Non – Seriality a Talk by Eugene Halliday
Précis
‘We are talking about how to break
down the serialisation which acts slower than our immediate awareness. If we don’t break down this serial thought in
the mind - because the serial process occupies more time than the immediate
necessities of the moment.- the serial mind must always be behind the reaction
time’.’ [ . . ] ‘ reaction time is slow,
and this reaction time gets slower and slower the more energy that is involved
in the five sense processes inside’. The
ideas of Freud and Jung relative to this
are discussed, [21 min 16], Maximum
Entropy [40 min 22] and the dualism of involving any idea of external causation
of the universe. [46 min]. Then in
answering a question [51 min 16] he discusses sub-entities and their
integration into the whole being and the achievement of ‘transparency’ at [54
min 32] to the end of the talk.
Transcript .
[All comments by the transcriber
are in square brackets. All the diagrams are the surmising of the transcriber-
as they were not recorded at the time of the talk as far as I know. The time points are all reckoned off the MP3
player and are added for ease of reference.
In this talk
[Question from one of
the audience] – . . .
It was that, effectually, we have to work from the conceptual apparatus that we
have, and this appears to be slower than the emotional apparatus. In other words if we get involved in a
situation that we conceptually decide we can do something about beforehand, but
it already precipitates itself before the concept can get a hold of it. And I was wondering, what was the method of
attacking it, to stop it.
E. H. – Let’s
do a drawing of our three part man again.
And we know that when a nervous impulse goes from the brain to produce a
voluntary act, that it takes a measureable length of time to get the message
down the spinal nerves and into – say – the leg. This amount of time taken, a portion of a
second, is very, very slow compared with the reaction speed in certain, life
preservative instinctive responses. We
know that we have a method of response, far quicker than this process of
voluntary, individuated transmission of a nervous impulse.
You know that if you put your
finger on a hot plate, without being aware of it, you will be aware that you
are burned, and of an attempt to get away from it. But it has taken a certain length of time for
the message to get from the finger to the brain centre and from the brain
centre back to the finger, so there is a delay and the finger is burned. If you had an immediate response, through the
field, that would not occur. And that
only occurs when you are abstracted in certain ways and therefore out of the
situation. In the situation, with your
feeling appreciation of it, you would function much quicker.
Now when we
are talking about the evolution of man, we are talking about the various stages
at which his will functions – levels of being.
When a baby is born most of its reflexes are from the mouth and down the
food tube, and from the nostrils to the lungs.
We will say that the one from the mouth to the food tube is the first
one, because we find that the baby spends quite a lot of his time with his eyes
closed and not taking much notice of things said to it. And its sensations, around the mouth, are to
it of primary importance.
Now later on when through repeated
stimuli through the ears certain forms are put into the mind, they are
verbalised forms, and the verbalised forms put through the ear have a certain
length of nerve track to go down, which takes time. And the immediacy of response has
disappeared. Now as it grows older, a
greater number of words are put in and the act of deciding becomes
progressively more and more complicated.
So that when you come to think through serially, the situation needing a
decision, if you take all the elements of the decision and individually,
consciously serialise them, and then try to evaluate them you will take up a
considerable amount of time. And fail to
solve it. [4 min 14]
You notice in the devil book, that it
is said there, ‘Count all or count not at all’, because when you start the
serialising process of counting all the elements in the situation, if you don’t
count them all the ones you have left out will undo you, and invalidate your
solution. If you do count them all,
serially, you are going to take an awful long time. So unless there is another mode of response,
as the speed of the stimuli coming to you is greater than the speed of your
thought process is to evaluating them, your reaction time will always be behind
the fact. And this is the matter of
experience of people in daily living.
They find that they have done things
and said things, which, if they had been able to inhibit them, they would not
have done or said. And in this ‘saying’,
they are committed into relations that they don’t want. That is because an immediate stimulus comes
in and runs down into the appetite centres which are more immediate than the
intellective ones. So that if someone
shouts at you suddenly, violently, you will tend to jump and get out of the way
– before thinking about it.
As soon as you begin to think about
the thing you interfere with it, slow down your reaction time, and the new
stimulus is upon you before you have had enough time to evaluate the old
one. A very simple illustration is that
if you try to go downstairs, consciously, individually, serialising the
movement of the muscles in your legs as you put your feet on the stairs. You will find that, if you try to run down,
doing that you will fall down. That is
because, once the body is on the move, gravity is carrying you down and you are
moving very, very quickly and you literally haven’t got time to get the data
filed in here. [referring to
diagram. 6 min 15] And run through all the necessary data for the
given act of going downstairs; and then
send it down to the legs in the appropriate order. You are already down.
The same thing, done a little bit
more safely is to run up stairs instead of down because then you don’t fall
very far. So you find the same thing, if
you try to run up stairs with individual serial thought , that you will simply
interfere with your process and it won’t function properly.
Now
the problem is this, as the organism can respond immediately, from field
awareness or the total organic reaction of field awareness, and the stimulus
come frequently through the field. If
the man has an ‘inertic tendency’ to think serially through the process then
his analysis of the situation will never be in step with the actual situation. Which means he is always living behind
himself, and he is always finding himself committed into a situation that no
longer exists.
