INTUITION
A talk
given by Eugene Halliday. A TYG Audio
Track 1
Khen: Now we do have a question, everybody is most interested in to know how to distinguish between the intuitional force and conjecture. How do you know one from the other?
I
think we will have a circle for that one. Intuition and conjecture, well
intuition means ‘in-teaching’ doesn’t it, in tuit? We have to consider a being
as circumscribed in order to consider the relation in. We can’t consider the relation in or out unless we first have a limit. If we rub out all the limits we are not talking about intuition at all. So
that intuition implies finity. There is being, internal to it there are certain
processes When those processes are equilibrated in all their relations and then
reflect onto the centre, here, I put the least number, namely two parts here.
If this is conceived as a stimulus point, here, and a ripple goes through the
being, and here is another stimulus point and the ripple goes through the being
here, these two ripples will meet on the centre and can there be co-ordinated
and if all the ripple internal to this being are co-ordinated at the centre,
they teach, tuit, the being within
itself. So that intuition means the teaching of a being internal to itself, so that
whatever is known is always known internal to a being. Remember the rule we had
before, a being can know only the modifications of its own substance. So, if
there is a stimulus on our skin surface I cannot know anything about the cause
of that stimulus, I can only know something about its effect in my own
substance.
So if I’ve drawn on this diagram, a stimulus here impinging on the perimeter of this being, this stimulus is inside my consciousness and therefore there is a circle I haven’t drawn on here which I should draw, namely the one representing my consciousness which is bigger than this and contains the stimulus and the being that is defined as receiving it. So that every being, supposing that is the limit of a body, and every stimulus coming to that body is inside consciousness. I don’t only know the edge of my body, I also know the room in so far as it reflects the light into my eye and the feeling of the temperature of the room, all those things are internal to my consciousness and the body limit to which I refer represented here by this circle, is inside my consciousness.
Actually, what is outside my consciousness is forever outside and not knowable to me, if there is anything. But my consciousness, as we said before, is not finite. It is only bodies that can be finite and they are inside consciousness. Consciousness itself is not finite, it is the bodies or objects of consciousness which are finite. So the intuition means we must consider a body, consider the totality of the motions inside the body and in so far as they are integrated and give meaning to each other at the centre of that being we all it intuition. So that intuition is total awareness of the significance of the modifications of the substance of that being. And if I get hold of that and close my eyes I know I have got something because it resists me. If I have never seen it with my eyes open I wouldn’t know what its colour was or whether the light was shining on it but I would know that something resisted my fingers and I would only know because I couldn’t make my finger and thumb touch each other like I can without.
So if I go like that and then put that between, there is something stopping my finger and thumb. It is that resistance which I experience that we conceptualise as matter, the resistance. You may remember that Spinoza had a concept of substance as infinite and defined the quality of matter as extension. But Leibniz contradicted this and said the quality of matter is resistance. Now, actually, both these are true because unless that thing is extended in space and has resistance, I cannot locate it. And if it has a location in space, it is extended, and if it resists me then I would call it matter, but if it didn’t resist me at all I would say it is an immaterial figment. So, matter is, necessarily extended. So really Spinoza and Leibniz were talking about two aspects of this fundamental of universal matter, extension and resistance. Later on we can prove from the fact of resistance that matter is power but we will leave that alone for the moment while we consider conjecture in order to clarify what is intuition.
Track 2
Now con is with and the ject means throw, so to conject is to throw together. Now here we have two halves and if we consider that these two halves are two ideas and we throw them together on the centre we call it a conjecture. When Socrates talked about the means of knowledge, he said there are four means: perception, inference, authority and conjecture. Indian thinkers use three, they don’t allow conjecture to be a means of knowledge because in order to conject you must have something already, and then throw that forward as a suggestion. So in their analysis conjecture is not a means to knowledge. It is knowledge offered as an explanation.
So, if we said this is male and this is female, and this is a seed which develops into a child, the product of the relation between those two, we could say that this seed was conjected by both of them. Thrown together, a fertilized egg is really a conjecture. This word, considered as a mechanical statement would cover the conjecture. If we think about it psychologically we could say we take the idea of the female, the idea of the male, throw them together and derive the idea of a resultant which we call the child. It is a conjecture only, but it is very important to realise why the Indians didn’t allow conjecture as a means of knowledge. In the early periods they were very, very clear about this and they said the conjecture is something you know already which you throw at a person in explanation of something so they denied that it was a means.
