Contents

Reflexive Self-consciousness. 2

Nescience. 3

Undefinable Consciousness. 3

Magic and Suggestion. 4

Fear 5

All Ideas Are Contained Within The One. 5

The Tip of a Pine Needle and a Mountain are the Same Size. 6

The Electron. 7

Field Spin. 7

Nerve Growth. 7

Animal Magnetism and E.S.P. 7

Field and Electric Current 8

Equilibrium.. 9

Materialists. 9

The Gross Material World. 9

Frequency. 10

Influence. 11

Embrace Fear 11

Fear Exercise. 11

Fear Of The Lord. 12

How to Fear Properly. 12

Jeremy Bentham.. 13

Mental Disease. 14

Spiritual Creations and Material Tyrannies. 14

Pursuing Fear 15

Accepting Fear 16

The Highest Fear 16

Karma. 16

Bravery and Courage. 17

Delinquents and Educators. 17

The Body — The Microcosm.. 18

 

 

 

Reflexive Self-consciousness

Transcribed by J. Bailey and with diagrams and arbitrary headings by the same.

Square brackets [] denote additions made to clarify points.

 

[Eugene begins, as he does in most of these sessions

with the reading of questions that members of the group had brought with them,

written on slips of paper.]

 

“Although I have not heard you use the term ‘higher mind’, I take it, when you refer to The Centre, and Universal Mind, Boehme’s experience, Illumination, Zen, the Golden Flower, all refer to the same thing as Gurdjieff meant. Are the ideas you are presenting to us a way of seeking the illumination by resonance and harmonics, an alternative to driving in to the centre, a slower way to the same result? Is there a practical exercise which can place a person in contact with Universal Mind by harmonic resonance?”

“If, when one musical note is played all the notes in the universe are contained within that note, does it correspond in the realm of ideas that all ideas are within the original idea, that is, the idea of creation?”

Those two are linked very, very closely together and can be dealt with together.

The third statement is in the form of a challenge designed to accelerate development. It says,

“It could be said that what you expound to us is a brilliant philosophical system, valid until some potential attacker discovers a weak link. I challenge you to perform an act of simple magic that will establish beyond doubt that Self-Reflexive Consciousness is not only an idea but a fact.”

And then follows a quote from my ‘Defence of The Devil’ [one of Eugene’s ‘Blue Books’] — “because I desired not to be first therefore I waited”.

The question is not asked as I originally intended because there are newcomers to the group which would have made difficulties. I thought a more personal attack would have been useful.

Now this is designed, obviously, as an accelerator and a tester. And the rule is that when a test comes, the man who — it’s usually a man, very seldom a woman — the man who initiates the test, by law, must receive back upon himself the demonstration.

I must examine the question very carefully, because there are one or two little points in it that need discussion. It says, what I have expounded might be a brilliant philosophical system, valid until some potential attacker discovers a weak link.

Now the first part of that might be relevant, or not. Factually, I am not presenting a philosophical system at all, nor a system of any kind, but a mode of approach to certain problems. We’ve said before on many occasions that there is no sys-tem other than a group of ideas that will help us for a time.

 

SYSTEM

sys —

tem —

saviour

time

A sys-tem is a saviour for a time

 

To be philosophical, it would have to be, by definition, purely rational in structure, and a large amount of what we are dealing with is based on feeling ... super-rational feeling. And therefore it could not truly be said that what we are talking about is a philosophical system at all. [3:42]

The suggestion that it might be valid until a potential attacker discovers a weak link is also not true, because a potential attacker is not an actual attacker, and only actual attackers could in fact discover weak links.

Now, the challenge for me to perform an act of simple magic is a nice challenge. I like it. There are many simple magics that can be done, chiefly in the realm of organic disturbances in people’s bodies, they being the most sensitive organisms for receiving this kind of stuff. If you remember the definition of magic is the production of change in conformity with the Will — and the statement ‘the Will is the point of initiation of a change in the field’ which is experienced as feeling — then it’s most obviously true that the simplest magic must act directly on the field of the organism of the being who requires a demonstration.

But then it says something that is quite impossible. ‘That will establish beyond doubt that Reflexive Self-consciousness is not only an idea but a fact.’

Now, no amount of demonstration of changes in the material world, or in the physical organism, or in the mind, can establish, outside the changing system, this concept of Reflexive Self-Consciousness. If it had been possible to demonstrate this beyond a shadow of a doubt — that is to say, empirically, scientifically — it would already have been done so.

Some of you may have seen last night a program in Lifeline [a television program of the sixties], of a man who claims to be a spiritualist and who used a psychometric technique for abstracting certain information from the person presented to him ... the psychiatrist’s wife. Now in fact, that demonstration, to anybody who saw it, certainly gave information that was not gained by the way Chan Canasta [a stage magician on the TV programme] suggested. It was not gained by manipulating, either mathematically or manually, cards or books or anything else. Those who noticed the man, when he was working — Douglas Johnson — will have seen that while he was getting the information and talking, he was not looking at the woman at all. And he looked at her when he said something that he had gained, not when he was actually gaining it. When he was gaining it he was looking away from her. And therefore the suggestion that he might have read either consciously or unconsciously muscle movements in her, was not valid.

And possibly the silliest statements made last night were by the statistician, who made a lot of quite irrelevant statements about it, which were debunked by another fellow on the same panel later. [6:49]

Nescience

Now, Reflexive Self-consciousness can only be known by the person who has it, by definition. Supposing we postulate for a moment that there is a realm of absolute nescience, an absolute not-knowing, and say for a moment that the mineral world corresponds with it. It wouldn’t be true, but it is a western heresy to think so ... that the mineral world is absolutely not conscious. If that were so we could not demonstrate to a stone that we have got consciousness. In order to demonstrate at all we have to lay something out so that it can be counted. The ‘mon’ in ‘demonstrate’ implies that the thing must be counted. And therefore a demonstration requires a mathematical expression. The very nature of Reflexive Self-consciousness is beyond this mathematical concept. Mathematics is based on separate units which add up and come to a total. And that total has significance only in so far as it is a short-hand expression for the number of units involved in the calculation. [8:06]

Undefinable Consciousness

Now consciousness itself, as we’ve said before, is philosophically undefinable. That is, no philosopher has ever defined Consciousness. Consciousness is that in which things exist and are defined. The things are defined, but Consciousness is not defined ... nor is it definable. Consequently we can say that Consciousness itself cannot be demonstrated as a fact because Consciousness is not a fact.

