Transcription of Eugene Halliday talk: Opposites – Non Opposites.

We are going to do something about the attraction of opposites to the attraction of non – opposites.

Liking of similar for each other and liking of opposites for each other.

It apparently contradicts itself and yet we do see that it really works this way.

Let us look at the contents of polarisation itself first by drawing a pole this way. It could be a may pole.

May is of course Maya, illusion. It could be a pole of illusion. We will see what we actually mean by it.

If we take a pole of any kind – a wooden pole or a metal pole - we are thinking about a certain form. We tend to think that a pole is rather longer than its diameter. If we think of a sphere we think of a form with all the parts of the perimeter equal distance from the centre. When we think of a pole, we think of a thing stretched somehow in space. If we think of a given pole, a gross material pole like a maypole, we are actually dealing with something that appears to be static and really is not. We know this wooden pole is made of molecules, of atoms, made of tiny little forces all dashing madly about.

If we want to consider why a pole is longer than it is across we have to say it is basically made of forces. The forces must be such that they are travelling through space in order to produce the elongated appearance of the pole. So if we would like to draw a spiralling force travelling through space, this spiralling force will give us the idea we want to examine in the nature of polarisation.

If we take a force which is travelling spherically simply going from the centre to the perimeter and at the same time changing its axis of rotation so that the force is sweeping out a circle which is rotating at right angles to its axis, the circle so spinning will describe the sphere. If you get a metal disc – say a penny – and spin it, it sweeps out a spherical form. We do not call it a pole because all its parts are equidistant from the centre and it does not have to travel about and prolong, elongate itself or strive from a point to a point. When we take the image of a pole we are taking a force which is travelling through space and therefore apparently elongating itself. Now we can see immediately that when we are talking about opposites we are actually taking a concept from geometry.

We are drawing a diameter across this circle and we say that the two points – the terminal points – of the diameter when they touch the perimeter are opposite points. The arching opposites of course are really op-posited. They are up against the sphere. Any two points on a sphere which would connect a diameter of the sphere are opposite points. We can therefore say there is a pole running along any diameter in the sphere, if we wish to do so. We observe then that opposites means that the two ends of a diameter of a circle are a sphere.

If we take such a diameter out, abstracts it and stands it on its own, it makes a polarised force. We see immediately that the force is travelling in one direction. We can say that one end is where it is coming from and the other end is where it is travelling g to. Let us mark the end where it is coming from S and the end where it is going to N. S means SOUTH and N means NORTH. Now this word SOUTH or SUD also means the orbital centre or source, something like a well springing up.

We have to imagine that the South is the point from which the force arises and the North is the point towards which it is travelling. The North is the motion of the right or law. North means motion of the right or motion of law. The North Pole is concerned specifically with formulations of law, and the South Pole is concerned with the arising forces. If we like we can take this as a model of the spinal column. The spinal column is also called a pole in certain esoteric symbologies.

The south point is the point of the genital organs and the north point is the cortical zones. The brain is large – specifically the cortex – because the south end is where the energies of the cosmos are penetrating into the individual and then squeezing through the individual and manifesting along a definite finite vectored line; that is to say have a finite direction with a force attached to it.

The force is appearing in the time process by simply squeezing in from the infinite which is also the eternal, and in squeezing in it forces an emergence, an ejaculation, an out throwing from the centre of the squeeze. We like to say that the force that squeezes in is the saturnine force and when it gets to the centre of compression – if it keeps running in – it cannot stay in that centre, it has to come out. So we can say that forces of eternity are pressing in at right angles to the line of time.

The energy presses in to the centre from the field. The field is eternal, the field is infinite. When it presses into a centre it generates a point of emergence in time. It is pressing in and when it is pressing in hard enough it emits energy and necessarily it emits it in a direction. Although the field is infinite, when it presses onto a centre and then squirts through the centre, the resultant is a line of temporal force.

The line of eternity is predicted into time by simply pressing on a point. So that when we look at polarisation we are looking at the concept that there is a compressing force pressing onto a centre and loading the centre with so much force it cannot contain it and therefore it squeezes through the centre and becomes a finite direction although the field was infinite.

