[Not verbatim. Please fix.-JH]

 

.IMPOTENCE

 

The subject of a talk given by Eugene Halliday to a meeting in Liverpool. Tan Y Garth tape number 233.

 

Very often we have a question about power, what power is, about what to do with it. Now we have a question about the lack of power. The question is, "How do we consider impotence on the three levels of being?"

 

We are going to consider how we deal with impotence on four levels of being. The three-part man is tied together on the spinal cord as coordinator. We will write in will, feeling and thinking on the three levels of being, coordination on the spine, and we will pro­ceed to examine what it is that causes impotence on any of these levels.

 

We will take the most obvious one first. Down in the belly land is the place where we digest food. The correspondent centre in the head is the mouth, the cake-hole. We draw a tube from the mouth down to the belly land to show the passage down which the food falls. Our food is simply material which we put into the hole in the lower part of the face and allow it to drop down to where it will be dealt with, chemi­cally, by activities of a variety of forces, to break it down to release the hidden energy in the mat­ter. This is a process similar to the process of nuclear division, similar to making an atom bomb only it is a little quieter and less destructive. If we see that if we don't put the food in and send it down to be digested, broken down, and the energies released, we will not be able to conduct the other functions of the body. We have talked about a story about the organs of the body, all having a terrible argument about who was the most important. The head said it was the most important because it could think clearly what to do. The heart thought it was the most important because it felt what is worth doing, but, the belly began to sulk and refused to eat and thereby gained the victory over the other two. Because it did not eat, the thinking began to fail and the heart began to become agitated. So, the belly won the argument about who was the superior by going on strike. This is the kind of victory that pleases the Marxists. We will agree that an army marches on its stomach, as Napoleon believed. The peculiar thing is, that the matter that we put into the stomach for digestion, can be returned into power only because it is already a condensation of power.

 

If we remember that we have a gross material body, and a subtle body of ideas, and a causal body of will or higher emotion, then we can see, with the physical level of the belly, looked upon that part which is centred on the gross material, will correspond with the gross material part of the world and the material food we put into it will then be the lowest part, the mass inertia. In modern physics, the concept of matter has been displaced by the concept of mass energy. There is no matter as conceived in the nineteenth century, matter is simply, a modality of force. When forces rotate, the rotation, the in-working and the forces involved, whereby we use the word in-ertive, in-working, this in-working of the forces and the rotation of them, establishes a point of reference with inertia, but it is only a force that has come in and started to rotate that constitutes matter. There is really, no matter in the old-fashioned sense of the word as opposed to force. Textbooks that you still find lying about on second-hand book stalls say that the universe is made of matter and force. Such textbooks might be less than a hundred years old. Today, matter and force are not in oppo­sition because matter is a behaviour of force.

 

When we put our piece of cake into the mouth and let it fall down, the cake will turn into force, into energy, simply because it is force. All that we have to do to turn that force in the cake into will power, is to break the inertia of its rotating motion and turn the rotation into a translation. If we can interfere with the constituent motion that constitutes matter, that instead of spin­ning, it flies out, develops a centrifugal force, we have turned matter into force. We have done so only because a primary motion, a translating motion, was caught in and began to rotate. It would seem therefore, that will-power is really the power hidden in food. We will see how many kinds of food there are later. At the gross material level it is simply the stuff that people have conditioned themselves to put into their mouths and drop into their stomachs and work upon with acids and so on, to break them down to release this rotating energy and convert it into the energy of motion of the muscles. The old way of spelling will would have been with a GU instead of with a W. You get this in the French spelling of the word, William and you get it in the word guilt. We have said before that guilt is simply the psychological state that one is in when one's will has been crucified by some action performed. So, if we do a certain thing, the thing we have done places us in a crucif­ied position so that we cannot get off it so that we must now expose ourselves to punishment for the thing done, we say we are experi­encing guilt, that is the crucifixion of the will. The exposing of it in a crucified position to action from outside, reaction from the environment against which the will had been released. The gullet means the little gull. The bird that flies through the air and is called seagull really means a flying appetite, primary gross material power. G for gross material and -ull for the power, going. So the gull in the word gullet or gull, the w in the word will have really the same significance.


 

We take gross matter and we return it to primary motion. The u which is the same as a v in the Hebrew an o, uvo, ovu, all mean the same thing, they mean power. When power goes into rotation and establishes itself by compression, it is uttering the Red Indian greeting, 'ug' and symbolises the passage of power into gross objectification. Because this has occurred, because power has con­densed itself as matter, therefore the process from matter to power is possible, the o becomes pu. It is obvious, then we can have impotence of the will simply by being deprived of energy, by not eating, by not being exposed to sunlight and so on.