A fact is an act of force — a force act [f-act].

And the act, by very definition of the word, implies a finiting process. And Consciousness itself is not finite. And therefore a fact, no matter how hard it is, the hardest fact that we can get, like a diamond, by definition being a finite is not Consciousness, and therefore can establish nothing whatever about Consciousness.

Consciousness is an immediate awareness by a conscious being, by a subject. The object of a subject is something that the subject has made actually by its own power. So we see there is no act, whether of simple magic or simple science or anything else, that can in fact demonstrate Reflexive Self-consciousness.

If we take for example a psycho-physical parallelism, and show that for every act of conscious Will there is a corresponding movement in the nervous system, a circulation of nervous energy from a centre in the brain through some other centres and back to the same centre, we would establish by that demonstration that nervous energies under certain conditions can arise from a centre and circulate and return to that centre. We could postulate a reflexion, a back bending of the nervous energy current. But that would not in any sense prove that there was a conscious concomitant of the circulation of nervous energy.

So that Consciousness itself, being an undefined and indefinable, can not be demonstrated. And the attempt to demonstrate it is just misconceived, and based on this fundamental confusion which arises from thinking that Consciousness is presentation of objects.

The objects themselves are not Consciousness. They are presented in it. And although we may demonstrate a series of objects following each other, and a certain logical relation between them as when we say, “one plus one is two” and “one plus one plus ONE PLUS ONE is four, therefore two twos are four,” that kind of demonstration is of the object relation, it is not of the Consciousness.

In fact therefore, the first two parts of this statement are really not a ground at all for what has been required. The question of whether to perform an act of simple magic or not must therefore be viewed quite independently of the conclusion to be derived from it. It says, “That will establish beyond doubt”.

Now, we’ve said that nothing whatever can establish beyond doubt Consciousness to any being other than to itself. [11:55]

Magic and Suggestion

If all the beings in this room are conscious, their Consciousness is of, for, by, and from themselves as subjects. They cannot even demonstrate their Consciousness to themselves. Either they actually reflect back on their Consciousness and in the act of doing so know that they are reflexively conscious, or they do not. No amount of physical demonstration, or organic distortions that the Will might produce, could possibly demonstrate Reflexive Self-consciousness.

For instance, in a demonstration about three years ago, a similar challenge was made, and the man who put it up was asked if he would join in a simple experiment to show that certain influences were transmissible. Now he thought that it would prove something. In actual fact, when certain organic discomforts arose in himself, which he knew he had not caused and he could not remove until they were removed for him, when he thought about it, he said, It could have been by suggestion, because he had initiated the question. So you see, there’s actually no mode of eliminating it. Now one of the first things to observe is that when this kind of idea occurs to a person, it comes out of a certain finite centre. It cannot come from Consciousness itself. Because pure Consciousness doesn’t make the kind of error that would say, ‘potential’ attacker when there are only ‘actual’ attackers. Nor would it make the one about ‘establishing beyond doubt, Consciousness,’ and so on.

Therefore it has come from a finite centre. [13:41]

Fear

Now, whenever something comes from a finite centre, if the same centre is attacked, it must necessarily fear the return of its own energy. This means to say that the author of this question has in himself a centre of fear.

Now actually, in the handwriting, there is evidence of this fear at a certain line. The sixth line in this shows the evidence of this fear. Now this fear belongs to a sub-ent [sub-entity] and the fear is that the challenge might be taken up, and in the process of being taken up might cause certain things to be inhibited, to be destroyed. Now because that fear is there, that fear itself — if I were to ask the author of this challenge to stand in the middle of the carpet here — that fear itself is sufficient to produce changes in the organism.

So it is quite impossible to demonstrate to the satisfaction of anybody here that such a thing would be a proof of the Reflexive Self-consciousness of any other person ... when in fact it could be done entirely by suggestion.

So it would not be a demonstration in the sense required.

The question therefore of whether to carry on with such a thing would have to be evaluated on another level. One of the simplest kinds of acts of magic is to induce a change in the Will of the person — or a change in the metabolism of the person — or a very, very simple one, a change in the heartbeat of a person. But these things are all known to be producable under hypnosis by suggestion, and therefore there is no proof conclusive.

So I would suggest, because these things could be done, and could be suggestion, that the question be reconsidered on another level, and see whether the actual disturbance of the sub-ents who initiated it have actually made it worthwhile writing it down. Because it certainly must put a cat amongst the pigeons in fact to think up such a thing, and then to have to re-think it on the inside.

So, I’ll leave that for the time being, and then if the author of the statement feels like an act of simple magic, which would have to act upon him, and he would have to feel it, and he would have to say that when it has arisen he cannot alter it, and he’d have to be absolutely sure that there was no element of suggestion in it or of fear. And that being so, then we could carry on with it and do the experiment.

So I’ll leave that for a little water to flow under the bridge and return to the other two questions. [16:50]

All Ideas Are Contained Within The One.

When one musical note is played, all the notes in the universe are contained within that note. Does it correspond in the realm of ideas that all ideas are within the original idea, that is, the idea of creation?

Description: ripple.jpgNow it does follow that all ideas are contained within the one. Remember, we’ve said before that the seamless garment of Christ symbolises the Absolute continuity of Universal Substance and Spirit ... substance being a modality of it. If we let this white paper represent Spirit, which is Force, which is Power, there is nothing other than it, and it is not made of parts. We must imagine it to be continuous. Then if we make a movement in any part, we necessarily alter all parts. We cannot distort even the slightest bit of that paper without altering the tension relation within the whole lot. This means to say that if I draw a circle on here, in the act of drawing it, I have made a ripple. As this chalk goes round, it vibrates the paper and the back board and the air behind it and everything else, actually sufficiently strongly for a sensitive, a fellow like Douglas Johnson, to be able to pick up the fact that I was doing that, even if he were in the other corner of the room with his back to me. [18:26]

When I go round and make a little circle like that, I vibrate that paper round it, and round that and round that, with diminishing intensity but it actually goes out infinitely so that I cannot draw a shape without drawing that same shape in the surrounding space in a less intense manner.