Because it is moving away from the centre of precipitation then we can talk about the opposition of the poles. We can now say: here is a length of pole and that means a force spiralling through space. We can draw a circle around it – and remembering our definition of positing the points of the diameter of the circle – by drawing a circle around this pole we can say that this pole has op-posited points. Points opposite to each other. One of these points is where the energy comes in, the other is where the energy goes out.

We see here that it does not mean what it has come to mean in many ways – something absolutely different. The opposite is somehow identical.

The force that is first in – in the saturnine compression from eternity – squirts into the time process and is travelling along. At any given point we can draw a circle and declare that as far as the pole has gone it has described the diameter of a circle. Therefore we can draw a smaller circle inside here and carry the diameter through stop and say: This is the north pole and here is the original south pole. We can draw another circle and say: Here we have another north pole and we can draw another circle: Here we have another north pole. We can go on drawing circles as big as we like and always there is a new north pole. This is why we say that north and south are relative in the sense that any point away from the immediate point of saturnine compression is north of that original point of precipitation.

So we can call the point where the field has pressed in “the original south” and then any other point away from that is a north pole for that south. Then any given north is south of the one above it.

So that polarity is not absolute, it is shifting all the way no matter how big you make a lot of circles continuously away from the original point of precipitation, which means in a very peculiar sense every point is a north – south. It is north to that nearer to the original centre and it is south to that further away from the original centre.

Now let us look at it another way and consider the attraction of likes and dislikes.

If we draw roughly a kind of cogwheel and we look at the shape of the teeth and the gaps between the teeth, we can draw another cogwheel to fit in. We can say that the tooth of one fits into the space between two teeth of the other. There is a relation between the shape of the tooth and the shape of the space between two teeth. Again this is a polar relation. In abstracting our concept of polarised differences we are going to use this cogwheel concept and say that the attraction of similars is the attraction of similar shapes but of positive and negative values.

If you put two teeth together they strike each other and knock each other away.

If you get what in effect is a wave crest in the tooth and a wave through between two teeth they fit because they are similar in their contours and pitch but one is positive – striking out – and one is negative – striking in. So the attraction of similars here is the attraction for a striker-outer and a striker-inner. But they must have the same pitch in order to do it adequately.

Let us go back to our original concept of the field of force and say the white paper represents this field of force, which is to say the absolute godhead. This piece of paper can undulate, it is a self moving paper; and as it undulates waves spread across it. If the undulation is started at a certain point, then from that point radial forces may be said to issue. Let us draw a force pressing through the surrounding field. As it is pressing through the field through which it is moving, the field has exactly the same shape around it. So that in a very real sense the positing force, which is the male force, is carving in the field an appropriate shape for itself.

And this again is a polarised relation. The positing force has drilled a hole into the environing field. It does this only because the field allows it to do so because absolutely the field is all there is, so that when the field mobilises itself as a positive, a driving finite force it has the power in the environment if it wills to oppose this force completely because this field is throughout identical with itself.

So if it can drive along in one direction with a definite quantity of force, it could easily drive in the opposite direction with an equal amount of force. That it can do.

But if it did so all that would happen would be that the one force would tend to stop the other as only turbulence would develop. It would start spinning and then would start spreading outside this.

There are certain occasions when that happens but basically the idea is that the field can derive two kinds of enjoyment simultaneously. If the field mobilises a finite thrust within itself, it automatically feels round this finite thrust finite penetration, it is being penetrated finally.

Now we have said before that the being experiences only the modification to its own substance and we have said that a being is any zone which can be circumscribed. The being being means circumscription so in so far as we have a finite binding line in existence, we have being. And this being can only know the modification to its own substance, and its substance basically is sentient power.

That it is a power enables it to thrust, that it is sentient enables it to know that it is doing so.

So when it is thrusting it is feeling: I am thrusting. It is a marvellous feeling. I am thrusting through a resistance. But fundamentally it knows that the resisting field could stop it, and then there would be a static tension.

So t hopes that it will not but it is constrained to push as hard as it can through the field because the more it pushes the more aware of itself as a pusher it is. It becomes self aware in the act of compacting its energy. It creates self consciousness by compaction of energy.

