Eugene Halliday - Hidden Persuaders


Question: What is the relation between the forces we experiment with and those of hidden persuaders?

Q. Those are forces that are ever present…that we are not aware of. That in doing the exercise we are gaining control of, is that so?

E: Yes, quite so. There is the coming to be of an individual, in all these diagrams you must consider the other circles, they overlap continuously. And in each of these diagrams we just draw one of these circles which has come to be within the Infinite, the Infinite is sentient power, is vibrating continuously, and the result is that any given finite being is traversed with motions. And these motions lay down a geometrical pattern. So that the totality of all the formal possibilities of experience is actually present in every finite being.

Imagine then a being full of vibrations and we will pretend for the moment that all the vibrations are equal, so the effect of drawing of this being shows a grid in equal stress. Now, we could say that that is the wisdom sphere of any given being. But that wisdom is equally stressed form. The total geometrical possibilities of the sphere in equal stress we will call wisdom, the dome of whiz with an aspirate in it, one, can spell it slightly differently, the dome is the sphere itself, the whiz or igs or whiz ship function…or …function means the power, sentient, moving to produce this dome. So the sentient power en-domes itself and becomes a wisdom sphere. And I put wish-dome here because the total formal processes in the sphere contain the forms of all possible wishes that the individual can have. And if they are in complete equilibrium, nothing happens. So that the wisdom sphere itself is a sphere embracing the formal possibilities totally of the sphere and thus including all the possible actions that any individual may perform. But in the absence of some disequilibrating force the thing cannot develop. The wisdom sphere will remain at the level of wisdom but it will never become knowledge. Knowledge implies - the K - a stimulus. A stimulus that comes in the NOW, this K-NOW-ledge. When the stimulus comes in a given Now a definite amount of energy enters the wisdom sphere and disequilibrates it. Now this moment of disequilibration is the same thing as an act of perception. Because at every act of perception is a moment of disequilibrium. The moment of the arising of serial knowledge is the moment of the disturbance of your wisdom sphere. So that if the stimulus is very strong, your wisdom disappears and is displaced by knowledge. And we will call knowledge the super-stress on a part of the wisdom sphere and the super-stress partialises the content of consciousness and makes the being partial. If the stimulus is pleasant we say the being is partial to the stimulus. But if it is unpleasant, the being is parted by it. He is still made partial. So if the stimulus is very strong it induces a very strong super-stress and overthrows the total equilibrium and thus destroys the wisdom and displaces it with knowledge. There is a dis-tortion introduced by the incoming energy of the stimulus.


Now, whenever a stimulus comes in it comes in with a definite amount of energy. It has to reach stress-threshold value actually to penetrate that sphere. When it gets inside it is either easily assimilable or not. If the energy is insufficient to produce a change in the wisdom sphere, then you are unaware of the stimulus. You say in fact you had no stimulus, you are indifferent. But if the energy inserted in the stimulus comes in at a certain rate, not too strong, not too weak you experience pleasure. You can assimilate easily at leasure. But if we increase the rate of the energy input beyond a certain level, it actually starts to threaten to disrupt the equilibrium wildly, and wherever such threat occurs there is experienced pain, that is, refusal of the incoming energy, fear, and round it, various levels of anxiety.


