Contents

Space (259 & 260) 2

Transcribed by J. Bailey (2000-12-18) 2

Tape 259. 2

S-P-A-C-E.. 2

Dynamic Spirit 3

Being Levels. 3

Tonal and Visual Behaviour 4

The Octave. 5

Unity. 7

Dependency and Responsibility. 7

Atomism.. 8

Space — Time. 8

Dynamic Space. 8

Spatial Awareness. 9

Moment 10

Material v. Space. 12

How we see things. 16

How we hear things. 16

Tape 260. 17

Absolute and Individual Light 17

To guard against mere intellectualism in relation to paradise. 18

The Nature of Stimuli 20

Break in recording. 20

Sympathy and Compassion. 22

Darwin. 23

Harmony and Discord of Colour and Tone. 26

Release from Mechanical Action. 29

The Sudden School 31

Dialectic. 31

 

 

Space (259 & 260)

Transcribed by J. Bailey (2000-12-18)

 

With diagrams and arbitrary headings by John Bailey & Alan Roberts

Further mods made from suggestions from Alan’s Dad

Tape 259

S-P-A-C-E

This is S and P, propagating. And every time it rotates it makes a little point and the little point is power, a posited zone, in relative motion. Point tells you that there is power in it and that it is in relative motion.

Po —

Power

in —

In

t —

It

There are forces crossing each other to make it. So the word space means that this undulation goes along, then rotates and goes along again. And that it is spirit. The word ace and the word aitch and the word ache all give you different aspects of the same concept.

S —

Spirit

P —

Positing

ACE —

Ache, aitch

Spirit itself is aching and this aching is the cause of its waking up. It’s exactly the same concept and the same root. Spirit is aching,, in terms of Paul’s expression, ‘the whole creation travaileth and groaneth to be delivered from vanity’. But not only is creation aching, but spirit itself aches to create, because it says, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his son’, etc. He so loved it.

Word —

Word

l —

Linking

Now a world is an order. Notice the ord in world again. It is the word tied together, labouring, linking and so on.

Wherever it goes round it creates a little order and that little order is a world and it goes on and it makes another world, it goes on and makes another. When we look at the astronomical facts, colossal nebulae and impossible distances, what we are seeing is a great undulation with a zone of rotating force and another undulation, a zone of rotating force and so on. And each little rotation is a little world and at each point where the rotation begins, there we have a turning moment.

And all that we call moments of time are simply these rotation point which appear as in-pulses. We change the ‘n’ to ‘m’ before a labial like ‘p’ or ‘b’. So we say impulse instead of in-pulse, simply because ‘p’ is pronounced on the lips. It easier to say impulse than in-pulse. So there is an in-pulse because there has been a rotation. Every in-pulse is what we call a ‘moment of time’.

Now throughout infinity this undulating spirit is passing on, rotating, passing on and rotating. I’ve drawn these rotations fairly far apart on here which would suggest that they have a long wave frequency. Factually those are so very, very tiny that I can’t draw them on the board without them interfering with each other. And thus it appears that moments of time are adjacent to each other in the world of tangibles. Nevertheless they still follow this same pattern. Also the direction of them changes from moment to moment. It’s a kind of alternation of direction. Once it goes around clockwise and the next it goes round widdershins and so on. There’s a continuous reversal of events in every moment.

Time itself is also the word emit. And it is emissions of energy that we measure in moments of time. In your nervous system itself there is an actual release of a definite quantum of energy every moment of perception. If that energy is blocked (it can actually be blocked by psychological tricks and by mechanical tricks), for that period (we won’t call it a moment because it isn’t turning in this sense) the being will be unconscious. That is to say it would be objectless — because the object is created in the rotation and as soon as a rotation has occurred it goes out, and in between there’s no-thing. There is an undulation and then there is another.

Now if we look at two ideas which are quite distinct like democracy and aristocracy, and we consider them, we will always find between the two ideas, no idea. And this no idea is not nothing, but it is undulating spirit. And space is that which is between these gross material bodies and that in which the bodies are stored (according to materialistic thinking), but in actual fact that space between is spirit. So that between every two ideas there is spirit, dynamically moving. Spirit is vectored, spirit is going, from one idea to another idea.

If we want to make this diagram a little truer we can make another undulation turn on the same point and go away and so on, and see how we associate ideas and how we free ourselves from an association chain (which has a definite direction, and therefore inertia, and therefore a tendency to repeat itself). To free ourselves from that by remembering that the space between is no idea at all. And therefore by practising inter-spacing, which we have discussed before — inter-spacing of ideas — we can increase our awareness of the dynamism of space.

 

So if we take an idea like a man with a horse and cart

and we let the man, horse and cart be in the mind,

and then we let the man unharness the horse and take it away, leaving the cart alone,

and then the man comes back and takes the cart away and then there is nothing.

That no-thing which is there is spirit. If you can hold it instead of allowing objectification, you have the creative origin of all ideas and all things.

Dynamic Spirit

But if the inertia of your organism and previous activity is too great you will find that when you try to hold it another idea will present itself. It will do so precisely because spirit is dynamic. It will not stand still — that would be a state, it would be static. Spirit is dynamic. What you can do with spirit is cause it to dodge in between the ideas. In other words, by practise, you can feel yourself about to make a statement, about to define a situation (remember that definition and statement is death, is locking up, is finiting), and as soon as you feel yourself about to define, to inhibit the definition, and be on your guard against the next definition which will try to present itself. And as you inhibit this tendency to define, you will discover not that you know less, but that you know more.

Being Levels

As you inhibit definitions on the plane of your usual mental life, you will discover that there are a lot more ideas above it than you knew about. If you then practise again the inter-spacing trick, you will discover there are more ideas above that. And you will unconsciously be changing your frequency.

¨                       If you concentrate on the gross material body, the one you can touch, then your frequency is the lowest you can have.

¨                       If you concentrate on the idea of it in your mind the frequency has gone up.

¨                       If you concentrate on the emotional relationship between two it goes up higher still.

¨                       If you concentrate on the rational statement that all these things are necessarily functions of this super-space which is spirit, pure dynamism, then the whole of your intellectual life is lifted up to a new level.

¨                       And if you then place yourself in the field, Absolute, you will experience an emoto-intellectual dual experience of form and feeling simultaneously in which all the bodies will be co-presented in one moment: that is, you will see the universe itself turn with all constituent parts within it — in that one moment.

 

Tonal and Visual Behaviour

Now just in order to remind ourselves and make sure that we can understand this fact (that tones do not behave in the same way that visual images do), we’ll blow a note on here. The thing is to notice that when we blow on here, the thing comes to you and you do not have any intellectual object upon which to pin yourself. When I did the drawing of the man’s profile here b, you referred to something in your memory — a category of beings called men as interpreted with pencils, and that was an intellectual act.

Now if I blow a note on here, you will find that there is no intellectual process, no spontaneous intent to find out anything about it intellectually, but the thing itself comes to you. You feel it to be outside your physical body in its origin. You can actually locate it in the dark with your eyes closed if you want. So it definitely has spatial existence. But at the same time it is coming to you through moments (that means impulses, emissions of energy). It is beating the medium between this instrument and you, in a definite manner.

Description: squares.JPGIf I play this ‘C’ here [plays an extended ‘C’] you hear there something, but your intellect is in abeyance. Can you all feel in fact that you do not think about that in the way that you have to think to interpret a square, visually? Now we said that when I did the two squares visually, the white and the black, you saw that there was a black and white square and nothing else happened. They didn’t fight. The retina itself is so arranged that adjacent parts of it are stimulated and in some measure insulated from the motions of the other parts.

When we put two tones together which are alright separately, they are not alright together. [plays a C and then a D]. Now either of those tones in isolation is alright but if I put both together then a quarrel begins, and if you listen very carefully you will find the quarrel is not your quarrel but a quarrel between the tones. I say this because certain psychologists have actually suggested that the dynamism of musical tones is subjective, meaning belonging to the individual only and not a matter of the tones. Now if you listen very carefully you will find that the quarrel is between the tones themselves. [plays a C and then a D and then C+D together.] That quarrel is not entirely your own handiwork. It is a genuine quarrel between the two tones.

Also when I blow one of these [C] if we walk around the room we will hear it in any place in the room, and so we can say that that tone is filling all the space in the room. The space in the room therefore must be dynamically beating at that tone. If we then play another one in the same place, this tone will fight in the same places as the other tone, only because of a different character of the two tones. And from the acoustical point of view the difference is a difference of frequency. Which means if the frequencies are too close they will be trying to move dynamic space in the place where they are in contrary directions simultaneously. And that will be the cause of the quarrel, as if you were to try to move your hand up and down simultaneously. Remember your physical body is only a behaviour of space where space, remembering the ace in it, equals pure dynamism, initiative power or spirit.

Now if we play two notes that are far enough apart, we find that they do not quarrel in the same way that they do when they are close together. Here’s a fifth [C followed by a G, then C+G together]. You heard another note there I think as well as those two, which was a resultant one. Which shows you another funny thing about this dynamic space: that when the two tones are beating together in the same place, they can beat up between them another vibration, the resultant to. It is totally different to the visual experience in space.

Now because of this peculiar factor about tones, philosophers from Pythagoras and earlier than that — for example a man who struggles to survive — philosophers of that kind have suggested that music is somehow heavenly, celestial. We know that in all the great religions music has been used from the very beginning to induce emotional states, non-intellectual states — that emotion is not an intellectually pursued thing, that music is not intellectually perceived, and therefore music is a method of shifting you out of your devilish analytical rationalising centres. Hence it’s used by the church.

The Octave

Now there is another peculiar fact, that the tones when considered, not acoustically but musically, are dynamic in the sense that they are trying to go somewhere. If we consider tones acoustically we are considering the thing simply as a phenomenon of vibration: frequency. But when we consider it musically we are concerned with the direction in which it apparently wants to move.

So that if I play two notes here [plays the 7th], which is a 7th, the 7th one is shouting out for the octave. You will hear it. You see you get an immediate sensation that this is right. When if I play a note and then the 7th and then put the octave in and take the 7th out, as the 7th disappears you will feel now it is alright. [plays the 7th then adds the octave, then stops the 7th leaving the octave]

This phenomenon of the octave has been called by musical theorists ‘the miracle of the octave’ because the octave is not musically different. That is its dynamism is exactly the same. Let’s take the note called the 5th and play that [plays the 5th] that 5th demands the tonic. That tonic is the tone, the unity principle of the scale. The T1 principle of the scale. So when we play the 5th [plays the 5th] it demands either an octave up there [plays the 5th and the upper tonic] or down there [plays the 5th and the lower tonic]. It doesn’t matter if it goes up or down. So we say that the peculiar character of the 5th of the octave is that it will move either up or down to the tonic. And it doesn’t care. That means that the tonic is not important as up-or-down, but as unity principle.

There’s something very, very peculiar about musical tones, they are not just frequencies. They are frequencies which when played together in certain ways, shout out for what we call resolutions. They shout out for returns to unity. We take a concept, a tone, and we introduce another note into it. And when we introduce this note you will hear a sort of threatening sound [plays upper C + F# and then lower C + F#]. Now as soon as I played a sharp there it threatened. So this isn’t quite right. And the reason it isn’t quite right is because the relation of the  ….

(Break in recording )

 

… individual being constitutes a peculiar pattern of notes. Every particle inside our bodies is vibrating at a definite frequency. You know that on a tape record with various speeds we can produce Mickey Mouse effects by recording at a slow speed and playing back at a double speed. Supposing we get two recorders and we record a note and then we keep doubling it up higher and higher and higher, we’ll still have the same dynamism that was in it but we can push the thing up until it goes out of audio frequencies but it will still be there. We will not be able to hear it because the ear will be too coarse. But if we push this back below the atomic level, down to primary motions, we will actually be at the level at which, if we could hear it, then we would be experiencing the constituent vibrations of sub-atomic impulses in our own bodies.

Now a human being has got a lot of parts. Each part is vibrating in its own peculiar way. If we take the smallest part and therefore the smallest vibration in a human being, and we count those up in body there will be a very, very great number. But because of the grouping of these things the subatomic parts give rise to atoms, these give rise to molecules, and these to proteins and organic structures and so on, all of which are compounds of this fundamental frequency. And each time we put a group of frequencies together we are really lowering the note.