It then has a peculiar dual experience. It thrusts and it is penetrating a field. But the field is infinite. That is to say it has infinite absorbancy which means it must be terrified that it might be annihilated and swallowed in the void. So it is trying to draw energy from the field to put into the organ of thrust, and it is robbing the field, if it can, to get energy to penetrate into the field so it will not be swallowed in the void.

If for any reason it gets blocked and cannot draw on further energies from the field it panics, and it experiences the sensation as if it was being absorbed in the void.

It always has these two experiences simultaneously. The experience of penetrating, of forces pushing into a resistance and it is overjoyed at its power to overcome this resistance.

But at the same time it is very much afraid that it might not be able to draw on infinite power to continue the push and it might push into a void. That is into an infinite field which might absorb its finite energies and swallow it up.

So from the male point of view there is a delight in the ability to push and a terrible basic fear that one might be absorbed by the field in which one is pushing.

The other side, the side of the receiving field, which is exactly the same shape but is a receiver, not a giver, also has a dual experience. It delights in the sensation of being penetrated but it is also terrified at the thought that it might not be able to contain what is being put in.

Supposing it finites itself, supposing the surrounding field finites itself conceptually, it now believes it is a finite being with a finite capacity. Now supposing this pushing being here draws on infinite energy and pushes into a finite receptacle, what happens is that the receptacle will be ruptured. So just as the pushing force has this dual experience so the receiving force has the dual experience.

It has the joy of receiving and the kind of terror in case it should rupture and loose the entering force.

Now we see again we have a peculiar kind of opposition. We have taken the opposite concept from the geometrical fact of the circle and the sphere and we have now applied it metaphorically to any kind of relation in which there is formal identity plus the idea that one is giving and the other is

So we see that formally, that is to say as far as the visual sense is concerned, we are dealing with a cogwheel structure in which one tooth of the wheel fits between two teeth on the other wheel. One tooth is positive, is pushing and the space between the other teeth is a receiving space.

We say this is formal because it is derived from the visual sense. We must be careful about this.

All ideas – as we have said before – are form and can be formalised into shape. So idea, form and shape all mean the same thing. They mean that which is circumscribable or is circumscribed.

The only way we have any evidence of this at all is from the retinal image.

We imagine the eye to be a kind of camera. There is the lens and here is the plate on the back. There is an object and there is the light shining on the object and into the eye. When it does bounce into the eye it covers a certain amount of the retina with a certain tone value and a certain colour. There is a certain amount of light and it falls on a portion of the retina and leaves an edge on the retina.

Now this edge on the retina is the ground of our idea life, the formal sense. The formal sense, the sense of circumscription comes from the eye. Most people would think that it comes from any of the senses without bothering to think about it.

But in fact you cannot smell the edge of the perfume of a rose. You cannot locate the edge of it. You cannot locate the taste of a peach. You cannot find the edge of the taste. You cannot locate the edge of a note that is sounding in music. And you cannot locate touch in a circumscribed sense. The sense of touch gives you only resistances in varying degrees. If you close your eyes and eliminate all your visual memories and the press against something you will have no sensation of a circumscribing line. You will only have a point of pressure. So that our sense of idea, form or shape is a visual idea. This visual sense is two dimensional. It is not concrete. It has no depth. The sense of depth is not derived from the eye in spite of bifocal vision.

Bifocal vision is trying to coordinate different views of an object in order to assimilate it to the sense of pressures. And the sense of putting one’s arms round something and trying to construct how the idea of three dimensions link to a system of pressures and visual impressions.

The two dimensional image on the retina is very very abstract. Because of this an idea also lacks depth of itself. It cannot move us, it is simply a characterised line turning upon itself in a certain way. It is a serpent with his tail in his mouth, he is two dimensional.

When we feel a thing we do not have this two dimensional sense at all.

I meant to use the word feeling not in the sense of touch but in the sense of the verb ‘sentire’ – to feel – as when you are aware that your body exists quite apart from any particular tensions you might induce in it with your eyes closed to locate a given limb. You have a general sensitivity and this is feeling. This feeling is always all around you, it is in all directions. It is not two dimensional, it is three

Dimensional but it is edgeless. The edge comes from the eye.

