LIFE IS HARD

The text of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands. Ishval tape 104.

Track 1

Any interest about the subject matters?

Two have already been suggested and if you do not like them say so immediately. One is the subject matter of inertia. Do you know about inertia? And the other one is the saying which a young man read recently which he thought was brilliant and worth living by. “Life is hard and ends in death.”

I asked him what he liked about it and he said a very intelligent thing. He said, “If life is hard, I can take it, and I don’t care if it ends in death. If life is not supposed to be hard I cannot work out why people are so horrible. If life is hard, accept it and fight the good fight with all thy might but if it is not hard and people are just being horrible to me on account of their own peculiar dispositions, well then I don’t like it. I would rather retire from a non-hard world where people treat me as it were hard. A hard world I can assimilate.”

We are going to examine this one very carefully. The word hard, normally we throw out the vowels to clarify the meaning, HRD. Same consonants in Herod and Harrods. You know about Harrods. HRD, it means hierarchical, discriminative division. Let us think about that very carefully. The Universe is hard means that actually there are differences of power and discriminative ability. Some people can think more clearly, see better than others; some people have more power than others and that is the exact meaning of HRD. There are differences in the Universe of power, of a discriminative ability and divisive activities arising from these two. You all know that there are differences in height, weight, biochemistry, nervous distribution, emotionality, rationality; all these differ in different people. No two single individuals are identical in any respect. That is the meaning of the word ‘hard’.

Now, we also know, apart from one or two weird people, like somebody going up to heaven on a chariot and somebody walking with God, who we see no more, and somebody, after crucifixion, riding off on a cloud in the sky in the presence of witnesses. Now, those are so rare, we can discount them. So, life is hard is easy to understand because we know it is in this sense, it is hierarchical, that is, there are differences of power; it is discriminatively different in capacity, people cannot see in the same way, or feel or think or will with the same degree of strength or discrimination. That is hard.

Now, this question of the certainty of death, everybody believes that death is certain for most people. Historically, very few have been transpirated without going through the process of dying. So that let us have a look at death. When we see what we call a dead person we are looking at a body no longer animated by a life principle that was operative perhaps an hour before or a minute before. A dead person is a non-functioning body. About the life principle that animated the body we know, externally, nothing whatever. A person is living, functioning, relating, yes, even relating, with other beings, and suddenly stops. Along comes an expert and says, “Oh heart attack, oh thrombosis some kind, oh something has gone wrong with the mechanism, ” and now it is not animate, it is not self-mobilising, it cannot discriminate, it is just a corpse on the ground. Now is that saying anything whatever about the life principle that animated that body before it was in the condition called dead. Nobody has really, physically seen and attested to, and scientifically demonstrated the departure of the life principle from a living body so the body is then dead. Some of you have been lucky enough to be near a person dying and observed the process, or you might have picked up a bird in the garden that a cat has had and seen that that bird’s eye is bright and looking perhaps terrified, and then quite suddenly, for no reason, the eye suddenly ceases to shine. Have you seen it? Now can you believe that sudden departure is something to do with the body or is it something to do with the interest that the animal had? When you suddenly see the eye lose its shine, nobody is looking out. A second ago somebody was looking out of the eye of that sparrow at you, apprehensively. But looking, a real, observing, conscious power suddenly withdraws, and then you have a dead body. Now, most people had some kind of experience like that, and it is a this strange fact that there can be an observing, living principle in a body one second and then depart in the next second, that makes us say “What is this living principle that is in this little sparrow one moment and in the next it is not?” A question say, where has it gone? Now where is a spatial word in ordinary parlance but it is not a spatial word in the phonetic value, W H R again. Now that W is a drive letter, signifies ‘push, drive,’ H R again, a hierarchical power, so to the question, where does intelligence go, instead of thinking in terms of space, has it gone to another place, think it has simply tuned or de-tuned, its hierarchical discriminative power, it has simply stopped focus on the body. It does not need to go away down the Med or to the Amazon, or somewhere far away. All it needs to do is de-tune from the body and the body is then dead. Think very carefully, that word where actually does not mean place in the naïve sense. Where has it gone means how has it de-tuned itself from this body? So the word death occurs, so-called, it would be more correct to say withdrawal of interest has occurred, withdrawal of interest. Now, I have seen a lot of people dying; change their minds under a pep talk. Really it is a question of creating interest. If you manage to create interest in a person who is dying, it could be a trick, it could be a showing them a photograph of long ago of a one time beloved and say he is still alive, he is coming to see you. “Oh pass my comb immediately. I will tidy up before she comes.” Now, as soon as you create the conditions of renewed interest, you create the conditions of a re-tuning into the body. So really the naïve sense of death is a false one. It is the wrong concept. That is to say tuning into bodies to use them and tuning away from them when you do not want to use them. That accounts of some of the weird cases of people apparently dead coming back to life. One of my Mother’s aunts was such a case. In the coffin loaded onto the hearse, luckily the bearers were unequal in size and the forward left one was short so the coffin was tilted, it hit the edge of the hearse, and there was a knocking…. from inside the coffin Now she lived fifteen years after she died and was buried, which was not bad.