Let’s imagine for a moment this is a mono-cell. A very strong stimulus comes in, enters into it with great violence and actually destroys a portion of the protoplasm. This we will represent by black. When we are chasing the record content of a person in (enviat?) pursuit we often find the person saying there is nothing here that is black. And ….this statement about black. We know there is something there worth chasing. Because they say it is black. Black means it has been destroyed. Now imagine here is a portion of the protoplasm that has been destroyed. But in being destroyed it has absorbed some of the incoming energy. Now let’s cut this thing with the grid - we will say this is now a human egg which in the process of mytosis has cut itself into many many cells. One of the cells here is killed. It is black. It is really killed, it is destroyed, it can’t function. Too much energy has been applied to it. But in the act of killing that cell the incoming energy has been partially absorbed. Round it there are some other cells. And these cells feel under threat. They are grey. They know that something on the inside of them has been destroyed. They know that they themselves are under threat and yet they are not killed. Now, round here there is another row of cells. And this row of cells can feel apprehension on the inside of them, they get the vibrational state of the grey ones. And they can feel that something is wrong inside. They don’t know that anybody has been killed, they seldom receive the stimulus, but they do know that something awful is going on inside them. Now round here there are another group of cells, and these cells are vaguely anxious about something, but they don’t know what and they don’t know in which direction it lies because the energy isn’t sufficiently intense to destroy them or really to upset them. So they have a vague undefined state of anxiety. Now the next row of cells round here have an even vaguer state symbolised by the -----(There is groaning from someone, so Eugene interrupts what he is saying and says: “How are you feeling,William?” “Terrible”. “Will you come over here a minute, William?” “Can you come over here?” Can you come over here? Can you get across?” There is a lot of shuffling noise, moving of chairs and so on, and the groaning sound of someone in pain.)

Eugene (explaining at the same time what is going on in William): “This diagram here has actually triggered off a process inside and it is a very very common one because very very deeply inside all of us there are damages that we have suffered. The original cell may be destroyed. The cells next to it know that that destruction has taken place but they are not destroyed, but they are in contact with the fact of death next door. So they themselves are terribly scared of that death, and they shout out, “We are in danger of dying”, because something has died on the inside here. Next to the them are another row of cells who are aware that these are shouting something has died. They don’t know what, and so their degree of fear is less intense than this grey row. Black and grey are very common words to come out of people when they are getting near to a particular point of damage.

Now, as we are moving away from the actually destroyed cell we come across rows and rows of cells with progressively less intense fear upon them. But there is always some motion from this point of damage spreading through the being. We put our sentient infinite spirit which is never penetrated by those motions and is never damaged nor is it damageable, but in the rest of the being, in the whole of what we may call the somatic zone -if we call this the psyche inside here - and from this inner ring to the outer perimeter we can call soma, the body, the soma. Through the soma goes some vibration from the destroyed cells, and it travels all through this somatic zone, and the word used to cover it by the existentialists is the word “Sorge”. Now, this “Sorge” is a background concern. There is no existential individual without concern for existence in its soma. His body as such, his protoplasm, is concerned because it has been injured. And the vibrations of this injury are traversing it and they continue to do so throughout the whole of individual life unless the person, through a process of inner education, becomes aware of the imminent spirit and identifies with it totally. The only rescue from this concern is identification with spirit. And apart from that, the whole soma is swept continuously with motions of concern.


If then we start to work on ourselves, we become aware that the observer is not the observed, the psyche is not the soma but the psyche is the embodied spirit. Spirit has en-souled itself by rotating, but this observer is not the observed. When we become aware of this we are prepared to dare to enter consciously zones of pain, zones of destruction, zones of death and so on.


Now, in the case of hidden persuaders the commercialists who know that the soma is reactive because of pain utilise the findings of the conditioned- reflex theory which deals only with the soma and not with the psyche as such, nor with spirit at all, and what they do is examine statistically the basic concerns or anxieties of the human race. When they have learned what these are they deliberately play upon them. And they are attacking by external stimulus the soma and inducing motions in the soma which they know have resonances with engrammed patterns of pain and so on. So they are related to the work we do in this sense:

They attack from the outside the soma with the intention of re-stimulating fears to force the person into an extraverted reaction. We become reflexively self-conscious and then enter into the zones in the soma consciously in order to discover, to take the lid of the pain zones, to penetrate to their meaning, to discharge locked emotion from them and thus to gain freedom. So the hidden persuaders and the work we do are exactly opposite. The commercialists using the reflex theories are stimulating people deliberately to force them into entirely mechanical reactions, and we are penetrating into these somatic zones and the engram patterns in order to discharge the emotion from them, because when this emotion is totally discharged then one is not reactive at all to any stimulus whatever and cannot be triggered off into buying a commodity we don’t want.

