Contents

Levels of Being 257. 2

Mineral 2

Vegetable. 2

Animal 3

Empirical Man. 3

Necessary Logic Man. 3

The Five Senses. 5

The Frequency Gaps. 5

Desire. 6

Pure Inertia. 6

Levels of Being Diagram.. 6

Necessary Laws of Motion. 9

Responsibility. 9

The Choice. 10

Psychological Effects. 11

Absolute and Free. 11

Empirical Insecurity. 12

Desire. 12

Waiting. 12

Mineral 12

The Laws of Motion. 13

Male - Female. 13

 

 

 

 

 

Levels of Being 257

Transcribed, with diagrams and arbitrary heading by John Bailey

Editor’s comments in square brackets [ ]

 

I think we’ll start with a diagram tonight. We’ve had a few before; we’ll have another one:—

 

1.                       Down here I’m going to put a square to represent the mineral world.

2.                       In the next level a pair of leaves will do to represent the plant world.

3.                       In the next level, an animal.

4.                       In the next level a man. And this man has a 5-pointed star in his head, so he represents the man dictated to by his 5-senses.

5.                       And above this level another man whose head is a bit bigger probably, and he has a double triangle or a six-pointed star.

 

Now, we’re going to talk about levels of being. We know that if we represent the origin of all things as cause — cause = power — somewhere up here there is power absolute. And this power, by a process of self-involvement, generates all the levels below.

Now we tend, in the time process, to start with the material world, the mineral world. When we do so, we are dealing with something that up here is quite free, and down here is bound.

Supposing we represent a circle here called bondage, another one here, another, another and we have another at the top and then a couple of free horns. You remember that the semicircle is to remind us that force descends through successive levels down to a limiting factor, and then climbs up again. So we’ll have a force from the Absolute, from the Infinite, involving itself in successive layers of being, or successive vehicles ... successive coverings.

Mineral

Let’s start with the lowest one of all ... the closed one of matter as the mineral world. This one is inertic. It is the only world we know of that acts only when it’s struck from outside. If we take a billiard ball, it will lie indefinitely on the billiard table until we take the cue and hit the ball with the cue. So we can say that the billiard ball is the type of entity response of the mineral world. It does not move unless it is struck from outside. [03:09]

Vegetable

Now, immediately above this level we have the level of the plant, and we see something in the plant that we do not see in the mineral world. We see orientation. The plant stays where it is, but nevertheless its roots seek moisture. And its branches seek light. So there is a tendency in the plant to break out of its own centre. If we take a round thing like a billiard ball it remains itself. If we take a round thing like the seed of a plant, as soon as it gets moisture and warmth it starts to grow from inside. So in the plant there’s a principle that orientates itself. But it doesn’t uproot itself and run about.

Animal

When we come to the animal, we find a level that runs about. So that if we let the mineral world be represented by pure inertia that does not change unless acted upon from outside, we can say that the plant world represents the feeling level of being where there is a definite orientation without pursuit. There is a preparedness, a readiness to grow, providing the means of life come to it ... moisture and heat. In the animal level there is not only the preparedness to grow, there is actually a running about in pursuit of the means of growth. The animal runs about to find its food. [04:47]

Empirical Man

Now when we climb up to the level of empirical man, we find that the means of life are pursued by the man, like the animal pursues them, but he adds to it a process of comparing the sense data from his five sense organs and computing with these the best means of surviving. He does something that the animal doesn’t do adequately ... he compares things from different sources. He goes all over the world for his information, and he brings all the sources of information together in a manner that the animal cannot do. The animal can do it to a very, very limited degree. We find in the anthropoid apes a tendency to use a stick as a lever or to knock off bananas or something, or to pile boxes on each other, but we do not find them collating these things and making very wide analogies between different levels of being. In the empirical man we do.

Necessary Logic Man

Mow when we come to the man above the empirical — the man with the double triangle — we are concerned with a man who thinks not after the fact from experience, but before the fact from first geometrical principles. To think geometrically is to say that if a certain thing occurs, something else necessarily follows. Now in the realm of empirical man there is no necessity, there is only statistical probability. Science built by empirical men using their five senses does not admit necessity at all. It only admits statistical probability. If you go to the USA, to New York a sufficient number of times in the year and find a lot of automobiles there, you will be led to expect some more if you go again. There is nothing necessary about that, because the next war might wipe them all out. It might submerge Manhattan Island itself. [06:56]

So for the empirical five-sense scientist there is no necessity, there is only statistical probability. But for the man of the double triangle — the man of the a priori knowledge — there is necessity and he thinks in terms of necessary behaviours, of necessary behaviours of energies.

The logic of the dialectic of the double triangle says that if we close a zone by running a force around it, wall it off, that we have necessarily isolated the inside from the outside ... that the circle necessarily includes and excludes simultaneously.

