THE VALUE OF WORDS by Eugene Halliday

Transcription by Bob Hardy

[Recorded in Liverpool sometime between the late 1950’s – early 60’s]

1. There seems to be a general idea that it may not be necessary to understand the words that we use when we’re thinking, and that there might be another way of understanding ourselves without understanding what we’re thinking.

2. We’ll have to explode this because thinking is a process of formulation in consciousness. And what we call a problem is necessarily a formal situation. Problem is that substance – that’s the ‘M’ at the end - into which we can insert a probe. And a situation is only problematical in so far as it is formal. If we remove all formal considerations whatever, then there is no problem.

3. This first question says that, “Throughout the teachings of Gurdjieff, continual reference is made to the importance of words. And Gurdjieff says that there is a ‘Universal Language’, and that it depends, not only from words, but on the ‘being level’. He says that, “Self observation is dependent, in the first stages, on clear mentation,” and that, “this cannot occur without clarity of the definition of the words one thinks in”.” (Gurdjieff: ‘Enneagram’ – BH)

4. Gurdjieff, like many of the thinkers, even in the scientific field, knows that ‘to think’ is ‘to formulate’, and that the words that we use, must be in correspondence with our thought processes.

5. If we have words not in correspondence with the elements of mentation then we are not understanding ourselves. ..

6. The other question related to the first one is, “Up to now I have understood that knowledge can only be useful if there is a corresponding level of being.”

7. Now there is a peculiar crime we can call intellectualism, where things can be inserted into the ears, record themselves in certain sections of the brain, come out on the tongue without ever getting into action. And this we would call ‘the crime of intellectualism’.

8. We have a ‘three-part man’ (we have to keep drawing this man – he’s always recurring…some damage below as well … as usual … the spinal column). Each part contains the other two, and most obviously we see this in the brain.

9. If I take the head and look at it from above … there’s a man’s nose and there’s his ears … If I cut the skull-cap off, I’ll see a place there, and a place here, and a place divided in the middle … so roughly it’s like this window we see in some of the churches in the middle-ages…. This front part corresponds with itself. It is the part that is peculiarly concerned with intellection; the middle part shows a definite division into two parts here … In the floor of the skull when you remove the brain you can actually see the bone forms … this partition, … and it corresponds with the partition in the chest … into the lungs … and the back part again has a unity … an the spinal center, going down .. here, takes the messages.

10. Now, the intellective part is concerned with form, and the back part is concerned with the urge – the motor centers; and the feeling part is concerned with ‘yes’ and ‘no’, “I like it,” or, “I don’t like it.”

11. So – there’s the same kind of three-fold relation in the head, whereby we can think about the correspondence in the body.

12. If we want to learn what ‘the logos’ means, in the Gospel of John, we have to understand what ‘form’ is. That ‘logos’ - that ‘L’ and that ‘G’, remember, they’re upside-down to each other, and were originally the same letter – making a six-pointed star and represented ‘the wheel of being … Well that was the word ‘logos’ before it was separated out into a ‘time-world’ … So the six-spoked wheel is the ‘logos’ and the ‘cosmic being’ – the totality of being itself – is the ‘logos’.

13. In the Gospel of John, where it says, “In the beginning was the word,” the Greek version has ‘logos’ (5.00) and this ‘logos’ is ‘God’ … Imagine a circle in which you can imagine no larger, that contains all formal actualities. They are not mere potential they are actualities of form. And there must be, for each form, a corresponding symbol. And without the symbols in our mind, we cannot understand the relation of the forms.

14. So if we want to understand precisely what the word ‘think’ means, we understand the meaning of the ‘T” and ‘H’ and ‘I’ and ‘N’ and ‘K’. … If we want to know the difference between ‘think’ and ‘thing’, we must understand that ‘K’ and ‘Gey’ (the hard ‘G’) have definite significances.

15. And if we don’t get this ‘Universal Symbology’ correctly fixed in our minds, we cannot understand the Bible, or any great religious document, because they are all primarily written by people who knew this symbology.

16. So when we come to look at the three-fold nature of man as: ‘form-man’ - idea; ‘feeling-man’ – the affective nature of psychologists; the ‘conative-drive’ or ‘urge-man’, that is a statement about three aspects of the whole man – in the Kabala, the Adam Kadmon is the ‘cosmic man’, the ‘Logos’ of the Christians, and represents itself in the ‘individuated man’ by making centers in the organism.

17. And the three centers are separated deliberately so that the three aspects of being can function independently.

18. If we write ‘will’ down there (psychologists call it ‘connation’); and we write ‘feeling’ here (we call that ‘affection’); and we write ‘thinking’ here – we would call that ‘ideation’ (Gurdjieff calls it ‘mentation’, the difference I’ll explain in a moment); we then have a ‘will’ or ‘power’ of initiative; a ‘feeling’ of liking and disliking; and a formal presentation.

19. Now it is tremendously important to understand that the ‘will’ corresponds to ‘the Father’, and the ‘form’ with ‘the Son’, and this ‘feeling’ with ‘the Ghost’ this ‘Spirit’. And originally this ‘Spirit’ is ‘Absolute’. When Christ says, “God is a Spirit,” he is making a relation – an equation – between this and this …

20. The Trinity of God necessarily has ‘Truth’ as one of the terms we can apply to it. ‘Truth’ is ‘form’. … It is also ‘Love’…. And it is also this ‘Power’ … These other three aspects of God, who’s ‘omnipotent’ … and this field of all-action (‘feeling’ is ‘field-consciousness’) is ‘omnipresence’; and form is its ‘omniscience’…

21. So in the individual man the same things recur at the finite level. That part of ‘truth’ which appears in the mind of an individual man we call ‘thinking’, where the thinking is self-consistent - as in ‘true logic’; that kind of feeling in man appears as ‘Universal Compassion’ is ‘divine love’, working in the individual; and that part of the ‘Absolute Power’ which appears in ‘individual man’ as ‘initiative’, is the ‘Power of God’ - the Omnipotence - that at the individual level is manifesting as ‘individual will’.

22. Now, if we were to mix these terms up, as we’ve been asked to sometime… Why, for instance, it is said, “Why not pretend that ‘feeling’ is the word we should use for ‘thinking’,” Well, I’m going to show why it should not be used…

23. Supposing we write down the word ‘feel’ here… When you pronounce this word you have to make the ‘F’ on the lips, by letting air through. Another form of writing that is the Greek letter ‘Fee’ [Phi] .. the lips with air coming through .. you put the lips together and blow. Hat is the letter ‘F’. Now if we want to make a ‘closive’ out of it, a ‘puh’ - … the significance of the ‘P; and the ‘F’ are not the same. We cannot make them the same. We can’t say ‘peeling’ can have the same meaning as ‘feeling’. ..

24. This release of air through a compressed (10.00) substance like the lips has a different meaning from the release of air following a build-up from a sudden explosion.

25. So if we wish to bring our thinking into correspondence with fact, we must have the correct term.

26. If we ’voice’ ‘P’ it becomes ‘B’. The difference between the labial ‘P’ and the ‘B’ is that the ‘P’ is whisperable and the ‘B’ not. You can say ‘p’ but you cannot whisper ‘B’. ‘B’ has ‘tone’ on it, we say, “It is a voiced consonant,” So the meaning of the letter ‘B’ is not the same as ‘p’, but there is a substantial significance in ‘B’.