So when we come to look at the idea of similarity of form we are necessarily saying: Here is the retina, here is a shape on the retina. It is a certain coverage of the retina by light stimulants and here is another one and they have a portion of their contour in common, and this portion of their contour in common is their similar form.

Similar actually means the law of the sea, it means they have a like origin.

If we get two pieces of jelly and we press them together very hard, on the two surfaces attached they assume the same form. In the same way if you stick a pencil into a rubber sheet and you stretch the rubber sheet with the pencil, the pencil will determine the shape of the rubber sheet.

But we are looking at a visual sense when we are thinking of similarity of form. Now form is two dimensional. It is not aware of the feeling of the drive. It is simply aware of the binding contour of a characteristic shape. This is why Christ says: Not by creating thought, not by manipulating ideas can you add an inch to your stature.

When you manipulate ideas you are manipulating two dimensional abstract visual shapes.

If you want to move something you must have a motive and a motive is not an idea, it is a little feeling mobilised. The feeling is the direct experience of the field, the mobilisation of the field is what you call will. The point of initial mobilisation of the field is the point of will. You cannot will unless you first feel. First you feel and then you mobilise the feeling and this is will. And then you move this will in a specific characteristic manner and it gives birth to a form. Because the form is born from the field it is touched with the awareness the field has for three dimensional concrete reality. So from the field and the mobilisation of the field comes all real creativity.

Let us look at the word image and see what it means. If we like to cut this word it says: i +mage.

Magi - and here is one of the magical men who went to see Christ.

The root is a Persian word ‘mughli’. ‘Mug’ means will, means primary drive, means substantial urge with an effort in it. The ‘gh’ sound in it means effort. The M means substance. The ‘u’ means the going urge of it. ‘Mug’ means substance mobilised with effort. This word means WILL.

So a MAGUS (master) is a man who can activate his substantial power, his appetite, and grossly precipitate that appetite. He thus brings to be a gross material reality by simply mobilising his appetite. His appetite is his field of awareness. This is Shakespeare’s universal wolf in Troilus and Cressida. Appetite is the universal wolf.

The MAGUS is he who can get hold of his substance and knows that he is substantially sentient power; who can energise that substance and then grossly compact it and mobilise it and produce an issue from it.

Now image is simply an ‘i’ or a ‘1’. Letter ’i’ is originally a point. It is a point making an earth. ‘ma’ means to evaluate and to measure and ‘ge’ means the earth. So a point in substance energising and establishing itself at a gross level. That is an ‘image’. Something like a Greek icon which you have seen a lot of in the Russian Church.

Images are gross material shapes specially made to focus upon, not to focus by thinking. The image is itself sunk for you. It is to give you a support for your feeling so that you can mobilise your feeling in accordance with the significance of the image.

The imagination is the power in us which can move from the field by self condemnation, self condensation, condemnation – damming itself into a finite situation and thus precipitating an image. Image is the same as ‘I make’. If we look at this German word – it is the same root – ‘magen’ which means stomach. If we change the ‘g’ in the English word into ‘ch’ and then take the German Sachsen word ‘machen’ it means ‘to make’.

You know that the macula means a spot. Immaculate Mary is spotless absolute substance.

Machen is to make, magen is the stomach and it is also the substantial energy generator. In English you put ‘sto’ – you can put ‘w’ in it if you like – which is where you stow your power.

You know that is Japanese wrestling, in judo and in the Zen tricks and so on, belly power is the ground of all of it. The heart centre is the centre of the field but the belly is the centre of mobilisation of the field.

So it is only when you can move your belly or the bowels – the same thing – it is only when you can move this drive - which is sub-diaphragmatically existent- can you factually bring to be something which did not previously exist.

Now we can see from this word ‘mag’- the base- the type of polarisation again. ‘M’ means substance, and we know that substance absolutely is not matter, matter is a modality of substance.

The real substance of the universe is sentient power.

