RAISING THE CORPSE
The text of a talk given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands. Ishval audio 78
Track 1
What I’m going to talk about, by request, I wonder who requested it, Does anybody..... is the meaning of the Tibetan idea of the raising of the dead, raising the dead. Do you know the story of Tibetan techniques of raising the dead, where you get a corpse, preferably fresh, and you put the corpse on the ground and you lie on top of the corpse, leg for leg, arm for arm and you make yourself congruent with the corpse. That is very important, congruent. That means you lie exactly like one triangle on another, fitting perfectly, and then you bite the tongue of the corpse. This is very important. You must bite the tongue of the corpse. I don’t know whether the corpse has put its tongue out for this special purpose or whether you have to hook it first with a finger. In which case, the arm you use to hook it with is, at that moment, not congruent with the corpse. So let’s assume that the corpse died with the tongue out, in which case we will say that it must have been a male corpse. The idea is, that if you bite the tongue of the corpse and lie congruent with it and concentrate very hard a vibration will start in the body of the corpse. The vibration will then increase and increase, and if you do not get too scared, the vibration will re-animate the body, and then the corpse, at a certain critical point, will jump up and dance about. And this is recommended as a method of raising corpses.
Now, like all such priestly mysteries, there are four levels of interpretation. You know the lowest level is the literal level, where you think it means a corpse, like a corpse you find any day of the week, lying about. And the second way, the allegorical way, is that you think it does not really mean a physical corpse of a dead man but a corpse, like something not as lively as it ought to be, and you tell yourself a little story about this corpse which is not a truly dead body of a once living being. The third level, the homiletic, means that you get a large crowd of people, about fifty thousand strong, say a football crowd, and you then lecture them about the art of raising their own level of appreciation of life. And the fourth level is the mystical level. Now, we are going to talk about the fourth level. In the fourth level, the corpse is oneself. There is a joke about Shiva, Shava. The SHIVA is the god of the universe, and if you change the vowel I into A, Shiva becomes shava, corpse.
Now, if you hold the tongue in ordinary speech, it means you keep quiet. Hold your tongue means keep quiet. The fundamental idea is that you have to make your consciousness congruent with your organism. You must make yourself fit yourself. Now you know that ordinarily, you are thinking about one thing, feeling about another, willing about another and probably, doing something physically totally different. So, there is no congruence in the average person’s average daily life. But this congruence has to be attained, and remember the word ‘mystic,’ is from ways, ‘to shut one’s mouth,’ and keep the secret. Mysteries are secret. It is saying, if you manage to get hold of your own tongue in your own teeth, you know the expression, “I could have bitten my tongue for saying something.” If you get your tongue in your own teeth so your tongue cannot say anything, it will try to say something. It will vibrate, it will want to live, it will want to say its piece, and if you allow it to, it will remain dead. Now by dead is meant suffering from inertia. When Jesus talks about the quick and the dead, he means those who are capable of initiative and those who are not, those who are wrapped in inertia. The dead are the inert; the inert means the habitual process. It is not examined but conducts itself without any overlooking, without any congruence of consciousness.
Now people are continuously finding themselves saying things that they don’t mean, that have been acquired in situations over which they had no control. Say like in quarrels between parents, children pick up the naughty words during the row and find them very effective. Now every word that is learned by a child and becomes engraved in the mind of that child, and then, on an appropriate stimulus comes out on the tongue, that word is a mechanical reaction; it is not an initiated, willed action. It is not free, it is not new, it is a repetition of an old pattern. Now if we allow habitual processes in our organism of thought, feeling, will, physical activities, if we allow them, and perhaps are not even aware of them, then we have to say they are not acts of initiative, they are not free-willed acts. But the quarrels of the human race, whether it is in the Lebanon or South America, or Iraq-Iran, anywhere throughout the world where there are quarrels, those quarrels are, in general, initiated by words, that is to say, of the tongue not being bitten, the tongue being reactive to things learned. All the quarrels that nations and individuals have are nothing but mechanics.
If we recognise this we can understand the story about raising the dead. To make oneself congruous with one’s own organism means that consciousness must be aware of its thinking process, must be aware of its feeling, its like/dislike, must be aware of its volitional intention and aware of its physical reactivity. If it is aware of all of these and retains the initiative, then it is congruent. If it forgets any one of them, or two, then the forgotten portion is not congruent and there is no control over that part.