27. In the Hebrew Bible the first is ‘B’, and the significance is, when we write the Hebrew ‘B’ .. It actually means what we mean when we say the word ‘being’, the termination ‘ing’ meaning ‘continuously. So ‘B’ actually means ‘to enclose a substance’.

28. The earliest form of the letter ‘B’ is a circle, and then it is squared off, cut in half to make rooms, and then it is written quickly as a cursive form, like that. The Hebrew one represents the ground upon which a tent is erected (the wind is blowing this way, and there’s Abraham here).

29. Now this ‘B’ means ‘enclosure’, and ‘substantialization’ … So that is we want to understand a given concept to deal with substantialness and enclosure, we will have to use the letter ‘B’ to signify it, because if we don’t we will cause the whole of our vocabulary to slip, and be out of phase with the fact. we say, well it’s quite arbitrary to say, “This is ‘triangle’,” try ‘triangle’ here instead., so we write ‘triangle’ there. That means we have to find another term for ‘triangle’ … Alright, we’ll put ‘circle’ there.

30. Now, we may not realize it, but in order to do this we will have to shift every word in our vocabulary from its true significance. We are not allowed to use ‘circle’ now, for this, or ‘triangle’ for this. So that every form that is defined in terms of a part of this cannot be called the arc of a circle, but the word ‘arc’ which belongs to ‘circle’ – you can actually hear it in this ‘circ’ here, it is the ‘arc’ word – cannot be used if we use the word ‘tri’… angle’ for this. ‘Arc’ would no longer apply to it. So the whole of our vocabulary would fall to bits, and we would become guilty of a logical inconsistency.

31. So that, those people who think that terms are arbitrary are making a very, very, big mistake.

32. All terms are the product of primary phonetic facts… It is a physical fact, that when you whisper a vowel, you cannot alter the pitch of that vowel no matter what you do… If you whisper ‘Ah’ then ‘e’ you can hear the difference of the pitch. Now try to whisper ‘e’ on the pitch ‘o’ and you will find it’s impossible…

33. The form is an aspect of that which appears on the ear as sound, and they are so related that you can’t have the sound without the form.

34. Now the whole universe is a formal structure, and that form is power behaving in a certain manner. ‘Form’ is the way power behaves. So if power goes like this, and travels along, triangulating … that’s a description of what the Hindu’s would call ‘argmee [?] motion’ … when power goes like that it actually generates heat … This is why we use the triangle as a symbol of fire ..It is actually a character of motion … The absolute power of God moves in various ways … It can move like this … And it can move like this … like a Greek threat [?] … This kind of motion produces the gross material earth; this produces expansion and heating of bodies; this produces the atmosphere, and so on …

35. Each kind of motion is no more than a modality of power. Power behaving in a certain way is what we mean by ‘form’. When the power behaves continuously in the same formal manner we say there is an existing being (15.00). If my body keeps approximately the same shape for a number of years, people re-cognize me, they fit me again into their mental pattern, because my shape isn’t altering so much as to become unrecognizable, and yet really it is all power repeatedly behaving in the same way.

36. This power, which is behaving in this way, is formulating itself as idea. You know there’s an argument between the Dominicans and the Franciscans about which is prior, the will, or the intellect, of God. The Dominicans, who like to order things put the form on top, but the Franciscans, who believe in freedom – ‘Francis’ means ‘free’ – say, “No. The will of God is prior to His intellect, because the Will is the ‘father’ aspect of God, and the ‘form’ is the Son aspect.

37. So, when we come to look at an idea, which means ‘a mode of analysis’ in the Greek word ‘idea’, we are talking about power behaving in a certain modal manner, and if we have used the wrong form, we are referring to the wrong power.

38. Now all magic is a question of manipulation of will, and yet the will cannot be focused without a form. So that we cannot do anything unless we have a correct form.

39. If we give a screw-driver, and a hammer, and a saw, and a block of ice, and a jug of water, to a small boy, and ask him to build a house, and he’s never seem them before, he won’t know what ‘house’ means, but if we draw one and explain it to him and so on, and give him those things, he may try to do it. Because he doesn’t know that there are some inconsistences in the things we have given him. So he will go, and he will try to produce this thing.

40. He will try, perhaps, on another occasion, to build a house of cards, higher and higher, and the vibration of a passing lorry will shake it down. And he becomes gradually aware that some things are not worth the energy expenditure, except for experience standpoint – they teach you what can’t be done.

41. But thee is a real relation between the form and the way the power is behaving. Such that, if we get hold of the right form then we can guarantee to manipulate the power. “Know the truth,” that is, the formal aspect of the universe, “The truth shall make you free.”

42. What it makes you free from, is the erroneous ideas that previously gave you faulty directions.

43. So, we can write ‘Truth’ here – that’s the ‘Logos’. We can write down here, ‘The Good’ or ‘Goodness’ (make it into a non-substantive) and ‘Beauty’ here. We’ve got the Platonic Trinity…. ‘Beauty’ is a matter of feeling sensitivity. The ‘Good’ refers to the Will; the ‘Truth’ refers to the form in the mind. The ‘True’, the ‘Good’, and the ‘Beautiful’ are the ‘Three Aspects of Divine Being’.

44. I want to get this pretty clear tonight so that we don’t have to refer to this question of language and words too often, because we must go on and substantiate this fact.

45. Here is the ‘three-part man’ again, and the question of levels of being is raised, “Can a man understand without a being level?”

46. Now here is a man’s ear, and here is a sound … impinges on the ear … produces an after-motion in the brain.

47. And if it just goes round and round and round just like that, without expressing itself at all, you cannot tell – unless you’re clairvoyant – if the person has heard.

48. Nevertheless the fact that there has been a vibration and he has got an ear means that a process of response has occurred in his protoplasm. Now with quite a lot of people – when the eardrum is rattled – the vibrations go in the brain and they come down as far as the mouth and then they come out again and shoot into another ear over here. And this we call ‘incontinence’. Incontinence…. And it means the inability to contain.

49. Now we’ve said before, of a knee-jerk, you touch somebody there with a little hammer, there’s the handle to tap it with, and the stimulus of the blow goes up a nerve to the base of the spine, right up to the muscles, and the leg kicks (20.00) And the simple diagram for that kind of thing ... is that – once in and once out… Simpler that that would be that … you don’t usually get that as human beings…

50. An energy is inserted into a human being and immediately comes out … There’s the type of ‘knee-jerk’

51. Now, consequently we say that, that action is ‘mechanical’. It doesn’t go up to the intelligence level, it simply goes into that part of the nerves of the lower part of the spine and goes straight into the muscles of the leg and kicks out… It is not an intelligent act… You can, with practice, interfere with it so that you do not, even with a relaxed leg, show the ‘knee-jerk’. But most people would show this ‘knee-jerk’, not as an intelligent response but simply because the blow would impart a motion to the nerve and that would go, and immediately return [called a Patellar reflex- example of a monosynaptic reflex arc – BH]

52. Now that is the kind of thing that is ‘being level’ … without intelligence … It is possible to ‘be’ without being intelligent ... that is the ‘being’ of a knee-jerk.

53. The gross material body, we’ll take a material particle, say a molecular group, with no organization at all, we’ll say a billiard ball. No intelligent organization. We impart a motion to it with a cue, and it runs away.

54. Now, we don’t call it an intelligent response on the part of the billiard ball, because it has no alternative. It must run when it is struck.