Now in fact, if there were only one point in the Universe — or to be more accurate in the Absolute — and that one point simply posited itself in that manner: if there were no other points to resist it, then the motion of that point would spread throughout infinite space without any loss of power whatever. That is to say, it would be equally strong at an inch, at two inches, at three inches diameter and so on, outwards. The cause then, of the diminution of power as we go away from the centre is the fact that other centres exist and are also broadcasting their forces, and the result is that they interfere with each other. And the nearer we go to any given centre the greater is the interference by that centre with the motions from every other centre. [19:55]

The Tip of a Pine Needle and a Mountain are the Same Size

There is a saying in the Tao Teh King: The tip of a pine needle and a mountain are the same size.

Description: hexonic1.jpgNow, it does not mean metaphorically. It does not mean that if you get a microscope and look at the tip of a pine needle it will look like a mountain. We know that. It will ... including the irregularities. Those of you who’ve seen the back leg of a bee under a microscope will see just how knobbly it is. And if you take an individual hair off its leg, which looks quite smooth, you will find it’s quite knobbly [under a microscope]. And if you cut off one of the knobs and put it under an electron microscope, you will find that it’s more knobbly. The smaller we go the more knobbly the thing has become, because they are made of fundamental vortical spins of power ... which are like little knobs.

So a straight line under a microscope would look as if it were made of jagged pieces.

The tip of the pine needle is said to be as big as the mountain, not because it would look like a mountain under a microscope, and not because the mountain viewed from a sufficient distance would stimulate only a tiny portion of the retina like the pine needle would, but simply because the pine needle itself is disturbing infinite space in the shape of the pine needle ... this to infinity. And the mountain itself is disturbing infinite space in the shape mountain, outside and in, and as both the pine needle tip and the mountain are propagating their motions to infinity, they are exactly the same size. That is, they are both infinite. So you see this is not a figure of speech. It’s a statement about the dynamics of form within a continuum of power.

This means to say that if we know this fundamental fact, then if we take any idea whatever and extend it, it will go to infinity. And in the process it will include all the other ideas which are also extending to infinity. We can then collapse from infinity all the forms that there are, back on to a point, such as the most simple type of point, the circle — which is the most economic one we have. And we can then see that the circle contains within itself, all the formal actualising — all the formal implications or in-foldings — of all forms whatever.

Now if I get a sheet of rubber — I’ve done this with portraits of human beings, which is very amusing — but if I get a piece of rubber, and draw on it a circle while the sheet of rubber is in equilibrium, and then I pull certain points of that circle out by stretching the rubber, then I can pull out and make any kind of face whatever by simply distorting the original circle. What the circle does is circumscribe a zone. This funny fellow is only a zone circumscribed in the same way, and he is fundamentally simply a circle distorted [Eugene refers to diag. while speaking].

Now if we chase back any organic form, we will chase it back to the egg and therefore we chase it back to the circle. The egg from which all living beings derive is the geometrical, internal term of being. That egg, by distortion of its field, modalises itself. If the field of that egg moves out in this manner, the forces in the egg will distribute themselves, the skin of the egg will stretch, the nucleus will split, and there will then arise two cells from it. It is by field distortion that this process of cellular division occurs. The field must distort, stretch, and disrupt the bondage of the material elements of the egg. [24:23]

Description: christ_cross_circle1.JPGSo we see that when Jacob Boehme said, he who understands that diagram understands everything, he meant it, because it contains in itself the idea of circumscription, which is the idea of the limiting factor that brings all beings whatever into being. And it contains the vertical, the concept of the actualising force, the penetrating force — and the horizontal, the passive or receiving force. So we have a glyph of the cross in the circle which represents the very concept of the conscription of all beings whatever, and of their activity which means their spirit origin, and their passivity which means their inertia.

The Electron

Description: atom.tifSo that every being whatever is symbolised in the circle with the cross in it. So if we reduce all ideas whatever, we will actually find that this cross in the circle covers their essential qualities. Supposing we say, Well, let’s apply it. Push it right down to the level of the electron. Now, an electron is represented as a little energy packet like a sphere, and that energy packet is something like the earth, and it has spin on it. And it is travelling round the centre, whether it’s a proton or some mass of protons and other things, and in the act of it passing round the centre, it is distorting its form in certain ways, producing tensions within itself and actually polarising itself in the same way that the earth is polarised. So that in fact, there is a vertical within the electron, and there is also the horizontal. An electron has an equator, because it’s got spin.

Field Spin

So whether we are talking about the earth or the solar system itself, or an electron or any other entity whatever that exists ... all entities have got on themselves this glyph of the cross in the circle not simply as a symbol that might be applied metaphorically, but as a dynamic fact.

If you take the human being, and his head and his chest and his belly and so on, he has a spinal axis. Now that axis is equivalent to the one that runs through the earth, and has a north and south pole. There are forces going round the spine like this, and those forces are actually the cause of the outgrowth of the nervous system. They spin out the nerves by creating gradients along which the nerves are precipitated.

Nerve Growth

You know that when a nerve is growing from the body, it sends out a filament. On the end of that filament, under the microscope, there’s a little knob. And that knob burrows its way through the tissue from where it is to, say, a muscle. And in the tissue there is a gradient. Now this gradient is measured and found to be a chemical gradient, but not merely a chemical gradient, it is also a force gradient ... an electrical gradient. That little knob burrows through the tissue and draws out behind, it like a spider does, a filament. And when it gets to the muscle then it starts to grow over the muscle and put out its endings so that it can send a force down.

Now, the cause of the gradient in the tissue is the spin of the field in the being. And this field is experienced as pure Feeling.

Animal Magnetism and E.S.P.

