Truth
The
text of a talk given by Eugene Halliday YTG 251
There
is a text here, “Study to show thyself approved unto God. A workman needeth not
to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
“Rightly
dividing the word of truth.”
We have another question tonight about how to
help people who need help, and the two things go together.
Truth we remember is a TR with another T
at the end, aspirated with TH, is the same thing as the Law, the Torah. The T
here means the fixed and the R means the differentiator. So truth contains that
which is fixed, eternal and that which is differentiating or changing. The whoe
truth contains all statements whatever about all formal possibilities and
relations. Beyond truth, here there is nothing and that nothing is simply the
negation of a thing.. We can say that the whole truth, the whole truth of
macrocosmos is, if we like, a body of truth. This is the Logos body of Christ.
Christ says, “I am the truth. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the
whole truth,” he says. When he is saying this he is referring to the whole
cosmic body of ordered form.
Now beyond this cosmic body of ordered
form there is no thing, no form, no order, there is an infinite abyssal force,
sentient power, utterly unordered. It is the no thing because thing implies
that the spirit is crucified and grossly substantiated, TH into G equals thing.
So the whole cosmic body of truth is the Logos body of the cosmic Christ. In
Buddhism this would be called the Dharmakaya,
the body of dharma or Law. The great
enlightened sages of the Buddhist hierarchy are said to have obtained the dharmakaya of the Buddha, that is to say
the law body of the Buddha, but this law
body is just the same thing as the Logos
body of the cosmic Christ.
And the text here says, “Rightly dividing the word of truth.”
This means that the word of truth,
although it is a whole, can actually be divided. It does not mean that we can
sever the thing and separate the parts and throw them away from each other, but
it means that we can, intellectually, separate the various implications of the
whole law.
Now the first thing about this law is to
recognize that it comes out of no thing, out of no being, out of the non-being
of the abyss into being. Being we represent with the circle. It is a force
closing itself, the force of which we can conceive no bigger, the macrocosmic
force is the closed power, the body of the Logos, this the whole truth. When we
come to look at it and find the whole truth has two aspects, a fixed eternal
aspect and a differentiating or changing, and we have to divide the truth
correctly, “Rightly dividing the truth
We divide it rightly in this way first,
we say it is made of fixed elements and of changing elements. The fixed
elements correspond with Plato’s eternal forms; the changing elements
correspond with the forms of the Heraclitian flux, the world of changing
energies, but the whole truth contains the fixed eternal and the changing
temporal. So that if we divide the whole truth in this way to begin with into
fixed elements and changing elements, we have already made the first step
towards, “Rightly dividing the truth.”
On the fixed side we
can place all geometrical elements whatever. Triangles are eternally three-sided;
and the right-angled triangle, in the ideal world has a right angle that is a
right angle; but at the technical schools, where the student makes a right
angle, it may or may not have the correct number of degrees. So in the temporal
world, the triangles made by man may be made with carelessly, the right angle
may be less or more than the right angle. So in the temporal world, there is
the possibility of error. The triangle will have three sides but the angles may
be distorted or the lines may not be true lines, they may not be straight, they
may be bent and you get a funny kind of triangle that may not be recognized. In
the temporal world, all the forms can be distorted. In the eternal world they
are not distorted. So we have then two worlds here, a conceptual world of pure
forms which cannot change, the right angle with the appropriate number of
degrees and the temporal world where they do change and they have fewer or more
degrees than they should have.
Track 2
Now how do we apply
this fact to helping people who need help? We have said before that the man is
a microcosm, like the macrocosm, and therefore the same diagram will serve to
illustrate a man. A man must have in himself, something fixed and something
different. I put the T at the top here on purpose for a moment, and at the
bottom I’ll put the R. By the T, I means
all fixed forms are of geometrical and mathematical propositions which do not
change, and we keep these in our head, in what we call the intellect. But, down
below, in the belly land, we have strange rumblings and differentiations of
force. These forces are temporal forces, the force of sex, is a force that is
coming out, differentiating in the world, forces making lots of children and
these children are coming into relation and fighting and so on. Conflict arises
from differentiation. In the eternal world where the triangle is a
triangle, a triangle cannot fight, in principle, with another triangle, they both
have three sides; and squares and circles, and so on, all have their own
characters, they do not fight at all. But in the temporal world, the same
things distorted, can and do, fight.
So that we have in the
human being the microcosm, we have some fixed elements which don’t fight, where
all men will agree that a triangle has three sides and they don’t argue about
that; but they may very well argue about which triangular piece of garden
belongs to which man, because that is a temporal proposition.
Now between this
eternal fixed form and this differentiating energy, there is a fight. The
eternal fixed form wants to shout out all the time, “Triangles are triangles,
squares are squares”, but the differentiating energies in the temporal world is
taking any given square and running a sword across it and saying, “It isn’t a
square it is two triangles”. In the temporal world, we can and do interfere
with forms and by using our saws or analytical power, we can and do cut into
the physical representatives of these ideal forms and alter them. With a fret
saw, we can cut out any shape out of any other shape, and this fretting process
and the fret saw is very similar to the fretting process in the mind where the
individual is fretting because he is trying to cut out of the whole of reality
a little piece to please himself and somehow, it doesn’t fit with the other
pieces other people are cutting out. These eternal forms which are shouting out
that they are what they are, A equals A, which the type of it, and down here
the differentiating forces, are saying, “Well you may think that A is A, but I
am going to put two little feet out and a head and pretend it is a portrait of
my Uncle George”.