How to get out of this process? If the serialisation takes time – time is
actually a rotation of forces. It takes
time to go round a cycle, which has been defined by the initial term, the term
you start with and all its’ implications’ which have to be ‘explicated’. Remember as soon as you have a governing
concept you have a word, and that word contains implications. And to serialise the meaning of the word is
to explicate those implications. And it
occurs in time. And if you do this
serially you will never act correctly, you will always be anachronistic; just behind the time of the situation.
So first of all you have to learn how to
dissociate from this serialising process unless you have the governing concept
that the observer is not the observed.
You can’t state it too often to yourself. Let the paper represent the pure consciousness
of spirit. Spirit is power and
sentiency. It is power that is able by
rotating to embody itself, and it feels the mode of its own action. So:
its action, its embodiment, and its awareness are not three separate
substances; they are three aspects of
the one fact of ‘sentient power’.
To understand the trinity of Christianity,
or the three body doctrine of the Buddhists, requires us to remember this
simple fact which we illustrate by saying that the paper is the power/sentiency
itself – the sentient power. It knows
nothing other than itself because no ‘being’, and no ‘non-being’ either can ever
understand, or experience, anything other than the modifications of
itself. [ 9 min 32]
So if this paper, this sentient power does nothing it experiences nothing.
And if it waves, it experiences waving.
Now if we imagine we roll the paper up like the piece at the top here,
we make ourselves – here’s the perspective of it [drawing on the board] – we
make ourselves a roll of paper. We have
‘involved’ by rolling the paper round certain experiences which the power
sentience – the sentient power knows of itself that it has rolled itself
up. Involved itself. Whatever rolls
there are on the inside of that roll can only be experienced in the peculiar
relationship in the rolled up state.
If we write on
the outside ‘A’, then go round one turn and write below it ‘B’. Then go round another turn and write below
that ‘C’, then if we look straight through there, we identify with successive
layers we will see ‘A – B – C ‘in the same time space. But if we pull the roll out, to extend it, we
will see A, B and C period. Now this
‘involved state’, the in-willed state is what is meant by the word ‘same’. And this ‘same’ same spelling in modern
German ‘same’ [the German word ‘ SAME’, pronounced zama, but spelt as
English ‘same’ means seed] – ‘seed state’ – implies a spiritual [S] – energy [A] -
substantialising itself [M] - in a
field [E]; it is a field substance energy of spirit,
which is sentient power. It has turned
itself around, put into seed, that which it is in simple extention.
So there is
nothing ‘involved’ that cannot be ‘evolved’ – turned out. Complication means ‘with folds’ – if we
imagine we fold the paper backwards and forwards like this, then we have
exactly the same problem. We have a
simple piece of paper, when we pull it out – ‘sim-ple’, same ply – seed folded
and if we extend the thing serially, with letters which would have been
vertically above each other on the folded paper – we put them after each other
in time.
So we can experience, simultaneously,
different levels of being. And by
‘levels of being’, we what mean is ’folds of being’; by simply learning to focus through the
field, instead of being dictated to by contingents – the external stimulus. [12 min 28]
There are two beings, the perimeters
of which are in contact. As they impinge
on each other they disturb each other’s substance. There’s an empty hole in the middle that
can’t be disturbed, the immanent spirit.
Now the spirit
as we know it comes from outside if focused upon, must cause an externalisation
of consciousness – it forces the consciousness onto the perimeter of the
being. Now the perimeter of the being is
the part of it that has no understanding whatever. Observe that at the point of contact, these
two beings are in the least possible contact, and therefore in the physical
relation – shown by these two circles touching each other there is the least
possible kind of relation for any two beings.
If you want to increase relationship therefore you must discover
something totally different. From the
centre of the being ‘emanating ‘is the power sentient. Because it’s coming out, spreading out
centripetally, spherically;
centrifugally from the point of view of a being observing it flying out
from the centre, it is coming out and in so doing, because of the overlapping
of the contingent stimulus from outside you have a progressive veiling of the
inner, creative, sentient power. The
nearer you get to the perimeter the more disturbance there is from the
contingent stimulus. [14 min 06]
If you go into your centre there, the
contingent stimulus cannot touch you at all.
You are an immanent spirit. If
you get just outside that bound the contingent spirit reaches you though it is
less intense on the inside than on the outside.
Now let’s make a slightly larger
diagram for a moment. . . This is a being, immanent spirit internal,
transcendent spirit outside it. Here’s a
contingent stimulus from [lost word unclear at
14 min 36]
Now that, being outside, constitutes a
promise and a threat simultaneously. It
promises a relationship that might be valuable and the threat of a stimulus
that might impose on you and stop you developing your own immanent spirit. So we have a stimulus, contingent coming in
with an immanent, creative spirit pressing out.
Between the two here we can draw a band and say, ‘On this band the two
are equal.’
Below this band immanent spirit is
victorious over the incoming stimulus.
And above that band the contingent stimulus is triumphant. Now this alpha band here we can place the
five senses. Where the five senses reach
there is dominion for the contingent stimulus.