You may remember the experiment that rather shocked the men in France who were trying to disprove Mesmer’s hypothesis of animal magnetism, when they hypnotised people and gave them verbal suggestions. And by producing results they then said, all the results are the product of verbal suggestion, and therefore there is no animal magnetism.

Now in fact, it was just wish fulfilment on their part to say that all the effects were produced by verbal suggestions, because while one of the doctors was examining a woman who had been hypnotised and he was holding a glass of water which she had had, he absent-mindedly put his pencil into the water and stirred it. When he stirred it, she became dizzy and fell over. Now this rather shocked them. So they said immediately, it is suggestion, she has seen him stir it, she is identified with the glass and therefore when the water spins she thinks she is dizzy.

So he turned his back on her again and did it surreptitiously. She fell on the floor again.

He then thought that she had seen slight muscle movements in his shoulder and so on, and again it was suggestion. So, he then withdrew into another room and the other doctor kept an eye on the girl. And when he stirred that thing in the other room, she still fell on the floor. Somehow the identification had taken place. This was a simple act of magic. She had become identified with the glass spontaneously. But once she had become identified with it, then the same kind of connection — the rapport that you saw in the psychometric demonstration of Johnson’s — existed. And consequently, no matter where that water was placed, when it spun round, she felt this spinning and became dizzy.

Now this convinced them that Mesmer had not been entirely wrong. And that kind of thing led, through successive stages of experiment, to the present outlook on extra-sensory perception. There is still an attempt by sceptical minds to say that statistics could disprove extrasensory perception, but that again is quite unscientific ... it’s just a will to keep a certain materialistic outlook because of the implications of a non-materialistic outlook.

Field and Electric Current

When look at the axis of a human being, the spinal axis, and realise this fact ... there is an electrical current going down that spine. Now it is an elementary fact that when a current is going down a wire, then a field appears round that wire. And this means that wherever there is an electrical flow there must be a field. So the fact that we have a spinal column at all, and that there is a direction of flow down it, means that there is a field round it. Now this field must act — because it is spinning — like a centrifugal force.

So that the forces that come in and that are gathered from food in the process of breaking food down in the act of digestion — the forces so released will be spun by the field out through the various channels in the body, which channels have actually been made in the first place by this field activity. This is why you will find the mystical statement, that the fact that the arteries and veins are hollow in the body means that there has been a spinning force there to make them — and the fact that it’s centrifugal means that it is flying away from a centre.

If we then put down — what a mechanistic behaviourist of the Watson School in New York would say — a taxism of a negative order, is always accompanied by that type of reaction psychologically we call ‘fear’. So that where there is a flying away from a centre, the field which is experienced as feeling must be one of fear of something at the centre. So it actually flies from a centre as from a fearful something. And it flies to a limit and precipitates at the limit the wall of the artery or vein or whatever it is.

This means that all the hollows in the body — whether of man or animals or plants — all the hollows in the body are centres of fear. And this fear is the cause of the continuous flight away from the fear, and this flight away from the fear is what we call life.

Now if you look at existentialist philosophy you will find a nice word, we’ll put it down because it looks so nice when it is spelt ... we take this existentialist word Ur Angst.

 

Now Ur Angst means pre-rational fear.

 

And itself is stated by the existentialists to be the very ground of life. Now, it sounds very, very modern when we say ‘existentialism’, and when we talk about Zorge and Ur Angst, about a primary concern, a fear that drives all the force in the universe through space.

When we remember that we have nothing except spirit — there is nothing other than spirit, and that this spirit is sentient — it is intelligent — it is dynamic — it produces change within itself. Then whenever it moves at all, it must be that where it is moving from, it will be negative, and where it is moving to, it will be positive. Or to put it teleologically, it likes the negative end less than it likes the positive end. So it actually produces, between negative and the positive, a flow. And because it is sentient, it must experience this flow as a moving away from an undesirable, and towards a desirable.

Description: away-from and towards.jpgNow, I’ve just said that it sounds very modern.

If we go back to early Hindu philosophy, we will find the statement that God, before creation, was sitting alone, and suddenly said to himself reflexively, I am alone, and got the wind up. He became afraid, and in the act of becoming afraid a peculiar thing happened. This Absolute spirit suddenly became aware that there was nothing other than it, and a tremulation went through it in all directions.

Now the word FEAR means just this primary tremulation.

Equilibrium

Imagine this Absolute in a state of perfect equilibrium, and you have a good imagination if you can. When you think of perfect equilibrium, if you examine your thought very carefully, you are imagining that mythical entity, a solid material with no changes of relation internal to it.

Try to imagine anything whatever in perfect equilibrium.

Take a billiard ball. Imagine that all its parts are in static relation, that there is no change internally whatever, and immediately you will see that that concept necessarily derives from the material end and from insensitivity. You must be very, very insensitive before you can believe that there exists anything whatever that is static, absolutely. And therefore we have to posit something exactly opposite: namely that the spirit is pure dynamism. [37:06]

Not being static — that is to say not being material like a billiard ball with parts hypothetically in non-changing relation — the whole Absolute, Infinite Field of Spirit, which is power, is in continuous infinite motion in all directions whatever. And these infinite motions in all directions whatever are experienced by it as, movings-away-from—towards. It must have these two sensations within itself. It is moving from and to.

a a S                u a S            a a  O

Now it moves from Alpha to Omega. There’s the  Greek version, there’s the Hebrew version, there’s the English version, it moves from Alpha to Omega.

‘O-mega’ is ‘big O’ and is also substantial earth activity.

Materialists

This Absolute non-finite, in its primary ripples which it experiences as fear, in order to get rid of this fear tries to stop the tremulations. Now the top level frequency of Spirit is so high that at the gross material level, it is nothing whatever ... it just doesn’t exist. Therefore materialists don’t believe it. And they don’t believe it because they are afraid of it. They are afraid of even a little bit of it.