Now let’s have again another look at this problem.


There is a finite being, in the centre of that being to which the rotating energies cannot enter is the imminent spirit. That imminent spirit, insofar as it is circumscribed is called SOUL. The SOUL itself is a SENTIENT POWER , it is the essentially identical power with the ABSOLUTE SENTIENT POWER. But being circumscribed it has between itself and the transcendent spirit a zone of action, an action band, and this action band is the soma, your body. And it is this somatic reaction band that is being aimed at by the hidden persuaders. They know it is charged with pains, and they are determined to utilise that fact to force reactive behaviour, to buy commodities, determine the next war, and so on. It is here then possible to illustrate in a very simple way: too much energy coming in creates a pain zone, reactively the cells round about it try to stop it spinning. The kind of reaction that encloses the pain zone reactively is, one that we can say is entirely mechanical, is not controlled, is quite automatic and creates a zone of unconsciousness which, by the nature of any closure, is a zone of turbulence. That’s the TURBA of Boehme. Now, if that zone is not entered consciously, it remains a permanently reactive centre. But if we become aware that the observer is not the observed, we identify with the observer, we can take consciousness from our centre and deliberately penetrate through to it. The method of getting to it is always the same, we are looking for something we don’t like. We know in principle, if we don’t like it we have been injured in the past. But we also know that if we don’t like it we must have survived it. If we survived it we must have had enough strength to absorb the energy. We have an unpleasant zone, but if we can experience it and have enough energy reactively to wall it in we have had enough strength to survive, and therefore, no matter how unpleasant it is, no matter how much it shouts “I am going to die”, which is the usual cry from this zone, we know that because we have survived it so far with it locked up, we can dare to go into that zone. We can actually enter into it, see the unpleasantness, the death, the fear, the anxieties and the general concerns sweeping the being. We can enter it consciously. When we do so and see the form of the situation, every time we enter in a little bit of the energy comes out, and it is then less and less turbulent until finally it settles down into a state in which everybody going through the process says, well, I don’t just don’t want to go through it any more because there is nothing in it. It is now boring to enter this zone because I know all about it. It’s lost its meaning.


Now, we can say this, that emotion equals life, life-force. EMOTION and INTEREST are two words for the same kind of behaviour of power. If you destroy emotion you destroy interest. If you destroy both of these or the two aspects of one, they arose in, the life-force diminishes. In a state of deep apathy or unfeelingness there is no interest in anything, there is no emotion about anything. EMOTION is OUT-MOTION. It means that forces are coming from the inside and moving out.