So ‘m’ represents the field, sentient power, substance of all reality. And in the middle of it we write a little ‘g’. That little ‘g’ signifies the compacted ‘m’. ‘M’ becomes ‘gm’. The field condenses by the saturnine concentration and produces the gross material object.

If you like to relate this to Einstein’s Unifield Theory it fits in with it quite well because gross matter is simply the zone of condensation of lines of force. Where there are many lines close together that is a gross material object and where the forces are attenuated that is so called space.

So there is a polarisation here between ‘m’ and ‘g’. The ‘m’ is the field substance and the ‘g’ is the point at the centre of it.

This point only comes to be when you mobilise the field on a centre, and the centre comes to be only in the act of mobilising.

So if we take the field as absolutely spotless, immaculate, then what brings the spot – the created centre – into the field is only the contraction of the field. There is no centre prior to the contraction of the field. So there is no centre inside a human being until he concentrates his field energy.

This is the reason a woman tends less to formulation than a man. As we have seen before a sperm is inside a man and an ovum is inside a woman. A sperm is a highly compacted egg. A sperm may be a thousand times smaller. It has the amount of energy that an egg has but condensed into a very tiny zone. And it is condensed in order to mobilise it. We like to imagine this egg spreading out infinitely. At infinity mobilisation would be impossible. And we like to concentrate on the sperm and reduce it right down to the smallest conceptual limit, it would be rendered static on the point.

So we would have two kinds of immobility. The immobility of the infinite field which cannot go anywhere because it is already there, and the immobility of the statically established point which cannot go anywhere precisely because it is the centre of an infinite field which is pressing upon it./

So there are two kinds of unshakeability – one in man and one in woman.

In the man that is the unshakeability of what he is pleased to call logic, arithmetic, mathematics, geometry and so on. What he calls self evident propositions upon which he must stand.

And in the case of the woman the absolute immovability of her ultimate wolfishness. She is the recipient field and she is infinite. He is finited in order to become formed, and he is formulated in order to stimulate the field.

If we were to extend this circle on the paper from here to infinity we would not be able to draw it. And if we reduced the spot of the sperm infinitely in the opposite direction we would not be able to see it, so we settle for a compromise and we draw a fairly small visible sperm head and a fairly large visible ovum. But the point of the ovum is that it is a field waiting for the appearance of the stimulating point.

The essence of the point is that it is a seeker for a field to animate, a field to stimulate. Again we see polarisation of the same order as the ‘m’ and the ‘g’.

We now have a feeling and we can test this in ourselves very simply. We simply lie down on a bed and relax. Don’t think about anything at all. Try to feel and spread all over the place. Say: I am containing the bed, the room, the town, the country, the earth, the solar system, the universe, all verses whatever and you are spreading and spreading and spreading. It produces a very peculiar kind of immobility in the body. It stabilises the body, it is a very good exercise. But it does it in a peculiar way. It makes you very attenuated and when you experience it you understand what absolute woman is. You can feel what it means to be extended, to be in a strain waiting for a stress, demanding a stress. Demanding the point that will come and animate the field.

If you can do the opposite of this exercise – this is one for the ladies – you concentrate very very hard in the space between the eyebrows, slightly behind them. And you try to force your consciousness onto a point. You do not allow it to run about in the body. You do not allow it to run about in the head. You localise it on a little point between and behind the eyebrows and you force it to stay there without moving. When you do so you experience what it is like to be pure male. An absolutely rigid formally devoted intellectual.

Now between these two types of immobility, the immobility of the infinitely extended and the immobility of the established static point there is a continuous flow of polarising energies towards the infinitely extended field and back again to the static point.

So the motion is our very familiar one. Continuous approach to the centre, flying from the centre to the perimeter and continuously extending the dominion and always returning to centre.

This flow occurs between the static finite point and the immobilised infinite field. And the more we can become aware of the opposition in the infinite field and the finite static point, the greater the degree of mobility appears in the field.

The mobility between these two things is the same thing as creativity.

Again we have to compromise because we cannot draw nothing on the board and examine it very carefully, so we have to draw something and say: Let the circle I have drawn pose from the old definition of God; a circle which you cannot conceive to be any bigger. But let us remember that we should not have drawn it.

