THE
PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.
A talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands, 25: 05: 1986, Ishval Audio 106
How long has this talk about Philosopher’s stone been going on? How long has the human race, at least the thinkers of them, been concerned with it and why did it seem to them to be worth chasing? Enlightenment, turning matter into spirits, inertia into free will, darkness into light, how many thousands of years have they been doing it, and has it been worth doing. Now let’s approach the thing from the point of view of S T N. Now S means spirit and T means fixation or crucifixion, N means two wonderful things, negation and intelligence. Intelligence is that essence whereby you know how to join yourself to a purpose which you wish to fulfil. The fundamental idea in stone S T one, is that all matter is really spirit self-fixated and when this stone is discovered, it is stated it will confer immortality on the owner. What does it mean, immortality? Now what is mortality?
Death.
Death? What is death?
The end of life.
So every time you go out of the room you die a death. Is that true?
A very nice image.
It has been said that when you walk away from your friends, you die to them because you immediately tend to think about something more interesting. It’s a kind of death, everything you leave is a kind of death, but the word death really means disintegration.
Now the question is are we already dead, that is, disintegrated in some degree and if so what is the disintegrating factor?
[Long Pause]
Inertia.
Inertia? I would have said that inertia was not a disintegrating factor because it continues in the same way.
Chasing too many desires.
Chasing too many? That’s a good
Egotism
Egotism? Now that egotism is what? Focus upon a finite self reference. Too many desires would mean how many?
More that you need for convergence.
More than you need for convergence. Could be. You know purity of heart is said to be to will one thing, one thing only, now that is not too many desires is it?
One that you converge upon and everything else is subordinated towards that one.
Now, supposing you took all the energy that you have and just thought about one thing and then released that energy towards that one thing. How much probability would you have of getting it compared with if you had a thousand other things to distract you?
The more things that you are interested in that you have not already co-ordinated, the more disintegrated. Schizophrenia is an example of interests in the mind which are not co-ordinate, so they tend to operate independently. Like you might study a different subject of science, say chemistry, or you might study psychology, or you might study religious philosophy, but if you don’t link them together, they set up inside you a system of concepts which operate independently, so a person could actually be very religious on a Sunday and not on a Monday according to the stimuli hitting the organism.
Now…
[Leodardo da Vinciwas a scientist was interested in a lot of things]
Leonardo da Vinci.
[Could a scientific
personality converge on a lot of things?]
Why not? If he was interested in so many things and those things were not co-ordinated, then he would be a disintegrated personality. There isn’t a thing about Leonardo as he was supposed to be co- ordinating his various knowledges, yes? So he wouldn’t come under the heading of disintegrated, because he is always trying to find, like many Renaissance thinkers, the common factor in all knowledges, yes? And, incidentally, Leonardo is a very dangerous fellow to introduce into a conversation about brilliance of invention, considering although he did some mechanical drawing he also did some very unpractical ones like drawing aeroplanes that wouldn’t fly. It’s very interesting to find a man of his day interested in many things like most Renaissance young bucks were, but not having sufficient knowledge, technologically to do what they wanted to do.
Now, if we take a convergent man like Michelangelo and the human figure, we find that he co-ordinated his work brilliantly and in relation to that was not disintegrated but in relation to some elements in his stonework he showed a certain kind of awareness of a deficiency. And when we talk abut famous people in history who have been convergent in some particular area, so that that they were, in that area, not schizophrenic, outside that area, very often they were. In being very brilliant in one given direction, often they neglected another direction, and they thought the sacrifice was worth it. Say like Nietzsche as an example, who broke down completely because of his convergence on the idea of a superman and the idea of the eternal recurrence, and they are very, very difficult concepts to link together. But we can say this categorically, that if we can link together with a common base explanation, all our knowledges, then we are not schizophrenic. But to the degree that we do not co-ordinate them, we are, whether we like the term or not. And that means a hundred percent of the human race, are, in some degree, schizophrenic. There is something they know and something they don’t know, and there is something they think they know which they don’t know. So we have this beautiful fact, we can say, the only thing common about the human race is they are all in the same boat. They are creatures, they are finite, some of them are struggling for knowledge, and some of them are not, many are trying to enjoy themselves regardless of knowledge; many are trying to solve problems which have been badly set and they are insoluble because they are not correctly stated problems.
Track 2
Now let’s go back to our statement about the Philosopher’s Stone. The philosopher, the word is introduced to begin with without a definition and then is later said to mean, ‘Love of wisdom’, there the ‘soph’ part is the wisdom. Now if you look at the SOPH, soph in philosophy and Sophia, wisdom, and reverse it, it gives you PHOS, phos, which is light, so that the word soph actually means the word light turned round and back to its source. In other words it means reflexive awareness. Now we all know something, we all know a lot of things, but do we know them reflexively? That is to say, do we know that we know them or do we just know them? For instance, supposing we say cat, dog and so on and we see this, we think we know what a cat is. But do we? How many of us have studied cats so thoroughly that we know exactly what constitutes pure ‘catness’? Is a domestic cat a cat, is a Scottish wild cat a cat in the same sense? Is a puma, a tiger, a lion, a cheetah a cat in the same sense as the tabby next door, or are there certain things that are quite different and moved away from the essence of catness?