Now, in the case of intuition, which is the same as that noëtic principle we talked about before, the noësis is the motion of the whole being flying rapidly backwards and forwards in all directions, and continuously intersecting and producing a dynamic resultant of wholeness. Now this intuition, therefore, means whole awareness, and you remember we said that the noësis was the process of non-serial thinking and dianoia was the process of serial thinking about the same thing. And when we are talking and we take serially one word after another unless we take a word like mmmmm, the mmm which means the totality of substance which is said in one moment, and contains, if you explicate it, that is unfold its meanings serially, it contains all there is to be said about anything.
But intuition means the resultant of the whole motion of your substance, conjecture means you are throwing parts of it forward as possible explanations. You all remember that we added in to authority, we had first perception, the ground of everything, shall we have a hand on this,…. We will just go over this again. We had perception, we will show what that is in a moment, inference, authority, conjecture and we are putting down here, intuition. If we want to joke about it we call it the woman’s reason but when it is correct it is intuition. Actually, if a woman were to rely on it and not to think it out with guesswork she would never be wrong because intuition is the whole awareness of your will. But because it is whole it is difficult to articulate precisely what it is you know. Very often a woman will feel that there is something the matter with hubby today. She doesn’t know what it is, but there is something and when she tries to serialise that knowledge she may get into difficulties. He feels a little bit observed because she can feel something is wrong. He knows there is something wrong, he knows what it is, she doesn’t, so she tries to fiddle it out. She doesn’t want to make a mistake and she wants to make it precise. But to make it precise is to cut it and it is then no longer intuition., and she has been accurate once or twice in her intuition she will then tend to make statements. But every statement is an analysis result so it isn’t any longer intuition and it becomes conjecture. She throws things at him and watches his reaction. Now, if she could feel instead of trying to precipitate the situation prematurely it would come into her mind what it was spontaneously. But if she becomes eager so eager means boring, it is like an auger you know, if she bores, straight away she has lost the wholeness, which is a passive feeling and she has vectored herself, that is she has made an arrow of direction out of herself. And if we reduce the sphere, like we did last week, and we start being eager like this with it, we put our sensitivity on a tip. Now there is the borer. This is a charming wife saying to hubby, “Where were you last night Darling, and what is this hair”? This forward movement stops the true vibration of the whole substance because it produces here a closure which actually blocks and muzzes the vibrations which, in the pure sphere cannot be false but in the distorted sphere, which is the same thing as the eager personality, must necessarily be falsified.
Track 3
So
in order to intuit we must not care what the result is. If we care what the
result is we are biased. If we are biased, we are distorted and observe how
life is very much related to bias, bias, bios.
The difference is in the A and the O. Now that A means energy going
along and this O means the comprehension of the sphere. So the bios, the whole
life, knows what it is doing completely, but your bias, it makes you into a bit
of an ass, because it falsifies the whole awareness that you have.
Now let us go back to the beginning, here for perception. Perception is a cut, rational, per-kept. It means a rational cut. So we take the whole universe and we take a bit out. That is called a perception. Now, if we want to understand that thing we cannot do so if we isolate it, take it out of its context, but if we remember this thing out of which it was cut, then we have the meaning of that which was cut out, like a piece of cake. This is a perception.
The rest of it would be called psychologically, an apperception mass, that is a mass of percepts, there are a lot more in there, considered as giving significance to a percept. So when we are learning a process as children we perceive things, but at first we do not understand them. But after a time we get a group of percepts of similars. A child is shown an apple, then it is shown another apple, one is green the other is red then another one golden yellow, a small one, a large one. Gradually there builds up in his mind an idea that the apple is not necessarily green or red or yellow or small or sour or sweet but there is an apple-ness which somehow gives significance to the percept of any given apple. Now this complex structure of all the percepts you have had of the apple is called the apperception mass. The ap-perception means the two-percept, that to which you must put your percept in order to give it significance. So if we add two Ps on there, apperception is the term Herbart worked out the mathematics of this apperception process actually and Herbart’s work, funnily enough, in education, is considered very, very good by educationalists in his most superficial works, which do not deal with the mathematics. But the part that he thought was most important is never read, namely the mathematical processes involved in apperception. Diagrams of this order in general do not interest educationalists because they can’t understand precisely what is meant by it, particularly if you reduce this to a matter of degrees and start juggling with algebra, and then say in order to be a democrat, you must have a value of K to the enth or something like that. This seems so abstruse that they think it a bit haywire there but really it is his most important work. But it isn’t his most popular one. And this term apperception simply means you take percept to percept, group them by similars until you have an organ of thought.