55. In the same way, for all untrained people, this knee will kick when it is struck, so it’s an unintelligent response, but it is a ‘being’ level. Now, this is a kind of opposite being level to this intellectualism…

56. This is a being level in the brain, where the ear-drum being rattled goes round in the brain, maybe it makes the eyes a little wider in some people, and you think maybe they’ve heard. If they don’t say anything, you don’t know.

57. The next being level is when it is ‘being’ connected to the vocal apparatus.. There must be a connection, when a word comes out on the tongue and rattles another ear.

58. Now it isn’t good enough for this person, if the message coming – this is ‘Truth’ ‘He that hath ears to hear let him hear’ … First we must hear the truth, then we must understand the truth, then we must push the truth down into action.

59. Now first we hear it, that is, it rattles the eardrum. It goes in the mind, it goes round, can get on the tongue, and go out.

60. If it does so, the mere fact that it has waggled the tongue prematurely means that you have lost the energy that might have enabled you to understand what it was that came in.

61. You cannot understand a proposition if you allow it to leak out immediately.

62. So the thing is, when the eardrum is rattled, if you want to convert it into another being level (it is already ‘being’ at the audible level), you want to convert it into ‘executive power’ where the owl [?] is connected, or ‘going power’ where the legs are connected. You have to shift it, not allow it to leak onto the tongue, you have to contain it, and let it go down the body, into the feeling center.

63. Now every idea is a complex, but every complex, or form, has in it elements, which when reduced and separated will receive an unqualified, ‘I like it, or I don’t like it’. And when you have analyzed a complex idea into its simple elements, to each element you can say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. ‘I want it, I don’t want it’. And when you have taken the sound significance into the feeling, and then understood its relation to your life-direction.

64. Every individual is going somewhere – they ‘like’ certain things; they ‘dislike’ other things – that’s their orientation. One ‘likes’ a football match, another ‘likes’ ITV, and so on, and dislikes (………).

65. Now we have to find out what we like about these things, because in this liking is the orientation, and when we have orientated ourselves, turned ourselves towards the ‘Son’ that we worship, the source to which we wish to return – then we pass it down into the ‘will’ center where it then starts manipulating our drive forces, and carries us along in that direction.

66. So we can talk here, very, very, simply, about three levels of being. The ‘thinking ‘ level (25.00) the ‘Feeling’ level, and the ‘volitional’ level. Now it’s quite common for people to have their eardrums rattled, and for them to let it go and rattle someone else’s eardrum, and never deliberately bring it down and analyze it, and find out whether they like it or don’t like it in all its parts. That is the commonest type of reaction.

67. Another reaction, not so common, is to bring it down to the feeling level without analysis, and to become very confused – to feel ‘I like it, I don’t like it’, all over. I must get rid of it, and keep it for myself, and so on. A whole series of contradictions appear in the emotional centers, and that is quite common.

68. It is very rare for a thing to be clarified on this level of the feeling, and then carried into unity in the will center.

69. If it’s brought down into this center it actually becomes ‘gross being’ and will then produce a change in the protoplasm such that children derived will have that modification in them.

70. Now the reason that most children do not reflect the known mental content, or emotional content, of the parents is because it hasn’t been pushed right down into the will center.

71. The will center is the one that immediately models the germ-plasm form. So all the ‘Logos Spermatikos’, all this form here, goes down into the sperm centers and creates form – if it gets into this large [?] center – and then the children have, already, a formal bias.

72. Whereas if this stuff up here continually leaps out into premature voicing, and this feeling level remains confused, and is never pushed into the unity of the will, it will not transmit.

73. Now the ‘Messiah’ comes out of a line – there’s a genealogy, there are two genealogies in the New Testament worthy of study, because they are not inconsistent, they are mainly two different lines because He had two persons. And the marriage of Joseph and Mary is justified because both of them derive - although Joseph is not the father, nevertheless he is related to a ‘line Davidic’, and therefore it is quite legitimate to trace two genealogies, because these two lines are derives from the same ‘promised line’.

74. When Abraham is going to sacrifice Isaac, he shows - by the fact that he takes the knife - that he’s got an idea in his mind, that he’s prepared to pay a price. He feels it, he pushes it down into the will center and he goes with the son.

75. The fact that he goes, and he loads the wood on the son’s back, and he ties him up, and he’s ready to kill him, means that he’s gone right into the gross material. That means that it will transmit into the next biological result.

76. And every time a form is digested, ruminated upon, felt, pushed into the will center, it will appear in a subsequent generation. And the totality of all these commitments – of truths – into the gross material world, on the genetic line, constitute what is called ‘the line of the Messiah’.

77. The Messiah is a biological fact, as well as a cosmic fact.

78. So the question of ‘being levels’ is a question of understanding that every existent being, whether it is an error – that is, a ‘formal misplacing’; or a truth – ‘a logical consistency’, is possessed of being. There are no ‘non-beings’.

79. So ‘being level’ simply means, whether we are going to put it in the head and leave it there; whether we let it go into the head and slip on the tongue a little bit … The tongue belongs to the gullet, it’s the thin end of the gullet … whether we will carry it down into the ‘feeling being’, and, by analysis, find out ‘Yes’ and ‘No’; and then carry it into the will were it will be unified and objectified in the gross-material world.

80. Now let’s understand, that when it is said, by the Hindu’s - they are derived from the Brahmans, who are sons of Abra-haman originally. Abraham sends some of his people (30.00) into India very early on to become princes in that place. They take exactly the same thing … Just before you get into India you will find a Jewish sect there … and in India itself there are Jews. And these Brahmans are the Abrahamics who went through the North-West passage into India and took the same doctrine.

81. Now the sacred books of the Hindus are the Vedas, and ‘Ved’ is the same as ‘Dev’ or ‘Deu’ – God and it is the ‘ved’ of the Latin ‘videre’ – ‘to see’. What has been seen by the ‘seers’ is the ‘Vedas’.

82. Now, it is said, by the orthodox Brahmin, that things exist in the word because it says so in the Vedas. So if there is a thing called Vat [can’t find this – Sanskrit for ‘cow’ appears to be ‘go’] in the world as is a cow, it only exists because the word ‘vat’ exits in the Vedas.

83. Now some people call this superstition. The Christians say exactly the same thing when they say that the Logos God in the Gospel of John, “Without him there was nothing made that was made.” It’s only because things exist as form, which is a modality of power, that they can become objectified in the gross world later on as material beings. So the Brahman and the Abrahman and his linear descendants are saying the same things. There is a world of form, and there’s a world outside here – a subtle world … form … and another one, the Causal, and beyond that, the word form does not apply … ‘F-R-M’ … we’ll put the ‘O’ in there … Now this ‘F’ is the same as the ‘P’ blowing through it… it’s the spirit organizing itself… circumscribing… differentiating … and substantiating …

84. ‘Form’ means what ‘Pi-ratio’ means: ‘F-R’ and ‘P-R’ are a legitimate sound-shift. Wherever there is a circumscription, there is the ‘forrr’, and wherever the circumscription becomes substantiated with the motion within it, that is ‘form’.

85. Now the Platonic world, and the word of the Stoics – the Logos – which supplied he geometrical ground of Christianity is simply the substantial frequencies that occur inside the macrocosmic being … That’s a letter ‘M’ repeated … And the vibrations beating about inside the macrocosmic being, in their totality, are the Logos.

86. The Logos is the ‘ground’ of our logic. Because it is a circle all ‘logic’ is ‘tautologic’. That means, all definition is cyclic.