 

Impotence of the will can occur simply though lack of energy. One can be too tired or one can be deficient in materials for breaking down for food. There are various methods for getting these energies. Solar radi­ation is a very important one. It is through solar radiation and photosynthesis that we get most of the energies in our food. If we like to think about a lettuce as a certain amount of sunshine objectified, it is quite a legitimate image. Impotence of the will, at the belly level therefore, can be simply a lack of food, a lack of rest and, if anybody has been really tired or had a long fast, beyond a certain limit, we can fast much longer that we think, when we haven't trained, if this experience of extreme tiredness is undergone, through lack of sleep or lack of food, then one becomes aware that the will has got a relation with the food we take in. Either gross material food, or solar radiations or other radiations that might be available. So we said, very simply, one kind of impotence is simply the impotence of lack of power, the sheer lack of the material that supplies the energy that we need. We could call this a negative kind of impotence based on defi­ciency. Simple, the lack of the energy.

 

If we now climb from the level of the belly into the level of the chest where the feeling centres are more obviously centred as we can see by the changes in breathing and heartbeat under emotional stimuli, we find that we have two kinds of feeling, plus and minus. A yes and a no. Impotence at this level can arise by a simple contradiction of a situation, where the situation may present us with equal emotional stimuli in contrary directions. We can have an emotion that says "Yes, come here," and simultaneously, another emotion saying “No, don't come here.” If these two emotions, yes and no, are presented together, then the result is stasis at the emotional level. There is impotence in the emotions. We find this very often when somebody has not had an emotional call made upon them. An example of this was a young girl whose relation with her father was, in no sense, emotional so that she had not grown up emotionally at all. She had a quite rational relation with him but no emotion. The result was, that all the emotional potential in her that would have said “Yes” to say, sitting on her father's knee, never expressed itself if it wanted to come out. So, that when she started to move towards him, the memories of the previous types of relation she had with him, a cold, rational relation, inhibited the movement towards him, so that she could not go and sit on his knee. She wanted to and she couldn't. She wanted to, because she could feel this potential of feeling. At the same time, she didn't want to because she never had done and she was afraid of repulse. So, she had yes and no simultaneously inside her. So, she stood a few feet away from her father and looked at him and looked as if she wanted to do something and not wanted to do something simultaneous­ly. This simultaneous contrary stimulation, towards and away from at the emotional level. This is a fairly common one but not in its very pure form without a complicational factor of thinking. We will go up to the thinking level and then we will return to consider the relation of the three.

 

At the thinking level, we can have ideas of how things work. Remem­ber, 'how' is in reference of the mechanics of action and why is a word concerned with the motive of the action. At the thinking level of 'how', the thinking process is concerned with the mechanical means to success in the action. At this point it is possible to have impotence too, because one may be deficient in the necessary idea information about how something works. Supposing some little old lady buys a TV set and one day it does not go on. So, she rings up for the electronics expert who comes, takes it away and charges her for a new tube, say 26 pounds and brings it back and does what he could have done in the first place, he plugs the aerial in the back. That was all that had been happening, it had been pulled out when it had been cleaned. This is an actual incident, not a fabri­cated one. She was deficient in knowledge. She did not know that at the back of the set there was a wire with a little thing on and you push it in a hole. All she knew was the thing had been installed, it had gone and now it wasn't going. She did not know that in care-lessly swinging her hoover about she unplugged the aerial. So, at the thinking level, again, there can be impotence through lack of information. That is one kind. Generally, people are aware when they lack this kind of information and they try to get hold of somebody who has the information and persuade that person to bring it into operation. If they can't get that person then they begin to feel frustrated. That kind of frustration is fairly clear because there you know that you don't know a necessary thing, X, and you believe that somebody else does know it and yet you can't find the person. You are frustrated and you know what about.

 

At another level, the thinking process can refute itself. That is to say, part of your education at the level of idea input can make a certain statement, say, in the field of biology and another part of your education, say, in the field of chemistry, can make another statement and these two statements may be contradictory, but, because you have learned at a different time, say with a day or two between, you do not bring these two ideas together and see that they refute each other. Therefore you have two ideas in your mind which contradict you and it may not be obvious to you until you come into a test condition. Perhaps, in a certain stimulus situ­ation these two ideas spring to mind together and this immobilises the thinking process because now they are saying contrary things about the same situation. You have then an experience of what it is to be impotent in thought, not through deficiency, but through self refutation of the idea system itself, incurring inconsistencies of the ideas.

