INTEGRATION

The text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval Audio 114.

Track 1

I am going to talk about integration of the human being and we are going to talk about it in a very ancient, orthodox way. We all have five of these, unless we have been treated by drugs prenatally and they are connected with different parts of the being, and therefore we can make a five-fold analysis of the human being. And it is very convenient to remember these and place them deliberately on these digits.

Remember that your retinal image is two dimensional and can tell you hardly anything about anything worth bothering about with apart from colour.

If I draw an eye and say this part is the retina, there is a lens, there is an object over there and this object reflects sunlight, which gets in the eye and fall on the retina there. It makes a two-dimensional image. It has got height and width but has no depth. You cannot cull depth from the retinal image. Where you think you can tell depth, you are actually, unconsciously making cross references with other sense organs. If you think that a thing that is very, very bright is near to you and a thing very dim and grey far away, that is conditioning from other factors, from the use of the reason and from the use of the physical locomotion.

I want us to be very clear that the retinal image, as such, is two-dimensional but it cannot tell you anything more significant than an ink blot, and that the interpretation of this ink blot or this retinal image does not depend on the ink blot or the retinal image but it depends on other experiences that we have had. So think, if I were to abstract that retinal image and make it into a little, thin, skin like that, which is made of rods and cones, all over, and the light falling on the surface of this thing gives the information of nothing except colour and a degree of light and darkness, it tells us nothing whatever about the depth, this three-dimensionality of being.

If you look at an apple with your eye and the skin surface of that apple is intact at the side you are looking from, you cannot tell if there is a maggot in the middle of the apple. There is no depth information. We could repeat that if we had a recorder with a loop of tape on it saying, “There is no depth in the retinal image” and we could have this as a permanent background of what we are talking about tonight. If we had had more time and less sense we would have gone to extraordinary expense to have such a loop repeating, “There is no depth in the retinal image,” coming from six directions of speakers arranged round the room. Now, instead of going to all that expense I am suggesting that we try to remember that there is no depth in the retinal image so that I won’t need to mention it again, there is no depth in the retinal image.

This means to say that every feeling we have that has depth in it has come from another source than this retinal image.

Track 2

Now we are talking about the integration of the human being, the whole human being, and to help us in this we are going to use this five –fold symbol. I will draw you a rudimentary hand to remind you. Anybody can draw this – even without lessons. That is a very good drawing of the glove that was lost. There are many of those in the world. If you go in your bottom drawers you will find lots of odd gloves. This is the one that was lost, and is found, and there is more rejoicing over this one than ninety nine complete pairs that your wife gave you to remind you that you were married.

Now we are going to deal with this five-fold symbol in a highly complex way, but making allowances for ourselves we are going to begin simply. We are going to say, on the little finger I am going to write ‘body’ I am giving you time to write body. Has everybody written body yet?

Yes.

Are there any slow coaches?

Yes.

Has anybody written ‘booby’ by mistake? Can happen. And then I am going to have feeling on the next finger, you can anticipate me if you like and write it quicker that I am doing; and then I am going to put like and dislike because you have only got two kinds of feelings, like and dislike. Feeling is not terribly complicated, either you like it, that means you tend to move towards it, or you dislike it and you tend to move away from it. You know if you like things, know whether you tend to move towards them and dislike them if you move away.

So, a body and some feelings of like and dislike. On the middle finger I am going to put the word ‘mentation’ and I am going to define this word for you and I am going to put the word ‘serial’ by it. Serial means that you take the elements of the mental process, one after another, not simultaneously. In the mental process, you are thinking and you are taking the ideas and images, one after the other.

If we were to take man as he evolved, we could start at the bottom and say the first precondition of evolution is to get in a body, just to get a mass of protoplasm and identify with that protoplasm. Protoplasm is a colloid, it is nearly all water but there are some very minute particles suspended in it and very intimate, electric inter-permeations of forces and bio-magnetic fields. Protoplasm, the substance of all living creatures, plants, animals and men, in a mass, is called a body.

So first, we must have a body to refer to. If we hadn’t got a body, there would be as field of sentience which would be Infinite, an Infinite field of feeling with no body in it. If it had no body, it would have no centre of reference, if it had no centre of reference it would have nothing to think about; having nothing to think about it would be in a state called ananda, bliss. There must be something wrong with bliss, because although there is bliss at that level, prior to body, the same bliss has precipitated a body, and if the bliss were absolutely self-sufficient there would be no necessity for a body; but the bliss, that is, the Infinite Field, the ananda of the yogis, this bliss, just isn’t good enough for itself, the bliss is not self–satisfied, because it has not got a self. It is satisfied but not self-satisfied. It is infinitely satisfied but not self-satisfied. To be a self one must have a body. When we have got the body, the next precondition is that we must be able to feel, we must be able to like and to dislike.