Now this is a self-evident thing as soon as we state it. But it is not self-evident to the man who depends on his five sense organs all the time. As a matter of fact, most empirical scientists would even doubt the necessity of a circle enclosing a zone at all. They would say that it might be merely some phenomenal behaviour of the sensory part of our organism. And therefore the empirical man cannot see the necessity in this. But there is something in the human being that can see the necessity of such facts, and this something in the human being is the level of the necessary logical relations. [08:34]

Now I’ve draw this graph because it would be a very good idea if we make such a graph for ourselves. If each one of actually makes such a graph, and then on this graph places his knowledge about any given subject.

Now at the top level we have Absolutely Free Spirit. This means that in any subject where you are fully spiritually enlightened, you are free. As soon as we come down to the level of the logical, we see that we are conditioned in some measure. When we come down to the necessary logic of the double triangle, we are immediately deprived of the purely free, and we gain free-dome. We have now domed free, we have wrapped it up in the first phase and we have enclosed our concept. We have formulated the free spirit. And in the act of formulation that which was free becomes bound.

Now this double triangle, the six-pointed star, is the symbol of macrocosmic wisdom. It is the wisdom of necessary closures ... of necessary relations. Nevertheless it is a limitation. So no matter how big we make the circle of the Macrocosmos, it is still a limitation. [10:06]

 

 

If we take the gospel of John, we consider the logos in the first verse, we find that the word Logos is stated to be in the beginning with God and to be a god. Nevertheless that Logos is not that which is beyond it. That which is beyond it is the Absolute. That Absolute is absolutely free and being absolutely free has of itself nothing existent. That everything is beyond existence within it. Its first determination is therefore its first bondage. The man bound by necessary logic, determined by it, is at the top level. [10:50]

The Five Senses

If he lets go of his necessary logic he then commits himself to the experiential logic of the five-pointed star. When he does this he now becomes dependent not on a logical process of either/or and the identity of either and or — the identity of opposites — but he comes into a state of dependence on five very, very limited sense organs.

If you consider the whole mass of your body, and the very small amount of the cells of the body used up in special sense organs like the eyes, the ears, nose and so on, you’ll find the greatest mass of your body is not illuminated directly by sense organ activity. The general diffusion of the sense of touch over the body is the widest spread. The sense of touch is spread over your body pretty widely, but there are points of anaesthesia throughout the body. It is not total.

If you look at the sense of smell it’s fairly vague, and you can get a sensation of perfumes coming in your nostrils from over the hills and far away. But you can’t tell whether the chip shop is around the corner to the right or to the left, because it depends on the direction of the air current where it comes to you. So that if the wind happens to spin vortically then you can get false orientation about the direction of the chip shop. You may notice that if a fly comes in the room in search of something, perhaps it’s something sweet, the fly will not fly straight to it, but it will fly in certain apparently haphazard directions. It is really flying upon gradients of increasingly strong smell, determined by the air currents in the room. So that the empirical man is like this fly ... he can only fly in the direction of the sense stimulus.

And as the sense stimuli are very, very particularised, on the five points of the sense organs, the man who gets information only from the sense organs is automatically deprived of a terrific number of sources of information. Between the five points of the triangle that represents the five sense organs we have great spaces where no information is available at all ... between the five sense organs. The eye responds to a certain limited number of frequencies, the ear to another number of frequencies. [13:30]

The Frequency Gaps

Between the visual frequencies and the audio frequencies there is a terrific gap. Scientifically we know that this gap is filled with motion, with frequencies. But the sense organs can tell you nothing whatever about them.

But although the specialised sense organs can’t tell you anything about them, nevertheless the substance of your body can. Wherever the sense organ is not specialised, wherever the nervous system itself does not insert a limiting factor, a control factor on the cell, then you have the cell responding totally and therefore filling in the frequency gaps that exist between the five sense organs. This means to say, that if we take two of the points of the five-pointed star, we can fill in all the space between with cells, which you’ll remember are divisions of the original single cell from which you derive. Now, these cells, insofar as they haven’t got direct nervous inhibiting forces on them, respond totally in a situation. Therefore at the cellular level there are no gaps of frequency. That means that if you can take yourself by the suitable exercise below the level of the nervous system rational control, you will expose yourself to frequencies which in fact will give you information that you cannot get through your five specialised sense organs. And this information will be more diffuse than the sense organs, but it will refer to other levels of being than the sense organs can in fact touch. [15:15]

So, after we’ve left the free spirit, gone into the first bondage of the logos and the necessary form, we descend into the contingent form, which is not necessary and which is governed by laws only statistical ... that is the laws which can change as the information grows.