Now, when we come to look at the three-fold man, - with his head and his chest and his belly - , we can divide each of these three parts into three again. And the hidden persuaders are concerned to utilise the locked-up emotion in people and to create interest to force the life-pattern in a direction profitable to the commercialists. If we take the belly-region and cut it into three zones we can say that in the lowest zone of all there is sexual energy, in the middle zone there is the navel energy or belongingness and in the top part of this bottom zone there is simply the appetite of food. So we have an urge to eat, an urge to belong and an urge to sexual relation. Now we know that down in the belly a person is blind, that is to say, he does not logically decide what to do. This urge is an urge; it just pushes along regardless. By its very nature it is determined to move and it loves the feeling of overcoming a resistance, because the resistance overcome is the evidence of its power. So down in the belly-land we have an urge to eat (in the stomach), an urge to belong (in the navel), and the lower part an urge to sex. These three basic urges are the three that are most strongly attacked by the hidden persuaders. Most people would like to be sexually potent. Most people like to belong to a family or a tribe or a nation. And most people like to eat. And because they have the urge to eat they must have a fear that there is nothing to eat. Because they have the urge to belong they must fear isolation. Because they have fear that they may become impotent arising out of their urge to sex, it is possible to attack them. There are three levels here, and in the positive and negative phases people can be triggered. We can do the carrot and stick on the donkey. We put the carrot before its nose, we offer it sex, participation in social functions and plenty to eat. Or we threaten it with the deprivation of these things. The BO (i.e. body-odour)-ad says, you can’t get a girl, you smell. You see the same thing extended on the middle level says, you are not socially acceptable because of your hair or you use the wrong perfume. And the same thing says, you are not acceptable because you don’t know how to eat. You can’t tell a fish-knife from a butter-knife or something. Now, if we look at these positively, we see that the urge to eat must follow the carrot. All the advertisements that show food in glorious technicolour, they are using the positive side of the urge. They are saying, you want to eat and here is something to eat; it looks marvellous. The urge to belong shows people they are often in the Bahamas in their evening clothes enjoying themselves, high society and belong to the best people, positively. And the urge to sex shows, if it is in a car ad or a cigarette ad, that if you got the right brand you got the right girl, they go together. The positive phases are very easy to see, but the negative phases are equally easy to see, because all you do is prefix them with “not”. You cannot eat this, it is poisonous, or you cannot get this if you don’t live at the appropriate level. You cannot eat this, Caviar or something, unless your income is high enough and you know the right kind of people who eat it. You can’t belong unless you know how to belong, you need a handbook of belonging. There is a handbook that tells you how to fit in at a party, and so on. And in the case of sex you need a little handbook that tells you of all the errors you mustn’t commit. And you can see that because these three urges exist down here in their positive and negative phases, then any person who understands that they exist can start dividing his vocabulary, watching the words he has got can be examined carefully and all those to do with eating can be put together, all those to do with belonging can be put together, all those to do with sex can be put together. And then you can construct an advertisement or a piece of propaganda rich in the particular words that you want to trigger people off with. You know that men are riddled with the fear of impotence as they reach a certain age. You know that young people going to parties are very much influenced by this fear that they can’t fit in with the party. And you know that many of them are motivated by eating. Even if it is only “Black-Magic” chocolates. Here then we see that the hidden persuaders can act upon us insofar as we are not able to control our vocabulary. if we can’t control our vocabulary, simply we can’t conrol the words we’ve got in our heads to do with eating and belonging and sex. Then we are reactive to them. Remember we have two vocabularies; and should have only one. The two vocabularies are passive, the words we cannot define, and active, the words we can define. The words we can actively define are brought into the cortex up here and they are made available for ourselves to cause our own reactions, whereas the words of our passive vocabulary do not get in there, they come into the ears and they come into the emotional centre and then they sunk down into the belly very early in life, so the mere use of a word can upset a person. For instance the use of the word sex produces a peculiar resonance in the mind. If you don’t see that the word “sex” is the same as the word “sects”, cutting things into sections, then you start reacting unconsciously at an urge-level, because it says something very peculiar about it something driving, something primitive. But if you see that sex is the mode whereby A is sectioned, you alter the feeling tone of the word. As a simple experiment look at the word “sex”, s-e-x, and feel inside yourselves what happens. Feel the response to the word sex. Now if I can show of it a drawing of a man and a woman and look at the word sex and those two symbols, notice the change in the emotional tone. Now let’s re-spell it, S-E-C-T-S, and notice that immediately the emotional tone changes. You notice incidentally in some of the southern dialects in the middle of the word an intrusive T tends to appear. The Cockney has “T” in it, comes in the middle of a word. If you hear it, it tends to produce different associations. The word ‘sex’ has to do with a tabooed subject and the word ‘sects’ has to do with a sub-division of religion. Now if you look at the two words and feel inside yourself you will find that you have different emotional responses to those two words. Yet, basically, those two words have the same root. And therefore, basically, you shouldn’t respond to the one any more than you do to the other. But if you do you are subject to the hidden persuaders. If I say “sex” in a conversation to certain people they wiggle on their chairs. But if I say, I am terribly sorry, I meant, religious sects, then they think I said sec-ts, and they get a different emotional response. So you see even with a simple word like that you have definite evidence inside yourself as soon as you feel that you are emotively reactive to a verbal stimulus. Now, in the same way all the other words in your vocabulary can be placed on basics. Now, notice this three-fold division here: sex, belonging and eating, if we shift these three up into the head, then we will place at the back of the head we place the sex, and the belonging in the middle, and the eating at the front. Now, eating in the head level is the same thing as perceiving. Percepts are food for thought. And in the middle region of the brain there are special groups of cells that deal with belonging, the emotional, and this belonging is in the heart, the chest level. This sex is in the belly level, and this eating of percepts is in the forebrain. So again, you can begin to divide the words to change your ideas, in the same manner. Eating, that is taking in percepts. Belonging, grouping those percepts, and sects, analysing those percepts. Sections. So the same basic trinity down here shifted up into the head becomes a function of trinity of the intellectual order. And exactly the same thing happens in the middle region again. We will take the right side and put sex, we will put belonging in the middle, and on the right we will put the “eat”. On the sinister side I should say. Now, the basic urges from below, sex up to the right, the primary drive, eating up to the left and the navel up to the middle. In the emotional life belongingness is in the heart. The analytical process is in the left side of the chest where it is absorbing the feelings - it’s eating them bit by bit - but the analytical process of sects where it is sectioning them in order to perceive the differences between them is in the right side. So the right side is more active and cuts into the situation with feelings, and those feelings are aggressive. The use of aggression are sectioning feelings and feelings of absorbtion are eating feelings - you want to take the person into you - you want to cut the person out of you on the opposite side, and you want simply to belong, you want that person to belong to you. So again your feelings have three phases. In the middle the simple belongingness - what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours - and on the dexter side the aggressive feeling that cuts into what people are doing, and on the other side the simple absorbtion of the feelings from other people.