Now
an organ of thought, you remember, we said you have to create an organ of
thought, is built up by percepts from a given field of enquiry and you
gradually build up an instrument which can test for you any new percept as it
comes in. So perception is our first means of seeing, namely we cannot see the
whole because our word see, by the
letter S, which is that separative serpent, not the one with its 
tail
in its mouth, but the separated serpent. The Greeks have two forms remember,
one form like that and one form like that. This one is the closed serpent, this
one is the separative serpent. That one is intuitive, that one is analytic. To
see is already to open yourself to something other than yourself and therefore
is a finiting or cutting, cept, of out
of the whole. So a percept is taking a part of the whole, only in
consciousness. A group of percepts giving some meaning to that one by giving it
a context is an apperception mass.
Track 4
So
perception means simply taking a bit of reality instead of all of it. Now that
is our first base if we are going to know things, because K- now implies this
separation. The K in K-now is the operative for now is the present stimulus. There is the surface and there is the
stimulus. Turn it round and that 
is
your letter K. K-nowledge is simply that which you can now recall. It isn’t
knowledge if you can’t find it. A lot of people think it is but it isn’t. They
say, “Oh I know that, if only I could remember it”. But it isn’t known unless
you can actually recall it. Absent knowledge is not knowledge.
So
when we come to consider inference, we are going to do this fer, facere,
to do, internal to the percepts and discover the essence. To infer is to do
internally, in-do and discover the essence, in-fer-
ence,
and how we do it is this. Supposing we only have two percepts, then we can see
there is a curve here, common to both, so we can infer, that is we can “do”
with these two internal to them, so they have something like there the curve
which has continuity. Also they have a common centre. So we can infer from even
two of those, that if we take a length equivalent to that and a distance
equivalent to that on the same curve, we can make another one, and another, and
another and finally construct a circle. So the circle would then be a
legitimate inference from one of these segments if that curve is a continuous,
uniform curve, so continuous uniform curvature must produce a circle. That is
the process of inference. Inference means simply getting our percepts, plural,
seeing what is common to them and then making a rule.
And the funny thing about it is this. If we infer correctly we must discover something which is the origin of the percept. In other words, we get something after the percept, which we know existed before the percept, that is, the wholeness back again. The whole exists before we can see the part. When we take the part out we can infer the whole from it. But if you take a portion of the organism of a man, cut out his liver or something like that, or his stomach, let’s take the stomach as an example. Cut it out and you will see there is a hole at the top and another hole at the bottom. Now you can infer from that that there is a relation between that and something else because there is a tube there and there is a tube there, so there is for letting in and for letting out. So you can infer from that fact that there is something other than that because it is not a closed system.
Now, if we get a perfect sphere we cannot infer from that sphere, take a transparent Perspex sphere, we cannot infer, as we look through it, anything whatever other than itself, because it has no functional relation either inside or out, to anything else. So if we see that sphere we cannot infer that there is another sphere outside it or that there is one inside it, whereas if we take a thing like the stomach, which is truncated, it is cut off at the top and the bottom and it has a tube letting out and letting in, we can infer that there is a relation with something other than the stomach. So, that every time we come to a partial being which is obviously cut in some way and is itself a functional structure, we can infer a relation to other structures which function.
So if we trace, say, the arterial system from the heart right through to the terminals, and we there discover that the arteries are getting finer and finer and then they sort of filter away to nothing and then we find that that blood is filtering back again and going back to the heart another way, then if we cut out one of the systems, the arterial system from the venous system, we can infer one from the other because the heart could not generate the blood in itself, we know that it must get it back again. So we could infer the circulation simply by taking half of it. So that inference is a very, very powerful weapon. And from two percepts, if we examine them very carefully, we can discover a lot, but from one pure percept we can infer nothing because the idea of inference is the idea of doing something which implies plurality. So that inference cannot proceed on one percept. In fact it cannot proceed without recognition.
