THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM

The text of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands, 27:11:1977. Ishval tape 40

Track 1

The Heavenly Jerusalem is the subject matter, and I have drawn its picture for you to begin with and you are going to get one of those very quick flashes because you know I hate this thing. (Overhead projector) It cooks me and it makes a horrible noise, which I detest.

Anyhow, will you please get ready with your pens and paper we will see if we can get it in before Sheila has time to sit down and get it, ready, can you see it?

No.

No? Come closer Gerhardt. This is a drawing of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Now, you will observe that it is a circle with some straight lines, at least, they are supposed to be straight, inside it, and it is made in a very simple way. This is how you teach babies to draw boxes. First you draw a circle, more or less. It does not really matter because there are not any perfect circles in the time world, so, if it goes a bit distorted it will be in conformity with temporal usage.

First you draw the circle and then you put six points one there, one there, one there, one there, one there, one there, on the periphery equidistant and you put one in the centre there.

And starting from the centre you draw a line down and you write a letter Y, like that. (Can you see it, a vertical from the centre?) A Y.

And you then simply take those three lines of the Y and draw a pair of lines parallel with each one of those, with the vertical one, two, with this sinister arm one, two, and with this dexter arm, one, two.

That is a very simple way of drawing a cube isometrically. I have drawn it that way because it is a description given of the Holy Jerusalem and that means City of Peace. I have drawn it inside a circle because it began with a circle, remember? Have you all got this drawing down now, at least those of you who are interested?

First of all we have a circle, a sacred enclosure. Apart from that circle we have Infinity, but with Infinity we cannot do anything, so, we have to make a sacred place to do something in and the most economic way of making such a sacred place is to make a sphere and because it is rather a sticky job modelling spheres in new plasticene, we just draw a circle on the paper, or on the cellophane or whatever, or Perspex, slightly more expensive already; and having drawn this circle we are to remember that the circle represents a sphere.

Now you all know, you politicians and others of influence, of the expression ‘spheres of influence.’ Spheres of influence. Anywhere where there is anything of importance going on, a sphere of influence exists. That is to say, a place has had built around it, a periphery to protect it from the infinity of possibilities beyond. Mental note, - a sacred place, a sphere specially built, with a strong wall round it to protect the energies inside from an infinity of possibilities outside. That is the first stage of building the heavily Jerusalem. Did I say Heavily Jerusalem then? The reason is the word Heaven comes from the verb ‘to heave,’ to heave up.

From the central point which is the first to be posited, the power there posited, heaves itself up to a certain distance and then rotates. It makes a periphery round the central point. That is very important. All activities start with a point. That is called, ‘the point of initiative,’ the primordial point which creates universes, thought processes, solar systems, planets, every life upon a planet, every particle of matter begins with a point. And that primordial point is the Absolute Essence of all formal structures whatever. Now unless we have an enclosure we cannot work to build an integrated functional structure.

Now we all have such an enclosure, namely, our physical body with its periphery, the integument, your skin. You know that your skin is very tough because you knock it about, you damage it, you cut it, you bruise it and somehow you survive for many years. Without that tough integument, your life would flow out. It is a very magical thing, the skin. It has a certain thickness and it has a number of layers, all with different geometries in them, and it is the very beginning and end of your integration. Therefore, you are supposed to guard it. The chief method of guarding your periphery, your skin, is washing. You know, “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” is an expression used by Christians and the equivalent in other religions is some kind of baptismal ritual. You have to wash, you have to get rid of impediments, you have to get rid of everything that is alien to your being, and when you have made this round enclosure – if every one of us had a round enclosure – only, we could not build with it. Those of you who know the Gospel of Barnabas will know that there is a necessity for flattening the human race. Do you agree with that ladies? It is essential to flatten that sphere in six planes. And, when you flatten it in six planes you have a perfect cube. The Masonic term for it is the Perfect Ashlar. Ashlar means – Spirit Law, the Law of Spirit. You cannot build with perfectly round stones, they are not stable, so to make a city with citizens, you have to flatten the citizens, and there are two ways of flattening them. One is by violence as we know by the history of great conquests, and the other is by intelligence.