Now, we have to be careful that when we think we know something, because we have a word, we really have to be very careful that we do know the meaning of the word, to what it refers, and also to be able know it not only intellectually as a word, but to feel it and that feeling internal to ourselves, to become a volition so that we can actually will what we feel that we know. That is three factors. To will what we feel what we know.
To be reflexive is to say to yourself I don’t only know it, I know that I know it. I don’t only will it, I will that I will it, That is reflexion. That is the highest function of any conscious being, to be reflexive.
Now, let’s look at the stone again. The phonetics of that word tell you, spirit, that is free initiative, has crucified itself and in the process negated itself. Now when you set up a negation of yourself, you set up a self-resistance. Now, imagine what would happen if you had no resistance. Supposing we had a pure field of awareness and nothing whatever in that field of awareness to resist the awareness, what would that field of awareness be like? A field of awareness with nothing in it to resist it, what would it be like?
Like not knowing.
Like not knowing. Well, it would be what you call objectless, it would not be focussed, it would be infinitely diffused and consequently useless. Now when we say, aright let’s take this S for sentience and sentience itself meaning spirit, the awareness that we have is that whereby we are able to see, to capture an object in the field of awareness; and when we say the word ‘percept’ that means rational capture, when we say concept it means take a group of percepts and grasp them, that’s the ‘cept’ part in concept, get hold of them. And the sentience gets hold of itself, and by its action upon itself, moulds itself into a form which we call a conceptual essence. All our control ideas are concepts which have been moulded by the will to control, the will to attain formal control of a situation, the will to control the formal situation is the origin of concepts. It is the origin of percepts too, where the percept is a single one and concept is a group.
Now if we haven’t got these concepts, there is merely a field of awareness, there is no body there, nobody there. What is the field of awareness like with nobody there? Well it’s like nobody there. A field of awareness is very difficult for us to imagine because we do have a body central to our field of awareness and naturally we tend to start from our body and verify it, [Sounds of tapping something] I am here, and this body is the condensation of an intent to exist. You know sometimes people get a negative attitude towards life and when they do, they stop putting energy into what they are doing, and they become faint. Their character diminishes in energy and they become vain, vain means vanishing. They cease to energise their concepts, their ideas. Now when you cease to energise an idea, what happens to the idea? Well it sorts of languish doesn’t it, lie around doing nothing. That’s the state called pralaya, lying down doing nothing. Now is there any use in an idea lying down doing nothing?
No.
No, and because we are human beings, we like to be effective in some degree in some area of attainment, don’t we? If we thought we were totally ineffective we would tend to get fed up and think it wasn’t worth existing. A lot of people commit suicide annually because life for them is not worth it, and when it isn’t worth it they withdraw the energy from the life. Life there meaning the embodied, active process. They withdraw it and then the body, first of all the breathing diminishes, your blood circulation diminishes, the energisation of the cells diminishes, and literally you can fade away.
Have any of you seen a case of a person losing heart, perhaps because through a shock or the loss of somebody they are very fond of, and they lose heart, and get weak and fade away. And there are many cases of a man and wife who have lived together for years, and then one has died and the other has died very quickly afterwards because they cannot find that recipient and resistant co-operative other being to which they are used.
Track 3
Now, the Philosopher’s Stone, we will put it very simply and you can work it out later at your leisure, the Philosopher’s Stone is you, it is not a mysterious thing elsewhere, the Philosopher’s Stone is you, it is you and you know that YOU signifies an affirmed, potential drive. You are a zone of awareness, a zone of sentient power, and you can either do something or nothing, according to your intent. Sometimes you do something specific, sometimes you just sit around. Some people sit around and mope, some people sit around and sit around, some people think when they are sitting around, and no two people are identical at any given moment with what they are doing or thinking or feeling. Now the Philosopher’s Stone confers immortality in this way, to be a human being as opposed to animal is to be able to formulate, that is, to structure the content of consciousness with ideas. Idea is Greek for form, and the Latin forma is form and the Anglo-Saxon and the English shape is the same word. These are synonyms. So to have an idea, a form, a shape, is already to have structured consciousness. Now if we have no structure in consciousness we cannot relate intelligently to each other or to the Universe at large. Now, when we first become aware of our awareness as babies in the womb, our awareness is very, very vague. We don’t have the loud battering of external sounds because it is filtered through body tissue and the amniotic fluid and so on, although the baby in the womb actually hears, but it doesn’t know clearly what it is hearing. A mumbled debate between mother and father is received by the child but it doesn’t do a verbal analysis of it but it does pick up the emotional charge on it. So a baby in the womb can be disturbed by an emotional disagreement between people in that room. Now the vagueness of the baby’s is because the baby has not yet acquired a vocabulary, a group of words which signify precisely its own condition of awareness. Let’s say awareness is a general term for on-guardedness. The ware, wariness, the war in wary means that we are actually, in so far as we exist, vulnerable.
