Love and Will
There is a question here about God loving the world,
God so loved the world, God so willed the world and it says love and being the
same force, love and will being the same force at which point will the function
change from will to love or love to will.
Well, we
have already said that will is a term that we reserve for initiative. If we
take a walk to the edge of a cliff and at the edge of a cliff we decide that we
will walk over it, the point of decision is the point of will. Once we have committed
ourselves over the edge there is no further need to exercise will to reach the
bottom it is entirely a matter of inertia that we will reach the bottom. So we
have to distinguish between will as initiative and love as another concept
signifying the working for the development of the potentialities of a being.
That is L ove this ove is
the same as the egg L means labouring or working so love actually means the
power that works for the development of the potentialities of a being and will simply
is the point of initiation of a change. So we cannot equate the two together so
this little question has to do with the correct definition of will which is
initiative and love which is the working for the development for the potentials
of a being. The Greeks had four words all of which are generally translated as
love in English, Puthos, Eros, philos
and Agape.
Puthos or puthotic love is simply the love for genital activity. Eros
is the love for emotional interplay, philos is the
love of exchange of ideas of reasons and agape is really correspondent with our
definition, it is the Christian idea of
working for the development of the potentialities of being regardless of
the effect of your work on yourself, but you are working for the development of
that other being and the potentialities of a being are simply the latent
capacities for activity that it has. You know that when a baby is born it can’t
immediately walk but you know that given the proper food it will become able to
walk if it is a normal child and therefore you are actually loving it when you
are feeding it, knowing that as a result of your feeding it will eventually
develop its latent capacity to walk. You know that eventually when it can walk
it will walk away from you as well as towards you and when it has developed
sufficiently it will go away from you altogether and this is the idea of the
love, the agape love, of the Christian.
In its true
sense to work to the point where somebody may transcend the need for you and go
away from you and this is the sense in which the word love should be used of
God because he as creator is only interested in working to develop the
potentialities of each creature. And as all the creatures are quite different
it means in effect that some of the creatures will have potentials of
disobedience and nevertheless he will work for those too. So he works for the
development of prodigals and er he even gives birth to
Marxists and things like that that are atheist. In the bible it says about
it “ he can produce good out of evil” now we define evil as that which makes
against life and nevertheless if you threaten life the result is that the half
living being is stimulated to demand more of it, so that the evil is itself a
cause of the good. You know that some of the early theologians thought that the
evil was a good not simply a means to it but itself a good which means if you
consider evil as a stimulus threaten to destroy life it can be an actual means
of provoking a being to seize life. So it cannot be said that the stimulus that
makes you prefer to live is an evil thing, so that a threat against your life
may be the means to your life. This is another aspect of the thing we said
about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden, Adam should not
have decided that some things were good and some were evil in themselves. A
thing is neither good nor evil until you define it in a situation and then it
is only good or evil relative to a defined purpose, so that you could say that
a pin is very good for picking winkles or something and is very bad for sitting
on, it depends on the purpose.
So this
question is really concerned with a relation that depends on the definition of
these two words and we should remember that there are four kinds of application
of this word in English. You can love anything, you can love a new carpet or a
wallpaper or a bar of chocolate or so on. It is really a substitute word for
desire there and that is its lowest level. The Greeks saw that at its lowest level as simply the desire for
sexual stimulation at the physical level. Sexual stimulation being the type of
all sensuous stimulation, Freud would see it in the same way today all
pleasures, sucking a dolly baby or something for example, to a Freudian is as
much sexual as an actual sexual relation because of the nervous relation
between the mouth and various other parts of the organism. So to a Freudian there aren’t any non sexual pleasures and therefore we could
equate this Puthotic love of the Greeks, with any
kind of merely physical pleasure. The love of sense gratification whereas in
the case of emotional love, Eros, you can be tied to a person for no physical
reason whatever and for no rational reason but you can just say “well I feel that
I must sit with that person I don’t know why but there it is I feel better in
his company than I do when I am not”, so that would come under the heading of
erotic love, emotional. Philosophical love is the love of a mind for another
minds contents you find two people and this person says I like him he has a nice
mind, meaning full of good ideas and so on. But those three loves are all for
gratification by the lover, the lover is seeking his own gratification either
physically, emotionally or rationally.
In the Agape
love you are not doing any such thing you are actually working for the
development of the potentialities of the being that you are loving that is you
are actually working on that being to develop its potentialities. And the word
will we reserve simply for the point of initiation of a change so that if we
say that feeling awareness is the background possibility of will then what we
are saying that feeling when mobilised, at the point of mobilisation, becomes
will. And we apply the word will only at the point of initiation of the change
and not otherwise. So I think that should do for that one.
Here is one
that says after meditation I experience a profound peace and understanding or
feeling of power and achievement yet there is no tangible evidence of any
achievement, why?.
Well
achievement here really needs definition because if you meditate and get the
fruits of your meditation and you feel at peace, that peace is the removal of
some irritations that you had previously. Here the word achievement is used
ambiguously because it appears to refer to things done in the face of
obstacles. The idea of achievement is the idea of overcoming obstacles in the
way of some purpose attainment so suppose we imagine a person feels unsettled
or unsatisfied or irritated and he meditates on the cause of this feeling and
eventually discovers the rules that cause it and having seen the inherent
nature of it, he transcends it.
He hasn’t in
any sense solved the problem by an attack on it he has merely seen the
relations of forms that constitute the problem and in the fact of seeing the
way they are related he has transcended it and he then goes onto another plane
where the irritation no longer is effective. If we take say a kind of problem
in a piece of wood, a dovetail if we take this piece of wood and separate them
there has got to be an angle there and there in both pieces of wood
correspondent to make it fit. If you get a piece of wood and try to make a good
dovetail you will find you have to mark it very carefully, if when you have
done your best someone had been beating a drum in your ear when you have been
doing it and when you put it together you find it doesn’t fit you will feel a
certain amount of irritation. Now if you refer back and say well he was banging
a drum and therefore I took my mind off the work and didn’t measure accurately.