Track 2

Now this question of return is very weird because we can go into states so close to death that an expert could not tell the difference. We can have suspended breathing, suspended heartbeat and still be hanging around. We have got what we might call a naughty trick of somebody, of who has been neglected too long who thinks, “I will die, I will show them,” and promptly goes into one of these conditions of withdrawal of interest, and then everybody starts panicking and feeling guilty, “Oh if only I could have behaved better towards this person, and then they don’t think, oh I am not so badly, horribly, missed by these people, I think I will open an eye, frighten them a bit before I re-die.” And this can happen. It can happen every few hours a person….. I remember a particular, concrete occasion when I was visiting a man in hospital and he had had an operation and it is quite a mild thing, and the doctor said for some reason he had become depressed, would you have a word with him? And I had a word and I said, “Why have you decided to die, why have you decided to withdraw?” And he replied, “She is a very strong minded woman.” Now I knew something of the situation so I as not surprised at the reply. At half-past five in the afternoon and he was talking to me quite nicely, and then we heard coming, coming down the ward…. and he recognised the tap, tap, tap of her heels, and he said, “She is coming now, do you mind if I close my eyes?” And I said, “No.” And when she came in she said, “Oh how very kind of you to sit with him while he is in a coma.” So I got up and left and at seven o’clock, he was dead. He decided not to come back. Why? She was a very strong-minded woman. Now I said to her afterwards, about this very thing, “What would you have done if you could have done it?” She said, “I would have forced him to confess that he wanted to marry me and tell his sister, of whom he has always been terrified, that he wanted to marry me and then I should have refused him.” Now this was about the living, not the dead. God is the God of the living, not of the dead, the dead have no God.

Life is hard, hierarchically, discriminatively, differentiated, and life ends in what? Withdrawal of interest. Now that is not so bad is it? Can you think that life is other than, unequal in every respect? Have you ever seen identical twins? Have you seen them born simultaneously?

No.

Or one after the other?

One after the other.

I saw a couple of girls, one after the other being interviewed; they were in a circus playing front and back legs of a horse. And when I saw them, I said, “Aha, I will bet it emerges in this interview that the girl who plays front legs is born first”. And that is how it was. So they asked the girl who played back legs, “Do you mind?” and she said, “No, I have always been second.” The actual interest was determined by the mode of egress from that sacred place.

Hard, simply power, discriminative differences of capacity. Does anybody doubt that? No? Can I take silence as an agreement?

Yes.

Funny I get a noise, yes? I ask one, I get nothing. And suddenly I get a yes. How did I get that “yes?”

You asked for an affirmation.

I asked for an affirmation. So there is nothing people like giving more than an affirmation. Why?

It confirms them.

It confirms them. Very good, Ghreta. Heh, heh, heh. You have often heard people arguing like that about something and finally one says, “Oh, I will give you that,” instead of giving them the argument they have agreed with it and gained the victory by agreeing at the end. Or, “I will allow that.” That is very kind of them. So we know what hard means, and that it is a fact and we know that death is a very much misunderstood term and that really the process is simply withdrawal of interest and you can die in parts by losing interest in parts.

Not very long ago, a man said he was going to have a divorce because all sexuality had vanished from their relation. There was now no need to continue the relation because the relation between a man and a woman and there was now no sexual interest, therefore no relation, therefore no marriage so why not have a divorce. I was rather puzzled why if you are not married you need a divorce? Anyhow I said to him, “Will you do an exercise for me?” “Yes, if it will help.” I said, “It will help.” “What is the exercise?” “Do not allow yourself to think of sex in any way for one month.” That means, you are not allowed to leer at other women, just in case they have a stimulus factor in them, so he agreed to try. And, two days afterwards he gave in to the wife. Now why was that so? Because in forbidding him, something had been done to his energy, interest had been created. Give it up, you have finished with it, whatever it is; don’t have any more Mars bars. Deny yourself when you go in the petrol station and see them laid out, do not have one. And the eye goes….. Everything that is forbidden is brought into focus. Now, who invented that trick? God, He did it on Adam and Eve. There they were in their primordial innocence, wondering about what the hell to do when the garden had no trouble in it. He did not even need to garden, everything grew properly. Do you know there were no weeds in the Garden of Eden? And no naughties, except one, the Serpent, which God had put there because there were no naughties, somebody has to stand in. And the moment they knew there was a tree they had not to eat… convergence.