Desire

When we come down a further stage we come into a realm where desire operates instead of idea, where the desire is an energy pushing us along. It is pushing us towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant. It is nevertheless determined. Although it is not determined in the sense in which the mechanical adding of sense data at the top are determined, it is still limited. And it has fewer factors to play with and therefore its limitation is much greater on its action.

The animal runs towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant, and is therefore determined, we can say, in a double manner. We’ll put a plus for liking and a minus for disliking into it. Now when we come down on to the level of the vegetable reaction, we find again that this doubleness of the pleasure/pain is there, but it cannot run about to get it. It can only get it by a slow process of growth. The roots will grow towards the damp. They don’t get up and run towards the food, they grow towards it. Nevertheless it is a kind of orientation towards that which they need. [17:04]

Pure Inertia

When we come down to the mineral level, down here we are coming down to the level of pure inertia. This line that marks the mineral world top level we can call the line of demarcation between life and death. We’ll find this is very important psychologically, later. As soon as we get down to the level of the mineral we have entered the world of death.

Everything above the mineral level — it doesn’t matter whether we include viruses and bacteria or not at the moment, we’ll keep it simple — everything below this top line of the mineral order is dead; that is, inert; that is, unable to develop from inside itself. But everything above that line is growing:

·                     Either growing towards the object, simply and slowly like a plant

·                     Or growing inside itself internal organs of discrimination, organs of specialised desire, which lead to mobility.

·                     Then to the growth of specialised sense organs in five-sense man

·                     And then to the growth of the pure logos faculty in the cosmic minded man.

At each level as we go down, we are losing a freedom, and at the bottom level of the mineral we have lost all the freedom. The thing is now not free-dome at all, it is just dome ... it is restraint. [18:41

Levels of Being Diagram

Now, what we want to do is make a diagram. Everybody can make his own in the privacy of his own chamber without telling lies. He doesn’t need to show it to anybody else.

Make such a diagram and then start off with all the subjects that you can think of. Supposing you take physics and science, where will you put it on this diagram? Supposing for a moment you have no interest whatever in physics, you are quite apathetic, you don’t see that it’s of an use to you. Now, if you are apathetic, you are not feeling. Apathy means not feeling. Consequently, you must be on the level of this dividing line between the inorganic — the dead — and the living. If you don’t think physics is important to you at all, you have no feeling whatever for it, you can put your physics line inside the mineral world. You can say in relation to physics you are dead.

This might not seem important until you come to consider this — that the dead get buried by the living. Wherever you don’t know something you are passive to another being who does know something about that subject. [20:00]

Remember our basic rule, either you learn to push yourself about, or you will be pushed about by another being. And there’s no middle course in this world. The beings that will not learn to be self-determinant will be determined by other beings.

So if there is a subject you don’t know about at all and you feel apathetic about, so that really you say, I can be dead to that thing, put it down below and mark yourself a bad mark because in that field you are passive.

If in another field you think you can work it out from first principles — we’ll say one of you is soaked in Euclid or something — in relation to geometrical necessity, you can put yourself a circle up here ... if you can.

Now if your geometry is empirical, and has been derived by fiddling about with a pair of compasses empirically and no necessary propositions have arisen in you, then you will have to write it on the empirical level. But at the empirical level, you are subjected to the necessary laws of geometrical motion.

Take any other subject at all that you like, whether it’s art science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycho-somatology, whatever it is, place yourself a circle and write the name of that thing in the circle, and then have a look. You will discover that most of your circles are somewhere below the line of even the empirical man. You might get one or two of them just breaking the line out of the animal.

If you can say that you have a desire to do something and that that desire is actually making you study a little bit, you can place yourself in the animal level. If you’ve got a little bit of empirical information you can draw your circle breaking the line.

If you have a wish for a certain subject, certain information, but in fact you are waiting for it to come to you, you must put that one in the vegetable world. Now for every conceivable subject you must make a circle, and you must be quite truthful with yourself and place these circles on the diagram, and then you must look at them. They’ll all be down at the bottom. And then you must remind yourself that unless you lift these circles up, you are passive to the other beings who’ve already lifted up theirs. This means in every field, wherever you don’t know anything at all and couldn’t care less about it, you are dead and as subject to four other levels, finited and one level absolute.

If you can lift the subject into the wishing without doing anything about it, at least you are slightly better than the dead mineral ... because it doesn’t wish. [23:10]

If you can lift the subject up to the level of desire, where you actually start running about in circles without reading anything, then it’s gone slightly higher. If you accidentally run into the library and read a book, you go into the empirical level in some measure. And if you can actually get yourself a basic principle book of necessary propositions, then you can put your circle at the top level.

But for every circle you do not put in one of those levels, you can place yourself as non-existent and as such, you will constitute a non-entity for all the other forces in the universal field that actually do know something about it. It’s a very useful scale because in relation to any given subject you will actually find when you feel in your body, a definite positive or negative about it.

