[Not verbatim. Please fix. - JH]

INVOCATION

The text of a talk given in Liverpool by Eugene Halliday. Tan Y Garth tape 224.

We have a question here about the difference between invocation and creation. In the past, I have said that the Sophic Sphere contains all the forms of all the beings that have ever been or will be and that when one form is set up in the mind all similar forms resonate with it. I also suggested experiment by invoking similars and this question wants to know the difference between invoking things and creating them. God creates with a glance and yet if I become interested in something new to me, say stamp collecting, I will find myself seeing references to stamps almost everywhere. This fact, the ones who choose the subject, causes us to see things related to it all over, everywhere we go, is a typical example of resonance.

The difference between invocation and creation, shortly, we can say that invocation implied in-calling and creation, binding that which does not yet exist. The concept of in presupposes out, so that to invoke, we call in, the voc is the same as voice, we call in from outside something which was not previously inside. So invocation implies there is already this circumscription, a limit of the being, and invoking is the calling in the already circumscribed being something which is beyond their limit. Sometimes, in magical rituals, you will see the word invoke and sometimes evoke, and sometimes, in daily life, provoke is more common. Evoking is taking out of something, invoking is taking into it, but in both cases, the being already exists, already is circumscribed. Supposing this represents a given object like a stone and a primitive mind in a period when magic was a usual mode of operating, would either invoke or evoke a spirit in relation to this form, according to whether he believed a resident spirit in it. In which case he would evoke it, call it out, or, there was a spirit outside which he wished to fix inside that object. He would then call it invoke.

In primitive animistic times it was believed that every object had a resident spirit. That every tree had a spirit, that every stone had a spirit. In modern terms you might say the chemistry shows by the way it causes reaction in people, a causal power in it which acts when inserted into a being as if it had a resident spirit. Supposing we say that spirit actually means formative power. We know this by the piri and the final T which is fixation. A spirit means a formative force establishing itself, then any formative force whatever could be placed under the heading of spirit.

So if we take a given chemical element and find, that when we put that element into another being that the condition of this other being is changed, we have, in effect, done what the Ancients would have called, invoking a spirit into the larger being because there was, already inside this being, the spirit, a formative force. We will let a large circle represent the individual and a small circle a dose of medicine, chemical, then to insert that chemical into the being, is to invoke, to call into that being, a formative force. That force will then proceed to act on the substance of the being into which it is inserted and change its form of behaviour. All drugs act in this manner and the same kind of phenomena that would have been called spirit phenomena in the ancient world, are today called typical bio-chemical reactions.

Let us imagine, for a moment we have the trunk of a tree here. This trunk of a tree has been sat upon by some prominent person, perhaps Shaka Zulu or somebody. If he has a certain kind of resident fire in himself and he sits on that tree trunk, that tree trunk is bound to resonate in a different way from what it used to do before he sat on it. It does not matter how minute the change is, the fact is that there must be a change. Even mechanically, if he sits on a thing it compresses it a little bit and if the vibrations of his organism are of a certain order, they must transmit to the molecular vibrations of that tree trunk. The primitives then saw that the resonance relation between a powerful being like a king and an object that he touched would establish by sympathy a permanent virtue in the object that he had touched. So, we get this kind of thing in the blessing the water, the making the water holy by blessing. This blessing, in effect, is an invoking of spirit into the object. If we take ordinary dead water, so-called, ordinary mineral water, and we utter the appropriate mantram or prayer or command, to the spirit, then the quality of the water is supposed to be changed by this fact, and we have invoked, called it into that water, a formative spirit. The water is then supposed to be able to do something for you that it could not do before.

Supposing we take a little pea, and we let this pea be eaten, just as it is, a little hard pea, like preserved peas, and we eat it and we are calling into ourselves the forces of the pea that we eat. Supposing we wait a little bit, until the pea begins to germinate. As soon as that pea begins to germinate, the fact that it has started to germinate, is evidence of a change of its chemistry. The fact that it has started to come out shows that the forces that were buried inside it have started to extrovert themselves. Therefore, at the point of germination of that pea we would expect the message that the power rate would be more available. We can say that it would actually be better for us to eat a pea that had germinated than one which had not. So we find that people who believe in natural feeding in dealing with plants of this kind, actually cause them to germinate before eating them. Because the fact of it pressing out, at all, shows that the forces inside it have started to come out and therefore will be more available.

If this force coming out comes from inside of its own volition, then we could say that it is creating from inside that shoot. But if it is not coming out and it waits for a force like that of the sun to strike upon it before it can come out we can say that the sun has evoked, called out, its reaction. If we consider creation as arcing in all cases, it is rotation, circumscription of space, then when there is a form coming to be which did not previously exist, we can call it an act of creation if it is made by a power itself. So the power resident in this seed coming out is circumscribing a little bit, the shoot and afterwards gradually producing a complete plant. This is an act of creation. It is an act of arcing of form and every form that comes to exist is created in this sense. It is kra, the arc, the root of creation with which we have to deal.

So, in the sense that prior to the existence of anything, there was no arcing whatever, there was created thing, then the spirit that then existed which is called God by Christ, God is Spirit, itself rotated, arced itself and thus brought to be from its own rotation, a being. We have said before about the law of causation, the European sense of causation is serial striking a lot of billiard balls in a line, hitting each other, and in the Indian concept of causation, the effect is the cause itself involved. The way the cause behaves is called the e-ffect, the ex-factor, when viewed from outside by another being. There is an eye, an observer, and it is looking and the effect the out-fact of this cause is no more than the way the power in that place is behaving. So the power itself, becomes the effect. We know that will power in man works in this manner. To apply your will to a thing is to direct it at something and to cause your concentration to go round it. If you do this in any point in your organism, you can raise or lower your temperature by simply focussing your will on it, because the will is the initiative power in us. When we focus that will, it starts a zone of turbulence, it starts going round. It is similar perhaps, to shining into a glass of water a beam, like an infra-red beam. It will heat the water inside and turbulence will start in the water. Looking inside yourself, into your substance, with will concentrated has the same kind of effect on your inner substance that the heat ray would have on water.