And blame yourself for it for not keeping your mind on the work then you will
transcend it and the irritation will go away and you will feel at peace. Again
you haven’t achieved anything you haven’t made the dovetail yet but you have transcended
this idea that somehow you were interfered with because you know that if you
concentrate nobody could interfere with you by beating a drum. So in all this
question of achievement we have to distinguish between various levels and just
as we did in the case of the word love there are four of them we can say the
same thing again. There are the three
levels here this is the puthotic, the erotic, the philosophic
and your spinal column which is concerned with integration so we could say you
could aim to achieve something at the gross material level by actually making a
dovetail joint. Or you could aim to achieve something at the emotional level
like persuading somebody to like you or even to dislike you if you wanted to
get rid of them. And you could aim at achieving a rational interrelation of
ideas with another being or you could aim at integrating those three.
Now the last
one is the one really that we are aiming at in meditation, what we are trying
to do is integrate the three levels of being. And at the moment where it
becomes possible to see that we have in fact integrated a primary energy which
would be quite blind if it were not controlled, and would run us into trouble
and an emotional relation of pleasure pain and a formal relation the idea. When
we have integrated these we become aware of the real meaning of the word
satisfaction.
Satisfaction
is the same thing as being full, deed full, of being deed if you like, the
faction part is the action the doing the facere and the SAT is from being
and fullness . So in satisfaction you feel full and it is obviously impossible to
feel full unless you integrate you parts, you cannot be really satisfied unless
you ideas are in order and your feelings are correct and your prime urge is
under control. So the feeling that comes of peace and fulfilment is really a
thing that arises from an integration, this integration may be temporary or it
may last for a long time but when this feeling does arise it arises from the
fact for the moment you have attained a degree of integration that you hadn’t
attained previously. And it is the aim of all human being whether they know it
or not to release themselves from external determination. To get inner freedom
is the same thing as to release oneself from external dictatorship and this is
only possible providing you integrate your three parts and when you integrate
them and feel that they are becoming integrated you are at that moment
transcendent of each separate level. To integrate you actually move backwards
from the impulses that tend to run out into the sensuous mechanism and you are
really transcending the situation.
Supposing
there is a man and he is lying down, we will put his spine there for the
moment. The usual tendency of his nervous energy is to run down and forward
into the body, if he pulls those energies back into the spine so they can’t run
to those separate departments he feels that he has control, he actually has
control provided that his consciousness is in the spine. So if you can keep
consciousness in the whole of the spine you are necessarily coordinating those
three parts and in that very fact you will get that sensation of peace of
satisfaction and it always arises from integration. The integration may be short
term or it may be long term but where that feeling of satisfaction does come it
has to do with the perception that integration is occurring and integration
confers freedom from external dictatorships. In other words it is another way
of thinking about the acquisition of power. Power and integration are very
closely related, to integrate you must have already got some of your power
under control and as it is the object of a man to free himself from slavery
that is form external determination he must necessarily pursue power. If he knows he can’t have power until he
integrates he will pursue integration if he thinks he can get power without
integration he will get into trouble at one of the three levels. He can’t get
into trouble on the fourth level you will notice if he doesn’t integrate he can
only get into trouble in the belly urge or emotionally or rationally.
Most of the criminal types get into trouble on
the belly urge running about without rational control, the other people that
get into trouble are the emotionalists like a gentleman the other day who
suddenly broke out in all sorts of irregular activities because the girl in the
office had jilted him, he had to be protected by his boss from the fury of the
courts. This man really became emotionally unbalanced and therefore ran about
doing funny things. But even there the emotional energy he experienced had
climbed from below from a sexual source and then split into liking and
disliking. He liked the girl she didn’t like him so he didn’t like that she
didn’t like him and this produced the emotional conflict. Remember the emotions
in their conflicting state are merely the battles between yes and no. ???? in
the possibility of an urge fulfilling itself and a statement either from
outside or rationality saying “ you cannot fulfil yourself” and this produces the emotional conflict
across the chest level. We all know that the other aspect of getting into
trouble namely being illogical and causing confusion in ones
own mind is very very easy.
This one
says after a revelation is ever possible to put the experience into words. Well
revelation, we’ve got a veil in the middle of it. It is very important to
understand this that the revelation is really a re- veiling of the absolute.
Any form whatever is automatically, by being form, a veil over the absolute
when we talk we talk serially, we take words one at a time and put them out and
then you have to synthesise them again in the brain of the hearer and all he is
getting is a series of sound symbols which are only representatives of parts of
concrete reality. And we have said before that concrete reality is a seamless
continuum it has no edges and as given it involves every conceivable activity
of which we are capable , our three levels, our urge level, our emotional, our
rational, our integration function and all data presented to us are seamless.
And if we do not comment upon that, that is concrete reality philosophers call
it immediacy. Immediate experience of the concrete whole if we start to talk
about it we necessarily by the nature of serial talking abstract bits of it for the time being and in
taking a bit out we have falsified its relation with its background. So that it
is impossible to express the concrete reality to which you refer when you talk
about a revelation, so that if you meditate and go through a series of
experiences until you reach the contemplative stage of complete cessation of
serial thinking and you then really are a fully integrated being at the very moment you have become so and
therefore experienced the supreme value of being, the only thing worth
discussing. At that very moment you have put yourself beyond discussion, so
that when you try and explain what you are doing serially in words you are
falsifying in the act of explaining. Now the peculiar nature of human thought
is this that although it is a closed system of forms of images ..........{
lacuna}
With the
circle and the circle contents within us so we could write consciousness if we
wanted all the way round this and extend it infinitely and internal to it we
have an object namely thought. Now in order to express thought you have to set
up a system of symbols, you make an image this may be derived from an external
sense impression or from an internal sensation in the organism. Or the image
may be turned into a word we know in the case of the development of language
that the letters once upon a time were
actual images of things and after a time the initial letter or sound of this
thing was used to symbolised the whole animal. Thus the bet in Hebrew is the
first, the B is first letter of the house beth the
English word booth which means a house so it is decided to use the letter b
instead of writing b e t h or b o o t h you just have
to write b for that and that means a house. Now you can see what we are doing
we are abstracting from, that which is beyond that which is inside, and the
limiting factor namely the definition. And we are substituting for an image
another image we are substituting for a visual impression a sound and for the
sound in modern time we substitute a mark of printers ink in a book. So we have
to say sound that’s what you make when you see something like this, call that
ooh if you like when you seen something. And the sound itself correspond with
an idea in the mind which corresponds with a word, written glyph and down here
is the reality which is a concrete whole. Which is given the stimulus which has
caused the sound ooh to appear this has given rise to the motion in the mind
that was on an idea, and this after due ordering you can see by the ord
in the word word that it is an ordering device. After
due consideration it is decided to use a certain sound in a very definite form
and a correspondent in ink marks on paper to symbolise a certain aspect of the
real, but as the concrete whole is infinite it cannot be expressed in a finite
term, and the mere fact that we talk serially to abstraction that is taking
bits out one after the other.