Track 2
Let us think about this very carefully because it is the key to human relations. I understand that next week there is going to be a programme about the dissolution of marriages in the country where a very, very high percentage of marriages dissolve. They dissolve because the tongue will persist in reciting things learned long ago. Every time the organism is touched, every time the image is insulted, out comes a word; the tongue rattles away, utters things learned long ago and wounds the other person. And the other person retaliates. So if you can imagine two tongues having an argument and they are supplied with a tank of ancestral nonsense and as long as the tank is not empty, they will talk.
Now we have solider evidence that protoplasm, the substance of our body is a recording instrument of tremendous sensitivity. It records thoughts, records feelings, impulses of the will, the memories of physical activities and everything it can remember, it can actually replay at any level of thought, feeling, will, physicality. We have to say, then, that the tendency of the tongue supplied with energy is simply to repeat ancestral, habitual, argumentative patterns, and if it is not stopped, if initiative does not seize the tongue, then it will destroy most relationships. If you can control the tongue, it says in the Bible, you can control the whole body. Now, why does it say this? Because the tongue is at the thin end of the wedge. You know that ‘wedge’ is an expression symbolising the genital organ and the tongue is the other end of that body. The tongue has been evolved over millions of years to articulate, to verbalise the intentions and misintentions of the will. At one end of the body you have a primordial urge; at the other end you have a tongue and the tongue has actually been grown in order to articulate and command the situation. So the tongue really, is really a very refined gulletal appetite.
You know that the mucus lining of your body, the food tube, is continuous from your mouth, through your lips, right through the body, along that food tube right to the termination, the anal termination, there is one continuous, mucus lining. That means that that body is a unity, it is a unity of appetite; and at one end appetite is all power, all push; and at the other end it is all articulation, all explanation, all excuses. If we want to recognise that we can see the meaning of that little story, how to raise the dead. For millions of years there has been an evolution towards articulating appetival means, positive and negative. To posit what you want, to use words that will get it, and to negate what you do not want, and use words that will destroy opposition. So, your vocabulary is in two parts, helpful, constructive; and unhelpful, destructive parts.
Track 3
Now the appetite is very, very fast. Unlike the nervous propagation of an impulse along the nerve, which is relatively slow, the bio-magnetic field of your body is many thousand times faster than a nerve impulse and that means that our appetite can actually beat to the punch any time, any argument. You might have noticed that in argument, if your image is hurt, if something unkind is said to you, a word appears on your tongue without any effort. If the mood is good the word will be good; if the mood is bad the word will be bad, and you don’t need to look for it, it is there on the tongue. The reason for that is that our body of protoplasm stretches backwards through the ancestry, and the ancestors are equipped through experience over millions of years, for all kinds of situations. Now, if we understand that we are dead when we react mechanically to a stimulus and that we do not live until we can control our reactions to the stimulus, then we will understand the story. We have to get hold of our tongue and stop our tongue reacting mechanically to the recorded experiences of our ancestors. Now to do this, obviously we have to become conscious of this fact that we are the authors of our own activity. It is no use for us to say, “I didn’t do it,” “he said this,” “she said that,” “I merely reacted.” We are responsible not only for our actions but for our reactions to other people’s actions. So there is total responsibility in the story of how to raise the dead. We are all dead in so far as our thoughts, feelings, wills and actions are not the immediate product of initiative in the here and now. Anything except the now-here situation is dictated to by the past and future aspirations. Projections are from the past, from pleasures and pains stored up, trying to project themselves into a future.
So we have to say we must then recognise in ourselves that we are the authors of our own being, the authors of our thought and feeling and will, and that we are never at any time, justified in blaming another person’s stimulus for causing our reaction. Our reaction is ours and ours means it goes back through our total ancestry, so the stimulus hits not only on our immediate consciousness of ourselves as an egoic being, that stimulus hits back and by resonance raises ancestors from millions of years ago, thousands of years ago, hundreds, grandfathers, parents; all these come forward on the appropriate stimulus. So to break the mechanistic responses of the organism, we have to get hold of the word, which is symbolised in the tongue. We must become able to get hold of the tongue and control it. And when we control it, it is going to fight, it is going to vibrate, it is going to try to say that thing. How many of you have already noticed that if you are in a profound disagreement, that if you try to not say something you know is going to produce a further reaction, you feel energy pile up inside you? Have you noticed that? Energy piles up inside you and fights your attempt to intent to inhibit this action. There is a war. We will see what is the origin of this war in a moment.