If you know nothing about a given subject, and you think for a moment that you don’t need to, if you examine your feeling very carefully you will find the feeling-of-not-needing-to is accompanied by an excuse, a reason why you don’t need to. And this means that you are not really comfortable about not knowing about it. When a man doesn’t know about a certain subject he will present some kind of excuse — he hasn’t had time, or he doesn’t see the relevance of it. As soon as he sees the relevance, then his guilt will increase until he can climb up and get the information he needs.

Now if we say we’ll draw a line between the animal and the man like the evolutionists tend to do. They let the man grow from the mineral-vegetable-the animal world, and then they say there is a new emergent. This new emergent is in vocabulary and the human hand. Speech and the hand have made man what he is. Speech has enabled him to tabulate the world of forms and the hand has enabled him to utilise those tabs to shift the world about.

In fact to draw the line absolutely between the animal and the man there raises a lot of problems, because we do find vocabularies in the animal world and we find birds with vocabularies of perhaps fifteen or twenty different whistles. We find monkeys with vocabularies and so on. Their vocabularies are not as complex nor as well manipulated as those of an ordinary empirical man. Nevertheless they have them. So it isn’t an absolute difference. [25:56]

But as soon as we come to the level above the empirical, we can draw a really important line, because as soon as we get above the empirical man into the level of necessary forms, we’ve come across something quite different. The mineral, the billiard ball, moves when we hit it with a cue. The plant world is already waiting for the opportunity to move. Its roots are just waiting for the damp and they will start. Its branches are waiting for the light and they will start.

So that when you get after the cold winter, the seed lying dormant in the ground, and then the first rains come and the sun starts to warm it up, and you are moving towards the first point of Aries and the absorption of moisture and heat, are just what the plant needs then it starts to grow. It is waiting for them. When it climbs into the animal level it takes that energy, uproots itself, and runs about in search of its food and enjoyment.

We look at the empirical man and he only does the same thing. A billiard cue hits him on the sense organ. Light hits him in the eye and he sees something. He can’t see something unless he is hit in the eye by the stimulus. He can’t hear something unless somebody strikes the bell outside. And therefore he’s no better in principle than the billiard ball. He’s just more complicated. There are more billiard balls in the empirical man than there are on the billiard table ... unless it’s overcrowded.

And as soon as we get to the top where a man is aware of necessaries, he can do something that the empirical man cannot. He can hear bells that nobody rings. He can go in a quiet room on his own and from first principles he can argue, my physical body, my so-called material body is energy in motion. The particles of my material body are simply energies rotating. They are rotating in a field which is absolute and that absolute itself is a field of power and all the constituent motions of all bodies are simply modifications of that field. Consequently, from first principles, we can say that if we take ourselves into a quiet room and know that our sense organs respond to stimuli, then all the parts of our organism must be stimulating all the other parts. So if we make ourselves very, very sensitive and be very, very quiet, and listen very carefully we will actually hear noises going on.

If you lie down, relax yourself and wait, you will hear sudden pings in the head and in different parts of the body. You will hear funny noises like bells ringing, or you will feel a remarkable jolt or a flash like electricity jump in some part of the body. And you discover that you don’t need an external stimulus from outside to do this.

In the same way, if you lie in a perfectly dark room, and start looking — put your consciousness in the retina at the back of the eye — after a few seconds of doing that, you become aware that the room is not dark. Really what you have done on the act of concentrating on the retina is to stimulate it yourself. As you stimulate your own organism in this way, you give rise to phenomena inside yourself which are not dependent on external phenomena. You can stimulate those that have been derived from external phenomena and stored up in the memory in the substance of your being, and by concentration introversion and direction of these energies, you can cause memories to replay and you can raise them to the level of hallucination.

You can relive events in that way, by internal self-stimulation. In the same way by internal self-stimulation you can discover the kind of information that the cells will give you sub-rationally. You can understand how the vegetable part of your own being, the digestive parts of your body that absorbs things like plants absorb from the earth. They have a peculiar consciousness of their own. That is quite distinct, even though it belongs in this same body, to the level of the desire, of the animal.

·   There is something in you that just sits, and lets things come, like din-din down the tube. If it comes you will digest it.

·   There’s another level which, as soon as the stimulus hits you, if it’s of a certain order, you get up and chase it. If it’s of another order you get up and run away from it. It is a different part of your being and it corresponds with a different part of evolution when the animal in you, the desire in you, gets up and runs about.

·   Then you find another level where ideas are presented in your mind, from empirical experience, from stimulation of your five sense organs.

·   And then at the top level of the individuated being you find the sphere of necessary logical propositions, and the laws of necessary motion.

