Ancestral Influence (252)

Transcribed with diagrams, tables and arbitrary headings by J. Bailey.

Square brackets [ ] contain editors comments.

Have we got a subject for tonight?

[Question from the audience] I was rather interested, Eugene, in this program that I didn’t see …. [laughter] …. That said that the amount of tension/stimulation that a baby gets in its very early months can condition the whole reaction to life. So our ……??? must be put into us very early. Which gives us a difficult problem that we are going to struggle with later.

Yes, well of course it begins considerably earlier than birth. In fact it begins with a gentleman called Adam.

Let’s draw a circle here to represent the original human protoplasm from which we all derive.

Now it is a fact, not a theory, that all multiplication of biological elements is by division. The cell divides in order to multiply. Now this same thing that you can observe under the microscope in a monocelled animal occurs in the multiplication of human beings; only, the mode of doing it is rather less obvious. You get under the microscope a monocell (1) and watch it long enough, you will actually see the thing goes through a process of division. It has inside it a little nuclear spot, the intelligence. This is observed to behave in a peculiar way and then to divide itself into two centres (2) and then various processes take place between the two centres and it builds a wall up. And then it pinches where the wall is (3) and gradually brings itself into a state where it can sever itself into two beings(4).

And that’s the basic method of multiplication by division. [02:12]

The implications of this in religion and philosophy are tremendous, because it means that none of us actually start life with the blank tablet that some thinkers assume. The tabula rasa, the blank tablet of certain philosophical schools is just a pure abstraction ... it just never did exist.

Now, what happens with a human being: every human being derives from an egg, and at a certain stage a portion of this egg is set off for reproducing in the next generation. If we like to say in this diagram, schematically, we’ll just cut it in half, and say that one half is for next generation. We write ‘N.G.’, or ‘no good’. The next generation, those are the sex cells, and on this side the somatic cells which are going to develop into the body. Of course, it’s more complicated than this, because the sex cells are really inside the somatic cells.

Some of the cells are going to become body, and some of the cells are not going to become body until they have been extruded, joined to another cell from a person of the opposite sex, and projected into the future. But the sex cells and the somatic cells are created by dividing the original cells.

Irritability of Protoplasm

So we come to a very peculiar fact which is ignored because it’s too simple. The whole human protoplasm, here represented by one circle has divided itself, and through progressive divisions has multiplied itself. In each generation it multiplies more and more. We have about twenty thousand million such results in the world today at the human level. Now all these millions of people are derived from the original human protoplasm, called in certain mystical schools the Adamic Plasm. And this plasm has certain qualities. The basic quality of all this protoplasm is the quality of irritability. Irritability does not mean that your grandmother gets annoyed with you, in the field of biology. It means that when a stimulus comes, the substance of this being moves in response to the stimulus. The stimulus energy goes in and modifies the protoplasm receiving it, and that protoplasm reacts back onto the stimulus source. There is action from the stimulus and a reaction from the protoplasm, and this we call the irritability of the protoplasm.

Memory

A single cell has this cellular irritability, meaning this power to receive incoming energy and to react to it. But it not only does this, it not only reacts to it, but retains a trace of the original stimulus and its own reaction. This means that once a stimulus has been put in, as a certain amount of energy which initiates a movement in the protoplasm, that movement continues in that protoplasm throughout the whole period of the existence of it. This is the ground of our memory. It is also the ground of the engram patterns which constitute various mental disorders later. We can see here that because this protoplasm has this power to retain the patterns of all motions that it’s ever experienced, that the result is that every new stimulus comes into an existing pattern.

Now, there never has been a time when a cell existed with no pattern in it. For a cell to exist — a living cell — there must be a nuclear intelligence which is already characterised. And furthermore the surrounding substance around the nucleus, itself responds — has this irritability capacity — responds to the stimulus and retains the motion characteristic of the stimulus. [07:10]

Generation of Protoplasm

Now imagine an egg here, and this egg has been subjected to various experiences. The experiences are all engrammed inside, and the reactions to those stimuli are also engrammed, so that the totality of all the experiences of that protoplasm continues.

Now, if we now divide this egg — or the egg divides itself, by splitting its nucleus — we get two eggs. Because these two eggs are the identical protoplasm of the original, they also have traces of the experience they had before the division. Now this is the ground of what we call ancestral experience. This is the basis of the falling dream and such-like phenomena. It’s the ground of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, and so on.