Track 4
War always implies that there are
least two forces in opposition. The first force is the force of Infinite 
Consciousness
itself that is infinitely extended. That Consciousness is Absolute. We will
represent that consciousness with the letter A. So if I draw a letter A, shall
I draw a letter A on here so we can see it? So there is the letter A. That is
the alpha of the Greeks, the aleph of the Hebrew. That A is not just
an arbitrary scribble which happens to symbolise the sound ah, as
breathing (silent) ahhh. It was deliberately designed by priest-kings to
represent something very important. From an originating point, there came down
a split into two parts, and this side of it is intellection and that side is
volition, and the crossbar is the link factor implicit in the originating
point. So when we see a letter A we are to remember this peculiar fact. In
English, we say ‘ay’ (A), in practically every other language we do not, we say
‘ah’. The English are very good at being individuated, different and
awkward. A for awkward. In the word awkward in English you do not say ‘akeward’
you say ‘orkward’, whereas they would say ‘ay’ otherwise. But English spelling
is very ambiguous, which is a great nuisance to foreigners. If you learn
Italian you have no problem. Every vowel is quite simply itself, it does not
change, but if you learn English everything changes all the time, because the
English are super diplomats and will change anything to anything as the
occasion requires.
Now the A in that form in archaic documents is
represented like that. All you do is put a beak on it and a couple of talons
like that and it is a primitive drawing of a vulture. You will find that in the
Egyptian hieroglyphs. In some it represents an eagle, in both cases it represents
the high-flying intellect. Now, if there is a high flyer, as Lao Tse would say,
to define a high flyer is to define a low flyer. So we find the same letter
turned upside down, like this and it is now said to mean an ox, and the meaning
of the Hebrew letter equivalent to this, namely, aleph, means an ox. If we like to add a couple of ears there and
eyes, there is our ox. Now the eagle or vulture and the ox are both symbolised
by the same thing, the same sign, the same symbol, and in the one case the apex
is at the top, in the other the apex is the bottom. Now that is not accidental.
Did any of you see the recent
pronouncement from
By chance, I have it with me.
Have you? What a strange coincidence! I did not ask you to do that did I? Would you mind reading it out?
(The following passage is difficult to hear and the transcription here is only approximate. Some words are missing and the Hebrew words have not been transcribed.)
This has not been a good year in
ש ם ד ת to
ת ש ם ד
[ Read this way….7]
The
alternative is pronounced [……]…the most optimistic translation being “The evil
one is dead”….. Hamar says there are precedents for a year changing. 1938 meant
murder which became kabas, to wash or bathe.
In blood.
Now there you see an official body controlling the use of symbols. Did you know that there was such a body, that governments in every country have a language control and symbol control body? Why? Because the symbols with which you think, control your activities. An idea expressed in a word generates a feeling, an emotion, and the emotion passes into activity. So, if you can control the symbol you can control the behaviour.
Track 5
Now when you have your apex at the top it is signifying that your consciousness is spiritual, it is not grounded in the earth, and when your apex is below, as in the ox, “Their breath goeth down to the ground, even as the beasts,” it means your consciousness is materialised, your consciousness believes a materialistic philosophy. Now, people that believe in materialism say, like naďve Marxists, believe that matter determines the evolution of the universe. Actually Karl Marx himself did not believe that and didn’t say it. Nevertheless, there are naďve Marxists who think he did say it. Those who are gross materialists are conditioned by the information coming from external material objects through the five senses and patterning together in the lower mind, result in ideas based on the external material world, so the mental process is totally conditioned by materialism.
Now
to be conditioned in that way is to be a slave to the external stimulus. On the
other hand, if you put your apex at the top and say “No,” the earth itself is a
condensation of power which was originally distributed equably, before the
Universe existed, before creation, there was infinite Power and you are not
going to place yourself in material data which condition you, you are going to
place yourself in spirit. Now spirit means free initiative. So if your apex is
at the top as in the vulture or adler
or eagle, then you are saying, “I am seated in initiative, I am not waiting for
the external stimulus to condition me. I initiate my actions from within.”
Now
there is another way the A is written and we will draw that also which is like
this. Now on its side like that, all we have to do to find its origin is this.
It is an eye. Now, in our language eye begins with an E, but luckily we have
another language, German where it begins with an A [auge,] which is a
primitive symbol of Indo-Germanic origin, Aryan, and it says that the Absolute
is the Observer who is not finite. So the same symbol can mean a transcendent,
initiative-ruling being like an eagle or a high-flying bird seeing all things,
like a vulture, or it can mean an enslaved, grossly materialised creature like
an ox, turning round in a circle to grind the corn, or it can mean an observer
who sees both the others. Now if we say the Eagle is a predator and the Ox and
all beasts that go to the ground are prey, then we have predators and prey and
the third kind, the observers, who are neither predators nor prey. The Observer
is neither a predator nor prey. He has no desire to be a predator and go round
jumping on defenceless deer in the form of a lioness; he has no desire to be
the deer jumped upon. He is too intelligent and too awake and in alchemical
doctrines he would be simply called the artist, A for artist. Now the word art
and the Hebrew ‘torah’ and rota are all the same word. The law is observation, the law is
consciousness is a catalyst, consciousness creates being, the intentions of
consciousness precipitate ideas, magnetise them with feelings and create
activities.