And inside here is dominion for the immanent spirit. But at a certain level, we can call it half
way between, without finding out what halfway means, whatever it means
dynamically not from terms of so many inches.
When the power from inside balances the power from outside, there is a
zone where the contingent stimuli of the five senses can be observed and drawn
into relation with the immanent spirits creative movement. This is the zone where an artist stands when
he is controlling his pencil or paintbrush. [16
min 15]
He has his creative spirit coming out, and
he keeps his eye on his paper so that he can see what he is doing. If he is copying somebody else’s paper work
then the external stimulus is determining what he does. But if he is looking on the underside of this
band and he sees what creative spirit is trying to do and he allows his hand to
obey the immanent spirit instead of the external stimulus. This is the difference between artistic
creation and copying.
Now you know that we have relations with
other beings, and we’ll call these, if you like, social relations, and as all
beings in a contingent stimulus situation are surrounded by other beings, which
promise and threaten simultaneously. It
follows that some of the activity of this inside spirit might be unacceptable
to socialised beings on the outside.
This stuff that is coming up that is not acceptable to society, the
social being, that is the external being, will send forces to stop it coming
up.
So we have a special zone, down here,
where the social pressures meet the creative spirit and try to stop it
spreading out. So that, everything that
is created in an individual and appears to be anti-social will be repressed by
the conceptualised social energies.
Which are the energies of social concepts. They will spin round and stop this creativity
working. [18 min 09]
Now all these are different speeds. The one that serialises is the level of the
five sense stimuli and as you go progressively inwards you become progressively
less and less serial, and more and more simultaneous in your awareness. It is possible to go inside and to cut off
successive layers of the outside; so
that, in the process of going in, you become less and less aware of the
external world. This is the method of
‘quietism’. This is not the best method
because it actually leaves you immobilised, perhaps in a room or in a desert or
a forest and then the ants might come and build a nest around you.
Ideally you should be absolutely aware,
not just internally aware. The quietist
mystic, who forgets about his body – forgets he has one – when he contemplates
the creativity of immanent spirit as it bubbles up, is not doing all he might
do, because he might be watching his physical body as well. And the absolute is aware of all these
things. So in absolute identification he
has actually got identification with the gross material body as well as with
the creative spirit on the inside.
When we’re talking in psychological
terms, orthodox psychology, what they call the subconscious is not as deep as
the one that we have just demonstrated.
The Freudian subconscious doesn’t deal with the creativity of the
immanent spirit spreading out and being stopped by the social
consciousness. He deals only with
biological forces, which can not go any deeper than this particular band, where
the social forces impinge on individual forces which are themselves in their
totality, social. So that in that
psychological analysis there is no difference between the social conscience and
the collective individual consciences. [20 min 27]
We have a group of individuals, each one of
which is essentially pleasure seeking in that analysis. There is no deeper principle, no creativity,
but simply this pursuit of pleasure, through beings - who are supposed to be in
this theory - pleasure driven. So there
is no social law, other than the law that ‘pleasure seeking beings will stop
other pleasure seeking beings from getting their pleasures, if they interfere
with the pleasures of the others’. Now
this is essentially a very, very simple analysis and allows for no creativity
at all. Thus in the Freudian analysis an
architect, building the
Now obviously such an analysis is
materialistic, and quite external, and the whole of the Freudian position is
based on analysis of five sense data.
Now Jung - Carl Jung - allowed that there is another zone, deeper than
the individual that he calls the ‘Collective Unconscious’. But this, for him, is still only the
collective unconscious of the ancestors of the individual. so in a very
peculiar sense it is still a biological proposition, and an empirical
proposition because he is dealing with individual human beings and their
individual human ancestors. He has seen
that the protoplasm of these human beings is the same protoplasm, and that
somehow the experience of this protoplasm can be contacted and handed down and
makes things up in the form of dreams or fantasy drawings but he is not seeing
inside this biological fact another fact – the fact of the essential creativity
of this absolute.
So really, in his fairly recent work on
God, he has produced a book that treats
the concept of God in a way unacceptable to many theologians because it’s really
a biological concept he’s got and not a spiritual one.
[22 min33]
Now we are talking about how to
break down the serialisation which acts slower than our immediate
awareness. If we don’t break down this
serial thought in the mind - because the serial process occupies more time than
the immediate necessities of the moment.- the serial process must always be
behind the reaction time. Like a man who
is always getting a black eye because he’s a bit slow in putting his arm
up. He can see it coming, but it takes
time to get the message down the arm.
Or, a man driving a car with no road sense: he drives along, when he sees a car: he sees
a woman leave the pavement, and he doesn’t add up – car, woman crossing
pavement, change of behaviour in the car in front. And by the time he’s at the back of the car,
the car has stopped and he’s hit the number plate. His reaction time is slow, and this reaction
time gets slower and slower the more energy that is involved in the five sense
processes inside.
So we find that men as they are getting
older and older and more reminiscent, are getting slower and slower in their
reaction times in physically dangerous situations.. So we see the obscuring effect of the five
sense serialising activities.