So in that sense we can say that if we draw a circle for top C, we could draw another circle with three circles inside it and say that is another C lower down, and then take a group of those and draw another C but always have a circular form. But inside there will always be a greater number of these in-pulses. And we could, say, cut the impulses in half each time, and thus show that the octave is always half the vibration in the lower octave than it is above, or it is double in the higher to the one below. This means that inside the human being there are in fact, sounding simultaneously, complex structures, either concordant or discordant. This leads to the possibility of a religious significance and a therapeutic significance in music. Musical tone is dynamism. That means to say it is pointing.

You know that Socrates complained about the behaviour of certain Greek musical modes. Certain modes, that is scales, have certain emotional effects and they can cause lassitude. And another mode will cause sensuality. Another mode will cause a desire to go to war, and so on. These are not intellectual experiences, they are simply emotional responses. And it means that the tones of those modes are in effect causing resonances within the very structure of the being itself.

 

Supposing I play this triad here, which is C, E and G [plays the triad]. Now this feels quite comfortable and quite familiar, we’ve heard it often enough. If I now play the third one a semitone lower, this gives us a minor [plays the minor], you feel immediately a bit sad. Now we haven’t made an intellectual judgement. We are not that clever. We haven’t counted the frequencies intellectually and said to ourselves, “well, I don’t like the number of beats per second on my G flat, relative to the E natural”. We are not that good at mathematics. So we are not doing it intellectually. The thing is doing itself and we are being subjected to it.

Now if we lower it again and play internal minor 3rd and play a second, I’ll go down from the third, you’ll see a quarrel but at the same time a kind of relief. For that sadness has gone because you are going to have to do something about the discord that results [plays the major one]. There’s the major one.

Sorry there was a very high harmonic there — very powerful. I go down from that minor third into the second [plays the second]. Can you hear there that there is not only a fight but a promise that we might get home after all? Now supposing we say that the tonic lilt is the one that gives the unity to the scale — it is the one that we will return to at the end of the piece — that’s our unity principle. We play it: we move away from it. Now as soon as we play that second tone, we hear what we can call a direction implication, a dynamism. It wants to do something else [plays the first and then the second]. So if we play then the third [plays the third], it sounds what we would call right.

Now again certain psychologists have tried to suggest it sounds right because we have heard it so often and there is in some degree a possibility of that. But it isn’t the whole truth, because within itself there are certain frequency relations that are requiring a return to the tonic. So if we play the tonic and then the second and then the third and then back again we will feel what we will call the completion [plays C, D, E, D, C]. So we feel  that we’ve been away from home, and come back again. And this going away from home and coming back again is the basis of all that we call tonal music [C, D, E, D, C, D, E, D, C]. This being at home.

Ho —

behold

Me —

myself

Home is Ho – Me, behold myself, the only place where I can get my own way — and then going away from it is already to advance towards possible danger [plays C+D]. See, I’ve left home. Immediately there is discord that I’ve left the territory in which I can dictate. I climb out, I find a temporary resting place, but it’s not quite right. I’ll go a bit further to the 4th [plays the fourth]. That’s not right either. I come to the 5th [plays the fifth]. I’ve still got to get back somehow. I can go up to the octave, to the 6th and so on [plays 6th 7th and tonic].

Unity

Now this is a very important thing because when we talk about tonality — about this principle of unity — we are talking about something in us which we need tremendously. We need unity. And if the unity we’ve got is only a temporary unity, it can be broken and it will be broken at some time. Now suppose we thought for a moment that C was the only proper tonic, the only unity principle on the scale [C, D, E, F, G, F, E, D, C]. Supposing somebody came along and said to us when we were trying to do it, “that is not a true principle of the tonic, but D is”, and he started to prove it by going [D, E, F, G, A, G, F, E, D]. Now he’s got a unity out of D. It’s no good us standing on C as essential unity, because the same ratio between the notes exists if we start on D.

So anything can stand as a basis of unity — quite legitimately. But the unity of one thing is no ground for criticising the unity basis of another thing. You can say that every scale, every ladder standing on the tonic, is valid in and for itself, but its validity does not invalidate the tonal base of other beings.

And we’ve talked about the unique nature of individuals before. We’ve said that spirit makes everything unique and this ties up again with spirit and music because in music any tone whatever can stand as a unity base and providing we keep the same ratio between the successive notes, we will get exactly the same effect in internal dynamism and no matter how many scales we play it will never invalidate another scale.

Supposing somebody said, “well, there are only seven notes really, repeated, so there are only seven scales”.

Then another man would say, “ well there are semitones. We can start neither on C nor D, we’ll start on C# sharp if we want. And then somebody says, “well, alright so we’ve got thirteen in an octave of semitones. Twelve and the octave.

“Well,” a man could say, “we’ve got quarter tones in between C and C# there is another tone. We can start on that one. And in between those two we’ve got eighth tones and sixteenth tones and so on.” Then we will start moving down to the fundamental of the high frequency, the short wave. And we will come down to the Aleph frequency which is the fundamental from which all the other scales are built up.

In other words we have a frequency universe with an aleph beat, which is the fastest one we can get, and then we can take a group of such beats and allow that to constitute a larger wave and therefore a lower note, and treat that note as a tonic, and build a scale upon it. And this we can do arbitrarily, but no matter how much we do it, we can never invalidate the use of another scale.

Dependency and Responsibility

So if we want as individuals (that is as tonic bases) to be valid, we can never use our individuality as a ground for disallowing the individuality of another. And as all these different individualities are merely groupings of the Absolute, the Aleph frequency, then the man who claims to be moving towards Absolute consciousness is moving towards this aleph frequency which is the top ground frequency, groupings of which constitute the separate individualities of other beings. So that he actually becomes responsible (that is, able to respond) to all the needs of all those other beings who are finited, because … [unintelligible word here]. The more he knows, the more sensitive he becomes, the greater his ability to respond to these patterns of frequencies, the greater is his responsibility for them.

So we can never go (like some of the German supermen misinterpreting Nietzsche) and say that “if I become more sensitive than you, you are no good”. Because to become more sensitive is to move away from the long wave, low frequencies and towards short wave, high frequency base, and all the long wave structures are merely compounds of these fundamental beats, and increase of sensitivity is simply increase of the awareness of the dependency of larger groups of frequencies or low notes upon higher ones. Once it is seen that the lower ones are dependent upon the higher, then the higher must remember that the lower are dependent upon them. And therefore the increase of responsibility with the increase of sensitivity.

Atomism

Now we’ve only just come out of the 19th century by 59 years, and in the 19th century, atomism, materialism, was the rule. And in that period men were taught by so-called scientists (which means men crucified on the visual impression) that matter really existed in its own right. And that nature was simply a structure of material bodies, and that all these bodies were very busy fortuitously crashing into each other, and that by a strange piece of illogicality, nature was red in fang and claw. These blind fortuitously moving little ball-bearings somehow were equipped with destructive appetites and fangs and claws. They imported a psychological significance into a purely materialistic point of view. This is quite invalid.

Space — Time

Now in 1926 in the Cambridge experiment when the atom was exploded, then materialism became anachronistic, not only theoretically, but in practise. And there gradually arose from that period more and more consideration for space instead of body. Einstein had already begun to think about the space-time as a continuum: in other words he gave equal validity to time and space, and to make space-time a sort of unity in his uni-field theory. So that space no longer became simply that in which you store the commodities when you got a big business, but it actually was a dynamic substance itself (and here would have to reinterpret the word substance to mean super-stance, because it is fundamentally spirit), and it is this space-time which by the emissions of the energy of spatial substance, the ‘Ace Spirit’ substance, produces the time process.

And in Einstein’s uni-field the curvature of space is related to bodies within that space. Curvature increases in relation with certain bodies in space.

Now if we think of our undulation process and then rotation, undulation, rotation, we can see that wherever there is a body, there must be an increase of curvature. Once we have said that space is spirit — and that it is only a false orientation to focus with your eye on what would be, tangibly, experience if you walked up to it, and pretend that that is reality, and to ignore all the dynamism between you and it (because it isn’t tangible at the gross level), — once we have done that, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of advancing in power control and movement towards the Absolute.

Dynamic Space

It was because atomism had failed in the pursuit of power that men began to knock on the atom. They were pursuing power. They went down like Cain did, into the earth, and they thought, “in the earth is power”. So they collected the earth. That was their Mater, their mother, their material, and then they beat on it and did manipulations with it and suddenly it blew up in their face and disappeared. It refuted them. In the act of blowing up in that way, it revealed itself to be no more than compactions of force. And suddenly the universe, instead of being a material universe, became a dynamic field. And matter became no more than a little vortical spin. And compared with the colossal undulations, the little rotations occupy very, very little space.

So really there is very little matter in reality compared with spirit. Matter is just a little rotation, and between the rotations the space is colossal. Thus if you take the space in the atom, it is far in excess of the diameter of an electron, or of a proton. If we take the solar system as one structure, the distance from the earth, 93,000,000 miles to the sun, is considerably greater than the 8,000 miles diameter of the earth. The solar system is almost entirely space. But that space is not nothing.

And today’s science knows that that space is dynamic. That between the sun and the earth, there is not the cold dead void that they printed in the text books twenty years ago (already anachronistic of course), but that instead of being cold and dead, it is highly alive, charged with dangerous radiations (which means you have to put your hat on), and they now realise that the whole concept of voidity, of vacuum, of emptiness, was a construct made through focusing on the tangibles in order to avoid damaging your gross material centre of reference.

Spatial Awareness

Because the thing that makes the baby careful, is pain. When it tumbles and bangs itself, it learns to distinguish between falling on the bed (which is nice), and falling on the brass knob on the end of the bed (which is nasty). And this painful experience causes it to distinguish between bodies hard or dangerous and bodies soft, not dangerous. So that in order to preserve itself it has been forced into materialism, into the hard gross matter, for that’s for the baby to preserve itself.

When it’s grown up and it has learnt to circumvent these zones of hard pressure that they call material bodies, then it is time to rethink the situation. Having preserved its vehicle of reference, its physical body, then it should refine that preserved vehicle of reference and no longer bother to worship the material negatively through fear, but to examine the dynamic nature of the space between bodies. This can be done by increasing your awareness of space and the motions in space.

Thus if you sit next to somebody in a bus or train, and instead of looking at the man’s shoes and the fellow out of the corner of your eyes, if you compare the temperature of the man to begin with, with the lady on the right, and closing your eyes, just feel her, you will discover that she’s got a heat aura around her. Now that’s still a very material thing but it is slightly more sensitive than detecting the gross material body.

Now if you then look at the space round that man’s body, look at it with your physical eyes, you will discover little vortical spins of dust particles caused by the heat of his body. It doesn’t need a lot of practise to do that actually: to actually see the spinning of the air. And if the sunlight is at the appropriate angle, you will see it very, very easily. If you get in an artificial light like this, at certain angles in relation to certain objects, you will find that you can see it very easily. Once you’ve seen the dust particles, don’t focus on them, but try and look between them, and you will discover that you can see lights dodging about in between the dust particles. And then you will become aware that the space is becoming surcharged and you will have to remind yourself that it was so before you started looking at it, otherwise it will make you nervous. You’ll actually find that space is full of energies and that you can see those with your physical eyes.

Now you know that the embryo echoes the development of the human race, in broad outline, from its earliest time. And in growing up through the state of childhood into the state of adulthood, it passes through earlier phases of perceptive levels. And the child, before it has learned to focus on a gross material object (when it is still in its mother’s arms and it doesn’t have to, to preserve itself), it is at the stage at which our ancestors were a long, long time ago when they didn’t distinguish gross material bodies as such. And they never banged themselves, because (like the bat flying into a room with strings across, it doesn’t touch them) they were so sensitive that they never banged themselves because they could feel the presence of that body, like a congenitally blind person can.

This means that the child actually has (we’ve all had as children) this experience. It’s not something that we will discover, that we’ve never had before. It’s something that when we regain it we will remember that we’ve done it before, and in the process we have taken a step towards this higher sensitivity of seeing the essential dynamism of space.

Now the moment that you’ve got the dynamism of space firmly fixed in you and the concept that a material body is only a rotation of a motion in space, then the moment you take focusing off the rotation and onto the field, you are in a continuum. And the continuum has no parts and therefore all the bodies in that continuum are equally yours if you are identified with the continuum. Therefore your responsibility to all those bodies is the same, and furthermore your capacity for acting upon those beings is the same. At the Absolute level in other words you can say, as Christ said, “I and my Father are one”. That Absolute, that ace in space is the Father.