I know a lady who decided she didn’t want the baby she had so she threw herself downstairs. But it didn’t work because she didn’t throw herself hard enough or accurately enough because she hadn’t got the convergence to be quite sure that was what she wanted to do. Did you know that it has been estimated that eighty percent of children are not a hundred percent affirmed by their parents; some other problem, it could be economic, it could be emotional, it could be social, it could be anything, even the question of illegitimacy, it can make a person not wholly convergent.
Now a field of awareness means field of vulnerability and if you exist, that is you are an encapsulated energy, something can hit you from outside, an energy can hit you. For instance, experimentally, it can be shown that with radio waves, you can kill, just by beaming radio waves into the brain of a living being. They haven’t, to my knowledge confessed that they have done it to humans, but they have confessed and written papers about doing it to monkeys. They beam radio the waves into the brain, and the eyes go red and the nose goes red, and the monkey begins to look neurotic and then he dies. That’s because the brain waves are interfered with by the radio wave impulse and we may not think it but we influence each other all the time through emotive fields.
Track 4
Let’s define a field. A field is a zone of operative energy. A field tells you that energy is present. Now let’s think about energy very carefully. We pointed out that in any given existing system, dualism is impossible. Now, thinking is one thing and physical action is another thing but if they were totally different at base they could not interact. Things that are absolutely different cannot interact. So we have a strange thing, a field of energy which would appear in a person as an emotion and the physicality of that being, namely the flesh and especially the bones, they are mutually influence-able. You know that because you get somebody with a bone, spare bone say like Peter might have a bone, have you got a bone there Peter?
Plenty of them.
Then there’s your dear wife. Michael, have you got a hard pencil to hit him on the knuckle with?
I’ve plenty of pencils!
Now this is an experiment Peter, yes? I want you to hit him hard, don’t have any messing, on the knuckle, not to the point of breaking it but just hard enough to make him think you will.
And did you break then Peter? Did you feel it?
Yes.
Now was that a change in your emotive state induced by an action on your knuckle?
Yes, it focussed me.
It focussed you. Did you find you became a bit sharper at that point?
Yes.
Yes, right. And normally you are not that sharp are you, on the knuckle?
No.
Right, make sure yes, we’ll just check Peter, ‘cos it could have been a suggestion on my part now. Remove all my suggestions, I’m not hypnotising you. This is an exercise, you are going to be very honest and you are going to tell me if there is any change in your feeling state when this experiment enters into operation, right? Thank you.
Did you feel anything?
Yes, I was prepared that time when it came.
Prepared, good. Now this is where you are prepared there is a degree of reflexion, yes? Now which would you rather be?
Reflexive.
Yes, you would rather be prepared. Now prepared means rationally pared. You have got an image in your mind of a blow about to arrive, and then one arrives and you pare them, but you do this before it actually happens, that is pre- paration, right? And you preferred it.
Yes.
And you were able to steel yourself.
Yes,
I saw your eyelids go steely. Incidentally you will not revenge yourself on your dear wife when you go home.
I knew what to expect the thing is what you suppose is essentially a
different object, I was expecting a rap on the knuckle with a pen.
She might have poked you in the ear.
[That’s not fair}
You tend to do that naturally.
That’s too severe.
Yes naturally, because you can tell if somebody is prepared, so you look for the unprepared bit. Now a state of field awareness is where a zone of sentient power has not been hurt hard enough for it to prepare itself for the shock, right? Now if you are not prepared, supposing I get a lot of people to rush at you now, it is in your blood that you are unsure, and start beating you up, putting pencils in our ears, and banging you on the knuckles, kicking you on the shins all at once, what would tend, not necessarily, tend to happen to your field of awareness.
Well I had….
Yes?
When you
were saying that I had a memory of something that happened many years ago like
that.
Are you now telling me you can think of many years ago, you don’t look….
Mmm.
Merely a theory of that…. And what happened then?
Somebody beat me up.
Somebody? Just one body?
Well there were others watching them, it felt as if they were all again
me.
They all agreed did they?
Yes.
What was your then state?
Well, I wanted…I had something
in my mind which was the thought, which was not to fight back, because I
thought I could win by not hitting back.
You thought you could lose by hitting back at all of them.
Yes.
Why did you prefer the other statement?
Well I couldn’t believe that they both constantly hit me and beat me
down.
Yes?
The one person who could beat me was the one who hit me.
Mmm.
Right so we have a state of awareness which is vulnerable and a state of preparedness, yes, which is less vulnerable, because where you are already prepared you might take avoiding action, mm?
Now let’s use the word awareness as the general state of a field of sentient power, not prepared, and we will call the not-prepared state pre-creational sentient power, before creation. Those of you who believe in God, of which I am one, say that Infinite Power was prior to Creation, simply a field of Sentient Power without pre-paration for trouble, yes? And then it created by condensing within itself what we call, the World, beginning with a primary point.