So the difference between invocation and creation is simply this. In creation we are referring to the coming to be by the act of self circumscribing of a force and also, any kind of circumscription whatever that is imposed o a definite amount of substance. As we would say of a sculptor that he is creating when he hammers a piece of marble into a definite shape which he conceives. When we are talking about voking, either in-, e-, or pro-, we are already supposing a pre-existing being, and in relation to the concept, in and out, we are calling the voke. We are voicing and saying, “Let the spirit from outside come in,” invocation, “Let the resident spirit in it come out,” evocation, or we can strike on its perimeter with a stimulus and the resultant pire action within it is called provocation. Those are the three ways that we can consider it.

When we actually deal with this in ourselves we can see that when we set up a triangle in our own consciousness, by act of will, we select among our data the one that would call the form of a triangle. If we concentrate on that and let it dominate consciousness it will throw the whole mind substance into a triangular shape. Then the mind must respond to every triangle where so ever it sees them and from whatever angle, simply because the mind is vibrating in that manner. So if we set the thing up, a triangle in our own mind this triangle will call in, from outside, other triangles. That will be an invocation, by setting up inside, actually creation here, of a triangle, is then the first stage of an invocation of the outer triangle. If we can insert this idea in somebody else’s mind, the triangle, then, in effect, it will be e-voking a reaction. Because, once we have inserted the triangle in their mind, if we set another triangle up outside, the outer triangle will cause a response from the inner one and e-voke a response. This is the fundamental idea behind Pavlov’s Reflex Theory. First we set up a form, a tinkle bell in the mind, we associate it with another one a nice piece of beef, and then we present one of these forms outside and because we have associated the two inside, we e-voke a response. So we see all these things which are very, very modern, like behaviouristic psychology, are fundamentally identical with the old concepts used by the magicians, the Magian philosophers of Persia.

The question of brain-washing which we discussed is connected to the same idea. Because if we take any given mind and the mind has been subjected to stimuli of various orders, square, triangle, circle and so on, if we continuously present these stimuli to the mind in a fixed order, then there will arise, in the mind of the person a concept of orderliness which confers upon that mind the tendency to repeat the order, to become familiar with it, and in the process of becoming familiar with it, to feel secure, about it. If, when a person has become thoroughly secure in his feeling because he believes he knows the order of events, we then put him in a dark room and we deprive him of that order of events, after a time because there is no incoming energy from the external stimulus, the energies now involved in the memory, that is, the substantial modifications produced by the original stimuli, gradually equilibrate. They fall down to a certain level where the order of presentation is no longer dominant. At this point, they begin to appear in a haphazard manner. If you had been taught, triangle, square, circle, triangle, square, circle for several years, then you would think that was part of the universe. If you were then put in a dark room and you were expecting triangle, square, circle, and instead of that, nothing happens for a long time, and you are remembering the order and waiting for it to recur and then it doesn’t recur but you find that the triangle and the circle and the square begin to float in and out of each other as the order was the ground of your security, because you can anticipate the thing, you will then begin to feel insecure. When you are feeling insecure you are craving the return of that order. So once they have reduced you down to that level, the next step is to send a man in who says, “I know the order that things should be in. “Really, it should be triangle, square circle.” Since he says that then the patient, the gentleman to be brain-washed, jumps at this because it offers security again. Because of the conditioning of the reflexes, this man then appears to him to be a saviour, a friend because he has re-inserted into him the regular period that he knows about it. Thereupon, he automatically trusts, that is there is a positive taxism movement towards this man. This man has actually made him feel comfortable, therefore he can be trusted. So then he begins to confide in him. This man says, “I can get you out of this place, back into the land where triangles, squares, circles is the order of events.” So then he starts to talk. When he has talked sufficiently then he is let loose into the land of triangle, square and circle. But you can see that the whole system of doing it, is identical in principle with this invocation, evocation, provocation and creation.

We create an environment, a dark room for him, and then, deprive him of the order of events, and when the thing falls down into its level of equilibration, which any closed system must, ultimately do, then we give him a little taste of the old order to gain his confidence, and then we insert into him whatever we want. All that is part of the magic.

There is a question here, “Can the expression Exaltation of the Will be more clearly understood by reference to harmonics?”

When we are talking about Exaltation of the Will we are talking about lifting the will up to higher levels, and when we are talking about harmonics we are talking about notes related to a given note. If we take a piece of string and we subdivide the string, then the subdivisions of the string we can call upper partials. That is, they are smaller than the fundamental. They are higher notes, as we would call them. They are harmonics but they are not the whole of harmonics. We mean by harmonics not only the higher notes, the upper partials, but any notes whatever that resonate with the original note. We showed before that we can get resultant tones lower than the two notes that constitute it, and these are harmonic relations. Thus we played two notes together and heard an octave below one of them. This shows that when we are given a certain fundamental we can hear notes below it as well as above it. Exaltation of the Will means transcending any particular thing that is occupying your attention.