Track 5
When a baby sees something for the first time is does not re-cognise it. Re-cognise means fit it together. There is one idea and there is another idea. If you know it there is the cog process in cognition. They must fit so that when one moves the other is forced to move. This is why cognition is really a mechanical process, why thinking isn’t clever at all. Serial thinking isn’t a bit clever because it is entirely mechanical. Every word has a definite relation with every other word and if you think accurately you cannot help coming to certain conclusions because of the formal relations of the words.
So, if you define nature as of solids, liquids, gases, then once you have defined those it isn’t clever to recognise that water is not a solid, because you have already defined the situation. It is a mechanical process of cognition, so in inference we are really fitting things together, taking two percepts, and to see if their teeth are the same pitch. If they are they can relate together and if they are not, they cannot. This is why we take the concept say of energy, which is the Greek for work, and in, energy is, energy is work-in, that which is working in something. And if we take the concept of feeling, we have now got something that we cannot translate. We cannot make these fit, we cannot cog them together because energy has nothing in it to do with consciousness. Energy is simply a force working, producing an effect, but feeling implies consciousness.
Now if we want to fit them together we will have to have a term that is hybrid and we have such a term, namely the term emotion. Emotion is feeling but emotion is also mechanical, it is out-motion. So emotion tells us what is the link idea that enables to cognise the relation between energy and feeling and always there is some word which stands in the role of relating concept to two others that will not fit.
A lot of philosophers came to dualistic conclusions about the Universe because they didn’t understand that many words, like the word ‘energy’ have no psychological significance at all and many psychological terms have no mechanical significance at all, and instead of seeking for the words that link the two together, they failed to find them and the result was they produced a dualism of a Universe of energy, blind force, working haphazardly, and another Universe of feeling shot through and through with purpose. So we have two kinds of philosophies, teleological philosophies, that is philosophies of purpose which have to do with the psychological aspects of the Universe, and non-teleological or mechanistic ones which have no psychological content at all. And yet is we introduce the relating words which always have two significances, a mechanical one and a psychological one, then the Universe is seen to be no longer to be a dualistic one and we can reduce the process.
So, perception is taking bits of the Universe, inference is drawing conclusions from the bits, seen in relation, and authority , if we look at it, you can see the ‘Thora’ in there, means law, ‘torah’, the good old name Thora, ‘Speak to me’. Speak to me of Law. Now au [ow] is the same as ‘self’. It means a mobilised energy or will. Thor is law and the it is the establishment, the Y is integration. So an ‘authority’ is simply a being which has established the law in itself. So if we find in the New Testament that is says of Jesus, of when he went into the synagogue, ‘He spoke not like the scribes but he spoke as one having authority’. That means to say that he had worked it out in his own substance. The scribes copied manuscripts and they said it says in the manuscripts so and so, and between being twelve years old and thirty years old Jesus went about, and he did all the things necessary, so that by the time he emerges at thirty he has been the lost sheep, the one out of a hundred that went out and found out what it was to be every kind of human being there is. So that later on when it says he is all things to all men, it is because he has been doing things during that period. He already knew of his mission when he was twelve he told his Mother, “Sorry, I’m busy, can’t come home I am doing my Heavenly Father’s business”. When he was twelve years old, twelve means governmental perfection, he had governed himself and he knew where he was going. He was going to perfect integration which is the same thing as Universal Consciousness, and he knew, that to get it he would have to go to Hell. That is to say, he would have to go through an experiential cycle which would cover the whole of social welfare work today, right down to the lowest level. He would have to go in doss houses, he would have to go in brothels, he would have to know all about everything and be himself the prodigal, so that the time he was thirty, which is the three tens, he has now got his three parts, his drives, his feelings and his reasons are now perfectly integrated and put in order. He now knows what he is talking about, not because it says so in the book, but because he has done it.
And that is why we find that when he emerges and he is told to carry his cross, although a cross wasn’t a very big thing, because they were made for men to carry, he wasn’t strong enough to carry it, physically because he’d knocked himself about in the process of getting that knowledge and considered that the price was worth it. and said so himself, “Which one of you, before building a house, does not see whether he has the where withal to finish it”.