Track 5
Now, when you are in a state of generalised awareness of your vulnerability and you hadn’t defined how you may be attacked but you feel that you could be attacked, but you haven’t defined in how many ways you could be attacked, what is the name of that state?
It could be the same state as prepared because you would be prepared
for something that may not happen so that you would be wasting energy on things
that may not happen.
Do you know what the psychological term for that is?
No.
Generalised anxiety. Anxiety, you turn the word anxiety into fear when you have a known object that you could avoid or counter attack. Generalised anxiety is when your field of feeling has not defined the danger but feels there is a danger or [emergency] level, yes? Now. when we prepare, what happens to the field of awareness? Don’t we have an image that we have set up in the field of awareness?
It becomes tense.
Mmm?
With the preparation, tension.
A tension. When you put attention in a field of energy what happens I the zone of tension?
It precipitated your fear.
It precipitated a form, yes? At the fine level it is a causative power; at the subtle level, a bit heavier than that, it is an idea, mmm? And at the grossest end it is a physical body, a condensation of energy. You know how lightening appears in the sky? Before the lightening comes there is a preparation point isn’t there? But, until you see the lightening you are not enlightened. But if you have never seen it before it can be a big shock can’t it? Do you remember the first time you ever saw lightening, when you were a child? I mean the real big stuff, and heard thunder and you hadn’t heard it before? How did you feel about it? Safe?
No.
No. Any energy input which is called a stimulus, any energy input that we have not previously experienced and prepared for can shock us, and when that happens, like letting a very good shocker having a go at you, you are slaughtered, you are cut to pieces by the energy of the stimulus. Now does it feel nice to be one moment in a sort of semi dream and the next moment to be rocketed into self-defence with an internal shock so that you shake with fright? Have you ever had that happen to you? Have you been nearly hit by a car? Have you been nearly hit by a following brick?
Now, when you are in a state of shock like that is it a condition that you would like to stay in?
No
No? And your energy field, that is you, as a zone of energy, is trembling and in danger of disintegrating. yes? what happens if your reference centre, that’s your body, is suddenly cut to pieces. What happens to its field of awareness?
It disintegrates.
I was once lucky enough to see a very horrible thing. A five year old boy suddenly ran off the pavement in front of a big roller, and the boy was flattened like that with the roller before the man could stop it. You know what those things are, they are very heavy, and they don’t brake suddenly do they? And this little boy was suddenly flat, and when he rolled away there was trembling of flesh on the road. Flesh, it was obviously not dead, it was trembling, and I watched it with tremendous interest because it was trying to gather itself together. Obviously it was in such a mess that it would be difficult, but not impossible, because energy is all there is and matter is only energy, so that if it had been a little more practised, it might have gathered itself together. Unfortunately it couldn’t get the rest of the experiment completed, because a butcher from a shop immediately opposite where the accident occurred, rushed out with a bucket of sawdust, threw the sawdust onto the trembling flesh and shovelled into a bucket. That would have been even more difficult to assemble the child with the sawdust, wouldn’t it?
Now that was a remarkably shocking thing to watch, wasn’t it? And all the people that saw it were screaming and crying. The only cruel person there, externally, that I saw, was the butcher. He was extraordinarily calm and he did the one thing needful. I’m sure everybody preferred that he shovelled it up and put it in a bucket. At least it had a kind of coherence. “Now madam, would you like to take your child home? If he had put a hosepipe on it and swilled it down the drain I’m sure people would have liked that less. At least you could bury this thing with the bucket, couldn’t you and you would know where it was and you could put a little stone and go and cry every week-end over if you wished. It had a location, yes? A location, and that locus word means quite simply, locked up in a zone. Your physical body is your locus of reference for your field of sentient power.
Now in such cases, the thing that
shock teaches you it is not a good thing to be dis-integratable by external
forces. You don’t like it do you? Does anybody like the idea, that at this moment,
some idiot, far away, listening to Reagan’s latest advice, “Now drop a bomb on
Parklands, do you know those people are seditious there and some of them are
not sympathetic to
Right, now, because of very deep thoughts from the most remote times, certainly as far back as the sixth century B.C., you find this very peculiar interest in how to be free from threats from disintegration, and the condition is called, “The Philosopher’s Stone,” the stone, which if you find it, makes you able to re-integrate yourself. We don’t have many examples of this. We have Lao Tse saying, “I am going now,” and he walked away and nobody ever saw him again. He was eighty at they time and nobody found a dead body. A story arose that he translated himself into the next world. And we have Enoch and we have Elijah and we have Jesus, all doing something with their bodies, historically, giving the possibility in the mind of the human being of gaining a state where we can resist disintegration.
Track 6
Now when we look at our physical body and touch it like this, what are we looking at and what are we touching? If you press your finger and thumb together, press you finger and thumb together, do you experience resistance?
Yes.
Tell me, is your thumb touching
your finger?
Felt something.