If you take a perfectly gross, materialist humanist, and ask him whether he can consider inside his own mind, without anxiety arising in it, the possibility that he might be wrong in his materialism, and that there might be an intelligent force above him, you will find that he cannot honestly and truthfully say that he can consider it. Something in his mind rejects it. This something is fear. [39:06]

The Gross Material World

Now when we come to consider that the gross material world is a very, very slow vibration and that the Spirit world is a very, very rapid vibration, we can see the purpose of making the gross material world at all. The vibrations in the gross material world are so very, very slow that we can’t feel them. And because we can’t feel them, then we rest upon them as security. So a human being will actually feel safe on the earth, because he cannot actually feel the next earthquake building up underneath him.

The Japanese manage to feel safe in between earthquakes, because the periodicity is not so frequent as to disturb them every morning at 8:00. This slow beat of the earth has been specially produced to stand as a basis of security and for the elimination of fear. Now fear only means, as the word tells you, that the original force of the field is actively differentiating.

 

 

Fear

F — force of the field

ea — actively

R — differentiating

 

 

You experience every differentiation in your body as fear, as apprehension, as discomfort, and an attempt to get away from the thing that initiates this movement. All that human beings are trying to do when they are doing what they call ‘system-making,’ is an attempt to make something that doesn’t change. And if they manage to produce that non-changing thing, they will stand on it and say, Now I’m all right.

Now this non-changing is pure fiction. Everything in the universe changes and the non-changing is a construct by insensitive beings who have willed insensitivity for security purposes. [40:59]

Let’s imagine the top frequency of the universe — we represent by aleph — is so very, very fine that as soon as you get an impression in your mind ... it departs. It’s too fast to hold it. It goes away. It is produced by this power, and this power is itself intelligent. And it is produced because this power, by its very essence, cannot help doing this sort of thing. It is one thing that God cannot help doing ... namely being God. He is essentially creative, essentially dynamic, and therefore spirit which is working through us all the time is continuously trying to fly away from itself. And this flight away from itself, if were not curved, would result in the complete annihilation of everything. But because the flight away form itself produces this continuous Ur Angst, this fear, therefore to get rid of it, it tries to posit something at the end, to block the tremendously fast frequencies. And the only way to do it is to cause the forces to curve. Once a curve has been made, and the forces rotate, you then have a mode of blocking these very, very fine motions of spirit. And then you can fill in all the space within the finited zone and make it apparently solid. [42:33]

The conceptualising of a being, the attempt-to-integrate of a being, is only the attempt of that being to gain security. The greatest mystics don’t bother to make themselves secure, because they know that security is the same thing as bondage. If you make yourself secure, you have made a system. And in the process you have de-spiritualised yourself, because spirit is pure initiative. Supposing we take a man … [finishes side of tape]

 

 

… [second side of tape]        

Frequency

… allows us not to notice the rise and fall. Because at the slow level of material evolution, a man can be born here and die there. He can be born and die within a quarter of an inch on that curve. So he never knows that there would have been a trough over there. [Eugene is here indicating a diag.] So if we take the fact that it takes 25,000 years to shift through the houses of the Zodiac, then from our point of view as finite individuals we can ignore it, because it does not concern us in our short span of life. So the slower the wave, the more security there is for the more ignorant person.

The ignorant person is profoundly secure if he’s within a system the time-scale of which grossly exceeds his own. Thus, at the same time, although he’s gained security, he’s gained something else that he won’t want if ever he discovers it. Every low frequency down here is subjected to another one not quite so low. And the one above it can interfere with the behaviour of any little vortex that spins on this long wave.

Let’s imagine we draw a nice long wave like this, and imagine for a moment it’s on the sea. If we look at the sea very carefully we’ll find on it little vortical spins of water. Those vortical spins are exactly the same as individual human beings. An individual human being, as individuated, is finited. And he is simply a little vortex of force on that wave. Now he cannot know, because of his small scale, the whole cycle of this long wave, so he can’t see the changes that will occur, so he can’t see the collapse of his dreams and the destruction of his empire, so he can be smug [S-MUG] spirit — mug, only because he is ignorant. But because of his dimensions he constitutes a harmonic of that wave. That is to say, he is like an upper partial on that string. And above him there is another wave, and above that there is another one, and so on. [46:11]

Influence

Now because he is a partial on this long wave then the next level above him, here, will be able to influence him and he won’t know anything about the cause. He will undergo changes which are induced in him just by another level of being which he, being finited and identified with the long wave, cannot possibly comprehend. And this is the ground of simple magic ... that if you are identified with this material body then a being who is identified with a higher level can find in you something with which you have identified, and then induce a resonance change, and you will not feel that resonance in its initiation, but you will feel a distortion, a discomfort, an appearance in you of Zorge und Angst, simultaneously, and you won’t be able to stop it ... because you are not able to stop a thing unless you are conscious of it. [47:20]

Embrace Fear

Now right at the top here we have alpha waves, or aleph waves, and right down at the bottom we have omega. And pitched on this long wave are little omicrons, little ‘o’s, little ‘i’s, the sub-ents of the Universal Body. They are all entirely determined in their thought processes — even in the questions that they set — by processes that are going on at higher frequencies. So they are completely de-pendent, hanging-from, those forces which are above them.

We’ve said that this axis in the spine and the fact that nervous energy, electrical energy, goes down it, evidences a field, and that this field is spinning out and thus acting in a centrifugal manner, and that psychologically this must be experienced as fear, then we can say a very peculiar thing. If a man wants to attain Absolute Consciousness then he must do a very peculiar thing. He must embrace fear. That is, he must not try to get rid of it [Fear]. If he does he is bound to focus on an object.

But if he faces fear as an essential part of himself then he will not get identified with a system but he will move progressively the other way.

Fear Exercise

Now there is a question here about an exercise, an exercise that we might do. Here is a very good exercise. If we look inside ourselves at our feeling, and then present ourselves with ideas about anything whatever, we will find that those ideas appear to us with a halo of feeling round them, and in that feeling there will be liking and disliking, love and hate, courage and fear, according to the nature of the idea.