It therefore follows that what we experience
and what we refer to when we use the word
revelation is this. There is the veil of thought and the differentiating
factors of the analysis in here but the T O N function runs right through the
lot there is our T in the middle of it and out here is the N or continuity
principle that letter N occurs in the continuous forms of verbs the I N G the E N D and so on. In different languages
you will find that this N function is used to symbolise continuity. So beyond
the definitional world of thought we have a non defined but absolutely real
continuous motion which we symbolise here by N. If we write N there O the
energy going inside then the issue S we have written the word NOS, which is
intelligence. And the intelligence is precisely that part of you which knows
that there is always something beyond every definition you make so that no definition
not even the definition of whole is absolute. Whole actually implies that you
draw a circle the hole is what is included in it but what is outside it is not
included so whole only refers to this. That is not the whole out there that is
beyond it and this we said was why the concept of monism of a unity principle
as absolute is untrue and why Shankara the Hindu
metaphysician preferred the term advaita non dual for
the absolute reality. This is the biggest unity concept we have but the
absolute is not simply a unity it is more than that it transcends that barrier.
So we could say that revelation can
never be adequately expressed so the function of expression is not to let
people to know what revelation is. So the function of the book called the
revelation is not to let people know what revelation is, it has another
function. When one being expresses something he does it either deliberately or
not, a sleeping man snores we will say not deliberately, so he is not intending
to effect people outside but when a man deliberately expresses something in
words what he is doing is stimulating the reader or hearer to react in a
certain way.
Now he can
make them react in a very definite finite direction, like government propaganda
does, or he can do what the great teachers and mystics do force to you react in
contrary directions simultaneously. If we take that as a type of a being the government wants to force that being to
the ground down there and flatten it down, reduce it to a passive and then
abstract the income tax from it.
Lewis Carroll being aware of this said this is
the concept of the snark, the being that can be
negated, but the fact is that it is a boojum here, so
when you really do press it down and equal and opposite force tends to press it
up and produce a special brand of legal experts who can get round the rules. We
now have a being between two forces and you know that if you put a being
between two forces, owing to the inequality of finites you cannot make those
forces exactly equal and opposite, you can try to and when you begin to
approximate to it the fact they are vibrating and this is vibrating will cause
this to be displaced and it will bisect the angle between them. So if we
present a parable to a person that it is something beyond a one track stimulus.
What we are doing is forcing that person
to bisect the angle between the two propositions and we are not giving him any
formal stimulus in that direction. We are giving him two formal stimuli like
this and flirting him as a result like and orange pip between your finger and
thumb into another direction that he knows nothing about. And the essential
thing about the parable is that it forces you into nothing and when you are
precipitated by a parable into nothing, you are then to make your own mind up,
what you are going to do about it.
There is a
young man and he is so rich and he wants to follow Christ and he is a decent
fellow and he says I will follow you what do I have to do and he says just get
rid of what you have got. Well it is too much, it says that he was a young man
and Christ looked at him and felt sorry for him because he was a young man, he
had had these riches imposed on him how could he possibly get rid of them. It
was a great job, they were traditions coming on to him he didn’t even
understand them he didn’t know the
source of them , he didn’t know what they meant how could he give it up when he
hadn’t experienced it. It was too soon so he went away sorry.
Now the
statements about the kingdom of heaven and so on are all parabolic they are all
squeezing you to make your own mind up, they give you contrary directions. You
have got to work out your salvation in fear and trembling, it is as easy as falling off a log all you have to do is become
a little baby and so on. There are a series
of contrary statements between the contrary you are squeezed and you have not
got any formal lead you just have to make your own mind up, and therefore you
are precipitated between two types of form and this is part of the action of
love, you can see that it is a very painful thing isn’t it. Because when you
squeeze a person between two opposing things they become for the time being
very confused and they don’t thank you for it. Nevertheless if they are not
squeezed between those and flirted to bisect between them, and precipitated
into an abyss, they cannot grab.
Now let’s do
a diagram in which we say there is a little door open there and this is a nice
secure place, this is a house. There is
a little tiny door open there and a nice kind agape love gentleman comes in
there and squeezes this fellow very very hard and
gives him a slight bias like this so that he shoots straight out of that door
now all his life he has been protected and he has been formally educated so he
thinks he knows all about it except the dark corners of the room, and he
doesn’t go in those because its nasty in the dark corners of the room like the
cellar where the coal is. And suddenly he is squirted out of the zone of
protection he is precipitated into the abyss and there he has nothing whatever
to lean on except his own internal content so then when he is suddenly
precipitated out there he suddenly has to turn upon himself. And sought from
himself that to which he wills to give himself, he is seeking a concept in
himself, in order to save himself from within himself there is nothing outside.
Perhaps a man thrown out of a cannon tends to ball up, when he finds himself in
mid air he tend to reduce his area to avoid damages. In the same way this
person would be psychologically forced onto himself to seek for an idea upon
which he can stand and say this is thine. And from
that moment he can create outside a world of his own he then corresponds in
that state with the Yod point the point of creative initiation. So if we find
very very fearful people and we by examination of
them and the feeling and so on say well if I squeeze that fellow and he goes
out he will come straight back in again, it’s not worth it. There was a very
nice cartoon in the observer this week of fighters and in it there was a man
with a board and he said once I had the word, and I fought like hell to
propagate it, but another group came along and said that isn’t a proper word
this is so I left the first word and I
fought like hell for the new word, and after a time a man came along and said
you know that isn’t the word this is so I left that other word and fought like
hell for the new word, and then another man came along and said there isn’t any
word really what you have to do is become an individual and grow. So I went on
my own and I grew but I feel rather terrible I am just growing and the last picture says he has got a stick
with no board on it and he is saying “I wish I could find some more like myself”.