Now how to break it. First we have to say, ‘The observer is not
the observed. That is to say that the
paper is not the waving of the paper.
Now this is a very important thing, particularly in Zen Buddhism, where
the awareness of the abrupt school, the sudden
If you are identified with the motion, you
have no power to do anything at all; no
choice. You are simply identified and
you are moving. If you are identified
with the paper and remember to define it, ‘The paper equals sentient
power’; which is initiative, feeling
itself, it can increase and decrease the amount of movement it has. So in that sense there is no difference
absolutely between the paper and the movement of the paper - because the
movement of the paper is the paper moving. [25 min 15]
So when one monk asked a Zen master,
‘What is the Tao’. He said, ‘Eating when
one is hungry is Tao. Drinking when one
is thirsty.’ The monk should reply, ’But
everybody is already doing this.’ To
which the master would reply, ‘They’re not doing it like I am doing it, because
they don’t know they are doing it and I do’.
You see they are reacting to an external stimulus, but on the inside
there is an immanent spirit which tells you, before the external stimulus hits
you, that you are hungry. You’ll
probably be first at the table, too bad.
The person who is externally determined, from five sense stimuli, he has
to wait for the stimulus to come.
So he doesn’t know he is hungry
until he sees a poster of a meal - ’Feed’, but he is. But he is so preoccupied with some other
external stimulus, that he is unaware
that his body is hungry. So he is acting
when the external stimulus makes him act.
Whereas the person who is identifying with the piece of paper, it’s
essential self nature, and is aware of all the motions which he is making – he
is making them – he’s not waiting for an external to make them for him, he is
making them. He is aware that the energy
level, the amount of motion in his self nature, is dropping below that which he
requires for his next function. [26 min
53]
And his next function does not mean
temporally, serially, but it means the next one ontologically – immediately
below the folded piece of paper which it sees through. That is ‘A’ and that is ‘B’, and that is
‘C’. He sees them simultaneously as you
can see through two pieces of cellophane the letters A, B ,and C. Now on each piece of paper you look through
and see A, B and C, at once. You
separate them and you have to take three seconds to do it.
This simultaneity has a job to do
see. He has energy ‘A’, he now has
energy ‘B’. He needs energy ‘C’. He sees that simultaneously. He doesn’t need an external stimulus to tell him
that his energy level is a little lower than
needed for his next job; the next
job ontologically, not temporally.
When he sees this he immediately goes and
starts eating or whatever else he wants to do.
He is doing it deliberately and from inside and therefore with
initiative, he is not waiting for the stimulus.
The average man, in a relation with a woman for instance, would find, in
practice, that he never thinks about a girl until the’ I.T.V.‘ad, or a poster
in the street tells him to think about it.
He ‘s too occupied with something else – a bit of radio or a motorbike
engine.
Until the stimulus come he doesn’t know
about it, and he is so battered by stimuli from outside that he has no
awareness of the immanent spirit inside him has been very busy making sperms
and that those are now ready, characterised for fertilising somebody. He doesn’t know that. And meanwhile they’re moving. [aside
referring to a diagram]’ That’s
like a cross section of a testicle’.
They are moving, and in this case they are moving, they move to shoot
out. And at the point of maturity they
are going to get a way out, somehow.
The man who depends upon the external
stimulus does not know that they are about to come out. That it’s their time to come out. And therefore when the stimulus hits him he
gets a shock . The thing responds
mechanically and he has no control over it.
So he cannot choose the target.
It might be that he finds he’s taken out a very strange girl, that in a
more balanced condition he wouldn’t have taken.
[29 min15]
If he had been aware of the whole
field non-serially he would have known exactly how they were developing and
whether they were ready for out, and whether they would prefer one target to
another. And he would find that target
from immanent spiritual activity. And he
would not accept a substitute target inferior to the one envisaged by the
immanent spirit. So in the very, very
same act there are two exactly opposite modes of response to it: , one
determined by an external stimulus, and one by the free, creative activity.
We have to break the serialising process,
simply because it depends on the original five sense stimuli which follow each
other, and in their continuous following can never be added up. So that serially we can never have enough
data to deal with anything adequately.
So the man who tries to understand his girl by cross questioning her,
will never catch up with the large number of data it would need to
compute. Because according to her
principle of T.W.T. or ‘That was then’ , she has made some more data since she
opened her mouth, and gave him the last information.
So unless he feels right through the
whole field, and gets hold of her state of being, he does not know what to do -
which accounts for him being so often repulsed.
In this non-serial awareness, [aside]
‘We were talking about it in the car coming up actually’, two opposites ways,
here is one man and here is another man.
There’s a pointer pointing there, and here’s a pointing there. We have here a case of a man who has been
battered so hard by a certain order of stimulus, that the whole of his being,
substantially, is vibrating with that stimulus.
He knows only one thing - he is mono-ideoistic. And he is a catatonic, he is completely
fixed, he cannot move, he is a banana.
