in this pattern again aren’t you? Are you going to keep still?
In and out simultaneously.
Now, if you do it the other way you have already solved that problem. You made the deliberate mistake to avoid annoying other people who would otherwise kill you for being perfect, you see. That is very, very important. People who are trying to impose their arbitrary patterns of being whether it is individual, family, tribal, social, national, etcetera, if they are trying to establish and the arbitrariness of other beings stops them doing it, they become very annoyed and they have packets of energy in them which they cannot control. These are colossal volumes of energy round them in the field and they are in suspense, waiting to come in and smash anybody who does a perfect act, because this is a tremendous condemnation. If a person comes in and acts perfectly without error, it produces tremendous rage. This is the meaning of the sign of the Goat, of Capricorn and the birth of the Christ and the birth of Buddha and so on, the birth of Zarathustra. As soon as anybody looks like approximating to perfection, out come the hatchets because any one of those points might have thought of that good idea, just didn’t, and that is very, very important. You might have thought of that brilliant idea. Who thought of the idea of deliberately annoying lots and lots and lots of rabbis and folk and getting them to nail you on a wooden cross, so that you left a permanent engram in the human race? So that after two thousand years of argument, they still cannot get rid of the idea of it, who thought of that? Gautama didn’t, he thought of walking about until he had a bellyache at eighty and died talking about conquering desire for existence. That is not quite as good an idea is it? Do you think so? Do you think it is a good idea to go about telling people the world is an illusion; it is a good thing to get out of it? The way you get out of it is simple; give up wanting to be in it. That is simple. Now to spend your life, and at eighty die of a bellyache, why? If you are going to have a bellyache at eighty, why not get crucified at thirty-three, .. ....with a bigger bang and a more permanent mark? Because, obviously Gautama was trying to make a mark and he made a less mark in eighty years than another fellow made in thirty-three. Now Lao Tse, chose of course, to become the chief librarian to the Emperor and read all the books of wisdom and précis them and produce a handbook, the Tao Te Ching, nice little book, very nice, but has it had the same impact on the world. Is it as permanent and deeply biological incarnate as the crucifixion idea? No it isn’t. Now, if you can think of a better idea than self-crucifixion, if you really can, don’t tell anybody what it is, do it, but make an error somewhere.
Now He made an error, a deliberate error on the cross, didn’t he, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” That is nice, that lets some out. That has caused a lot of paper to be covered with a lot of ink marks by scholars. What did he mean with this mistake, was it deliberate? Robert Graves says, “Ho, its deliberate.” Some other fellows say, “Yes he was quoting from the Old Testament.” Some say, “No he wasn’t he was just plain scared at that moment and didn’t know.” All this is arbitrary, and I would say of that little thing, that the reason he said that was because he hated not to be able to do mistakes that other people do automatically. He felt estranged, alienated, from mistake-makers and at the last minute he thought, “Gosh! I have not made a mistake. What on earth, or in Heaven, can I do?” and He intuited this brilliant thing, and He made his mistake and He died happily then. Having done that, He commended His spirit to God and left. Please yourself what you do with the explanation. He could have been a Muslim, you know. Nobody is quite sure of His ancestry.
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
“Yes.”
“O.K. you go on centre.” Aid him to go on the centre. Anybody who is not on centre, put them on centre, yes? That will, at least, annoy the others. And keep it moving, won’t it?