Now he is a
fellow who has been flirted successively into this space and he want to run
back in again. This is a question of level of development you could say of
every individual of every finite that it has at some time or other been in the
condition when if you flirted it through the window it would immediately come
back again. But there comes a time when you feel really ready, having
understood the nature of definition to say well I now dare to leap outside the
definition. Plotinus said, that when intellect has completed its work and the
thought system is seen to be a tautological structure, a self defining
structure, and it is realised to be so then it time to put it down and leap
into the abyss. Why because that abyss is the source of initiation. Now those
who have put the letter N and that N is the letter of continuity and of
negation when you say the letter N you close your nose a little NE, and you
know your organ of scent is your oldest discriminator. So, to say N is to
negate so we know that this, this is N O, we know that this circle itself is a
negation, it is a negation of the absolute. So that what we have to do is to
negate the negation and two negatives make a positive so we understand that all
thought is negation this is the reference I made a few weeks ago to the secret
little egg you know about. And then you take all the thought structures and the
reasons that men pursue and you negate them you say they are only functions of
will what am I trying to be reasonable for? what I really want to be is wilful,
and get away with it. Nobody wants to be reasonable, they just want to be
efficient but reason is the only way whereby they can become efficient.
So we see
here that revelation expression is an equation that just doesn’t equate, no
expression can exhaust the meaning of revelation as we understand it. And we
see why because when we talk we are serialising and we are taking an aspect of
the real uttering a sound, turning that sound into an idea and then making a
word out of it, at its lowest level a mark on paper. And at each point that we
translate this there is a possibility of an error occurring because if the
printed mark on the paper does not correspond with the word, sometimes it
doesn’t, or the idea isn’t quite the same as that signified by the sound. Which
is why the meaning of letter is so important or the sound itself has been
uttered in a complex situation and been understood to refer to a part of
reality when it doesn’t it refers to another part. So we have a series of
possible errors there in the mere fact using words. So it really means what I’m
saying now is shot through and through and through possible errors and we have
to allow that as a possibility and then deliberately introduced proper
correspondence between these things. If I say the letter be as we write it once
upon a time was written like a circle and then it was cut in half to make two
rooms for it was a circular house and then one of them was turned up on top of
the other and made into the letter B so we still know that the B means a house
or a container to pronounce it we have to go B we felt the mouth with Tone and
let it pload. When it explodes it makes a little
doorway but just before it explodes we are fully aware in feeling that we have
a container with Tone in it, sounds nice doesn’t it.
So it isn’t of
it true to say that B signifies a container because it is the sound made by a
container and we can produce a correspondence between every letter that we have
and every letter complex, a word, and an idea, the sound value and an aspect of
reality when we do so we make a coherent world picture. And we have some sounds
which transcend this for instance we have written N out there the Egyptian
hieroglyph for N is that. Now it was simply drawing of water, waves that N is
an abstract of that, it simply means a ripple and the infinite is shot through
and through and through with ripples which produced that interpenetrating
sphere pattern that we did last week. So when we are talking about the no thing
Jacob Boehme talks about the no thing when you can throw yourself into no thing
that’s thing here and that is no. You are throwing yourself outside the
definitional sphere into the pure concrete reality this thing still remains
inside you like a gallstone but outside it you feel bigger than the definition
and the whole of magic is outside that definition. To create a magical change
or to create a change of metabolism in the body you must get outside the
definition, and then will in a certain way. Will is release of power initiative
and the power released always moves in a definite formal pattern and the
pattern precipitates at the physical end chemistry. And that chemistry makes your
physical body one type rather than
another and equips it for action, for emoting, for thinking. But the cause is
in the will, initiative and behind cause is the absolute, which is the seamless
whole’ referred to by the seamless garment of Christ. You remember that he had
a seamless garment and they didn’t tear it to bits after he was crucified, the
cast lots for it. This is just said to point out it is a seamless whole so shot
right through is reality. When we think we draw a circle round an aspect of it,
and when we serialise in words we are taking little bits and mentioning them
one after the other and we cannot after all the things you are in time because
time itself is very minute and circumscribed.
So we cannot
express Infinity, what we express is no more than a stimulus to flirt a
listener between the pairs of opposite ideas and precipitate them into the
abyss. A very good exercise is to sit on your own in a dark room so you can’t
see anything and deliberately imagine that there are no other people in the
world and watch your feeling and see when you are feeling that there aren’t any
other beings. Ask yourself what will I do now there are no beings, except myself,
it puts you in the position either you are going to sit down and do nothing for
you must assume the initiative of God, you must create. Richard the second in
jail is made by Shakespeare to say that “my brain and my soul between the two I
will hammer it out you, make a world”,read that
section in Richard the second in jail there. You will find a perfect
description of the internal processes that you should have to hammer out a
universe inside your own consciousness if you were the only one to exist. Now
when the next war comes it will be a very horrid war and the will be a lot of
people killed, and the people that are
not killed, will fall into two categories. Those who will fall to bits and look round for something to indicate to
them like this something to hammer them onto the ground and make them feel
secure. And the others who will be those who are worth squirting into the abyss
and at that moment they will concentrate and say now we have to make a new
world. And they will know about this these are the people referred to as the
elect, they know about definition and they will be prepared to make a
definition for the time being and put all these passive people inside the
definition. That definition will be the new society but only those beings who
are not afraid of being alone in the abyss will be equipped and able to make a
definitional system and put other beings in it.
This one
says knock and it shall be opened unto you implies a door. What is it on the
other side of the door?
Well this is
the thing we knock on the inside against here the other side of it we know is
Infinity. It is absolute power, so that’s a fairly simple one.
The devil
said to Christ all power will I give to you.
Now the
devil by definition is a divider so that his power extends no further than the
division does, so the devil has no power over you whatever except by
definition. That is if you can persuade you to accept a definition with
yourself as finite then you are under his dominion. So when the devil said to
Christ, I that is a finite being will give you all power, as Christ happened to
be the incarnate Logos what he mentally said to himself was a finite cannot
give me Infinity so it was not difficult to resist. So remember that if
somebody tries to define you in a finite capacity as incapable of doing
anything no matter what it is. It is upon yourself to see that you do not
accept the definition because if you do that person in effect has played the
devil with you, he has circumscribed you. There is a crime in the New Testament
called the crime against the Holy Ghost, you can save blow the father blow the
son but you mustn’t say blow the Holy Ghost. Why not, because the Holy Ghost
represents the spirit of freedom so that if anybody whatever persuades you that
you cannot decide, that you are not free to the point of paralysing your
decision power, your initiative. He has committed a crime against the Holy
Ghost and he has endangered himself because anything you may do after that to
him is his own fault. Because he has defined you as a certain kind of being if
you then respond by kicking him on the shins you must not blame you because if
his definition is accurate that’s just what you do. ..................Lacuna..................