Track 3

Now, you know, when you say one thing is like another, you mean it has a similar form, or a similar function, similar time, similar place, similar sequence or similar emotional tone. By means of these feelings we can move towards and away from experience units. The elements of experience can be examined by us and we can decide by feeling whether we like or dislike. But then, because we don’t have just one feeling, we have two, we need something else beyond feeling and this we call mentation. The men part of mentation is the same base as mensuration, it means measurement so that when we have a feeling of like or dislike we need this extra faculty of mentation. Mentation allows us to count the amount the intensity of feeling of like or dislike so you can give yourself marks for feeling responses to stimuli from one to ten; that‘s quite an easy one; from one to ten, you could say that dizzy blonde over there, this is a nine point nine returning reaction. You can’t give a ten reaction because you reserve that one for yourself; but, you can give a very high response; and the piece of rotten cabbage in the far corner of the room that has been overlooked by the daily help is worth probably nine point nine recurring negative, that is you probably dislike it. But by means of mentation, you can and do count the intensity of like and dislike and you also measure the dimensions of the body. By mentation you measure. You measure form and you measure intensities of like and dislike. You can measure electrical resistances, you can measure rate of flow, whatever you do that is measuring is the same mentation process and it is serial. If we take an electrical measurement say on an ammeter we see a needle moving. As it moves over the dial it takes time and it passes the units on the dial one after the other and this is what we mean by serial process, one after the other. It is very important to recognise that mentation is serial because because it is serial it cannot solve the problem. This is very important, people who think, use mentation serially to solve a problem, are wasting their time thinking that they can solve a problem. The purpose of mentation is not the solution of a problem, the purpose of mentation is the enumeration of the parts of the problem. This is tremendously important, no matter how much you think and count about any situation, the thinking process, the mentation, is not, and cannot be the solution of the problem. The solution of the problem takes you up to another level.

So, beyond mentation, we have another need and we will call this one comprehension. Can you spell comprehension on your own? I will put an H on it. We will have comprehend, that will do. Comprehen lays the egg after the serial evaluation has taken place. Comprehension is not serial, comprehension holds all the elements, like I am holding my fingers at the moment, bringing them together when they are altogether held, that is comprehension. When I fan them out, focus on one at a time and count, one, two, two and a half, three, four, and five, six, that is bad counting. Count again, one, two, three, four, five. Now when I have counted in this way, I have used mentation, a mental process. This men word is from a base meaning ‘to count.’ But when I see them all together and see all the things I can do with them all together; I can make a fist, make an indicator, poke myself in the ear, whatever I can do in a relational way the elements of which are simultaneously presented, then it is comprehension. So mentation is serial and comprehension is simultaneous; very important.

Now, when we have done these four we still need a final one, because the body has enabled us to have a focus within the field of sentience, like-dislike, the feeling enables us to move towards or away from; mentation allows us to measure he intensity of the feeling in relation to a given body and the dimensions of the body, its texture, its degree of slippiness, its flexibility, elasticity and so on, you can make a measurement for all these different qualities, and when we have got all these together, comprehended, then we need a final thing and that final thing is will. So on the thumb we put will and I am going to say that will is initiative.

Initiative means beginning. This is very important; to initiate is to start something. It does not mean to continue it, it means to start it. When you start a ball rolling it will continue through its mass inertia, to roll, unless it meets some kind of opposition, friction or another body. So will equals initiative, and by means of this initiative we can interfere with a situation that we have comprehended. The interesting thing about the will is the will can never operate unless there has been comprehension and all the energies in the body are brought into a state of stillness. If the body and mind are not still, if they are already running, they are running on inertia. Inertia is previously established motion, ‘in work affirming’ in ert ia in work affirming. The ‘in work affirming’ process is not will, not initiative, it is the result of will and initiative which set something going and then left this mass moving force to continue to operate. So if I were to drop this pen I would do it simply by releasing my grip. Gravity would take care of it and as it was falling through the air it would not be falling through the air with my will. My will would have been simply the moment of initiation, the decision to drop it, so this of tremendous importance, the point of initiation is will, what is not initiation is not will.

Track 4

So now we have five functions of a whole being and we are going to relate these, Are they all written down? We are going to relate these to the caste system in human society, and we will use the ancient system that is very clearly worked out in India, and has been a great cause of controversy in India and during the days of the British Raj in India it was one of the things the British used to say about the wicked Indians, that they had a caste system. And this justified the British occupying the place so that they could then teach them democracy.

