Eugene Halliday

God and the Devil

At no point in Christian history has this view, namely the view of the identity, absolutely, of God and the Devil, been seriously propounded or gained even limited acceptance, and this despite the earnest thinking of many great minds. This view has not been seriously propounded. The reason for it not being seriously propounded is simply because it is unfit for publication . So we will have to define what ‘public’ is, to see why we cannot publish it. Obviously you are not the public tonight, otherwise we wouldn’t be discussing it.

We might as well write it down - and that might be considered a correct way of spelling the word ‘public’.

And you know that this particular part refers to the rude end of the body and this l-i-c root is the same as the l-i-k-e root and simply means “to lick”. Now, this is the rude end of the body, and that is the licking of that rude end, the liking of that rude end, and the public, therefore, means that body of beings whose favourite occupation concentrates whatever energies they have down in the nether regions.

The reason that certain subjects cannot be openly and plainly stated to the public is simply because if they are stated, the public will assume that they already understand it because of their basic function being precisely this energy functioning in a polar manner already in themselves at that level. That is to say, they will imagine that a straight line entering a circle is what they are in fact already engaged in. And therefore they do not need to evolve because they are already fully proficient in this activity.

You can study the symbology of the great religions in every country and you will find, as one Liverpool doctor once discovered and wrote, I think, four volumes about it, that there is nothing in any religion other than phallic symbology. And that was as far as he went: he saw phallic symbology just like Freud did. Freud saw only phallic symbology, and by the phallus he simply meant a gross material member appended to the male. He did not think of the power behind it as in any sense an intelligent and spiritual power, because he was born in the 19^th century and was therefore materialistic and therefore for him phallic symbology meant simply the symbols pointing in the direction of certain physical organic structures.

Now in fact the real meaning of the straight line is an initiative force, a fertilising force, fructifying force and so on. And the real meaning of the circle is not the physical receptive organ of a female but is any zone whatever that can be entered by another force; meaning to say, a zone of low pressure in relation to a translating force of higher pressure. Now, this is not materialistic and is not at all like Freud. But it is like the basic secret teaching, sacred teaching, sacral teaching of the churches of all times.

Let’s just consider for a moment: The paper represents power. That creates white paper and therefore it can represent light as a principle of consciousness. and equilibrated light, the equable light of the mystics, the one you find in the Tibetan Book of the Dead referred to as the “clear light”. This is symbolised by the white paper. Now, this light is power. That it is light means it is aware. That it is power means it is able to induce action in itself; it can undulate, it is self-undulating power. The fact that it can undulate means to say that it has in itself creativity. It is a power - you can make power as a simile of cause, if you like - cause, causus, to strike.

When the paper waves, when it does so, if I initiate a wave at the top, it travels down the paper. That is because the paper is a continuum. In the same way as the seamless garment of Christ, the power of the Absolute is not made of discreet parts. It is a continuous power and therefore it is impossible to move any part of it without moving all of it. Therefore, to act on one is to act on all. This power then, from the point of initiation to any other point, may be considered to have gradients. A point of initiation, the paper can vibrate itself in any place, but wherever it does so, there is the centre of an undulation which spreads out just like the ripples on a pond when you drop a pebble.

The power is most intense at the centre only because there are other centres also doing exactly the same thing. If there were only one centre, this seamless power would respond to the centre of initiation by reproducing that ripple perfectly from itself throughout infinity. It would not diminish in any way. So, if there is a diminishing of power, and we see that there is so when we examine gravity, which we find decreases as we go further away from the earth, we find there is a diminishing, we can only account for this diminishing as we move away from the centre by the fact that there are other centres also broadcasting. And the waves initiated from given centres are able to interfere with each other. This has to do with periodicity, wavelength and so on.

From the centre of initiation, that is the point of will, to any other centre from which a wave has been generated, there is a gradient of power. The initiating centre we can consider, for analytical reasons, to send up a ray at the spoke of a wheel. We put several and take one for consideration. One of these spokes of the wheel which is an out-speaking of the force from the centre, travels through space and impinges on a ripple from another centre. Either this ray has power to penetrate that circular ripple or not. If it has the power to penetrate it, it is then, relative to that zone, male. If it has not the power to penetrate it, it is not male to it. If it were exactly equal to it, it would simply fail to penetrate and it would constitute another being equivalent to it of the female order. By the female we mean the receiving, by the male we mean the initiating and penetrating.