Track 2

Now, the intelligence is very important and it says right away, right at the beginning, “The wall of the Holy City, of that Heavenly Jerusalem, is made of a most precious stone, and the name of that stone is Jasper.” Now jasper means, the affirmation of reason, the affirmation of the spirit of reason, it means, pure logic. You know that you have an anatomy inside your skin, and you know that your anatomy, the internal organic structure, follows certain logical laws, laws of osmotic pressure, laws of calcium deposits, skeletal structures, joints and so on, all these laws are restraints on primordial energy. What would be like if we had no binding integument? Well, we would be very friendly wouldn’t we? The nearest you can get to it and still be human is to get very drunk, whereupon, you leak, don’t you, in every sense of the word. Have you ever been to a really good party, say, Hogmanay for the Scots, what happens? Everything leaks. You pour everything in that you can, and it comes out, and the more intoxicated you are with the spirit of the New Year, the more you put in, the more comes out. It comes out of your pores in perspiration, it comes out of your nine orifices and nobody minds because it is friendly. Are there any members of the Friendly Society here? Do you have an annual party in which you leak on each other?

Now, supposing that this leakage were permitted. Like a fellow said to me, “I demand to be free, absolutely free.” And I said, “O.K., start with a razor blade on your arteries. Liberate first the blood and then you will attain your aim.” Now he thought I was being funny, but I was not. I meant it quite seriously. Anyone who believes in absolute free without dome because dome means sphere, means control, to believe that it is good to be absolutely free, is to believe that it is good to be non-existent, because absolutely the free does not exist. Exist means ‘stand out.’ Exist means be a unity. Exist means be encapsulated, be uniquely protected in your sacred, secret area of operation.

So the first thing we learn about the Heavenly Jerusalem is this. It is an encapsulated zone, specially encapsulated to allow individuation, to allow unique developments of character, of function, of creative process. Now it describes the heavenly city as the same length and breadth and height. It is a cube. Any good mason can tell you, if he is in a leaky mood, all about the perfect ashlar, it represents your own being, perfected by work. You go to a quarry and if you are like Michaelangelo, you choose your own piece and you say to the quarryman, “Cut me that one out.” If they are friendly with you they do and if they are not, they give you a drink, take you into a little hut and say, “Wait there sir,” and they give you something that you did not ask for, and that serves you right for not paying attention when they are taking your piece out of the quarry. When you get this piece out, it is then hit with a kind of mallet, a gavel, and the rough parts are knocked off progressively until you finish up with roughly a cube, and that is called a rough ashlar, -ash, spirit, lar is law. It is already on the way. It has been taken out of the mob, out of the crowd, out of the mass of marble and it has been struck with a gavel, and that word is gabble.

In order to do your first work, you talk and you do what the Chinese poet, Li Tai Po Sleeping Dragon Li used to do and you talk at random to find out what about, ab – out, outside and away from your essential subject matter. You do this at parties don’t you? Business men do it a lot, they gabble. They talk rot, deliberately, and all the time they are listening in case anybody leaks out an important secret of a new change on the stock exchange. Gabbling or gavelling is a very useful device for making a roughly six-faced object.

Now, the reason it has to have six faces is this. You have a future; you have a past; you have power on your right side and deficiencies on your left side; and you have Heaven above you, powers which you can’t control and which are Infinite, and below you the earth, a material substance that is very, very difficult to deal with, but you start, roughly, by gabbling. We are gabbling at the moment. We are talking roughly, around the subject matter of the Heavenly Jerusalem. In the process, we are going to talk about the human future, human past, human power, human deficiency and that super human power of the universal energy which no man can control and every man had better learn its rules, and the resistant material, the earth, mass inertia.

Track 3

Now, once we have got our definition right we can proceed to the end. If we have a defined goal to which we are going and we are in certain conditions in nature, by means of the definition of the goal and the study of the conditions, we can draw a line from where we are to where we will to be, so that, the end, the goal, and the conditions of our existence, condition our approach to the goal. We must have a defined goal, we must recognise that we are inside existing conditions. We do not create nature. That is already done for us. When we are born we come inside existing preconditions of nature, and we try, as we grow up, to modify nature to make what is called second nature. Technology is second nature, those lights are second nature, the clothes you wear are second nature, they are a nature made by man. The first nature, the great universe itself is made by the Divine Primordial Power which religions call God, which is a Sentient, Intelligent, Infinite Power. But, we come into those conditions. We do not create the universe into which we enter. That is already done for us by the Absolute Power. But we can study that nature, that first nature and then modify our behaviour within it, and in the process of modifying our own behaviour within it we modify it.

We take a lot of clay out of the ground and we hammer it roughly into cubic form. We put it in a kiln and fire it and we have got bricks. We then stand the bricks up and we have a house and when the wind blows the wind cannot blow as it used to blow, freely and indiscriminately, but it has to blow round the house, so the form of the movement of the wind, symbolic of Spirit, is conditioned by the form that man’s second nature, the nature made by man, imposes on first nature.