The Son is the first big rotation, the macrocosmic self. The little rotations inside it are us. If instead of identifying with the little rotation of my individuality, I identify with the macrocosmic one, I am identifying with Christ as the macrocosmic logos. If I identify with the Father of that (the space itself), then I’ll identify with the Father. And when Christ says that we should be one together as he is one with us as he is one with the Father, we in him and he in the Father and so on, it is all a statement about the dynamism of space, and the Absolute inter-penetration of all the motions of this space, because this space is not made of discrete parts, but is an Absolute continuous power.

The practising of awareness of this from the point of view of a grown materially stressed adult must be by becoming more space-conscious — more aware of the aura of things. First of the heat aura, then of other things, little vortical plays of forces round the body.  And if we actually do that, we will find that we will rapidly become aware of space as force, and the only way we will stop ourselves from panicking (because it is so dreadful this power about the place), is to remind ourselves that it was there and did us no harm before we became aware of it.

Moment

A question here about time, about the measurement of years, months, days, etc. Specifically it is about the word moment and what it implies.

Moment is the common word for the shortest division of time, and implies movement mass. It seems to be true that all material is constantly in a state of change from k-rate (to create) to de-K (decay). This is an example of a good bit of phonetic thinking and shows how thinking phonetically can help to solve things that would otherwise be problematic. Can tie – m (time) be seen as a binding factor in the constantly changing rotation rate?

We’ve said on other occasions that this T letter signifies a crossing where the two lines represent forces travelling at right angles to each other. We do find an old symbol made of three ‘T’s, which is related to the one in the Isle of Man and we find one in heraldry made of four ‘T’s called the ‘cross potent’ where it is said that the ‘T’s are crutches. If you know something of the tradition of the devil going about on crutches, and the time process itself being a crippling process on eternal power, these things can be tied together. We pronounce ‘M’ with the lips closed and say that ‘M’ = substance, because when we circumscribe a force, we bring into being the possibility of an individual standing on the perimeter of that rotation and defining ‘that below his feet’ as sub-stantia, that which is underneath his standing, that would then be equivalent to substance. TM would then mean the crossing of forces in a closed system or time.

We have here a statement about key, k-reate, create, and decay.

T and K are very closely related. If we imagine a wall and then a force hitting that wall, we have the significance of the letter K. Where K = kick and keep. Now in T we don’t bother about the idea of keeping the forces together. We just allow that one force and another force are propagating at right angles to each other. If we draw a circle, let the perimeter stand for the top of the T, and the radius in it is a force going from the centre to the perimeter. And that would mean the tying of the perimeter to the centre, but we would not be concerned with keeping it there.

If we imagine the hand of a clock to go round in various moments of time, it is describing ‘T’ throughout that substance, that is ‘T’ and ‘M’. That is, it is describing time. But if we want to keep it in one place, then we must not allow it to rotate, we must nail it together. And then we use the letter K to symbolise it. When we put K and T together as in the Greek prefix kat, as in catalepsy and so on, we find a symbol meaning fixity and the symbol meaning the passing of forces across each other and therefore the fixation of forces crossing each other.

The animal called the cat, is so-called because its motions are all staccato. You notice that the cat concentrates on whatever it is doing from moment to moment, and as soon as the cat has exhausted the meaning of a given phenomenon, it turns away from that one to another one. It never turns gradually from one percept to another. We find this behaviour is quite other than the behaviour of a dog in this respect, because a dog allows its attention to go over a lot of people one after the other in a continuous change of direction. But the cat doesn’t do that. The cat always switches its attention suddenly. It hears a bird outside, it turns the whole of its attention on the bird. It may hear a rustling of paper in the room, it forgets the bird and turns onto the paper. It is because of this activity that it is called cat.

So if we talk about time, we were talking about the passing of radial forces along the perimeter. And if we are talking about the keeping of time, we are talking about the whole confining process.

In the word take which is the reverse of this, you have a fundamental idea to do with time because the suggestion is, there is a crossing of forces onto an already fixed situation.

Mo —

Substantial zone, zone of substance

Ve —

To develop

Men —

t —

To count, evaluate

Now when we consider the word moment, we are considering a root men, we meaning count, to evaluate, and a word mo meaning substantial zone, or zone of substance, and the passing of force. Now this moment implies that there is a crossing of forces being counted in a zone of substance. If we put a V in between it (and a letter E so that we can pronounce it — movement), this V means to develop. So if we take a moment and develop it, it must always go into another moment.

Let’s look at the clock for a moment and consider that when the hand of the clock moves, we are led to believe that it moves continuously only if we don’t examine its actual motion. If we put the motion under a microscope we will find that it is vibrating. We know in fact that it is being driven by little cog wheels and each little wheel gives it a kick. We’ll actually find that finger going round the clock ticking. And each one of these little ticks we would call a moment.

We get a similar idea in the turning moments architects have to study, and if we apply a force at right angles to the radius, and thus push the hand of the clock one point, the amount of energy needed to push it that fundamental distance we could call a moment. And that would coincide roughly with the meaning given to it by engineers and architects.

If we take a lever and we drill a hole in its middle, suspend it on that point, so that it is in perfect equilibrium and then we put on it a little weight, a little tiny weight, that weight is not heavy enough to overcome the friction on the point of suspension, then the lever will not move. But if we increase the weight so that it is heavy enough to overcome the friction, then it will begin to move, and we say that it begins to move in a moment, which means that the substance in the situation in which those forces are crossing has now caused an appreciable difference, a phenomenal difference — one that the sense organ can perceive.

When we are applying force, by a weight or directly by a pressure, a definite amount of force is required to overcome a definite amount of resistance and that amount of force we could call a moment, and the concept of a turning moment is related to this one. We have similar things in architecture, because we have to build very often with beams and they act as if they were levers. If we support a beam at a certain point and then put a great weight on the projecting part of the beam, and keep piling it on, eventually the beam will tilt and at the moment it begins to tilt, we have evidence of the force being sufficient to overcome all the counterbalancing forces on the other side.

When we are talking about time, we are talking not abstractly, in real terms, we are talking about substance doing something, that is forces crossing in such a way that we can actually count them. If we couldn’t count them, we could not talk about moments or about movement. The fact that the men occurs in the word tells you that we are dealing with counting processes. If we took a continuous line with no vibration in it at all (actually there isn’t such a line, but we can pretend for a moment that there is one), we call that an  abstract line, it is continuous and infinite. [11.29] It goes right off the paper in both directions forever — we could not count it. It would be an infinite continuous line and consequently not countable. We couldn’t even call it one line because we would not be able to find the ends of it if it were infinite. So we have to call it a not-two line. The concept of non-dualism would be evoked. But if we allow this line to vibrate or to ripple then we can count the wave crests, and the troughs if we wish, in between the crests.

So in order to count at all we must produce a difference. And difference is this: diff is the same as duality and this fer whether its fer from bear or facere to do, implies the same thing — it is doing or bearing two. And if it isn’t doing or bearing two, then it cannot be counted. There must be a difference between the trough and the crests in altitude before we can begin to count.

dif —

Duality

fer —

Facere, to do, or bearing.

Material v. Space

When we are dealing with visual space we are dealing with a very abstract concept. Because we are doing something as adults that the baby does not do. We tend as adults to define space as that which is between bodies. The material bodies are more important to materialistic people than the space between. Space is only thought of in general by materialists as something in which to store bodies.

The space is infinite and the bodies are finite.

The bodies are circumscribable and therefore locatable. You can get your hands on them. They are visual and they are tangible experiences.

All the space in between is of no use to a materialists except insofar as he can use it for storing material bodies. This is an adult way of thinking of things because the adult has been directed to the secondary kind of activity of a living being, namely the preservation of its life through acquiring commodities — food, shelter and so on. But before the adult has been stressed on the object as a second need (his first need is immediate self-preservation, like fight or flight, the second need is a job to get yourself some matter to eat), before this stress is placed upon the being, in a new born baby we find experimentally and we can see it quite easily with a new baby, that the baby does not focus on material objects as such. It has no concepts of material values, and of space as separate from those bodies. The child therefore when you watch it, a newly born child is rather alarming because its eyes don’t focus on objects, they don’t focus on mother or father and they don’t focus on any tangible and they roam about quite independently initially to the bewilderment of new mothers who’ve not seen it done before and the child seems to pay as much attention to space as it does to bodies. And this is a prime experience of a child. We have to consider it as valid at its own level.

Now you’ll often notice that cats and dogs (cats more often than dogs) look into space and then suddenly jump out of the way as if there something there. And therefore they’ve got a reputation for being a bit queer because of it.

We tend to think that space has nothing in it and really we mean nothing important for us at the moment. We are so used to focusing on the object, and we have developed an eye to enable us to do that, that we ignore space as a determinant except as a storage zone for materials. If we actually look between objects instead of at them, we discover that we get visual sensation that we don’t get if we look at the object. We can do it now, we can do it immediately in this room if you’d like to do …

 

If you look say four or five feet away in the air, you will become very quickly conscious of motion in the air. You may think it is motion of dust particles. Of course there are dust particles there — you wouldn’t normally notice them. But if we get a perfectly dust free room and we repeat the experiment you will find that you will still get visual sensations from the space. And you will also begin to see little lights running about in space. One investigator has related these light which he calls photons, which means little lights, to the biological forces of sex. And he is not wrong in so relating them, because light itself is life. The light and the life are two different aspects of a prime force.

 

Now in the last part of this question, it says can time be seen as a binding factor in the constantly changing rotation rate? Here the questioner has seen that time is an anagram of Tie-m. it is also an anagram of mite, the small. And this mite, the littlest thing, is the same concept as the least time division. If we don’t circumscribe a zone, and thus substantiate, if we don’t tie-m, we cannot generate tie me, which is the observer. We can only focus where there is an actual rotation of force. But that force, in order to be rotating at all, and in order to be tied, must be in principle an untieable force which somehow has got tied. So if we draw a line for a tied force and then say, why bother to tie it? We’ll draw the line extended without tying it. We then have an idea of a translating force. A translating force is one that keeps laying itself across space instead of localising itself in a zone which prior to its rotation and localisation didn’t exist.

You’ll notice in Norse mythology the devil is named Loki. Now loki is exactly the same as the location you get in the Latin, it is the finiting principle. To be tied to a locus to a place, is automatically to be finited. They are two ways of expressing the same concept. We can see then that when there is a tied substance, we have a tying process and for every observer a tying of me, me being the objective form of which the subjective is I.

So if we take I, there’s our glyph of the eye, you take the concept of me, me is the object. This letter ‘I’ s a translating force. That letter ‘I’ translating, goes along and then turns itself around and makes itself into ‘me’. This means that there is no separate ‘me’ from an I. Wherever there is a ‘me’ there is necessarily an ‘I’ to perceive it. And what that ‘I’ is perceiving is simply itself finiting itself by circumscribing itself. This is the meaning of Absolute subjectivity. And states that Absolute consciousness which is spirit, objectifies nothing other than itself. And the only way it can objectify is by circumscribing itself. This means that the limitation imposed on ourselves as body. You say my body, and the child says “me” when it falls over and bangs itself, this limitation imposed is a self-limitation, by consciousness and I has located some force within itself. You might think that this is rather a strange thing to do and doubt our capacity to do it. But we know that we can do it because if we look around the room and choose to look at a given person, first of all we experience a sense of gong out and it’s a translating force in consciousness and when it comes to the object then it runs round and circumscribes the object. This is a fact of our experience. We get the ‘I’ and the eye’s attention goes out and then it goes round the person it is looking at. And as long as your attention is on the person there is a force going round either the whole or a portion of that being. And if that force were to stop for a moment from going round, you would become unconscious of the object.

There we have a simple demonstration of a translating force, an ‘I’, becoming a ‘me’ by simply rotating. And that tells us how to get out of ‘me’, the object, which is both accusative and dative grammatically. You can hit it or you can give it things, dependent on whether you are accusing it or treating it datively, in order to get out of that ‘me’ all you have to do is stop circumscribing, stop defining. Let us look at another word, the word ‘statement’.