Now, this is not a matter of physical bodies. This is Freud’s error, and it is a Nineteenth century error based on the beliefs that material particles are themselves real, self-existing entities in space. It is not a theory any longer, there are no material entities self-existing. Every material particle is simply the modality of a centre of power. The centre of a field.

Insofar as we consider a force to go forth from a centre and to penetrate into a demarked zone, we are talking about the energies called male and the substances called female. Now observe that the difference between the energy entering and the substance is not a matter of an absolute difference of type or quality, it is a difference only of the amount of force vested in the two.

There is a certain amount of energy generated in a certain centre. There is another amount of energy generated from another centre, one of the radial lines, we will take out and let it penetrate.

Now, the amount of energy in the one place, insofar as it is penetrated, is considered to be a substance from the point of view of the penetrating energy. But the receiving zone does not consider that it has received a substance from the penetrating energy, but it considers it has received a force, that is an applied power. So there is no difference, absolutely, between substance and power. Any zone whatever that receives a force is viewed from the point of view of that force as a substance, because it presents a resistance. The only way you know that you are substantial is because of the resistance. If you cross your legs, you feel one leg on the other, and you feel the resistance of the two legs. This resistance is the sole evidence you have that you are a substantial being. And this resistance is the same thing as inertia. It depends on the rotation of the force.

So whenever there is a zone of rotating force, it can present a resistance to another force trying to invade it.

So the only difference then between a male and a female is that one is specialising in resisting and the other one is specialising in trying to penetrate. There is no other difference.

Now, you find in the Bible that there is God, man and woman. And the Devil - down there. And there is a direction recommended for action and consideration in their relations. And there is another direction not recommended. We’ll see why. God is the head of Man, and Man is the head of Woman. If we go back to Genesis we find that it was the Devil that gave a stimulus to the woman, the woman gave a stimulus to Man, and Man then turned back into the earth and away from God.

Now in this plain diagram it isn’t very obvious what is meant. But if we remember that Man is the initiating force and Woman the substantial force, the Devil is any dividing stimulus, and the Earth is any external contingent body we can re-draw the diagram. God is the plain paper, that is not drawn on. That’s the great white chief, the macro-prosopus .with the big white head not to be confused with Alfred North Whitehead, who can talk in a similar manner to divinity. We won’t draw on the white paper, but we will draw a zone circulating and this is Woman. And in the centre here there is a place from which comes out a force, and it goes to the perimeter. Now, right in the centre is the immanent spirit. And that immanent spirit is sending its energy out to conquer the surrounding substantial zone. Remember, substantial does not mean material, it simply means rotating power offering a resistance to a translating force.

From the centre of immanent spirit arises energy, travels out and proceeds to formulate. It enters into the substance round about, and it conquers that substance to a certain limit. And insofar as it is conquered, it is called Man. But insofar as its influence is diminishing as it goes to the perimeter because of the external stimulus, it is called Woman.

So we have the God in the middle, the immanent spirit, then surrounding that God is Man, and surrounding that the substantial most gross aspect, Woman.

In terms of Yoga philosophy, the immanent spirit will be causal, the Man would be subtle form, and the Woman would be gross form.

Now outside is another body, material body, which simply means, not matter but a zone of force offering a resistance and able to give a stimulus. This body we will call the Earth. And the stimulus coming from it we will call the Devil. Because quite simply, Devil means a divider.

Any force coming to a being, enabled by its entering that being to proceed to calve the being into bits like energy, acts as a Devil on that being. Schizophrenia is a typical example of a devil-ridden mentality, it’s death, and the devil in the case of a schizophrenic is very simple - here is hell the father and then the mother, they did not agree. And he has gone to school and had a series of teachers, they didn’t agree, and then he had a lot of friends and they didn’t agree, and he’s been to the pictures and that didn’t agree, and then he’s watched TV and that definitely didn’t agree, and so on. Now, this fellow is zoned all over with the records of his stimuli received. And because these stimuli are in no sense harmonized, they literally calve the substance into separate zones, and thus the man becomes schizonphrenic.

So we find that type of disease increases more and more, the more men become civilised and the more they become subject to external stimulation without having the principles inside themselves to protect themselves against it.

Now let’s linger on the […] situation again: The immanent spirit which is God, the conquered zone, which is Man, the contested zone which is Woman, the external body which presents the stimulus - this is the earth - and this is the Devil, the stimulus.