Track 6
So, authority means the Self with the law established in it and it can only come by you actually exposing yourself to the situation. It can never come out of reading a book. Out of the book you can get the suggestion of where to go tonight, but if you don’t go it won’t help you. Out of a conversation you can get hints, but if you don’t apply them it won’t help you. You can turn into an intellectualist, but you cannot turn into an authority. If you go to all the Universities of the world, it doesn’t matter where they are, the best in the world, you will find professors of Philosophy who are, as Nietzsche said, “Sitting in the chairs of death and who know nothing whatever about human beings”, because they have never been off that chair. They started fifth century BC, in the Middle Ages and they finished up, having studied through Kant and Hulme and everybody and yet, in fact they are quite incapable of solving the most elementary human relation because they have never exposed themselves to a real tight, difficult situation. And it is this readiness to expose oneself that converts mere intellectual propositions into authority.
So we can understand why Socrates was an authority. Socrates stood in bare feet in snow, from one day, right through the day, through the night and through the next day, meditating and every body looked at him and thought, “He is a tough fellow”. He was. And they listened to him because he was so much harder than they were on the battlefield, so much less perturbed than they were, so much more sure of himself than they were because he knew where he was going.
Now any man who has ever become
an authority must, necessarily have exposed himself. If you talked to
intellectualists you will find men who can recite all sorts of funny things
from sources. You put then in a tight spot and they collapse. There is no
authority in them. Authority means the law established in their own substance.
It is a matter of nervous integration. A fellow was in a Chinese jail in
Supposing we had no regard for any idea as such, we are not pinned on it, our will is not too stressed on idea, well then they cannot brain wash us. It is impossible. If they shock us or starve us or do anything whatever, simply because our will is not too stressed on idea as valuable they cannot brainwash us. But if we have got a favourite idea which we think is essential to out life, and then they come along, and electrically blow that idea, nerves, synoptic grouping to bits then our treasure where our heart is has gone, we can be brainwashed. So the protection against brainwashing is don’t rest in form. Don’t rest on a material idea, rest in pure will and know that the will can generate an idea again if it wants to and if it is useful. All ideas are simply the way the will behaves. And therefore if you rest in the will and in nothing else like Julius Caesar rested in the will when they said come to our meeting, he sent the message “No”. “We demand you to come”. “No”. “You must come”. “No”. “Why won’t you come”? “The cause is in my will”.
You ask a child, Jesus said, “Become as children and you will get in the Kingdom”. “Why are you doing that”? “I want to”. The child only knows one reason for doing things, it wants to. If you smack it you may make it want to obey you because it is painful, but its ground reason is I like it and I don’t like it. And when Christ said, “Say yes and no”, all else comes of the devil, he meant don’t waffle. Feel very, very clearly whether you like this part or this part, or dislike this, and if you like it take it and if you don’t, reject it because if you take a thing you are not sure of you are taking insecurity into yourself. Whereas if you take only the thing you are absolutely certain of you are building yourself a being which cannot be broken.
One of the titles of Jesus is the irrefragable, the unbreakable. He is unbreakable because his name means un-breakability. And Jesus simply means Iasus, means affirmation saves, positivity as we call it. Keep your will positive that saves you. Christ means circle with a cross in it. If they were trying to brainwash you, they couldn’t was out the circle and the cross, because that circle is your being, it’s your body, and that cross is the itch in you, the part. And, if you know that Iasus, than which there is no more excellent name, you know that positivity will always rebuild a universe. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” is the statement of a gentleman locked up. Because that nutshell is simply circumscription itself which worked out like this, and like this can produce a psychology and a philosophy and a socio-political theory, it can produce anything because everything is derived from it necessarily. So authority means the integration and establishment of law in and by your own efforts.