Is it? Is you thumb and your finger made of protons, neutrons and electrons, the outer circles are they not electrons? Do they not act in a spin and have resistance to each other so that you can’t make two electrons touch, because their repulsion power is so great that you can’t overcome it? So the pressure that you feel when you press your finger and thumb together is an electronic resistance, it isn’t matter. Think about that very carefully. The resistance you feel is not the resistance of what you call naïvely matter, it is the resistance of the forces of repulsive electrons. Do you agree? Anybody would like to argue that point? Any physicist in the audience? Is matter made of protons, electrons, neutrons etcetera, are they not forces? Right, is there any such thing as gross matter not made of force?
No.
No. Therefore what you actually
feel is force resisting force, yes?
Yes.
Now, supposing you identify with your physical, you go like that, would it be surprising if I said what you are feeling is the resistances between electronic components of the food you have eaten. Supposing you don’t eat at all, what happens to your body?
You waste away in a meaningful
way
In a meaningful way? Meaning- empty way you mean. The less you eat the lighter you get normally don’t you, so the Sanscrit word there ana means food, ana maya, food-form, kosha, food-form body. Now, when you eat cabbages, do you look like a cabbage for five minutes, or do you have a fight with the cabbage and win.
Have a fight with the cabbage and hopefully win.
Hopefully win. Well I know a man who had a fight with a strawberry on the end of the nose and lost, and for years and years he had a wonderful collection of strawberry on the nose like that. And everybody used to laugh about him and call him ‘Strawberry Nose.’ And he managed to survive until his wife died and this is very significant. He put up with a strawberry nose and his wife put up with it, why? I am asking you to solve the problem of this man as a wilful being. He let his strawberry nose grow which it did over the years, slowly, and his wife allowed him to grow it, why did she allow him to grow it? It made him unattractive. “Just keep your strawberry dear, I love you,” and he, because he was loved, kept his strawberry. Then his wife died. Now what did he immediately do?
Get rid of his strawberry.
He rushed off and had a lovely operation and came out very handsome except the surgeon had been geometrician and he cut the nose, like this, fhit, whish, it was like a prism. It was still strawberry colour but it was now this wonderful prism and, for some reason, it seemed to deter ladies. Now why would that be? Well it didn’t look organic, it looked definitely dangerous. Now he had a will to get another wife didn’t he, and without that he wouldn’t have bothered going through this wonderful operation. My aesthetic sense at the time, cos’ I was very fond of drawing noses, I liked drawing noses and ears, but noses I loved drawing, and when I saw this twisted geometry, it wasn’t interesting I had to draw it immediately like this fhit, whish, fhit, whish, whereas the really interesting nose its takes an awful long time to get the bits.
Now, we all desire either to
integrate or disintegrate and simultaneously we can hide one under the other.
When we think that life is going well we desire to integrate and keep what we
have got; when it goes badly, we want to get out in some degree. Can you see
the sense of that? Now, when you have a fight with a cabbage and you win, what
have you done with the cabbage?
You’ve altered it.
Well, you have broken it down into its constituent energies and appropriated those energies for your purpose with your form. But doesn’t that prove you have got a form of your own, a form that is not made of food, the form of your energy field, yes? Can you feel yourself without touching, like this? just feel. Put a hand in the air and feel it without tension. Are you aware that you have one?
No.
Well there is a temperature difference, then there is also dynamism, isn’t there? Now are you feeling the food or the energy?
You are feeling the energy. The technical term for that in Hinduism is prana, PRANA. Prana is this vital force which you are, yes, which can eat and defeat other life forms and assimilate them, that’s prana. Now the first part, pra means reason, and the second part na means sensuousness, so prana is an energy that rationally formulates itself and enjoys itself when it succeeds. So the funny thing about prana is it is you as a mass of energy, not the food you have eaten, but the energy with which you take in the food and break it down and subject it to your will. Now Prana yama means control of that and that is one of the biggest aims in yoga, how to control your sensuous, rationalising energy, because if you can control that, you could, in principal resist forces of disintegration. Now, see very clearly that your physicality made of food is not the form of you, but the form of you that makes you you like you are a fellow and you are a girl, yes? And you can see the difference formally. Now supposing give to you a banana, yes? And I give a similar banana or even half of the same one to your wife, yes? and you both eat them. Do you look like bananas? No. Do you look like your wife or do you look like you? Does she look like herself or does she look like you? You convert it to your form don’t you? You actually have this mysterious power, this prana, which is able to utilise the energy forms of other beings, break them down, reduce them, destroy their form and add them to you and you do this with this field of energy called prana. If we put, on the little finger the food, then we put the prana, the energy on the ring finger, yes?
Now this is tremendously important because if all matter is only energy and an energy that is self-conscious and reflexive can pre - pare itself for shock, there is no reason why the energy field should not be invulnerable, and that invulnerability, when attained for each being for himself, herself, is the Philosopher’s Stone.