You now deliberately select an idea that causes fear in you, and when you are experiencing that fear, you are actually lifting yourself off the lower wave. Because when you start experiencing fear, it is a sign that you are becoming more sensitive. A little girl who didn’t cry when she fell over, didn’t cry when she was scalded, didn’t cry when she fell in the fire, was discovered to be insensitive. There was something the matter with her nerves.[50:08]

Fear Of The Lord

When we become aware of these fears, let us know that we are becoming more spiritual ... simply because we can feel fear. This is tremendously important. If we kill fear, stifle it, or do what Gurdjieff would call ‘setting up buffers’, then we are progressively de-spiritualising ourselves. Fear is the positive movement of spirit and the guarantee of creativity. It is not a thing to be dodged.

 

 

When we understand the meaning of fear properly, we can understand why Christ chose crucifixion, chose the most fearful thing for himself, and why in fact we are told,

“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord”.

 

 

 

 

[Psalms 111, 10

Job 28. 28

Proverbs 1. 7

Proverbs 9.7

Proverbs 15.33

Isaiah 11.2

Isiaih33.6]

 

Description: alif.jpgThe lord is the principle of order, L-ORD, in the universe. That principle is represented by these changes of frequency at the different levels. And it says there is a hierarchy. The slow waves are subjugated by the fast waves. The top wave of all absolutely controls, by internal resonances, by harmonics, all the lower frequencies. [51:32]

How to Fear Properly.

If then we fear the Lord, and don’t kill the fear of the Lord, we will understand just precisely what is happening on all levels. What we want to do is find out how to fear properly.

You remember the story of the princess who said that she couldn’t feel pain, and some enterprising gentleman put a pea under seven eiderdowns, and she still couldn’t feel it. Well, this is a fairy tale of mythic origin representing the same thing. That princess is your soul. It is said to be a princess because the soul is female relative to spirit. It is male relative to the body when it orders it, but it is female relative to spirit.

In fact if it is said that the male aspect is always positive and active, then there is only one true male, and that is Spirit itself. And everything below the level of spirit is automatically female.

So aleph, alpha is the first letter, and the second letter is Beth, and that represents the boundary of femaleness. B for boundary. Remember the old form of B is a circle. Once such circle has been made it is subjected to the subtle vibrations of the aleph traversing it ... to which it is entirely transparent.

Description: evolution of the letter b.JPGTo get the Fear of the Lord is the precondition of evolving into Spirit. Gross materialists have no fear of the Lord, they don’t believe he exists. And consequently they are colossally insensitive. Just like those people of the statistical order who can actually watch that man Douglas Johnson doing that performance, and then make even verbal errors, and use statistics to bolster themselves up, when all statistics is based on large scale probabilities, and have no application whatever to an individual ... which any statistician knows, and therefore fundamentally inside himself he is being dishonest. He hasn’t got the integrity that Johnson, in all humility, said he had.

This fact of the function of fear is tremendously important in relation to the exercise we are required to do. Look inside our minds, find something we don’t like, and do not try to kill the fear. Try instead to see the reason for fearing. Try and see that it’s a very, very good thing to fear. That the little girl who couldn’t feel any pain when she fell in the fire didn’t have very long to live unless somebody took care of her. Fear is our only means of evolving. What we want to do is fear intelligently and not fear rubbish.

Jeremy Bentham

And yow you know that Jeremy Bentham, the British utilitarian, when he was a little boy was told by the servants of his father that there was a bogey in the lavatory, and that this naughty bogey would get him, and this used to terrify him. And when he thought about this terror later on and realised there wasn’t a bogie in the lavatory. Then he thought very, very carefully about it and he thought, we can be afraid of things that don’t exist, and this fear is stupid. But that didn’t make him not afraid of real things. It simply made him not afraid of fiction. And Jeremy Bentham is famous for reforming the English legal system by putting his finger on what he called fictions. And his work on the theory of fictions is very interesting ... where he takes a whole series of concepts that in fact have no validity whatever, most of them legal, and which terrify millions of people. [55:49]

There’s a thing called red tape. Really it’s the tape of blood that ties certain families together. But they use this tape and turn it into another colour — blue tape — and make an administration to terrify people by making them fill in forms with incomprehensible words and sentences.

Now, this is fiction, and one should not be afraid of that kind of stuff. But one should be afraid of Spirit Aleph. The whole of the Bible is nothing else but a book telling you how to be afraid of God and not afraid of man’s fictions.

So when you look inside yourself, look for a fear and ask yourself,

 

“Is this fear of a fiction made by man, or is it a fear of the Lord.

Is it a fear of an inherent law of the universe

which I must observe if I am to evolve and to preserve myself?

I preserve myself only in order to evolve.

And when I realise that I don’t need to preserve myself at all,

then my evolution will be complete”.

 

Now, is that fairly clear? Does it cover the particular question? [57:06]

Would you describe fear of the Lord as a realisation? For instance, that by judging, you put yourself under the Law?

Yes, if you understand just how you put yourself under the Law.

Remember that when you judge — and I assume you mean ‘condemn’, not just evaluating — when you judge you somebody, you have, by our first rule — any idea contains all other ideas — and therefore that represents you. It also represents the person you are judging and these are necessarily in identical relation at infinity.

So, whatever you assert as to be condemned in this being — we’ll say, supposing supposing you don’t like that corner. So you say, I don’t like that corner in that man, so you must cut that corner off and put round it a wall. Simeon and Levi digged a wall to their own hurt [Gen. 49:6]. [1]Simeon and Levi killed a man because he did something naughty to one of the girls in the town. They didn’t say, Why did you do it? He liked her, you see. And that was biological, and biology is fundamentally Spirit at the material level. So they were arguing with Spirit when they killed him.

Mental Disease

The fact that you condemn a portion of another being, plus the fact that you are identical with that being, means that you have condemned a part of your own being. This means that somewhere in your brain, if you condemn an idea in a man, you have condemned that idea in your brain. Now, every time that you condemn an idea in your own brain you isolate it. You spin energies round it. This is the first step to schizophrenia. You cannot know the idea in the other man to condemn, unless you have that idea in your own mind. And if you condemn it in him, you necessarily condemn it in you.

You know, Attlee in a recent article talked about one aspect of this, in which he said that all the men who, in the political field, complain about the corruption of the government, are corrupt men.