We have only done that so we can focus and then we are going to push it out infinitely and say that what we are pushing out into is the field – sentient power of the absolute.

We are going to put a point at the centre and let us remember it is made visible for our convenience. But it must be assumed to be invisible and absolutely fixed.

Now we have said that the male is devoted to form, to idea, to shape, to the retinal image and therefore to the science of the eye in the perceptual sense.

The female is devoted to feeling and to the mobilisation of the field in will.

Between the centre and the perimeter there is a continuous flow of forces. This continuous flow of forces from the perimeter to the centre creates the sphere of the logos. This is the logos.

The logos is simply the dynamic, spinning energy of the absolute field precipitating itself onto a static centre. It is finite and flying from that centre continuously round and thus bringing to be the sphere

of form.

The name of this sphere of form as containing all possible forms whatever is Sophia – wisdom.

It is the sphere of the Sophists, the Gnostics and some of the Coptics. It is the sophist sphere, the knowledge sphere, the wisdom sphere. It is the wisdom sphere as simultaneously presented form.

When you stand back and see the whole sphere in your eye, all you see is the geometry of the absolute sphere.

But when you go inside the sphere you can seize on one of the lines going from the centre to the perimeter or from the perimeter to the centre. If you confine yourself to that line you are no longer wise, you are merely knowledgeable. You have finited your awareness to a line of serially presented form.

And this line is time. The serial presentation within the eternal sphere is the time process. So the time process is going on inside the sphere of eternity.

If you become aware – by widening your awareness – of a greater number of spheres, of lines in the sphere you are approximating to wisdom. And when you can hold the whole sphere of formal possibilities simultaneously then you are wise cosmically and your work is finished.

What you know is all that the time knows serially plus the essential simultaneity and unity of the time process.

Again we have a polarisation of eternity to time. Time is like the point and eternity is like the field. From all of this we can see that by the law of polarity and the attraction of similars and opposites we can generate within ourselves – by practising concentration and decentration – the power of the imagination. Not the imagination in the popular sense of simply creating fantasies – the unreal. But imagination in the original sense as used by the ancients and reused by William Blake. It means the power to precipitate concrete forms of art and this does not mean merely forms of clay or bronze or paint or music. It means the power to formulate living tissue to become the objectified image of one’s own ideal.

That is to say as we define ourselves, within our own consciousness we have the power to become the kind of being that we can ideally present to ourselves.

And this we do by defining a worthwhile ideal and then getting hold of the feeling of the ideal and then precipitating the feeling by mobilisation into gross material action in the physical body.

This forces the physical body to respond to the ideal.

The ideal is a working idea, an idea that works for you. If you embody this ideal by making the body act as if it were so, then the gross material body becomes characterised by the form of the ideal.

And the being then becomes such a being as he has willed to become.

In modern existentialism you know that your existence precedes your essence. First you exist and then you have to make yourself essentially what you are to become. The fact is that you are precipitated into existence unfinished and you may become anything. What you become depends entirely on the kind of ideal that will work, that you encourage in yourself, and the number of times you force your physical body to obey the ideal you have divined.

When the physical body is constrained into the form of the ideal, so it becomes substantially exactly what that ideal is. And you become what you have designed yourself to become.

It follows from this that the infinite field has created the point and that the point contains all the form of the whole field. It follows that any given point within infinity – no matter where it is – is an individual sentient centre of initiative and every single being has such a centre of initiative within itself.

The centre of initiative can choose the kind of idea or form that it will embody.

Now if it chooses purely from its own centre it will always choose correctly and it will have no grounds for complaint. But if its choice is interfered with from outside by other centres so that it is deceived and taken away from its own inner principle , its own inner self determination, if it is so taken away it loses its own intent, its own original face before it enters into the time process.

So the statement : “saint know thyself” and the statement: “to thine own self be true” is seen to be grounded in a very old initiation ceremony about becoming what thou art.

Every individual is unique at his centre, he is a unique centre of initiative.