On the other
hand if you escape the definition and insist that internal you have
potentialities, that you are still free even if you have not actually achieved
at a material level. Yet achievement is possible for you at all levels at some
time if you work towards it and therefore it is your ultimate duty to yourself
to reject any suggestion that you are finitely circumscribed and by that fact
rendered impotent, void of the initiative.
The second
part refers to exercise we mentioned, feed the will into the intellect and the
intellect into the will, is this dangerous?
Well,
anything at all that is powerful is possibly dangerous and the way to avoid the
danger is by watching your motive. Here is the reciprocal feeding of the two,
put a line between the one on the sinister side we will say is the idea and the
one on the Dexter side is the will. If you get an idea remember that you have
got the centre of a field, there is an idea a form and the field is the will.
The feeling mobilising itself to produce an idea at the point of its decision
to mobilise it is called the will. So this diagram can be drawn like this if we
want this is feeding idea into the will putting the form back into the field,
if you remember that every idea you have comes out of an impact between your
own being and another, in a field which it experiences feeling the impact of
two opposing motion breeds at their intersection, the point of impact, an idea.
So an idea is really a pair of forces locked together if you then analyse the
idea you will find in it motivation, that is feeling mobilised to make you
move. Every idea is simply a precipitant of will. At some point feeling it has
initiated a formal precipitant so to feed idea into will is to take the form
and analyse it and discover its motivation content what the idea requires you
to do and how it can mobilise your feeling to do it. To feed the will into the
idea is when you have taken idea which is inertiac, which you have not examined,
you have just accepted it from tradition. Say like the idea of democracy and
you say alright I am going to energise it I’m going to push my will into it.
And see what it is like in practice to be a democrat so you deliberately go
about behaving like one you assume you have as much right to be on the throne
as the Queen so you go to the Palace of knock on the gate and say I want to sit
on the throne today she had her turn yesterday. What it does is teacher
peculiar thing about the abstract nature of political ideas, in concrete fact
they probably won’t let you in, and feeding the will into the idea energising
the idea activating it exposes you this is why it is possibly dangerous. But if
you have got enough of that funny stuff that resides in the lower tum it is
surprising on many occasions to find if you push hard enough in the right place
the Queen would actually let you sit on her throne for a bit to see what it
felt like.
Now it is
possible to push yourself that far and amazing things can be got away with but
as you are only empowering that idea you
won’t stay on the throne. To stay on it you would have to empower and lot of
other ideas too. As a finite being you may consider that you only have a
certain amount of energy this is a devilish definition, you don’t know how much
energy you have got until you open the door inside yourself and start pulling
it out of the ideas you’ve got. You may probably surprise yourself by
discovering that you have so many ideas that on analysis they will give you
power that you never knew about and that you can’t know unless you try to put
them into practice, put the will into the idea. It is dangerous but if you have
average intelligence and carefulness and you are prepared to risk things and
you don’t mind a rebuff then be in powering of ideas by will can teach you a
lot in a short space of time and the pouring of idea into the will can also
teach you things the more dangerous of the to is to put the will into the idea
and fly it. But if you are really watchful you can watch the situation very very carefully and decide the moment to stop it, just
before the chopper comes down you can withdraw with an apology. So it is very
useful to do it, this has something to do with your question last week Bert.
The question
is how much do you know of yourself you got to know just how much you got it
now in a given situation how much push whether you can keep a straight face if
somebody tries to stop you. This is a question of self examination, you must
make little exercises and test yourself I think we have one about sitting in
somebody else’s seat on a bus once didn’t we in the early morning well it’s
little things like that, the actual breaking of an existing social routine and
holding yourself together in the fact that gives you fibre. Fibre is made out
of the word fire with a B thrown in it because that B means to contain. It
actually makes you very overheated when you do a thing like sitting on somebody
else’s seat that they always have doesn’t it. It raises your temperature now if
you don’t panic and you hold that fire in it becomes fibre. Fibre is fire
contained, in fact that when Christ said when some of born eunuchs and some are
made eunuchs of men some become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven sake he was
referring parabolically to containing of this energy.
The energy that does it is the same sexual
energy but sexual energy is only polarise spiritual energy. Spiritual energy is
prior to sexuality, sex is the polar half circle it comes from spirit and the
bottom half of the circle is the material world and this polar relation of the
terms of spirit we draw our circle plus there minus there and we complete the
circle and put matter in here. That matter can absorb a certain amount of the
spirit and after that a formal change will occur when it is reached it optimal
state of tumescence a formal change will occur and the new emergent is presented.
It cannot happen to an individual unless he exposes himself to existing inertic
forces and cuts across them. If you know what you’re doing and you don’t mind
if the other fellows get a bit overheated because you watch their temperature
to just before it comes out on the bicep you say I’m terribly sorry and you
give it up.
The thing is
not to let that heat get out of you not to lose too much in the apology because
that heat turned back inside you is the same thing as spirit. You know there
was an old educational statement in the 19th century the best way to
educate people is to break their spirit. It was a stupid statement, and it led
to it’s equally opposite stupid statement, free expressionism in education. To
let a person do exactly what he wants, to give him no opposition is to deprive
him of the possibility of getting finer but to crush him completely into the
ground is to do him no service at all. So you have to present people including
yourself with enough opposition for the time being so you know you’re getting
overheated becoming overheated is the first thing you should look for in
yourself to see whether you’ve got the stuff, the spirit, that is worth
containing. If you don’t get overheated you are not growing, if you get
overheated and you dissipate it in apologies you have lost it. If you are able
to contain it and just say to yourself oh this is an exercise I am doing and
making no excuse to you I am doing an exercise. In that fact the fire becomes
fibre and all character and efficiency deriving from character comes by the
holding in of this energy which you experience primarily as heat.
I think
we’ve got rid of the short ones and we
got one here which is a very philosophical one. Since the absolute is infinite
and the maze of spirit is an aspect of the absolute how can it translate before
creation.