Track 6
Now
let us look at this A, the one we originally drew and put three aspects inside
that A. And we will say the letter A (ah), a free-breathing ahahahahaha,
that free breathing means spirit. It means Infinite Spirit, it means Spirit in
no way limited. But Spirit is initiative and initiative is conscious power.
Initiative is power that knows that it is power and when it converges consciousness
it converges power, so that to converge consciousness and to converge power are
really two expressions for the same fact, to converge consciousness is to
converge power. This is why in Yoga, the most important thing is to acquire ekachitta,
one-pointed mind. When the mind comes to a point, it precipitates. Now all
power is sentient, all energy is sentient. It feels itself and knows itself to
be what it is and it knows exactly what it is doing with itself as power. It is
a self-precipitator.
Now
we have to represent the power of the Absolute streaming forth from the Ah
of primordial power, so we write a letter U like that. We have now written A U,
au. If I were to add a G and an E, I have written the word ‘auge’ which
is German for ‘eye.’ We will look at that again in a moment because the AU
means Absolute Power driving and the GE is the same GE in geography, it
means earth, it means consolidated life. So auge in the German actually
means the Absolute Power, which by self- consolidation brings itself into
existential living. The driving power that comes out of the Primordial Absolute
Ah, coming down, needs resistance and it creates its own resistance as we see
by this polarising process. It goes down like this and it continuously
distinguishes between intellection and volition. Now I am going to put a line there and leave the dots there.
Where the dots are that means separative ideas and where the continuity is it
means the non-discontinuity of the will. The will is always one, but the ideas
can be broken into many. The will is always one initiative is always one but
ideas can be split by analysis. Now when it polarises it writes for itself a
letter T. Now the letter T symbolises in the mouth, by the way you execute it,
there is the arch of your mouth and there is the tongue touching it, teh.
It means an intersection. It comes down like this and carrying on with this
polarisation, it creates for itself a resistance because it is inside its own
infinity, so that it can oppose itself. And the opposition which it presents
itself with is what we call matter. It impinges like this and that horizontal
line represents the linear extension of the material world, and continue these two
lines here and that is the letter H
Now
in Masonry of the archaic world, you had a little sign like that and it was
called Triple Tau. The T H, Templum Hierosulem,
that is to say the Temple of Jerusalem, the Temple of the City of Peace. The
City of
Track 7
Now if we look at that we have
written AUTH and we have to contain this in order to express that this absolute
divinity here is incarnate in every human being. So we draw ourselves a nice
big O like this. We 
have
now written AUTHO. The O is the container. Now all we need is the letter R. The
letter R, the ruach, the resh, means to vibrate. It means that
forces are in opposition, striking against each other. To represent it we are
just going to go over that O and we will vibrate it like this, and all this
dithering round here is the letter R. The dithering is the letter R. We have
now got the word AUTHOR written in its original form. This is how the word
author sounds and is a vibratory structure within the field of every individual
being. Now every individual being is an author, that is to say, a power of the Absolute driving onto a
point in which it crucifies itself in an opposition field of idea and will
within an encapsulation zone. Now outside that zone we call it spirit,
which means absolutely free initiative, and inside it we call it soul. The soul
is simply spirit encapsulated. Now we have to think very carefully about this.
It means that we are, each one of us, individually absolutely self-responsible,
and funnily enough this is the one thing that human beings generally do not
like. We say absolutely responsible because in the place where we are, as
individuals, it is the Absolute individuating. It is not something else, it is
the Absolute, individuating.
There is my friend Arthur Berwitz. Next to him is his wife. They are both absolutely self-precipitated, one as a man, one as a woman and the will to be exactly what they are, is there expressing itself, physically, in a certain manner, with certain coloration, certain bone forms and so on. That divisible expression, the concrete physicality of a being, shows something of the origin. We call this signature of being. Signature is SIG, that means spirit into earth and nature means the law of the rotating of sensuality. Every person is marked, stamped, engraved with the totality of the intentions of the long protoplasmic body which has evolved up to that very point where now sits in a chair, an individual. And every individual sitting on a chair is sitting there with absolute authority to do so. The Absolute is not separate from the individual. The individual is a modality of the Absolute. Sitting on the chairs here we are individuals, Absolute Beings sitting on chairs because through a long process of searching we have come to be determined to discover what it is that makes us tick. And we have come up with the conclusion we make us tick. Each individual must say, “I make me tick. I have not noticed it before but I have done it.”