 

On the fourth level, the spinal cord, the coordination line, another kind of impotence is possible. It is the failure of power to bring into coordination the thinking, feeling and willing func­tions of the body. Its general cause is sheer lack of speed of perception. if you can speed up your perceptions so that you are flying, very rapidly from what you are thinking about to what you are feeling about what you are thinking and what you are willing to do about what you are feeling and thinking, and then fly backwards and forwards, up and down the spinal cord, so that you present yourself, more and more with the relation between thinking and feeling and willing, if you can do this, then you are potent because you have all the information in the mind you need, you have the feeling you like it or you don't like it and you have the will-power either to confirm it or to deny it, simply because you are speeding your process up. But, if your process is too slow, your coordination will suffer, because you might see something with your eye that means you forget, and be rather slow in adapting your emotion to it and then you might be slow again in using your will to do something about it. You know that if you drink alcohol like plum wine, or something, and then you start driving a car, your reactions are generally slower than they would be if you were sober. You might see a lamppost coming towards you and it might look as if it was coming at ten miles an hour when it really was coming at about eighty because your perception has slowed down. You see something of this in the high speed stratosphere planes that fly at 1000 or 1500 miles an hour and the time between two planes coming together is so short that the human organism has extreme difficulty in making the necessary adjustments to avoid a crash. So there can be a deficiency in coordination by sheer failure to speed up the process of perception of these three functions.

 

If we go back to consider this again, when we come to this basic will in the belly we say that it depends primarily on food, that is matter that is taken in specially to break down and supply the energy. Let us suppose for a moment that we have no food and no energy input at all, then nothing is going to happen because all work is an expression of energy. As soon as we put an unlimited supply of energy into the will so that the belly is continuously supplying the rest of the organism with forces to utilise, then we raise a problem of whether we are going to direct this energy, which of itself is essentially positive, that is, capable of work, of positing a form, producing changes and so on. This purely posi­tive energy, when it comes into a situation where the feelings can say either yes or no, the will prefers, normally, to say yes, because the will is naturally, positive. It is a force that works. It will not become negative unless something opposes the will.

 

If something opposes the will when it is moving towards something then the energy of the will begins to pile up behind the resis­tance. Let us draw a line to represent the will going along without any impe­dance at all. Nothing is stopping it, it just keeps on moving through space and thoroughly enjoying itself. This will is Sentient Power. As power it is producing the changes, as sentience it is aware that it is doing so. So that when the will is travel-ling along without opposition it enjoys itself very, very much. This movement of the will, without any impedance whatever is what we mean by bliss and is what the Buddhists call Ananda. It is the motion of the serpent in space as it goes about unimpeded. It is also love, because it is moving simply  to develop itself, to propagate itself in infinite space. But, as soon as we put an ob-stacle in the way of this primary will, because the will is energy, it piles up against the obstacle and turbulates and there­fore it raises its temperature. This raising of the temperature of the will

is what we experience, psychologically, as frustration. If the obstacle is not very, very strong, the amount of turbulence gener­ated, before it breaks down is not very high. If the obstacle is a very, very strong one so that the amount of available will power cannot break through it, it piles up against it and turbulates terribly and gets very overheated. We then say this is experienced as hate. The free movement of it as it is going along we call love, but the impeded movement and the movement impeded by a strong obstacle, we call hate, so that we say, hate is love deprived of its fulfilment in its action. Hate is love deprived of its object. When we come to consider that the Absolute energy of Sentient Power has condensed itself into the material world and therefore, food itself is Sentient Power, condensed, then we can see that when we break it down we are releasing energies of similar qualities to the energies which precipitated themselves into that material form.

 

It is from this that you can see the meaning of rules about diet. That each form of food is actually an objectification of certain kinds of Sentient Power.  That means that each kind of food has a defi­nite psychological correspondence. So that if you eat one kind of food you will feel happy, if you eat another you will feel miser­able. This governs all the early priestly rules about diet. Each kind of material being really a condensed Sentient Power, a con­densed psychological principle, necessarily acts back on the psyche when it is released and therefore induces certain psycho­logical states. All the drugs used in mental disorders are based on this fact. They act on the sensorium simply by reversing the objectified process of spirit, by returning the objectified spirit or matter or food or drug, back into the original state that was before it was condensed.