Now the description we want, which must serve as our goal and guide us where to go, is the one given in that Book of Revelation in the twenty-second chapter and there you will find it is a peculiar city, it is a city that needs no light of sun or moon, for the light of it is constituted by the Glory of God and the Light of the Lamb, His Son, so that already we have a definition. What we are looking for, what we hope to develop into is a being that needs no external light. We don’t need an external sun, we don’t need an external spotlight, we don’t need an external moon, we don’t need external stars. Our goal is that our light shall be inside. Here is your Heavenly Jerusalem, somewhat fallen, (meaning our self) a rough ashlar, but you can knock it progressively into cubic shape so that you have six concepts to control.

And then there is this lovely description. This city is of pure gold, but the gold is peculiar. The gold, although it is pure gold, is translucent, transparent like glass. It is exactly like pure glass but it is pure gold. The meaning there is quite simple. Gold is an incorruptible metal and for thousands of years has been used as a symbol of the will in its incorruptibility. You have a will. This will is the universal energy of God which has created, as God, the universe, and posited inside that universe, man, and inserted into man the consciousness that it is from the Universal Power that the power of man’s will is derived. The power of man’s will is Divine Power encapsulated in the physical integument of the human being.

So pure gold means pure will. You all know that expression – “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Now, the will is the JA in Jasper and the PER in Jasper means logic, pure logic. So, Jas pere is, literally, to affirm pure logic, the pure logic of being. And it is transparent. How is it that it can be transparent if it is gold, which as everybody knows is opaque? Because in symbolic language we look for particular qualities, particular attributes of particular substances and then we extend them into higher significances. We call this myth and we call it symbology, but it is real. You have, inside you an incorruptible will. Generally we call it personal awkwardness, don’t we? Have you tried to control children who do not want to be controlled? It is not easy is it? You need all your per in Jasper to get a baby to obey unless it wants to, and if it does want to, it has seen an advantage to itself so to behave.

Track 4

There is, in every human being, a little seed and that seed is the seed of Eternal Spirit. It is the seed of a will which is utterly incorruptible. That is, you can’t break it because it is not made of parts. Now that will, that incorruptible partless power, can only be, logically, the continuum of the universe itself operating in the centre of a living being. You see, a continuum has no parts, no parts. A continuum is by definition, throughout itself, identical. It has no divisions within it. Having no divisions within it, it cannot break. It is incorruptible. To corrupt is to break. So the continuum itself, the Absolute Power, which is partless, called the garment which has no seam, the seamless garment, seamless because it symbolises no parts, there is inside you, a centre of that continuum. Bruno, in the year 1600, was burned at the stake by the authority of the pontiff in the Vatican for saying the centre of infinity is anywhere and the periphery is nowhere. That is to say, that every point of space, every simplest, smallest point of space, is a point in an infinite continuum, and the Infinite Continuum, being a continuum, has no parts and cannot break. But, because that point within the continuum is only a conceptual point, it cannot break either. That is the per, the conceptual point PER in the Jasper. Your will is a centre of Infinite Power and it is utterly indestructible and mysteriously, it is absolutely transparent. Gold is the symbol of the will because gold is incorruptible and at the same time, to the being who self- examines himself, his motivation, so that he makes his motivation inside himself absolutely clear to himself, although he is gold, that is, will, he is also as clear as glass to himself. But, mysteriously, because of the uniqueness of the will, to itself, within the continuum, with the whole Infinite Continuum resting on each point of the will, that will is opaque to every other will and it is the opacity that will that constitutes its indestructible individuality. Any person who examines himself, his own motivations, discloses to himself his own will, in the act of disclosing to himself his own will, is both gold and as clear as glass to himself. It is not accidental that the word glass in Glasgow and Douglas means ‘green’ and green is the colour sacred to the goddess of Love, Venus. So to be transparent to oneself one must love oneself throughout. One must, in loving oneself, know oneself because you cannot love that which you do not know. You can have an idea that if you did know, you might love, but you cannot love the unknown. First you must define the unknown in some loveable way before you can begin to move towards the unknown.

Track 5

So here we have it, the Heavenly Jerusalem is the human being and the macrocosmic human being, the Adam Kadmon of the Hebrews, the original Adam, not the one on physical earth, but the one whose body constitutes symbolically the whole universe, and that man, known fully to himself, in his motivation is himself pure gold for he is will and transparent as the clearest glass, and he cannot be that unless he loves the continuum and all that the continuum does. A man who attacks another man and takes him to pieces and conceives him to be an enemy is unfortunate. Un-fort-unate. He is not strongly unified because he has not understood that when he attacks another being he is attacking the continuum, which is partless, and therefore attacking himself. He cuts himself to pieces every time he attacks some other human being, or, indeed, anything whatever, animals, plants, minerals, what ever he attacks within total reality and imagines he can do without, proves merely his ignorance of the continuum which is, fundamentally, the Being of Beings.