So life is hard, hierarchically, discriminative and differentiated, and it ends in the withdrawal of interest and the method of creating interest is by forbidding processes. In the Tarot cards the sixth card is the card of sex and the High Priest who is before it, has fabricated a statement, sexuality is forbidden except by ecclesiastical or civil licence. This merely makes everyone think what on earth is this? If it is forbidden that means it must be valuable otherwise why forbid it? So the way of creating interest is forbid,

On several occasions I have been confronted with suicide cases and they were about to commit suicide and their psychiatrist had said. “Very dangerous, we will land in the coroner’s court and we will told off for

allowing it, what would you say?” And I would say to this person, have you killed yourself before that you remember? “No.” Have you died before that you remember? “No.” How do you know that when you are dead you are dead? Supposing you are not properly dead; what condition are you in? Have you ever been in a nightmare and been glad to have a body to wake up in to? Mmm?

Of course.

Track 3

Now if we can now change the subject from hard life with death at the end, to inertia. ERT, who is sniggering over there? Are you puzzling as how we got from hard life….

Yes I am a little bit out of breath.

It is inertia.

The ERT in inert is simply ER G with the G turned into a T. Now you know that an erg is a unit of work, isn’t it? When you say en-ergy, leave it to the back end it means affirm-earth-motion of life. En-er-gy (NRG), Y, affirm, that G should be really hard, er-gee, and that means compaction of the motion of the life force. Energy means life force on the move consolidating itself affirmatively, that is energy. Now if you get crucified on it, that is identified, then it has difficulty in breaking it, it has turned G into a T, symbolises a cross or fixation. If you look at your Hebrew alphabet, the last letter of that alphabet is a Tau ת, and it says by it, in the Hebrew lexicon meaning, ‘cross.’ It means ‘fix it,’ so inert means in or within, a point motion of a life differentiation nailed, fixated, crucified. Now, inertia, the I A at the end, means affirmation thereof. Now you know that physically, inertia is the tendency to continue to do or not do something unless you are acted upon by an external stimulus, but that is an inertia that is an affirmation of a crucifixion of a mode of life-motion pattern. Inertia means that you are affirming a life-motion pattern that you, initially have established and then forgotten about it. The opposite of inertia is initiative.

Now initiative means beginning, initio, I begin. You start something, that is energy, you converge it, focus it and let go of it, and the moment you let go of it, it runs on its own with the form of your intention in it, and it is then an inertia, it is an affirmed, fixated, life-differentiation motion pattern. That is inertia. Now has it got any use in inertia? Well the answer is yes. I mean things that remember themselves automatically are inertias. They are things that once upon a time you affirmed because they had a value, and you have released the pattern, ordered it, “Let there be remembrance of where the loo is.” Now once you have established it as important in life, it is a self-remembering energy. And that is inertia.

Now, supposing we had no inertia at all and there was just pure initiative, no repetition, because initiative is always a fresh start, initiative is always a beginning of something not previously done. Now imagine an infinitive ocean of energy, the energy is sentient, because we cannot have a dualism there, the energy is sentient and therefore we have an infinite ocean of sentient power, power that can feel itself, that is its sentience, power that can mobilise itself. So an infinite ocean of self mobilising, self feeling power, and imagine that is all initiative. Everything it does is instantly new; there is no re-cognition. Now how would you like that?

Imagine an infinite ocean of sentient power, which is throughout itself, entirely pure initiative. That is to say, everything it does, it has never done it before, so there is no re-cognition. Now, how would you like it? You get up and you go out and you do not say “Goodbye” to anybody because you do not know them. You have not re-cognised them. In consequence, what kind of a relation is it, if there is one, in an infinite ocean of sentient initiative power? Well, in the Cabbala, it is described for you under the title, Edomite Kings. Now the word Edom means do not dome, do not formulate, and that means don’t tie yourself up so that you can recognise something and then have to obey it because you can recognise it. There is my friend over there, Shibat, another one behind him, Akim; I have got two recognitions there. See what they do with me, they inhibit my initiative. Do you know this is true, I know a little bit about you, so I would know how to annoy you. But I must not do that, must I? So I am inhibited, aren’t I, and Akim behind you, he has got two very big Irish wolfhounds, do you know that? I will bet the pair of them together eat more together than he does per week. Am I right Akim?

Yes you are.

How do you feel about that?

I feel O.K about it.

You feel OK about it? You do not mind keeping other people who eat twice as much as you do?

No, not a bit.

Generosity is your middle name is it? Do you know what that means; it is possible to tread on thin ice? All I have to do is extend that, he has not only got two very large wolfhounds, but he has got a wife. Now is he as generous in thinking about the wife as he is about the wolfhounds? See what I mean? Can’t I get you into trouble? Now the Edomites hate trouble so they say do not let us know anybody. So, as soon as they feel a sign of recognition they rush off, and it says, rather amusingly, they made an awful lot of worlds before God made this one but they vanished as soon as they made them, before they had time to re-cognise, re-know them, they let go of them, gone, no longer bound.

Track 4.