87. Lewis Carroll was well aware of the nature of logic, and he knew its derivation.

88. All truth belongs to that sphere of which there is no bigger – the ‘macrocosmic logos’, and every word that proceeds out of this mouth of God, here, is a truth.

89. When it is said of Jesus, “There is no more excellent name than this,” it’s because the word ‘Jesus’ has a very definite significance. It means – if we write it in English instead of the Hebrew – ‘Yes’… and there’s a letter in the Hebrew here which means ‘No’. … So His name means ‘yes and no’. And he says’ “Let your ‘Yeah’ be ‘Yeah’ and your ‘Nay’ ‘Nay’. All else comes of the Devil.”

90. If you don’t analyze your situation, and reduce it to its fundamental elements and then give an unqualified ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to each element, then there is confusion in the emotional life. But if you do, then you are practicing ‘Yes/No’ - your ‘yes’ is ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ is ‘no - and you then have technically the mind of Christ. Which means every time that you analyze a situation – see it very clearly – all it’s elements separately, and give an unqualified ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to each one. And put all the ‘yesses’ and all the ‘no’s’ on opposite sides, like sheep and goats, then you have the mind of Christ… If you do that … If you don’t do it, then your mind is chaotic.

91. The meaning of Jesus simply means ‘yes and no’ , “There is no more excellent name than this.” To be able to say “Yes” unqualifiedly, and “No,” unqualifiedly (35.00) and not to fall into that dreadful error …. … called . err .. the ‘Lah-dee-kay-an-least’ error [?] – blowing neither hot nor cold, you won’t say, “Yes,” you won’t say, ‘No.” You can’t be bothered to analyze a situation, you won’t et go of it, and you won’t take it up.

92. That kind of thing is really death, disintegration, to the organism.

93. So, when his name – Jesus – is conferred upon him in the time-process, it is derived from the primary dichotomy, ‘no’ down there, and ‘yes’ up there. ‘Yes’ to the light: ‘No’ to the dark. We say ‘no’ to nescience, and ‘yes’ to intelligence.

94. And this primary dichotomy, mentioned in Genesis as ‘light created’ in the darkness, and in the New Testament later, as the darkness not comprehending the light, and the light shines in the darkness. This ‘no’ is the dark, and this ‘yes’ is the light.

95. So, when we look at his other name – Immanuel – this ‘E’–Manuel, means [?] this ‘X’-Manuel … ‘Man’ is the word which means ‘to count’ ... to evaluate … this is ‘counting out’ … this is the ‘going of God’.

96. So ‘Immanuel’ – meaning ‘God with us’ - really means, that as God goes, man counts out. Man is the extension in the time process, at the individual level, of an ‘Absolute Power’ … and his name is ‘Immanuel’, that is, when he is aware of the fact that all his Ideation is no more than a reverberation in his substance of an Absolute process, which appear to him to be serial thinking.

97. If he’s identified with it and the truth comes out he thinks he’s clever; if rubbish comes out, he’s quite sure somebody’s tricked him…

98. This ‘Immanuel’ is quite a legitimate name to give to the man who says, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. God is with us when we say, “Yes,” and, “No,” and we do not say “maybe,” in between.

99. We are either crucified or not. It’s no good at that moment to think, ”Well I’m not quite sure yet. I think I’ll go and have my dinner.” It won’t do. You can’t make a cross with figure that’s completely turned the world upside down for two thousand years by wishy-washy not knowing what you’re doing. You have to say, “Yes,” or, “No.” And this “Yes or No” is the word ‘Jesus’…. In the Hebrew it’s spelt in exactly the same way as the word, which translates, to ‘Joshua’ who fights all the battles that take the people of Israel into the Promised Land. And the ‘Pales-tine’ has to do with the Pi-law stem which is again, this intellectual structure formed […?….]

100. Let’s have a look at the leaving of Egypt. If we write …err… ‘Egypt’ like this, you can see the Greek word for ‘earth’ there, and here you can see the word ‘type’ anagrammed – ‘type’ is the same thing as ‘form’ and this is substantiated.

101. Egypt always symbolized in the Bible, the land of gross-material science – ‘materialism. And when the Jews were in Egypt they became very materialistic. If they had stayed there they would have been orientated towards the gross-material world. They would have become very, very, good at acquiring the world’s commodities – they had already done very well – and they would have forgotten all about their higher purpose of integrating themselves on other levels. So they had to leave.

102. And because of the volitional activities of the progenitors of the Jews, there were in the Jews certain impulses to get out. And these embodied themselves in the person called Moses. I’ll put the Moshe, you put the ‘s’ on the end … the ‘Moshe’ ... the Hebrew version of it. The [..?..] this means ‘taken out of the waters’. ‘The waters’ symbolize ‘materiality’, they are Egypt. He is put on the waters in a little Ark of rushes, that’s like Noah is put on the waters (40.00) because the universe itself is a big ark inside an inimitable ocean… That is the inimitable ocean; the Poseidon of the Greeks; the Neptune..

103. Here is the big arc[k] … ’Noah’ is ‘consciousness’ – ‘noetic principle’ [Noah is Hebrew and means ‘peaceful’; noetic is from the Greek ‘noetikos’ meaning ‘intellect’ – don’t know what’s going on here – BH] He has his three sons. Moses is this same function again at another level. And he takes the Jews out of Egypt and he leads them towards another land. And the land he leads them to is the ‘pi-law-stone’ land, or Palestine.

104. Now the pi-law is the great law of this rotation… You know what pi is … it’s the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle …

105. So, taking them into the ‘Palestine’ the ‘pi-law-stone’ land is taking them in the higher reason of the Cosmic Logos. The Jewish symbol for it is two interlaced triangles, which you see on the Israeli flag today.

106. When we consider such a word as ‘Palestine’ and see its relation with the pi-law-stone, because we know about the stone that Jacob rested his head on … and that Queens and things sit on today, with.. em.. appreciation … we are talking about an objectification in the gross-material world of a macrocosmic fact., that the universe is a logical structure. Plotinus, Plato, Prophilus [?] and the great thinkers of that period knew perfectly well that ‘to think’ is ‘to formulate’ and that the formulation of the whole universe is the thinking of God. The Absolute Simultaneity of thinking in God is called ‘The Eternal Thought of God’. But the serial perception of a little bit of I by a finite observer in it, is the serial process we call thinking. We think, at ordinary levels, one idea after the other, and we concentrate – if we’re lucky – on each idea as presented. And because we concentrate on them we see them one after another. This is serial presentation. But with God, all ideas are simultaneously presented, and being simultaneously presented to Him, He sees all their relations absolutely. And the name of the being, substantial, with all form in it, in simultaneity, not serially, is called ‘wisdom’.

107. If we write the word ‘wisdom’ down again – there’s a missing aspirate there … you see … we runagun [?] this out again … see, now this is the Joshua word again. The ‘I-H-S’, that’s a double-U, ‘I-H-S-V’ which is simply the Hebrew name of ‘Jesus’ again, the ‘Joshua’ , and the ‘dome’. This is the dome. And the ‘yes-no’ inside here - those two triangles. The wisdom therefore is the totality of all form in simultaneous actuality. What we do when we think is take a little bit of it out. And by concentrating upon each element one after the other, we generate time. We generate it. Time is only kept in being by its serial concentration. If all the beings that there are, were to concentrate on the Absolute logos simultaneously, there would be time no more. That state is referred to in the Revelation, “There will be time no more.” … And people realize that serial thought processes cannot give the truth, they can only give partials. We have to have the simultaneous presentation of the substantial form of the ‘macrocosmic being’, and that is the wisdom. That is ‘truth’. And to take out even a little bit off the arc, where there’s an Arch-angel, to take that little bit out, is to falsify if it is taken out of its context. So any truth whatever, lifted out of it, other than the whole, is automatically false… ‘False’ means it is …[End of side one]…(45.00)

108. There is a dog, by Lawrence Lowry, famous artist. Now f I write over the top of this ‘Horse’ … That’s a lie, that’s a dog. I’m making a correspondence between ‘horse’ and ‘dog’. Now supposing ‘horse’ is there, and ‘dog’ is over here, and I say ‘that’ is ‘that’. That is a lie, and yet both the elements (..?..) are true.