Now the Indian caste system is based on a warrior, a priest, a business man a worker. Everybody knows that the Indian caste system had four castes; there is one missing. What is it? It is an untouchable. You see, a rather interesting thing about the untouchable later, the untouchable is the most important thing about this caste system because it is non-caste.

Now we are going to draw a line round there and we are going to put this in a box like this. Oh that is funny, it got bent, I think that bend there must have been the profile of the great god Shiva, looking at this symbol. I don’t believe in accidents do you? Now he set up the caste system and Shiva means pure consciousness, absolute omniscience, and omniscience knows all about this five lark, because this five lark is the lar or law in the closure in the case, caste means case. We want four inside the case . and one outside the case.

Now what is the function of the one outside the case? Any volunteers?

Something to do with the will and initiative

Something to do with will and inintiative?

Four of the fingers and that is the thumb.

No that is the little finger

Is it something to do with to give value to the ones in….

To give value, as they say in Petticoat Lane, the lady on my left, to give value to the whole system.

Have you had, outside your vast emporium that you own, on a Friday night, as the workers come out with their pay packets proudly clutched, have you seen a little scrofulous man who smells horrible and holds his hand out for a little backsheesh, isn’t he the basics of the system? He looks so awful he smells so awful, you have to give him something to get rid of the smell. But he has given you something, he has given you a horrible picture of what not to be, namely, outside the caste system. So the real function of the untouchables is to make you very sure that you do not want to be like him so you will stay inside the caste system. So, every time you see a smelly beggar or should you say smell a seely beggar, feely beggar, every time you see one, greet him and say, “Here is your backsheesh because you frighten me into decency. You frighten me into reliability, into ethical behaviour. You frighten me into being either a worker which means I am satisfied to be just inside, or a business man, which means I want to be even more inside, or a priest which means I want to be even more inside, or a warrior, definitely inside.” Now when we do this we have the little finger at the bottom and we have still got him there, and we are going to say that not only in human society but every human group and every human individual this five fold division is there. And that you cannot conceive any being outside this five-fold system that would not have to comprehend them all and include them. So if there is a being who knows about the five-fold system and he isn’t in the case but can see it and is not an untouchable, but he can see it then he must be a sixth being, and I have represented him there, so we will put his mark. He is a number six.

That looks like a drawing of an Indian nose on a friend of mine from Bombay. I might as well put his lips in. He has got nice fat lips. He is quite a nice fellow; he has a very dreamy type eye and he holds his pupil about there because he finds it much better for pleasing the ladies. A little eye partly hidden by…… and this strong friend of mine is actually an observer, he is a six man. You might have recognised, actually that he is a very famous maharishi. He says he is not going to be an untouchable and he is not going to get in the case either. He is going to stay out. And, that is funny, because there must be another fellow watching him, which is the seventh man.

You know, God rested on the seventh day and seven means ‘spirit even.’

Track5

But this seven thing does not even want to be outside the system because to him, the seventh one, funny fellow this one, he is really upside down to the system. He has got a sort of grim face like that. The seventh one is aware that even the yogi is reactive to the system, it is the system historically, that persuaded him to be a yogi. If we like to examine the history of Gautama Buddha, we can find that he was driven out of the system by certain horrible experiences he had to do with death and disease and old age and beautiful dancing girls, in reverse order. So there is the seventh one, but if there is a seventh one there must be a relationship between this seventh one and all the others, and that one is the eighth one and we do the eighth one like this. Now when we have come to the eighth one we have finished with the whole process except for the ninth one. But the ninth one is a very special case and we will come back to him later. So when we have finished with the ninth one we have quite definitely finished, nothing after that.