Track 7
Now when you furnish your mind with concepts derived from percepts, which are rationalised sensa, when you do that, what kind of being are you? In the process of taking sensa, those simple sensations and by defining them, converting them to forms called percepts and then grouping them together to make concepts, what kind of being are you, if you can actually do that?
Well intellect is the means whereby you formulate, but what is the cause of the intellect? Volition, the will to be an intellectual, yes? You are not an intellectual, you are a will, which may be intellectual or it may discard intellect, like the pleasure pursuers of the world will not follow intellect where it deprives them of pleasure, they are wilful. Some people are very wilful against intellect. Nietzsche himself didn’t think much about it except as an impedance to the will. Finally the will, the will to power, that willig zu Macht, the will is the determinant in all cases.
Now supposing you say, O.K., I am a field of sentient power, I sense myself, feel, and when I feel, I can tense myself, that is hold, tenere, hold myself, increase my pressures, I can even hurt myself, and I can relax. And I can formulate myself, and when I do I am making idea structures, percepts and concepts in my field of awareness. Now supposing I study a lot of utterly unrelated subject matters and many of them are erroneous, erroneous ideas. You know Omar talks about the two and seventy jarring sects of philosophy. That is to say there are so many different opinions about ultimate reality and they are all so terribly contradictory that if you hang onto all of them you become schizophrenic.
For instance we take six basics,
basic monistic materialism, the idea, you could write these on a mogun david if you like, two triangles,
the triangle that is downward pointing, on the bottom you write, shall I do it
on here, or have I? No I haven’t, no, luckily I don’t have to put it on. Never
mind David, don’t bother. You can do it, do the double triangle, we can have a
six pointed star. The one that points downward on the bottom put MM for
monistic materialism. That means that you believe at that point that all
reality is matter and there is only one of it, just one kind of matter. Now go
up that line to another point on the same triangle, yes, and put M.D.,
materialistic dualism, yes? Materialistic dualism says that there are two kinds
of matter. Some of the Greeks believed this. There is a very gross, coarse
matter that we call the gross, material world [knock, knock] that one, and
there is a subtle, fine matter with very little particles, that goes in between
the gross ones, and the gross one is your physical body and the fine one is
your mental body of ideas. They actually taught that, a materialistic dualism.
Go along that line to the other point, the remaining point, put M.P.,
materialistic pluralism, there isn’t only one, there isn’t only two, there are
many, many, many, many little particles. Now in the Nineteenth Century that was
called atomism. It was also called atomism in Ancient Greece. Leucippus,
Democratus, they believed in primary particles, many of them. Now are they
compatible 
those three philosophies; that there is only
one matter, that there are two matters, one is gross and the other finer; and
there are many, many matters, are they compatible?
No.
By some of us, hopefully.
Are they compatible with each other?
That would depend on whether they were sub self assessment essentially are in the types parts of matter or whether[………… they talk about matter in parts….]
No because then you said types of matter, you have already typed it and gone back to your monism,
Say that I have gross matter on one hand, subtle matter on the other
hand you say essentially what I have is matter.
Well you are back in monism again.
[But that’s … sorry….]
You are back in monism if you do that. But you’ve used one term, namely ‘matter’ to convey two totally different ideas, because the thing about the idea as such is that you can’t knock it like this [knock, knock] let me give you an example.
If you wish to have it that way then surely you would say I have here
matter and I have here not- matter.
No, that is two totally different
things. That wouldn’t…
Explain that[..] again
That wouldn’t be a materialistic dualism would it? You said matter and not-matter.
[ But it would still be no argument to say there is dualism or not…… and then you would have a completely
different side effect…….].
No, either two kinds of matter and you are using the same word ‘matter’ to signify fundamentally that they are the same, or you say ‘matter’ and ‘not- matter’ but ‘not- matter’ is not matter,
But they are fundamentally the same and the opposite but the opposite
is possible and we argue about what is materialism.
You are back in monism again.
I’m not saying I’m not
That is alright if you want to do that.
Track 8
Now we will invert this triangle and the one with the apex at the top, this time we will put S.M., Spiritual Monism, and then on the corner opposite the dualism S.D., Spiritual Dualism, and then on the other S.P., Spiritual Pluralism. Now that gives six philosophies. When you said matter and not-matter, you have gone from one triangle to the other. Now these ideas are incompatible; for one thing matter always has mass inertia; but Spirit doesn’t. Spirit is pure initiative and there is no way of relating pure initiative with mass inertia, if there is such. So we then have a dualism of the two triangles, yes?
Now through having a variety of
contradictory ideas like that, do you know what historically happens? They
murdered each other physically, put each other to death, in the name of an
idea. The most famous one in the time of
So when it comes to one fellow
pinching another fellow’s girlfriend in the march, does it still hold? I know a
fellow that went off to
Now in order to get a harmonious disintegration-resistant body of ideas you must have some idea that embraces all other ideas. Now, some philosophers thought they could attain this by what they called eclecticism. That is, take the best ideas out of every religion and then believe them all. You are then eclectic. You collect all the best ideas from all the different religions and put them together.