T

J

R

S

L

JE affirm

RU S -watching discriminate

SA Sentient Activity

LA A -doing clinging to life

M

inetia

Yea JE, RU, SA, S, L el, M on your little finger, Jerusalem, and observe that when we go like this with it, the middle letter at the top here is S. S means Spirit. It is the mysterious letter of Spirit. Now if we hold our hands in this magical way, magic means pertaining to the will; Sa or Spirit, the fundamental basis there means sentient activity, Sentient Activity, SA, sa (S spirit, a = act, sa,) and that Sa polarises in two directions, one towards S an one towards A. Towards S is sentient, towards A is activity. It polarises towards watching and doing and towards watching what it is doing. So when we put Jerusalem like that, which you can spell heirosalem if we wanted, the Peace of the High Priest, - hieros alem, God’s primordial substance establishes itself as its own high priest, your consciousness is your sentience self-activated. You have nothing in you except your activation and your activation can be physical, emotional, mentational, comprehensional, volitional and overlooking. It polarises through S and A, sentience and activity. Now, moving towards the thumb, it polarises as R and J. Now R means to discriminate and it is the letter which belongs peculiarly to spirit; to the Arabic ruchk the Hebrew ruach, to the Roc, the bird that carried Sinbad; to discriminate: and the J means to affirm. So the S has become discriminative, discriminative affirmation, towards the thumb. Towards the little finger it has become la ma. You know lamentations comes from this L M base. It polarises towards la – clinging to life; and ma, the inertia of matter. So we have a peculiar polarisation. Spiritual activity has made itself into a discriminative, affirmative power and a clinging, inertic power. To make the Heavenly Jerusalem we have to balance these facts.

Track 6

What are these facts? Let us look at them as you know them.

Cold winter morning, no heating on yet. How easily do you leap out of bed with gaiety and abandon to greet the new day? It is not even light yet and it is damp. Do you leap gladly out of bed to face the day, or does your body itself, the body, like being in the warmth? Does it? Yes? That is a terrible enemy you know. It is comfort. It is your M function taught to you by the eternal cosmic mother, and reinforced by your terrestrial mother. She encourages you to like comfort. Wrap the baby bunting in somebody else’s rabbit skin. Always my baby must remain comfortable at the expense of some now naked rabbit. This is the principle of the mother. The mother must protect its offspring otherwise there will be no future generations. But that same instinct in the mother that protects her child, does so at the expense of every other child, which is why Christ says, “I am come to destroy the works of woman,” because they have to be de-(s)-troyed. Troy means law, establishment and you have to unestablish it when it has served its function. The function of the mother is to give birth to the child, and then having given birth to it, to nourish it until it is big enough to punch her on the nose and leave home. If she Ls or clings, that L means li, to cling, if she binds that child beyond its own natural maturation point, she is no longer of any use, she is now an enemy of the child to which she gave birth.

So the L M down there are called, “the Wicked Ones.” They are the evil ones, clinging to mummy, L to M. Do you believe it? How do you feel mummies? Do we agree? In principle says mummy, “Yes it is quite right. I am quite happy to get rid of all my daughters. And if I have got a handsome son he had better watch out because daddy is bound to die earlier than son and we don’t want to be alone so we will tend to cling, and teach ‘clinging to mummy’ to the son.” Little girls can fasten their own shoes when they are three, little boys can’t fasten them properly when they are thirty-three, true! Do you know I can’t do my own shoes yet? I really can’t I never get the opportunity. If I start trying to fasten a shoe, some mysterious hands appear out of space. I have even had somebody so eager that they have laced them up before I have got them on! Now that is all L M function. And this is a very serious thing. To be a new Heavenly Jerusalem you have to balance five in one. You are a six-fold being and you have to balance these five in this one. In this original sphere you have to learn to flatten yourself, to give yourself planes, surfaces which can be put against the surfaces of other beings to build the wall of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and that wall is Jasper. Mysteriously it is translucent, it is light, it lets light right through because the person who knows himself thoroughly, is transparent to himself and yet, mysteriously, he is an affirmer of reason, Jasper, that is logos, cosmic reason, not Aristotelian reason. Not bent reason of the greengrocer who has got a lot of rotten apples to sell and at the end of the day so he lets you have them cheap. Not that kind of reason, pure reason and this mysterious Jasper which is glass, is gold, because it is only your will, your purity of will, your purity of intention.