Now in the world there are two groups of men who are governing the world by agreement. One has agreed to put everybody on centre and the other has agreed to take everybody off centre. These are two groups. The group that puts people on centre are called the Right Hand Path. They are good. And the ones that take them off centre are called Left Hand Path and they are bad. There is a great mystery in that one. If you see somebody on centre, if they really believe that they are the one, only true centre of reality, it is your plain duty, as an arbitrary definition-maker of duties, to move them, and if you don’t, you are allowing them to continue in this error. But, if you don’t, somebody else will. So, do you need to bother? The positive way of opting out is to say, “Well, if I don’t knock him off centre, some other crass idiot will. It is only a matter of time, so I don’t need to do that. What I will do is watch the goldfish in the pond, the dicky-birdies in the air.” That is Lao Tse, you see? Or, “I will go about teaching them an impossible thing, like give up the worm that dieth not.” And you will land in a place called Nirvana, which is totally undefinable, and when you get there you will be so glad, but don’t define it. That is another way. And then the really awkward way say, “Crucify yourself, be really smart.” If you want to make a permanent mark on total reality, fixate yourself so that you don’t move, you are well and truly nailed up. If you manage to keep still in this tremulous oscillating universe, do you know what happens? They will all become aware that somebody is not oscillating.
Somebody is in the middle.
Somebody is in the middle. Every time you stand still you are a centre for the non-standstillers. Now this is an elementary, psychological and spiritual fact. If you keep still, and relative to the movers, you are a still centre. Now, Every Spirit Seeks A Body. In a world of entirely arbitrary activities, at the level of pure spirit the arbitrariness of all of them is immediate. That is very important. Immediate arbitrariness, so that as soon as you try to make a spider pattern somebody takes the pattern away. And they are so damn quick at it. So then arose a problem, one of them thought, “Well all this arbitrariness and freedom is very, very nice but nobody can get anything done, permanently. How can we see what one man would make if he were not interfered with by all these other clever fellows. How about a system of closure, self-encapsulation so dense, that nobody can interfere with it immediately? They will have to interfere with it mediately, through other techniques.” Now this is the precipitation of your physical body. Your physical body is precipitated from this by condensing like this, folding up lots and lots of possibilities, yes? It is possible that that might open itself out slowly. That process of opening out you call evolution, growth, yes? But each zone of the Infinite Eternal has done that. They are all in and remember, a continuum is the same throughout itself so there as many zones of encapsulation in any soul as there are in any other soul
So, that when I put that down and say that represents each person here self-encapsulated and held in, he has seized, he has grabbed. In the German, in the beginning, in the Bible it says, “Am anfangen,” fangen, to catch, to grab, the beginning is grab, yes? In the English we say, “In the beginning,” that means in the house of a woman. Well if that isn’t a free translation of “grab” I don’t know what is. You see I could have won that bet couldn’t I? I could have won that bet.
No.
Oh! Do you know I can provoke you to double that bet as your assurance increases.
You can double it but it won’t be there, not if it is cash you are after!
You have to have your cash with you when you come for the bet and it has to be put where I can see it and you are going to be at the other side of the room.
Alright.
Track 11.
This is any monad with the totality of possibilities identical with any other monad and entirely arbitrary in what he does, he precipitates himself, like that. That is under the sign of Saturn, urn of being and this Saturn is full of seeds of potentialities, of possibilities, of ideas of emotions of wills, and you put it on the plane of existence in the time-space and then, you let go of it to let it exfoliate in the isolation of time and it does that. And this compressed energy and these possibilities exfoliate themselves and nothing appears except that which was locked in it. Now, this one is growing a little slower than the other one, why was that?
It is almost like an embryo.
It is almost like an embryo, it is almost like a Japanese Samurai on his knees, about to commit harikiri, or anything else you care to mention. It is a three-dimensional Rorschach test projected in two dimensions. The reason it is a bit slower now is because I hold it very tight in my hot hands, partly because it was thinking about the money I am going to get later, and I have altered the molecular relation a bit.
Rocked it a bit.
Yes, arbitrary turning over of the beast. It may be static, maybe it has got no capacity to exfoliate now and might lie dormant for a thousand universes and then, a change of temperature, it might spring up. There is no telling, in an arbitrary universe whether anybody is going to be saved or not saved. This is why any mass religious conversion without individual self-perception, is nonsense. If anybody could have converted the world then the Messiah could have converted the world. Only He didn’t. Even in the local village, which He knew quite well, he did no marvellous works and marvelled at their unbelief. Did He say He couldn’t do any marvellous works or He did none? This is a matter of scholarship. He marvelled at their unbelief and their belief was necessary to the marvellous work. They were entirely arbitrary.