Now the best idea in Buddhism is that there is no God.
The best idea in Judaism, there is a God
The best idea in Islam, there is a God and His will is absolute and you obey whether you like it or not, as it says in The Book
The best idea in Christianity is that a man wilfully had himself crucified, dead, buried and rose again and mysteriously vanished into Heaven.
Now they are all very good ideas.
Can you put them together in one, magnificent super religion?
No.
You may be I don’t know, can you? Does it sound easy?
No.
No? Lao Tse’s politics are simple for the people to govern them, empty their minds and fill their bellies and you will have no trouble in ruling. That’s a good idea isn’t it? How do you empty people’s minds? I mean, can you? What do you do? Fill their bellies, how do you do that? Get Mr Geldorf on the job. The world is not quite as simple as the people would like it to be. The world is energy, and all the energies are very, very busy fighting each other for their own survival.
Now, for every living being, there is a possibility of attaining, in their own being a state of total power to resist disintegration, and when it is attained that being is, himself or herself, the Philosopher’s Stone. That stone simply means the power, through perfect self-knowledge to resist integration and disintegration and decide what you shall integrate and what you shall not.
Track 9
You don’t want to integrate the wrong ideas do you? you don’t want to disintegrate the right ideas, and your ability to do that. Let’s make a word, AYN. Now that happens to be a Hebrew word meaning Absolute Observer, also supreme negation of ignorance. That ayin, you know that in Old English ayin means the eye. It is also a plural form for I, the observer. A means Absolute, Y means yes and N means no; the Absolute can affirm or negate itself. That is you can decide actively, A for activity, whether you will say ‘yes’ to doing something or ‘no’ to doing it. Now every observer signified by this word ayin, AYN, has this power of agreeing or disagreeing with anything whatever in his field of awareness.
Now supposing you say integration is worth having and it might be a good idea to develop an immortal body of ideas. Now never mind your food body, that is your physicality, but integrate your ideas in such a way that if somebody came and steamrollered your physical body you would not dissemble your idea body. Now in the Bible it says anybody who comprehends this shall not be hurt of the second death. Now the first death is the death of your physical body, but the second death is the death or disintegration of your body of ideas which has served you as a reference centre during life. Now if your second body, your body of ideas, is perfectly integrated any part of it signifies all the others because they are all mutually defining. Can we see that that’s a tremendous aim, to make our ideas so self-consistent with each other that if we know one we know them all. Now the yogic answer to that is purna, PURNA. We have already done prana and this purna is related to it, the Na means your sensuousness, that means your capacity for sentience and the pur means your structuralising power. Pur is an ancient word for city and a city is a structure and the purpose of making a city was to stop energies disintegrating.
Let’s take an example from
history. Today there is a state called
Now a concrete example, when you first learn to drive a car, does the car obey you very easily?
No.
Or does it prefer walls and lamp-posts?
It seems to have a will of its own.
It feels like a will of its own.
But then you learn there is a gear lever, and there is a clutch and there is a
brake and there is a steering wheel, and gradually by repetition of the repetition,
you condition your nervous system and then one day suddenly you find you are
not running into walls, you are going down the road. To your amazement you can
look out of the window without fear. You can even spare the time to insult
another driver for rotten driving, can’t you? So it is possible to get an
inertia and deliberately set it up so that it will do the remembering for you
and at the same time retain your initiative to determine if you will, a new
direction. Like
Now this Philosopher’s Stone is the human being in and for himself, able to resist all disintegration and to control his two enemies, inertia and initiative. Inertia is an enemy if you don’t know you have got it; initiative is one if it scorns inertia. You don’t want to be a change for the sake of change every second do you? So we will have to get this wonderful idea it is actually possible to build a body of ideas so that if somebody comes along and kills the physical body, they have not killed the zone of energy with its system of ideas there which is so well integrated that they survive death. And not only do they survive death, but they can actually deliberately go and find another body, or build one. A person in full integration, in Hindu Philosophy it is very clear there, a person with good integration, if he dies, say of old age, or political necessity like Ghandi, he could immediately re-incarnate in a baby that is just in the moment of being conceived. He is so gathered together he says, “I want to be born again now, there’s a fellow over there with a girl, those two will do, I’ll select those for my parents.” Most people don’t know that they choose their own parents do they? They like to blame the parents for their rotten behaviour.
Look upon this as an energy problem, there is no matter other than modalities of energy and energy is sentient and self-determined absolutely but it has two possibilities, initiative - change it; inertia-maintain it, and it can intelligently decide which to do at any given moment. There is a nice word ksana, that is KSANA, it means now, but it means the moment of release of an energy into action. Now if you know that initiative can change things, and inertia maintain things you can actually decide to keep an idea or get rid of it at will.