Track 7
Next we come to conjecture and this is the weakest thing we have got here it simply means you have a go. “What is the cause of that”? “Oh a banana fell off the roof last Tuesday”. It is as good as anything else. If it is merely conjecture it just means throwing anything in at all and that is why the Indians didn’t allow it. Now Socrates allowed it because people do it, and he said it is a barmy way of thinking and can hardly be called thinking at all. But sometimes you could accidentally say it right, but you wouldn’t know that you had but it could be right. So he allows that a man can accidentally conjecture a thing correctly and not that he would know it was correct. So really it is a silly sort of process. But in intuition we have the top level of total awareness of the significance of the parts in the whole
Now we can do a little process very important
here and do a little bit of evolution. I want you to imagine we have drawn a
very big circle and then taken an ausclicht, one of these segments, take a
piece out of the cake and we will draw it. There is the curve of that big
circle to remind us. This would go down to the centre. Oh I’ll be daring, I’ll
draw it. Now we will draw down here the mineral world you see. Now the mineral
world we know simply to be energy rotating, all the time rotating, rotating, it
never does anything else, except rotate. Just going round all the time, it is
energy and from the psychological point of view, it is Hell, that is to say if
we consider the energy psychologically we will have to say that each little rotation
of energy is a psychon, what life is called a monad, a tiny little amount of
spirit busy rotating and being nothing other than a little rotating system. And
we would call that the matter world. You mustn’t confuse that with substance,
Now from the
top level there comes radiation, which as far as our factual knowledge is
concerned, comes largely from the Sun to the earth and causes some of the
energies in here to start growing up. We say that the seeds, how do we get the
plants coming out? There is the origin of our letter V, vegetation, V already means
a split, to develop, to de veil, de veil opt, take the veil off your eyes it
means. Here everything is 
veiled.
The op or ob- ject, thrown down, this is a reference to the satanic
down-throwing and then the saving energies from above come down from above and
work on it and literally force some of the matter to start developing itself,
which is the vegetable world. Now if we call this the bondage principle that is
the free principle. And here is our first stage of freedom, the vegetable world
growing out. And we will draw a line here now to represent that process. Now
the vegetable is bound into the Earth but free in its branches. It is rooted or rotated, the root is the rota
from which it springs, the energies in the seed were rotating and then they
shot from the rota to the routas, and
began to draw and then b- ranch, branch is the same as break. So here we had
the freedom of the first order, we will call it first order free-dome here, it
is still dome, not merely free, free-dome, and then along comes the animal, there
is the animal masses, and proceeds to eat this first level freedom and it has
added to it in the evolutionary scale the possibility of translation, that is of
moving about and selecting what it shall eat. So that is freedom of the second order, second
order freedom.
Then there appears man, who can,
factually run about collect the animals, collect the plants and move them to
where he wants, so he has third order freedom. We are at the level there if we
do not evolve any further. This is the fellow that you would call a pretty wise
fellow because he can go and dig in the Earth, get the metals out, stand
bridges up all over the place. He can collect all the plants, transplant one thing
to another and cover one continent with rubbish and liberate another horrible
moss all over the place, all these are
capacities of this fellow, and he thinks
he is free but his freedom is only of the third order, he is only the fourth
stage from complete bondage. And above him is another possibility. This one we
call 
man,
but man only means this fellow of the maw running about, is the evaluator, the
counter. But slightly taller than that man, here is another man, his head is
above this line, this is the counting line. And this one is called a god. This
one is called man and this one is called a god. It doesn’t really matter
whether we take the New Testament or Indian metaphysics, the categories of
beings go through and after man comes God, but human is the same meaning
because man plus hu means spiritual power on top of the man. This is why Jesus is
said to be a divine human. Jesus was accused by the rabbis of being a blasphemer,
saying he was equal with God. He quoted the Old Testament to them and said, “It
is written ye are Gods”. That is to say, every person who intuits the whole is
a God because he is not different from the whole at the moment of intuiting it.
The same being can be a god one minute and a devil the next minute and if you
read in the Old Testament you will find the Sons of God married the daughters
of men. Some of these counters have got very good-looking daughters and some of
those intuitive fellows like those daughters because they are good-looking and
they take them and they marry them and they produce a sort of intermix level
that has flashes of intuition but the rest of the time is a serial thinker, so
is a good business man or a good militarist and so on he has flashes of
intuition of what to do next in the
business so on and at the rest of the
time he spends at the dianoe[t]ic
level working out the details, mechanically.
Track 8
So there is no difference whatever between The God and A God, at the level where the person is intuiting, what he knows is what the Universal knows. And if he then makes a private purpose, he immediately puts his head down, he bends like this, puts his head down there, starts picking things off the ground, he has started becoming Cainish again. This is Abel, this is Cain. This Cain man is always turning back into the Earth. Now that turning back into the Earth is a necessary process, because this is part of the world limit. And the world limit has got its intuitive knowledge at the top, internal to that is serialised knowledge, this is the motionless mover of Aristotle, this is the rationalist process of the Stoics, then comes the man who has his head about that level and just manages to keep his feet on the ground and we say that he is an animal man, the Indians call him pashal meaning a passive man to the stimulus from below and we have some fellows like Aleister Crowley who go like this and try to get their heads down and still keep their feet on the floor, and it is all legitimate if you know what you are doing, and if you pitch yourself in the will it doesn’t really matter what you do, and it is because of this that Christ never made a moral statement in the New Testament, because the moral is the expedient for the ruling classes; the ethical is merely the habitus of the human race in general as a rational, dianoic race.