Every egg now existing contains within itself residual traces of the experience that that same protoplasm had before the cell divided. So if we go on, starting from any modern man, pushing back through his parents, we are pushing back all the time into this original protoplasm. And the important thing to realise is that the protoplasm of our body — the one we have now — is not new. If we are twenty-one, it is not just twenty-one years old. It’s exactly as old as the human race. There is no human protoplasm that is not as old as the human race. Consequently nobody comes into this world unconditioned. [08:59]

Mnemic Patterns

In recent experiments of the kind just mentioned, it is shown that the protoplasm of children at a very, very early stage from birth respond to stimuli and retains the impressions and that subsequent in-going stimuli are conditioned by those already received. This is the basis of the conditioning process. Less popularly understood is the fact this the same egg, which is developed into a child, was already sensitive before it had altered its form from the egg into the embryo. All protoplasm is human protoplasm — is the original protoplasm — is not something different from the original derived from it. It is the original protoplasm, continued by division through successive generations. And consequently if we start with any given egg, we can go back to the two ancestors of this egg, continuously multiplying on the way back. And this way we would get more ancestors than we have descendants, were it not for the fact that at a certain point we discover that inter-marriages occurred back. And the triangle begins to narrow and we come back to the one protoplasm from which all human beings started. [10:26]

Now, if we like to think of the generations of protoplasm as simply the layer experiences of one human protoplasm, we can see that in each generation there is a layer of experience. And this has to do with the intensity and duration of the original stimulus. Imagine for a moment we have an egg here and we subject this egg to a mild electric shock ... a mild one that just makes it feel slightly unpleasant. And we put it on only for a tenth of a second. There’s a little ripple through it. It starts to contract, but the stimulus switches off and it quickly returns to its normal position. But inside it there is now a motion, a shadow motion going through it from this little electric shock. Now, that motion can never cease as long as that protoplasm exists. And it would condition our behaviour all the time if it were not for the overlaying of this mild stimulus by others ... less mild.

Supposing the next one is very violent. Now we get a very strong reaction. And this one, when we look at the drawing, if we don’t know that we already have a shadow ripple in it, which we actually saw being drawn here, a quick look at that and we might think, oh, these are the only marks there are in this cell, and the paper looks a bit dirty elsewhere. Now these very strong waves — these very strong alternate contractions and expansions of the protoplasm — overlay in stimulus value the other stimulus below. But if we take away this strong stimulus after a minute, then these strong ones begin to subside again. And they can fall down to the level — providing we don’t re-stimulate them — they can fall down to the level of intensity nearly like the other ones.

This is what happens during dreams, when your external strong stimulus, the material environment is reduced. You cut down the light stimulus. You go into a darkened room. You make your body comfortable. You relax it. You try to cut down all the stimuli from outside, and this causes a general lapsing, down to a threshold level, of all the records of all the stimuli you’ve had. Now if, when you are in that state of total, nearly equal stimulation — not quite equal, that’s impossible: nearly equal — if then a horn blows in the distance and the sound comes from the window, that horn sound stimulates some already existing patterns within, and lifts those up into consciousness, and this re-ecphorised mnemic pattern is a dream. [13:57]

Now, if we imagine that all the experiences are nearly down to the same level, then the thing that determines what we will dream is the character of the stimulus hitting the whole complex. Now in the same way, when we come to examine our own experiences and our parents’, our immediate parents’, if we can cut down on the immediate stimulation in our own body, we can begin to become aware of our father’s and mother’s experiences. This is not merely a matter of theory, it’s a matter of daily, experimental fact: that when we push a person back into early childhood and then into the early pre-natal zone, we can by a series of verbal stimuli reactivate certain early phases and from these trigger back, until finally the person is reading the record of his own mother and father. He can recapture verbal phrases. He can see the scenes they saw, see the clothes they wore, and so on. Because the protoplasm we are examining is the protoplasm which was the parent body. [15:11]