Now, most people, when they listen to music, to begin with, not being trained, listen to the highest note, the one which they think is the melody. In very, very simple compositions you will find the melodic line occupies the top place because the mind of man is positively phototaxic. It prefers light to dark. In other words, there is an anti-gravity something in man and the gravity force represents to him bondage, inertia and death. So, if we play a very low note, say the lowest note on a double bass, which is forty-one and quarter vibrations a second, it is so low that it hardly seems like a musical note at all. It is very grumpy and something in us says, ”It is a bit earth-bound that note, we will have another note.” So if we play that note and another one an octave higher, then one an octave above that, we will tend to listen to the top one and we will go on doing this until we get up to the level of piccolos. A piccolo can blow you the highest note, say, in an orchestra, in general, something like 2,700 and odd vibrations per second. If you blow much higher than that with a special instrument, it becomes physically painful and you would then find that you would not prefer the higher note. In general, in ordinary music, the melodic line occupies a high position and the reason why we like it is because we are positively phototaxic, that is, we prefer light to darkness. This is a very strange thing because in the Bible it says, men love darkness rather than light because their ways are evil. In actual fact, all the people we know, do prefer light. Even the criminals prefer light when cracking a safe but they like to confine it to the job. We are positively phototaxic. There is something in us that prefers light so that we can see what we are doing. This, musically, is represented by the top notes. Just as very, very high notes can become painful so very, very intense light in the eye can become painful too. In fact, we find that there is a gamut of vibrations, a certain number of vibrations, quite small really, within which, life is comfortable

And below that it becomes too gross, too heavy, too difficult to move. Too inertic and above that, the thing becomes difficult to control, difficult to assimilate and painful. In fact, if we look in the universe, we will find that if we take the top level frequency in the universe and then the lowest one, that life only occurs between these two in a very, very narrow band. Thus you protect the life on earth. If we go very, very deep down we find the life diminishing in quantity and if we go very, very high up the mountains we find it diminishing again. There is a particular band, a gamut of vibrations that organic existence needs and above and below that is either too much or too little for it.

To Exalt the Will we take it off a particular idea which is really a partial of some fundamental and we consider the related ideas to it. There is, actually, a definite frequency for every idea, and certain ideas are related to other ideas in a very simple ratio. If we take the unison, musically, as one to one and a fifth as three to two and the next as four to three and the next as five to four and so on, in the ratio, we will find that we can make certain sounds very, very pleasant, and that the sounds that are very pleasant, have their numbers quite small, somewhere between six and three. If we go up to other numbers, fifteen, sixteen and so on, the thing becomes discordant and difficult to assimilate. So there is a real relationship between sound and this harmonic concept and the Exaltation of the Will.

If we take certain of the classical musicians we find that they have the power to exalt somebody’s will although, in fact, the person is only sitting there listening, they feel that they can do great things. When they listen to certain passages in Beethoven, they will feel tremendously moved and capable of great things. Then if we give them Kettelby’s ‘In a Monastery Garden,’ they will feel not so capable. Yet the only difference between the two arranged sounds is that one is observing these fundamental laws more rigorously than the other. The one that observes the law most closely is the one that has the greatest effect and the one that does not know very much about the law has very little effect. So, the men that can observe the law of the aerofoil make a better aeroplane than the man who doesn’t. In order to grow in power, to become independent, we must obey the law. So we have the old statement, “Obey in order to rule.” We must learn more and more about the law in order to obey it. If we obey it, then we will learn how to fly but if we don’t we will remain earthbound. Then, we have to discover the law.

Let us say that a tiny little part of a string is like a little idea in the mind and it is related to the fundamental, the whole mind, in a certain way. To exalt the will is to turn the will off that little idea onto the bigger idea and finally to the fundamental idea of the individual and then of the general universal and finally of the non-dual Absolute. The more we can understand about this harmonic law, the better for us because, as we have just said, if we understand the law and obey it then we will rise and we will rise above all the little laws that the big law controls.

Supposing we imagine a little man, standing on that partial, (1) just a little bit, and it is vibrating in a certain manner and it is joggling him and rattling his teeth and, owing to the law of vibrations, his teeth are becoming loose and threatening to fall out of his jaw. To escape that, if we can stretch his legs a bit and put the legs on a wider base (2) he will slow down the frequency or the beat. If he can stretch his legs further still, (3) then the beat will get slower and slower. If he stands right on the term (4) he will find, in fact, that it does not disturb him at all.

So there is a real value in considering ideas that are not particular but are universal. David Hume showed that the general is only the particular used over a number of instances. When the instances are identical, or practically so, then we call it a general rule but that is universal which covers all the phenomena within the universe, and the man who can stand with his feet on the terms of the universe is going to be freed from all these disruptive vibrations.

If we change our diagram from the string diagram of the fundamental we will see what it means to stand on, in a finite being, the two terms. We want one leg inside and one leg out. One leg in the hole in the middle, that is the immanent spirit and the other one in the transcendent spirit. Between these two, will arise all the vibrations which constitute the forms of the universe and they cannot affect him if he is standing in these two zones, because both of those zones are not within this turbulence of the creative. It is beyond creature as the mystics used to say. The creature is simply the zone of turbulence in so far as it is krad or arced/arked, closed. Right in the middle, as we have said, the force cannot go, because it is dynamic so there is an empty zone and that is beyond creature on the inside, and beyond the perimeter, there is beyond-creature, the Infinite Spirit and with these two in mind, we can become superior to the whole process of action within it. So when we are considering the harmonics in relation to the exaltation of the will on the diagram where we use the lines to represent a fundamental as a string of a musical instrument we see what it means to extend it there and when we translate this diagram into another one we see what it means to stand with one foot on the inside and one on the outside of the rotation band. Every problem that a human being has is necessarily inside this action band. It is this pyro and the b which is the whole closure and this lem, the original lem in the dilemma, that constitutes a problem. A problem can only be a closed system and apart from closed systems there are no problems. A problem is something into which you can insert a probe and you can’t insert probes into anything other than finites. You see why we say, no man ever yet solved a problem he merely transcended it. If there is a man inside and he can’t get off that action band within the universe he cannot solve it at all. If he remains concentrated on himself within it, he will be determined by the law of any being identified with that particular band in the action zone. So that to be identified with a formal situation is automatically, to have a problem. No problem can be solved because that position in the action band is an eternal fact. But, we can transcend problems, that is we can go beyond them by practising non-identification. If, instead of concentrating on the physical body in a gross material situation that we call problematic, we start thinking of other things, we might say there is no sugar in our tea tonight and we are very annoyed about it and at that moment, the news comes over of an earthquake in Agadir and the mind flies out from the sugar for a moment to consider something more important. At that moment, we transcend the problem. There is still no sugar in the tea. The problem has not been solved but we have transcended the problem.