109. So ‘lies’ are simply ‘false conjections’.

110. A theological definition of the ‘absolute lie’ as ‘pure non-being’ is therefore true.

111. In order to exist at all, a thing must be ‘true’. So if a lie exists, the parts of it must be true and only the relations are false. So whenever anybody tells you a lie, they have told you a truth. In fact more than one truth and made a false relation between them. So you need never worry about ‘lies’ and ‘evil’ and so on, because if we understand that if we push that to there and that to there, that is a lie. But if we let it go into its own place… As Christ says’ “Every man goes to his own place and his works follow him,” [I can’t locate this quote – BH] then, the whole thing will be true again.

112. There are no evils, there are no lies, in the world, that can deceive us if we simply say to ourselves, “The parts are true.”

113. Man cannot tell a lie to me because I listen to him and I take all the parts separately, and I refer them to the Macrocosmic Being. Now whatever he means by it is a matter of no importance to me … in what he ….

114. …. Or what’s this got paws on. And horses don’t have paws they have hoofs you know, so this is not a figure of a horse at all, he examines the object because he doesn’t want to get something for nothing, he doesn’t want a horse for the price of a dog, therefore he cannot be deceived. That is the gypsy justification of ‘twisting’ people. “If they weren’t greedy, we couldn’t twist them!”

115. So in this question of ‘form’ and ‘words’ we are to realize that in order to get the real value out of language, we have to learn to interpret the word in its real context, and this we can only do by the Universal Language – the true symbology referred to by many of the mystics throughout the ages, and by the great religions as a symbology which is always in perfect correspondence with the universe.

116. So if I write down a circle, and say, “That is the letter ‘O’, and whatever is circumscribed I can call an ‘O’, and therefore, because ‘to circumscribe’ means ‘to bring into existence’, ‘to put a ‘B’ on it’, ‘to make it into a ‘B’’ … Because ‘to circumscribe’ means that, I have brought this, in the act of bringing it to be, into a peculiar relation.

117. The line on the paper has produced an apparent separation between the paper here, and the paper there. But really the paper has not been disturbed. The paper is under the line, inside it and outside it. The mark is only on the paper.

118. Now let the paper represent the Absolute Consciousness of God, and let a mark on the paper represent a form. The form rests upon the ‘Intelligence Absolute’. If that paper didn’t exist I couldn’t make a mark if god’s intelligence did not exist there would be no form.

119. The form, in no sense, interrupts God’s essentiality. So that, all the forms of the universe that we see with our eyes, and the other things that we sense with our other four senses, are formal plays which in no way interferes with the Absolute Consciousness – which is God.

120. So the shortest way to God is to rub out all the forms. This is the way of ‘quietism’ – it’s very, very hard work. It’s the method of Raja Yoga; it’s the method of Nana Yoga – to rub out all the forms. When you’ve rubbed out all the forms, what remains is Absolute Intelligence.

121. And you need never worry that if you rub the form out, it won’t exist. Because other beings are willing it to exist. So when you have dissociated with it, it will still exist because other people are willing it to exist. And only when all the beings in the universe will the non-existence of all forms will it disappear. As long as one exists, and requires the presence of other beings, those (50.00) beings will remain.

122. So, supposing we identify with the form, and forget the paper, then we will fascinate ourselves – go round and round and round… this is called the wheel of existence. This is the wheel that the Gautama Buddha was breaking, and this is the world that Christ said he, “Was not of.” But this white paper – the Absolute Intelligence, inside and out, God imminent and God transcendent – that is what He is talking about.

123. The rulership is in the consciousness, and what is being ruled is the form. So, the more conscious of consciousness we become, the more control of idea we gain. But, if we become conscious only of the idea, and not of the consciousness of the idea, then we become under the dominion of the idea - we become slaves.

124. We know, in general, we can disturb people - advertising shows it, propaganda shows it – that we can determine reactions in peoples minds and bodies, a stampede, a war, can be made by simply rattling peoples ear-drums.

125. It’s not so long ago since the last war and we saw a nation like the Russians… our glorious allies, and then they’re eternal threat, possibly the Mongol Hordes coming in. And in a matter of a few days, the whole mood of 60 million people here, there are 180 millions in America, and so many more elsewhere, can be changed by simply rattling their eardrums, and this is a dreadful fact. That by means of little boxes with electricity in them, they rattle people’s eardrums and then there occur processes in the mind, and people run amok. This is an external determination, and it can only occur where those people are conscious of the form, but not of their consciousness.

126. A young man who had very, very, great riches was like this, when he went to Christ and asked what he could do to enter the Kingdom. Christ said, “You give up all you’ve got and follow me.” Now he was full of form, like this. So, when he looked inside himself, if he had given up what he had, he would have given himself up absolutely. And if he had no concept of this white paper, no concept of intelligence, and so on … To give that up would have been to give himself up absolutely, he would have no being, because he’d been mis-formed.

127. So, in the same way, if we take a man with a cherished idea, and strike at that idea, that man will be shaken as if we’d hit him physically. One of the elementary facts that we see is, if you say, “There is a man down the road is no good.” Without mentioning his name, nobody bothers much. And if you say, ”A man I know, who is related to somebody in this room is no good, “ then a thing called ‘blood is thicker than water’ operates. And this, again, is a matter of conditioning, exactly the Pavlov conditioned reflex.

128. People are identified with forms. Two boys in the same family who fight like mad all day long and are real enemies. When one of them is attacked from outside, the other one gets very, very, annoyed. … Why? … Because he’s identified with him as part of his unit. And wherever identification with a form occurs, an attack on that form is the equivalent of an attack on that being.

129. So today, if you take a Christian, and you say to him, “Christianity is really nothing, it’s just a matter of faith originally. Hey haven’t got a philosophy or anything. They had to borrow it off the Greeks.” Now the average Christian will bounce at that. But if he’s well-read he knows it to be true, and he also knows something else, that the temporal appearance of Christ a couple of thousand years ago is simply the ratification of a macrocosmic fact. That supreme being of the universe has pressed into the time process and objectified itself in the personality, which has come out of a long line of being meditating on the microcosmos. Such that they have produced a reciprocal point which was able to have exactly, the mind of the macrocosmos, which we call the mind of Christ.

130. And it was out of Jesus, the man who said, “Yes-No,” that the Christ arose. His, “time was not yet come,” he said, but his mother said, “Let’s have a little wine out of the water,”.. He wasn’t ready, because he was only working towards it then. The body was being brought into a condition, of greater and greater response capacity (55.00) to the macrocosmic being.