So we get a three-fold division again within each of the sections of the three-fold man giving nine divisions. And of course the tenth now is the coordinator, so the fourth is the tenth. Remember this one of Pythagoras? 1 + 2 = 3 + 3 + 4 = 10. Now ten, tenere, ‘to hold’, this holding is the ordinal perfection of the system. If we count 1,2,3, and this three-fold man and this final link is four. And if we divide 1 into 3, - 3,6,9, then its final is 10. And this is why one of the Greek philosophers said to each other: “What comes after one, two, three, four?” And one said “five” and the other said, “no, ten”; he was thinking in a different way. He was saying, “if you get your three parts coordinated, and then you re-analyse these three, you can write it down as ten – ordinal perfection. Ordinal perfection in a man arises when you are aware that every part of the three old men has three parts within it. As you become conscious of this you can begin to liberate yourself from the trigger situations presented by the external world. Remember that old tag – “to whom the good”? Every time you see somebody putting something forward no matter what it is, the correct question you should ask is, “to whom the good”. Somebody is saying it, they are not saying it for nothing, they are saying it for something. Somebody is going to benefit, we want to know who.

Now let’s have a look at man. A man has five senses and he has a common sense to coordinate the five, beside that he has an intellect, and inside that he has his imminent spirit, his initiative self, his inner self. Now, a man can place the accent of consciousness anywhere he likes within his being. And where he habitually places it THERE will be the centre that determines what kind of a benefit. So if a man places himself in the intellect and makes a statement out of that, that statement is benefitting the intellect. The intellectual statement and every part of the organism witnesses itself. So when the statement comes out of the individual, you should say, “what centre in him is saying this?” And to find out what centre you say, “what centre gets the benefit if I believe it?” So if a man places himself in the five senses and then recommends something, he is only recommending the activity of the five senses enjoined to their function. If he stands in the zone of common sense and speaks he will talk about common sense and only common sense will get the benefit. If he stands in the intellect, only the intellect will get the benefit. And if he stands in the imminent spirit when he speaks, the imminent spirit will get the benefit. The important thing is to know that any individual man can and does have a general stress accent somewhere in his organism, that this is subject to periodic change according to cyclic law and therefore the things that come out of him are always benefitting a part of his organism.