Now you have a beautiful saying, can you remember that diagram a moment, possibly? Can you still see it in your mind? Keep that in your mind and say to yourself, “This is a true diagram of myself. I am a soul means I am a spirit, encapsulated. That I am a spirit means I am initiative power. I am intelligent, I am power and I initiate my presence here and now.”
Track 8
Now
you know that everything in the universe vibrates. There is no thing whatever
that can be examined by science that is not vibratory. A vibration is
contraction, expansion, contraction, expansion. Now, on the moment of the
contraction there is contra-action, because the free that is the letter A, in
the act of moving towards a centre has contradicted its absoluteness. The the ah
and the u (oo) are in self-contradiction. The ah means to move, to
drive, but the Absolute is already infinitely extended. Now, to the infinitely
extended field of Sentient Power what does a movement mean? It is already
everywhere. It means there is an
intention generated when you move. Now imagine an in-tention is an inner
tension within a field of power. Imagine the infinitely extended field of
power, call it the Supreme No Thing. It is not a thing, an infinitely extended
field of power and then, because it is infinitely extended, it cannot go
anywhere. But what it can do, because it is sentient, it can focus anywhere
within itself and the focus is simply an in-tension to look inwards. And, in
the act of the in-tension there appears a tension.
Now we represent that tension with a dot ·. The letter yud in the Hebrew means a jot or dot and signifies a primordial point precipitated by Infinite Absolute Intelligence. But the Absolute Intelligence is infinite and the point is finite, so at the very moment of the Absolute positing that point it is uttering the primordial word aahee, AI ai, aa- ee. The dot on the I is the original letter. The precipitated point is a focus within infinity. The Infinity is not focussed but it focuses within itself a point. But that makes opposition, that makes contradiction, because the infinitely extended is not the finitely posited. But the finitely posited is not the infinite extension as to its infinity. And yet, that point is a modality of the intention of that Infinite Field. So there is a primordial contradiction. Right at the beginning of creation because the Infinite Extended Sentient Power is positing a point and the point posited is finite and is a resistance point to the Infinite.
Now, when you push that point it develops a 
part
the air and the air goes into the shape like the
At risk.
At risk. Maybe there is a man under the bed. Maybe you are a woman and there is a man under the bed. Maybe you are a man and you do not care whether it is a man or a woman under the bed. But certainly, your eyes open. Now, in the mystical parlance, it is said that angels and original man had no eyelids. Did you know that angels have no eyelids? Isn’t that strange – no eyelids? Adam had no eyelids.
I want you to deliberately open your eyes wide, stare at the darkest piece of carpet or background that you can see, and feel yourself staring at no thing and then tell yourself, “I have no eyelid.” How do you feel?
Worried.
How would you like to stay that way eternally?
No.
Are you happy? You would be?
Yes.
You think you would?
Yes.
Must try it some time.
It would be you that was being…..
No, no, there was no being there - you must not use the letter B until you encapsulate, so you cannot use any idea whatever derived from ‘being.’ It is just pure consciousness looking where nothing is with no eyelids. Now we have come into existence and we are modalities of that Absolute and therefore our existence proves that that Absolute invented eyelids. If you said it got fed up with staring that would not be quite correct because the feeling image is derived from the finite world, but if you said it was eternally full of itself, that would be nearer. But, what it was, you have to cross the word ‘self’ off because it has associations of a finite being. You just, you can’t literally imagine it because you cannot make an image. You get the feeling that you are infinitely extended awareness and you are looking into no thing eternally.
Track 9
(Inaudible comment here about a feeling that is being expressed but the content is unclear)
There is a very strong feeling that you could do with a rest.
Yes but there is still a feeling of intention….
Intention, yes, but the intention is to have a rest. Now that word ‘rest ‘is very interesting because it actually means a differentiation of essentially crucified being. That is ‘rest.’ So when that infinitely extended consciousness focuses, it precipitates a rest point, and rest means est, it is, est, EST. The R means to discriminate, the E means life, the S means separativity, the issuance, T – crucifixion. Those eyes that are wide open, seeing nothing, they want to do that, to focus, and at the moment of that arises in-tension and the intention is then an object. The intention, the primordial will to close.
Is that the point of view?