If we can go beyond all this action band into the immanent spirit and the transcendent spirit, we transcend at one blow, all problems and the essential of transcending a problem this, we must realise that the cause of the problem is identification with the finite. That there is no other problem. We know that this is so, it is demonstrably so because one man’s problem is no problem to another man and yet the situation is the same. It is only identification that makes the problem.

One man who did the interview on the Agadir earthquake went there not to rescue people but to get a story and he got his story. So the problem for him was getting a story and the problem that was for the people that were underneath the masonry that had fallen down was how to get out. They were identified with that and he was identified with getting the story. The problems were different only because the identification was different. If he had got there and said well, more important than this story is that I get even just one person out then he would have taken on another problem other than the problem of story-getting.

So, the value of a problem is no more than the stress of identification and we can take any position we like within the wheel of life and identify with it. Some people identify with everything that happens and the whole word is problematic to them. One man beats another man up in the street and some person going by becomes tremendously upset. This is identification and identification is the same thing as saying, “I have got my teeth, dent, into the situation.” In so doing, id, it, becomes an entity. I put my teeth into it and id becomes an entity. That is to say the idea that you formulate and make a centre of reference becomes an entity. It starts spinning round, it gathers force. It takes force out of the food you have eaten. It becomes progressively more and more substantial.

The Exaltation of the Will, the carrying above the situation of the will, the taking of it out of the situation, progressively, in bigger and bigger concepts therefore has a very, very close relation with the harmonic problem. You can take any factual situation in harmonics and look at the same thing and use it as an analogy in your life and you will see that there are moments of transcending the situation by non-identification.

Supposing we play two notes and we hear a resultant that we haven’t played. We are hearing that resultant because we are trying to. Most untrained people don’t hear those harmonics. They are there but they are not identified with them. But, if we played the two notes separately and then said, “Now, can you hear the third one?” then they reject the two that you have just played and in the rejection of those there is space for the other one to be heard. Listening to harmonics is a question of rejecting particular notes that you already know about and this leaving yourself free to let the other vibrations speak to you.

In the same way, if you want to hear an idea that you have never heard before you will have to reject the idea that you have already got. This continuous presentation of ideas with which you are already familiar is the enemy. If you go on doing it you will become an old bottle and when you become an old bottle you will unable to see that there are any other ideas. If we present an idea in a closed system, say the idea of flying by a piece of wood to a man in an African tribe far away from civilisation, he believes that flying is done in that way. Then quite suddenly we give an airlift to a modern plough and plough before his eyes and he is literally terrified with the demonstration of efficiency. He is an old bottle in his way and when these new ideas come in and are demonstrated to him they literally disrupt his peace of mind. Therefore he rises against it and tries to stop it. Every time an idea is put into a situation it provokes reaction. In order to control that reaction, we must invoke into them, call into them, certain ideas which will balance the energy of the new idea and thus produce an equilibrium. You will notice that the reaction towards automation has not been as violent as the reaction to the introduction of the Spinning Jenny and other things in its day. The reason was, in those days the methods of conditioning behaviour were not so popularly known and the result was, the did not get a penny lecture before the fact to prepare the mind for it but they were suddenly faced with a fait accompli which shook them to their foundations. Now, because they have learned, by the Pavlov method that these things can produce such violent reactions, therefore we have very nice, smiling faced men who say, “Automation is good for you. It actually makes a need for more workers than it did before because it increases production, widens the market and so on.” This makes the mind that is not good at arithmetic actually think that automation is increasing labour instead of decreasing it. Of course, manifestly, it decreases the need for it at any given number of commodities produced under its method.

( Break in the tape at this point. It continues with an example from medicine)

Somebody may say (my italics) “You are not very well, I can tell.” So, the idea, ‘You are not very well I can tell’ goes in the being and it resonates with the idea ‘I’m not feeling very well’. So the two together say, well really I must not be very well. I don’t feel it, I’ve just been told I don’t look it. That is two. These ideas then spin round and the idea ‘I’m not very well’ is the same thing as saying, “I’m not a well of force.” There is nothing coming out of this well of spirit on the inside. A well is a certain amount of water where there is a spring feeding into it and the spring of the individual being is the Immanent Spirit in that being. But if you say you are not very well, in effect, you set up an idea inside there that whizzes round and keeps reciting, “I’m not very well,” and the spirit which is trying to get through, which is springing forth is blocked by the rotation of this concept, “I am not very well.”

So while the person is feeling not very well because he has just been told by Mr Brown that he does not look very well and he did not feel very well, perhaps another person comes and says to him, “You have just been told that you don’t look very well, but the man who told you that you don’t look very well did so because he did not want you to go to the party where a certain lady will be because he wants her.” Suddenly the barrier is rubbed out. Cross it off. The spirit comes out again and says, “I will go, I am really quite well. I have allowed myself to be deceived.” If there is a genuine value out there, namely, to prove him wrong or snatch the girl from him then it is time to come out again, let the spirit spring forth and then the man is well. This word well and the word whole and hale and heal and so on, is all the same word, fundamentally the same root. It is based on H L.