Infinite Intelligence

To understand this properly is to understand the real meaning of reincarnation as opposed to some rather naïve ideas of reincarnation. The resident nuclear intelligence there is simply the intelligence of the infinite vibrating on this highly sensitive nuclear centre, and through that, conditioning the surrounding plasm. But that intelligence is the Infinite Absolute Intelligence that created the universe. And yet that same intelligence appears in the worm and in the donkey and in man, and differs in them not on account of itself as intelligence ... but on account of the peculiar pattern of their bodies. Their bodies respond differently because they have different levels of organisation. There is no evolution whatever of consciousness. Evolution is of form. A sensitive organism responds to intelligence better than an insensitive one. The congenital idiot is just as intelligent behind his deficient body as a genius is with his efficient body. We must never think that one being is more intelligent than another, but only that the vehicles of these beings differ so much that they filter this intelligence in different ways in different degrees.

Now, here we have a human egg and it is going to develop. At each stage in its development, the nuclear intelligence — which is really the intelligence of the Absolute — is working through to organise this protoplasm. It’s going to make a human body. In each stage it has self-awareness. When it’s in the stage of an egg, it feels like an egg, and the content of consciousness in that zone is egg-shaped. Prior to the process of mitosis where it divides itself, it is entirely a rudimentary, protopathic awareness. It feels like a sphere and this sphere is a sensitive sphere. It is not yet analysed. It is a pre-analytic whole — it is not a synthetic whole, which implies analysis — it is a pre-analytic whole. Every human being has been an egg, has been in the protopathic state prior to cell division, and because of this irritability of the protoplasm it retains within itself this pre-analytic, whole consciousness. And this pre-analytic whole consciousness is the ground of its belief, which later is going to help it back to wholeness when it’s lost it.

Internal Self-contradiction

Now, the nuclear intelligence under the influence of Absolute Intelligence here divides and puts a wall up. As soon as that wall is put up, the content of consciousness — not the consciousness — the content is changed. It now has the whole awareness still engrammed on it — still it is aware of a wholeness — but it now has an awareness: there is a wall inside it. And it has an awareness of the stages of separation of the nucleus, and it has an awareness that this part is giving orders, and this part is giving orders [each of the nuclei]. But the orders on each side are shielded by the wall. So we immediately have a possibility of a conflict within a being. Quite apart from any external thing, the being can fight itself. Wherever there is a cell with a nucleus, and that nuclear intelligence can give orders, there is the possibility that the orders of those cells will not coincide. So we can say immediately that on the appearance of the first division within the egg we have the possibility of internal conflict, of self-contradiction [cell-f contradiction]. [19:42]

Now, in the bible this wall building is called Simeon and Levi¹. It says, Simeon and Levi digged a wall to their own hurt. They slew a man. The man they slew is this egg. They slew him, they killed him, they deaded him, or divided him, by putting a wall inside. This breaks the original, non-synthetic, pre-analytic unity, and sets up inside it the possibility of ignorance.

This nucleus centre does not know with the same intensity that it knows itself, what the other side is doing. All conflict in the human race derives from this fact ... internal self-contradiction.

When the bible — it says they digged a wall — the reason is that when you take a bit of earth and you put your spade in here and throw it up, then you get a ditch and a wall, something like a sine wave. They digged a wall. Now, this wave is actually the kind of process that sets up this wall inside. There is a depression and an elevation corresponding with each other. In the same way, every resistance in the body is a dynamic resistance. There are no materials in the universe other than force behaviours. Matter is a function of force.

When the plasm contracts, it makes a zone difficult to penetrate, and when it expands it makes a zone easy to penetrate. And it does this alternately and very, very rapidly, and it does this throughout the continuance of the protoplasm and thus it keeps the walls in being dynamically. All these walls are simply functions of force vibrating very strongly. And you know that when you spin a bicycle wheel, if you try to put your finger through it, your finger will get hurt. And the faster you spin the wheel, the easier to get hurt. And if you stop the wheel you can put your finger between the spokes very, very easily. So you see there’s a relation between solidity of matter and velocity.

And the same thing is true in the atom, where we have an attendant electron going round an atom, and the electron takes a certain length of time to complete its orbit. If we want to hit the nucleus of that atom, we must fire a particle at it so fast that it can traverse the orbit of the electron before the electron has time to get round and hit it away. So that even within the realm of the atom, solidity is a function of velocity.

The faster a thing moves, the harder it is to penetrate it. You know that if you take a candle and put it in a gun, and fire it at high speed, although it’s only a wax candle it will go through a wooden door. This velocity confers upon it a quality that it didn’t have before. Somehow, solidity is velocity.