That is the point of view. It is also the point where it is possible to fall into forgetfulness that really you are infinite because at that very moment you can actually think, “My God! I have found something to rest myself.” And then go into it like Indra into the pig and start enjoying the formative process. That letter I, the dot, signifies form. As the power intends inwards it makes a form and the form taxes your imagination and if you are not careful you will fall into identification with the form you have precipitated. And if you do that you have the horrible fact that you, the Absolute, have trapped you in a formal precipitate of yours, and unless you can remember your absoluteness again, there is no salvation.
All religions aim at, with all their techniques, whether prayers or meditation, they all aim to restate the awareness of the Infinite in the finite. To re - posit infinity in yourself as an awareness in you that you have precipitated you, that no one else can be blamed, you, each one of you, have precipitated yourselves. Just like I precipitate myself into my awkward condition, we have absolute intention and absolute motivation for every thing we do, and we do it.
Where does in-ter-est come in?
In-ter-est means that you are
crucified in the being and that you have gone in to an earth, in terra,
made by you in order to rest. You know the greatest cause of that programme thing
next week, really about marriages, will be that most husbands like to rest at
home and therefore they like the wife to be there. They like Delia Smith to
have done the cooking. They go out into the world and they do great deeds and they
get tired. They want a nice, charming housewife, faithful, pure, dedicated to
making sandwiches. Then when you go home, you can rest and your interest in
someone is the interest that you posit in them in so far you think you can
stabilise them and make them a reference point that will be there when you want
it. And you can nail it down with words or with demonstrations or with rituals
or ceremonies of any kind. You can nail it down and make it stay there you can
rest and you remain interested as long as you think they are at home. If you
happen to go on a long boat on a canal for a quiet weekend when you are
supposed to be in
Now interest is always for the
same reason. Would you think it was as simple as that? It really is. Interest
means that you make an earth for yourself to rest on. In the Egyptian myth of
the origin of the world, out of the primordial ocean comes a little hillock,
and there is a bird rests on that hillock. That bird means spirit, something
like a
Track 10
Now, the symbol of spirit is fire
and the fire precipitates water, like it does if you burn yourself a bit and
make a water blister. The water is the symbol of the chaotic, psychic energy,
passive, waiting to be heated. And then, as the heat, that is the fire,
operates in the water, it turbulates and it creates for itself a little zone or
island and then sticks that up above the level of the water, and then the fiery
spirit can come down and rest on it. But, if you rest on one hillock a long
time you get bored. So what you do, you lay an egg and set fire to yourself and
then try again. That is the origin of the
The continuous process of that…continuously
generating…
Well, actually it is discontinuous in doing it isn’t it? Because it creates these little references and all the references are discrete, like we did the broken line on the A going down on the sinister side. In the Persian analysis, Ahriman, the Devil, means granularity, discontinuity. On the other side is Ahura Mazda or Skylight, which is continuous. Look at the blue sky with no clouds and you see the continuity of blue and you look down and see a grain of sand, separativity. The granularity is called Ahriman, the Devil, and the continuous arc of the blue is the Ahura Mazda, skylight. Now we have this opposition, the opposition between an analytical intellect which breaks things into bits and a unific will which does not break itself into bits, and the will is always positing something to be interested in, but it tends to forget that it posited the object of its own interest.
Let us apply this in the case of the relation man and woman.
Now the primordial polarity arises out of the pre-polarised Infinite. The Infinite Power manifests as S and P, sentience and power. It is a very strange thing; it is very, very subtle. Just think, you feel, you exist even when you are not thinking but if you start thinking about what makes you feel that you exist and you start looking around and you find that you have got a body, and you have hands and arms, legs, head. If I touch myself with my finger, although my protoplasm is continuous, my contact, my contingency, my with-touch-ness, my accident, the way it falls, funnily enough I hit myself there and hurt myself a bit, quite tender there, rather interesting. Now, when it hurts like that, I get an interest, immediately. Where is this point of pain? I must find it exactly and then economically, make a little shield and put it on there. When I’ve found my painful points and then put shields on them I begin to feel secure. But I felt, with my sentience, before I did that, that I could do it. We are fields of Sentient Power but the sentience, our feeling ability, is not the same as the power because we can hold the power in abeyance, we can hold the power so that it is not operative and then we call it potential. Potential means ‘held power.’ Po-tential, power held. This power doesn’t need to go into operation. Now it is an extraordinary difficulty in theories of polarisation. Sentience is that whereby we know that we know, and power is that whereby we initiate the changes in what we know. And yet, we do not have to initiate changes. We can hold the power and then it is potential, it is not operative.
When we are simply sentient without precipitating a form as an object we have held our power of operation still and the sentience and the power are not separated from each other in the sense of dissociated. You are aware that you are sentient, that you feel yourself. You are aware that you can make a gesture, that you can point, that you can punch, you can do these things, yet you don’t have to. So, apparently there is this weird kind of possibility of a dissociation between sentience and power.