This kind of distortion
of eternal facts is conducted by temporal energies. And the man has these
differentiating energies inside himself and they are in conflict with his
eternal, formal content, and the truth and a truth contains both.
Now the intellectualist
error is to pretend that the form is valid and the temporary energy
differentiations are invalid. We know that Plato believed, certainly in his
younger days, that the eternal forms were the type pattern of things on Earth
and that you could actually apply these eternal forms in the world. What he
found, in his own attempts at political judgement was that he just couldn’t
make it. His eternal forms truly were eternal but he could not persuade anybody
in the temporal world to sit upon them and keep their position. And so, in the
same way, if we want to help somebody, we can only help them with the truth.
Somehow, the whole truth has to be stated, that time is not a villain, opposed
to eternity absolutely, time is a function that is equally valid and time is a
part of truth.
The mere fact that that truth is taken
out of the word of torah, which is
the same thing as the rota and serves as the sign of the wheel; that we all
have a still centre and a whirling perimeter, it stands still and changes, and
all of this is truth. Certain religionists think that eternity is true and time
is false. The Platonist thought that eternity is true and time is false, and
then they made the error of trying to impose the true on the false, that is,
imposing eternity on time. They didn’t manage to do it. Confucius in China had
the same idea. He was given a territory to govern and he made a mess of it,
because he tried to apply his static, self-evident A is A to highly dynamic
energies differentiating in the world, they just won’t conform.
Truth, the whole truth,
rightly divided into fixed and differentiating. The differentiating arising out
of expression and the fixed saying change is impossible. Here at the top is
Parmenides saying change is impossible, it does not exist. Xeno is making his
silly paradoxes to show that the flying arrow stands still. You shoot him dead
with it but he still thinks it is standing still. Down below the
differentiating forces and the temporal world appear, and they rise up to
express themselves and the eternal forces press on them and between the two in
the zone of conflict of the feeling, is the no man’s land, the place of
emotional conflict. To help people we then have to tell them this whole truth.
A living, existential human being, is a battlefield. He is a battlefield
between the eternal propositions, absolutely immobile, eternally static
triangles and circles and squares; and a biological energy, a temporally
expressing energy down below. Both of these things are parts of truth. The
whole truth embraces the whole of eternity and the whole of time. It is
incorrect to say that time is all wicked and that eternity is all charming. It
is incorrect to think that you can earn eternity by behaving well in time; if
you think that time and eternity are different, then, automatically you are
falsifying your action. Jacob Bohme said this when he said, “He to whom time
and eternity are the same, he has finished his work”. To see time as serially
expressing the content of eternity, to see time as showing nothing except the
expressed relations of eternity is to see time correctly.
What is the purpose of
differentiating of force,
differentiating of universal parts? The answer is very simple, if we don’t
differentiate them, then they are non-differentiated. If that is so there are
no individuals. No individual human beings, animals, vegetables. No
individuals, no relations. No relations no values. So, the serial
differentiations of forces are necessary bases of values, through
differentiation. On the other hand if these differentiating forces exist alone,
they a have no synthesizing forces to act upon, but the forces that can
synthesize and give sense to the differentiating forces, are the eternal forms
which are concepts which enable us to group adequately, the temporal, serial
forces of the world.
Every man has a lot of
time down in the belly land. He eats food into the belly; he appears in a
family in the belly and is determined to make another family in the belly. He
has these three centres, these three zones. They are all to do with time.
Eating food has to do with time, coming to a family has to do with time, making
another family has to do with time, down in the belly are all these temporal
processes. If we cut off the belly completely, we deprive the whole man of
necessary energies. Saw the man off below the diaphragm and see how he fares in
his other remaining processes. Because of the essential nature of these
serialising temporal forces down below, St Paul says first a physical body,
then a spiritual body. You cannot become a spiritual body without first
becoming a physical body. A physical body, matter, is a centre the reaction
whereby spirit becomes conscious of itself and is enabled to reach reflexive
self consciousness through its own activity. Without the physical body
reflexive self consciousness is an impossibility. When it says God so loved the
world, it means the world has a function for God. Some careless theological
thinkers have thought God is omnipotent, He doesn’t need the world. But if they
say that, then He makes something He doesn’t need, this depends on the
definition of the word ‘need’. If need implies a ‘lack’. They say God can lack nothing,
therefore He can do quite well without the world. But if this omnipotent,
omniscient God bothers to make something that He has no use for, He shows
Himself, at least a non-utilitarian. In fact the Book says, He loved the world,
this world has a function for Him.
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4
Let’s see what happens
we draw a little circle to represent the world.