Now, the Bible says, the order should go: God, Man,Woman. Meaning to say that the immanent spirit which is the paper itself undrawn on - remember the rotating force cannot go to the dead centre, so it has to leave an empty zone in the middle, but there is an action-band round it. This immanent spirit is pouring itself out to counter-balance any external stimuli and to free all the surrounding substance from the dominion of any external stimuli.

If, therefore, the Man is oriented inwardly, that is he goes to his initiative centre of spirit, the immanent spirit in himself, his pure Is-ness, his Being, if he goes to there, then he will find the energy and the formal content to enable him to combat the external stimulus situation. But if instead of turning to that immanent centre he turns into the woman in himself, that is, to his external substance, his physical body, and particularly to the parts forward and down, in so doing he exposes himself to the contingent relation with other bodies, and the stimuli coming from those bodies vibrate in the substance more and more intensely as his will feeds them, and thus they crowd the zone inside which would be men. So that Man becomes progessively made female by extraverting himself and becoming subject to the external stimulus situation.

Now let’s have a look very carefully at the nature of this contingent stimulus situation.

Both of these circles are the product of the energies of infinity coming in, so they are both created by God. The paper has vibrated, the lines are drawn upon the paper they are simply possible modes of the motion of the paper. The infinite equable light has turned itself in and mde a finite being called a soul.

Spirit which is absolute is called soul when it makes itself solo, i-solates itself. It can do this in any number of times, but in the act of doing this it makes possible and inevitable, contingent stimulation.

So although God, that is the white paper that is Spirit, although he has created all these beings, and has created no evil, nor can he do, yet in the fact of creating them as existential beings, he has brought to be the possibility of external contact between the finite beings.

Now this external contact is the possibility of the stimulus which will obscure the message that comes from the immanent spirit. So the external stimulus situation plays the devil and creates all the evil that there is in the universe. If we remove these things from each other so that there is no contingent stimulation, then the pure creative energies of spirit carry themselves into operation.

Now, supposing God had made a very special method, which he could have done, of maintaining resistances between beings in such a way that they could never come into contact with each other. This could have been done, it could have been done by a mode of swirling.

Sometimes you throw up a bunch of matchsticks onto a stream and you see them dashing round and round, just missing each other, they are being carried by the swirling of the water. So if you made two streams in the water in this manner and if you put a match here, you can run round and go to a centre, another match here, run round and go to the centre, the two matches will not strike each other. So it is conceivable that a world of perfect beings could be created, which beings would never come into contingent relation and would therefore never be knocked off centre by an external stimulus.

Now, as this was a possibility, why did God allow contingent stimuli to come to be, considering from the contingent stimuli all the evils that people complain about have arisen?

The answer is perfectly simple: God is infinite and omnipotent and omniscient.

He knows all things, He is everywhere, and He has all power. There can be no deficiency in Him. And this means that there is nothing undone in God. If we say that God has not done something, we must say that God is deficient. And no theologian would say that God is deficient in any way.

And consequently we have to observe this fact: That the vibrations of this paper must include in their patterns - I’ll just draw the ripples of the paper, as they can be in their intersections - whatever way they go, these vibrations must include all possible shapes, all possible modes of behaviour which require only superstress to make them existential. If we imagine all these lines to be drawn exactly of the same weight and thickness and they all represent ripples, that represents the pure dynamism of the absolute power vibrating equably within itself. So although it’s traversed these ripples throughout, there is no existence in it, because existence means out-sistence. From ex-istere, out of the six.

To make a thing existent we must superstress it. We cannot superstress a thing that does not already exist in the pure act of the Absolute. But to bring it down existentially, into separativity, we must put extra force unto it. Then we can make any shape we like by simply going over some of the lines that we see. I’ve drawn the shape there, we can draw any shape, a lion or a tiger, it doesn’t matter. All the forms that there are in the Universe pre-exist in the Absolute as pure ripples of power equably balanced.

These ripples of power in all their intersections and interrelations are what Plato referred to as the world of ideas. They are not existential, they are not phenomenal, they are noumenal. Remember the “phe-“ in “phenomena” - there is your Greek letter “phi” - means split names. You see you have this “nomen”, that’s “name”, and you split it. Phenomena means “split names”.