So here we have a situation. The reason you are in a physical body is because your original preferred response pattern was continuously interfered with, spontaneously and immediately by other monads at the spiritual level that had their preferred response patterns that they included you in. Your preferred response may involve you having your crown or a mortarboard, according to choice. Whatever it is you prefer, you are, by the act of self-definition, disqualifying another person who has already seen you and decided what to do with you. Remember Socrates, “If we had no hewers of wood and drawers of water we would not have time to think philosophically.” That means those who wanted to think philosophically defined some other beings as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and by superior definitional power, persuaded those other beings into doing so. For the beings that took that, without fighting back had actually thought to themselves, if we do that we don’t need to rack our brains and in between drawing the wood and chopping the water we will chase the maidens. They had some arbitrary reason for allowing themselves to be subjected.
This was some risk outlook?
Mm, mm? Read Henry the Fifth’s little discourse to the soldiers complaining to know what he thought about their complaints. They are there because they have put themselves there by what they have done.
Track 12.
Therefore, Every Spirit Seeks a Body means this. You have an eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent omnipresent Self, but this self has preferred a certain response pattern and this pattern would have been interfered with by every other spiritual monad and you therefore decided to lock yourself up, to get into a body, so that you could actually get on with your little finite preference, sheltered from the others. And then, the dialectic, and when you get into the time process where you have precipitated yourself, strangely, the same idea has occurred to a lot of others. So they are now all sheltered and they have their inner preferred responses on the inside of their consciousness hidden in their skulls, and they are all telling lies like mad to divert each other from interfering with their preferred response patterns. But then in abandoning spontaneous declaration of aim they have done something else. In precipitating their gross material body they haven’t escaped interference as such, but only interference of a certain order that is, immediate spontaneous spiritual interference, and they have replaced it with gross material, ordinary every day, thump and black eye interference. The same thing is going on in the depths of every person, there is a preferred response pattern, it is carefully concealed. When it says Adam, after the Fall, with his dear spouse, aware of their guilt, ‘they sewed themselves skins.’ That meant they veiled their purposes. This skin, this integument, is a method of hiding my spontaneous spiritual intent to create a certain kind of universe. And in so doing, making myself opaque to you I have made myself within thumping range of you at the gross material level. Therefore, all the human beings go about looking for signs in the gross body of intent, and manipulating material events digging ditches for people to fall in, making walls to keep people out. All this is done by interpretation of signs in the physical body. So the situation has not changed. It has merely altered the tempo and the density. In the physical body people are denser than they are in the spiritual body and they are slower and a lot of them have forgotten how to interpret the physical signs of the preferred response so they get confused. But those who are aware of what has really happened, say what is the technique, the method of remembering our preferred response of regaining our immediacy so that by our immediacy in the realm of no immediacy, that is, time, we can deserve the title conferred upon us by the Lord of Trickery, Lord Jesus Christ. “Be ye quick in the land of the dead, ” yes? Simple, hoi necroi, the dead, that means those dead from the neck up, that means those in routine mental processes, who are not even in their physical bodies properly, they live in fantasy. If you are in your physical body, you are called cato that is, a fixed being. You have got a reference you know where you are. You are driving the car if your hand goes on her knee it is yours not somebody in the passenger seat. You know your own body, therefore you are a fixed being, but the necroi, the deads they don’t even know that, they live in fantasies not in their body. So the first thing to do is really get into your body and become aware what your body is, and then use that body as a centre of reference, make a permanent centre of reference, this is the meaning of the incarnation, and then with this permanent reference centre, regain, this is called the Birth from Above the Second Birth, regain your original immediacy whilst you have still got your physical body. And then you will be in the land of the deads and the slow and you will be able to realise your preferred response in the midst of all those other beings who are still identified with temporal, linear processes of trying to get their own way.