Track 7

Now, it says, “There is no temple in this Holy City,” no temple. You would think that if it is religious there would be bound to be a temple wouldn’t you? There must be a cathedral there if it is only for the sake of the tourists, but this Heavenly Jerusalem has no temple inside it and it says, why? Because God and the Lamb, His Son, they are the temple thereof. Now the word temple means ‘time play.’ But this temple is not a temple which is a time play. Tem is time and PLE means to fold. The foldings of the time process are the temple on earth but there is no temple like that inside your own being when you know yourself. There is no time-play but there is something else. There is the power of God there, and that power of God is essential creativity and there is His Son, the Lamb, which is your capacity for meekly taking whatever comes to you and converting it in such a way that the people who impose upon you whatever it is they are imposing, when they see what you have done with it they wish they had not given it to you to play with. That is the meaning of the Lamb. If you manage to assimilate all stimulation to your own being, you can convert the most dangerous, the most destructive, the most petty, the most mean and you can turn it into pure gold and this gold will be transparent and this gold will be Jasper. You will see that rationale of the temptations to which you have been exposed and there will be no temple there. You don’t have to listen to church bells ringing out of tune. You don’t have to go anywhere. You are yourself, internally, the temple, the living God and His representative Son.

Now, how are we going to get to this state? We know that it is very difficult. We know there is pain, suffering, typhoons, cyclones, floods, wars, business cheating, misrepresentation, petty lying, extra marital affairs, and even worse, affairs within marriage, like a man and his wife looking at each other as if they were not married. That also is a mystery. If you are sufficiently drunk you can actually think that the woman you have married is, after all, a nice girl. When this happens you can start behaving towards her as if you were not married for five minutes, until you sober up. So even within that intimate relation you can start being intimate and then wish you hadn’t been intimate later on, because now there are five to go to university and it is not cheap in these inflationary days.

We have to know how to get to it. The fact that it is a cube that has the same length and breadth and height, or length, breadth and depth as St Paul would say, is the key. You stand in the middle of six orientations. You are a little dot standing in the middle of that cube and you can think forwards and backwards, you can think to the right, to the powers you have, and to the left your known deficiencies, and above to the powers that you cannot control but must obey and to the earth material, the clay that you have to model. When you remember this at any moment of the day or night, you posit yourself inside this sphere; flattened into a cube, the squaring of the circle, the cubing of the sphere, the great mystery of the mathematicians and geometricians, how to square the circle, how to cube the sphere, this is the problem of the building of the Heavenly Jerusalem; you have to stand at any here and now, it cannot be done yesterday or tomorrow, it can only be done now. You posit yourself now in the middle of your future, your past, your powers, your deficiencies, the uncontrollable Infinite and the modellable earth matter and at each moment, you have to tell yourself, “I am about to say something, I am about to do, to think, to feel something and what ever I do is an orientation and I must know whether this orientation is towards my future, my past, my increased powers, my increasing deficiencies, my subordination to the universal power and my modellable creative power acting upon the earth.

Track 8

Now if we do that kind of thing at any moment, how can we do it wrong? We can’t can we? If we actually, in a given here-now, see the future results of our present act and we see the backward tendency that made us do it and we see that our powers are threatened by it and deficiencies increased by it, and we know that there are powers above us that we cannot control, Karma, action-reaction, and we see that there is an earth that we are modelling in the very act of doing this act, how can we move? Does it make you keep still? In ancient India, the Jainists were a religious group about the time of, or slightly before the Buddhists, and their whole aim was to keep still. There is a magnificent statue there to Mahavira, one of their great prophets, fifty-odd feet high, and a vine is growing round him because he is keeping still. The same thing in Zazen. In Zazen you sit still and if you still your physical body and you reduce your inner activities as near as you can get to nil, so your life processes slow down, your breathing slows down, your circulation slows down, and you bring yourself as near to death as you can get. Your mentational, serial thing slows down, your preoccupation with personal patterns reduces and your individual willed intent to interfere ceases. You are left only with the sixth there, your overseeing, your episcopal function., your epi scopos, you are your own bishop watching yourself and you do nothing, to the best of your ability. And if you attain that nothing, sitting in Zazen, if you attain it, what happens? Do you think that the continuum, of which you are only a modality, is doing nothing about you? Or, do you think that continuum, which is infinitely extended Spiritual Power, fully omniscient, doesn’t look upon you there, sitting, doing nothing, and says, “Useful fellow, a door through which I can operate without impedance. He is transparency, I am the same. There is nothing in the way. I can use this being for my cosmic purpose.” So right in the middle of your Zazen intent, suddenly, while you are doing nothing, something appears inside you. Because the field power, the continuum, the Absolute Spirit presses in on useful tools, servants of the Most High God it calls them, it just presses in and inserts an idea and says, “Now get out and do something.”