Track 10
Now a lot of people don’t believe in life after death, do they? They don’t think it is worth it any way, they are already bored stiff here without bothering with another world. It is true a lot of people are bored. You can’t actually be bored unless you are not interested. If you are really interested, you can’t be bored. If you are interested in the hairs on the back leg of a flea that would be enough to keep you going. Interest is energy convergence, interest is life dedicating itself to perpetuation. Now how do we like this idea? We have, from the very beginning of our own being, been the cause of our own existence. That is a terrible thing to say, and we are now where we are because of our prior choices, we can’t blame anybody else. We can’t say, “Oh so and so gave me bad advice,” because we could have refused it. And when we ask other people for advice, generally it is an attempt to pass the buck in case it goes wrong.
Now allowing that we are self generated in the first place, we then have that the field of sentient power is pure spirit, which is initiative, but it can set up a system of inertias which are formal, and the formal inertic system is called a body. And you can have a body of ideas made permanent so that if your physical body is disintegrated by a crash you do not suffer the disintegration of your ideas. You are there, you say well that body has gone I think I’ll get me another one. You might actually take a nearby person who is not being much use anyway and say I’ll use that body for the time being, and suddenly a man that has been very dull witted starts talking and behaving like a genius. It was the integrated person with the Philosopher’s Stone type body who took it over. Now you might think that is a bit fairytale-ish but it isn’t, because, in fact, people are continuously taking each other over by giving each other ideas. And when an idea embodies in a person, well then that body is the vehicle of the idea, and the idea has determined the behaviour of the body, and the body is nothing but a means of expression of the idea. Saw that with an idiot like Hitler or a Mussolini, or a Napoleon in his degenerative condition. You get an idea and the idea runs away with you. The idea is the living being and the body is the inertia aspect attached to it.
Now how are we going to get hold of ourselves in such a way that we build our being into a philosopher’s stone by our own efforts? And the answer is, terrible answer this one; tell yourself only the truth. In other words, do not allow self-deception. The body of total resistance to disintegration is the body of truth where truth means formal, absolute, self-consistency. Now as soon as you tell yourself a lie you have started to disintegrate and you are not a Philosopher’s Stone. But, if you tell yourself the truth and find another truth that fits with it you are building your Philosopher’s Stone.
Now it says about this, this Philosopher’s
Stone is a rock on which the
Now, if this is a possibility how do we feel about this, from now forth I am going to tell myself the truth about me, internally.
Track 11
What you will find is that you are purna, you are who you are, a structuralising power, NA a sensuous enjoying power, and what you are enjoying is your own structure made by you to your specification.
Now supposing we say, the food body, the energy body, the mental body, the conceptual body, the bliss body to the will. You know that bliss is when you will do something and willing it you are glad you are willing it and when you have done it you are glad that you willed it; that’s bliss, when everything you do coincides exactly with your will to do it, that’s bliss, that is ananda maya kosha, a bliss-form-body. That you will, simply will to do something in full, clear consciousness, and now we have shifted awareness into consciousness, awareness is general sense of vulnerability, consciousness is con-sci ous-ness, with analysis SCI, OUS – being, NESS – essence; the essence of being analytically perfected and held together, that is consciousness, as opposed to simple awareness. What do we have then? If we can afford to face the pain, and that is fainting, of telling oneself the inner truth about oneself and one’s own motives so that you don’t have any dark patches that you are ashamed of, you are building, that body, the Philosopher’s Stone on the rock of absolutely, consistent truth. Rock, our English word, ruhk the Arabic and the chess fellow of the same name, ruach of the Hebrew, it is all the same word; it means discriminate – R, khet – hierarchical power. When you discriminate the hierarchical powers of your own being truthfully, with no vacillations and no avoidance, you tell yourself the truth about your structures and what you have made of yourself, deliberately, in order to be the kind of being, and you do this with thorough self-knowledge, you must necessarily become a zone of power- sentience able to resist all disintegration and re-assemble yourself. You know that power of reassembling is there because all the cells in your body, all day long, are breaking down and dying and being repaired aren’t they? There is a breaking down process and there is a repair process. Now if you want the repair process you simply will to continue to exist and if you get fed up or too bored you will to not exist and you stop structuralising, and that is from pur into na. Then the na, the sensuousness we just throw away, like a snake into the Infinite, and the pur restructure and the na can go away.
How are we, in this test? Can we dare to stand in front of the mirror of the mind, look in your mind, the mind is a mirror and tell yourself the truth about your own motives, and if you can, and you can bear it, and structuralise yourself volitionally, in full consciousness, your body becomes, never mind your food body, it is going to be lost anyway, your body of ideas becomes utterly invulnerable. And you are then, the mysterious Philosopher’s Stone that you have been seeking, and you can live in any world and re-appear at any time in history, in any universe, deliberately. So you will not be hurt of the second death, second death – disintegration of erroneous ideas. You will survive in all universes, under all conditions.
How do you like the idea, as a goal? How do you like the idea of having to tell your truth, your truth to you about you to get it, is that as comforting?
No.
Can you feel the wigglers, the wrigglers, the avoiders? They are there, because every time you had sensuality, that is na and pur, structure is trying to control it, it is trying to wriggle out.
Shall we just consider that a little?