He cannot evaluate a banana because he is a banana. [31 min
28]
To evaluate a thing one has to have a
letter ‘B’. One must place ‘banana’ over
there, and the concept of fruits of various kinds over here; with a governing concept – ‘Fruit’. And we must have an eye there, and we must
look along there and along there and make the connection. That is his mode of evaluation. But if the stimulus comes so strong at him
that it throws his substance continuously into the same form – ‘continuous
stimulation is equal to no stimulation’ – he knows only the banana therefore he
knows nothing; not even the banana.
He cannot evaluate it because he can’t
let go of it to look at the other thing, and he has to evaluate it again. So his mono-ideothism is non-serial because
he is just a banana. And his being is
going - ’Banana’. Like the Chinese
mountain that is a mountain because it is just meditating – ‘mountain’. Such a man, I know one who’s been – 1946, yes
in 1946 – he’s been seventeen years ‘still’, stuck in the same condition. And they haven’t managed to knock him out
with every treatment they have. [32 min 39]
And he didn’t understand what he was
being, he was being it. And to be
totally identified with anything whatever is to be incapable of evaluating the
thing with which one is identified. So
to evaluate one has to break identification, for there is one mode - the
negative mode of non-serialised thought.
That is to say ‘thought captured by a powerful stimulus. The being saturated with the stimulus; so that there is no room for any other
stimulus whatever. And therefore one is
being that thing and therefore has no energy left over to separate it to
evaluate it. It’s a very low level kind
of existence. The condition of a man,
who’s private ‘hell’ consisted in being locked up, in what is in effect to him
non-being, because it is simply being one undifferentiated form.
Now in the other case we have a man who
is fully aware of the polarity of being;
of the paradoxical nature of yes and no, of idea and will. He knows that if he stops the external
stimulus from dominating him, and deliberately shifts his attention from that
which is serialising, and gets hold of the feeling of his being, he will
simultaneously feel every process of his body; simply because they are going on
simultaneously. He is not feeling
‘together’ things that are ‘serial’. He
is simultaneously experiencing what is simultaneous.
We can demonstrate this in various
ways. One of the ways is to show a person that what he calls his ‘past’
existence is still present in his body and to determine it. In the same way we can show that what a
person will call ‘his future’ is already in his substance. And if he doesn’t have the appropriate
stimuli to knock him off it, he will fill full, fulfil the destiny of his own substance. But if we insert an new stimulus in we can
alter his life, in ten, or twenty, or thirty or forty years, by inserting a new
determinant in now, which alters the configuration which has a logical end in
twenty years hence.
In this kind of non-serial thought we
have a person, who instead of being completely focussed on one form is focussed
on no form whatever. He is ‘paper’
identified – he is not identified with the motions but with the paper. Now this paper is moving [sounds of him waving a sheet of paper] and you can see that in practise you
don’t have to watch the motion, you have the power to watch the paper without
the motion. [35 min 32]
If I wave the paper and you look at the
paper as paper you will find that the content of your mind is different, from
if I ask you to watch the edge of the paper waving. Watch the edge of the paper waving and you
can then identify with the motion. Now
take it off the edge – which is a definition – and put it onto the paper, and
say, ‘This is just paper, the waving of the paper is irrelevant it is just
paper’. Now the movement of the paper is
now peripheral. It is still there, you
are aware that it’s still moving. You
are not identified with it, therefore you are free from it.
So you see that in fact you can do two
things. You can identify with the paper
when it is moving, without identifying with the motion. You can be aware the motion exists, without
it determining your actions.
Simultaneously, being aware of the motion, you can be aware that the
paper, as such, is unchanged; that
nothing is lost. You can then say the
paper is power, the sentient power of the absolute. And the motions thereof that we observe as
the created universe are simply motions of it.
We can do exactly the same exercise. We can centre ourselves on our ‘power senses’
- our sentient power in ourselves. We
can still wave our hands, and we can ‘feel’ our field, while we are waving our
hands. It is quite different from waving
our hands and concentrating on them, which is a very good exercise. If there are a lot of brave men in the
audience they can do it now. Let’s wave
our hands, like this. And put the eye on
the hand and see what happens to the sensations in the mind while you’re trying
to follow it.
Do it slowly first so that you can follow
it. Then increase the speed and you will
find that the attempt to follow it does funny things with your mind. Now keep it waving, and instead of thinking
about the movement, think about the feeling of the hand. Now the movement of it lapses from
consciousness, but you have a definite substantial feeling that the hand is
still there. And this is a fact that we
have such power.
We can feel the hand and we are not
confused by the motion. And we can focus
of the motion and forget the hand and become confused. And this is an observed fact. And it is exactly this that we do with this
sentient power. We can get hold of
sentient power, and it doesn’t matter how madly the universe gyrates - [prounounced standardly as ‘J’yrates], ‘G’yrates [emphasising
the G] I prefer - and
every focus on the ‘g’yrations of it of it – and try to keep up with them – we
become very dizzy; very confused. But if we just remember that this is sentient
power vibrating itself, and we get hold of the power, we can see what it is
doing and we are not confused. [38 min 33]
We have no doubt when we are waving
the hand that the hand is waving. And we
understand it very well by just feeling the hand’s substance. We don’t get any more information by trying
to follow the hand’s motion – we get less, because we get confused. In the tag, ‘Let go and let God’, is simply
the direction, let go of the conscious individual – or the individuated
conscious attempt to keep up with the motions of the universe – and ‘Let God’,
that is to say ‘the absolute self’, which is this paper moving these things, do
what it will. It will always do better
than the confused individual will do with the same data.