When we are talking, if we are not careful we are making statements. And a statement is a counting of forces crossing each other, statically. And this ‘tat’, which is good German for deed, with an o in it is good German for death. It is our word dead. A sound shift from ‘T’s to ‘D’s. so a state is static and as such is an illegitimate locus being treated as if it had validity from itself. So any statement that we may make is necessarily static and therefore false.

Now if I made a statement (when I said any statement is necessarily static and therefore false), that would be false too — if it were a statement. But we have to examine it very carefully to see whether I did actually say anything static. And in fact the implications are not static. To the contrary they are an undoing of the static. If we say that this S is the undulation of spirit, and then we put the T on it (like Moses did with the serpent in the desert, to which Christ refers), we take this undulating motion and we put a T on it. Then we take the flux of spirit, the flux of life, and by crucifixion, by ‘taoing’ it, we fix it. In the act of fixing it, we have allowed it to come into a state (that is to say we have made it static), and for a moment (that is for a crossing force accountable in a closed zone), we have an object of attention. Imagine the Absolute undulation to be going about anywhere and nowhere and then deciding, “I’m fed up with that”, we’ll rotate a bit and then we’ll cross inside the rotation, and we’ll use this cross as the basis. That is another form of the letter ‘T’.

Now in the fact of rotating we have brought to be (that’s the letter ‘B’) a zone. Zone means zealous unification, actually. The power is zealously going round and making a one in that place. It is a locus because we have tied, kept in and established that power.

L —

Tied

C —

Kept in

US —

Established

Prior to a rotation there is Absolutely no location whatever in infinity. Remember we were talking about the way an adult sees space as that in which we store commodities, when we are in business? We said that it was really an abstract idea and really the baby doesn’t do it. The baby is just as much aware of the space between as it is of the bodies, and it isn’t until by extension of the hand that it finds a resistance in the hand correspondent with certain visual sensations, that it develops the idea that there are resistant objects which later it will learn to call material objects, and some non-resistance at the tangible level, called space. But the child knows, like the cat knows and the pigeon knows and everybody else in the instinctual level knows, that space is every bit as important as bodies once its proper function is realised.

Description: squares2.jpgSupposing we do a painting now, or a drawing. There is a rule in painting that if we do a little condensed or concentrated mass of colour or tone, very small one in one corner, we can balance it with a large mass, not so intense of another tone. Now when we look at this picture we find a very intense spot and the same amount of blackness spread over a larger area in the diagonally opposite corner, and we can see that our attention keeps moving across it. But the eye is tied to the visual sensation. The dark tone here and the grey one, lighter here, and it tends to skip across the space as of no moment — that is, as not causing any turn or orientation. The orientation at the visual level of the adult (not the child) is towards the material object and therefore the eye runs from this spot across space very quickly to the far corner of that grey mass here and then rotates round it and measures it. In the visual arts, in painting and architecture and so on, we talk about organising space by means of form.

Quite simply, if I draw a curved arrow in one corner and then carried the curve right through and put a dot far away from it, although I have not actually drawn a line there, because the curve has a certain amount of inertia in it, it is doing what we call ‘pointing’ at that dot. And the attention then goes across there.

We can show that we can produce almost a visual hallucination by doing this in a slightly more complex way. If I start to draw the profile of a man, like this, and go down, I don’t touch the paper on the forehead, and I build it up from below with tones, you will begin to see if you are not careful, connecting lines where none exist. I want to show this vector quality, like the arrow. If I draw very carefully now the edge of this shape and make that shape point to where the eyebrow goes, they are now pointing across that space. You can’t help feeling at that moment that that forehead is straight. If you look at it carelessly and then you’ll have to say what you see, you would actually believe that you had seen such a thing. If we wanted to make the space in between there not straight, all that we have to do is vector a particular part of it slightly out and then immediately the eye organises the space between those two terms. So if I carry this one out a tiny bit more, and then tip it like that on the bridge of the nose, it will alter the character of the space between there and there. Now this is what we call the organisation of space by form.

 

 

Now the fact that we can do this visually could be explained by saying, “well in effect we have imported a thing out of the physical body, mass inertia, which we experience when we rush along, and find that we can’t stop immediately — we tend to carry on in the direction of motion. And therefore we unconsciously carry the attention over in the direction of the line until we come to an object. And being materially orientated, our whole attention is to find an object as a resting point.

In all the visual arts we are concerned with organising space by suggestion of form. The eye being concerned with avoiding material obstacles is very, very concerned with the tone values and colours of objects, and therefore it is very ready to respond to any suggestion of direction at the visual level which would allow body motion to be conducted without impedance.

But there is another kind of space as one German fellow wrote in a book called ‘Gibt Es Ein Hörraum’, or ‘is there an auditory space?’ He noticed that while in the visual arts a line can produce the filling up of a space without actually filling it at all, in the case of music a tone actually fills that space — it does not leave it to your imagination. It actually fills it. And when you are looking at this board, these lines, and you find certain forms there and your interest is held by them in some measure, if you examine yourself you will find what you call attention is going out to the object. And you have to go out and look at it and then a process of interpretation occurs inside you. And you have to work on it intellectually. And this is very, very important.

You have to work on a visual impression intellectually. So we can say that the eye is a symbol of the intellect. So we can say that the I, first person, is also the symbol of the intellect. But an individual as such is an intellectual. But the moment you stress your individuality at all you have stressed your circumscription in the ball of the eye, you have made an object for yourself whereby you know that you are that individual and not another, and at the same time in using this circumscription you have brought to be the possibility of radial moments, and therefore the development of the diameter and the cross.

Then we can start talking about ratio.

We can’t talk about ratio until we circumscribe a zone. So when we circumscribe a zone we bring to be the I, the individuality, egotism, the finiting of the observer and rational activity all in one go.

Now you know that the devil’s crime is reported by tradition to have been intellectual pride. Intellectual pride therefore would correspond exactly with

¨      ignoring infinity for whatever reasons,

¨      finiting himself,

¨      and then proceeding to rationalise the substance on the inside and say, “I put myself in order as a finite being, and therefore I do not need any relation with any other being outside myself”.

Now a being who believes that he does not need a relation with any other being outside himself is either Absolute, or self-deceived. If he is Absolute he does not need a relation with a being outside himself because all beings are necessarily inside himself.

But if he doesn’t believe he is Absolute and therefore infinite, he must believe that he is finite. And if he is finite he must necessarily believe that he needs a relation with externality. Because every finite being that we know, in order to grow from a baby to a grown person has to absorb energy from inside and push it out to its perimeter. The fact that we have to breathe and have to eat and have to have solar radiation on us and so on, to make us grow, shows that as finite circumscribed beings, we are not independent. It is demonstrated that the egotist is deceived when he postulates that he is sufficient for himself as a finite. But if he realises that he is not a finite, then the question of his relation to beings external to himself takes another form and instead of being a relation of beings external to himself, it becomes a relation of beings internal to himself as Absolute. So that he cannot in any sense escape the relation.

Either he is finite and therefore needs external forces to maintain him, or he is Absolute and all the bodies that there are, are internal to him and they are his relational problem within and not within his finite physical body from which he starts, but within his consciousness. All the bodies in the universe are equally the property of the Absolute. And therefore if a man, say practising yoga, climbs up and declares himself to be Absolute, at that moment he has declared himself Absolutely responsible for all the beings internal to Absolute space.

So whether one is finite or infinite, relations are still one’s problem, either because one needs external force to maintain oneself or because all finite bodies are within one’s Absolute Consciousness.

Now in the visual field we always as adults tend to concentrate upon form and to organise space in works of art by vectoring the form, by pointing the form with a definite direction and stress, and in so doing to create something in nothing. Because from the point of view of the materialist, space is nothing. The man pinned on his visual sense is therefore committed to an abstract analysis of the world in terms of material bodies. If we had no experience other than visual experience, purely, and had never had any experience of tangibles — supposing we’d been born deficient in certain nerve ending so that we never had a sense of touch or of resistance — the universe would be made up of light, of colours and shades and so on, but there would be no concept within us of a gross material body to stand separately from other bodies. It isn’t until we come up against the fact of resistance that we construct the idea of external material bodies.

How we see things

Now in the inter-spaces, when we look at the eye and an object that is seen, we say in the theory of how we see things; a light shines on an object and is reflected into the eye. And stimulates the retina at the back. Produces certain processes in the brain, which long experience has taught us to interpret as an object outside. This experience involved walking and stretching the arms and touching and so on. But the space in between here is ignored and a process of intellectual evaluation takes place in interpreting the visual object.

How we hear things

When we come to music we get something totally different. Instead of interpreting things intellectually, we do not find that we have to go out to the object and begin to think about the object. The object, the dynamic tones that come to us, although experienced as in space outside us and coming to us, are in fact felt as pressing in upon us and themselves doing the work.

And the peculiar difference between the visual and the hearing experience is that in the visual experience, if I draw two squares, I shade one of them dark and leave the other one, these two things are seen visually and intellectually analysed so that when I see them I say there is a white square adjacent to a black square. And there is no third resultant. Nothing happens. They don’t quarrel. They are just adjacent. The black one doesn’t shout at the white one and the white one doesn’t shout at the black one. All we’ve had is a perfectly non-emotional experience where certain areas of the retina have been stimulated and intellectual processes of interpretation have been conducted and decided that unequal areas or unequal stimuli of areas in the retina have occurred: the result — a perception of two adjacent squares.

But supposing we take two tones in music and we play them next to each other, like C and C#. Now instead of C and C# lying side by side, together, without interfering with each other, and leaving it to us to say, “there is C and Cand no third”, instead of that we get interference, dreadful interference called dissonance or discord. And this interference actually occurs not only subjectively in our minds, like some psychologists think, but it also occurs outside the physical body from which we start reference, in the space. Because if we blow a discord on our magical instrument which we’ve got with us, we will find that if I blow it, I can hear it here, and everyone else in the room will hear it where they are, and if you move about in the room, wherever you move, you will hear this noise — this beautiful discord. And the fact that you can move about in space and that wherever you go these two still fight each other in that space, tells you that the space itself is full of this quarrel between these two tones.

So whereas in the visual experience we have an intellectual, an unemotional, analytic process able to see things separately and produce no resultant of a third order, no quarrel, the moment we introduce musical tones we start a fight in the substratum which vibrates when those tones are sounded. So that we are then in the presenting of a musical relation giving evidence that between the material objects which the intellect separates, the space is not nothing at all. The space between those objects is dynamic.

When we look at the word space — we’ve dealt with this before — we’ve said the word ace is in it. And the word ace and the word aitch, and the ache, all refer to the same ultimate fact of the sentient self-moving spirit. Space is spirit. And the spirit undulation is positing, that’s the ‘p’, spirit. It goes along, and then goes ‘puh’ [pronounced as plosive puh]. Makes a little rotation, goes along and does it again. Now this is s and p.

Tape 260

Absolute and Individual Light

This is why of course in the name Jehovah, the name itself means male/female. The Ja and Veh in Jehovah, means the same as Adam and Eve. It means Man/Woman. And as to the woman you say, “I want to create.” As to the man, you say, “Well, I’ll show you how” — meaning it formally. So there is a simultaneous wanting and a power to fulfil the want in the Absolute. It then spins in and makes a world. All things are made in the same way: by the in-spin of the infinite onto a centre and the generation in that circumscription of a finite. It must do so to get something out of it, because you never put things in except to get them out. So when the infinite puts itself into the finite, it must be that when it comes out it will get something worth having.

Now if we remove the concept of opposition, we remove the concept of friction.

If we remove the concept of friction we cannot develop the results of friction.

The Absolute is an equable light. The Bardo Thurdo of the Tibetans is a whole chapter about the equable light, about the fact that everybody at death sees this light and few people manage to retain it because it is equable. If you manage to hang on to it you are alright. But hanging on is a finiting activity. There is a paradox in it. The Absolute is an equable light and yet it wills in and creates darkness. When it comes out, it doesn’t come out as an equable light, it comes out brighter than it went in.

Let’s imagine now that we have an infinity of light spirit force. It goes in, rotates and overshadows itself and puts its light out. Now in overshadowing itself it is actually packing energy in to a finite container. The more it packs in, the more interference there is in that zone, the darker it gets. This word dark, D-RK, means interference. So if it keeps on packing it until it becomes saturated with light, it goes black. Hence the alchemical and Rose Cross statement, “from excess of light — darkness.”