The whole function of sitting in Zazen or sitting in any contemplation whatever is simply to reduce your individual, egotistic impedances to nil in order that the Absolute Intelligent Power can use this organism for its own purpose whatever that might be. If you retain an egotistical intent to utilise the Absolute then you have impeded yourself. You have blocked yourself with your egotistical intent and the Universal Intelligence looks at you sitting in what you think is Zazen. It says, “Pity, there is only one thing blocking me using that fellow, his own stupid intent to utilise me.” You cannot defeat the Infinite Intelligence. That is the Power above you which you cannot control. But, you can, by careful sitting and doing nothing in the most intelligent way, bring yourself into a condition where it, looking at you with purity of motive, with no impedances, will say, “Thank you very much. You are a good vehicle of my activities. I work through you and then you become something, such as a painless sacrificial being on the cross or a shot politician, or anything. You could become anything. But if you think that you want to choose what you shall become, you are impeding that Infinite Intelligence.

Track 9

Now posit yourself inside your flattened sphere, the cube, and ask yourself, at any moment of your life, am I aware now, that I am projecting, creating, formulating my future irretrievably in this here-now, and what is making me do it; my past inertias, the L M, the clinging to the memory, L M, clinging to the memory of the comfort mechanisms imposed by the Cosmic Mother and reinforced by your terrestrial mother? If those project themselves into the future, they jump now and you have no present. But if you have no present you have no presence, and if you have no presence you have no creativity. So, the whole art of building that Heavenly Jerusalem consists in getting into the here and now in full consciousness that the here and now is not a negative nothing. It is an absolute creative power with these six orientations around it. Your exercise is quite simple, and, like all things simple, tremendously difficult to do because of the L M function. You have a material body and that body has been bequeathed to you by two parents, nature and man.

Take nature back to its source, you are talking about the continuum of Divine Power. Take man, he has built a second nature. A civilised man is not a natural man. Did any of you see “The Long Search” during today or earlier in the week? In it there was a man there, a Negro, and he believed he could contact his ancestors and he said, “You white people say I am primitive to believe this but I tell you I interpret the word primitive as meaning pure. That is why I can contact my ancestors.” Primitive means put there from the origin, primitive means pure and they had to have a negro, so-called backward, telling an intelligent TV searcher for truth, a thing he never thought of. Primitives are pure. What you have to be is more primitive not less.

Now six thousand years ago, some super comedian invented the alphabet. By means of the alphabet he enslaved the human race to concepts. Previous to that time nobody read in the way that we do today and everybody lived spontaneously and occasionally in the jamboree somebody got killed. It did not matter much because it was all in fun, and they departed into their next level of being aware that it was only in the heat of the moment that a friend had hit him on the head with a knobkerry, rending that body, temporarily useless. But it had not killed the continuum because that is indestructible. It had not killed the spirit of man and so he could reincarnate and come back again. So there were no hard feelings. Wasn’t it C.S. Lewis who once said that when two men on the battlefield kill each other simultaneously, they burst out laughing in the next world – “Wasn’t it a silly fight?” Because you all know that is true. When you are rowing and fighting and disagreeing and trying to get your own way, whatever that mysterious word own means, are you not thoroughly conscious in the middle of the fight, that it is rubbish? That you are fabricating things to get your own way, and do you not know that if you get your own way you have got the worst way in the world and that your friend, in opposing you is your greatest saviour? Do you feel like that in the middle of the row, no? But, when you have cooled down, don’t you start modifying your argument? So the next time you meet that same opponent are you not really quoting him as you said what he said? Is not that the most comic obvious thing? You meet the fellow and he says to you exactly what you said to him last week. Only now he says he said it. You know, “I said that.” “No, no, no, you misunderstood me.” Because both of them are fishing to be correct are not they? They go home and they meditate and they work out how they would have won the verbal argument if they had won it, and they appropriate it. And they meet again and they swap sides. You know that all conflict is a means of education of consciousness.

It has a function because there is nothing in the universe that has not got a function. The essence of a continuum is power and the essence of the modalisings of power is to create functional structures and they are not there for nothing. They are there to sharpen consciousness. So, if somebody disagrees with you it is only the continuum educating you. That being so, you can say to your opponent, “Give me another insult, I rode that one too easily. Find something deeper,” and if it is a very good thinker he will be able to find something. “Thank you very much, that really hurt.” Now I can examine myself, because what I want is volitional purity and I can’t get it until I get rid of my hurts.