Painful Stimuli

Now this wall inside our being, created, is simply a very, very rapid zone vibration ... a vibration confined to a certain area such that when motions from nuclear centres are transmitted and they hit against this vibrating wall they are reflected back to their centres. This means that each cell in the body is a little individual. Each cell is a little individual. It feels its own sensations, as well as transmitting to other cells that information. When you burn your finger and you feel oh, I have burnt my finger, not only do you feel it but the cells that are burnt have felt it too. They send you the message. You get the message in the brain cells, and they have already had the immediate sensation of burning. Each individual cell itself responds to pleasure pain as well as sending a message to the control centres in the brain. And because of this individual capacity of the cells, cells with painful experiences upon them can refuse to let you know what is going on ... cells can bypass information.

Now, let’s draw again ... Simeon and Levi put a wall inside. And that would cut the being into two beings from the point of view of messages, if were not for the fact that we grow over this wall a little nerve. That nerve allows the passage across these resistant walls of information from one centre to another. In the bible, this is called Joseph. Joseph throws his vine over the wall. Simeon and Levi digged a wall and killed the whole man, that is, cut him in two — or into thousands when mitosis is completed — and Joseph throws his vine over the wall. The nerves grow across the dividing walls. [25:34]

So we have here a peculiar double advantage. If we take a cell and divide it [1], when a stimulus comes to one side, the energy of the stimulus is confined for practical purposes to the side that receives it. The other side is free. The wall vibrates a little and there’s a faint shadow in here of that, but not enough to determine the cell response. So if this is a painful stimulus, this half wants to move away from it, but the other half doesn’t. Now this is the ground of the possibility of free choice. If we then put another wall across it, which happens in the egg [2], and if a painful stimulus comes here, it is confined to only a quarter of the cell, then three-quarters of it are free. And if we go on dividing the cell in this manner until we’ve got a few million of them, and if we put a stimulus at one point it is confined to that zone by the surrounding walls, and that means the rest of the being is free. So that when you put your finger on a hot bar and feel it burn, the rest of your body doesn’t have to go away.

In the early phases before cell division, the whole body reacts, so that if it is painful it all wants to go away. But if it does, it will never learn anything, and never be characterised. So this putting up of the walls which initially destroys the unity has function. It enables us to locate, to localise, to confine the energy of a painful stimulus — or of a pleasurable one — into such a small locality that the rest of our being is free. And this gives us the power to motivate the rest of our being and push towards the pain. This is tremendously important. It’s the ground of all religious teaching — the power to move towards a pain. Because if we haven’t got that power, we are always conditioned by the pleasure/pain situation. But many things lie hidden behind walls of pain. [28:04]

Supposing there is a wall and inside that wall there’s a treasure. And this wall is painful. Symbolically it is the fiery sword turning at the gate of Eden. Inside there is Eden ... this is the centre of your intelligence. You start to introvert. You go inside and you come against a band of pain. You are turned away from it, and you go back into the external world ... you become extroverted and therefore dependent upon the external stimulus situation. But if you have enough of yourself free, and you can localise the pain, with your free part you can drive through that pain band and get into the Garden of Eden again.

Now, pain has a function. It’s to keep people away from things until they can drive themselves into things. Christ being deliberately crucified is saying, I’ll show you how to do the most painful thing in the world positively and deliberately and thereby conquer everything ... basically, conquering death, because death means division. If we are to gain unity we must break down the divisions of our being. But every division is a pain. That is, every division is a resistance which when we try to overcome it will be experienced as a pain. But if we don’t penetrate this pain, we cannot gain our unity, and we cannot gain — if we don’t gain our unity — our optimum level and our supreme striking force in life. [29:52]