Let’s …to this equal man (?) and examine the same proposition. If a man speaks out of the lower belly, usually in wartime, and a voice comes out of the mouth saying here, lo, I may be dead tomorrow, the voice has come from below. All you have to say is who gets the benefit if I believe it. And as soon as you discover who gets the benefit, what part of the organism gets the benefit, then you know who said it, namely the one who said it. Because in the doctrine of sub-ents, a sub-ent is always self-witnessing. Every being is self-witnessing, and therefore as soon as you know who gets the benefit you know who said it. So if a man, having become impotent physically talks about the community of minds you know that he is talking about the community of minds because that is the only level at which he can get the benefit. Therefore if you ask yourself the question who is getting the benefit of this statement as soon as you have discovered who gets the benefit you know who said it. And when you know the level from which that voice comes consciously you can decide whether you are going to cooperate at that level or not. That is a matter for your personal will and direction. And if you don’t know this fact, that these voices come from different levels and that they shift about according to periodic law within an individual, then you are reactive to the stimuli given to you by other people. The hidden persuaders can go to work on you if you don’t know that every part of your organism has its own voice. Remember that we said that nothing succeeds but that which loves your call (?) and every cell is loving its own function. The stomach loves one thing, and the navel loves another. And the genitalia love another. The heart loves something, the right lung something, the left lung something, the head something, and so on. The lips love something, the nostrils love something, the eyes do. An expression like “the lust of the eyes” means what it says: Eyes actually enjoy looking at beautiful colours, so that they are reactive to colours. Ears enjoy harmonious sounds that they are reactive to. If you don’t know that each part of your organism loves something and will move towards it presented or will shrink back in terror if you threaten it, then you are reactive to any person who knows those facts and can present you with the appropriate stimuli.

We repeat once more that we are dealing with exactly the same thing that commercial men are dealing with, they are dealing with it from outside and deliberately restimulating zones of fear and hope within the organism to provoke unconsidered reaction which places cash and property into other hands. Whereas it is our purpose to become reflexively self-conscious and to penetrate into the somatic zones and discover within them all locked-up energies which would be reactive if they were left locked up. And this process of penetrating into them causes a progressive release of the energies induces freedom from the stimulus situation. And we can say that no man is free until in fact he is no longer reactive to an external stimulus situation.