We had this last week about this problem of
motion, we said that in Infinity there are impulses, each impulse just strains
and stresses when we press into a centre like that to stress we have strained
up to the perimeter. And we say that Infinity is full of impulses and these
impulses do not change their positions at all, but that the apparent change of
position is caused by this impulse and
this one and this one not concurring in time. A stress here and then the
relaxation followed by a stress here and relaxation followed by a stress here
produces for us an apparent movement from there to there. Now all motion is
apparent that is why it is said philosophically motion is not real that is
nothing happens corresponding to what people think happens. Merely in Infinity
there is a shift of stress not a shift of matter not a shift of substance a
shift of stress, simply that if I go like that in that place quickly put my
hand out and go like that and then like that and then like that if I do this
behind a black cloth grabbing the cloth like that you would think that
something had run along the cloth wouldn’t you or like a ruck in the carpet
you would put a little bit up and you
press it down and it runs along, or a wave in the sea really it has not gone along
at all it is an appearance and all motion whatever including the motion of my
hand is apparent in that sense. What we call real motion is impulse in its own
place if we like to think in the case of the sea the apparent motion of a wave
it is like this and the real motion is like that at right angles to it in the simple lift and
fall of the water in each place. So there is here no problem about the movement,
all movement is apparent, and is no more than the stress of impulses in
adjacent positions. If we think that real motion exists we can find strain in
the body because we are trying to move something conceptually and the concept
is false, it is the same thing with the physical body if you put in a man on a
seesaw and let him think about walking without moving his legs just think then
the will be a movement of blood and so on towards the legs and the seesaw will
tip now if you try to force the blood along with his own efforts it would not
happen. He would be using his thinker and the blood with tend to go as much
towards the brain as the legs because he had a wrong concept, if is aware that
is simply a stress in the field that does it and he assumes the effect,
assumption is the key, he assumes the effect then the effect occurs.
This is the
real basis of all faith healings and all miracles, assumption of the effect
without any doubt whatever, doubt is doubleness doubleness contradicts itself you have two directions.
William Blake said “if the sun and moon should doubt they would immediately go
out” the thing about them is they don’t doubt they don’t have two motions they
have one simply to get out to radiate. They have no other thought so the person
that only has one thought starts to flow of energy in the direction of that
thought if he doubts his capacity you will start to flows in contradictory
directions and produce a static condition.
Now if God
it creates by glance and this means a stressing of consciousness at a place we
cannot call the stressing a movement of consciousness because that is
everywhere already.
Well this is
explained by the first thing consciousness is infinitely extended and the
impulse is simply a glance where the word glance means no more than it says.
You have an immediate experience of creativity when you look round the room and
decide to let your eye rest of one form rather than another there is no more
effort to it than that. If you watch a child at play you are reading a book the
child is playing and you surreptitious lean lift your eyes up without turning
your head and look at the child and after a time the child who hasn’t seen your
head move will alter the character of its play it can feel something different
going on after a bit it will look at and catch your eye if you’re not quick to
turn it away. To look at a thing is to produce a change, not by the movement
from one place to another of consciousness but by the infinitely extended
consciousness precipitating by impulse where it already is. So concepts of
movement are derived from change of place of material objects that all such
changes of place are an apparent change caused by impulse and expulse in
different locations.
Well all
that has to do with this problem about movements and the last bit says we have
understood that the field is the causal, the father, but now the field has
become female and the youth has become a new father. Now this is one of the
things we are talking about the nature of thought when I drew that circle in
order to make it a circle and not a dot I left the space in the middle of it.
If I want to draw a very big circle it would have exactly the same character
that one and if I draw a very very small one like
that and just for fun I will draw another one inside it a bit smaller and I
will draw a lot more, it begins to look like a dot. Now in fact if you remember
what we said very early on, every rotation of force necessarily does not go to
the dead centre it cannot do so that’s a force going round if it spirals in
like this and goes to the dead centre it will stop the whole thing so what it
does is go nearly to the centre and then move out again. Always in the
centre there is a hole, that is the hub
and this is the rim, there is a hole in the middle that hole there is the same
as this. That is God immanent, that is God transcendent here is the action band
between, that little hole in the middle and this big hole differ only in the
action content of this zone. That one could quite easily make a smaller one
inside but it can never go to the dead centre because if it did the whole thing
with seize up. So the type of it is that, it goes in and out, always in and out
but never to the centre so when we come to think about the field it is easy for
us to make the equation the field is the Yod. Now this Yod is a letter in the
Hebrew which if I draw it big enough for you to see like that is your hand held
like this, it’s holding the universe it is also a little spiralling of force in
like a commar and the question of magnitude is not
raised it simply says that there is a turn inwards that the field is all this
that is turning right into the centre of it. And in the centre of it is the
field and outside is the field and here is the field this is action in and of
the field. When we talk about initiative we say this is the Yod the father if
we talk about the field without considering the initiative we call it the
mother if we consider the field to be substantial we call it the motherhood of
God this is the meaning of the Virgin Mary actually or the Kwan Yin of the
Chinese or the mother concept of Indian philosophy.
When you
consider the field as a substance you call it the mother when you consider
exactly the same field as initiative force you call it the father. And this Yod
this hand means to affirm YO D,D is the glyph for division YO D means to affirm
division this hand is the executive power so if I put a circle on the paper
there I have divided that bit of paper from that bit of paper by making a Mark that is Yod that is
affirmation of division. This is the first letter of God’s name necessarily
because he as creator is the first affirmer of divisions to create is to divide
and the first creator in his initiative aspect is called father in the
substantial aspect is called mother the resultant of these two aspects is
called the son. The father the initiative, the mother the substantial aspect of
the field the action resulting from the initiative action on the field is
called the son and the effect of the son back on the field is called the daughter
in the four letter name of Jehovah.
So the
equation that we made last week of the Yod Hey, the field, is seen simply by
remembering when we define we do not define things we define the limits of the
application of terms. We have to engrave this on our brain so that we never
think for a moment the we are defining a being things are adequately defined
already this piece of chalk is precisely chalk even if I never mention it. If I
proceed to use a word to describe it we call it marking chalk or bale chalk or
something then I have not altered it in so doing I have merely altered the
content of my mind by making a given sound symbol refer to this fact and I have
said I will not use the same sound chalk for this other sensum here for which I
reserve the sound paper.