We have said that HL is the symbolic representation of the He Law or Spiritual Law and the L means the link factor, the thing that joins and the H means the power, the spiritual power. So to be a well or to be a whole or hale and so on, is to be linked to the source of power and the source of power in oneself is the Immanent Spirit.

If we go back to the Book of Genesis, we find there was a Garden of Eden. That Garden of Eden corresponds with the zone of Immanent Spirit, because Eden means don’t judge. Para dise means beyond duality, para is beyond duality. When a stimulus came from outside through the Eve or substance of the being, and provoked an extroversion of attention from the intellect, that is the man of the being, then the being became subject to contingent relation. The simple extroversion of a man under an external stimulus and his binding into identification with the action processes arising from external stimulation is The Fall. As soon as his attention has gone out then a rotation of the substance begins determined by the order of presentation of the stimuli. This rotation is called turba, turbulation of the substance and it spins and causes a centrifugal motion of the attention all the time and right in the centre is therefore, generated, a wall which is the inner limit of the centrifugal force so if we try to get back to paradise, in effect, we find we have an enemy, the natural tendency of the mind to extrovert itself and seek a stimulus. When we drive back against this tendency to seek a stimulus we come to a centre and we find there a very, very hard wall. It is called in Genesis, a fiery sword circling round Eden. That fiery sword is to keep us out. That is what it says in The Book, and to keep us out must have a function. When we originally were in Eden we had an initial movement outwards which was not constrained. We could have stayed inside even when a stimulus was presented because the stimulus movement had to make its way right through the substance. At the point where the free spirit is, we could have stayed in free spirit and therefore the first act of going into the substance was a free act and therefore it is represented mythically as Adam and Eve turning outwards. The reason stated is :– It is very pleasant, nice to look at, and it confers power and we shall be as gods. This external stimulus, this titillation of the flesh, is very pleasant. There are very nice things to look at and we are led into believing by that fact that we shall be as gods, that is, we shall create situations. Once we have gone into there, then the spirit who does not want this to go on continuously, allows this process to develop more and more and more, it does not attempt to restrict it and so there gradually builds up a colossal inertia of extroversion. The result is that we have to stay out until we have exhausted the meaning of the perimeter stimulation. This means that the fiery sword round the centre has a real function. It is not merely keeping us out from paradise, from that beyond duality, from Eden, beyond judgement, it is forcing us to learn more and more and more about the very thing that we don’t want to learn. When we went out, because it was going to be pleasant and a nice place to look at and would confer power, we did not consider what would happen to us when we did so. As soon as got out we wanted to turn back very quickly and not know about it, but if we had turned back too early we would very quickly, tended to go out again and have another look. If the shoe does not pinch hard enough, the lady will continue to wear it. But, if we are driven out continuously, more and more, onto the perimeter, into contingent relation and crashing with other beings, we will gradually become convinced that the game is not worth the candle, that the thing is so terribly unpleasant round there that it is really time to go back.

The Prodigal Son asks for his share of the inheritance and goes out, he goes right to the perimeter and he goes right round it and he experiences every conceivable experience, and if at this point we take the perimeter of this wheel as equivalent as the fundamental of the string on our straight diagram, he has to pass through every partial, every tiny little part to that fundamental and only when he has gone through all of them will he really know all about it. Only then will he be convinced that it just is not worth it and make up his mind and say, “I have sinned against Heaven and against my Father and I will go back. But, until we have been hammered enough by events we will not want to do it whole-heartedly. We will only want to do it a little bit. It is very painful on the periphery so we will retire inside two inches and then we will just sneak along and find a pleasant bit. All this kind of dodging is not whole-hearted and only whole-heartedness can get back into Paradise. One must stop this attempt to reject particular events and seize others as pleasant on the perimeter and drive oneself back into Paradise, to beyond judgement.

Nietzsche says, “If a man misses a step it will never forgive him.” Supposing we take one of the partial on the perimeter and it looks like pain and the man is coming round towards it and he jumps over it and carries on, then the shape of that man will be that he has got a bit out of him. He will not be a true sphere and only the true sphere resonates with the Immanent Spirit which is inside there, inside the perfect sphere of the wall of Eden, so that he cannot resonate properly, so that if he did retire to Paradise, by divine Fiat, when he got inside, he would not be the right shape. He would be short of a little bit, an experience and that little bit would niggle at him. Eventually, he would realise that there would be no eternal rest for him unless he committed himself back into the situation. It is this will to commit oneself back into the situation that is the cause of reincarnation. Remember, you reincarnate every day as well as in one life into situations that you have not yet exhausted significance of. If, in any situation whatever, you leave something not done you will feel a little niggle about it. You will feel you want to go back and do it. If you don’t do it, all that will happen will be that the niggle will dive deeper and deeper. It will go down but it will still be there and will annoy you. If you can make yourself go back and face the painful thing, at the moment you face it you will suddenly discover that you feel very, very strong and very, very glad about it. You have actually made it unnecessary for yourself, ever again to stand on that step. You transcend the step in the act of facing the step.