The eighth means reciprocal interrelation. If you do not like writing reciprocal interrelation you can write this word instead. This is simpler. Now ji ji mu ge. Ji means an individual, and another ji means another individual, and mu means substantial movement, and ge means the earth. So jijimuge means individuals are moving together within the earth and inter-penetrating each other. So the definition of jiji muge is absolute reciprocal interpentration, and we are saying that at the level of the eighth there is an absolute reciprocal interpenetration of all beings. If there any beings here who thinks they are isolated from the other beings here they are making a mistake, even thermodynamically. If you have got any heat and you are selfish and you want to keep it, you can’t. You are radiating it. If you have got a hotter body than the girl next to you, she is getting warmer, and you can’t stop it. If you contract yourself to make sure she doesn’t get it, your temperature goes up, and she gets hotter. If you deliberately relax yourself to reduce energy, you get hotter. This is most peculiar. So whatever you do deliberately, you are working and work is heat and heat is work. So the girl gets hotter. Some girls know this, so when they are cold they go and sit next to selfish men and it produces a most peculiar jiji muge type of interpenetration of intention and temperature goes up all the way round. We have to recognise that we cannot be effectively selfish, right? Jiji muge, the eighth man. The eighth man is a man nomad. He is a fellow who says, “I don’t care if I do interpenetrate, I don’t care if when I do go to the cinema, I do warm the people on either side of me and the one in front and behind. I don’t even care if they warm me.” When we are able to say, that we do not mind, at any level, our reciprocal interpenetration with all beings, then we are qualified for the badge of jiji mugist. One day we will deign the badge and we will sell it, to defray expenses for making the badge.

Track 6

Now, we are talking about this basic human being and a human being is a being that understands this principle to some degree. Everybody understands it to some degree because everybody has got this kind of organism. They have an organism, a body; they have feeling like-dislike; they have a mentation process, serial; they have a comprehension and they have a degree of initiative and by the use of what they have got, they get more. “In Thy light shall we see light,” if you have got a little bit of light you can have some more. So we start with a little bit of light and we get more. The more we have, the more we want, what we want is infinite light. We want so much light, that from this excess of light there will be darkness and the darkness will be the new body that we precipitate in order to work through it Every time we change our attitude to anything, every time we change our feeling orientation, our like-dislike, every time we change our mentation, every time we change our comprehension, every time we change our will, we change our chemistry. Just as before we saw this five-fold structure we can say if a stimulus comes to the physical body, the stimulus from that body goes through to the feeling, through to the mentation, through to the comprehension and through to the initiative. And this we will say will produce a reaction to an external stimulus. But also it goes the other way. From the will there comes a stimulus to the comprehension, from the comprehension to the mentation, from the mentation to the feeling, the feeling back to the body and then we get a motor response to the environment.

All human beings have this same problem; the integration of five functions. All human societies have the same problem, the integration of that caste system there. Unless we have someone who can overlook the whole process then there will be war, because if there is not total comprehension then the untouchables will feel out of it, for they are also human; the workers will feel out of it compared with the business men; the business men will feel out of it, they used to feel out of it compared with the priests, now they are feeling out of it compared with the workers and some of them are giving it up and becoming untouchables; the priests definitely feel out of it in relation to Montgomery and therefore we have to say that unless there is an intelligence comprehending the whole process there is bound to be unconscious interaction, a war of an unproductive kind. We don’t want no war, what you want is intelligent war. We want a war of ideas, a war of wills, we want a war in which everybody is involved consciously, and in this kind of war there will be no uneconomic bloodshed because you never changed anybody’s mind by killing them, blowing them up, dismembering them, you never converted anybody by physical violence. And consequently there is tremendous need for total comprehension to make a total war which would be totally efficient. The word ‘war’ is an interesting word because it is the same word from which we get the word ‘weary.’ War makes weary, prolonged war is the cause of weariness.

Track 7

Now we have our five-fold process again. We are going to do another interesting fit with it now. We are going to start, with coming out of the bottom there, a snake. This is a snake. Now this snake is your spinal cord and this snake has grown itself a brain, and this snake is your little finger. So we are going to say, here, snake. And we are going to say this snake represents total, sensuous, self-satisfaction. SSS, sensual self satisfaction. The snake has no regard for any other snake. Remember baby snakes come out of the egg and they don’t say, “Thank you mummy for laying the egg from which I came out,” they go away; and mummy does not say to baby snake, “Good journey, happy go.” If baby meets mother next time, baby might be swallowed. If mummy is tired and baby is bigger, mummy might be swallowed and this is sensual self-satisfaction, rampant. But it was discovered very early in the universe in the evolution of consciousness, that sensuous self-satisfaction means that everyone is on guard against everybody all the time and it is very, very tiring. In a pure snake world you would have a kind of wriggling process of mutual devouring, a kind of jiji muge with no intelligent relationship, a continuous swallowing of everything by everything. Therefore the spirit of the snake decided to try another method. So, it grew itself another brain, and the brain it grew round there is called dog. I will write the dog in there. The thing about the dog is that it is a pack animal, put this one on your ring finger, it is the one that does not want trouble with its own neighbours; it is the one that will co-operate with other dogs to bring down a bison or a mammoth that is too big for it to battle on its own. So the dog symbolises, we had the snake with sensual self-satisfaction, that is why snakes go ….. to you. You know every animal bears its own name inside itself and the snake says its own name continuously. Other beings are always telling lies, they keep saying other names apart from their own and the snake is the only truthful creature in the universe. This is why it was the symbol of spiritual truth to the Ancients; only the snake is honest. So the dog now, he is a pack animal of group being and he says, “Let us get together to pull down this bison too big for any of us separately. Let us co-operate.” But in the chase, one tends to get over-heated and when one gets over-heated and finally the bison is pulled down, this terrible over-heating means that one dog accidentally bites another dog’s leg instead of the bison. The result is that at the group, or pack, or herd level, the dog level, is the beginning of what we call resentment. Remember that, resentment. It can only occur for the first time with a group animal, snakes do not resent anybody. They never even think about anybody, but the dog can and does. Any group, herd, pack animal can resent.