In a very weird moment today, I switched on the television and the Red Shoes was on. God help us. Do you remember it any of you? Are any of you old enough to remember how bored you were the first time you saw it? Anyhow, there it was again, good as new in colour. Do you know why it was in colour? It was called Red Shoes. Perhaps they had a debate, should they leave it in black and white and just tint the shoes in, when they occurred? Now the recognition those read shoes meant tendency to prostitution in ladies. She was offered by Anton Wallbrook, a career as the most marvellous dancer the world had ever known if she stayed with him. And he made a speech at the end of that film that nearly killed me, do you remember it, she throws herself under a train in despair because she could not chose between the dancing life and respectable marriage? She had given herself to the casting couch to get the job in the first place and she wanted to be respectable as well. She could not tolerate this difference of directions so she mysteriously threw herself off a high place, under a train. I could not work out in the shot immediately afterwards how she got from where she was in a previous shot, to under this train. There was really no precedence for it, but that is artist’s licence.

Now imagine, prior to the creation of this world, there was no inertia, there was an infinity of sentient power and it hated being tied down with anything. So whatever it did, it immediately undid it, and they are called Edomite Kings. They were kings because they were the boss on their own nothingness. That is quite a high attainment, the King of nothing forever. Now those Edomite Kings still exist. Do you know what they are in us? The tendency never to finish the job that we start, have you noticed it? There are real forces that float about in the interspaces of this world, saying, “Do not finish it.” It is true. You know how many times you have promised yourself to do something and then don’t, and you are quite sure that it would be a good thing if you did? But you do not. It would be a good thing it would improve the Universe if you did it, but you do not. Those are the Edomites and they still function. We cannot say that they exist because exist means they stand out. They do not, because they are too cunning. They won’t stand out because you might recognise them.

Now, is there any positive value for inertia? Answer there is, yes, the inertia of pure logic. We want twice one to be two and a triangle to have three sides, a square to have four, forever. So that, when we make a sign like this, we say “triangle,” and when we go like this we say “circle,” and we re-cognise it, we know it again, and by this fact that there are forms that can be re-known we can orientate ourselves in our life.

Track 5.

Now let us mentally draw a circle and let us all that circle the Island of Logos, where that Logos means logic and remember the lambda is consciousness and the gamma is the precipitate of that consciousness as the solid reference point called Rock of Ages. Imagine in the infinite ocean of edomitish non-recognition there is a special sphere made, and that sphere is going to be consolidated logic, and that sphere is the infinite power, self- incarnate as that sphere. There is no other power so that sphere is simply that power willing to be interested in being a sphere of logical reference. Now we want that logical reference to continue to run itself continuously forever, world without end, logic, world without end geometrical principle, world without end mathematical equations. Imagine, geometry, logic, mathematics, all referring to a primordial sphere of being in the midst of an infinite ocean of uncommitedness. Now there is an interface isn’t there, imagine the sphere and outside the sphere an infinite non-recognition energy. Where the non-recognition hits the sphere’s periphery, what is happening, can anybody tell me? Imagine that sphere of pure logic and beyond it an infinity of non-re-cognised, non-committed energies, continuously dissolving, but when they hit that sphere’s periphery…

It is going to upset them a bit.

It is going to upset them a bit. Right, so now we know, the human being is a microcosmos of the Macrocosmos. This is the great law in occult philosophy analogy, Man is the little Universe inside the big Universe, and there is nothing in Man that is not everywhere and there is nothing anywhere that is not in Man. So, in Man we have a sphere of logic and a sphere of annoyance on the edge of it. Isn’t this our problem? We have an infinity of initiating energies that do not want to be bored by repetition and we have a sphere of logic always saying the same thing, so that, when somebody says to Socrates, “You bore me, you always say the same things about the same things,” and Socrates had nothing to say except about the same things, “I always will.” He was committed to logic. Nietzsche said about him that proves he was the final evidence of the collapse of Greece. Greek civilisation had now proved itself fundamentally weak. Why did Nietzsche say that? Because the Greeks actually had a concept of the Logos that was not quite correct. The Logos has an attained finite, not an ever-extending infinite Logos, so they thought they knew about things, a bit like the Eighteenth Century Encyclopaedia makers in France. They thought they could gather all the knowledge of the world gathered by men and put it in a collection of volumes, it would then be human wisdom complete. You know like buying the Britannia and believing everything in it and committing it to memory. How would you feel if somebody gave you a nineteen, what is it, eighty-five, is it, is it eighty-five, I can never keep up with these dates, and you get the very latest Britannica, and you read it all that way through and commit it to memory? You are now infinitely wise. Are you?

No.

Why not?

Something has happened. Somebody rewrote the History of Russia after Stalin died. Somebody rewrote German history after Hitler, and so on. History has been re-written many times. I was very lucky, once; I got the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for fifteen pounds, not bad was it? Except that about ninety per cent of it is out of date and untrue. You should read any article on Atomic Physics in it. Imagine a book that says to you we know all things. Think of Diderot. This is really gossip now, and in his encyclopaedia the word ‘laser’ does not occur. What do you think about that? What do you think about light drilling holes in steel? Would you not be a bit puzzled?