Let this represent any individual’s mind and we will arrange the ideas in concentric circles. On the perimeter are all the behaviour patterns that that being considers socially acceptable. They are on the surface of his being and so we say that his good manners are superficial and just below the surface he has another king of behaviour that he uses at home. It is not quite as superficial as the other but it is still not very deep. Then there is another kind of behaviour that he uses when he goes to bed and thinks inside himself and when he goes further inside, he finds the tendency to fling himself out to the perimeter is getting stronger and stronger and he becomes aware of something inside him that is not satisfied with him. This he will call his conscience. So, just as he has got a facade on the outside to show to people, socially acceptable behaviour, so he will erect a facade on the inside to show to spirit. This one on the inside is a bigger enemy than the one on the outside because, inside, if you listen very carefully you will find a special record which recites the extenuating circumstances that cause you to do such and such. It is a much bigger enemy than the one that makes excuses to other people, because, when you are making excuses to other people you don’t much believe but when you make excuses to yourself and recite them, you will tend to believe them. If you do do so, then the same kind of relation will occur inside, between yourself and Immanent Spirit that occurs between you on the perimeter and other beings outside yourself. Now, your relation with contingent beings on the outside is one of distrust. You don’t trust them because you don’t know them. You may guess certain things from their behaviour patterns but you have no depth understanding of their motives. Where you don’t understand it you have a zone of not-knowingness. Not-knowingness is the same thing as insecurity so that your external relation with other people is superficial, is necessarily void of depth understanding and is therefore, in so far as it is superficial, isolated from that other being. There is no conversation person to person. There is merely the bang of contingent relation, the clash and friction. If you build an internal facade, the same thing happens there. There you cannot have an immediate relation with Spirit because of the silly conversation going on about extenuating circumstances for your perimeter behaviour. So, again, you feel isolated on the inside. We find this very, very often in people that are mentally disturbed, that they experience two kinds of isolation. One is they feel cut off from people on the outside. That one they talk about a lot because of the flow of extroverted energy but that one is not the real problem. The real problem is the fact that they are also isolated on the inside.

There are two nothingnesses. The nothingness beyond the perimeter and the nothingness within. Between those two nothingnesses there is a continuous wheel of fear and anger and reaction. This is the zone of the angst of the zorga and the concern of the individual and as long as the individual is identified as the reference point in consciousness, then there must be concern, anxiety, worry about one’s life. We have therefore, to stop two kinds of superficiality, the outer superficiality, we must try to get into relation with other people and the inner one. The inner one had better come first because if we are not sincere with ourselves on the inside, we will discover that we actually cannot be sincere with people on the outside. It is possible to give an appearance of sincerity on the outside but it will deceive nobody except a blind person or a person very, very eager to take advantage of it, but it will not deceive you but on the inside is this danger of self-deception, deprivation and the creation of a spiritual isolation.

If we know this to be a fact and realise the nature of the contingent relation as being by the fact that it is a relation between two circumscribed beings who are not, usually, interpenetrating, that the contingent relation is, necessarily an isolating one. There cannot be an intimate relation at the level of the physical body, because the bodies do not interpenetrate. There is an attempt to create such a relation in the sexual act where part of one body is cut out and another part is extruded to fill it. In this relation, there is actually an attempt, at the physical level to destroy the necessary isolation of material particles but it does not succeed, because that kind of relation is still based on circumscription. As these beings are circumscribed, they have not really penetrated each other at all and they are still as isolated as they were beforehand. If, then, they realise this fact they will realise that the external relation itself can never produce intimacy. What it can do is produce a very, very strong consciousness of the failure to secure intimacy, that in the most intimate physical relation, the sexual relation there is a heightened sense of distance. You find this by this determination in the young somehow to force themselves beyond this physical mutual exclusion by physical attempt to bury each other together, and yet that cannot be so. We find a poem by Heinrich Heine doing this and his image is that to do this he will have to die and his girlfriend will have to die and they shall be buried in one coffin. This is an attempt to produce intimacy at the physical level but it does not work. It cannot work simply because two circumscribed beings cannot possibly penetrate each other in that way. Penetration cannot occur at the material level and therefore, if it is possible at all, it must be at a non-material level and the non-material level is what we call psychic and spiritual. The psychic one as a matter of feeling and the spiritual one as a matter of initiative, dynamic form.

The Field itself is Absolutely all there is and these contingent beings, these circumscribed beings, these material beings, are merely modalities of a Field. If, instead of identifying with the physical body, we identify with the feeling of a being, already we are penetrating them at another level. Now, intimacy begins to appear in the feeling. In an ordinary physical relationship, say between a man and his wife, who through sheer mechanical habit association co-habit, there is a general feeling of isolation, revulsion mechanicality there. If feeling is introduced into it, then the mechanical aspect lapses into the background and it becomes what it was originally intended to be, simply a kind of platform upon which to stand the other higher relation. We have to be taught that the contingent relation is forever isolated. That it won’t do. This is why the fiery sword goes round on the inside and flings us out again to convince us that the physical relation, as such, is no good for us and yet the physical relation is the only means whereby we will ever find out that it is no good for us and therefore it has a peculiar kind of virtue, a negative virtue of convincing us of its utter uselessness.

If, now, we shift our attention to the Field, we become aware of the wholeness of this. We feel these two beings to belong in one, so the lovers, at the feeling level, say, “We are one,” and they are referring to the feeling level. That is the psychic level of mutual interpenetration or participation in the one feeling. When people say they are in love, the word “in” should be taken literally, because love is a feeling in the field internal to which are both the bodies under consideration. They are in love. Love is a feeling. That is the psychic level.

Now the spiritual level is higher than the psychic and refers to the form of the field, not the feeling of the field but to the form of the field. Thus, at the spiritual level you become aware of the fundamental vibrations running through all beings as form, as idea. You intuit each other’s formal content. You intuit each other’s ideas. “Our conversation,” says St Paul, “is in Heaven.” That is to say, we are transmitting ideas, not through contingent physical relation but directly through the non-dual spirit.