All these coexist inside the same being. And you can only get at them by fulfilling the conditions at which those things themselves must exist, and which they must fulfil. [31:38]

Necessary Laws of Motion

This means that if you want to know about what happens at the necessary level, you must study the necessary laws of motion. If you don’t know about them, you’ll have to draw your circle about them elsewhere. If you know nothing about them you’ll have to place it right down below and say you are dead in relation to the laws of motion that are necessary. Let’s consider a very simple one we’ve done before: motion is either open motion or closed.

Description: translating motion.jpg

Description: rotating motion.jpgThere’s open motion going along and it never closes itself. So it is just a continuous travelling through space, but the closed motion goes round and bites itself on the tail. Now necessarily the one that travels in a straight line and never closes anything, can never bring anything to be, cannot make anything. Make means close [K] the substance [M].

The make in the makeless maiden Mary, immaculate Mary, unspotted Mary, means the substance, the Mary, mare, or cosmic ocean, which itself has no closures within it. If we consider the virgin substance — that is the substance of force absolute, with no closures whatever — then we are considering the meaning of the symbol of the immaculate Mary. The infinite ocean of power considered without any rotating forces in it and therefore without closed forces is immaculate or unspotted. And that of itself — because the Absolute Power is sentient — must consist in a ceaseless travelling without arriving. It is a perpetual travelling without coming to a term.

Term implies a closure. And when it says in the bible that god so loved the world, that he gave his son[1], it means that there was something peculiar about this absolute unclosed motion, which to this motion itself seemed unsatisfactory.

Unsatisfactory means

not being-making

Un-sat-is-factory

not-being-making.

Being means

closure.

If we imagine this absolute ocean of infinite sentiency, it must feel itself eternally unsatisfied, because it is a going without arriving. It is a seeking without any finding. Now if it is to become satisfied, it must turn. It must close itself. [34:25]

Responsibility

When it closes itself it has done two things: it has found for itself an object, but it has restricted the amount of force involved in the closure. Now this is the very beginning of dialectics. This is the very beginning of the statement, if you do a thing you will simultaneously do the opposite. If you know that fact, you won’t mind doing the opposite at the same time. But if you don’t know it you will find yourself locked up when all you wanted to do was play about.

Every time you commit yourself into a situation you are looking for some satisfaction. But if you don’t analyse the necessary relations in that field you will put your energy into it, looking for the satisfaction and in the act of in-winding your energy into it you will lock yourself up.

So the person who wants to be important in politics must study certain things. And as he succeeds so duties will be put upon him. Now he may not go in for the duties, he may go in for the job, for what it can give him, perhaps in reputation or increased earning level. Whatever he goes into it for, he will find that he doesn’t get that thing only ... he gets the very opposite. He raises his level in order to become freer and to get more power, and in the act of raising his level he finds he is less free and has less power, because the higher he goes the more responsibility he gets. Because responsibility is the ability to respond. So when he gets right to the top he finds he’s got absolute responsibility, and absolute responsibility means responsibility for absolutely everything there is.

So if a man climbs to the very top level seeking absolute power he discovers when he gets there that he is now in charge of the universe, and he will have to run it on the same kind of lines that he complained about when he was at a lower level. [36:36]

The Choice

Now, not to see this in the first instance causes striving for higher power. But as soon as you see — the increase of knowledge increases responsibility, puts restraints upon you as well as freeing you, because in freeing you from the level of the dead mineral it puts you in restraints at the vegetable level, because you are now subjected to the pursuit of moisture and warmth — if you free yourself from that you become an animal and you run about, you find yourself restricted to the terrain where your dinner grows.

If you free yourself from the animal and become an empirical man, you find yourself freed from those things and simultaneously bound to try to discover more about them. Because if you want to get your dinner where you want it when you want it, you’ll have to learn to dig in one country and transport the produce to another country.

So the more you raise your level, the greater your responsibility and the more restricted you are.

When you get up to the level of necessary concepts you are very, very restricted indeed.

And there’s only one thing left to do there, that is shoot yourself and go back to the mineral or assume absolute responsibility. If you do so then you find that you will do certain things freely, but they will not be the things you thought you would have done when you were down at the level of the empirical man. The empirical man can’t see very far so he makes a big bang, and the big bang irradiates the atmosphere, and the radiations bite back at the empirical man. So he is forced by facts to re-evaluate the situation, because he hadn’t enough necessary thought in him to see the consequences of his act before he did it.

 

Now we place all the subjects that we know somewhere on this graph, and know that when we do so we are in fact:

passive to the Absolute, if we have a circle in the top level of the necessary logic,

or to the Absolute and the necessary if we are at the empirical level,

or to the Absolute, the necessary and the empirical if we are at the animal desire level,

or to those four if we are at the vegetable level,

or to those five if we are at the mineral level.