Yes I would. I would not believe it

Track 6.

Right. So we are we are going to see his denial of the concept of Logos as a statically attainable final statement to another kind of Logos, which is this infinitely expanding truth, which it is creating as it expands. It retains them all that it has made in the past but it has got an infinitely expanding new world, “Behold I make all things new.” There is no final statement that can be made that you can learn, seize and say now I know everything, so I can have a rest. Because the Universe is sentient power, expanding and evolving by its own willed, its own operation new truths that have never been known before. I am old enough to remember people arguing about the Boer War. Nobody thinks about it these days. I once did some illustrations for Rorke’s Drift. Have you ever heard of Rorke’s Drift?

Yes.

Oh! Somebody has, how funny!

So, now let us keep this Logos. The Logos is not static, it is expanding but all the time, when it is expanding, what is happening in its expansion? What is happening to the Edomite Kings outside when the Logos sphere is expanding? Is the Logos not entering their territory? Is it not stealing their energy?

Yes it is.

And committing them to new evolutes, logics, forms, maths, geometries?

Now, man is a microcosm containing all these things in himself, so in us there is a Logos sphere expanding. Every time we get a new idea, a new viewpoint, we expand our mind and with it our being, but every time we do so we take some previously unformulated, uncommitted energy in us and threaten it with committal. Now, how do we feel? Have you got any free energies in you that you know about that do not like committal?

Yes.

Now man is in this very peculiar position as a microcosm because on the one hand he has this infinitely expanding Logos Sphere, the so-called numinous world of Plato and down below, the concrete, solid earth and man is between, be twain, be two. Man has this peculiar fact, he has already gained a certain amount of logic since he swung in the trees and a lot of energies have been trapped by his newly acquired logic and they do not like it. They really do hate being trapped in decent logical, geometrical, mathematical behaviour. I have got a manuscript, which I have never offered to a publisher yet. It is called The Mathematics of Love. I am asking the ladies this particularly, how would you like to know it is possible to analyse the love life of a woman in pure mathematics with graphs. How does it feel?

I would like to believe it.

You would like to believe it, but can you?

I do not know. Difficult.

I might release this manuscript on you one day, Ghreta, because you have definitely proved it. You know how the feeling that not even a fantasy that was logically analysable and predictable….

I can believe that,

Now is not that awful from the point of view of the uncommitted energy.

Yes.

Now it is a hard world and finally there is withdrawal of interest from it by act of will, usually, but not necessarily. You can decide to live longer if you wish or die earlier if you wish. There is an old saying, “Live until you die,” because, in fact, most people do not. They do not commit themselves to the living process while they are still vaguely interested in remaining in the body, but to become aware that you are committing you into the body is very important. Now what does it do to commit ourselves to a physical body? Remember what we said, there is an infinite ocean of sentient power, of initiative uncommitted and it is in a perpetual flux, with no recognisables in it and therefore, no cognisable identity. So you have no sense of “I” and no directive, no goal, no purpose.

Now when we have converged this energy, like that, into an ovum and a sperm and conjoined them have not we made for ourselves a reference point?

Yes.

And is not this the cause of our tendency to hang on to our bodies when somebody attacks them?

Yes.

Now the virtue of having a physical reference point, a body of reference, is because without it, we are in continuous danger of nightmarish uncommittedness? You know what it is like in certain types of nightmares when you are on the run from unknown assailants, not even definable, vague unknowables, they are not nothing at all, they are energies, uncommitted and they are threatening your committedness; and the committedness is terrified that those non-committed energies will seize the committed part and tear it to pieces. You know Grendel’s mother in the Beowulf thing, remember she is a very horrible old haggis-type haggis, haggis type old lady, can you imagine, who hates logic, hates everything, especially housework, and she is an appetival, terrible power, and the hero, called Beowulf, has polished off one of her progeny, she is a bit annoyed. Her infinite ocean of sentient power is under threat. How well does she fight?

Hard.

Hard, with a hierarchical, discriminative differentiation, so Beowulf, if he is not careful, is going to get caught. Now these myths, these fairy stories, are just different versions of the same things that we find in religious scriptures. They are all stories about of how uncommitted appetite is terrified of committal, because committal means logical structure, and if we remember our definition of Logos as not a static attainable form with an infinitely expanding sphere of ever new possibilities without loss of the old ones, you have still those in memory, but capable of entertaining you forever with new forms you would never have seen while still retaining the old ones. So you open yourself to the newness of creative possibilities without losing the memory of all the things you have already done. So you are then committed and uncommitted. You have solved the problem.