 

When the energy from food is climbing up into a situation and succeeding easily in whatever it is doing we say that it is posi­tive and it is saying "Yes" to it. But, if we were merely to say yes, then there would be a perpetual propagation of this power and this power would never formulate itself because it would never have a resistance to overcome. If we draw a wiggly line to represent the propagation haphazardly of this power, this wiggling motion is the chaotic motion of the ancient philosophers, a motion in chaos is a non-ordered motion. In its continuous wiggling about, occasionally it crosses over itself and it makes a rotating zone. This rotating zone is an ordered zone because the word order, root, 'ord', is simply the same word, sound shift d to t, as the rota. There is no orderly system other than a recurrent system, a rotating system of force. This rotating system spontaneously comes into existence through the prior chaotic motion of Sentient Power. The so-called chaotic motion is simply a movement which has not got any mass inertia. By mass inertia we mean that the energy has wound itself in, the 'in' in inertia, and is working, that is the 'ert' in inertia, and affirming that process. So if we say - in ert ia, and read it boustrophedon, it says ia - ert - in, affirm the work inside. This means that every material body, every material par­ticle, is simply the affirmation by a spirit or Sentient Power or force of a zone in which it encloses itself and rotates and com­presses itself. The mass inertia, is simply the amount of energy working in that zone. The word 'energy' should be the same word. En for in, er, g for t and y for affirmation, energy is the same as inertia. The affirmation of the work inside means energy.

 

When we imagine this Sentient Power to come in from the chaotic free motion, in the act of rotating it makes 'dome', it restrains itself in a sphere, and you will observe dome, boustrophedon is 'mode', it is the way in which something is done. The zone of dome is the zone of order and beyond that is the zone of chaos. Orderly beings define chaos as undesirable. Chaotic beings define order as boredom. William Blake was well aware of this when he took sides with the chaotic and this is why he would rather be a devil than have a three foot square lawn neatly to mow every evening in the sunshine. To him the mode of doming was not a good thing because it meant the imposition of restrictions on the free action of spirit. But, to those inside the dome, it means security, it means a pro­tecting wall, it means nobody can come and harm them and it means we can predict everything, we can do what we like because we know what is going to happen.

 

So the beings that are domed are those beings that have specialised in modes of control, and we find that the civilised world is based on modes of doming. Those people who have affirmed the control have filled the earth with cities, that is with control domes, and as the cities have grown progressively, by ingesting the energies of chaos into them and thus pushing out their boundaries like the expanding universe, so the inter-spaces between various dom(e)ains have been reduced. So, that as various civilised people have made their cities grow and grow and grow, the amount of common lands and waste lands available for gypsies decreases. We see this in the obvious dilemma of the nomadic peoples like the Arabs, and the growth of civilisation of the modern state is really forcing the nomadic people to settle down. Either they settle down or they will have nowhere to settle at all very shortly.

 

In the Bible, Jacob symbolises dome and Esau symbolises chaos. The Hebrew for this won't dome is Edom. E means the field and there is dom(e). Edom is outside the dome. Esau does not like it, he hates the dome. He wan­ders about chaotically. Esau was an hairy man means he was not bothering to shave, he was not a civilised person. Jacob was a smooth man. The 'cob' in Jacob is the same as dome. It means lock the thing up and make a house of it. Yacob means affirm the locking and closure of that house, but Edom means 'refuser'. This Jacob is the fellow who supplants or takes away the heritage of Esau by a trick. He sets up a hierarchy of power when, in fact, he does not himself believe in it. He doesn't believe in the immediate applica­tion of power, he believes in the indirect method. So, he puts on hairy gloves at his mother's request and he receives the blessing of his father and thus derives the benefits that should come to Esau, to himself.

 

We can see that the chaotic movement can be called impotent in one special sense that if we translate the 'im' as in, as we should and the pot in potency as power, then the impotence is 'in power'. Chaotic power can be seen within infinity and is simply the power that is not rotating  and ordering itself, that is, subjecting itself to recurrent behaviour. Remember order only means do it again and again and again and again till you have established expectancy. This expectancy, psychologically is the same thing as inertia physically. If you get up at seven in the morning and go off to work at eight and come back at five and so on, if you do this every day you will condition your organism until it deserves a medal for orderliness. A news bulletin reported that now even ladies are given a badge for orderliness where perhaps a hundred years ago they would not have been given a badge at all. Now they have got a badge they are very pleased!

 

We can see here, that the kind of potency in chaos, the in-potence, the 'ence' means essence, the essence of the power in the field Infinite, that kind of power is no use to a being of order. A being of order is a being who wants to enclose, to rotate to make a recurrent system so that it can establish a periodicity and a rhythm.