131. When it was perfected, then was the time for the crucifixion. This has to be on a ‘33’. There’s a certain relation with the number of vertebrae in the spine, and a special function of meditation on it. Christ has to be ‘raised’ – lifted up – there is a serpent on the cross in the Old Testament. This serpent is ‘life’ as an undulation, and the ‘T’ represents ‘form’. That life is like the urge in the belly, and the ‘T’ is like the idea in the mind. Christ says, ”As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man shall be lifted up.” That is, our private, serpentine cunning and individuation must be lifted-up onto the Cosmic Cross to become macrocosmically conscious, and then, in that lifting up and pining on the macrocosmic, “Then,” he says, “I’” – that’s the cosmic consciousness – “When I be lifted up to the macrocosmic level, will draw all men – all individuated men – to me.” Because all men are striving for more and more power.

132. All men are power seekers, simply because they are men. ‘Man’ means ‘to evaluate’, and evaluation involves power. The individual man would like more power, and therefor when he sees a way of power, he tends to move towards it. So he needs must […?...] of the highest level when he sees it. So when he sees steps on the on the ‘Sky[?] effectionis’ towards the macrocosmic sphere, he moves towards it.

133. If you show him too much too soon, it can paralyze him and frighten him, hence the parables in the New Testament. Christ talks in parables, that hearing, they might not understand. Because if you tell them their objective position in relation to the macrocosmos, they will be completely paralyzed with the colossal size of the task. That’s how it appears; really it isn’t big at all, because all we’ve got to do is rub out all the form… But it appears very, very big … if you say, “I’ll have to understand all my ideas. … I can’t do that!’. See the Jnanic yogis in India, they say, “I must understand it!” And the Bhakti Yogis say, “No. I just love it – it’s easier!” And Karmic Yogis say, “I’m going to do the dishes properly instead, because it’s even easier than loving and thinking!” And so we get three major kinds of Yoga there, and a fourth kind, the Raja Yoga, which is aiming to concentrate – which is the hardest of all.

134. Now all these things we can show inside the New Testament. The words of Christ are exactly the synthesis, and the real significance, of the whole Upanishadic and Vedic doctrines of the Hindus – crystalized. If you get a New Testament with the ‘red letters’ of Christ printed in it, and just take the red letters, and read those, you will see an Absolute Statement of Universal fact in a series of dialectical propositions involving the relations and the duality of above and below and right and left in the macrocosmos.

135. So, we have to get clear in our minds, that we can only think by means of form and we can only manipulate form, by saying what we are doing. And to say what we are doing is to use words.

136. Words are principles of order ‘W-ORD’ is the entity that orders.

137. When we put our words in order, then our thoughts go into order. If we have a wrong definition – verbally – it doesn’t matter how sincere our intention, we get into trouble. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’…. plus ignorance!…

138. So we must get hold of this Universal Symbology that pre-Babel language of the human race.

139. Now we know how the human race lost this language. It says, in Genesis, that ,”They assayed to build a tower to heaven , lest they were scattered in the earth.” And God came down – that’s this Absolute Force – appears, and scatters, and scatters their vocabulary. … At that time (it says) Man was of ‘one speech’. And therefore, when a man spoke to another man, the man understood what he said. And as they individually conspired, in one language, to dictate, from the material end of the universe, the Universal scattered them, and diversified their vocabularies. And the result was confusion – Babel ‘a house against a house’. (60.00)

140. Each being, using a different language, is confused. So from that moment, human beings could, never again, unless they recovered that pre-Babel language, could never again understand each other. So the whole of human activities should be directed towards understanding. And this understanding involves clarity. This involves a proper use of terms.

141. If you read Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books you find how clear he was about this and if you read the works of Jacob Boehme, who deliberately obscures the Universal language while referring to it continuously. He is giving hints that there exists such. He’s giving hints how to find it, how to work on it. And at the same time he’s saying, “Thus far and no farther,” because there are naughty people in the world who would abuse it. They will use it for power. And the fact is, that the more that is known of the process of conditioning of reflex, the more power is in the hands of that man as a propaganda agent.

142. If somebody understands the way a knee-jerk works, and how to condition a reflex, and how to tie, say, the heard back in ‘apperception gnosis’ into a person’s mind, he can enslave the minds of other beings. And he does it by words.

143. In the same way that we can tie people up with words, through the paralyze their volitional centers, so, by application of the truth they can regain their volitional unity – which is identical with this white paper, the Absolute Intelligence.

144. This macrocosmic logos says, “I, and my father (that is the paper) are one.” Because this form here is simply the way the paper … moves. A vibration of the paper produces a form. The form is not other than the paper vibrating. The Son of God is not other than God the Father moving in a particular manner – ‘formally’. So when Christ says, “I and my father are one,” he is making a metaphysical statement, an ontological statement of fact. It is the same being, the same being that somebody makes like this – that’s the letter ‘M’ – and the same being that goes like this, with the letter ‘O;’ on it and goes round, and then undulates around the ‘O’ and that’s the word ‘ON’. That very, very same being is the only being there is…. So that, absolutely, the consciousness in us, in each one of us in this room – and when I say’ “Each one,” I mean, “Each body.” … The consciousness is identical. There are not separate consciousnesses, there are only separate forms to which the one consciousness refers.

145. So when Christ says, “We should be one with each other, as He is one with God,” and we shall be one in him, and He in God, and so on … It is all a statement that form is simply a modality, a behavior of the Omnipotence of God. And yet the only way that we, as men, that is, as evaluators, can get at it, is through vocabulary.

146. It doesn’t matter in what religion we go; we find that the great religions have a ritual. That if there is a religion with no ritual, it is fanatic and destructive. That the men that cut down absolutely on ritual, say the extreme Puritans and so on, are fanatic and destructive. And they are trying to get down to something that they call ‘essential’, and they become in their dress and their thought processes, and in everything else … dead. That is, they pin themselves on the skeleton, because they are trying to illuminate what they would think is ‘lush form’.

147. Now, ritual has significance, - it is form. And every ritual is embodied in words. If the words are correctly understood, they are words of power. But, if the meaning of those words is not understood, by the individual using them, he will not get the full benefit. But he will get some benefit, because they will condition his thought processes.

148. So if you teach a baby to say, “ 2 and 2 are 4,” as mere signs, it won’t understand the reference. But later on when it grows up, it hears somebody says, “2 and 2 are 4,” and putting down being pennies on the table, it will ‘click’. And something it has learnt without understanding will suddenly have conferred upon it understanding.

149. This is why the Catholics as a body say (65.00), “Let us educate the children and engram upon them, the form of the ritual, and then later on we’ll tell them the meaning. Now they are very, very, good theories in conditioning reflexes, although they don’t call it that, they call it ‘religious education’. In other churches, say in the Protestant Churches, they tended to cut down on the ritual, and in the process to impoverish the mind, except for a few very, very, great men.

150. If you read a man like Kierkegaard, you’ll find a man tremendously clear about the significance of his terms, a man who is the father of Modern Existentialism. You find all the great Protestant leaders are thoroughly aware that they are juggling with terms. Why should we bother? There’s ‘faith and words’. Shall we throw away the word ‘works’ and retain ‘faith’? ‘Faith … You have ‘faith’ in the church, what does it mean? It means you believe what the church says. What should you do about it?

151. Well, the Catholics said, “You must work.” … What does ‘work’ mean? Well if your not a working chap, you can give some cash to the church. Now this causes a drift of money … to Italy … into the Vatican. Half the time it was observed that this technique was very, very, good – ‘faith and works’. So some other fellows who wanted to stop the drift said, “Cut off the ‘works’ and lets save some money” This caused Luther to get a gospel, the Gospel of James and say, “This is an epistle of straw, because it says, ”Faith without works is dead.”” And manifestly work cannot save you. Because a perfectly ignorant man could work, and work, and work, and work, without any benefit whatever. Unless he believes that his work is helping him, it won’t help. So therefore throw the works away.