So when we
remember that we are talking about the application of terms when we refer to
the field as substance we say we will call it deliberately the mother aspect
the M other aspect. M itself means substance if you say Mmm
with your mouth closed you will feel tone vibrating in your mouth this tone is
substance and there is no other substance in the universe other than tone in a
closure this is why the sacred OM of the Hindus or the er
mums the word of the Masons and so on symbolises substance. Keep your mouth
shut Mmm that’s substance so people if they agree
with you and they are to lazy to say yes say Mmm but
if they don’t agree with you they say Nnn they turn
to N. And if they are being forced to agree with you but they really don’t they
will close their lips like M and put their tongue where they say N and say MN. If you listen
very carefully you can hear these things going on in all the people with whom
you converse.
So the
equation Yod equals Hey is simply a shift of frame of reference when you
remember that the terms are being defined in the limit of the application you
are not defining the thing the concrete whole is that which contains every
conceivable aspect of reality inextricably permeating itself so that the field
aspect the initiative aspect the formal aspect and so on. All these are
contained internally in it and make a coherent concrete whole. So when we
deliberately take out the concept of initiative and call it Yod we have not
altered the concrete whole we have merely made a convenient reference for
ourselves and our mind.
Now here is
a very metaphysical one here. The being existence concept is the one with which you can resolve the
opposites, and that contained within it is an understanding of immortality.
Well now we
have to be very very careful about this, er in the Buddhist scriptures and the Bhagavad-Gita and so on
there are statements that show you to what you should apply the word immortal.
Immortal means unbreakable and that only is unbreakable which has no parts so
that if you can take any being whatever which is compounded it is necessarily
mortal. It follows from this that the only immortal ( ......Lacuna.......)
identity with this seamless continuum. Now if you do in fact gain that
consciousness of the absolute continuum, the seamlessness, then you are using
the word you to refer to the conscious self, you are immortal. Now internal to
you, you are equated with the field, is a physical body from which you started
your exercise. This body is made of particles and because it is made of particles
if you let go of it will disintegrate,
the dust from the ground will go back to the ground, now you are immortal that
gross body will go back to where it came from. Now cannot even conceive of a
good reason why you should keep that particular body eternally can you? And therefore you cannot see a good reason
why you should be immortal in a gross body on a finite dump like the Earth. Because
you could very easily exhaust the interest content of the earth in a short
space of time and when you have exhausted the interest content of the Earth you
have no further need to stay on it.
So you the
self who is identified with the absolute continuum and is therefore immortal would not bother to keep together as
he has the power to do a gross material vehicle which he has no further need.
Because he could re-assemble the elements if he wished at some future time
historically, this is the resurrection of the body. The same material elements
exactly the same amount of H2O the same amount of C and
whatever else there is in it can be assembled so the same body could be
assembled, it is the same body which would be resurrected not another one.
Because what you mean by body is not the gross matter, it is the form into
which you put the gross matter. The amount of food you eat only becomes body
instead of falling on the ground are making no difference because you have a
form into which you pack it and it is this form of that is your body, body
means a container. And then it is already a field a special field for each
individual meaning a type of activity in the infinite seamless field there are
zones of action different from other zones of action and these are what is
referred to as individual fields, plural for convenience although there is only
the one field. So that in any given zone of the field where the action is of a
certain order there is a continuous tendency to integrate matter and manifest
the body that is there, but that body is eternal. As the Bhagavad Gita says
whatever is cannot cease to be and whatever is not cannot come to be. In that
world of interpenetrating spheres that we saw all our bodies are exactly as
they are in all their stages that is as newborn baby and so on right through.
All of them which particular one we shall select to stress for a given
situation depends on our will, the will to reflexive self-consciousness forces
itself through the stages of ovum, sperm, union relation, embryo, baby, growing
up child, youth, man, old man, death and so on in order to complete cycle of
experience and when it has completed that cycle of experience it is then a
reflexively self-conscious immortal. It can then please itself whether it
incarnates or not, so it is true that the immortality concept is linked up with
being existence because you’re being is already eternal and immortal is the
word we used to refer to the unbreakability of a thing. Morta means
that the substance is vibrating and then falling apart this can only occur to
compounds and the compounds to which it occurs are things that have been
arbitrarily gathered together for a specific experience. Thus the fact that one
man eats potato and another man steak and another man stuffs with meringues or
something at the same table is arbitrary. That that each one has his purpose in
his will for so doing and he will integrate particular matters into his body, his
body is not his gross matter is body is his spiritual form. Remember what we
said about soul, soul is spirit when it rotates and makes a sphere. Power that
is not rotating is not called soul it is called spirit. So it is spirit outside
here and when it rotates it is called soul because it is now made itself solo,
alone it has made itself into a one, created itself.
So every
soul is a spirit finited and created and as soon as that rotation has occurred
which occurs at very high levels initially there is a body, that body is called
the spiritual body. Because it is the body that spirit made for itself by
rotating and all the form inside of his called the spirit of the soul and the
substantial aspect of it is called the soul which has that spirit. So when we
are considering the substantial sphere as a sphere of substance we call it soul,
when we consider the form within it we call that the spirit of the soul but that
is not the gross body, now that cannot be broken it is eternal. But there is a
lot of fallen stuff down here, we call matter, and by certain resonances that
matter can be accreted so that soul and gather round it and make a gross
material body because it has been accreted from outside it can be allowed to
drop off again later so that by its nature it is mortal. In the same way by its
nature spirit is eternal, now there are two deaths mentioned in the Bible the
first death is the death of this accreted gross material body, which is
appointed the man once to die, and the second death is the death of his ideas
if they are erroneous.
Death means
disintegration, when a being of parts disintegrates then we say it is dead, if
in fact they person lies down and stop’s breathing and stop’s heart beating and
so on, in general a doctor would say that man is dead. But a man that had more
experience would say I am not sure you may be in the state of catatonia or in
some other kind of state of near death, and he may wake up. In America I
believe in one state they have a rule against burying people without embalming
them because they might bounce up and doing a lot of jumping up and spoiling
the funeral ceremony. And I remember in one occasion at Kendal in Lancaster
there where forty two people who had been buried alive in one cemetery. That’s
because man can go down to such low levels of physical activity whilst
retaining his activity in the soul that he can approach as far as symptoms are
concerned to the state near death, yet if he does not disintegrate then that
thing is not dead. So death means disintegration. Now when body to you outside
the gross body you expose yourself to stimulation from other gross bodies and
the stimulation from those gross bodies goes inside here and makes your five
sense reference, image complex. So you have your original six pointed star
which is your soul immortality because it symbolises the polarity that
eternally exists and the five pointed star signifies your five senses. So you
have a pattern, a worldview built out of sense activities, if that pattern that
worldview does not correspond with ultimate reality it will break, and that is
called the second death.