Track 7

Now that problem is solved in the words used in the Indian Philosophy, Purna. Remember Purna, P U R N A. PUR means city, it means structure, it means Logos, na means snake, sensuousness, sinuous twistings and avoidings of committal, and it says, all attained yogis arrive at the same ultimate enlightenment, it is all purna. Every structure is made by appetite for the time being and then transcended with another creation without destroying the old one. How do you feel about that one? We have got our cake and we eat it. Now it says that, in the middle of Samson, “Out of the eater came forth meat, out of strength, sweetness.” Now the eater is the edomitish, appetival uncommittedness trying to eat, digest and break down into bits, eat and digest, assimilate and excrete. The digestive process tells you the whole thing in one simple analogy. This uncommitted energy, every time it is committed energy, wants to eat it, that is grab it, bite it and destroy it, squirt acid on it and throw out a formless mess which is the manure for the next world. How do we feel about this when we say man is a microcosm, all that we have said is true of every individual? Appetite is destroying all logic and logic is surviving. When you have eaten it, the one that has eaten it has digested it, has analysed it, found out what it is and stored it in his memory as a further thing to be avoided in the future. So the uncommitted energy is perpetually on the run. The name for a running snake is Anna; the name for a rotating snake, making a meatball is On, O N. Anapurna, the rolling snake makes the city so the snake can live in it, like Cain, after he had murdered his brother, built a city, to protect himself, and inside he bred children that were murderers like he was.

Now we cannot get rid of this polarity of an infinite, unformed appetival sentient power and within it a sphere of already defined attained form. And no matter how much that uncommitted energy tries to break down the sphere of logic, eat it and excrete it, it does not get rid of the logic of the digestive process. So it is actually going about sowing tomato plants after every tomato meal. You know how marvellous it is that many, many seeds that we eat are encased in a digestively resistant field, aren’t they? That means that logic can protect itself by putting itself in the form we call seed. That means every little ovum, every little sperm, is actually a pocket of logic, and appetite has tried like Herod, to murder it, and destroy it but it has superb protection. Think, you put that seed in your tum, and you squirt acid on it, viciously, and it goes merrily through and the acid does not bite through it so you get your tomatoes later. So, there is no way that man the microcosm, man the little universe can escape this duality in his being, a duality of function, that is function of gathering together, that is the logic, and a function of scattering what has been gathered together, but every time a sphere is gathered together, it makes a logical, self-consistent system that can be logically defined in all its parts. And then, when it tries to destroy it, to eat it, to digest it, what it excretes is full of seeds and logic. We have no escape.

It gave it the mess to grow on.

Yes now we have this type inside us. Now how many times do we remember this when we have what is called, a difference of opinion between ourselves and our near and dear ones. Do we remember? So life is hard when our partner is hierarchically, discriminatively divided from us and that it is actually, eternally impossible for one person, to control from outside another person’s internal, volitional motivation, absolutely impossible. Now it is not believed that it is impossible by most people. They think they can with a little technique, a little manipulation, a little emotional trickery and they can influence people from outside by what is thought, said, done, emoted, but that but that is utterly and eternally impossible because every being is a seed of Logos, one of the logoi spermaticos. A little sphere of logic is the very essence of the human soul.

Track 8

How do we feel if we think that actually, internally in our own being, we need never be afraid of anybody, in any way, because we have an indestructible centre of Logos in us and this is our personal, individuated Rock of Ages? Can you believe it? And, if you believe it, how do you feel? Nobody can take you away from you. Nobody can intimidate you unless you encourage them to do so by identifying with the threat. We live in an ocean of power; the power is sentient; when it swirls round it makes spheres; when it flows without swirling it makes waves and it oscillates between a wave-form and rotatory form. Now we can learn to gain an absolute control over this sentient power in our own being by referring to the Logos seed inside us. We have an absolutely impregnable, unassailable, unbreakable, impenetrable logic seed in each one of us, and it is unique, and it is the very, very essence of individuation. How do we feel about it?

I feel OK. I am absolutely without needing to frown, I am absolutely convinced that nobody I have ever met or could ever meet can change my mind contrary to my will. Not with all the bribery and corruption and offers and reductions, it is impossible to do it, so when I disagree with somebody’s opinion about my opinion I don’t need to scowl to make myself strong.

What about under torture, Eugene?

Torture? Another interesting word, it means twist.

If you are that frightened of being tortured…

Then you have got an erroneous idea, haven’t you? You have identified with a body being tortured, you have not identified with pure consciousness have you?

No, that is very hard if you are at a certain level, isn’t it?

Oh no, it is at an uncertain level.

Yes.

Supposing you are put on a table and somebody applies a scalpel to you?

Mmm. Interesting!

It is not so easy is it? You have to identify.

Well, I had a friend, and he is very fond of surgery and he had no education and no possibility, he thought of becoming so, and he was telling me how he loved the thought of being a surgeon. And I went out and bought him some surgical knives, and I said, … very expensive actually, they were, like good ones are, and the first thing he did was open them and look at them, he gazed with admiration, and then he started on his own finger to take skins off, one by one, and he had such good eyesight he could do it. And with these wonderfully sharp knives, he took one skin and another and another until there was only one left and the blood was pulsing visibly, underneath it, and he said, “I won’t cut that one it is my last one.” And he had done that. Ken laughed and he knows that fellow quite well from the past. He managed to cut himself and somebody asked him what he had been doing and he said, “You torturing me.” Whether you are tortured or not depends on whether you think that you have initiated the process or somebody else is initiating it without your permission.