So the two aspects we consider above the material, are the psychic or feeling aspect, you simply feel it without contemplation on the formal content of the field, and the spiritual one on which you actually concentrate on the initiative form within the field. It is that initiative form within the field that has actually precipitated that relationship between those bodies, because both of those bodies are at a certain level and the resident consciousness in those bodies is the certain evolutionary level and it needs the next lesson. It is this next lesson those bodies need that is the resonance factor in the harmonic scale that makes spirit bring two particular bodies together so that there resultant tones shall produce unity within them. So all the relationships at the physical level of beings are actually precipitated by spiritual form and felt in the zone of the body, because the body is not fine enough to perceive immediately, the spirit, they are felt as feeling inclinations that bring the two bodies together.

There is a little question here about psychic law.

“It has been noticed, that owing to an astrological, psychic law, that there easy periods and difficult ones, During the hours of darkness, when no man can work, should one struggle against these difficult periods or try to retire and observe how one is being affected?”

When it says, “The darkness in which no man can work,” it means literally that, no man can work. So there is no question then of whether one should struggle against it because one will not be able to and therefore you should work while it is light, because the night comes when no man can work. Let us consider this again in relation to the perimeter diagram.

The perimeter of a finite being is not just a continuous even line, it is a vibration. We can represent it as a wavy line and in the cyclic progress of an individual round his life, because of this, he is going up and down. He is becoming depressed and elated, depressed and elated. One thing we see about what we call cycloid people is this. That they become very, very elated and then afterwards they become very, very depressed. They become very elated and go over the median line and then they go very depressed, below the median line. They go above it and below it to exactly the same height and when they are above it, they feel they can do marvellous things and when they start falling, they become very, very depressed. When they are very depressed, these cycloid types can do nothing. They can’t even commit suicide. So, in fact, we find, statistically that the suicides in cycloid types do not occur at the black depths of despair because no man can work in there. He just hits the slump and feels black. They can’t occur when you are rising because you are sure that everything is going to be fine so therefore they must occur before you start becoming really aware that you are rising, and immediately after a black depression. So we find the cycloid commits suicide, as we say. About seven o’clock if we continue it as a cycle on the hours, then the cycloid falls down from twelve to six and as soon as it starts coming out of the darkness it has got enough energy to move, but it cannot face the next depression so it commits suicide. It goes to seven or heaven in that moment.

If we remember the symbology of this, that twelve signifies governmental perfection and six means the lowest level of sexual energy, and seven is an attempt to equilibrate it, then seven is the very dangerous time for it, because at this point, there is the promise of elevation plus the memory of the previous depression. When the promise of that elevation and the memory of the previous depression get together, a fear of another depression occurs and the person tends to commit suicide, all according to law. This means, that if we tabulate a person’s reactions very carefully and study their cycles, we could actually say, at what time they would commit suicide if we didn’t interfere. For instance, there is a certain time between sunset and sunrise when your life is at a low ebb. There is a certain time that more people die that are ill and so on. All this has to do with cyclic law and energy levels.

So, in answer to this question, we have to say, that when it is dark, no man can work. Hence the command, work while it is light. So, if in fact, we do find ourselves very depressed, what we want to do is tell ourselves this law. A depression can never be deeper than the preceding relation. We cannot go lower than we can go higher relative to the median line, and we can’t work in the depression, so we must work in the beginning of the elation. We have enough energy there s we deliberately pull down the feeling of elation, knowing the law, that if we pull it down we cannot go lower that we are allowed to go higher than the median line. The whole conquest of depressive states is in this diagram. If we understand why this must occur, why we must go down as deeply as we go above the line, then we will, when we are able to, that is just above when an elation period starts, deliberately pull ourselves as low as we can, tell ourselves the law, and gradually we will come nearer and nearer to the median line. There is obviously a relation between the height that you go and the depth that you go because if we take the median line as representing a tympanum or a skin or an elastic substance stretched between two points, if we push it up at one point and then let go of it, it must fly down just like a pendulum must, to the same depth that we raised it to in height. This by ordinary energy law. If we remove friction completely, if we pushed it up once it would just alternate going up and down in elation/depression without any variation. The fact that we have a physical substance tends to slow the process down. The fact that we have external stimulus situations tends to either aggravate it or alleviate it according to the nature of the stimulus.

If we find a person tends to become elated and we know this law, we will say, like the mother says to the baby, “Now don’t laugh any more, you will be crying in a minute,” it is a rule. Those rules are very, very old and they always come through the mouths of people near to final experiences, because they spring out of the depths, out of feeling depths and spiritual depths. When the mother says, “Stop laughing now, you will be crying in a minute,” she does not know why she says it but it has been passed on for thousands of years. It is almost an empirical observation engrammed on the tissue except that it isn’t, it derives from spiritual fact and the necessary behaviour of energy.

If we then think about the substance of our mind as an elastic substance and we lift it up in one place, we need a certain amount of energy to lift it up. If we tire and the energy weakens it will start coming down. If we get very, very tired, it will swing right through to the opposite, and therefore, every time we allow elation we will become depressed. When I said this to some depressive types they have replied, immediately, in the same way, and frequently with the same words, “You are describing death. My whole life is valuable only in so far as I am elated and therefore, if you talk to me about the even keel, you are talking to me about death. I don’t want it.” Because, it seems to them, because of their memory of this tremendous feeling when elated, that this level thing is nothing and in a sense, the depressions are worth it for the elation. So you will get a man like Dostoievsky having periods of depression and having periods of great creative activity and actually thinking that the creative activity justifies the periods of depression. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of the spiritual action represented by that median line. The median line of spirit is not static. It is not dead. It is not uninteresting. It is such a fine vibration that it contains in it all the conceivable forms of these very big vibrations that are felt as alternations of elation and depression, and so many of these elations and depressions are packed into a small portion of that line that the being who is aware of it could anticipate all elation/depression cycles of himself, and, if he wants to extend it, of all other beings, and thereby, he gets a new power. He has the power, then, to act freely without either being positively taxic towards elation or negatively taxic towards the depression. He actually finds himself able to initiate without being determined by the elation or depression stimulus. Now, if we see why elation/depression is bad we will turn away from it.