In the eternal world of form, the noumena are not split, they are not “phe”-noumena, they are just noumena. That is to say, that is the principle of intelligence, Noah, Nous, counting, evaluation of the Absolute. The absolute evaluation of intelligence. The noumena are eternal forms and phenomena are these eternal forms superstressed and thus brought out of context. And in the act of superstressing them, precipitated into what we call the time process.

It is this production of phenomena out of noumena that constitutes the Fall.

There is an absolute totality of all conceivable forms in the initial sentient power of the Absolute. Through it are going ripples. Those ripples are eternal facts. Every single human being we know and every animal and everything else, every planet, all exist absolutely and eternally. In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita: “Nothing which is can ever cease to be”. And nothing which is not can ever come to be. The Absolute is traversed with these ripples of its own power, and these ripples traversing each other produce all the forms in the mineral, vegetable, animal, human, angelic and any other worlds there may be. But, until we superstress them, there is no time. This is why in the bible it says, in the end of a certain cycle, “There will be time no more”.

Time is simply a superstress placed on it to abstract a pattern.

When we made that pattern we stretch, we stress here and strain the surrounding.

The stress is the generation of a body and the strain is the generation of space.

So the generation of a body is the same as the generation of space round it.

So the space-time world comes into being by superstressing some absolute forms which are eternally in being. Once that zone is stressed, the zone itself , because it is sentient power, gets fed up with vibrating in that way and stops doing it, it inhibits itself, and immediately the next zone takes it up. And then the next zone takes it up. And the next zone takes it up. Now, this is what we call the motion of bodies in space. It is simply that the Absolute power lets go of the stress. And that same stress is taken up in the next adjacent place. And then that lets go of the stress and the next one takes it up. This is how you know that motion exists. You see a certain body called Jimmy Jones in such a street and then you see him in another street. So you assume it is the same body that has moved, because it has the same form, only seen in place A and place B.

Actually what has happened is that the absolute power in one place has stressed itself, saturated itself with the meaning of it for itself and then let go. The next place takes it up and thus there is a vectoring of energies which we call the generating of the time process. The vibrational structure called the Earth, which is going round the Sun, is really a part of the solar substance, which is vibrating in a certain manner at a certain rate. And this mode of vibration is what we call the Earth. You may notice that they just recently in talking about the eclipses said that probably the corona of the Sun really reaches as far as the Earth. But in actual fact the solar system itself is one substantial power throughout itself. It has zones of precipitation, of concentration, called planets, and the solar centre itself. But really it is a great disc which was once a sphere which by rapid rotation flattened itself, reduced its poles, until it became the solar system as we know it. It is one power.

When we come to consider the relation of God and the Devil, as in the case of the argument advanced in the Defense of the Devil, the statement is made that God, that is the white paper, Spirit, has a purpose. The purpose is pro-posited, that which is set before for realisation.

He could make a world of non-contingent beings. This would be rather like the monads of Leibnitz. They would not see each other, they would not have any contingent relation, and therefore they would be utterly ignorant of the possibilities of compassion and understanding of mutual suffering, because it wouldn’t exist.

Now the question is: Is a being who has never experienced any suffering whatever and has lived in unalloyed delight, equable light, in eternity, is that being as much value to God as a being who has been through the mill and learnt to suffer and to generate compassion and to understand the nature of God?

God wants men to understand God.

And God is a very funny fellow because he is sentient power operating, so he is a peculiar trinity. He is a power, a cause, he is a form, he is the experiencing of this form in act.

He wants to know Himself. And He can only know Himself by going through a certain process. Called reflection. Reflexion with an “x”. The back-bending process of a power on itself. Reflection with a “c” in it is the way light bounces off a surface and goes somewhere else.

Reflexion with an x is a bending back, serpent puts its tail in its mouth. This is one of the oldest symbols of God in the universe: The serpent with its tail in its mouth. And that is called “the old serpent”. It is to be equated with Saturn and Chronos and with the very nature of Being itself, because to Be is to be enclosed. And to be enclosed is to be finited.

When one of the theologians said that God is the biggest circle that we can conceive, the circle of which we can conceive no bigger, he is still talking about a circle, and therefore he is talking about a closed system. Now this closed system must be if there is to be value.

Remember the Cabalistic statement that all the letters of the alphabet stood up before God and started to shout: Each one shouted its own name and said, please start to create with me. And God began with B, whereupon A complained and said, I am the head of the alphabet and therefore you should start with me. But God said, I cannot begin with A because “begin” begins with B. But on that account I will recompense you by starting the ten commandments with A. That’s not in English, is it? I mean, in the original. Now, ‘to be’ is to be circumscribed, and to be is the same thing as to exist as a finite.