Now it isn’t positing the darkness as an end in itself to retain it, but when it has gone dark, if it insists on putting more into it, then quite suddenly it incandesces. The dark now suddenly flashes out and the light that flashes out is brighter than the equable light [48.34] from which it derives. We’ve now got an individual light as well as an Infinite Absolute light. And the process goes on. Throughout space it keeps turning in making little black awkward egotists and driving more energy into them until finally they suddenly incandesce. This is ‘funkeline’ — nice word ‘funkeline’ isn’t it? This sparking goes on and induces in the infinite equable light an infinite number of individuated lights. And all the individuated lights (as seen in the second half of Mr. Watson’s question) are factually subjected to different intensities of stimulation. Which is the same thing as saying that all the individuated lights are uttering different notes. They are shining forth different colours.

In the Absolute there is no tone as such — because tone implies unification. And the Absolute is not monistic — it is non-dual. When it brings to be the first great sphere, it has brought the first tone to exist and the first equilibration colour — the white. When further involvements produce individuated lights there arise in each individuated light a centre for the distribution of a new colour and a new tone. So the whole of art in terms of visual and audial, tactual experience as we know it, and all that we call value springs out of the creation of individuation centres which have been precipitated by the non-individuated, the Infinite, for its own good pleasure. So if you find out, “Why am I made by God”, the answer is to enjoy God and to know him. That’s the dogmatic statement about him. God loves to create and he loves his creatures to love that he creates.

But that doesn’t mean that we can all immediately start enjoying ourselves, because some of us have only just been precipitated into the darkness and we are not nearly so dark as we will have to be before we can strike an individual light. Hence the necessity for prodigality. If we don’t consciously survey our wickednesses and consider the nature of them we cannot become that individual light that the infinite has precipitated us to be. You know those Laodicean gentlemen who will not blow hot and will not blow cold, the infinite spews them out of the mouth. The mouth is the great sphere of the universe, and if they won’t blow hot or cold they are pushed to the perimeter by the forces that are blowing hot, and they are then blurted back into the infinite and absorbed because they are no good.

If they blow hot or cold within, then strife occurs and out of this comes this inert characterisation symbolised by the cross and this characterisation is the same thing as tonality in music or colour harmony in the visual arts. In order to get a good unique colour we have to go very dark first, suffer various crucifixions and then emerge with a consciousness of the peculiar steps of our crucifixion. So although we all as individuals derive from the non-individual, God the Father, when we do come to be individual we are destined to be returned to consciousness of the Father, and instead of being (as misunderstood Buddhism asserts) lost in the sea of infinity, we always retain the form of our initial precipitation point. Which means we have a unique value once we have been through the mill and come out on the other side.

To guard against mere intellectualism in relation to paradise.

The tendency, as men, is to think, and to think as we’ve said before is to do what would be feeling — only in the mind. In the gross material world we come up against situations. In the gross material world we do find a few pleasures but we also get a lot of kicks. Now the kicks in the gross world tend to force us out of the gross world and turn ‘Ge’ into ‘Ke’. If we allow the pains of gross material experience to force us into the thinking world only we will become intellectualists and we will dodge all the painful situations of the gross material world. If we do that we will never strike a light individually. We cannot strike a light except in exposure in the gross world.

The thing about say Gurdjieff for instance, was that he began with a hard ‘g’. That’s his dominant concept. He goes into the gross world, and he does things in the gross world because his grandmother said he’d have to either do that or go to school like ordinary folk. He exposes himself and discovers things about himself in the gross material relation that he could not possibly discover in the merely intellectual relation where he could only say, “if I were to expose myself I might experience certain things.” When we hear people saying, “if I were to do so-and-so” and then they don’t do it, we know that their furniture of form in consciousness is insubstantial, and it is quite useless at the gross material level.

Now a king as we’ve said before is a man who has an idea and puts that idea in to the gross material world. If he cannot take his idea and put it in to the gross material world then he is not a king.

K —

Idea

In —

In

G —

Gross material world

When we talk about paradox we are talking about that which is ‘beyond – para’, ‘opinion – dox’. And that is the same in ‘para’- ‘dise’, where ‘dise’ means duality. Beyond duality, beyond opinion. Now we have to be very, very careful that we do not reduce this to an intellectual proposition. If we do, it will do us no good at all, and we will fail to make contact with space, dynamically.

Paradox — beyond opinion, paradise — beyond duality, is not simply an idea that intellectual ideas are in pairs of opposites and that you can intellectually assert both. It is not such an idea only, it is a statement that beyond opinions, beyond dualities, there is space and that this space in between is alive. It is vital, it is intelligent. And this space, if it weren’t an abuse of the word, we could call concrete. But we can’t call it concrete because concrete means grown together, ‘Together grown’. Concrete means grown together. And if it were merely an intellectual proposition we will not be able to feel the dynamic space between objects..[57.08]  If we identify with physical bodies in this room, our own each one of us, then we finite our understanding to the level of that body. But if we dare to feel what’s going on between bodies in the space we will actually feel a different tension between this body and every other body in the room. And the tension will not be the same for all other bodies but it will be a unique difference between this body and every other body.

Now you can do that (because of the nature of space) now as an exercise without bothering to get up from where you are, but you don’t know each other very intimately and therefore you can feel the situations without much intellectual blockage. If for a few seconds you just deliberately try to feel the space between your body and another body in the room, and feel the quality of the feeling between them. and then change it to another body, and feel that and compare it with the first, then change it with another one and feel that, and change it with another one and feel that, throughout the room, you will find a definite feeling tone difference as you are simply doing it. And it is not an intellectual creation. It is a felt fact. And it has to do with the tension between forms.

Supposing we take the tonic and the 3rd and the 5th, and play them in music: as soon as we do that, we find a peculiar tendency, in the tones and between the tones, to want to do something. If we play a minor third instead, we find that the tension alters between them. This tension itself is the product of the fact that each tone is a vortical centre of infinity and therefore is straining the space between. And according to the distance between these centres (it’s only distance in the tonal scale), according to the distance between them, so is the frequency. A great distance we call a long wave, and a short distance we call a short wave. And it is this difference between them, the difference, the duality in their bearing and the duality in their doing, that we feel in the inter-space between us.

Now you can do this (I hope you’ve all been doing it surreptitiously in the last three seconds), you can do this either at home or anywhere else — in the bath or on the bus, wherever you do it — if you actually tell yourself the truth, that space is not empty in the ordinary sense of the term — it is only empty in the dynamic sense that we’ve just said. It is literally full of frequencies and all you have to do is increase sensitivity to them. Until you can feel them you cannot manipulate them. When you can feel them you cannot help manipulating them, so you’d better be careful.

To become aware of a thing in your organism is to change it. Remember consciousness is a catalyst. As soon as you become aware of a force in your body, its character alters. You cannot become aware of it without changing it, because to become aware of it is to induce energy of consciousness to the zone where it is.

So simply to think of somebody is to change the dynamic relationship within that body. The animal is the most obvious at showing this immediately because they are not conceptualised, but it’s just the same in human beings. If you think of somebody, if they are in farthest antipodes or somewhere, wherever they are it makes no difference. As soon as you think of that person, you have changed the dynamic relation between yourself and that person, and at the same time the inter-space between you is different, and therefore the pull or push between you has increased. You cannot think without producing an energy change. And that must either move you further apart or draw you closer together. This is simply because space is what it is.

Space is force.

We all know things that we tend to ignore. The room is full of radio waves now, full of cosmic radiation, full of all sorts of marvellous radio programmes, and if we don’t turn the radio on we don’t get them, but they are there. Everybody knows it. Today it is commonplace for the schoolboy and yet we don’t hear them under normal conditions simply because we don’t want to. We are busy.

Once upon a time, man did want to and he could feel a tree, he could hear a tree, he could see a tree — simultaneously. But in so-doing his natural tendency to interfere with things was inhibited.

Now we’ve said that when a man is precipitated in as a baby, he is darkened and turned into an egotist. Now, when William Blake said “let God go into a circle and see how he goes on”, he was merely making a metaphysical statement. As soon as the equable light diminishes and darkens, the only way that being knows who it is, what it is and what it can do, is by having a go.

Now we need an infinite piece of paper to show the next diagram. I’ll pinch a bit more space. We’ll repeat this little diagram. There is a gross being come into existence. It is dark. It just doesn’t know what it can do or who it is.

Who it is, is an intelligence with a potential of action.

What it is, is a gross substantialised being made by that intelligence.

What it can do it does not yet know.

The Nature of Stimuli

Now supposing it sends out a force. Like Omar Khayyam did, I sent a message to the infinite and something about afterlife to span”. Now supposing it travels out infinitely, just keeps on going. Then if that is so then this being cannot possibly know what it has sent out. It’s quite impossible for a finite being sending out an impulse or an action, if that impulse travels infinitely, for the being to know what…..

 

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  ….hit the being. Now on the return, the being knows the quality of what it sent out in relation to the thing that reflected it. This is the ground of reflexive self-consciousness.

We do something… pretend for a moment that is an actor. I was talking to an actor the other day, and they were complaining about certain things, about the bad audience they had. And I said, “supposing you had a very, very good audience [104.57] who appreciated all your jokes and even anticipated them and gave you a round every time you opened your mouth. How would you know how good you were”. They all said immediately it wouldn’t do because you wouldn’t be able to evaluate your own progress. So they actually have to have something, here, a firmament or resistance barrier and it mustn’t be too ready to respond. It must be a little inertic so that it doesn’t give them back in its purity and immediately what is sent out, but there is a time lag and what comes back is slightly distorted, slightly muffled, slightly covered and choked. Then you send out another impulse and see what happens to that one when it comes back. And you just go about sending them out and they keep coming back and the whole of space is traversed by lines going out and back to every finite centre within Macrocosmos.

It is these lines that have led Einstein to believe that space-time is curved.

Now, this gross body now finds other gross bodies and it finds that if it fires a stimulus at a gross body it gets a quicker response than if it fires one at the Macrocosmic Logos. So it finds it will discover its own capacities better and quicker by kicking the shin of the little boy next door. That gives an immediate response… or fairly. Therefore he tends to drift into relations more and more with these little black boys in their search for God, and they keep kicking each other. In so doing they are learning the nature of the stimulus they have sent out.

Now this is a strange fact and if you care to think about it and then watch very carefully you will find out that in general people are not talking to you at all. This is a strange fact. People are not having conversations. They are shooting out remarks to see what happens. And the remarks when they come back give them some information about reality.

Now if you know that fact and you verify it with a little test by firing something out consciously and deliberately and seeing what happens, you will gradually become aware of your own nature. Because when the reaction from another being attacked by one of your own stimuli hits you, it produces a response. You might say, “well, I am going to insult that man to see how he reacts to an insult.” So you insult him. Straight away a reaction comes, a long arm, a punch on the nose. Now you can watch your own nose end reaction to the reaction that you initiated with the original stimulus. This causes the growth of self-knowledge.

Therefore there is no immediate danger of your over-doing it, because like the baby is very aware that it won’t tumble over the edge of the staircase, as soon as it can crawl, although it has never fallen before, there is a natural tendency for the eye to blink when a little bit of dust goes near it. And so there is a natural tendency for the body not to endanger itself unduly. In fact it requires quite an effort of will to insult a man three times larger or heavier than yourself, who looks rather ferocious.

But whatever you do, if you deliberately become conscious and make these statements to see the reaction that that other being gives to you, what you have to do in order to evolve quickly, is to be more concerned with the reaction that you have to his reaction than you have with his reaction to your stimulus. That way you can evolve every quickly and it immediately inverts the usual law of affairs. Because usually a person fires out a stimulus, looks, grins, and says, “well, I got under his skin that time”, is not concerned with his own reaction if somebody gets under his skin as a lesson to be learned — is too busy being injured.

So in this situation where all these precipitated finite beings (who are all on their way to being a little private ‘funkeline’ and making lovely bright lights and new tones, new non-tonic base music and so on), as they are all evolving towards it, they are all at different levels. They are all at different ages. Some people are millions of years old and some people are just born now, and that has to be recognised. So that if you see anybody behaving what you call ‘badly’, you should out of what is called charity, assume that they are a bit younger than you are to begin with. They have not been around so many times [1..10.20]. And bring in always into yourself, this consciousness that you are being fed through and by space — that space is not nothing.