 

We know that in religion and philosophy, the early thinkers were concerned with the rhythms of nature and specifically, the seasons of the year. In Egypt it is possible to predict the flooding of the Nile simply because the earth rotates and travels round the sun and certain weathers result from the recurrent motion of the earth. Those people who learn these recurrent systems first are the domed or mode people. They are the people who saw how the universe works, recurrently. Once they saw it and the others didn't then they began to utilise it to gain power over their brothers who were not so pre-occupied with recurrent orders.

 

If we like, we can see two types of human being as basic to our four Zodiacal divisions. One type we can call the domed type and the other we can call the undomed or free type. The Egyptian priests, studying the recurrence of phenomena in the Nile Valley, were now able to predict and they able to subdue people who could not predict and they fabricated a lot of mythological stories to obscure the fact that what they were really saying was based en­tire­ly on material rhythms in the earth. By obscuring the ground of their authority they managed to persuade people that they had greater authority than they really possessed and by their power of prediction they were able to establish when to do certain things.

 

We have, more or less, a four season system with spring, summer, autumn and winter and the agricultural cycle is based upon this and those who know the agricultural cycle are basically the ones who are feeding the others. Because the agricultural cycle requires knowledge of astronomy so the agriculturalists grew more and more conscious of the periodic nature of universal action. With the aid of this knowledge they built the agricultural civilisations in great river deltas and elsewhere and with their knowledge, they dictated to other beings who, temperamentally, didn't want to settle down in this agricultural recurrent manner. If we wrote inside the dome, agriculture , outside it we could write the hunters. The earth cultivators and the hunters are sort of two primary types of human beings that we see. The ones that settle down and dig in a certain place are tied by the earth that they dig and the ones who do not dig run about chasing their food. They might be hunting radishes or truffles or deer, but they are on the move all the time instead of cultivating the ground. But, the ones who are on the move develop a certain type of character in psycho­logical response based on free action. The ones that settle down develop another kind of culture based on bound action or restric­tion. There is a certain inherent dialectical relationship between these two. The one that is in-potence itself, the Infinite Field is the hunter. We see this 'hun' in hunter and the 'ter' which is the same as tora(h), law, this hun means the power that is running about. The hunnish peoples, the ancestors of the Huns that have been confused with the Germans, were people who believed that they aught to run about the surface of the earth. The others, who believed in doming and building a wall, settling down, developed a totally different world-view. The ones who settled down developed a hierarchical view based on form, that is, on ritual, on social structure, on costume, on manners and so on, whereas the ones who run about outside the dome had a hierarchy of immediate power.

 

Each one can be considered to be impotent outside its own field. If we take a city-bred, domed man, a man who knows how to control him-self, who had very, very good manners, when we throw him into the middle of a vast plain where he has never been, and we sit him on a wild Mongolian pony, he probably will not do very well because he does not know the laws governing outside, namely the laws of alert­ness, the laws of free motion of power. In the same way, if we get one of the hunters and put him inside the town hall behind a desk he will probably be a little confused and certainly claustrophobic about staying there eight hours a day. These are two different temperaments and each one is potent in his own field, one in the finite field of the dome and the other in the Infinite Field of space, but, where it is said that the whole world lies in the grip of the devil it means that the whole material world is lying in the grip of the domers.

 

In astronomy the universe is said to be expanding. The kind of process of osmosis and endosmosis in the body where forces go through the membranes of cells, and they can go through both ways, osmosis-endosmosis, in the same way, the forces from the Infinite chaos can get through the rotating band of the macrocosmic sphere and they can they proceed to worm this sphere out and make it bigger and bigger. When John the Baptist sees Christ coming, he says of him, he must increase and I must decrease. Any finite system was first of all, a force that was in Infinity and has rotated and bound itself up, but, it has its origin in the Infi­nite. The Infinite is in-pressing itself to rotate and in so doing is making an orderly zone. But, this orderly zone is an object- ification  of that which transcends order, absolutely, name­ly, the Infinite. In positing this orderly zone it has negated its free state. So, if we put a cross inside this circle, like an elec­tronic engineer would, to symbolise the positive, what has been posited in the dome is a negation, that is, a finiting process. Whereas, if we go outside of the dome and write the negative, what has been negated is the negation posited in the finite.

 

We have had this before when we said, to  create is to arc or rotate a force and therefore to produce a finite, but a finite is a negative. Therefore to create is to posit a negation. If we rub out this positive negation we are negating a negation. Two negations make a positive. The positive Absolute is that which is Infinite and therefore is not posited in the finite sense at all.