152. Now when they had done that, they had started a process that enlightened Medieval men could see would result in people saying, “Alright now we’re being saved by faith, so we don’t even pay tithes any more. In fact we put buttons in the collection box, because we don’t need works.”

153. Now you see, every formal statement admits of a dialectical opposite. Therefor Taoism says, “If I had a great chopper, I would hesitate to use it.”

154. Did Luther know that when he chucked out the ‘works’, that later on the linear descendants of the new tradition would find it very, very, hard to keep a church in repair, because ‘the faithful’ were just faithful and not ‘work-full’. Did he see it? The problem immediately for him was one of expediency.

155. Now these things have got to be seen and it was the ‘word’ did it. So when we’re thinking, we have to get the right words in order to produce the right substantial conditions. And substantialization of words in us means, first we hear, then we think about it, then we put it down into the feeling center and break it into bits. Do I like this bit … that bit … and so on. We put all the bits to which we can say, “Yes,” together; all the bits to which we can say, “No,” together. And then we throw away all the ones that we say, “No,” to, and we affirm the ones that we say, “Yes,” to – unqualified.

156. Now when we give an unqualified ‘yes’ to anything whatever, the Will orientates towards it, unifies the elements to which ‘yes’ has been said, and projects into the gross-material world, the substantial reality. And it cannot be done by anything other than a unific affirmation – it must be ‘yes; to every element.

157. So if you have a relation with human beings, and you find there is a terrific lot about them to which you must say, “Rubbish,” then you want to re-think it. Because why should you say, “No,” to rubbish… Supposing that was a very, very, finely, sensitively built rose, and a man came along and started putting manure on the ground around its roots, and the rose said, “I don’t want it… I don’t like the smell.” … You see …. And supposing the man listened, and didn’t bother to do it. What would happen to the progress of the rose? It wouldn’t improve.

158. All that we call ‘rubbish’ in the world is quite right, for those people who worship. This is why Christ talks in parables. He talks about the Sermon on the Mount in one way, and he takes his disciples into a little quiet spot and says, “Now I’ve told them these things, they’re hearing, that they might not understand. But you are the salt of the earth (70.00) - ‘salt’ means ‘savvy’, they’re very, sharp – and to you it is given to understand the mysteries of ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’.”

159. Now there’s a handful of men: thousands follow him, then a few hundreds; some found things very, very, difficult to understand. And most people ran away when he said, “You must eat my body, and drink my blood,” – that’s cannibalism. So they all ran away. A few were left, and of the twelve that led there was dissension and juggling for first places in heaven. And one he mentions as his favorite, and that one was the supreme intellectual, Saint John. He knew the meaning of the parables, an in that fact he was equated with the macrocosmic logos, in its individuated sense, on earth, in an earth body. John means ‘intellect’. And ‘John the Divine’ means ‘the intellect devoted to divining the macrocosmic logos’. And Christ is that logos. So John is devoted to Christ, and The Christ counts him as his favorite because he’s devoted to him. He says, “If you love me, do as I say.”

160. If you feel in a certain way let there be action. This is the way to substantiate being.

161. So, in fact, the problem for us is this, we’ve often heard it from different circles, I know, quite a lot of different circles working in ways roughly similar to this. Most of them say, “Nobody works, everybody talks,” and so on. And they don’t realize that you cannot work until your thought process is orientated correctly. You can’t work to become spiritual unless you first have the right direction. You could do a horrible thing to yourself that [..?..] would call ‘wrong crystallization’ could occur. A man with insufficient data could work very hard at integrating insufficient data, like Hitler tried to do. He could have an idea, an erroneous idea, that the Teutonic peoples are supermen, and that the rest of the world are simply things to be distributed by them. And he could work with that idea, and integrate it, and act upon it. And it’s a false integration. And therefore when somebody wants work to be done, they should be very careful that that work is not being done prematurely.

162. What you’ve got to understand is that the macrocosmic logos in its broad outlines, before we work at all, first you must hear about it, then we must meditate upon it, then we must decide whether we like it or not, in all its parts. And then, if there are some parts we don’t, just throw them away, it’s a mistake; throw them away for the time being. Devote to the ‘yesses’ and unify the will. That will take you on a definite life course and you will discover, in the process, like the rose did, that the manure has utility.

163. If you’re absolutely sincere, at our own level of being, at any given moment, and say, “Yes,” and, “No,” you cannot go wrong at that level. And a mistake is simply a ‘miss-take’, is ‘taking something amiss’, and an error is a ‘running away’ from that to which you should run towards. And an evil is ‘that which is contrary to the live’(‘evil is [..?..] ‘live’). And sin is ‘separation from the absolute good’, and it has no other meaning.

164. So all the falsities, and the sins, and the lies, and the evils, and so on; all those things are simply less, and less, and less, o what we want. We want more life, more abundant life, more intelligence, more will power. All these things we want, and anything that moves us the other way is an evil and a sin. And it has no other meaning to talk about, ‘sin’ and ‘evil’, unless it causes a degeneration of our faculties and our powers.

165. So. I’d like if possible, to get this perfectly clear; that we must understand the words we’re talking about, that even work with a dictionary is not wasted. We find a certain term in a dictionary and it leads to another one.

166. If we take the great … You had a question didn’t you Jack, about the planets outside Saturn … If we say, criticizing the cosmology of a certain period also the ideas of the astronomers. Why do (75.00) count only to Saturn? The answer is, Saturn represents a certain limit of individuation. And if we take Uranus and Pluto, and Neptune, we are talking about something beyond the individuated. The universe is the ‘heaven power’ which is born out of the ‘earth power’. You know Saint Paul says, “First a physical body, then a spiritual body,” and ‘heaven’ is made, in Genesis, after the earth is stated. “The earth was without form and void, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” And then He made a ‘firmament’ and this ‘firmament’ was called ‘heaven’, and that is Uranus, and that is ‘limit’, ‘limiting factor of a sphere’, and Pluto is the ‘Lord of the Underworld’, of the darkness, beyond this is the pi-law again, in its absolute limit. ‘Neptune’ is ‘the ocean of form’ not yet rotating; just being waves, undulating round the cosmos.

167. These are different levels of being. And until we understand, up to the level of Saturn, that is, up to the level of individuation, it is quite useless for us to talk about the non-individuated. We must understand finite thinking before we can talk about infinite thinking.

168. We must understand why ‘I’ like so-and-so, and dislike something else, before we can talk about Universal Compassion.

169. Lots of people can knit socks for people in Africa they’ve never seen and they won’t knit socks for the woman next door. … That is ‘Universal Compassion’ without ‘Individual Compassion’, and we’ve got to get back to ourselves.

170. The tendency is, not to work on what we have, but to want to know more, and more, and more, about bigger metaphysical problems. Because it relieves us of the necessity for immediate work on ourselves.

171. So, if we know anything at all, no matter how tiny, if we can take the idea of it, feel about it, and then force it through the will into action in the material world, we are carrying it through one level of being – intellectual, through the feeling – the emotional level, into the gross-material world. And that is the ‘term’ of action.

172. If it once gets in there it will stay – permanently. A man can think about riding a bicycle, and never have ridden one. He then gets on it and finds that he falls off. And after many tries, many tries, he finds … quite suddenly that his body is riding it.