Spirit itself, which is eternal and infinite, cannot be elated or depressed. It is omnipresent. You cannot elate it and you cannot depress it because it is Infinite, so, if there is elation and depression it can only refer to the material being and the material being is, necessarily, finite. So if we look at this fact and the waves formed round the perimeter of the being, we can see that the elation and depression arises from a stimulus on the outside and a stimulus on the inside. The one from outside presses it in and the one from the inside presses it out. When the one from outside presses it in there is a tendency for a local feeling of depression, of passivity, of being imposed on, but if the spirit can penetrate through this miasma around the spot and push the being out again then you feel elated, so there is a very close relationship between the elation experienced and the creativity of spirit. This is why creative men like Dostoievsky very fond of that feeling because they knew that the fact that it was there was evidence of higher levels of being that could be attained. But, we can attain them by not responding to the external stimulus. The external stimulus pressing it down and the response of spirit pressing it up produces a relation, like a sine wave. One is as high up as the other is down. If then we take the median line and make ourselves perfectly still, we do not respond, we do not become depressed by somebody from outside dictating to us and then there is no reaction from inside to push us beyond our limit. Remember, in the contingent relationship, to push beyond your limit is to penetrate another person’s territory and must produce a reaction in them then you will deliberately not allow that relation to represent itself formerly, by a material expansion of being. You know that if you do expand in the presence of other finites, they will take out their hammers and start knocking on your expanded bit to drive it back. So, that, instead of expanding on the material level, you do something totally different. You still expand but not on the material level. What you expand now is your feeling. You send your feeling beyond the limiting effect of the body of that other person, whether he likes it or not, you embrace him in your feeling, and you send your spirit, the formal content of the field also beyond it. Your spirit enables you to understand formally what he is about and your feeling enables you to act on his feeling. If he is identified with the contingent relation of the physical body he cannot know what you are doing, but he will know you are doing something. He might even resent it because, somehow you are being charming underneath and that is not what he wants. He wants a fight. He cannot hit you unless he can provoke you to hit him first and somehow you are doing what the Germans call umarming, putting your arms round him on the psychic level and it feels a bit awful or peculiar to him. If this is a business man trying to do you out of a contract, he does not want you loving him because he requires your hate in order to be able to do that trick on you.

If you actually through this feeling consciousness, transcend the physical limitations you are not counting him as another person at all and that is what he wants to count himself as in order to enhance his position as an individual. So if, by spiritual and psychic identification with the infinite, you include him, you have robbed him of the only thing that justifies him doing you a bad turn, and in the process you make him feel guilty, because if he cannot get the reaction from you of aggression, he cannot justify his aggressive act. If he aggresses against you and you do not respond at the same level he puts himself out of equilibrium internally. As his action comes out, instead of receiving another action to balance him, the thing goes out and he can’t lean on it. It is a psychic and spiritual judo. He is then forced to try to turn the energy back onto himself to avoid falling over and in the process he becomes overheated and becomes aware that he is in danger, danger of disequilibrium. If he can’t provoke this reaction out of you on a material level, he loses his equilibrium and losing that, he becomes inefficient. He is in danger if he falls into the void.

So we see that this is tremendously important to understand this spiritual and psychic transcendence of the physical relation. We know why these difficult periods exist simply because of the cyclic nature of existence itself. To exist is to be a circle of energy and every one of those circles is built in this pulsating manner and therefore, there are ups and downs in it, with appearance of expansion and contraction in every being.

The Seal of Adam is the seal of separating out the good and the evil. God said, “Do not eat that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in that day ye shall surely die.” The external stimulus, the Serpent, said, “You will not die.”

Here there is a break in the tape

(The Serpent)......it was driven along a certain path by (avoiding) pains and pursuing pleasures and that is a kind of life of the Serpent, wriggling between the difficulties. So the word ‘die’ for the Serpent didn’t mean quite what it meant to God. The Serpent was not telling lies. It was Adam’s innocence that just didn’t comprehend the difference between the two definitions. So, in a real sense, the Serpent, the Devil as the author of lies defends himself by saying his lies are not absolutely untrue. They are merely harmonics on the fundamental, taken out of context and presented to the unwily and the unwily see them as the truth instead of a truth. We have said before that absolutely there are no total untruths in the world A thing to be totally untrue, must not exist. If it exists at all it has already truth in existence. So the Absolute lie is impossible. The Absolute lie would be non-existent because, if that lie were to be posited then it would automatically become a truth. If the Devil says, “I will tell a lie,” he tells an untruth if he tells one, therefore there can be no Absolute lie.

Let us consider the whole thing, the whole structure of the universe, has, identical with the structure of any individual and both illustrated by the elementary fact of circumscription which encloses one area and excludes infinity, that the forces that go in cannot go to the dead centre, within the zone of immanent spirit, that between the immanent and transcendent spirit is the wheel of existence, the wheel of fortune; that the wheel of fortune is the vibrating perimeter and as the events on it go up and down there are swings and roundabouts and whether you are on one or the other, it makes no difference ultimately because you go through a definite number of swings and roundabouts and they exactly balance each other.