So if God is a being he is by that fact finite, and is therefore not God.

This is a dialectical fact: Either God closes a zone, either this absolute power closes a zone, or He doesn’t create. This root “cra” in “create” - you notice it spells the word “Arc” backwards - to create is to circumscribe, to finite and to close a zone. ‘God created’ means ‘God arced’, God closed, God finited.

But that finiting is immediately a denial of the Infinite. But as that particular closure was made by God, that is this white paper, we must conceive that this paper vibrates in such a way that it produces a circular vibration. Now, the paper is in no way made finite by the production of the finite within it. So God is not made finite by the production of the finite, and yet there is nothing other than God. Absolutely. So this finite is created by God within God. So in Him we live, move and have our Being.

Yet the fact of the appearance of this arc, this zone of cicumscription, is the beginning of trouble. Let’s see why. If we take only the one circle here, we can see a strange fact: The power outside can go about undulating like a meander, and it can stimulate as it hits and produce a ripple within this closed system. Now that ripple provides data to the closed being and thus gives it information, experience. But at the same time it tends to cause extraversion.

Now, the power of the Absolute which we represent by the letter aleph or the Greek alpha or the English letter A, that alpha-spirit has a certain frequency which is so high that the closed being of it, which structures intensely down to the level of A, which is the letter E in English, that E-level is a lower frequency. So this aleph-frequency can go right through it. And yet it can stimulate it and modulate it. But not in such a way that the closed zone can be aware as an individual of this aleph.

So it says, the light - that is aleph - shines in the darkness, but the darkness does not comprehend the light.

“Comprehend” means “to get hold of and put together”. Now, this finite cannot get hold of infinity and consequently the darkness, which is the self-closing of the power, cannot comprehend the light. This is a matter of pure mechanics. The light, that is the high frequency, shines in this darkness, but this darkness of the closed system, cannot comprehend the light.

Now, as soon as this process of closure has occurred, either God, that is, the maker of this closure, is satisfied with the One or He will want to enrich it.

Let’s assume for a moment that because we exist He has decided to multiply it on the inside, as in the process of myotosis. He’d start making other circles inside this one. Now each one of these circles inside here is another being in the big Being. Let’s pretend that this big Being is the circle of which we can conceive no bigger, then that one is the Logos of the Gospel of John. And that is the “Word”, but that word is not THE God, it is A God. So if you look in the Gospel of John you will find :

“In the Beginning was the Word, the word was with The God and was A God.”

Now the English does not come out because they don’t translate it in the way they should. Where the definite article occurs in the Greek, they should put “the” God, and where there is no article in the Greek they should put the indefinite in English. So they should say “the God” and “A God”. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God (THE God) and was God (a God).

It is perfectly clear in the Greek that this Logos, this Word, is not to be equated with THE God but with God as an object of a worshipper.

We can see immediately that the closure of any zone creates an object. Remember the word “orb” but without the “r” in it, simply means “a sphere”. With an “r” in it it means differentiating sphere and a running sphere, and without the “r” it means simply a sphere. When He has closed a zone He has made an object. This object is the basis of the possibility of objective stimulation. An objective stimulation is the enemy of the human race. Let’s see why.

That represents the body of one human being internal to which is immanent spirit. Here is the body of another human being with immanent spirit in it. Supposing these two beings to stimulate each other. Being A, being B. B stimulates A. Now A feels itself to be a subject - in a grammatical sense - it is doing the perceiving, and it believes that B is an object. But in the centre of B, B believes it is a subject and believes that A is an object. The fall in relation between human beings is that in which a given human being decides that he is a subject and other beings are only objects which are either useful or non-useful to his purpose. Now, if one human beings treats another human being as if he were not human but merely an object in the furtherance of his own life-scheme he de-personalises the other being, de-humanises him and materialises him and then, by this process of de-personalisation, has no conscience when he begins to push him around. And yet this reduction to the level of the object is only possible from the contingent stimulus situation.

God has to exhaust all possibilities for Himself, and the beings that never were in contingent relation in Defense of the Devil and the Counsel of Light they never had a contingent relation that caused them any pain, and in the Bible, two-thirds of the angelic host who did not fall never had a contingent relation. So they are in a sort of lush feather bed of delights. But they don’t know much at all, and they are, insofar as they exist, to be superseded by man when he has completed his evolution.