Track 10

When we are building this Heavenly City we are trying to structure ourselves in such a way that we become immortal. Immortal means we don’t fall apart. Mor - tal means breaking in bits, potentially disintegrative. To be an immortal you have to fulfil certain conditions and the first one is purity of will. You must have a single intent of will to bring yourself into absolute conformity with Cosmic Logic. That makes ladies tremble a bit doesn’t it? Funnily enough, it makes gentlemen tremble too, on their mother’s side. The fundamental idea is that if I become perfectly logical I might give up some of my private purposes but if I examine my private purposes too carefully I will find out that they are not only private, but they are privative. They are deficient, they are inefficient, they will get me nowhere so I had better not examine them. You know self- examination is very hard work, is not it? Have you tried it in the middle of the night? It is how to go to sleep very quickly. Don’t try to go to sleep. Set yourself a little problem. This is the problem – “I would like to be sincere with myself,” then start trying to be it. I bet you are asleep within five minutes. It is a most miraculous sleeplessness cure, and it is free! No tablets, just try to be sincere with yourself and I will bet you will fall asleep because your private purpose is not yet finished and the key to that is in the words of Christ, which he said to John the Baptist when John the Baptist, asked to baptise Jesus said, “I am not worthy to do it.” He said, “That is fine, then do it, because to be baptised by an inferior being is a bit of a change. Usually it is superior beings that baptise and we have got used to that now let us be baptised by inferior being.” That means when somebody comes to insult you from a lower social stratum or a lower financial stratum or a lower spiritual stratum, the fact, that they are lower is a very good method of being criticised. Don’t be criticised merely by your superiors, be criticised by dumkopf. Find the stupid and get them to criticise you. You will be surprised if you work a little with congenital idiots, how perceptive they are. They know every error that their keepers commit because stupidity is very nearly primitivity and primitivity is very near purity. They can see.

Now within this city of your being you are the Heavenly Jerusalem not yet finished building. Each person is a city of God. Each skin is a wall protecting you from interference in some degree by others also trying to build their cities, and to build you must have an enemy. You know when you build one brick on top of another there is a force called gravity trying to pull it down. Do you think that is a good idea? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could build and they did not fall down? Would that be good for you? I put a brick on another brick and walk away and tomorrow it is still there. What happens to me if that is so? What has happened to every great civilisation that has established its bricks one on top of the other so securely that it has not needed to attend to them?

It has fallen down.

It actually dies in the middle of its greatness because it begins to rest on its laurels. It stops the necessary striving to transcend its own previous creation and as soon as you stop the movement to transcendence of going beyond your own design, you are already dead. It is only a matter of three hundred years and you will really fall over. Rome was dead three hundred years earlier than it showed itself because it had begun to rest on a concept that was built originally by man.

There is primordial nature, Cosmos itself, and there is second nature created by man interfering with first nature, and your body is given to you by the L M, the loving mummy and nourished and conditioned to comfort and it likes you to be baby shaped. Do you know that? Have you noticed how wives, especially new ones, start stuffing their husbands to make them round? It has two purposes. One is they remind mummy, potential, of the baby she could have, and they give her a baby to play with until she gets another one. And, if it is a boy then daddy has had it, and also they make that person undesirable to all other women. A very, very round baby-like form nurtured by a woman is undesirable to other women because they want it thin to start with. The first thing they do if they start a love affair with somebody else’s wife, is talk about his figure. They reduce him, they make him the lithe, slim, animal male, and then when he gets rid of the first wife and gets a second wife, she brings him up into a new fatness which is hers! She has created this fatness and she signs it with garlic and various things that the other woman did not use. So if ever the first wife finds him and he is not smelling of the right kind of food, she will know that she has been pipped at the post. The loving mother. And opposite to the loving mother is the affirmation of pure logic, the Yeru, (Jeru). This Jerusalem is the city of peace, a Jeru of shalom, of peace, salaam. But it cannot be at peace unless it is balanced perfectly by volitional intent. It is no good being balanced from outside oneself because then one is at the mercy of the balancers. You know, when your daddy picks you up and throws you to the ceiling and catches you, just for thrills, and the little girl giggles doesn’t she, especially of the daddy is a good catcher? That is a game imposed on you from outside. Is it the best kind of game? Some day you will have to be able to throw yourself up and catch yourself, otherwise you will retain the awareness of your L M function, you are bound to matter. You are inert, you are not your own king in your own territory. You are at the mercy of other beings.

Track 11

Now, it is a very interesting thing to build a city of Jerusalem out of your own being and if you don’t build it with your own being you can’t build it at all. No external educator can create a Heavenly City inside another person without that person’s co-operation. That is a sure guarantee against egotism. No teacher can guarantee to turn all his pupils into great scholars. No artist has done it, no poet, no musician, no composer; nobody can make a pupil learn unless the pupil wills to learn. But an intelligent pupil can say, “Thank you very much. You have got plenty of knowledge, I can now work on it,” and possibly transcend the performance of the teacher. If he is an intelligent teacher he says, “Very, very good! He plays better than I do now. I showed all my technique and he, being creative continually, created further developments of the technique so now I am ashamed of myself relative to my pupil.” Now that is very, very good to be able to say that the pupil has exceeded the master. It is the opposite rule to the rule that you get in schools of art where the rule is the pupil shall never become greater than the master.