In Utero Development

Now, let’s return to the babe a moment. Each baby has begun as an egg and has gone through various phases. It’s developed itself and got a little head and legs and so on. Each phase of its being is recorded inside it. This means that by the appropriate techniques — it can be done by hypnosis but can be done more efficiently by another method — a person can be returned to any phase of their existence. So that he can re-experience what it was like to be born, what it was like to be six months in conception, three months, what it was like to suffer an abortion attempt that failed, what it was like to be something like a fish, what it was like to be a little egg, and so on. All these are recoverable ... but that isn’t the beginning of it. When we go back to conception point, if instead of coming forward we push back through conception point, and just keep pushing the time factor backwards, suddenly we become aware of mental contents that as an individual we had not had previously had at all. And we begin to see environments, figures, costumes and so on, of periods not contemporary. When we do this we will find that first of all we are discovering impressions from mother and father, and mother and father’s mother and father, and so on. But there is no limit to this retrogression backwards, because the protoplasm we are dealing with is the original protoplasm of the human kind, which has simply multiplied by dividing. So we are not trying to get to know about other beings. We are getting to know about our own being. So that we can push back in principle right to Adam ... to the first human protoplasm.

Going Back to God

Rather funnily, a fortnight ago, I was sent a patient who was rather difficult and rather upset the psychiatrist — who was a Freudian — because this psychiatrist was expecting to find a birth trauma and instead of this, this particular fellow jumped back to conception and began to describe these processes. And this particular Freudian psychiatrist was not used to it and became very, very alarmed and told him to stop it. But he couldn’t do it. And he started to regress and he began to describe other periods. And then he came to the point where he insisted he was Adam. But he wasn’t content with being Adam. He went back to be God. And at this point the psychiatrist stopped him, became very alarmed and sent him to another psychiatrist. He had reached God.

Now he was absolutely convinced that he’d reached God ... not as an insane being, but simply that the nuclear intelligence at each generation level is the same nuclear intelligence right back to the first human protoplasm, and that first human protoplasm is simply organised by the infinite intelligence called God. Now he wasn’t allowed to go back to God again, and he was very upset about this because he felt very good when he was God. But according to the theory, he hadn’t gone back to God, he had to be stopped. And he was told by two other psychiatrists that he had gone too far and he mustn’t do it again.

Now, I didn’t mind him going back to God at all. So I recommended him to go back again and he went, and after a time he got bored ... [laughter]

This is metaphysically accurate. If you remember the great Indian philosophers, how they thought about God. If we represent God by the white paper, if we don’t draw on the white paper, it’s equivalent to God not creating. If he doesn’t create at all, he has nothing to look at. He has no object, no Only Begotten Son, no universe, nothing whatever to play with. And consequently, he is bored. In the Indian myth, it says, God was alone. Suddenly he realised he was alone and he got fed up. And then he became afraid of remaining alone, so he fashioned for himself an object. And this object of course, as God is a man, had to be a woman ... because man means evaluator, you see. So he made a woman. And he then got hold of this woman and started to procreate. And she said he mustn’t do that, because I am only you, and ran away. And he then pursued her, and she changed herself into a tigress. So of course he had to change into a tiger to catch her. And she then ran away again and changed into a deer and he changed into a stag and he caught her again. And from this all the forms of the universe in this lovely myth are derived. [35:26] ***

And this myth is basically true. The Absolute intelligence has produced a supreme object for itself and without that object it has literally nothing whatever to play with. In the Indian system, the universe, the one turn, uni verse is a great big ball for God to play with. And this playing about with this ball is called Li-La. Li-la means sport. Something like lie-low to me. And this sport is that whereby the Absolute Intelligence can apply its infinite power and get a reaction from its own power and thus be reflexively aware of its own being. In Christian terminology, this big sphere is called the Only Begotten Son: The Logos Sphere.

The Gnostics would call this, as to its formal content, the Sophic sphere ... Sophia; the Wisdom sphere. Logos means ratio. It’s easy to see the relation between Sophia and Logos, because Sophia is the sphere of all forms and Logos is the ratio of those forms.

The Universal Soul

So here is a great big object. Now this great big object is the universal soul. This is the anima mundi of the scholars and because this — we represent by the paper — is sentient power, as power it is cause and as sentience it is aware of what it is doing, then this great big sphere, this original macrocosmic sphere, is Sentient Power turned into an objective unity. And the name for this objective unity of Sentient Power is soul. Any objective unity of sentient power is called soul. And this big one is the macrocosmic soul. In the mystical Hebrew concept, it is also the Adam Kadmon ... the big universal man.