 

 

So although raising the level increases the responsibility, not raising it increases passivity and slavery to other beings on the way up. Now the fact is that you cannot rely at all upon any of the beings here to do what you want them to do if they are above you, and as their level is frequently not that of the Absolute and therefore they haven’t got absolute responsibility yet, they will not have a sense of responsibility towards you. And therefore if you wish to escape the consequences of their erroneous and rash actions, you have no alternative but to try to raise your level right through the whole series. [39:49]

Now this is a dialectical process. Either/Or. Either you stay at the bottom and let everybody kick you about or you climb up. As soon as you climb into the level of the plant, you can feel. Now you’ve got pleasure/pains.

When you climb into the animal level you can have people depriving you of motion ... of the pursuit of your desires.

When you rise into the empirical level, people might contradict your empirical results, write rude books about your conclusions like you find in the field of empirical science. Historically all the discoverers of all the inventions are busy writing insulting books about each other and proving that not that man but another man discovered this very thing. At every level there is warfare. Only the Absolute runs through the lot and supports them all. [40:43]

Psychological Effects

Let’s look at what happens psychologically. If we interpret this in terms of feeling, if you are at the Absolute level you feel free, but you also feel in that fact that it would be a good thing to create. Because at that level you are spotless: you are immaculate and you have no object. This is the objectlessness of the sage, the Taoist sage who wills nothing at all.

We know that Taoism in China, taken seriously, actually stopped them developing altogether, and it wasn’t until an atom bomb dropped on a Japanese city that the east woke up the fact that they had become passive ... because of this concept of the absolute disinterestedness in finites of the Absolute itself. The whole of oriental religion climbed up to the Absolute, identified with the Absolute, and then sat down and let an ant colony be built around its ears.

When the Europeans who were at the empirical level came and found the Yogi surrounded by an ant hill, they first took out their Brownie number two and photographed him ... and then they picked him up on a shovel and put him in a museum. He had become passive in fact to these other men. Which means that in climbing up to his Absolute and then staying there and yet leaving his mineral body accessible in the earth, he had been guilty of a little bit of bad logic.

Absolute and Free

In terms of feeling then, we have the Absolute, feels free and is free. But it feels inside itself a tendency to create, to create forms. And this tendency then passes it down to produce the absolutely first finited being, the necessary logical being. Now as soon as that’s been put, the feeling of searching for something is fulfilled. You then feel quite happy with necessary truths; with necessary laws of motion. You don’t see people at all at the level of an ordinary man, you don’t see a lover and his lass. You see a couple of packets of necessary motion. And you can see precisely what these packets of necessary motion are necessarily going to do in a minute. They’ll get moved on by another necessary packet called a bobby [slang word for policeman].

Now, as soon as they see these necessaries, they as regarding the whole thing at the level of motion and they feel perfectly secure because the whole thing is absolutely necessary. It is no empirical search, it is no animal desire, there’s no merely vegetative waiting and there is no inertia ... but there is a continuous penetration of the situation with necessary propositions of logic. Spinoza’s philosophy is at this level, where he sees even God himself under the necessary laws of his own being. [43:52]

 

So the Absolute feels free and feels that it would be a good idea to make something. As soon as it’s made something, what it has made is necessary laws of motion. And at that level the being feels that it is quite all right, god’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, because all the motion in the world is necessary.

Empirical Insecurity

But as soon as he identifies with the empirical man he goes under the law of accident, because he doesn’t know then what stimulus is going to appear at what time. He doesn’t know whether he is going to be hit in the eye or the ear or the nose. One of his five senses or more will be stimulated, and he will have no control over it. At this moment he is feeling changes, and the feeling instead of being one of security and of the necessary laws of motion, becomes one of continuous insecurity.

The empirical man is in perpetual terror, because he does not yet know enough. He doesn’t know the necessary, therefore he has no security. So he runs about rapidly piling up data in the attempt to get that security. [45:13]

Desire

The next stage of involvement is when we come down to the animal level, and there instead of pursuing knowledge as such like the empirical man, we feel in us the pursuit of the desirable and the avoidance of the undesirable. This is a totally different experience, quite valid at its own level.

Now we’ve lost the feeling of being free, we’ve lost the feeling of necessary, we’ve lost the feeling of the pursuit of knowledge as such and we are now merely pursuing the desire. This is like the average man on a Saturday night. Really he doesn’t really want to think. He is merely pursuing something far better and he lubricates himself with many pints to get the engine working properly before he actually goes off on the chase.