But for the person who is determined to discover this principle in himself and knows that he must echo the whole universal process, and then if he doesn’t go down there he hasn’t completed his education, for that man it is permissible for him to do anything, only he must ask himself before he does whether he has got the wherewithal at any given moment, because he may not have on a Tuesday, the energy, the consciousness, the concentration he needs to do a certain job which he will be able to do very, very well in another five years. So he aught to grade the hells to which he is prepared to go. For instance Jesus says that, when they tackle him about marriage, he says, well not everybody has to get married, some people are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs off men, some become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. But for the man who has had no experience at all, ever, there will be a black spot, a spot of ignorance in his life about certain relations unless he does it. Now nothing goes up except that which came down, that is the words of Jesus, “Nothing goes up except that which came down”.
This is the whole circle, this is the precipitate, if we like to continue that and pretend that is the earth, we can do. It is the Moon if we live on the Moon, it is Mars is we live on Mars, wherever there is a concentration of matter, there are round it forces trying to make it grow, vegetative forces, the atmosphere of the planet Venus shows that there must be some kind of vegetation on there because of the chemistry of the atmosphere. There is a growing process on there. On another place there may be animal life here we have got man life. Somewhere else there may be lots of this human life, but on Earth the next stage of evolution for humans beings is to convert serial thinking into this simultaneous, intuitive thinking and you can only do it by inhibiting your serial process.
Track 9
Now we want to show, why Plotinus
himself said that you will have to go through this serial process before you
can reach the other. Supposing I start to draw a curve like this and don’t
finish it. There is a 
certain
feeling about that curve which tells you that if you were to carry it on it
would go like this and come back here. Now can you all feel that? And that curve says there is some more of it
there. So this curve we would call a stimulus, a partial stimulus, which forces
you to think about a whole. In the same way, if I go like this you tend to want
to fill that in don’t you? You know it has been left out really. So there is a
process going on inside you that says wherever there is a hiatus in
consciousness, wherever there is a formal lack, there is a niggle, you want to
fill it in. Now, if you try to understand the whole Universe prematurely, you
will find you can’t do it, because of the little bits that are not filled in. There
is obviously a tendency to go back and examine that curve; so all the
unfulfilled parts of your life niggle at you. As a matter of fact, you sit down
very quietly and try to remember the things of your past life you will find
that you can only remember two orders of things, high spots of joy and the
errors you made that you blush at the time. A very simple experiment with
children is to give them half a dozen mathematical problems, very simple ones,
and to interrupt one or two of them, and then ask them what were the problems
they had to do. Now all these children show that they can remember the ones
that they were not allowed to finish, not the ones that they did finish. The
finished one has got the nervous energy going round, round, round fitting
itself. That is called satisfaction. ’Sat’ is being, faction means you are
being done fully. Satisfaction is full doing. If you define a certain problem,
how many beans make five? And you start adding them up, a bean, a whole bean, a
half a bean, and so on, you see, like Mr Bean, if you stop an action you will
find a dither in the mind, mmm that’s not right. There is expectancy in the mind and it must be
fulfilled, because there is a drive in you to fulfil it. That is the moost, it is the same as Moses.
Gurdjieff says, “Ich liebe weil bekohs ich müss”, I love because I must and actually
the English word must is phonetically false for Germans, they müss because the urge is there. You see
we have flattened it, we have emasculated it, we have taken the drive out of
it, we have civilised it because really we müst
not except perhaps in
Track 10
So therefore it was said, first complete your dianoic process in any given field, then intuit it, because you will not intuit it until you have done. Now the example is we take a glass, we put water in it and we put some salt with dirty earth in it, stir it up. After a time the salt has become invisible and the earth has settled at the bottom. Now we have the water, the hidden, invisible salt, the dirty earth at the bottom. That dirty Earth represents the mass of your body; that water represents your soul and that invisible salt represents your savvy that you don’t yet know you have got. But you will have to pile into it more stimuli, these are the little bits of salt coming in you see. Every salt is a jump, salute, same as health. You keep on putting this in, still nothing happens, the water is clear, there is more mud down there. And then you put in a little bit more salt, suddenly the water starts to dither and then you see crystallisation begins.