Let’s look at the earth as a zone of great darkness, closure and resistance. Here is the sun shining away, sending energy to the earth. Now, in this zone near the Sun there are energies that have never been compressed down to the level of the earth yet. Many of them are being driven towards the earth as photons, and there the plants catch them up and by the process of photosynthesis they capture those light-beings and contrapt them and make them into earth-bodies.

Now, this light is the same thing as intelligent power. Coming from the Sun there is intelligent power and it is being captured by the Earth, involved by plants and then, as the plants are eaten by animals, the same intelligence comes into the animals and then the men. You can see that as this energy of non-gross bodies coming towards the earth, being captured by the Earth, converted by plants and animals and men, is brought into a state of suffering. Suffering completes the cycle of being of God who must know all things. This is why Christ says of men, “Is it not written ye are Gods, men are Gods?” They are potential gods as to their acts to be developed, but they are actual gods as to the immanent spirit in their own centre.

The light of the Sun shines down unto the Earth, and then the plants spring up and then animals and men. And in each case there is an increasing awareness of the source of the energy in the being. The plant dreams; the animal desires and rushes about; man evaluates. And hu-man becomes aware of his spiritual origin. Any man can evaluate, but the hu-man is already evaluating the power from which he derives.

So we see that the forces from the Sun here - and the Sun is only a filter from the Absolute and is called the God of this world, because he is a mediator. When the light of the Absolute is made very very coarse and very dim so that it is not too strong at 93 Million miles to hit on the Earth and be captured and utilised to turn back upon itself.

So inside man there is a principle. This principle makes man what we call phototaxic. He moves towards light. We see this as a fact. We are spontaneously pleased when spring comes. We are spontaneously pleased when the dawn comes. We are not those beings that live under stones which, when you lift the stone up they rush off into a crevice, - they are negatively phototaxic. They belong at another level. We prefer light, and this can only mean that light is our source. Because a being cannot assimilate except through itself. So the fact of the light orientation of the human being means that light is the source.

And yet if we are not deprived of the light first we cannot truly evaluate the light.

Imagine for a moment that this paper, - the white paper that represents the spirit of the Absolute, - that this is alone; imagine all the marks to disappear. This paper cannot know itself unless it makes for itself a point of resistance. When we say “know” we have used an old glyph of a force hitting against a resistance. K -Now. And the production of a Now in the time process depends upon the reception of a stimulus by a substance. To “k-now”, that’s the “gno” in the gnosis of the Greeks, the gna of the Indians, always means that you are substantially existant and you receive a stimulus. You cannot k-now anything unless you are finited and you receive a stimulus.

So this paper which represents THE God - not the Logos, but the Father of the Logos, the paper itself - this paper, if it does not draw on itself by moving itself, vibrating itself and so on, if it does not bring to be in itself zones of resistance which constitute substances, then it cannot give itself the kind of stimulus that results in what we call “k-nowing” or k-nowledge.

So that God cannot know Himself in all His possibilities unless He exhausts His possibilities. And one of His possibilities is knowing what it means to meet a resistance.

Now, there is one thing impossible for God, namely to cease to be Himself. God the Absolute is an absolute plenum of sentient power, infinite, but: this power is in act; God is the pure act of power sentience. He is God because He completes all processes.

If He refused to go to hell He wouldn’t be God.

He would just be deficient in knowledge of what goes on in hell.

All of this is very interesting. So, He drives Himself down onto centres in order to fulfill all righteousness; this is to say, in order to fulfill all differentiations of power.

“Right” means “differentiations of power”. Remember the “gh” used to have a nice rough sound like a good Scotsman I knew and even the German, in “Recht”. To fulfil all “recht”ousness, God must produce zones of compaction, zones of resistance, and then He must overcome them. “Blessed is he who overcomes.” He who overcomes an army is very good but he who overcomes himself is greater. God must, to fulfill Himself, overcome Himself. That is to say He must produce a zone of optimum compression possible for Himself, and He must then proceed to enter it. He must make an immovable body and then He must move in. If He doesn’t do this He must be eternally frustrated because He has left something undone.