Whatever we do in a situation, from freedom, coming out of freedom will not be reactive and therefore will not be conditioned by the past. Notice the peculiar nature of the reaction. A reaction is only possible providing the person has been hurt in some way. There must be a degree of hurt before he is made reactive. The innocent are not reactive. And if a person gets hurt in even a small measure he becomes reactive; so if he is reactive, there are zones of pain within him. To gain freedom is the same thing as to penetrate consciously into zones of pain. Now this is the affirmation of the cross again. If we like to put little zones of pain and mark them with a cross, we can do so. We are crucified within the body wherever we have endured a pain and shut down on it because it was a pain. To release ourselves from the cross, to be resurrected, is to penetrate with consciousness into that private hell, that recorded zone of pain, and then to come out into that zone again into the light. Resurrection then is a possibility for every sub-ent, and his endured pain. Resurrection can occur in parts of the organism every day. If you take the fact that the one cell divides itself into two cells as the nucleus splits and both halves get a bit, it goes on dividing in the same way until it is a mass of little cells, each with its own nuclear intelligence, then any single cell is equivalent to the whole cell or to any other cell. This means to say that if one of those cells suffers a pain and is darkened by it, is killed by it, then it needs resurrecting. Resurrection can occur in part. The time process is a process with a continuous generation of deaths, and if you are lucky and remember your imminent spirit, continuous entry into deaths to make resurrection. So the whole man can die and be resurrected, and a part of a man can die and be resurrected. And because of the terrific amount of work needed, the terrific amount of energy needed to resurrect all men in one go, in fact in the temporal process, he is resurrected in bits. If we can reclaim lost bits of ourselves that have been hurt, if we can reclaim one a day we are doing very well. If we can reclaim the basic injuries that we’ve been done within perhaps a year of work, then we are free to go on and look downright more intelligent. If we don’t reclaim our basic zones of turbulence, if we don’t resurrect them, we are in fact being conditioned in all our work by their attitude. And it is very important at this point if you are dealing with people at all who are in any way sick or negative to recognise the high suggestibility of pain zones. Pain zones don’t want to be opened. They don’t want to. The imminent spirit would open them if it became reflexively aware. But there is resistance from the cells that have been hurt. So if you are dealing with a person and the person refuses to listen, it isn’t the person who is refusing to listen, it is the zones of pain. So if someone is debating a problem with you and you find resistance there, do not attribute it to the person. The person is never resistant. The intelligent person, the person is intelligent, the resident intelligence within that soma, in that body, is never resisting those things which would restore its wholeness to it. But because of the nature of the pain zones, they are resistant to being opened because they put a wall round themselves because they were under attack. And they don’t want to take the wall down because they hear from inside I am about to die. If I look at that thing I will die, they say. We have to penetrate into those, knowing that they will resist. And we must never fall into the error of thinking that the person is resisting. Because if we do we will generate personal animosity. Now if you once get out of relation with a person you have created a new situation of pain. Remember our own diagram of two beings in relation. They can relate at the somatic level, body to body, by simply knocking against each other, or they can relate where A takes his intelligence and penetrates to the physical body of the other and assesses its mode of reaction, and then A adjusts himself to B’s mechanicality. Or both can penetrate to each other’s imminent centre as spiritual intelligence. Now “thou” is the expression of Martin Buber’s, thou. Each one is an “I” to itself and a “Thou” to the other. There is a relation “I-Thou –I-thou” from centre to centre. There is another relation “I-it” from centre to the other being’s body, and there is a relation it-it, body to body, pure mechanicality. Now, the worst error a psychiatrist can make would be, when a patient comes to him who is unaware of his imminent spirit, for him it doesn’t exist, and he is identified with a very large zone of painful turbulence, and the psychiatrist is supposed to know. But in general, if he is a Freudian, the imminent spirit doesn’t exist for him either, and he is identified with a concept, the concept of the dynamics of psyche, the nineteenth century view of the world and the evolution and so on. Its materialistic, its not in the centre, and this psychiatrist, the Freudian, he is not going to look at the patient from his own point of view. And the result will be that, because he is not aware of the inert centre in himself he cant become I-Thou to the other being. His concept won’t let him. So if the patient now starts arguing with him, because he doesn’t think that there is an imminent spirit in the patient he thinks the patient is arguing with him and he can actually do something he is not supposed to do even in theory: he can get annoyed with the resistance of the patient. He can actually shout at the patient and say, “You don’t just want to accept the treatment”. Now this actually occurs. A psychiatrist who argues with their patient and try to convict them of resistance, not knowing that this resistance can never come from intelligence because the intelligence itself in the centre has only the will to make a whole out of its being. And therefore, whenever there is reactivity and resistance to health, it can never come from the person. If you think it does you identify the person with the problem, the superstress tension, and you then proceed to condemn the person for being ill, when it is the illness that brought him to you. Now if we understand this in ordinary human relations we can say this: If you can get into a relation with imminent human spirit with another person their somatic reaction to you is a matter of no moment. If there is a loss of temper, resistance, irritability and so on, you know that it can’t be the intelligent centre of that person that is so behaving. And consequently you spontaneously forgive that behaviour because it is mechanical and pain-driven. And it isn’t the person. The person is not rejecting you. So if in a debate you make a statement out of your centre and as it is traversing the somatic zone on the person, a reaction sets in and he shouts back at you and he says, “rubbish”, when as a matter of fact all you’ve said is “two and two is four”, instead of thinking that the person has disagreed with you, rejected your person, and then going into identification in your soma, you keep yourself out of it, know that you have stimulated by some word some painful record within that being and that the record is reacting. So then you penetrate again to the centre, you apologise for the disturbance caused and try to discover the trigger word. If you both work together in this way you can unlock these reactive zones. Remember what Tolstoi said, we have said it many times before? When a surgeon operates on someone he uses an anaesthetic. When people are operating on each other’s souls, they need an anasthetic. He said the anaesthetic for a soul operation is love. If you love somebody, really love them, then their activities are of no account. All reactivity, all aggression, all resistance is pathological. There is something the matter with it. The cells have been injured. A cell cannot react unintelligently unless it has been hurt. Every cell in the body has a function. It does that function perfectly unless it is hurt. But if it has been hurt it is on guard. And its on-guard-ness will make it defend itself. And because it is on guard it has put a wall round itself, and because it has put a wall round itself it is in the dark. So the act of self-defense is the same thing as the act of self-induced blindness.