 

Whatever is fed into the objective state from infinity is simply that which was Infinite and has now become, through self-object-ification, finite. When it does so, it has fulfilled a purpose. Remember purpose, pro positum, that which is placed before for realisation. The object, the orb, thrown in infinity, is simply a zone in which the powers of infinity have started to rotate. They have made a finite zone into which energy can be poured to a point of total fulfilment. This is the meaning of the word satisfaction. The 'sat' in satisfaction means being. The 'fac' is facere meaning to make, to do. Satisfaction is that state in which one is full of being. To be full of being is not simply to have a perimeter, it is to have the space within the perimeter full of force, actualising itself. If we make a finite sphere and then insert force into it, then force, by the nature of the constraint of the sphere, rotates. It is this rotating within the closure of the sphere that we mean when we talk about order, that is repetition of form. If we like to demonstrate it we can get a bowl and we can connect a tube to the water tap and we can fill the bowl by simply squirt­ing the water th­rough the tube. Because the bowl is round when the water leaves the tube and goes in the bowl, it goes round. We see that that which otherwise would translate freely from the pipe, arriving in the constraint of the bowl, is forced to rotate. In rotating in this way, it has gained order, but in gaining its order it has lost its free initiative.

 

In both this dome, which is im-potent, that is to say, a power standing in itself, and that transcendent Infinite, which is also im-potent, are exactly equal and opposite in one respect, namely, that the concept of the boundary, presupposed by finite existence, limits the finite outwardly and limits infinity inwardly. Towards every finite centre we can say that infinity is restricted where the finite object exists but we can also equally say, that from the centre of the finite to its perimeter, the finite is limited by the infinite beyond itself. So that, when we say, to draw a circle is simultaneously to include and exclude, to include the finite and exclude the Infinite, we are saying that these two, the Infinite and the finite are equally valid. They are concepts, and concepts have pairs and we must assert a pair of opposites together or deny them together.

 

We see that this question of impotence is a very subtle one because impotence might mean the power is held inside, or, it might mean there is no power held inside. Supposing we get a balloon and we blow it up and then we spray the surface of the balloon with a special plastic which penetrates the rubber and then sets it very, very hard, so that it is quite rigid, and then we draw all the air out and then seal it up. We now have a vacuum. We can say that this one is impotent in the negative sense, it has not got any power on the inside, it cannot explode. It will implode if we increase the pressures on the outside of it. You can do this experiment by getting a metal can, an ordinary coffee tin will do with an air­tight lid. First of all you heat it over the gas stove, then you put the lid on it, then you take it away and put it in a cold place. While you are watching it, at a certain point, the internal pressures in the can will be less than the external pressures of the air and the can will implode. It will suddenly collapse before your eyes because the pressure of the relatively extracted air inside has dropped rather than that outside. That is implosion. That could represent the kind of impotence caused by lack of energy. Like the one we mentioned in the first place the lack of will power because you haven't eaten enough or rested enough.

 

There is another kind where you stack the sphere with energy, and it is all there, but you re-enforce the perimeter of the zone and make it so strong, that although the inside is in very, very high tension indeed, yet it can't break out. These two kinds of impo­tence, the impotence of dearth or lack and the impotence of excess­ive restraint are both equally valid. So we can find inside our­selves these. The one when we are tired or lacking in food energy and the other one when we feel we can do this job easily if only something be removed that is stopping us. In psychological parlance the thing which is stopping us would be called an inhibiting fac­tor. Something is holding down this marvellous potential. I know a young artist who is going to paint like Michelangelo. To me that means he doesn't know much about Michelangelo because,, of course, Michelangelo is not the greatest painter at all. He is greater as an artist who is naturally a sculptor and who came into painting by a route not really essential to himself. When he paints he simply paints sculptured forms. These forms are perfect but they are not what we call painter's forms, they are sculptor's forms painted. This young artist can feel that something is stopping him. he does not know what it is. It could be what the psychologists call a complex, a negative complex of ideas that are telling him, "Do not do this thing which you are capable of because if you do you will be worse off than if you don't."

 "...happy low, lie down,

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

If you make a success in a field, you might find yourself in a job for life and consequently there may be a purpose in the kind of impotence that is experienced as an inner pressure with an inhibit­ing factor upon it. We have to discover in ourselves, just what is the meaning of the specific kind of impotence we experience. Is it simply that we ought to go to bed a bit earlier or ought to eat a bit more food, or stop expending energy faster than we put it in, or is it that we are stacked with energy and have certain inhibit­ing factors upon us, either psychologically within ourselves, or, external ones like social pressures that don't like the kind of talent that we want to exhibit?