Now the possibility of the dissociation of sentience and power, when actualised, is the cause of all that we call insanity, because we feel an infinite potential and yet our actualities may fall very far short of what we feel to be our infinite potential. We don’t actualise all we can do, usually because of fear.
Now that Greek word sabaste, ‘one must terrify the people,’ if every person knew that he was an absolute self-precipitated, initiating being whose sentient power were two aspects of one ultimate reality, then nobody could be ordered about by anybody else. Now if you can’t order people about, who is going to do the washing up? It is possible to get in each other’s way at a single unit sink, to put elbows into ribs in the attempt to be helpful. But it has become, historically, a fact of the division of labour, sentience and power. Once this division is made in the field of awareness, it is possible to identify with either one to the exclusion of the other one.
Track 11
Now let us examine this very
carefully because we have two exactly opposite analyses of this in the
mythology of the East and the West, and if we trace the Indo-Germanic line
right through from
Supposing we say that power, and
the word power is
Now, when the men went off to war they had to learn how to make a bent twig into a straight twig. You probably remember, at least the boys will, making bows and arrows as a child, and any bit of bent twig would do for a bow and any twig would do for an arrow and you found that if you shot a bent arrow it did not fly straight. Now this made you get out your penknife, or even borrow one from a friend who was rich enough to own one, and take off the little knobs that spoiled the straightness of your twig until you finished up, approximately with a straight twig which is an arrow that will fly better. And then you got smart and glued to it a few feathers of a bird at one end and they would act as a drag, a resistance to the air, and keep one end of it behind while the other was in front. You had made a scientific thing, you had analysed, in which case the S then meant male and it meant science.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the lady making hamburgers out of condemned meat, was getting mad at you Supposing there is no war and it is not hunting season and you are sitting outside, there, and you have got your whittling flint with you and you are looking at this twig and going like this and you are not concentrating on the spouse are you, do you remember boys? You are so busy with your twig and you are determined this twig shall be very straight and you haven’t communicated with her. You have not told her the principles of the flight of the arrows. Have you seen a very fat German book called the Introduction to the Principles of the Flight on Arrows, and how you have to put three feathers and twist them in a certain way and if you have got the right twist, it will go like this, it will rotate, and the faster it rotates the more stable it will be in flight and the more accurate and the more you can kill your enemies and the animals and your wife will be very, very proud of you when you have got it right. But you have not told her all about this, and she does not care anyway. In that case, the suppressed energy in her becomes rage and it posits things like soup on the head. Have you ever had soup on the head?
So you see the S and the P can be changed round. When you change the application of the term do not be surprised if somebody else thinks you are being inconsistent. You said S meant female last week and this week you say it means male. When you change what the medieval scholars call your universe of discourse or your frame of reference, providing you say we have changed the frame of reference it is permissible to change the significance. S equals feminine when she is feeling where the husband is and she is in the cave. S is masculine when it means the analytic science of the man straightening his twigs and P is the precision of the male on the hunt or at war; and yet the same thing is pure, naked power of suppressed rage about to smite you. And this polarisation of S and P can occur in an individual human being at any time.
Track 12
Now, apply this and we see that our author has a contradiction between the absoluteness, that is the letter A, the ah just like there is a contradiction between the eagle and the ox, one looks up, the other looks down and yet it is the same symbol and the same power, it is the same power that goes up and the same power that comes down. Nothing goes up except that which came down. Nothing goes down except that which will go up. It is the same, but the universe of discourse or the logical frame of reference, changes and you change it deliberately.
Now the opposition between ah and oo means that the Absolute is infinitely extended, cannot go anywhere, but the U or oo drives, can and does go, and it is going to make a point of interest somewhere, but there isn’t one except the one that it generates with its own push. This means that when young people fall in love, they are not looking at each other at all, they are looking inside themselves at an ideal image of a relational possibility with an entity which doesn’t exist, which they are busy designing, and they look out, and it happens, that at that moment, something goes by, a bi-ped, and the internal designed flashes out and hits this unfortunate creature outside and is pinned onto it, “That is it!”
Would you believe that a man actually told me that when he saw his wife for the first time, he knew he loved her? The very first time! What do you think about that? He believed it didn’t he? Do you remember you believed it? That is because you did not know enough psychology. If you had known that the image of your ideal is not that creature outside but it is your determination to make yourself an ideal rest point, and you are going to model that other creature into that shape if you can, and if it is very, very cunning and has a lot of self-control, then in your presence it will be so be modelled. It will actually conform to the definition you have made. Like a girl I knew, this is a fact, she has one blue eye and one brown eye. She had two boy friends and she always walked in profile, a very cunning girl. That is what you call adjustment to reality.