So as far as the technique of getting off
the level of serial thought to the higher level is concerned, first we say,
‘The observer is not the observed’. We
decide what we mean by it, the paper is not the motion of the paper, but the
motion is of the paper. But actually we
can identify with the paper when it is moving, and we are not confused, or with
the motion of the paper, or forget the paper and then we become confused. So we identify with the sentient power, we
break identification with the motion but the motion does not thereby
cease. [40 min 01]
Now the attempt to make it cease
is one of the greatest stupidities that pseudo-mystics have ever done. If we try to stop creation absolutely, to
level all things, to produce this maximum entropy of being, we produce
nothing. If we actually take the mind
waves here, and hammer them down flat – we’d have to hammer them from both
sides to do so successfully. If we
hammer them flat, when we have succeeded, and we can do it, what we have got is
precisely nothing except self created stupor.
Now this self-created stupor has often been mistaken by people, and this
is how the Quietists came to be condemned, because misunderstood Quietism means
hammer your mind into a flat plain and don’t let it move. Now it can be done, but if you do it you’ll
be no wiser when you’ve done it. Except
for one element, you will realise that you can make yourself consciously
stupid.
Now the other fact we have to accept
is the fact that, this paper is not matter inert, it is power and its essential
nature is motion. So that if we don’t
interfere with it, it will create; it is
creation. But if we still the mind, by
which we mean the external, five sense stimulated substance, we will become
aware that this power is actually still creating. We feel its motions but we know that they are
not motions of contingent stimuli. They are – one of the concepts of Indian
philosophy, of Pralaya – the great
equilibrium into which things go – is seen to be an abstract idea. If there ever was an ‘equilibrium’, there
never could have been an ‘overthrower’.
To overthrow an equilibrium, you need an external force to act upon it.
There is no external force in
infinity, therefore, if there ever had been an infinite equilibrium there could
never have been any creation; there is a
creation, therefore there has never have been an infinite equilibrium.
Factually we have to accept that
when the contingently stimulated individual comes across a cessation of the
contingent stimulus, if he is extraverted he thinks that everything has stopped
because the external stimulus has stopped.
And he then runs about looking for another contingent being to stimulate
him. But if he knows more about his next
visit, or if instead of running away he decides to go into a room on his own to
find out what he was running towards, if he has that much self-control and he
says, ‘I won’t go to the pub tonight and jollify myself. I will sit at home and allow to arise in my
consciousness all the purposes for going there’. If he can make himself sit in
the chair all the impulses that wanted him to go, seeking that external
stimulus, will re-stimulate all the memories of the previous contingent
situations in which he has enjoyed himself. And he will discover that he was driven by a
previous external stimulus to find the equivalent again in the external world.
Such kinds of external determination, is a
slavery of the material order. If there
has been an equilibrium, of the 19th Century pattern, where atoms
had ever been stabilised in the field – and there were nothing other than atoms
– then nothing could ever disturb them.
They could not disturb themselves and therefore there could never have
been a creation. One of the problems of
‘science’ – so called, is the problem of ‘entropy’. All the motions in the universe, which is
seen at the material level, if they strike against each other, being motions of
bodies – there is always some energy lost in the collision – and the bodies
slow down. This admits to an ultimate term to such action called ‘maximum
entropy’ where they have collided with each other so often that they have now
slowed down to the term. In other words
they are quite stationary.
Now if they were ever stationary in
the past – they couldn’t move. And as
they are supposed to be moving towards that entropy, or equilibrium, in the
future, when they get there they won’t be able to move either. [44 min 55]
Now anything that has an end has a beginning. [short gap or silence
in the recording] One of the problems of time, so
called, is the problem of entropy. All
the motions in the universe, that you see, at the material level, if they
strike against each other, being motions of bodies there is always some energy
loss in the collision and the bodies slow down.
This admits of an ultimate term of such action called – ‘maximum
entropy’ – where they collide with each other so often that they’ve now slowed
down to the term. In other words they
are quite stationary. Now if they were
ever stationary in the past they couldn’t move.
And as they are supposed to be moving towards that entropy, or
equilibrium, in the future when they get there they won’t be able to move
either.
Now anything that has an end has a
beginning, so if ‘maximum entropy’ is true, if there is an equilibrium to which
things tend, when it is reached, there can be no more creation after it. For if that were to be an end, there must
have been a beginning. And the beginning
and the end would be in equilibrium and the original beginning must be
disturbed by some force from outside, because it cannot be disturbed any other
way. And therefore there must have been
a time when there was equilibrium in the force external to it, to disturb it –
for they are in motion.
If we don’t take this to the maximum
entropy term and make the equilibrium again creation stops. But if we have conceptually been forced to
let an external force in on the first occasion, we have no reason to stop it on
the second occasion. We then have a
concept ‘dualistic’ – an infinite lump [?