So that
after the death of your physical body if you have been a materialist and
devoted yourself to the ideas of the material world then you have devoted
yourself to an erroneous structure which we saw by the definition of thought
earlier on is necessarily partial. So because you have gathered it together
from outside it must fall apart again and this is the second death, now it says
of those who commit themselves to the truth they shall not be hurt of the
second death. Which means that after the death of the physical body and the
disintegration of it than the person who understands the equation Yod/ Hey or Initiative/
Will equals the field will understand this interlaced triangle diagram, he will
understand polarity and therefore he cannot disintegrate. He has not got an
erroneous complex of ideas he has got an absolutely fundamental one and he is assured
of personal, conscious, immortality after the disintegration of his physical
body. So that is really a tremendously important idea because it is something
you can work towards even if you were on the point of death it is worth working
towards it because you which is the accent from outside to in, and devote
yourself to the popularity concepts which are inherent in being and therefore
cannot be abstracted from being and disintegrated.
Now it says
here there is a very close link between an understanding of being existence and
the practice of magic.
Now we have
said before that magic is the production of change in conformity with the will
that the Mag is from an old Persian word meaning will and all this zone is
spirit, initiative. It is initiative because there is no inertia in it
whatever, we oppose inertia and initiative. This N is not closed it just goes
about and it goes in no determined manner so that it is not in any sense a
routine activity. A routine activity is a rota activity so outside the cycle
there is only free initiative and it is in the realm of free initiative that
the changes are made. Now we have said here is the soul and outside the limit
of the individuated soul there is free initiative. Also inside the soul there
are various motions running about some of them are in resonance with those
outside and some of them are dependent upon gross material stimulation. Those
dependent upon the resonance from outside our symbolised by the six pointed
star those from your gross physical body are the five pointed star, it means
that you cannot possibly work magic with five sense data, as your base. Trying
to make magic with five sense data is self refutation because the five sense
data are fed to you from outside and are therefore beyond that on which you are
concentrating namely your physical body. And if you revert to the six pointed
star, remember it is two triangles interlaced which represent the positive and
negative aspects of concrete reality, that they resonate these lines transcend
the circle and goes straight through into your initiative and remember that
assumption is the key to it. Whatever you to stress by looking at it, and
assuming that the mere act of looking at it produces a change, a change will be
produced. We know this in the case of er hypnosis
where the assumption that certain things will follow is enough. First of all we
put a man’s critical faculty out of order by a little trick with lights and so
on or by other methods, the light method is about the crudest , the most
external, once we have got the critical faculty in suspense we then throw an
idea into the consciousness, and the consciousness immediately precipitates on
it, it has assumed it, in the same way
that the Virgin Mary has been assumed in the dogma by Christ taking her to
heaven.
So it is
this precipitation of the field onto the form that constitutes the essential of
magic. When you are talking to anybody whether you are on guard or not whatever
you say to them they have not heard before goes into their field and the field
immediately grabs that it to see if it will sub serve its purpose. Now if you
cut off the critical faculty and throw a form into somebody’s mind they will
necessarily grab at it, and that is the process of magic. Once they have
grabbed at it the energy feeds it and it then piles in until it reaches its
optimum absorption and then it squirts out into action. So the relation being
and existence, being is the six pointed star and in its polar aspects and the
existence we remembered was the
serialisation of the six spokes played one after the other, and one of them
became the common sense and the other five became the five senses.
If the
message comes from outside, you cannot control it from outside but as outside
an independent on accepting the definition of finite beings. If you transcend
the definition of finite beings knowing the nature of thought you go into the
field beyond all definition and there is
therefore nothing outside you. You can then proceed to think beyond the defined
limit say of your own physical body and as we said about this fellow flirted
out here, if that represents an individual and he flirts an idea out of himself
and there are no other beings that that idea will generate a world out of itself
because an idea is spirit, simply a form of spirit. And spirit essentially is
initiative, so if you precipitates spirit into the abyss it will immediately
start to work it will cohere, produce its first form a sphere and then proceed
to work inside it will make a world.
William
Blake once made the remark let God go into a circle and see how he will go on.
This was a reference to this spirit transcendent which is meant by God and this
diabolical world here, the circumscribed world. If there are Churchman who say
this God transcendent is not evil and that this devil here is very evil,
William Blake said you take your transcendent God put him inside that defined
field and see how he will go on. Necessarily, if a force is put inside a finite
situation then it is going to behave differently than if it had no definition,
the definition is going to condition its activity. In fact of the absolute put
into a finite situation response to the finite exactly as the finite’s that we
know in the world already do.
Gap..................................
Yes will all
the rest of that question is about this relation transcendence, the definition,
the active and the passive. If we identify with the paper in the diagram that
is the absolute sub stratum of all possibilities, absolute power then this
definition no longer determines what we do but, we determine the nature of the
definition and by the manipulation of the words that we already have we can
determine new flow, new directions of flow of energy and in so doing we can
move towards that immortal consciousness which is simply the consciousness of
the whole field. In practice the exercise is to accustom yourself to looking at
your body like that and saying that which I see is not my body that is the
gross material which I have packed into my body by eating and my real body is
unbreakable by definition. So that all we have to do is realise our essential
eternality and then not committing ourselves to false ideas from the five
senses we cannot suffer from the second death because we cannot have a
disintegrating idea structure, and remember it is exactly as painful to have a
favourite idea and see it torn to bits as it is to be torn to bits. People do
suffer tremendously if you take their favourite idea and proceed to prove it
wrong, now if they knew it was only a definitional system they could abandon it
and say why don’t you tell it to bits.
The Turks have a very funny way of replying to any kind of argument, if you
argue with them about metaphysics they look at
you......................................End of recording.
Richard
Freeman