How does resentment occur? It occurs quite simply by saying, “First of all we are buddies, we are friends, therefore we don’t bite each other do we? No, we gather our strength together and we chase the bison and we pull it down and then we share it, don’t we?” No we don’t because we have not grown mentation yet, have we? All we have got is a like/dislike. And when the jaws start working, whatever is near at hand and smells like meat gets bitten. So the peculiar thing about the dog, the very symbol of group activity and fidelity, is that when he loses his temper he turns into a snake. We call this regression. Every time you go back to an earlier we say you have regressed. This is very, very important for the psychopathology of all human disorders. Regression means you go back to an earlier phase of evolution. You de-volve instead of e-volving. So out of excessive heating in the chase one doggie bites another instead of biting the bison, biessen bis gebissen”

Now it is obvious that there is a need for, sorry about that one you Germans, there is a need for a counting process so we will have to grow one otherwise these dogs are going to fall out. So we grow one, and this we call man. This is the mentation process. And we actually have, inside our skulls charmingly enough actually in our skulls, physiological representation of these three levels and this man is the cortex, the outer part of your brain. The man’s job is to count everybody present and see whether it’s a bison, a dog or a snake, very interesting. In the over-heating of the chase one tends to devolve back to the serpent and become sensuously self-satisfied. The dogs fall out, they fight, many a dog has been blinded by a brother dog in a moment of bison-excitation and the necessity for a kind of counting process to sort out the dogs from the snakes and this produced man.

So that we have a dog for a group animal, remember this is inside your head, you have got a group animal there, a group reflex, a tendency to belong to groups and this causes you to deserve the baddle, boodle tail-waggers badge. But you have to have this calculation to know whether you are dealing with a bison, a dog or a snake. So man, we will say, evaluates by counting. Those of you girls who are married to Italian counts will know that the title Count was given to men that could count, and it was a simple as that in the old days. If you could count the king was so astonished he said, “You are a count.” That was marvellous, so you could keep the accounts, so he got a job, as accountant. Every accountant today, in the world, is entitled, by that fact to call himself ‘Count.’ If you go on holiday to Rome, or even to Paris, you can meet counts every day, lots of them, usually living with rich ladies.

Track 8

Now, the peculiar thing about this man inside our brain, he calculates. In the group animal you had the possibility of resentment, that means re-feeling. If you want to prove this, get a dog, stroke it and then hit it. You will immediately see, this is a laboratory experiment, and you will immediately see a peculiar look in the dog’s face of resentment, because the dog, being a group animal says, “We are buddies aren’t we? And you tread on its tail or paws out towards the warming fire and it takes it back and it goes like this, gives you a special look called resentment. Now funnily enough, that is the beginning of the possibility of a neurosis, but only the beginning. Snakes don’t have neuroses, they can’t even begin to think about it; but doggies can. You can have a neurotic dog, you can make a neurotic dog very easily, stroke it, feed it, kick it, apologise to it, kick it again. Do this every day, in three weeks time you have got a neurotic on your hands and you have created the preconditions of mentation in the dog, you have helped it to evolve towards the state of man. In fact, this morning, a man said to me, very intelligent Jewish man, “So we are doing a favour to the dog when we kick it? We are hastening its evolution.” I said, “Yes, true we are and we should have regard for developmental tempo. Only slow growing up, only life kicks and only rarely, otherwise we might accelerate the dog too quickly and it would become as neurotic as we are, which it is unfair for dogs.” I mean we can be as neurotic as we like because it is our job, but not dogs, it is unfair. Snakes we can’t find.