 

We have to find out for ourselves, in ourselves whether we are suffering from the impotence of dearth or the impotence of external restrictions. We have to find this out on three levels, on the level of will basically that is a lack of energy from food or from lack of sleep, or our impotence of feeling, where our feeling for and against are simultaneously presented, so that they contradict each other in a simultaneous yes-no, and impotence of the ideas where we may be simply lacking in ideas or we may have ideas inside us which inhibit other ideas. We can say, because of our original law, the chemistry of all parts of space is the same, that all these types of impotence are simultaneously operating in the aver­age person until he seriously works upon it. But, at any given moment, the type of impotence experienced will depend more on a lack of energy or on restricting influences than it will at another moment. Careful self-observation of behaviour patterns and of feeling responses will tell us whether we are suffering from the impotence of lack or the impotence of external restrictions.

 

Question: Could you check on the double meaning  of the two letters together, like the two Ls in gull, the interchangeability of T and G in 'ert' and 'erg', and why the free  negates the dome in free­dom?

Answer: Remember that each letter has a symbolic value. Once upon a time these letters were drawings of things, plants and animals, parts of man, retentions of all kinds, and they were chosen because they symbolised a kind of function. They have descended to us in a very simplified form and yet they have retained, through the sheer inertia of usage, a large percentage of their original meaning. So if we take the letter N in Egyptian, which is simply the waving of water the ripples on water and we cut this down, for economy's sake and we just draw an up and down, we get the letter N. What they were talking about was the motion of the water. You can see that when you pronounce the letter N, what you are doing with your tongue, against the palette, when you press it, you will see that the palette and the tongue make this form, that the organs of speech are unconsciously mimicking the behaviour of the natural function. If we close the lips on this things and were to draw a circle and then fill it with these things, the circle says, this is bound. The motion inside it says it is still going on. If we make this sound with the lips closed it makes the letter M. This letter M is, simply, motion enclosed so that we can use M as the symbol of mass, meaning mass energy, mass motion, simply a zone in which motion has compacted itself.

 

When we set off with the letter A, the Aleph of the Hebrew, the letter itself is made in a form rather like the letter N only slightly more decorative. It really has three parts. In the Greek it is another shape, looking like the Taurus sign in the Zodiac only turned on its side. All of these equal the Absolute, and the next letter of the alphabet, is a B, which means the zone of bond­age, the dome. So when we are wishing to represent the concept of dome, we simply draw a circle and the earliest form of the letter B is a circle. Another form with a square pen is a square and some-times with a line through it, makes a two-roomed house plan and then you might write it cursively as we do.

 

All letters on the later side of the letter B symbolise finite processes and objects while the one letter prior to the B, the A, symbolises the Absolute. We have said that all the letter of the alphabet mythically, present themselves to God and say, "Please create with us." Each one shouts for himself but God begins with the letter B because B means boundary, it means the B in beginning. He can't start with A because A is Absolute and eternal and the eternal is not a start at all. In the word start you can see the Tarot, the Tarot which is the anagram of the rota, again, and it is the word tart, which means 'sharp' as a reference to the planet Saturn, pressing on a point, sharpening itself up. So, this start­ing process is a finiting process and prior to the start is the Eternal Absolute.

 

When we come to the next vowel in the Hebrew, the letter is E. This E symbolises a hole, an air hole. In Hebrew it is written as if it were a tent with a back and a roof and a little bit of cloth in front to stop the sand from blowing on your feet while you are sitting inside, and there is a ventilation hole for your exhala­tions of alcohol to go out. This letter is called He, it is our letter E, and it symbolises the universal field as opposed to the Infinite Absolute. For the Infinite Absolute we can draw nothing, for the universal field we can draw a circle and put nothing in it. Nothing in it at all, it is just a circle or a zone in which Spirit is going about but we don't want to draw it. We have said that the Aleph level is the level of the Absolute and that is the Godhead, the source of all divinity, but the universal level is the mark of the High Priest or pontiff, who claims to know about this Absolute, but he himself, the pontiff, is actually visible in the finite world. He has got a bondage. He is saying, "I know that beyond this boundary you should not go, and I am the owner of the boundary, I am the voice of the boundary, and I am telling you that the Abso­lute has set up this boundary in order that you don't get lost. In order that you don't get lost, you will pay me to remind you not to go beyond the boundary." This is the priestly function of limiting the limitable. This letter E represents the field of universal, not of Absolute, the field of universal energies, and it is under the dominion of the High Priest.