Man does not mean a being with a couple of arms and legs sticking out of his sides. It simply means an evaluating intelligence ... whether you have legs or not. You may remember that Grenfell of Labrador on one occasion said that a friend of his in India had got in a railway accident and lost both his legs and arms. And as soon as he lost them all his relations came from miles around and started taking the furniture away. And he sent a message to a lawyer and the lawyer came and talked to him and he insisted that he was still he, although he had lost his legs and arms. And so they went to court, and in the court he was able to establish that even without legs and arms he was he, and all his beloved relations had to return the furniture.

So you see, the essential thing about being a man is that he is an intelligence with the power to evaluate. The word man simply means the substance [m] energised [a] moving [n], and this is the basis of a word meaning to measure ... mensuration, from a root ma to measure, which you see in mathe-ma-ta ... mathematics. So a man is an intelligence that evaluates. That being so, the macrocosmic being, because it is sentient power — because there is nothing else for it to be — is itself a man. It is the macrocosmic man.

This macrocosmic man in different religions is called a different name.

In Christianity it is called the Logos, the Cosmic Christ.

For the Gnostics it’s this Sophic sphere. It is a fullness, a pleroma, a great fullness of forms.

In Buddhism it is the Dharma Kaya, the body of law of the Buddha ... that the Buddha is not an individual on Earth, but the Buddha is this cosmic self. And any individual within the Cosmos who can bring himself into the same vibrational level as the Macrocosmos, is thereby a Buddha. Therefore in the Buddhist scriptures you will find statements, otherwise quite puzzling, which say, I am breaking up the idols of the Buddha because there is no Buddha. And if there is a Buddha then all the Buddhas are the same Buddha. And the man who thinks there is a Buddha to worship other than himself is deceived. Because if the man is going to worship the macrocosmic Buddha, the act of worshipping it objectively separates the worshipper from it and he doesn’t become a Buddha. Therefore boddhi-dharma who was a very tough Buddhist said there aren’t any Buddhas. He said, don’t worship it. Break it to bits. If you see one, smash it. Because the moment you start to worship it, you have objectified it and in the act of doing so you have severed yourself from it.

Now in the same way, the man who thinks that Jesus Christ is an external object to himself, to which he must bend the knee, he is not participating in the mind of Christ. To participate in the mind of Christ he must become it. He must have the same mind. But when he does that he has no worship of an external objective mind, he is that mind. And when all the beings have attained that level, then it says, in those days, no man shall teach another of God, for all shall know him. And what they shall know shall be themselves.

The real self in the nucleus of the egg — the real intelligence — is not other than this macrocosmic self. And it is only identification — which means a super-stress placed on a finite vehicle — that separates a man from salvation ... that is, separates a man from his macrocosmic awareness. [41:58]

The Macrocosmic Sphere (Sophia)

Now this Macrocosmic Self is a big egg of sentient power and this is the source of the irritability of the little eggs that are made inside. This Macrocosmic Egg, being power, squeezes itself, contracts onto its centre, and then flies away to its perimeter. And it does this, alternating. This is the same as the heart beat and the same as the breathing. It breathes in, and it breathes out. And it does this perpetually ... in-breathing and out-breathing. When it’s out breathing, all the scientists get excited about the red shift and say it’s expanding. When it’s in-breathing they all get excited and say, very shortly we’ll all be compressed into a nutshell and won’t be able to live any more. The whole process is going on all the time, from the very, very nature of the Infinite Absolute Power itself.

Now, because it has this power, it retains within itself the formal actualities of its own being. These are actualities for it. But for a finite being within it, they are not actualities, they are theoretical possibilities. But at their own level, at their own frequency, they’re actualities now. And the motions traversing the macrocosmic sphere backwards and forwards, produce by their intersections all the forms of all the fauna and flora of the world. So that every conceivable form there is, or could be, or has been, is a permanent actuality within the macrocosmic sphere.