In fact all portraiture is self-portraiture.

So the only way that you can avoid condemnation results is not to condemn.

Condemn is ‘dam’, to hold in to check.

If you condemn anything whatever, no matter how bad — the worst thing that ever got into the Empire News or the Sunday Despatch — if you condemn it, you have necessarily condemned the same part of your own organism, and immediately you have put a vortex of energy round it, and therefore you have created a zone of fear inside yourself of a particular.

Spiritual Creations and Material Tyrannies

Now if anything whatever exists, and is created from within, it is of spiritual origin.  The things that come inside man from his very centre are spiritual, and those things are eternal. The creations of man, like social structures are from without and are imposed from without, like the accretions in the growth of crystals in the mineral world. So the social structures of man are like material tyrannies piled on top of man. But the things that come inside man from his very centre are spiritual, and those things are eternal.

So, if you condemn a particular thing that springs up out of Spirit, like an unfortunately trained person might condemn, say a girl, who has a baby at 14. You can’t have babies at 14. You can only have them legally at 16 ... so she’s broken the law.

Now it isn’t the law of God that she’s broken, because that is impossible. It is a stupid and arbitrary law made by certain men to impose on society. If you then are misled into condemning that particular function in her, you must necessarily condemn it in you.

Now practically, apart from physical accidents — like a man being knocked down by a bus and having a his head cracked, that sort of thing — apart from the purely mechanical causes of mental diseases, nearly all of them are caused by this conscious or unconscious condemnation of parts of other beings. [1:01:42]

All the efforts towards control are to prevent the reaction that put you under the law. Say a man that is constantly in a rage or bad temper always appears to find himself in situations or up against people that will always reciprocate it. He’s more or less under the influence of this. He put it on himself.

Yes.

If he frees himself from that then he doesn’t get it reciprocated, does he? He frees himself from that law.

Yes.

 

relax

salvation

re - lax, loose,

sal

 

 

Now in the word relax, you can see a thing, the lax part ... loose. This is the same thing as the concept in salvation. This loose is the sal in sal-vation. The ‘ax’ in rel-ax is the ‘ach’, which is Spirit itself. To relax is to put yourself back into Spirit. In order to condemn you contract. When you contract, you contra-act, you oppose yourself. And in so doing, you set up these walls, which, if they are allowed to persist, must partition your being and eventually destroy it.

Christ is not just being sentimental when he says Judge not lest ye be judged[2]. He is making a statement of psychological and spiritual law. It is a physical impossibility to judge anything whatever in the sense of condemning, without condemning the corresponding part of yourself.

And nevertheless, he says, If I judge from myself I judge wrongly, but if I judge from my father, the spirit, my judgement is right.[3] When he judges from the spirit, he is judging in the sense of evaluating, and then when he decides to damn something, it is a conscious determination to stop a flow of energy in a given direction. But it will never be in a direction that would contradict the evolution of Spirit to its highest level. [1:04:01]

So, if we actually disagree with a policeman when he is trying to arrest us, and we take out our own private copy of Police Powers and Privileges[4] and read the appropriate chapter to him, we are damming his energy, which is trying to dam ours. And our energy to dam his, is coming from an inner source, and his energy to dam ours is coming from an outer source. So that the superiority of our centre is demonstrated over his externality.

Pursuing Fear

This exercise of pursuing your fears and not trying to stop them, but to penetrate into the meaning of the fear, to find out what this fear is driving you away from, what it is trying to save you from, the initial fear, the UR ANGST of the Absolute is saving itself very, very simply from valuelessness. If it doesn’t create, circumscribe, there is no value. So it saves itself from Absolute Infinity — which is the same as non-entity, because an entity is finite — by positing a finite, and entering into it.

Would you say that in the early stages, fear could be a thing that could assist intuition?

Without fear you haven’t got any intuition.

Under stress I mean.

Under stress, most of life preservative actions spring out of fear.

I was thinking, it would appear that when you are under stress, and you’re looking for an answer, it’s under those conditions when you appear to get these flashes .....

Well, fear is quicker. We’ve already said that fear is quicker than security. So it’s only when your security is threatened that you become quicker.

This is the reason why you press into unusual situations all the time, rather than be driven into them?

Yes. It’s why Christ, having argued with himself in Gethsemane — which word itself contains in its meaning the whole process — affirmed the cross. If it could be taken away it would be very, very nice. But nevertheless it cannot be, and attain the value. There is a real psychological value in entering into fear situations without any attempt to remove the fear.

Never try to remove the fear.

Try to penetrate to the meaning of the fear ... because that is spirit. Spirit is significance. And significance disappears as you progressively insulate and hide the fear from yourself.

Are you saying that fear is actually access to higher frequencies.

Yes. That’s why the more refined you become, the more afraid you become. And the weak ones who prefer security, when they get out of the merely material levels, feel these fears, they turn back into materiality. It’s called the dog returning to its vomit. Because they have a misconception.

Accepting Fear

In fact in the case of mental disorders generally, if you could persuade a mental patient to:

 

1.         Accept fear, instead of trying to remove it,

2.         And to look at fear

3.         To enter into fear,

4.         Examine every little vibration of fear

... then they are already on the way out of that condition.

 

Because it is only the fear of fear that damages, rather than the fear itself. Fear itself is protective.

You see, the whole transvaluation of values has occurred because a little bit of pain causes a contraction ... or where there is contraction there is pain. That diminishes your size and reduces the area of attack. So if you are egotistical, you contract to reduce the area that can be attacked. But in so doing you have compacted yourself and reduced your area of effectiveness. So if the British Empire were to contract onto England without sending Prince Philip on a 36,000 mile journey in three months, then it would mean it would become hard little people living on the memory of past imperial glory, instead of doing what is actually being done, going out back into those zones, onto their territory and advising them how they aught to behave and how they release themselves from it. And always in a tension situation. [01:09:08]

The Highest Fear

What has taken place then is something ... you fear no longer.

There’s another fear, above it ... and therefore more spiritual.

Until you finally come to the top fear ... the fear of not creating.

The fear of not creating?