Christ says that he is the big Macrcosmic logos. ‘I am the vine’. It’s a funny vine because it goes inside itself and it makes branches on the inside like this. These are grapes, you see. The apes of wrath as they are called. These grapes growing on the inside vine are the individual human beings. Christ says, “I am the vine, my Father (God the father) is the husbandman, and he will cut off any unprofitable branch and if there is a profitable branch he will purge it so that it brings forth more fruit”. So in either case we are going to get it roughly. Were are either going to be purged because we are doing well or we are going to be smacked a bit because we are not. Which is one of the hard saying in the NT (new testament), or TNT as it should be called.

Now, once we have understood this, this space, which is God the Father is infinite goes right through Macrocosmos, right through all contingent beings, is in the very centre of every egotist, and it is this space force, it has no resistance, no character, no cross no crown. So this same Absolute force appears as Devil or Tempter. Which is why in the lord’s prayer it says, “lead us not into temptation and it is a prayer said to God the Father. Temptation is Temporal Presentation or the serial processes of relation within the Macrosphere. And when we think we’ve had enough bashing, enough of the joys of temptations and their results, then we say the Lord’s Prayer. At first we don’t mean what we say when we say, “lead us not into temptation”. You see we are a bit like St. Augustine who said “deliver us, oh lord, from the concupiscence of the flesh — but not today”. When he said this he was talking about a fact inside himself. Some part of him that had been hurt in a painful situation said, “I think I’d rather be good”, while lots of other parts that are well shielded by nature, of necessity, said “well, we’ve not been hurt yet, so we will carry on and fulfil our experiential cycle”.

When it is said, “I believe, help Thou mine unbelief”, it is another aspect of the same thing. A little portion of us that has had a really good bashing says, “I do believe in you now”, and a lot of you say “oh, God, don’t be stupid”. Now the funny thing is that the part that is saying, “don’t be stupid”, is this dark part that doesn’t know anything at all about anything, except in so far as it can fire out a stimulus and get back a reaction. But as the whole process is initiated from infinity, this dark part misbehaving itself and occupying open borstals and being delinquent and so on, is not frowned upon by God the Father because it is the only process whereby these beautiful fairy lights can be made. There is no other process. There is only the one process.

This is why the Cosmic Christ refuses to condemn a manifest sinner. Why? This Macrocosmic Self, the Christ self, takes upon itself the sins of all those individuals. They are within it. ‘In him we live, move and have our being’. Every sin, every contingent clash reverberates through the whole of Macrocosmic Space, and the Macrocosmic Self actually suffers, that is, is in passive relationship with the violence initiated by those finite individuals. So it isn’t as if really he could dodge it. Because we are inside him. And he has no more opportunity to dodge us in our violence internally than a mother has the possibility of dodging the baby she is carrying when it kicks. She could complain and she could smack herself in the rough zone where she felt the kick, but he has already turned over and is kicking somewhere else.

Now this has to be realised. That God has a genuine problem himself in making this universe and this universe is his Son the Logos, and precipitating internally further sons because we are all sons and these sons are going through this process of darkening and egotism as part of their necessary characterisation process, must kick, and these kicks must reverberate back through the Macrocosmos. So it is quite useless to condemn anybody for anything they do because what they do is the product of the total constellation of forces the gestalt of the Macrocosmos itself. The Macrocosmos does not condemn any single one of them. God the Father who runs right through the lot does not condemn them.

And nevertheless there is this strange fact of judgement. There is a judgement because each one of these when it sends out an impulse is bound to get it back again, and that is the judgement. The reaction to our stimuli which we release is the judgement. And just as there is an individual judgement for each man, so there is a collective judgement for Macrocosmos. And it is this collective judgement of all the beings within Macrocosmos that is called the Last Judgement, the final one. Because there is a definite amount of energy involved in it and a definite number of impulses for each individual to come to his level, and a term therefore for a collective equilibration of the whole process, and a final judging or reaction relation establishment throughout the whole process.

Ana —

Running serpent

Lys —

Loose

I’ll just repeat this fact. We must be careful of intellectualism. The intellect is an instrument of analysis and we analyse or make running serpents loose. We loosen the forces in order to see what they are. But when we loosen them we have not destroyed the continuity of the Absolute, the seamlessness of the Absolute. The intellect has split reality and behind it the feeling must retain the unity. The man who analyses with his intellect only and kills his feeling, kills himself, cuts himself out from space consciousness, and as soon as he has lost spatial consciousness, he falls to the gross material contingent level, becomes in act a material being, subject to gross material law, and acted upon from above by beings more sensitive than himself, who can push him around because he has identified with his gross material body. To identify with an analytical process an intellectual process, that severs bodies is therefore to go under the law of separateness and to become unaware of the field forces which can only be known by making feeling more sensitive. To make feeling more sensitive of the interspace is actually to become spiritually aware.

In Buddhism the doctrine of the three bodies of the Buddha, the ‘trikaya’, there is:

¨      A dharma body, a kind of law body.

¨      A sambhogakaya, a body of bliss — the whole feeling body.

¨      The nirmana-kaya (kaya means body) the body of transformation whereby we take our gross material body, and by progressive exposures and testings and so on, and increases of sensitivity of feeling “we turn that body”, as St. Paul says, “from a gross material body into a spiritual body” by increasing sensitivity to the forces traversing it. And the whole thing depends on clarity of analysis as a first step to climbing out of the whole thing. And when the analysis is completed, to avoid falling to bits (which is what analysis does to you), to practice feeling the inter-spaces. The mark of Christ the mark of Buddha and so on is com-passion. That is feeling-with other beings. And the only way we can do that is by becoming more and more sensitive to the inter-spaces between you.

Sympathy and Compassion

Q:        Sympathy – with compassion. How would you distinguish them?

Between a Greek and a Latin concept really, ‘sympathy’ means ‘same feeling’, ‘compassion’ means ‘with feeling’.

You could feel the same as another person and yet you could say, “Well, I’m feeling the same as you. So what?” that would be sympathy.

In compassion you feel with them, not only the same. You also feel as if you are with them. If you remember that form itself is only a modality of the Absolute, then compassion is a necessity [1.20.54]. And if we say that we are not experiencing it, or sympathy, what we are really doing is deceiving ourselves. It is impossible not to feel what is going on in South Africa now, but when you do feel it, when it is presented to you, you can refuse to look at it. But it is an act of will to refuse to look at it.

So that everybody spontaneously feels because they are, before they are existent, a field — an infinite field of intelligent force. So this field consciousness is prior to their individuated consciousness because this infinite is prior to this precipitation. So the feeling experience is prior to the intellectual analytical experience. And it has to be regained, plus this heightened awareness, the sharpened brightened light which was the purpose for which the infinite finited itself.

Q:        Will they become identified with this compassion? This would be the fall into the emotional upset where they become emotionally involved with all the feelings of which you individually…

Not necessarily. E-motion is out-flowing motion. And it could be out of control or it could be in control. It is possible to feel compassion without becoming overthrown emotionally.

The danger of emotionalism, to make an ‘ism’ out of it (to build it into a substantial system, the ‘ism’ means), is that it causes you to identify and destroy your efficiency in the relationship. Whereas compassion increases efficiency in the relationship, because it makes you aware of the feeling determinants in other beings.

One of the things — you take a man with a poker face, he specialises in not exhibiting his feelings. Now if you get a man playing cards with a poker faced gentleman opposite to him, he feels a bit upset because he can’t read that man’s emotion. There was a fellow interviewed recently — Alexander, a chess player — he said that when he played with Alakeen on one occasion he had heard that when Alakeen was emotionally disturbed, started twisting his hair. When he noticed that he was twisting his hair, then he thought, “now I can win, he is upset.” And he himself got excited and made a mistake. Whereupon Alakeen stopped twisting his hair again. I know this fellow Alexander and he got excited at the thought of beating this world-beater. If only he could have inhibited this, at that moment he might have won the game.

When you are in compassion with somebody, it does not mean you are emotionally out of control. That means to say, emotional lack of control means that the energy has started to flow out, and you are really no longer merely compassionate. There is more energy going into the situation from you than the situation warrants.

Now in a perfect relation of compassion you can feel how much is wanted of emotional exhibition to stabilise it. And there may be in some cases an occasion when he would have to say, “oh, my word”, and that would stabilise the situation. And in another situation you might have to shed two dozen crocodile tears. In each situation there will be an emotional need on the part of another person locked up in his dark shell. But emotional leakage is not presupposed by compassion or sympathy. You’ve always got to keep your control if you want to have proper compassion. And because the fear of emotionalism particularly in men, the tendency is to formulate intellectually to get rid of this emotionalism.

Darwin

And if the analysis goes too far, you get rid of it completely. Until you get a man like Charles Darwin complaining in his old age that he was no longer able to appreciate music at all. His intellect had cut into him so strongly that literally nothing happened to him when he heard a great piece of music. And he thought he’d lost something. He had. What he’d done was identify with a mechanical process of intellection, and put a super-stress on it so that his feeling life died. It was still underneath, but he hadn’t got the wherewithal to pull it up. In fact he didn’t even have the concept that it was there to pull up — as a materialist. He just thought it was a thing, discrete, detachable, that he had lost. Not simply a capacity that he had suppressed for scientific reasons.

Q:        Wasn’t it the price that he had to pay for what he did?

Well it was the price that he did pay. If he’d have thought more carefully he would have been more truthful. And he wouldn’t have had to pay such a price. You know that Darwin altered successive editions of his greatest work, to keep it in pace with fact without admitting, without writing in the preface that he had altered it. That wasn’t honest. And the desire to be right, was more important to him. It is that kind of thing that made him kill feeling. If he had been really sensitive he’d have said “that’s not nice”, and would have mentioned it in the preface. Nobody reads prefaces in any case.

Q:        Mr. Halliday, this business of tensions between two finites. When I asked this question about space, I was thinking of it more in a literal sense. I’ve had a discussion with a gentleman who has agreed to science fiction edit and he’s very taken up with this business of the possibility of exploration of space at the physical level, and in considering this question I suddenly thought you had told us about the sidereal, solar and terrestrial influences and that man’s substance is modified by these influences and in its turn brings about a certain psyche in his nature. Whether or not that when if he manages to get  some contrivance which will say shoot him off to Venus, will not the whole ratio [ 1.30.29] of forces in the universe that play upon him have suddenly altered to such an extent that he must become an entirely different thing altogether? Not a man any longer?

Because of this danger you will notice that men who have been chosen out of all the volunteers to go on these space expeditions are not just ordinary men. They are men highly formulated and the seven of them chosen in America are all religious. Which means they have a dominant concept. Now these men are rehearsed — they have faith (which is an essential), in transcendence — so that whatever formal situation they get into they have something superior to the formal situation.

You know that they put them in various contrivances and disorientate them and they are then attacked by various fantasies and this is how they test the space-worthiness of these fellows.

Those fellows with faith in transcendence come off better than the others. Because they say, “oh this is only dizziness” — not “I am terribly dizzy, this is awful” — but “This is dizziness. This is a sort of formal manifestation. And beyond all this there is God Absolute, in whom I believe. So let the dizziness come and let the strange beings with the long green hairs on the end of their nose come too. They are still only forms.”

You know that a lot of the Americans who have been tested for this space stuff recently have been frightened — and have seen gremlins on the dashboard. They have been seeing fantastic figures. And those are the projections of their fears. If a man will panic under test conditions, when he knows he is in a laboratory, think what will happen to him if he is fired out into space. They have discovered that for ordinary people a photograph of the girlfriend is very, very helpful and if he has got one of those when he is spinning about, it helps profoundly. Because it is a target for his biological energies.

 

 

Audio version starts here for Archive site.

Q:        Can I ask a question? When you speak as you do now, it’s extempore.

Extempore is ‘out of the time’.

Q:        Yes.

From the time.

Q:        Does that suggest that the best music is not written down?

The best music is not written down? The best music cannot be written down! The notation on a piece of paper is an approximation to the composer’s intention. It can very, very easily be misread.

Q:        Is that the correct interpretation of that phrase extempore? Would you say it was outside the power of time?

It’s usually to the contrary out of the time. That is from the time. It means that the time situation is speaking. When a moment occurs it gives you a stimulus and you speak on the stimulus. That’s the usual meaning of extempore.

Q:        Because an unprepared speech is always better than a prepared one?