So we need something here of tremendous importance, the recognition that man is the creature that can and does invent, by his cleverness, neurosis. And he does that by counting his resentments. You see, whatever the resentment that the dog has in him, he keeps a record of it, and he keeps files, under their proper initials, all the things that cause him resentment, and then he goes over his resentments, and he repeats them very, very carefully and he gives them numbers you know, from one to ten. Like say Solomon Black, my friend, resentment nine and a half. Can’t resent him totally because he introduced me to the wife who happens to be the girlfriend of a second-hand car salesman and he got me a cheap car. So I have knocked him half a mark off for total resentment. That is a man’s function. We cannot be neurotic unless we are men, unless we count, and unless specifically we count our resentments.

So, at the level of the neurotic man, there is a need for another kind of brain, another organ, and so far, in the skull, we haven’t got a great deal of physiological evidence of this other brain. It is one of the next evolutes, but there are a few people who say, “We have got one of those,” and we might say, wrapped round this membrane, there is a little membrane like that, to protect it. Mmm? Which comes first Bill, the pia mater or the dura mater?

The pia.

Pia, yes? That means let us be kind to them, the dura mater means let us be hard with them. We need one that will be kind, so here we have a very thin representative here and we will have it and we will call it The Counsellor. Ignore the seller there will you please, it is a count who is selling you something, he is a counsellor. He needs your tears to wrap his feet. The Counsellor here is saying to all men who become neurotic. “I can tell you how you became neurotic. You became neurotic through resentment, quite simply you are resenting life.” All you have to do is accept life, like Alan said to me, “Do you know how I learned to accept life? By finding so many resentful dogs inside men who could count, that I have got a job for life counselling, so why should I resent it?” That is counselling!

Now the counsellor keeps everybody exactly as they were, mysteriously. You could have, if you lived ninety years, ninety years counselling. So there was a necessity for another kind and we have a little representation of that. These things are quite thin, but above that counsellor we have another fellow, the Hard Man, the man who says it is actually possible to rise above the needs to be counselled.

Track 9

How many have we got, one, two three, four, five. We have got a wilful man at the top but we are going to call him a hard man, just for fun. You know, Pavlov found that some dogs were hard, they don’t condition very easily. Oh we’ve put a T on there so if there is one in the audience he can recognise it, a Hartman. Hardt bis du bist dedegn von stein? The Hard Man says counsellors are fairly satisfied, they are nearly as satisfied as snakes, because as long as there are resentful dogs and counting men, they have got a job for life. But the evolutionary movement in the universe is going through these processes and to get through it, it will have to learn to be hard with itself, and we have that Hard Man in the will. Anybody called Will or William or Wilson, Wilhelm knows what it is to be hard. He needs to be able to steel oneself and instead of falling into resentment, instead of counting resentment, instead of fleeing to counsel, say, “I will learn to pay the price of my own activities. I will harden myself. If I can harden myself I will become self determinant.” Now this Hard Man is a necessary phase of self-evolution, and you can’t go beyond the Hard Man to the

phase above the Hard Man until you have been a Hard Man. You can’t go from snake to consideration for everyone beyond the Hard Man in one leap. It can only be done step by step. The untrodden step will never forgive you. If you do not know consciously that you are a snake who disguised itself as a dog who disguised himself as a man, who disguised himself as a counsellor who fought his way to Hard Man you cannot go to the step beyond. And, beyond that Hard Man is the man who is looking at the whole thing and seeing, as we saw before. Here we are, that warrior is the Hard Man, “Fight the good fight with all thy might,” and as Mohamed said when he came back from his war against the wicked infidels, when he had had a successful campaign against El Cid, he came back and said, “Now begins the big war. The little war is the war with other people outside you, the big war is the war inside you. Great is he who conquers a city, great is he who conquers himself, much greater.”

So the warrior is the Hard Man and he practises being hard but when he has become hard enough, then he can afford to be soft. Those of you who are old enough to remember Montgomery’s beautiful gesture in Africa, he was a very hard man, but he provided night lights for soldiers. That is very interesting. If you are hard enough on yourself you become illuminated, and you can’t strike a light without flint, you need something to strike on it to make a spark. If you are not hard you can’t become illuminated. If you become illuminated you are immediately soft again. But, not soft like you were before, you are soft with the memory of all stages. When you are soft, then you can say, “There is something beyond even this,” because in the toleration of the Soft Man beyond the Hard Man, it could be that evolution could be stopped, out of the super kindness of the man who has learned to be hard and has decided to be soft.