You know, during the Inquisition, very often, when they were torturing people; the tortured person fell asleep and had to be wakened up to become conscious of being tortured. This was very annoying to the torturers. Can you believe it? Well, by a practice you can actually do it. There was a very good Buddhist exercise about that where you imagine the worst death you can think of. When I said this to a young fellow here one day tell me the worst death you can think of and he said, “Burning to death,” and I said, “OK, visualise yourself burning to death,” and he was sitting on the settee there. And I said, “You are not actually burned to death now, are you?” “No.” “Now can you imagine flames, visually and deliberately conjure up the memory of being burned,” and do you know, although he was not there, he did not like the idea of imagining he was being burnt, but he saw the logic of it. Now he went through the exercise and when you do that, you actually do not care if you do burn. You know, one of our Martyrs put his hand in the flames and said, “You signed my good faith away, you burn first.” That is the excuse for being a sissy, isn’t it? It is only a matter of this. If you are centred, you know you have two selves, in Sanskrit terms are Jiva for you lower, empirical, egoic self and Atman for your true high eternal self, now if you focus in the lower self you are terrified of your body being in pieces.

You know the story of the German girl being raped by an invading army soldier, said to him, “You have not touched my soul.” That meant to say she had not identified with it, that was all. Most of the damages of rapes are not done by the physical act but by the moralising behaviour of people round about. How do you conceive yourself?

Adequate knowledge equals activity, equals happiness; inadequate knowledge equals passivity, equals misery. If I annoy someone so much they start beating me up but I know I have done it on purpose, it is not so bad, I am not surprised I had a brother who used to do that regularly to me. He was three and a half years older than I and big enough to beat me when I was very little but it never cured me of annoying him. And I did not mind being thumped, the harder he thumped the more I enjoyed it because he only thumped me very hard when I had annoyed him very much and a little annoyance did not get me a big thump. So I used to think up ever-new terrible things to annoy him. You do know you do not have to be passive to be tortured do you? You can actively annoy people to make them act against you to convince yourself of your own activities in the situation. Now God is called the Supreme because He is actually proved He is pure act. There is no passivity in God.

Track 9

Now how about this one, God made the matter out of which He made the world. Now matter is only energy rotating. Now, when He made that matter, it was a certain amount of His energy committed to being passive. Now how was it feeling when it knew that it was being created to be bashed? Well, it said, “Be it unto me as unto the handmaid (made?) of the Lord. Go on thump me, if that will help your enlightenment, OK.” That is the voice of matter, to feel is to spirit. Now, if wives could learn that one, they would be very, very good. When their husband are raging mad and kicking up, they could say, “If it helps your psychological development dear, thump on.” Now how would you react to that? Is not the essence of his desire to thump that he can prove his superiority is a power. He must not be allowed to thump must he? He must be thumping against a resistance in despair.

Now that is the real psychology when somebody is having a knock at you, say, “Very interesting." Would it help you to tell you the sensation of that again? Would it enlighten you? Now it may cause him to rush out to the pub. What stopped my father was this threat to truth. So to your question, how do you go on under torture? The answer is to remind yourself that you put yourself there. You did.

Think of a baby that is an ovum-sperm get-together and there is a resident consciousness in them, which is neither the ovum separately nor the sperm separately, there is sentient power that has taken those two and put them together and organised them into this child. Has not it put itself in the position where it is being tortured? Did it examine its situation beforehand… or did it fall into it through lack of observation? Now if it fell into it through lack of observation does not it deserve it? And if it chose it, is not it glad? This is how we convert ourselves from the misery of passivity to the happiness, and then the happy means power applied precisely. The old term for that is HAPI. Our word “happy” is derived from that. Happy means hierarchical power precisely applied. That is happiness, that is activity. No passivity, nothing is happening to us except that which we will to happen to us and provoke so that we can learn our personal next step.

Now how do you feel about we have talked enough?

Track 10

Takes practice and time to overcome the inertia. You know in that Mexican earthquake after five days a lot of little babies were taken out, why did they not die? Do you know why? They lay under that rubble and said, “Oh Mummy has decided not to give birth yet.” They did not have any adult worries. They just thought Mummy had gone awkward again. Mother Earth, Can you see that? Did you see them on the newsreels? Came out and there they were, ready for feeding and they had been buried for five days. Actually they had been lounging about in the womb in their imagination.

In their imagination?