Pre-pared means ‘pira’ pared which means rationally cut, and therefore necessarily discrete. If you are linking by feeling (which is the only valid link Absolutely because it is field awareness), then the mode of progression is not determined by the vortical points but by between-ness. Just as in music the dynamism is to do with the tones and the distance between them called the interval. So in musical theory we talk about intervals rather than the notes themselves. An interval of a second or the third or the fourth or the fifth. Rather than of a note ‘C’ ‘D’ ‘E’ and so on.

Q:        So the prepared thing is never so appropriate?

It cannot be by being pira-pared. In fact the whole failure of the French (French is Fira ? Pira) their capitol city is Paris which is a pira function, it is built on a wheel and their whole concept is intellectual and therefore they abandoned the field because it was formless and therefore abandoned the cause and therefore went down the nick as a world power. And therefore fell down to need the Gaullet [De Gaulle] to help them up. You see? And until they get rid of this rational stress they will not hit the top level.

Whereas the Germans who are Bosch, are herren form not pira form. They still believe in this power. Which we’ve said before that Nietzsche was quite clear in his mind that as the rationalist is weaker than the man of will, the rationalist will always hedge the situation, surround it with definitions and then try to hypnotise other people with his definitions, so that their Will will be paralysed by his intellect. But the real Herrenvolk, the real men of will, know that the man is only making a reason because he hasn’t got the power to do without. So they ignore his reason. ‘Reason has moons but moons not hers lie mirrored on her seas.’

Q:        When they ignore his reason, have they understood his reason? Have they transcended to understanding it? We cannot step up above the definition. We can only transcend that which we have understood, can’t we?

Yes but these men, herrenvolk know that the pira is a function of the hera. The ripples on the surface are only products of the pebble thrown from above.

Q:        I was thinking more of what you said earlier regarding doing the exercise, where when you feel yourself coming to the point of definition, this supposes that you know the definition that you are coming to the point of.

What will happen: before you can do that exercise, you will persist in defining through fear.

Q:        This validates that fact that we also must be quite clear about the definition that we are going to  use.

You can’t transcend it until you’ve done it. 

Q:        This is what I’m talking about.

Remember fear itself is a pira function. The Buddhists were quite clear that the mind as counter is the organ of fear and there is nothing in it except pains added up saying, “look out, dodge that one”. There isn’t anything else in the pira, in the reason, other than records of pains experienced in situations stored up so that it won’t happen again. So the whole structure is negative. But nevertheless we have to evolve through those things. And because of being finite and identified with the finite we feel impotent and being impotent we think in order to avoid the painful situation. And we go on thinking to avoid the painful situation until Christ comes along and He says “don’t think to avoid the situation because that merely adds up in the mind another painful thought”. You’ll be an eternal dodger. Penetrate into the situation, find out why it is painful (pain is point of refusal), what are you refusing there, penetrate into it and discover that that painful situation is a posited power, and by penetration get hold of the power in the situation. Then it can’t frighten you any more. It can’t rationalise you any more because you’ve got hold of the power.

This shifts the accent off the rationalising function onto pure Will. For the Will is no fool. Because a fool is already a pi-law. Because a man who doesn’t know the meaning in the first place will go along, come to the precipice, and fall over it. Now if he gets depressed about that and turns fool into pi-law and pi-law into pi-ra he won’t go near crevices and precipices any more, and dodge them. But if he is a proper fool he will keep walking. Every time he comes to one he will fall over it. Consequently he will be going down, won’t he? Not up. He must come to the substantial fact eventually. The point of return.

Harmony and Discord of Colour and Tone

Q:        You were saying earlier that in the case of two discordant notes being played, there is a distortion in space as well as actually produced within the mind.

Yes?

Q:        In the case of two different colours that actually clash if they are produced in the mind, at the same time each of those colours a frequency of its own hasn’t it?

Yes.

Q:        Notes too that are discordant have their own frequencies. Is it not illogical to suppose that because the notes clash because they are dissimlar in frequency, the colours also clash in space as well.

You could say if you like that the colours clash in space, provided you were quite careful about what you mean by colour. You see, we know exactly what we mean about tone, and we cannot say that the experience of tone is the same thing as the experience of frequency. We cannot say that the stimuli on the retina are quite the same as the pigment on which the light is shining. Whatever the frequency is in colour, if it gets too close, we know it must interfere in space, because it is traversing space and it is being reflected from a surface. So if the colours are of such an order that they jangle in space that would be discordant. But it isn’t a discordancy of the musical order. Not the same thing.

If we get red and something not quite so red it is harmonious.

If we get something ‘C’ and something not quite so ‘C’, it is discordant.

So that they are not analogous in that sense. There is something very, very mysterious about the relation between these two. They are almost opposite sides of a coin. Because adjacent colours are always harmonious and adjacent tones are always discordant.

You see when we get a spectrum as split through a prism, and we play that out on a bar, on a line, we separate out certain colours and it’s disappearing into ultraviolet there and to infrared there. And there are some visible frequencies. But that’s an abstract trick. It isn’t really like that in space. In the same space there are many, many frequencies coming and the eye is only adjusted to receive a very, very limited number of  them.

The ear is not perceiving the waveform which is at right angles to the wave as in light, but the ear is selected to perceive the longitudinal push.

So light is travelling through space in a waveform like this, at right angles to the wave, but sound is travelling longitudinally, beating. So that they cannot be identical experiences, even when they are raised to the same frequency. Because the same frequency experienced by the eye and the ear would be experienced literally at right angles to the vibration. The sound vibration being experienced at right angles to the visual vibration. So they cannot be the same experience. And the laws of the integration of the beating longitudinally of sound cannot be the same as the laws of the integration of the waveform crossing the line of propagation. That’s why we have to be very careful of hasty generalisations from analogy. Some psychologists decided to show that there was a frequency for smell and one for taste and so on. That is true, but they are of a totally different order from tone sensations and visual sensations and they haven’t analysed the kind of motion that is necessary to produce it.

There’s always a desire in the rational mind to get to the conclusion, so that now we know what it’s all about. This causes rapid making of analogies and jumping to conclusions so that you get a base to stand on, and then you can conduct your life from it, having solved the problem. But of course life is infinite and it is therefore impossible to do that. What you have to do is put your feet in infinity and not bother to stand at all, knowing that standing is the same thing as being static. Accept the essential dynamism of your own begin and be secure in your dynamic continuous insecurity. Because that is an inner security.

 

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A question here about the unity of man. Sounds a bit Buddhistic in foundation here. Is he intended to be on the…

As man has no essential unity, will not this become a serious obstacle to his investigation of space? Forces ordering his behaviour on earth must surely be of different intensities elsewhere and would not this produce a sudden dis-equilibrium quite altering the behaviour pattern of any individual?

And by man here, we say man has no essential unity, we must be referring to the individual man as an aggregate of forces. Yes?

Yes.

This of course would be a serious obstacle to investigation of space because space itself is not made of discrete parts.

We’ll draw an individual man for a moment and make him a not very well integrated man with hard bits, and we’ll say that this man has no essential unity because the formal structures in the zone of consciousness where this man is, are actually not fitting each other properly. So we say he lacks integration.

The question says, “because of this lack of unity will it not be an obstacle to this individual if he tries to investigate space?” Now space is in-between all the parts of his being. If he is identified with these behaviour patterns within himself, then for him space will be what he would call a pure void. Remember he will misuse the term, because the word void and the word empty and the word vacuum, all mean leisure. Even in a dictionary. All their roots go back to the same concept of leisure.

What is at leisure in emptiness, in voidity, in vacuum — is force. And it can only be at leisure (not essentially because force is never at leisure) relative to some Englishman. To an American it would be ‘leeziure’. And this leisure part the ‘less’ here really refers to the left, the passive. So it says that the force in the void is passive, and this can only be relative to some being, either superior in power or at a different frequency and unable to appreciate the activity in the void.

Let’s look these three words for a moment. We’ll put a fourth one, space.

 

Space —

We’ve already said that the Ace in space means spirit.

Empty —

You can see in the word empty we have a substance and a point a crucifixion relation, a crossing of forces.

Void —

In the word void we have the Greek root of form plus the glyph of transcendence. Void therefore means that which transcends form.

Vacuum —

In the word vacuum we have the root of voice.

 

So in all these different words we are dealing with something beyond manifestation. When we translate manifest, as made fast in order to be counted, mani-fast. In voidity there is form transcendence. We’ve already said that form is circumscription, and we’ve shown before that when force rotates it cannot go to a dead centre, no matter how closely it approximates to it. As long as it is going round, it cannot go to the centre. What it does is go in and come out continuously to maintain a being. In the centre of every being there is a void. Every circumscription always contains a void, and fills a void in the circumscribing action and has a void outside it.

If we add the ‘sunyata’ concept of the Indian philosophies — Hinduism and Buddhism — the idea of the sunya or emptiness, implies again an idea of transcendence. We are affirming a motion of spirit and the statement is that form is void and void is form. Because if we go inside the circumscribing limit, as soon as come to the inside of it, we come to the void again. If we go from the immanent spirit which is a void, outwards, we come to the action band and then we go through that back into another void.

If we like to represent all the beings in the universe in terms of circumscriptions, those circumscriptions are simply lines demarcing voids — particularising voids. It is then not very difficult to understand what the Buddhist concept of the equation, form = voidity means.

As every form (FR – PR and M, substance. PR is PI Ra, rotating substance form) is necessarily a rotation, and every rotation simply circumscribes a void, then every form is void and throughout the whole of so-called voidity we have a force, which when it appears as void to any finite being, does so only because the frequency of motions in the so-called void is too high for that individual to appreciate.

If a man then identifies with a finite character in the field of his consciousness — supposing he is a bus driver — if he conceives of himself as a bus driver most of the time and some of the time as a husband and a small bit of the time a drinker of tea at the terminus, then he has three references and if that’s all he’s got, he has no mode of relating the three together, he will not have a concept of voidity in himself as form, but he will believe that form is simply being a bus driver and being a home bearer and being a tea drinker.

In other words when we identify with the form and attribute to the form substantiality we are pretending that that substance as other than voidity. And then beyond the limit of the circumscribed character we say there is space and we are postulating that this space has nothing in it, no force. And therefore it is of no importance. Now we’ve said that space is really spirit. Space is dynamic, space is that which produces all the modalities, all the rotations which constitute spatial objects. Objectification is only a sphericalisation. Force just turns round, fills up a space, demarcs the space with spherical action. And as long as it is twirling around spherically that is a sphere in space. It is made of ace, it is spirit rotating.

Now if we take the concept of Maya, which is usually translated as ‘illusion’ and we split it phonetically down to its root mantric base, we have:

M —

A —

Y —

A —

Substance

Activity

Integration

Activity

Maya which is supposed to mean illusion, is only illusion to the individual who cannot penetrate through the form presented. Maya is not only illusion, it is also said to be (say in the Bhagavad Gita and elsewhere), the means whereby God creates. He creates by substantialisation, by activation of substance, by integration, activation. First he makes a substance, that’s like clay, and then he puts a form actively into that substance. The whole universe of forms is then Maya, illusion.

Now an individual (which relates to the second part of this question) in a given part of space is subject to certain orders of stimuli and the stimuli can only cause to appear in consciousness things of similar resonance. So if we are in space ‘A’, then elements of space ‘A’ in the being will resonate when the stimulus from space ‘A’ comes in. Suddenly the man will become aware that he has elements ‘A’ in him. If we now take them away put him in another space we call ‘X’, the ‘A’ will become dormant and ‘X’ elements will resonate in him. This we can demonstrate in a variety of ways — with tones and also with geometrical forms and with colours.

We can induce colour changes by putting a colour down, say yellow, and then painting without touching the yellow colour, a red one beside it. Now the moment we put a red one at the side of this yellow one, the yellow one will start to look slightly greenish. Because the complementary colour of the red is green in pigment level. If we then put a bright green on the other side of the yellow, the yellow will start looking like a yellow again. The green will be so much stronger than the green tendency of the yellow that it will force the yellow back into its yellowness.

 

 

Now this tells us that without altering a given entity we can cause it apparently to alter by altering its relations with other ones that we bring in to be. So if a man knows A and B and C and they are not related together, if he goes into environment A, A will resonate and dominate his consciousness. B and C will lapse. If we then take him away and put him into another environment, B will work upon him. In another environment, C will work on him. And as the external stimulus conjures up a reaction of the same order inside, so the man would think that he is changing his mind.