46 min 40] of matter, disturbed by a force non-material. This dualism resulted from naïve
materialism.
Now today we don’t have this we say
that matter is simply the behaviour of force, that there is a unity of the
force- although we would say a non-dual field which is a higher concept – that
this force is a self moving field that has the power to wave itself. As if this paper is endowed with a power
called ‘either waving or not waving’.
But the difference between waving and not waving is in the meaning of
the word ‘not’. [47 min 23]
If we say that a piece of string, going
along without knots is non-creative, but it is going along. And if it makes knots as it goes along then
it is creative.
Then we
see that the difference between creating and not creating is the difference of
the word ‘knot’. Now this ‘knot’ [not ?] also
means ‘to suffer’ – another bad English word related to the German word spelt
in the same way, meaning – suffering, passivity, and in the highest sense to be
deprived of ones absoluteness. If there are any knots [nots ?] in
us, it means that there are negations in us.
So those negations are simply negations of the sentient power rotating
round itself at that point. There is no
reason whatever, why we should be knotted [notted
?] other than this –
wherever there’s a knot there’s a reason.
But it is a rotation of this sentient power,
self-knotting, that is self rationalising because the rationality depends on
the cycle; and it is that ‘cycle’ which
is the ‘knot’. So there is no
rationality other than ‘knot’ or negation.
So if there is a reason for ‘knot’ it is simply the ‘knot’ being looked at
rationally. And if there is a negation
at all, considered rationally it can only be the self-tying of the absolute
power.
Now this
self-tying goes on literally, and the being can identify with any rotation
point or ‘knot’ , and he can by effort of will, initially, confine himself into that ‘knot’. And he then goes round in that private
eternal recurrence. He is suffering; and he is denied of his absoluteness. If he makes this extra strong he puts a ‘K’
in front of the ‘N’ which symbolises the application of a force against a
resistance to keep it there.
There is no negation, no knotting, no
keeping, no slavery, no bondage other than the bondage of self to self; that the slave is the master
self-enslaved; that this paper is the
sentient power, that when it waves it has the power to feel its waving more
that its ‘paperness’; and it has the
power to feel its paperness more than its waving. If it feels its paperness more than its
waving it’s a sage. If it feels the
waving more than the paper, it is an ordinary man. For that is the only difference.
To feel the paperness is to be field
conscious throughout. To look with your
eye on the movement of the edge, is to serialise consciousness and to catch
ones self up and to bind ones self with the form of the presentation and to
forget ones own sentient power. Which is
not different in any way from ones own will.
[Question
from one of the audience]
– Before you go could I ask you just to
give one specific example in the terms of your analysis here? . . . Very often
a situation occurs, some behaviour pattern, from somebody outside. And I find that I’m able to grasp my reaction
to the behaviour pattern and inhibit an annoyance behaviour from myself. Then, two seconds later, if this behaviour continues,
I find that I’ve fallen back, despite the fact that I’ve previously sorted
it. [51 min 16]
E.
H. – Yes - and the chief cause of that is that the mere fact you are practicing
the 'inhibition exercise’ means that it has not yet become fully yourself. You are still partially identified with the
motion, this is why you say that you are ‘trying’ to inhibit it. Now the moment you succeed with inhibiting
it, a sub-ent. [usual E.H.
abbreviation for ‘subsidiary entity’] called
‘self opinion or J T or whatever you like, rises up, rubs his hand and says, ’I
have just succeeded‘. Now that is so
much energy rubbed off the individuating process. And you’ll find if you analyse yourself at
that moment, that always occurs. Until
you don’t need to inhibit - because you
are not identified - that will happen.
You will inhibit, you will succeed – if
you are lucky – and having succeeded a voice will rise in you and say, ‘I have
succeeded at that exercise’. But this
voice takes energy off the exercise. Every
voice in here inside you is not nothing, it’s energy. And it is part of your total energy.
[Same questioner
continues] – So why do you get the annoyed reaction if
you’ve just conceptually inhibited it?
[52 min 33]
E. H. – Well
when you inhibit, you see, you have a certain amount of – there’s a stimulus
there contingent – part locally inhibiting comes from inside here - sends out a message over here ’Inhibit’. Now when you start doing a bit the energy
that is spinning around here you have to drive against it, and locate it; because it’s threatening to overwhelm
you. Now, as soon as you close it, it
starts to rotate, and it is held in by your pressure. And as soon as you have got it held in, it
immediately feels to you, ‘I can let go of it now’ because it’s now held in.
Immediately you
let go of it, because it’s now held in, straight away you get a sub-ent. or a
series of sub-ent.s round here who say, ‘We’ve just successfully completed an
exercise’. At that moment the energy
that was pressing against it to defeat it, goes back into these self
conceptualising sub-ent.s, and immediately this wall is pushed further into
your being.
And its inner formal content – namely the
nature of that stimulus- now spreads and floods the sub-ent.s that were just
enjoying themselves. And it is the
original annoyance that you inhibited that is doing it. It is not another one, because that annoyance
is only a definite amount of motion characterised in a definite way.