The fear of not creating. The one that made God work. God so loved the world ... you see? And in the Hindu version, God was afraid when he recognised that he was alone. That is, the Absolute Power ripples. And it experiences those ripples as departures from a place to a place. Where it is going from it says it’s afraid of. Where it’s going to, it says is the goal. So the Arche and the Telos — the beginning and the end — are really, absolutely, essentially the same. They are spirit leaving and going. And the place it’s just left is the place it went to, as posited before it left another place, which it thought was negative, which it thought was positive in the other place.

Karma

Are you saying that your fear determines what happens in your life then?

Yes.

And so as you transcend it, so your next one is going to turn up then.

That’s right.

So that means in the mechanical sense the karma is past?

That’s right. Ka-r-ma means that. Ka-ma itself, without the ‘R’, means Eros. And Eros is that fellow who is always running away from a situation into somebody’s arms. Ka-r-ma, the ruling of you by your erotic drive, is the meaning of this.

Bravery and Courage

What does this make bravery?

Bravery?

Is bravery the opposite of fear?

Bravery is very, very similar to fear, but it is bound. You see the ‘B’ in bravery and the ‘Rave’ in bravery. You get a finited being and compact him more than he Wills, he will start raving. That is, the energy applied from outside will compress the energy inside and he will experience that increased compaction which he didn’t Will as an overheating of his being. Because now he’s got the same amount of energy in a reduced area. He will then overheat and he will experience that as ‘rage’ and he will try to break out. It isn’t really worth the medal [laughter from the audience]. That’s a device to encourage people to rave. But bravery is only fear. Only it’s fear induced from outside by pressure. Honour and shame are the same, says the Tao.

And courage?

Courage has two aspects. The lowest aspect is Cou-rage or sexual annoyance when somebody pinches your girl, you see, and Cour-age when you climb up to a mature heart. But the cou-rage is more common. [more laughter, 01:12:27]

Delinquents and Educators

Perhaps I misunderstood your remarks about judge and be not judged. Supposing you were going along the road, and you saw a young fellow beat an old lady on the head, and say ‘well he shouldn’t have done that’. Do you stand back and let him go ahead and do it, for instance, or will you prevent him or make an attempt to alleviate the situation?

Well, supposing you saw a motor car missing on two cylinders. The fellow with his head under the bonnet and you knew something about engineering. Would you go and roundly curse the car and condemn it, or would you attempt to trace the trouble?

Well, the fellow who will beat an old lady on the head is a kind of motor car, missing on a couple of cylinders. It is not the act of an intelligent, spiritually conscious person is it? So it must be the act of a person lower than that. And lower than the Aleph level there are only degrees of bondage. So in order to do that he must already be enslaved in some degree, and therefore mechanical, and therefore not to be condemned, because you don’t condemn machines ... you just say they’re faulty.

You take this attitudes towards delinquents, — Let’s flog delinquents more often. It’s a misapprehension of what the problem is. Delinquents are created by their educators. They are made into bad machines in the first place ... and they come into the world quite good machines. And they are made into bad machines by imposing, from outside, artificial restrictions. And it is that that is the cause of little old ladies being beaten over the head. Of course you would go, if you saw him, and restrain him if you could, from beating her over the head. But you wouldn’t condemn him as a person. You would merely say his machinery is a bit out of order. Wouldn’t you? Because you know as a fact that if you did it, you would feel that there was something the matter with you.

This would imply that the system of law is grossly at fault.

The whole system of law is grossly at fault, and admitted to be so by the legalists. And their justification for it is that it was made a long time ago, is now anachronistic and they’re doing what they can to overcome the mass inertia of people.

When Philip went on his recent journey and came back, he said something about it. He said that he didn’t know how all these people had actually taken it. He didn’t know what the end effect would be. He’d seen millions of people and they’d come out to see him. But he was intelligent enough to know that they might have come out not because they liked him. He said they could have come out for millions of reasons. But he’d gone out because he thought it might have a good effect and therefore their own reactions, which he couldn’t control, were their business. But his action, which he could control, was to go and make at least a show, an attempt, to integrate some of the world pattern of forces now.

The Body — The Microcosm

If you remember that this one idea contains all ideas in it, and therefore your body is a microcosm,  it contains every other person within it — and you know this is a fact in your consciousness because everything that you know is in your consciousness — then to act upon any being outside your physical body is still to act within your consciousness, and therefore to act on a content of your consciousness, and therefore to condemn an external is to condemn an internal of your consciousness and therefore to segregate parts of yourself. Then you can understand this reflexion, this re-visiting back on people.

St. Paul says, We fight against principalities and powers and corruption in high places[5], because in fact people who have been suppressed by certain overlords for a long time, hit back at the term.

Jacob Boehme could say it in 1700. The time is nearly run out. He said that then. The time is nearly run out. The globe is finite, people have been pushed back by these muscle men, but they pushed them back round the world, so finally they’ve pushed them right back on themselves. So in a finite system there’s a necessary conclusion to be reached. So although on the short term view they could hit out, today in fact you can hear a man like Montgomery — who comes from a long line of brass hats — saying war is anachronistic. It became anachronistic when the development of the means of violence reached the level of the H-bomb.

The world is round because spirit posits, and every point expands spherically. And then every thing goes round it. And so if you had very good eyes on a clear night and you stood on the edge of the world and looked out you’d see the back of your head.

 

 

~~~ End ~~~

 



[1] Gen 49:5-7  Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.

 

[The full story of how Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country ‘defiled’ Jacob’s daughter Dinah is in Genesis 34.]

[2] Matthew 7.1, Luke 6.37, 1 Corinthians  11.31

[3] [John 8.16].

[4] ”Blackstone's Police Operational Handbook 2015 is designed specifically to meet the reference needs of officers whilst out on patrol. Written in a concise and accessible style, it covers a wide range of common offences and clearly explains and interprets the relevant legislation. Using clear and consistent presentation throughout, each chapter offers you a definition of the offence, the points to prove, and a clear system of icons covering police powers and mode of trial. At a glance, you can access everything you need to make a quick, informed decision in a host of everyday policing situations.” 

[5] Ephesians 6.12