We’ll find a man, we’ll let A represent for the moment the flesh-pots of Egypt, or jolly activities without. We’ll let B represent going to church. Now he is going out and having a wild party and he’s going in a charabanc to Blackpool and on the way he sees a little lady that he used to know years ago and held hands with her in a pew this reminds him of church and conjures up the Christian ethic for a moment. And he feels a little tug inside him. Now if the chara’ is going fast enough he will be carried beyond the range of that stimulus very, very quickly and lapse back into his merrymaking.

Now in fact the content of an individual man’s mind in an untrained man depends entirely on the stimulus situation, both internal and external.

And by internal we mean the memory stimulus of previous externals including the ancestral ones.

By the external one we mean the present physical situation.

An untrained man has no control whatever over his thought processes; suffers all the time [from] reaction. He is conjured to think things by the nature of the stimulus.

Release from Mechanical Action

The second part of this question says that he would be exposed to different intensities of stimulation elsewhere and therefore his behaviour would alter. It says in fact, what we were talking about last week about the negative aspects of subjectivity. He is subjected, or thrown under the stimulus. The stimulus is able to determine his action.

Now you know that Napoleon told one of his officers that he never met a new situation on the battlefield because he had already envisaged this situation and rehearsed mentally what he would do in all the possible alternatives. If we now ask ourselves what is the best thing to do to defeat this tendency to react, there are two modes we can adopt.

One is the intellective mode, and the other one is the mode of volition.

We’ve discussed this before in relation to paradox. In one case we study the nature of the stimulus that is likely to arise and we define the opposite of that stimulus and we deliberately engram on the mind the opposite to the incoming stimulus, plus the pre-tended or held-before relation. In other words we rehearse the situation and we present the opposite stimulus from the memory to meet the extant physical stimulus. And the result is, when the two meet, there’s stasis. The things stand still and at the moment of standstill there, there is a possibility of decision.

Now that’s the intellective way. To find the opposite of the kind of stimulus we are trying to conquer and to imagine the stimulus coming before it actually comes and to engram on our memory in relation with that stimulus the opposite of it, and by firing in the energy in through concentration so to build up in the memory the opposite concept that when the external stimulus does come, what it rouses instead of itself is the contrary. And the two elements are both presented in consciousness then simultaneously, and the result is you stand still.

When you’ve got yourself in a state of standstill you will have to something about it. You can’t stand still permanently because the universe is not static. So you have to make a decision. It is therefore a moment of great danger. Because in fact when you have suddenly discovered by this technique that you can control yourself in a situation, you can say, “now I can control myself I can afford to let go a bit and indulge in the relation offered by the stimulus because I know I can pull out.” And that is the worst thing you could do, because in fact it is again feeding energy into the thing you are supposed to be controlling. And even when you have succeeded and made yourself stand still and are therefore free at that moment, when you will into the thing confident you can pull out of it again, the law of inertia operates. As soon as you put energy into it then the thing is dis-equilibrated and it starts running into action. And it will, unless you are a superman at concentration, run to its term. That is to say, the energy will exhaust itself before you can stop again. So that if you do find yourself committed in that way, all you’ve got time to do is regret it. And the best thing to do is to start rehearsing like mad, that the next time that you see this opportunity you will not decide to go into it to prove to yourself that you can control yourself. You’ll be just satisfied to control yourself in the relation. Now that is the intellective mode, to find the opposite type of stimulus to the one that you want to defeat.

The other method is simply chopping the whole process by act of will. This we’ve said before, you practice by inter-spacing, by horse and cart removing one at a time and then contemplating the void, or by stopping a serial process, like you might say, “one plus one equals..”, and don’t allow the mind to complete the series. Now this exercise looks fairly easy. Until you try it. If you can say “one plus one equals..” and nothing happens in your mind, you are actually doing very well. It is worth acquiring. Because if you can actually do it with that, although you haven’t gained the power to say, “one plus one woman equals..” and nothing happens, because you’ve change the quality of the stimulus in objectifying it, in concreting it, taking it out of abstract mathematics and into the realm of biology, you’ve introduced a new factor, nevertheless you have practised a little bit in inhibiting.

Now if you can inhibit any serial presentation of that order, where you have been led to believe there is a logical necessity, then you are on the way to becoming aware of what vacuum, voidity, emptiness, space, sunyata means and you discover that far from begin nothing, that which is in between and internal to all rotations is force. To become aware of space is to become aware of force. It is not to become aware of nothing as one word, but of no-thing as two words. It is ‘no thing’. That no-thing is simply not a finite and that which is not a finite is infinite. It is infinite force.

Now because it is infinite you cannot objectify it. The human being for security reasons tends to objectify. To inhibit this tendency to objectify is an essential of evolving reflexive self-consciousness. If we contemplate simply the paper, look at it and allow nothing to form on it, if we succeed it’s a guarantee that we have done a certain amount of work already.

Let’s look at this white paper and try to see the white paper for a moment. If we’re not careful we will immediately see that there is a drawing showing through it. In other words, the mind tends to seek an object. That object is the same thing as death. If an object appears in the mind, the mind start rotating round the circumscribing line. And as long as it is so rotating it is necessarily bound, circumscribed and the force available at that point is finited. If we then ignore that, just look at this line for a moment and say that line is not to be considered as a deposit of carbon on paper, it is merely to remind us that a force rotates there and encloses a force and excludes a force. And that the three forces are not three separate forces and cannot be because the nature of the Absolute is continuous. It is not discrete. So the force outside and the force of the circumscription and the force inside are not three forces although actually it appears so. Remember the only differences in the world are differences of actuality. And that means K-T.

There must be a closure in an establishment before actuality can come to be. If we remove actuality all we are removing is simply objectification. And when we remove objectification we’ve got no thing but we have the cause, that is the force, of all things. And this force experienced immediately, without objectification, is identical with our own will. If we get hold of our Self, not as an object but as Will, without edges, what we have got hold of is the space, the voidity, the vacuum of the Absolute. And this is not nothing (one word) it is no thing (two words), the Supreme Non-duality.

Now because we are men, including the ladies, we necessarily count as men. Men are counters. It means there is a motion within that substance which is objectified intelligence, making a me. An ‘I’ objectifies itself as a me and the motion internal to that constitutes its menschlichkeit — or its ability to count. Remember if you take a substance and just look at the constituent motion traversing it, that is the meaning of counting. There is the substance itself, that is the M, and the M is written as an equilibrated or balanced entity and the N as a dis-equilibrated one. So that the M signifies substance (which means forces in equilibrium), and the N signifies motion (that is forces in dis-equilibrium).

So to be man is to be a substance with internal motions. The internal motions are presented and constitute what we call thinking. Now these motions are eternal. This process goes on. It goes on continuously through all beings. And in spite of that fact, we can stop it, although it is eternal and Absolute, because when we say “stop it” we mean something very, very special. We mean to say we can take the spirit which is moving and we can do what Moses did with the serpent. We can crucify it in that zone and we can put a dot in the middle. In other words we can make a central concept to which we will refer all motion and then we can ignore (not be innocent of) the motion inside it and hold the concept. And the concept we are going to hold will be a paradoxical one, because we want to paralyse the tendency of the motions inside to objectify and fasten the consciousness.

Consciousness itself is force infinite. If it objectifies it concentrates and then it doesn’t do anything other than what the form allows it to do. So if a man objectifies as a little wheel, ratchet or something, and somebody identifies as a little metal finger, then the one turns round and the other says, “tick, tick”. Now as long as the consciousness is so identified in both of them, their relation is kept up. And a definite amount of consciousness is involved in the identification, and completely circumscribed by the form of the object in the identification. That is the same thing that we mean when we say that the individual man, that is the formed man, is a machine insofar as we identify with ourselves if I think I’m not a Bantu or something, then I would exclude from my consciousness all the forms relating to that particular. And in excluding them I release myself from reacting mechanically at that level.

The only way we can release ourselves from mechanical action, is by non-identification, and to get it we can do it in two ways:

The Sudden School

Either by act of will, immediate. Say “all form as such is circumscription, cross it out, because it is finite.” Assert the voidity immediately. That’s the sudden school, the Zen school. It says “don’t try to think about it at all, cross it off”. If you argue with a Turk about any subject at all, he just points up, down, and across at the top. Because he says “in fact, you’ve done this”. You’ve made the dichotomy out of the non-dual. So whatever you say, cross it off. That’s the short way, the sudden school, the Zen school. Or the school called ‘immediacy’ in European mysticism.

Dialectic

The other way is to get another ratchet form and turn it the opposite way to the way that would fit with it. The result is that they differ. When the two forms cannot function at all, the mind seizes up. You can do this experimentally with your own mind. You can take a pair of contrary ideas and insist on holding them both at once. You can assert if you like that that paper is black. We know it is black because the light that comes from the bulb up there is hitting the paper and being reflected from the paper into the eye, and it is only because the paper is rejecting the light that the light is coming into our eye and therefore the paper is black. It looks white. It is really black.

So we look at this apparently white paper and assert that it is black. And we can see that it is white and we are asserting that it is black. And so we call it black/white paper, simultaneously. In 1984 in Animal Farm and things like that you get this statement, “freedom is bondage”. Now we’ve already done this and said the dome in freedom is bondage. There is no freedom other than self-bondage. The man must bond himself, tie himself to a concept of freedom, or he will be bound by somebody else’s concept. It’s a very simple either/or.

We have then the two ways of controlling the situation. Either by direct intellectual opposition causing a seizure of the mental processes by asserting a pair of opposites (that’s the paradox), or by an act of will, crossing them all off simply because they are forms. Now obviously, if human beings were equipped at birth with the power to cross all the forms off, and chose to exercise it, as fast as babies were born, if they exercised it they would become unborn and disappear. And the world would then no longer be problematic.

What we find in practise is that babies enter this world remarkably identified considering they are supposed to have never been here before. They are equipped with all sorts of tendencies. They are able to support their own weight, hanging onto a pole at birth, within an hour of birth they can hold their own weight. They can suck, they can breathe, they can kick, they can scream. They can do a remarkable lot of things all of them calculated to perpetuate their existence in this world. Which means that they come in already identified.

Now it is obvious that if a baby comes in identified and derives from the Absolute then the Absolute must have precipitated it into identification. Because you cannot say of the baby itself that it has reflexive self consciousness and is deliberately willing objectification. So it has been objectified by a force superior to itself. Now this force we call God, God the Father, because father means generator. So the Absolute spins energy in and makes a child. Now that child is now objectified. The whole in-going process is a process moving towards objectification.

Now the in-going process you remember we use the symbol Saturn to express. Which makes God the Father equivalent to Saturn. this is why William Blake says that everybody is worshipping the devil under the name of Jehovah. What he meant to say was that creation is necessarily arcing, circumscribing. Circumscribing is finiting and that is the same as binding, tying up, putting in gaol. But God in his infinite wisdom must be doing it because he wants to, because he can’t be under constraint because being infinite there is non-other to constrain him. So he must be willing objectification of finites for a definite purpose. It says ‘God so loved the world’. So it has a purpose. So He puts a certain amount of spirit into a finite form, and crucifies it. That cross inside the circle represents the form of experience through which it will have to go.

It comes in into a physical body, and it’s limited by it and immediately upon extrusion in the world is subject to a big bang from somebody’s arm who is already developed. That’s to encourage him to breathe.

Now, we come into the world, as St. Paul says, first a physical body, and out of this we have to grow a spiritual body. Let’s see why God bothers to objectify at all. Rub out all the objectifications in the immediate sudden moment — let’s all be Zenists for a moment. Rub them all out, leave ourselves with the infinite. The infinite is not finite. It has therefore in it nothing whatever manifest. It is Absolute non-manifestation. Only we know from the fact that we exist, that that non-manifestation has actually manifested because we exist. So it has the power to manifest and we are deliberately conceiving it as not manifesting. And because it is not under constraint to manifest, we say it manifests from its bene placatum or good will: its good pleasure. It has no other reason. It cannot be under constraint because constraint is finite and this spirit, this force, is infinite. So when it wills a universe, it wills it because it wants to. Which makes it to be, from the point of view of the old matriarchs, a woman — because it only does what it wants.