Now, we know that some people opt out of the battle of life, they opt out of hardness and they say I will never injure anybody again. I will refrain from advising anybody again, because advice hurts and causes trouble, and I have gone beyond hardness. So I will be soft, and this is alright as another phase. But beyond this phase of the softness following the hardness, there is another one that says, for the sake of human beings who are being at any lower level held in a static condition, sometimes it is necessary to be hard, tempered with soft. The balancing of hard and soft becomes then a very intelligent manipulation. How to be very, very hard and apologise in the middle of the hardness. This is a phase beyond hardness and beyond softness. Hardness is five, softness beyond is six, evening out of those two is seven. So we have a seven man who is doing it, and then beyond that the reciprocal relationship, flowing, where a man who knows how to be hard and soft can balance all these forces within himself and therefore can help to balance them in other people and bring them all into the eighth phase of reciprocal interpenetration.

Track 10

Now we said there was one level beyond that and that was the level which we said was nine, and you know that nine is six upside down. Nine is the number of the magician. You know all stage magicians use nine for mathematical tricks because nine remains the same all the time. It is the ability to say, ”No.” to everything. To say, “No,” to being a snake, “No,” to being a dog, “No,” to being a man, “No,” to being a counsellor, “No,” to being a warrior, “No,” to being soft, “No,” to balancing those two. The ability to say, “No,” to everything absolutely is nine (nein) and that is the number of the Magician. Those of you who have done your O level maths, know that nine remains the same whatever you do with it. You double it, you get eighteen, you add the digits together, eight and one are nine; you triple it, twenty seven, seven and two are nine, whatever you do with nine it remains the same. So it is a very, very special number. Nine nines are eighty one, eight and one is nine. Nine is the number of a man who, no matter what he does, no matter what he does, absolutely, he is untouched by his own activity. He has gone beyond Karma. And then we finish because if we write ten we have merely written one with which we started, and an O, meaning circle completed.

There we have the problem of integration and we have to start at the level at which we find ourselves. Let us see. Are we merely snakes? No, we can’t be, because we are all in one room, centred upon one subject. So there is a dog in us. Are we merely dogs? No, because we are not only serially counting, we are also comprehending what we are talking about. Are we merely comprehenders? No, because we have an intention of will to do something about it. Now have we got anything beyond this at this stage of evolution, an intention of will to attain, through hardness towards oneself, the possibility of being soft to everybody else in order to get through that stage to be able to be hard and soft simultaneously.

A very famous rabbi, Hillel, before Christ, was famed because he was hard on himself and soft on everybody else, but he knew that he was developing him by being hard and that he was not breaking the law of developmental tempo for them.

So the problem of integration of the whole being is first, we must become conscious of the parts of the being. You cannot integrate what you don’t know about. This means we have to become absolutely conscious that right at the space of us in the centre of us, in that part of our being here, the snake, we have what is sometimes called private convenience.

( Inaudible comment)

Who said that?

Now private convenience is another word for the will before it has gone through its process of self-development. It can become a public convenience when it goes to the level of dog. If we are prepared to admit that the very centre of our being is the worm that dieth not, biblical expression for private convenience or sensual self-satisfaction, I will draw you that S again, sensual self- satisfaction. Are there any Hebrews in the audience, if there are they might notice, this funny letter. I’ll draw it a bit more orthodox. There we are, ש that is the letter shin or sin If you put a dot on that side it is shin, put the dot on that side it is sin. The meaning of that letter is fire; the meaning of fire is spirit; the meaning of spirit is eternal power, eternal initiative, the very ground of self-consciousness.

So this same selfish serpent is nothing but the essence of that which, in Christianity, is called God, the Father. When it says in the Old Testament that God, the Father of the Universe, is a devouring fire and when Christ says later, “And he is come to bring fire, and what is it if it be already kindled, are you alarmed?” The Universe, as Heraclitus pointed out, is fire, equals spirit, equals intelligent energy pursuing its own end. But, its ends are dialectical. You cannot pursue your own development to its maximum stage without involving yourself in relations with other beings. In the words of Brother Blake, “Opposition is true friendship, be my enemy for friendship’s sake.”

If there is a snake going along,….. incidentally, that is how you write the word ananda or bliss in primitive language, just draw a snake. In Egyptian hieroglyph you double it and pretend it is water and then you cut a little bit of it off and you say that is the letter N. And N, na is the archaic word for snake, and we want to tighten it up a bit so we add another letter group round it and we find the original na, the naga of the Hindu myth, the snake, is the original image of spirit, of intelligent sentient power, and say Absolute Sentient Power, the asp. Every time you see the asp, think it is an original precipitate of Absolute Sentient Power and it is pursuing its own ends, and there are not any other ends to pursue. But, mysteriously, this power has to divide in order to express its capacity.