Now because God has done this, therefore He wants other beings to do it too. And He is very busy driving people to do it. People He drives generally, but Yogis He drives individually. He drives people by precipitating souls, that is finiting processes of spirit, puts them into bodies which then come into contingent relation, and in this fact of the jostling in the contingent relation arises the possibility of choice, of pain or pleasure. He who always pursues the pleasure is running away from the contingent relation and trying to get back into the state of an angel that never fell down. Needless to say, he doesn’t last very long in this world.

Remember the Greeks, the hedonists, were trying to do this; they were very practical people, so they worked out that life is only worth living if one can enjoy oneself, so they decided to do it. Immediately they felt like doing something they did it, but very often they found that two Greek gentlemen who wanted to kiss the same boy at the same moment on the same cheek. The result was they collided in a contingent relationship and generated heat, which proves that their basis was wrong. So they produced a modified version, a neo-hedonism which said “Get it when you can” and made do with it.

By a contingent relation a being is shown what are its own capacities of reaction. And it discovers itself progressively more and more. And the important thing is, it can not learn anything valuable about itself in a pleasure situation beyond the very elementary level. The deepening of character, in itself, can only come by pain. It can only come by the entry into a closed situation, a resistance situation in which it expends the energy of its will and tries to conquer. You notice that in the revelation there is great stress placed upon this fact “blessed is he who overcomes”. Because it is the overcoming of resistance that is the overcoming of these closed zones (which are, of course, symbolically, the same thing as women) and therefore the persistent attempt to overcome women in men. And of course with the Yogi, the man in himself to overcome the woman in himself, which is far harder. Because the inner woman has very little intention of being conquered. Whereas external women have every intention of being conquered on their own terms.

Let’s see once more that unless the Absolute finites beings within itself, creates zones of resistance and then enters into them and conquers them, it has not completed its possibilities. And once it has done so, and God has done it, once for all time, in the incarnation of the macrocosmic Logos in the universal being itself, prior to the time process in which Jesus appears as a being the victory has already been gained absolutely, and it is consolidated in the temporal process by the entry of this conscious cosmic logos into the material situation to the ordering of that material situation.

Once in the time process that force of the Logos has come in, the whole substance of the world has been irrevocably changed. From that moment no human being can stop the march of that force of the Logos to the historical process. So that whether human beings like it or not, it is now too late, after a couple of thousand years, to dodge, at least the external example, but much more subtly, the internal structural and substantial alteration of the human being himself. He cannot escape his inherent logic now. And this inherent logic in the human being is just a voice of the cosmic Logos in himself, driving him to complete his process. So that we actually see in a small boy picking up a large piece of rock a determination to conquer something. He doesn’t know why, because at that age he is not reflexive. Something in him is driving him to see what he can pick up. This something is contracting his muscles and driving his brain. He may hurt his muscles but he won’t stop. He has got to pick it up. His mother may come out and stop him, but that’s again the dictatorship of the devil through a woman. He should be allowed to make these attempts, because if he is sheltered from them, his character becomes deficient. It doesn’t matter if you lose a few thousand boys through the rocks dropping out of the […] because there are plenty more. And you are much more likely to lose one the other way by over-protecting him.

The process then of the justification of the Devil is quite simply this: The absolute power, to fulfill all righteousness, must leave nothing undone. And therefore it must create a zone of closedness, of passivity, it must create a hell.

It does this in biblical terms simply by cursing. God cursed the earth. There is a contraction tendency in the earth, and as that contraction tendency appears in the earth, there is an immediate opposite motion away from the earth. This motion away from the earth in the bible is called the curse. It’s exactly the same thing when with your hand you try to grasp the air. As you close your hand it runs out between your fingers. The running out of the air is the curse.

What happens then is that the forces that are contracting which have the will to contract, represented by the Saturnine symbol, they should be allowed to go to their term. And therefore the forces that don’t contract, the forces of Jupiter, they run away from that centre. And in running away from it they allow the contracting forces to drive onto the centre proper. Now, every being should be allowed to do exactly what it wants to do freely, whether going to hell or going to heaven. So that when those forces of Lucifer and his minions begin this contractive process unto the centre, God does not try to stop them, he simply runs out of the way, that’s his Jupiter force - God the Father - and leaves them then contracting in the centre. That contraction in the centre is the generation of earth’s matter.

All the matter in the universe, wherever there are planets, is generated in exactly the same way by the superstressing of the contractive saturnine forces and the running out of the Jupiter forces from that centre.