That crystallisation shows you what is going on inside. Suddenly you see that your soul had a spirit in. The spirit is the form of the salt. You cannot get spirit unless you pile in percepts, and they must be first hand. They must be your observations of light they mustn’t be simply read out of a book or discussed and left at that, you must actually go and see it because your five sense organs are feeding your intelligence with stimuli, spiritual food as Jesus calls it. So, suddenly there is crystallisation inside the salt and you begin to see what the meaning of form is, form is crystallisation. Christ and crystal are really the same word, is this cross criss-crossed. This is the process, crystallisation. You can’t get it without piling in the stimulus into your soulish life which is the water. There is your body, that body is a means of anchoring you, that is all. It stops you flying away. Before you had in a physical body, if you didn’t like something you just left and it was not possible to find you, because you were pure spirit. You could be actually hiding inside another spirit, like the salt was hiding in that water, so that there used to be a lot of dodging going on before the world was made. That dodging in Qabalah is called the Edomites, you see, the Edomites. They run like Esau in Edom and rejects the dominion that should have been his and swapped it for a mess of potage. The mess of pottage was Egyptian lentils. Egyptian lentils are aphrodisiacs, they act on your sensuous apparatus and make you imagine wonderful delights and they stop you doing any work So Edom means I won’t dome. I refuse to control myself.
So
now we will draw the Universe again and we will say that is the circle that
which there is no bigger and outside
there is
The Universe is expanding, it is invading Edomite territory in the same way as in Israel now, the Edomites descendents, the Arabs, are being pushed back by the Israelis. It is exactly the same problem at the biological level, those who lived in the tents and wandered about and wouldn’t settle down and put one brick on another will find that the brick builders will push them out and they will have to start brick building or be pushed right out.
Track 11
So this process of crystallisation which is the same thing that Jung would call the integration of the personality depends on data being fed into the soul. The water is the Soulish life, pure feeling. The stimulus makes ripples in it. You don’t know how many ripples you have got until the consummation of days, which really means you don’t know how wise you are until you are dead. When your physical body is precipitate and falls to the bottom, when all the stimuli are added up you will suddenly discover you know something, and it is yours permanently. Everything you lay your will to is yours eternally. If you lay your will to nothing, you have got nothing. If you lay your will to reflexive self-consciousness and the awareness of the crystallisation of the whole principle, cross in the circle, with that as your permanent furniture in the will you can construct a Universe from first principles, you can become lord of your own universe. If you won’t learn it you will be back again, because you will be spewed out of the mouth of the Universe, as it says in the Revelation. If you won’t say yes and you won’t say no you are said to be Laodicean, which means literally, “Let them say it, what does it matter, we don’t care”. So let them say it, so you will be spewed out of the mouth, you will be there. Meanwhile more energy will be in becoming orderly and later on again it will invade you. And you will have the choice again. Are you going in to continue your education, or is thing going to pursue you eternally threatening you with order you have not got in yourself?
So all the beings that at death do not have in themselves the principle of integration will find that they are whipped back in again ultimately, into the cyclic process and made to reface in another body the problems they shirked before. If you know that you will have to face it ultimately then you affirm it, Yea-sus, you affirm it and say I might as well learn this time. It is an historical fact that the early Christians believed in re-incarnation. After all Christianity is an oriental religion. Jesus himself said that John the Baptist was Elias come again.
Now we know that if a person had
only one life he would go out of it very dearly, he might as well not have come
into it. The fact that we can appreciate today certain things is only evidence
that we are coming into the fruits of other people’s labours, other bodies
millions of years ago, amoeba have struggled about and lizards have grown and
disappeared, the plants and the animals and
men who have all lived and contributed something to our understanding potential.
Either we take it a step further or we fail, so if we fail, we fail as
individuals, because life does not fail. If it is no good a given body,
alright, discard it. If a man identified with that body he is discarded because
he identified with it. If he identified with the life process itself, he is not
discarded because he is working with it. So we have this whole process, quite
logically involving, that is in-willing, and evolving, that is out-willing. And
the ultimate stage is, as defined by Christ and also by all the great Rishis of