If we get the snake and we put it with its tail in its mouth, like that, there is the snake with tail in mouth. This snake is biting itself and going round and round, creating the conditions of eternal recurrence, but it is highly repetitive. And there is a great law, the law of sentience and phenomena, of S and P, constant uniform stimulation is equivalent no stimulation. Constant uniform stimulation is equivalent to no stimulation. So if this initial, spiritually, intelligent power gives itself a uniform motion and continues it, it will not know that it has continued it and it will be as if it were not doing it. Therefore it has to introduce into itself, differential tensions. The differential tension you can see easily if I draw sideways, like that, and if I thicken it for you like this, you can see what it is happening. Supposing I made that of a piece of rubber, then the rubber would be contracted there and expanded there, contracted there, expanded there. I put a plus mark for positive and a minus mark for negative. By positive I mean it tends to posit, by self-contraction on this inner curve, and to extend itself on the outer curve. So on this one I can write “Intent,” inholding, and on the outside and on the outside one “Extent.” All your intentions are contractions. You curve the field of sentient power and that is an intention. If you close the curve you then have an ideational content, an idea in your mind, or a definable feeling of like or dislike. Intent, inholding, extent, outholding. The same force that is going along, if it oscillates is making itself aware by differential self-stimulation, here an intention, there an extension. If it went round in a simple uniform curve, like that, uniform rates, it could not know that it was doing it, but by means of oscillation, it creates intent/extent, it becomes aware that it is, factually a self- stimulating appetival being. So that is stage one, the snake. But, it is not going to get optimal self-stimulation if it merely goes around in this way. This is the symbol of bliss and its name there is ananda, the bliss snake. It is just giving itself ananananananana. When it curves round and gets hold of its tail, it is called on, ON, serpent with tail in mouth. Serpent running along is an, ana, the running snake and the circulating snake.

Track 12

So its next thing is, to bring itself into relation with another snake. It actually finds that if it going along, oscillating and it is seeking another way of getting another kind of stimulus, ah, at a certain point it crossed itself. At that point, there, where the cross is, he had a new kind of stimulus and therefore the letter T, which symbolises inter-section is tremendously important. It is the first mark of otherness, the first mark of the possibility of the enriching of self stimulation by using another. This spirit, this ananda, going along has discovered by self inter-section, there is a possibility. So, it does it again, it does it again, marvellous. When it has done it three times it really knows it. And it notices that when it does it again, it has made a little island, there. So, it observes that when it crosses it can do that. That is the sign of Taurus in the Zodiac. And it means it can go round, like that, like it did in the on phase and come out of it again, like it does in the an phase and then it can separate that one from another one that it does, like that. I am going to enlarge this now. Having made one and another one, like that, it can stimulate this one from there, this one from here, it now really explains the whole of the universe to itself by extra-cellular stimulation, it has enriched itself tremendously, Your body starts as a single cell, it divides itself and it finds it can send messages across the divided half. And then it finds it can make itself into a cluster of cells and it can then have intercellular stimulation by nueronic lines. It can make a very, very rich being by this simple process. All this is by rotating of original simple snake spirit; and it can send a message from there to there, one from there to there, one from there to there, one from there to there, one back, one back, that is quite complicated. It can use that middle one as a mediator, and so on. If you imagine looking down on your being with a cross section through it, the middle one is the original tube that you laid down inside your being and surrounded with cells, then we can see there is the possibility of making two different kinds of tubes, a nerve tube, like in the spinal column and a food tube, like the one from the mouth to the anus, and by means of these we can have a highly complex relation in which a tube for food, there, has another tube for control, like this. This is your spine, this is your food tube and by means of two-way stimulus response, it can make a highly complex, delightful, reciprocal inter-relation of pleasures and pains that it could not get any other way.

So the original spirit, the original S, posits itself a universe, S posits P, and P means the phenomena of the sentience. The phenomenal content of sentience is the P in the S and there is no P, no phenomenon, other than within the S, and the S has produced the P by self-intentionality. The subject has written its own predicate; the self observer has posited its universe for itself. And it looks very complicated today but it is not terribly complicated, it is no more complicated than your hand.

So, if we are to gain integration, we must first become conscious of the parts constituting our being, how the parting arose, the purpose of that parting, and then, by continual remembrance of this functional structure within the being, simply by continually remembering them, they begin to integrate. You needs must love the highest when you see it so that you cannot help liking your own efficiency better than you like your inefficiency, and your dislike of your inefficiency is the same thing as the driving power that moves you to evolve to your top level, number nine.

Have we done enough now David?