By the accumulated errors of nescience, of not knowing that he was a centre of initiative, he has for a long time been eccentric, he has been off centre, he has been duped, he has been mislead by propaganda, by advertising, by suggestion, by gently kneading, by exhortation. He has been taken away from his own centre of initiative and he is therefore on an erroneous line of experience.

The accumulations of errors on him constitute his peculiar individual character. But if these errors are assimilated they have a tremendous value because they enable him to comprehend the means whereby many other people have strayed away from the sphere of wisdom into the time process.

This has to do with The Prodigal Son. Prodigal means to drive forth, actually you can tell by the word that it means a wheel of fire. Firing the wheel of experience. When a person drives into experience in a purely positive manner, in him there is no no only yes. He characterises himself in the act of positing and it then does not matter if the act that he does would be in part defined as an error. Nor does it matter if the act that he is now doing is defined as an error by other beings. If he is doing it positively in order to characterise himself it is not an error.

An error is a running away from – the word error means to run away. If you deliberately and consciously go towards any experience whatever, determined to characterise yourself in the process, you cannot fail. It is said that he who does not declare his aim cannot be said to fail.

Now supposing you say: my aim is to get experience, then you will certainly get it. It is one kind of aim you can declare. As soon as you move into a situation you will get experience. If you are positive in it, the experiences work as a characterising agent for you and it does not really matter what the idea is as long as it is positively affirmed. And there is no crying afterwards when it seems they kick you.

Again you have a polarised concept because the situation – the field in which you are moving – is that which is going to characterise you when you commit yourself to it.

If a pushing force enters into a given field, that field is already characterised by the motions of its own substantial power and the force pressing into it is committing itself to absorb the form of the field in the act of penetrating the field and trying to inform it.

At the purely material level this means that when a fellow goes with a girl and he thinks it is a one way influence he is grossly mistaken. If he thinks he is informing her and she is not informing him he is misguided. We know this because we can actually recover from a man’s plasmic records the records of his girlfriend’s boyfriends. She has absorbed the form of the boyfriends and he has absorbed from her in the relation.

Assuming we have got a male, he is normally equipped with a penetrating device, so he tends to think of one way delivery of form.

But in fact for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In bringing himself into relation with that person of the opposite sex, he is bringing himself into relation with all the male line of the ancestors.

So he is not simply trying to overcome a female, he is trying to overcome – with his individual form – the totality of the individuated forms of the whole of her male ancestors and male experiences.

When this is realised it tends to make the male a little more careful to see whether he is ready to assimilate certain kinds of plasmic forces that originate from very far back.

We have examined the idea of polarisation simply from an initial drawing of the pole right through to the basic idea of sentient power with its dual aspect sentiency and power. Sentiency simply means the awareness, the feelingness of this absolute. And power simply means this absolute viewed as cause of motion.

And these two we cannot telescope into one. When we look at the concept of power and define it, at no point can we introduce sentiency into the power.

Power is simply the concept of push and sentiency is a psychological category. Feelings cannot be explained in terms of power. It is an immediate apprehension of self awareness.

So the polarisation sentiency and power cannot be eliminated.

And yet it cannot be formally reduced to something prior to it other than the term ‘the absolute’. We know that because sentiency and power – in a mysterious way – interact.

Sentiency and power must be two terms referring to the polarised aspect of the absolute, which of itself must be beyond polarity.

So in fact we find we can concentrate on our feeling and we can concentrate upon the power. And we can mobilise the power without feeling, without sensitivity - crudely, cruelly - if we want to.

And also we can increase our sensitivity to the n-th degree without increasing our power.

It is no use for us to increase our sensitivity to the absolute level unless we have the power to do something about it.

You may remember in The Arabian Nights the boy who got the magical eye of wisdom and he could see everything that was going on in the Universe and he saw a lot of horrid things going on. |He was in a finite situation. He had got the wisdom eye and he had not got omnipotence. And he took the eye and smashed it, and he said: “If I cannot do something about it I refuse to know about it.”

This shows that that the sentience without the power would not be good enough.

The power without the sentience would also be useless because it would be utterly crude, unaware of what it was doing.

So we have to say that sentiency and power are the polarised aspects of the absolute, both of which must be developed simultaneously if either is to reach its optimal value.

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