Waiting

Now when the next level is reached, this desire thing lapses from consciousness and you simply become aware that you are waiting for something to happen. You wish something would happen, you’re not doing anything about it. But you sit there vegetating as we say waiting for the sun to shine, or your boots to get wet so that you can grow yourself a root. This stage is a genuine experience inside. [46:29]

Mineral

And the level below that is the level where you don’t even wait. This state we find in certain mental cases of catatonic state, where the being just sits without moving at all, with no signs of sentiency, with no responses, quite anaesthetic, you can stick a pin in him and he won’t move. He’s now like a mineral.

 

 

All these states exist inside us, and as far as the empirical man is concerned, a stimulus from outside hitting him on one of the sense organs can knock him down into one of the other levels. It can’t do this on the man who knows the necessary laws of motion. But it can do it on the empirical man. The empirical man is full of information — formal — and the information is caused by the knocking of the matter of his sense organs producing feeling states and then desires, which have attached to them formal records.

So that if a man eats an orange, he gets a sense stimulus of satisfaction. The empirical man doesn’t think it’s necessary. Consequently he tends to go down to the animal level and search for another orange. So every sense stimulus hitting the empirical man drives him about so that he’s not really much better than the animal. The animal has a smaller vocabulary, and therefore a more restricted response system to the empirical man. But he is still driven about. [48:11]

And we’re concerned especially with empirical man at the moment, because we can say roughly that not many parts of the being of man today are really preoccupied with necessary knowledge. If you say that necessary knowledge means that all of the things that you are supposed to know about, you actually understand the necessary laws of motion that cover them. If you know something about mechanics, you must understand the necessary behaviour of a lever, of shearing actions, of tensions, of stresses, of strains and so on. If you know something about electronics, you must know the necessary motions of them before you can put your circle in that field ... not the empirical, probable motions. [49:05]

So in any field at all that you care to mention, only if you know the necessary laws governing it can you really put yourself in that. In psychology it would mean not that you think the soul is a feeling being — which it is — but that you actually know the necessary laws governing its feelings. You know that if it contracts in a certain way it does so necessarily according to certain laws. And you know that these contractions will necessarily produce within it certain feelings. If you can actually say so, truthfully, then you are at that level.

If you can of course, you’ve really not that much more work to do. In fact, you’ve only got one work left to do. When you’ve got all your subjects raised up to the level of the necessary, all you have to do is throw them all away and enter into the Absolute, and become unspotted.

Description: aries and taurus.jpgUntil that time we’re concerned with how to raise that man to the empirical level. Now the empirical man has collected a lot of data, most of it erroneous. You can see that it is erroneous because most of modern science is still declared to be empirical. It does not act upon the necessary. Only a very, very few small number of higher mathematicians think in terms of the necessary, and everybody below that level is thinking in terms of the probable only.

The Laws of Motion

When we look at the laws of motion and we lift them up one stage higher, we can see why we like and why we dislike certain propositions. Remember that the Absolute has produced a universe simply by involving itself and its passing out of itself as well. This is the diagram of Taurus in the Zodiac, and it means the entrance and exit of the absolute force. Just like the sign of Aries itself means the absolute force. We add this sign to a circle — the sign of Aries to the sign of the circle — and it gives Taurus.

When that energy comes in, the fact of it turning round creates necessarily a situation in which energy within it is bound, and bound to rotate. So as soon as the energy coming in closes itself and goes round again then the whole mass of force inside there rotates. Now a rotation of a motion which cannot stop, cannot go to the dead centre. This again is a necessary statement. So the motion which is coming in, spiralling in, closer and closer, toward the centre cannot reach it. It can drive in so far only, and then it has to come out again. Now this really is the secret glyph of the whole universe. And we’ll simplify it like this. We go in and in and in, and then we shoot out.

Now that is the graph, the symbol of the polarity of the universe. There is an Absolute force unclosed that is coming in, winding in towards the centre which it can’t reach, packs itself very tightly, and then shoots out. This is somebody winding in all the energy he’s got, and packing it so tightly that it must shoot.

Male - Female

Now, the part of it that is winding in is female. The part that is shooting out is male. And there is no being that has not got energy winding in and shooting out. This means that every being is a hermaphrodite. And you’ll find that all the great religions will tell you that the human being is a hermaphrodite. He is a male/female. Remember that the Absolute Power is sentient power: it comes in and feels itself coming in, winds round, feels itself coming to being, to being restricted, to pack itself in the centre to get hotter, hotter, tighter, tighter, more and more under the necessity of letting it out. It must let it out, because the closure is necessarily finite. And at the moment of letting out, it is male. And this is going on continuously. [53:32]

Now factually, in our body, we have the power — because we are not different from this Absolute Sentient Power — we have the power of identifying with any part of the function. If we identify with the in-drawing, the to me buffaloes as they say in the girl guides or scouts, the to me function, we are being female. If we can identify with the to you function, we are male. And this is the only difference. Now as far as we are concerned empirically we know of many cases of women turning into men. We know of no case, authenticated, of a man regressing into a woman. Let’s see why not. [54:20]

The force of the Absolute comes in and starts to turn. So the state of woman is prior to the state of man. It cannot squirt out until it has been packed in. So the whole process of the in-packing of the energy in the time process is prior to the shooting out. So if the shooting out in a straight line and the to me, the circle, are considered as temporal events, then the circle itself is seen temporally to be prior to the straight line. But we see immediately that because the circle is derived from the straight line motion of the Absolute prior to closure, that the Absolute is absolutely male. As soon as we say that the to me finitely means female, we have to say that the absolute translating power is male. This is why we say God the Father and not God the Mother.