Now, those forms are eternal. If a super-stress is placed upon one of them, you might see an ostrich, and if the super-stress is placed on another you might see a man. If the super-stress is persisted in, we’d say there is now identification with a given form. But that identification itself is of a coarser order than the subtle frequencies running through the macrocosmic sphere. And just as in our first diagram a heavy pain stimulus can overlay a relatively less severe one, so in this way a great stress on the individual organism can overlay the macrocosmic information. And when that super-stress is put on and the information of a given vehicle is stepped up beyond a certain level, then the person feels very clever and the measure of his cleverness is in direct proportion with his ignorance of all the other things he doesn’t know. [45:03]

In coming to know very sharply by super-stress, it follows by law that he has un-become to know the rest. To super-stress one element of knowledge is to throw out of balance your wisdom. Knowledge and wisdom are therefore opposed in this way, because knowledge has to do with a given now. It is a ledge of now. You know something but in the act of knowing it by super-stess at a given moment, you have actually cut away the rest of your cosmic knowledge. And the totality of all knowledge is called wisdom. So that when your knowledge is total and macrocosmic, then you are wise. Of course, there is not much to say then, except paradoxically and dialectically. But if you have knowledge stressed very strongly, then you can talk serially for a long time.

When I am talking now, I am super-stressing particular elements from this sphere deliberately to bring them into awareness, and at the same time aiming to bring the intelligence to another level so that the form within the consciousness can in fact integrate with more and more subtle forms. And of course as we’ve said before this is always done by a refinement of feeling and by the cutting down of serial stresses and the becoming simultaneously aware of the field of consciousness. If we become serially aware within this sphere, then all that happens is: we put a super-stress, rub it out, put another, one rub it out, put another one, rub it out, and so on. [47:00]

Serial consciousness gives us elements of knowledge which continuously change, but it cannot confer wisdom. Serial knowledge is opposed to wisdom. But if we inhibit the serialising process and make ourself sensitive in the field, we then become aware of the total field of formal actuality which in the serial state is no actuality to us ... but is merely a theoretical possibility.

Now, here is the macrocosmic egg, the Logos and the Sophic sphere — the ball that God plays with — and inside it have come to exist various sub-spheres, the various divisions of organisms, and so on. One of these sub-spheres we will say is the human sphere. And each sphere is conditioned by the preceding motions of the sphere beyond it. So that the macrocosmic sphere with its total formal actuality conditions all subsequent spheres that are brought to be within it.

Now this total macrocosmic, formal content is called the Law. It is not many laws ... it is one law, the Law of Motion Within a Sphere. The Law of Motion brought to be within a sphere, which is palpitating or alternately contracting and expanding, and thereby causing itself to rotate. The Great Law of Macrocosmos is a Unific Law which, understood, can explain all subsequent laws that appear.

The Law of Unity

So the first law we are under is the Law of Unity. This Law of Unity is imposed on all subsequent levels. But every sub-sphere within it has the Law of Macrocosmic Unity imposed upon it, the law of its own being — which is another unifying and particularising element — and also the Law of interrelations contingent with other beings.

Now, there is the whole human race, and we’ll divide it into three sections for fun: Shem, Ham and Japheth. And we’ll pretend that we are a few Japheths and go in here. At each level there are laws imposed upon us ... all based on the original law of unity. And when one of these little beings divides itself and makes a little derivative being called a baby, that baby is still subject to all the law that is imposed on all the beings that have preceded it. And it is still, because it exists, the same protoplasm as its parents, as its ancestors, as the macrocosmic sphere and the Absolute Infinite Spirit from which it derives. So we have, not in past time, but now, directly through the nuclear centre of our own cells, access — if we want to take it — to God ... that is, the free spirit. We don’t need to go back in time, because Adam is with us now. This was said by one mystic who said, although by one man all men fell — Adam — the reason that all men fell is because each man is his own Adam and repeats the same trick.

The sin of the original Adam is this choosing between good and evil, rejecting pain as evil and pursuing pleasure as good. This causes the dichotomy, the original opposition when the first wall is set up, and until a man is prepared to accept that pleasure is no good and pain is no evil, and simply to say that both of them are specific kinds of action, and to be prepared to indulge in both equally, then he cannot regain his original unity. [51:25]

Hurt and the Resistance to Unpalatable Truth

So here we see that when a baby is conceived, it is nothing new. It is simply some protoplasm of the original human race, which is some protoplasm of organic life on earth, which is some protoplasm of the macrocosmic soul. And therefore we have immediately, and now, a direct line through the nuclear intelligence of our protoplasm back to the infinite spirit. And the question is, how to get at it?

The obvious and simple answer: to get at it we must cut away the things that stop us, because it is there all the time. It has never not been there. This Infinite Intelligence has never not been anywhere. And consequently to get at it, all we have to do is remove the interfering motions of our own being.