 

The next letter related to it is the letter called Khet which is our letter H. It is nearly the same as the letter He except there is no air hole, it is blocked, and it is said to mean a hedge. In this phase the thing appears as a ladder, usually with three rungs upon it. We cut the top and bottom off and use only one rung and this ladder or hedge had a variety of uses, like the rod, pole or perch did. You could take this hurdle and you could put several of these together and pen the sheep in with it, or you could use them as a ladder to climb up somewhere. You could do a remarkable lot of things with a few ladders for penning animals in, and therefore this letter H, the aspirant letter we call it, is the letter symbolising all ambition, all hierarchical forces, under the domin­ion, not of the universal, but of the developed individual who we call the hetmen or headmen a man who knows how to give orders from the individual level without an appeal to the universal or the Absolute, who considers himself sufficiently well developed as an individual to order about beings at any level lower than he is. He can't order the universal about because the universal knows the trick. He can't order the Absolute about because the Absolute has no order whatever, it transcends order completely, but he can order about beings below him we represent by the letter K. The letter K symbolises the cupped hand. We can draw a hand simply, and then you turn it on its side and that is a letter Kaph or K and it symbol-ises the idea of control or containing something like a cup, the sa­me way as cup and it means the intellectual, the man who is a good clerk, the clergyman, the man who can write. He receives his orders from the hetman, and he himself has no individual power other than that  vested in him other than the act of writing. The scribes and the monks, who were writing out, copying documents, gradually became the book-keepers of the world, because they could write. They had an intellectual superiority to beings below them. They have no authority whatever over the Hetman or the E man or the A man. Their authority is always over beings below them.

 

The only man below the intellectual is a man, who we say, spends all his time talking through the back of his head. The Hebrew letter is the drawing of the back of a man's head. There is the back of his skull, there is his spinal column (Draw the whole man in) This letter is the letter Q. You can see it in some forms of our Q.   turned round, and it simply means sexuality. A much more obvious symbol of it is when you draw a circle and put a straight line. The circle symbolises female, straight line - male. The circle symbolises anything whatever that is defined and has a boundary. The straight line symbolises any force that can break either in or out of that boundary without permission. The circle is passive relative to the straight line. Below the level of the intellectual, the fellow who can write, the scribe is simply the Q-man or sexually directed man, the man whose whole joy in life is a hole joy in life and he has only this one function, only this one interest. He likes to go and get himself into a sexual relation, and because of certain inhibiting factors imposed upon him by K men, Hetmen and E men, he usually needs alcohol to help him. Alco­hol, of course, comes from the Absolute. Al in alcohol means God, the co means to relate, and the hol(e) means back again into chaos.

 

Alcohol has the funny effect of disco-ordinating the already estab- lished inhibitions of the social code. Therefore it is a very good substance for ingesting for Q men, but the Q man is the lowest kind of man in the sense that in the social hierarchy he is under every­body else's orders. He is under the orders of the clerk because he has to go and get a card and get it stamped. He is under the orders of people who transport him backwards and forwards. He is under the orders of his brewer and his cigarette manufacturer and so on. Then the clerk, the scribe is under the orders of the hetman. The hetman acknowledges that the universal exists, that the priest exists, but he has a very simple reply to the universalists and that is that the universal can act only through the particular and that it acts  through the best particular, best, and the hetman claims to be this best particular and therefore, whatever the priest says about uni­versal truth he says,"Yes I agree with you, you are talking about myself." The universalist, however cannot appeal to anything other than pure logic to estab­lish his case of univer­sality because if he goes beyond the pure logic of the ratio­nale of religion, he goes into the Absolute, beyond the definition. As soon as he goes beyond the definition, he has, unfortunately, inverted the whole process because this same Abso­lute energy is the same energy that heaves in the Q men at his sexual level. As soon as the universal­ist, the high priest tries to go beyond the defini­tion that estab­lishes his right to rule in this priestly manner, and goes into the Absolute, he has gone from the field of relative function to the field of Absolute Power and the Absolute Power can and does func­tion at any level whatever immedi­ately. Therefore he undoes it. Wherever the high priest, wherever the church, has tried to estab­lish its case with pure logic it has had to stop at a certain level, as we see in the summa of Thomas Aquinas, simply if it goes beyond this ultimate reason it turns from a rationale of the uni­verse into the will of the Absolute behind it. At this point it transcends the need for its own exist­ence because, as William Blake says, the lust of the goat is the bounty of God, and the orders may well go the other way. That is to say, that the people who are Q-ued, might, in fact, rise up against the clerks and they might drive the clerks into union, you know that the Q people are con­cerned with union, and drive the clerks to make unions against hetmen, and hetmen have already made their personal union against universal men. All the universal men are then driven into ecumeni­cal councils to try to stop the Absolute from feeding the Q men with the data that over­throw the system.

 

When we are considering the question of potent solutions we should remember to view it both from inside and outside the limiting dome.