173. Now when the body is riding the bike – that - is substantial being. The form of riding a bike is now substantial. He doesn’t need to think about it, he has actually substantiated ‘bike-riding’. Now that is what we want to aim at.

174. We can think about spirit, we might even emote about it. Lots of people emote about

175. the crucifixion – once a year. They get very upset. Can they put it into the will, and then go out and crucify themselves in the same way, in daily life? If not, they’re deficient on the lower level of being, and that is the ‘term’ of action. And you cannot turn round and go to heaven until you’ve been ‘down’ properly. Christ has to be crucified, taken off and buried and go to Hell, before the resurrection.

176. So we cannot do it by simply intellectualizing, we can’t do it by emoting. We’ve got to get it down to the will level, put it into the gross-material world before we can resurrect.

177. So really we don’t want to know anything about levels that we cannot apply.

178. Is that fairly clear now about the word values? … See, most people think that words are arbitrary and that any old word will do.

179. Not so very long a bright young woman said, “Well there’s no reason why I shouldn’t call an elephant a fox.” … Well that makes it rather difficult for the foxhunters straight away.

180. Everything has to be shifted. And if you shift one term, you’ll have to shift all. Lewis Carroll called it, “Paying extra.” And it will falsify our vocabularies, our thought process, and because our emotions are tied to those ideational forms, it will falsify our emotions. All the neurotics that we see increasing yearly, are confused in words first. Nothing else. (80.00)

181. First you confuse their terms. You give them a lot of ideas of duty, about what they want, about what they should have, about what they aught to do. These words rotate in them, and they don’t fit’.

182. This ‘not-fittingness’ of words, produces ‘non-fittingness’ of ideas. This produces emotional confusion. This disorientation upsets them so badly that they literally begin to disintegrate. So that all this mental sanity, this wholeness in the mind, requires consistency. So we should never scorn the ‘word’. And our best way to do it – in the initial stages - is to put down key-words like ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘immortality’, and so on – and really get to know what they mean.

183. Don’t have a vague idea of it, ‘immortality’ means ‘unbreakableness’. … Have we got ‘unbreakableness’? … Of the physical body; of the ideas.

184. We can’t break the soul, it is an absolute continuous being, it has no parts. But we can break minds, and we can break bodies. Body and mind are mortal, they are breakable. So, not having parts, being a continuous entity, is not breakable, therefore the soul is immortal.

185. To become quite clear about these terms, enable s you to let go of things that would be problematical, and turn your energies towards another level, substantiating each level.

186. If you say to yourself, “Alright, I’m stopping worrying about my soul now because it’s immortal. I’m going to start putting my mind in order not my soul… because my mind can break. And I’m going to be careful of my body as an instrument of experience on earth. I will not put it under a bus, because it’s breakable.

187. You need to stop worrying about the things you don’t need to worry about – the infinite, the absolute – we shouldn’t worry about that because nothing can break it. Yet there are people who actually worry about the possibility of God ceasing to be. That’s because they don’t understand what God is. God cannot cease to be, that’s the one thing that God can’t do. And therefore we’ve not to worry about it. And we should do are … any ‘work’ we have to do should be done on earth, as individuals. Put our forms in consistent shape, and then we are building immortality in the logical consistency of our minds.

188. If we bring our mind into exact conformity with the Universal Mind we then have what is called, ‘The Mind of Christ’. That can’t break because it is being held by God.

189. Christ says, “Those the father puts into My hands, no man shall snatch out.”

190. If you once see a self-consistent truth, penetrate to its meaning. The cleverest fellow in the world cannot take it off you. So that, when the truth has really got you, and is substantiated it in you, nobody can shake your confidence. You can say, “Alright, break my body, it does break in any case. In a few years time it will fall to pieces even if you don’t break it. So I’m not putting my money on the body. And about ordinary ideas through the five senses, I won’t back those either, because they depend for their relation on the order of presentation of stimuli. But about my internal reason, about the light that lights every man that comes into the world, the Macrocosmic Logos, I put my money on that, because that won’t break because God is keeping it in being.” So we back the thing that must win.

191. So we want to grow in confidence and power, and life. And this we can only do by affirming these things. We can’t do it by negating, we must affirm.

192. And if there is any rubbish, a behavior, or physical fact, or feeling, in another being, never say that that rubbish is absolute. If it exists, it is a part of truth, it has a utility, a bit of irritability, a bit of bad temper, an explosion, and so on, in another person. A near and dear one we usually find them in.

193. When it occurs, we shouldn’t say, “This shouldn’t be. This is a terrible thing. My near and dear one’s hitting the ceiling, and shouldn’t.” … We should say, “It had happened. And it is to me that it has happened, therefor I need it. I must examine myself.” (85.00)

194. How should I react? Do I require something different? I have to accept every gross-material thing that happens in the world as coming to me. And when I accept it and penetrate to its understanding, I have changed my being level. Because what we want to do is become immune to external determination.

195. So if somebody flying off the handle can reduce us to misery, that’s a bad thing. We should be so integrated that it doesn’t really matter what anybody does on the outside. We should penetrate though their naughty behavior, right through to the essential white paper behind the black mark, and that is our ‘Self’, and relate only to that. And call all the rest, all formal behavior, superficial.

196. We actually find a slight difference between the male and female in this. That a man would tend, as a rationally stressed being, not to forgive as quickly as a woman, because, she being stressed volitionally, wouldn’t retain the form if it was no longer useful. So after hitting you very, very, hard, she’ll forgive you. Whereas he would tend to hold it and think about it, and rationalize it and say, “This shouldn’t be.”

197. Now he should be able to let go. This is were the Tao Te Ching says, “He who, being a man, could remain a woman - his work is finished.” If ‘he’ - with the ideas – when he is being hit very hard, instead of wrapping it up, suddenly scrubbed the idea out, and returned to being a volitional being. The Will, not being made of parts, is eternality itself, so if he returns to the will center, scrubbing out the idea, then he has regained his original unity. Whereas, if the external naughty behavior of the ‘near and dear one’ throws him into a state of rational misery, where he tries to work out why she did this thing, for about four days, and she’s forgotten all about it in four minutes.

198. You see, it’s his identification with the formal process, being a rational being, that leads him into prolonging his misery, and he’s being unchristian, “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” and yet it is a national tendency…. …..

199. Q. Does a dictionary help much?

200. Yes. An etymological dictionary helps a great deal.

201. Q. What dictionary?

202. An etymological one. One that will give you the root of the word in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit. … A very good single volume one is Wyld’s

203. Q. Wyld’s

204. ‘Wyld’s Universal’ you know, H. C. Wyld’s is the best single-volume dictionary you can get, unless you want to go into the Oxford 30 volumes, which gives you the dates of the appearance of the word.

205. And you get back to the root you’ll discover there is nothing new under the sun. All these clever things that the scientists talk about now, they have to borrow root ideas, mostly from Greek today, (The Greeks had a word for it) and just distort that thing slightly into a modern spelling … For a fundamental mechanical or psychological fact. And the same reality can be viewed as a psychological fact and it is a feeling fact, or as a rational fact, or as a gross material… So the different fields of philosophy, and psychology, and science, all have words which run into each other. The word ‘attention’, psychologically, is ‘ a tension’. You cannot have an ‘attention’ psychologically without a ‘tension’ of power somewhere in you. So when you try to think, and concentrate, that means ‘with center’, you put a center, and when you … (89.29 - Fin)