We have done a very good method to help each other to escape the hidden persuaders, that is to say, we watch each other’s reactivity, we never identify the reactivity with the person, and when we think that we have discovered something to which another person is reactive then in love we tell them that we think we have observed a certain kind of reaction. And if we have the right feeling when we tell them it will be acceptable. If we have the wrong feeling when we say it it will be attacked. So if our motive is perfect we can say anything. And if our motive is to injure or to be superior to the other person, then the tone that comes out isn’t quite right, and it goes into the somatic zone with its resonances – in effect it is an attack. So it is only in the fact of this perfectly pure motive that goes from centre to centre that we can dodge the result of reactive argument.


Any five-minute point to raise?


Q: These unconscious determinants whether you have pleasure or pain and the feeling has built a wall around an idea or a reaction, are they the things that determine the karmic pathway of those people?

E: Yes, yes. If you remember that Karma itself, which means action and reaction differs from kama only by the insert of the “r”, - “kama” means desire, the Hindu eros, and “karma” means the rulership of desire. You can see immediately that this “KAR”- K-function and this “MA” - M-function – closing activity, substantial activity. The closure is the same thing as desiring, appropriating substance. KARMA – “I take to myself this substance”. It is the Hindu God of Love. Love-appropriation, the love of possessing urge, the love that says you shall be mine and nobody elses, and as soon as it has made a closure, it has created for itself a zone, differentiated from other zones, and therefore is gone under periodic law so we insert the “R” into it. It goes: closure – differentiation of substance, and that is the law of KAR. Each time we close something it will be opened later. Because if it is closed in time it must be opened in time. That which is eternally closed or eternally open will remain so. But that which is open in time must close in time. And that which is closed in time must open in time. So the law of KARMA is the law of appropriation of substances. Of the desire, Cupid, little god of love that desires. So the whole of the KARMA of a person is desires of that person in their totality determine the mode of differentiation of that person out of the wisdom sphere. It takes him out of absolute equilibrium, precipitates him into a serial process of action and thus exposes him to serial stimuli which disequilibrate him in specific ways determind by the original desires in which he indulged himself. So that he must always receive back from the equilibrated sphere the results of the peculiar kind of disequilibrium that he affirmed.

Q: These small determinants that you have. Are they subsidiaries to twelve major determinants? Are they the thing that you are working to control in the knaves of Hercules (?)


E: Yes, or in the symbolism of the Zodiac, if you like.

Q: Well, all these things divide into twelve, don’t they? With the twelve disciples…

E: Yes, that’s based on the fourfold man, the threefold man and the coordinator, sub-divided again. The twelve arises from three-three-three. That’s 3,3,3 and the coordinator has also 3. The part that deals with the head, the part that deals with the chest, the part that deals with the belly. Does the twelve arise from the three? Means simply three times four. And the fourth again is the tenth. Once you get that mystical word “120” which is very important in certain periodic law. In other words if you like, you can place everything to which you are reactive somewhere in this twelve-fold man. And by twelve-fold man you mean the three-fold man with three parts, divided into three parts and the coordinator divided into three parts. Because there is coordination by intellect, coordination by feeling, coordination by will. And if you place these round the zodiac you rediscover the symbolism of the twelve signs.


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