Yes, and the more primitive people are, the more survival they have got. It is the highly educated, highly civilised that are in danger, because this thing should not happen to a civilised, intelligent person. It can happen to me because I am a fool. I reckon I am the most primitive person I know, in that sense. I really have never given any credence whatever to anything offered by educational processes outside. I do not believe them, so they never inhibited me, I that sense I am very, very, very primitive and I could fall asleep in the middle of an earthquake and wait for them to dig me out or if they did not dig me out, OK, I would quietly rot and send them up a perfume saying, one neglected corpse here. The more primitive we can become the better for our survival. And civilised man thinks the opposite, the more high tech you have got, the more survival you have got. The high tech is nuclear bombs in space wars. Is there not something dialectically weird about that? The more we know the less safe we are. I bet there are people somewhere in the world, that after the next nuclear war will not have heard about it.

True, yes, and I bet one of them somewhere is swinging his wife round by the ankles and fracturing her skull for nagging, spontaneously. When they interviewed one of those Polynesian men who had done that and another one in the Amazon, He said, “But it is our custom.” Yes? At forty in the Polynesian Islands, a lady is considered to have done her duty, had her children, satisfied the call of nature to multiply; take her to the sea side, they take a big pebble and they bash their brains in saying they have done a good job but they are very kind and compassionate because they let her get drunk first. Good anaesthetic.

So we have got a very hard world, it is hard, we all agree and if we accept that fact, we expect from other beings nothing, except hardness, which we provoke by the way we relate to them. How many times, sincerely I ask you all, how many times, sincerely have you, in the middle of a disagreement, and I prefer a disagreement in an intimate relationship like boyfriend-girlfriend, man-wife and so on, an intimate relation like that, how often do you manage to get hold of yourself and start considering the other person’s feelings? How often? Not until it is dinner-time usually. You bury the hatchet in your opponent’s head, don’t you?

So we have got a hard world, we have got inertia. The positive value of inertia is this. If we did not have it we could not have re-cognition of our own being. Now, in that name of God, yod, hé, vov, hé, called the tetragrammaton, four letter word, the first three letters that in Hebrew philosophy are said to be the three essential names of God, yod, hé, vov, Yahweh and the final letter, which is a hé repeating the second letter, is said to be hé in exile, outside the sphere of logic. It is the Infinite, uncommitted and that word, cut in two read anti-Hebraica, says Hu Hi, he-she. God is a hermaphrodite. God is the sentient power that has initiative and logic, that is male; and feeling and physicality, that is female. And with those four together you have initiative, intellection, feeling, physicality. And the relation like that those two are male, those two are female. That relation generates this funny animal like this, and the middle finger there is time. If you look on your seriological charts, you will find Saturn is on the middle finger means time. Time is generated by energy of initiative, intellect, (intellect means formative power,) of physicality condensation and emotively valued. Initiative, formal intellection, emotive evaluation, physical condensation, in their interplay together, creates time. So you put Saturn on your middle finger and make the funny animal. Time is nothing but an interplay of those four forces and those forces are the significance of that Tetragrammaton name of God. It is said to be unpronounceable, and you know why it is unpronounceable because the sphere of Logos is infinitely expanding, so it cannot have a term. It is forever wide open to the future. The past is closed in memory, the present is active now and the future is open to infinite possibilities. How do we feel about that?

Track 11

Now, remember man is a microcosm, you are little human being, identical in all respects with the whole big universe except size, but that does not matter because resonance operates between large and small like it does between double base and violin, there always will be communication. You are one of those, you have inside you, initiative, formative intellection, feeling evaluation, which means like/dislike physical capacity for self-condensation, and through the interplay of those in us, as a little universes, time is developed by our inter-relation of these four forces. In other words, we are actually creating our own self, now. You initiate, you start something, thought process, an emotive reaction and volitional intent. And we formulate it, wrap it up so we can define it, we evaluate it emotively as like/dislike and we then condense it in our physical body as biochemistry. When we do those four processes, we actually create and precipitate the very chemistry of our physical bodies.

Now imagine as you become progressively more aware of this and decide to do it, seize the initiative, seize the formative power, evaluate sensitively like/dislike and condense your being with your own decision to be, you are a self-creative, self-generating being, a law to yourself, creating a universe, unique for you. How do you feel about that? That is the goal of man. When you get it you are said to be of ophilised, or divinized, or immortalised, various terms for it, because you simply become a self-directed, self-surviving, intelligent power, and then you do not need inertia, because now you are initiating continuously and leaving the inertias to roll on as memories in Cosmos, but you are creating new universes. We have been through many, many universes and many lives and deaths ourselves, as individuals, but every time we get reborn we are reborn into a world that is made of the debris of prior buildings that we have made. That is called karma so we are always dealing with what we ourselves have precipitated for ourselves. Have we any legitimate grounds of complaint? None at all. So, when we accept that factually and realistically and say, “OK, I am going to give up complaining. I will stop complaining about myself, my partner or anybody else. I will stop complaining and I will start initiating something worth-while being.” I become a co-operative, co-creator with the Absolute. How do you like it?

Fine! Can we think about that a little?

Yes.

Thank you.