The Absolute force travelling along is male. It is pushing through infinite space. When it turns, it becomes female and it will carry on being female until it has packed into itself so much that it will shoot out again.

Now biologically it happens to be a fact. It is a physiological fact that every man has been a woman. Every man has been a child, and a child in utero has actually been a female before it was a male. The male genitalia have actually been inside the body before they came out. This means that every man has been a woman. But before the force could shoot out there was a time before it had shot out. And at that time the stress was on the to me. [56:19]

Now it’s quite easy to see why this should be so. The child inside the mother must say to me for a long time to get the energy to grow. If it says to me very quickly and gets very well fed and well informed and packs lots and lots of energy inside it, it will increase its heat and the necessity for discharge. This piling in of energy we call the movement towards tumescence. And after tumescence occurs ejaculation. But the ejaculation cannot occur unless the tumescence reaches its term. So the energy drawn in by the developing child in utero goes on to a certain level and if it gets sufficient of it, it becomes a he, but if it doesn’t get sufficient it still has an appetite for more.

Imagine a being thrown into the world which has started the process and not completed it. That’s a baby girl.

Imagine a being that has started the process and has completed it and this has become so strong in its consciousness that it has realised the virtue of aggression, of activity as opposed to passivity ... as soon as the being has experienced the superiority of activity over passivity it will never go back. We cannot conceive of a being abandoning power once gained, unless it is constrained to abandon it by a superior force. So that as soon as a being has become stressed on this active side, the aggressive side of its nature, the male side, it will not abandon that unless we strike on it with tremendous forces from outside and knock it back and make it regress. We can never get it to abandon that completely, because it will always have a mnemic trace of the value of the activity. So we can’t get a man to regress completely to the level of a woman. We can treat men with hormones of a certain kind which will make them a bit softer than they were. They might develop secondary characteristics of the female, but we can’t make them abandon completely the masculinity they have derived. [58:38]

So here is a female, and the fact that it hasn’t reached the term of tumescence means it is still hungry. And it knows what it is hungry for: it is hungry for more energy so that it can pack in and shoot out, and thus aggress or dictate the conditions of life outside.

Now when it says in Genesis that the desire of a woman shall be to the man[2], it means quite simply inside every woman there is a tendency, a desire, a movement, towards increasing self-determination. Self-determination is that which occurs when the energy packed in shoots out and makes a universe of its own.

We’ll actually see what happens if we take any centre of energy which has come in at a certain frequency and condensed — that might be the sun in the solar system — the energy condenses, packs very tightly, becomes tumescent, reaches the limiting factor where more energy coming in, suddenly it explodes, shoots the energy out. The energy shoots out to a certain distance, and then collapses on a new centre. So all the energy shot out collapses on a new centre. It’s this kind of process that develops planets in the greater universe. That energy shot from centres of compression collapses onto new centres outside. [1:00:10]

So that the ejaculated energy of a sun, falling at a certain distance onto a new gravity centre, has become self-determinant. That is, it is no longer dependent on the centre from which it derived. It now proceeds to involve itself and generate a system from itself.

And this is the ideal for all the beings there are in the whole of infinite space: that every being is pursuing absolute self-determinism. And this is not an immoral thing because morality or immorality is irrelevant to it. It is a necessary motion of the Absolute Spirit.

 

The Absolute Spirit is infinite.

It is not in any sense frightened of the generation of finite centres, because they can never overthrow it, but it continuously moves into centres formed, piles them in with energy in order to shoot out fresh energies to fall onto gravity centres and make new beings.

Every time it shoots onto a gravity centre it creates a new being and the new being is unique.

There are no two beings, not even identical twins, in the whole universe that are absolutely identical.

This means that every being is peculiarly itself in its peculiar configuration, and therefore is absolutely justified — that is, justified by the Absolute — in existing, in and for its own development.

And from the relations of all these unique beings, the whole process of universal evolution is enhanced and made more valuable. [1:01:46]

 

 ~~~~~~~~~ End ~~~~~~~~~

 

 



[1] John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

[2] Genesis 3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.