Once those zones have been made, they are then the footstool of God. God immediately starts to use them. He doesn’t say,”I am not going to play with that wicked fellow”, he says, “ok. he has made a nice solid floor, I’ll put my foot on it. In the case of the Indian Shiva dance you see him dancing on a dwarf. The dwarf is a symbol of this contracted man, where the earth is macrocosmos contracted to its term. So the earth is kind of dwarfed.

The Devil, then, is simply that which divides and centres the divides from each other. Because every centre of precipitation is an exhaustion of the space between. And so the zone between two centres of precipitation, being called stress-points, produces a point between them of strain. Between every two stress-points there is a strain, and the strain is what we call space, and the stress is what we call body. And the body-part is said to be under the dominion of the Devil. But every action has an opposite and equal reaction, and therefore for every stress there is an equal and opposite strain.

In between two centres there must be a zone where the pull is equal in both directions. That is a point of equilibrium and a point of choice. The point of de-liberation is a point of liberation from the alternatives. At that point between two centres of precipitation you stand still and you can chose to which one you will incline, to which one you will go or whether you …..and go somewhere else. Whichever you do you’ll find yourself then in another zone near to another one, and again you must chose. Whenever you stabilise yourself and make a deliberate act, it means that you are on the thin line of choice. This is the strait like in straitened circumstances, too. It’s strait, it is stretched, it is taut. And it is in this line of choice here between these two centres of precipitation that the strain is felt on both sides very very strongly. If you incline ever so little off this point of equilibrium, to the right or left, you become aware of a tendency to stress, which you call an “inclination”. This inclination is carrying you into a centre and is therefore a temptation. As soon as you get out of the centre of deliberation between two centres of stress you feel inclined to go in a given direction. Now, as soon as that inclination is obeyed, you find yourself involved with the conditions of that centre and you then suffer. Because the centre has dragged you in to an experiential situation which you will have to face because you inclined into it.

Now, in order to be free one must be able to deliberate, that is, to stand still between these opposing stress points. And in order to realise the value of freedom one must suffer. So we find that there is no tendency to stand and deliberate in the young because they haven’t suffered enough yet. And they have a theory that it is possible to enjoy life, unlike mummy and daddy, it is possible to enjoy life by being more intelligent. So when they go into a situation because it is a stress-point, and time is made of these stress-points, to enter into a stress-zone, to follow an inclination is to become subject to the time-space process, which is said in the bible to be the gift of the Devil. But in that process of becoming subject to it, not subject in the grammatical sense, but subject in the sense of “thrown underneath the stimulus”, then you suffer, and you then you decide it was not worth it. Then you turn away again, like the prodigal son and you move back to equilibrium. Now, you go on doing this through your life, deliberating a bit and then being a little lazy, not deliberating enough and allowing an inclination to carry you into a situation. When the inclination carries you , you are becoming subject to temptation, and when you are subject to that, you suffer pain, when you have suffered enough pain you come back to a line of deliberation and go on again. But if you become lazy again as you are going into your line of deliberation, you will fall on to another centre.

Every time you do not deliberate, every time you are mentally lazy, you will incline. And when you incline you will suffer. When you suffered enough, then you will come out and start deliberating again. In the Lord’s Prayer it says, “Lead us not into temptation”. It means quite simply, we have had enough already of this suffering of following our inclinations. So we appeal to God not to drive us into temporal situations which we know as being painful. Which makes, again, God and the Devil as tempter to be identical in the Lord’s prayer.

There can be no precipitation of the gross material world by the Saturnine force unless the Jupiter force runs out and allows it. If God remained in the centre and when the contraction started stayed there, the contraction could not succeed. But God put a mark on Cain’s forehead so that he could remain alive in order to suffer the consequences of his murder of Abel. In the same way God will always make room for a being to hang itself. He is very obliging, whatever you want to do, when you pray, be very careful, because he will help you to do it. And when you do it, you will have to pay the price of your own choice. And when it is painful enough often enough, you will go on to your line of deliberation, and only in deliberation are you free.

“His worship is perfect freedom” means that ultimately to worship the free God, the free spirit, one must stop inclining towards centres of stress.

And when all the beings that have been precipitated have completed their education, then the superstress is taken off the time process and there is time no more, and then all the forms of all the beings that ever were in the time process continue their eternal existence with the qualifying difference that they retain with them the memories of their temporary experiences as characterisations, making it worth their while to have been out in the first place.

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