You are in process of self-education and you go about the world looking for means of self-development. Everybody is looking for means of self-development and there is only one correct way and that is simultaneous development of your total faculties. Some people try to develop their bodies for years and years and don’t bother about the rest of them, and they turn into gentlemen called Mr Universe. You know the kind. There was at one time, not very long ago, an attempt to make a programme, a TV programme, with Mr Universe on it. Can you imagine a more boring programme than a fellow who stuffs himself with proteins every day and gets a mighty arm and he poses, looking at himself with great admiration? And yet funnily enough, he can’t lift weights properly and he can’t fight and he can’t run properly and he is not an Olympic champion. He is just what he imagines is a beautiful body. He didn’t bother to develop anything else, just a physical body. Now, would you be satisfied to be a body beautiful? Have any of you seen lovely physical culture magazines on the railway station with a large muscle man on the front and you know very well he is not a world-beater in any physical sport, but in just in looking big in the muscles. Not good enough, and some other people, they make another error just the same, at another plane of being, the error of being aesthetic, like and Eighteenth Century exquisite. You can so refine yourself with poetic sensitivity that you can faint at an appropriate balance of verbs and nouns and adjectives. Do you know you can swoon at a Shakespearean sonnet? Do you believe that? I’ve actually seen a man, complete with trousers and essentials, quivering with exquisite delight at a single line, “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore.” And I knew another man who thought that, “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, and the murmuring of innumerable bees,” exquisite, and he fell all over the place and could not finish his drink because of it. That was extreme aesthetic sensitivity. And there is another fellow, very, very clever, a very useful pal, you go to buy something somewhere in the store and he has got a brain like a pocket computer. He goes ztztztzt......, you can have, that, that and that and it will cost you 75p! And he does it immediately, terribly clever that. Sometimes those fellows even get on the stage as memory men and they do mathematical tricks, serially. And then there is another kind of weird excess, comprehending Cosmic Purpose from a dizzy height. God is in His Heaven – all’s right with the world, you know. Meanwhile somebody, while he is sitting on the bank of the canal, thinking his high thoughts, is drowning and he contemplates that somehow, in the mysterious economy of things, the drowning of little babies is part of ultimate significance. Have you met one of those? And then there is the other kind, the revolutionary fellow, the hi-jacker and the over-thrower, the man of the military coup. He wilfully interferes with everything. He sees it and goes hn (Thumps the chair) whatever it is.

Gerhardt, wake up! Just nudge him for me Marghanita. Hard! Hit him, properly, you have got the right, you are the wife! Hit him! I’ll throw this thing at him if he does not stop. He is demonstrating his one-pointed mind. Actually he has been sitting in Zazen for the last half hour.

Track 12

Now we can do this and we can also do the impassive bishop, number six, the episcopos, who contemplates everything from an infinite distance, and it is not like the primate, the man that understands the plan of God. He is all-perfect, he does not bother about the plan, he just contemplates like this. Some where, whatever is going on is going on there below with no ............ anything about it but at least it is overlooked.

Now, those are six ways of going wrong aren’t they? And then you can pair them if you like, and triple them if you like or make lovely quarternities or quintuplets, or whatever you want to do with them, but nothing less than all of them will constitute simultaneously that Heavenly Jerusalem. That is hard work isn’t it? And, it can only be done now. Like now like this now, now. If you think about the past or the future, your powers, your deficiencies, the Infinite above you, the modellable earth below you, separately, you have unbalanced yourself. It must be done now. You have to sit and you have to know in that sitting, you have not moved. not at all, and in the middle of that non-movement you can do something, - adjust, create second nature. Your physical action does not in any way impede your non-action spiritually. In other words, whatever you do, if you are on centre in the middle of that perfect ashlar, that cube, if you are on centre with those six awarenesses around you, whatever you do is a perfect act. And what does it say there, right at the end of that Revelation? Behold I come quickly, I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and I come quickly. Why does it say that? Because it can only come quickly, this realisation comes in a now, dimensionless. Not half a second, less than that, less than a millionth of a second. It comes now and now is not a temporal event at all. Now is an in-break of eternity into the consciousness of man, not a temporal event, but it appears in the middle of the time structure and totally changes it.

“Behold I make all things new,” in that immediacy of the moment of creativity of the non-temporal eternal in the temporal finite.