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.

 

“Rightly dividing the word of truth,” implies that truth itself is divisible and yet truth is somehow whole. Let us daw ourselves a whole. It is a circular whole. This whole which is a WHOLE heareth the greater truth.

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.

 

Track 4

Let’s see what happens we draw a little circle to represent the world.