Now the correct way is, of course, is not
easy to do in the first instance. First
you have to try to inhibit, but if you remember – ‘ the observer is not the
observed,’ you will not bother to inhibit but you will dissociate, and you will
allow the energy of the attack to go through you. There’s no time to locate it and hammer it
into quietness, which is what you do in your inhibiting exercise.
[54min 32]
You are transparent to it, the
transparency of the ‘sane’ is quite simply that you are not identified. There is a motion of the ‘paper’, you are the
paper what do you care about the motion?
A man insults you – has he? He hasn’t – he knows nothing about you. How can you insult someone that you don’t
know, whose characteristics you are not aware of?
You fabricate an insult for me. I know a man he lives in a certain country,
I’ll not mention where it is. His height
is somewhere between an inch and six feet, his colour – not worth
mentioning. His hobbies and his business
we won’t divulge. Insult him for
me. Can you insult him without a
definition, it’s impossible?
Now, therefore if you are insulted you are
conceptualised, and the man who is insulting you has a concept of you, but the
concept isn’t you. So if you react as if
it were an insult you must be conceptualising yourself – As insulted at
least. If you know that the man is really
reacting to another stimulus, that he is not deliberately trying to annoy you
but he just won’t shut his mouth. He is
not high enough yet to do it. So he is
not insulting you because he doesn’t know anything whatever about you. He is reacting to stimuli in him operating
his mouth, this is coming out. It is no
more than the motion of that paper.
Supposing we draw a circle on the paper here
and another circle down here. Now this
is a fact – this is you, this is another fellow called ‘insulted’. Now a motion starting here reaches here, and
goes beyond. Who started the motion that
went like that? I did over here. Has this one below insulted that one
above? Has there really been an insult? Not at all - it is an essential nature of
sentient power to produce motions throughout itself.
If you are identifying with that
signature, the motion with a direction on it will be assumed to being caused by
the first being in line.
So the little boy knows this with his
pea-shooter . . he gets in a bus queue
and he looks up the queue – inserts one behind the ear of the man in
front. All the man in front knows is
he’s been hit from behind. So he turns
around, and the one behind gets shouted at.
There is no such thing as individual causation. All causation is of the
sentient power. The individual, as such,
can do nothing. ‘Of myself I can do
nothing, I can do all things in Christ[1]-
my Pappy ‘.
Once that is fully grasped, you cannot be
insulted. Because this thing, knows
nothing whatever about the formal content of this [perhaps
referring to the two circles, ‘insulted’ and ‘you’] couldn’t define it if you tried. Can’t insult because he’s under stimulation
from the absolute – he suffers all the time.
And the measure of his suffering is the measure of his identification. Break identification there is no suffering. Suffering means to be passive to a
stimulus. To be passive to a stimulus is
to be at the mercy of it. And the
absolute is stimulating every form all the time; that’s the one to get at, that’s the chief
insulter.
Insult means – jump into. Who is jumping into all those circles I’ve
drawn? Only the paper – the circles are
on and of the paper, he has every right to insult them – might is right. It appears that IMS is insulting RW[2],
. . but it’s not, the paper is insulting
everybody. [58 min 30]
Why? in order to break
identification. Why? Because they are
better off without it. Then why did he
make them in the first place? The answer
is he didn’t make them in the first place.
They are eternal facts with super-stresses on them imposed in the
contingent reaction. The paper moves and
there is a motion from here, across the intervening state of the finite which
impinges upon there and collects there.
Between two bodies there is a contingent stimulus, which doesn’t come
immediately from the paper. There is a
movement in my right hand and in my left hand to bring them together; they clash when they hit. It’s not from the original will to move them,
I didn’t will the clash, I just willed to bring them together. The clash
resulted from bringing them together.
But in the bringing together they become more clearly aware of what they
are, and this makes them, progressively, more and more aware of what they are
not. And it is what they are not which
is the trouble.
So we have to un-become the individuated
man, so we can not be insulted, except by God, by the infinite and that we
don’t mind. He’s the gentlest insulter
we know of. We never attribute causal
power to another being and therefore we cannot be worried about him.
If
you saw a large lorry rolling down the hill with nobody at the wheel with the
brakes off and you are on a narrow lane, between two big banks, and you could
not get away and it rolled over you. You
wouldn’t feel vexed with it – you may feel vexed with the driver for not
leaving the brake on but that is because you would assume he had
responsibility. If you understand that
no individual is any better than that lorry going down the hill, you won’t be
vexed. But if you know that it was this paper that took the brake off, you won’t
be vexed with the driver either.
It is only by such meditation that you can release
yourself from this error of inhibiting a reaction to a stimulus by individual
effort instead of by transparency. You
can see the mechanical error can’t you?
That the incoming energy as you feel it about to overwhelm you, you
hammer at it. You succeed, you hammer it
into a corner, and you think, ’Made it, what a clever bloke’. You take the energy you put against the wall,
and examine your ‘clever bloke ‘ concept – some of the wall expands – something
on the inside is still there. It’s as
simple as that. [1 hr1 min 19]
[End of recording]