Another opposition, when the energy from the Absolute drives and comes down and impinges on matter, and matter is the resistance generated by spirit to itself, then at the point of intersection, there is a contradiction again. So, if the force is driving to establish itself, then it is driving into a resistance created by the Absolute. So if we take an example in the world, we might have a small boy playing with a rock and a hammer, and there is a law of action-reaction in the world of matter, he has a hammer and he hits the rock and the hammer bounces and hits him. Now the universal law of action-reaction, not yet known by that boy, hits him. The resistance of matter to an impressed force is there. The individual boy, who is unaware of that law, thinks he can hit that matter and make it give in. He can’t. There is a universal law that there is always reaction to action and that every push will beget a counter-push. And this law is established simply by the Absolute positing itself as a resistance so that no individuated being, and an individuated being is a modality of the Absolute, no individuated being can impose on the Absolute.
Track 13
That is not bad is it? Call The Absolute The Father, the Ab, the Abba. As against the Father the son is always in the wrong. That means that the finite, temporalised, individual human being, if he opposes the Infinite Law and hits with his hammer on the rock, the rock will not behave the way the man wants but the way the Absolute wants. The Absolute is the All-Father. In the Norse religion God is called the All-Father. He is the origin of rocks, the mineral world, plants, animals, men, whatever else there are, He is the ultimate origin of all of them and He is not going to let go of His own authority, but He will allow you to have a relative authority within your field of operation, but that Absolute will never allow you to take absolute control over the Absolute but only absolute control over your little bit. And the absolute control over your little bit, when you get it, is called your talent. It is a seed, a potential lent to you for application. Now does not this make us terribly self-responsible?
Let us add to this, another little thought, energy. There was a nature film on last week and it showed some chamois jumping down a mountain, which was covered in icy patches. And these baby chamois jumped up and down, they fell on their backs, on their heads. They were being jumped. They had not yet got reflexive control of their own energy. They were being jumped by energy. Energy is sentient, the energy wants to jump. The cause of the jump is that energy came from the spring, that is to say, from the Sun, and the energy is sentient, and when the solar energy gets into a living body, it is so delighted at its first entrance into that body it wants to use that body and to try what that body can do, and it uses the body and apparently the body jumps but really the energy is jumping the body. And until the child grows up and gets hold of its own energy it is at the mercy of that energy, that sentient power. Now that ties in with the biting the tongue.
If you can bite your tongue, you have got hold of your primordial energy of will and you can avoid being jumped by the energy. And if you cannot bite your tongue you are being jumped by Universal Energy which is simply experimenting with your being to see what it can do. And it is not individuated in you by you until you assume the authority for it. Jesus puts it in the expression, “My Father works and I work.”
Now you know that your body is grown by cosmic forces from conception onwards and that it creates organs, cell division, organisation, heart, liver, pancreas, spleen, everything you have got is being conducted for you by Universal Sentient Power which is called God. And this process of organising your being goes on and on and is looking forward to a time when you will be so developed you can say, “Right, Generative Power of the Universe,” that is called the Father, “you have done a good job, you have made the organism usable, and now I, the individual, am going to work on the organism in the same way that you have.” And when you can say that your work furthers the development of your organism towards greater efficiency in every way, when it is doing that you are then doing the work of that Father, and you may be advancing in one direction and slowing down in another direction, even if you advance too much in one direction you might become unbalanced, you might forget the other direction. So, you keep oscillating, developing in a certain way to a certain distance and then coming back and developing another thing that you had forgotten about.
Our Father, that is the Universal Power, brought us into being and is moving us through evolution towards a point where we can say, “Thank you very much, I have got an organism and now I am going to use it as an individual because I know that is what you want me to do. I am going to consult with you,” that is, inwardly, in your self, in your highest point of awareness, which is the divinity in you, find out what you can really do and then do it efficiently to the best of your ability and then you say, “I work also.” When you do that you have got the control of your tongue, you have got control over the energy in your body. When you have got that control you will not make harmful, destructive remarks to other people that would destroy their organism or put their evolution back. You will always work towards higher levels of co-operation.
Let us close with a reminder of the Author. The Author is the Absolute Power driving itself into time-matter to provide itself with the resistance whereby it will educate itself about its possibilities and about the contributions it can make by its own personal efforts to the further evolution of universal life.
Shall we rest awhile?
Re read by M.L October, 2011
Talk given at Parklands 31st October, 1982