Now let’s have a look where most of them come from. There is a being. It had a nuclear centre. It split. It put a wall, it put another wall, and so on. The more walls it put inside itself, the more possibility there was of conflict within the being. These are the walls of Simeon and Levi killing the man to their own hurt. We grow nerves across these walls to help us to integrate and convey messages, and by means of electrical resistances we are able to determine the path through which a given thing shall go. But if a given cell has been badly hurt, it has the power to contract to avoid being hurt again, and it has the power to refuse to let a message go to it ... it will refuse to let a message pass through into another cell. Now this is the ground of all resistance in the minds of men to unpalatable truth. Somewhere they have been hurt. [53:42]

Now, if we imagine a being with no other beings outside it, we can easily see that although this being may divide itself, this being is never going to hurt itself so much from itself that it is going to destroy itself. There’s a limit to how much it will hurt itself. Like small boys testing their muscles, lifting up bits of rock in the garden, it will be prepared to hurt itself to a certain degree, but it won’t hurt itself beyond that degree. And it is only beyond that degree that trouble really begins. So that we have to introduce the concept of contingent relation to account for the painful stimulus that actually causes a shut down in consciousness ... a zone that is going to refuse to let a stimulus go through it. For every part of our cells where we feel a resistance to a truth given to us, we can say immediately there is a pain hiding inside some cells. They don’t like it and they are not going to accept this truth and let it into themselves, and therefore they’re not letting it through to some other cells which may need it.

A little bit of meditation and reflection will teach us all that we have such resistances in parts of our being. But if we allow those resistances to continue to exist, we cannot regain our original unity and we cannot function efficiently. So the method of regaining our prior unity is to remove these resistances. Now we can’t remove them other than by deliberate conscious facing of the very thing that doesn’t want to be faced consciously.

If we take the cell and we bring another cell into contact with it and let this one beat very violently this one, then the cells inside here contract and try to isolate the zone of that being so that the painful stimulus will not spread. When they succeed they have created of one moment a zone of unconsciousness and a zone of turbulence. Because as soon as you isolate that zone the forces inside go round and round and round. That means that every painful experience we’ve ever had has produced a zone of unconsciousness inside us and at the same time a zone of turbulence. That turbulence whizzes round and it is because of the high velocity of that turbulence that it’s extremely difficult to get a message through it into the rest of our being.

As soon as we come to a painful part of our experience and begin to look at it carefully we will find turbulence. We will find funny voices saying, mind your own business, don’t come in here, go away, I don’t want to see you. This turbulence itself is like a little sphere, and every sphere as we’ve seen before, contains within itself all the formal possibilities of all spheres. So that an unconscious zone of turbulence within us is a little subsidiary entity — a sub-ent [sun-entity] inside us — and has its own intelligence, but is highly turbulent. This means it is a devil. A devil is defined as a force that is dividing the unity of the being, a force of turbulence, and this turbulence is the cause of the qualities called hellish. This turbulence is the cause of the overheating. If you say something when somebody is off-guard, a little un-flattering, and they blush, that is just a tiny bit of the heat from the zone of turbulence where the energy flies around rapidly. And then this rapid motion generates heat and this heat causes the rising of the temperature of the being and the blushing, and so on. Zones of turbulence are little hells and each little hell is a little demon ... a little devil.

Casting out demons

When it says of Christ he was casting out demons, or devils from people, it meant to say that he was cutting straight through the thing that they were trying to hide, and letting the energies come out. When they do come out they sometimes make a lot of noise. The noise should never upset us, because it is better out than in. When it’s in, it is actually making inroads into the protoplasm, carving the protoplasm up and laying the foundations of organic disease. When it comes out it can’t do any harm. [58:54]

Hell and the Seven Deadlies

So we see here, that wherever a pain has occurred in a being, there has been a cellular reaction walling it in, creating a zone of unconsciousness, which is a zone of turbulence, which is a zone of thwarted and hurt will, which is a zone of the seven deadlies. As an individual it is full of pride, it likes itself. As an individual it is envious of the power of others, it is covetous ... when it sees something it wants it. And when it can’t get it, it is angry. And it would stuff itself and it would go to sleep, and it can in fact perform all the seven deadlies in itself in its little hellish, turbulent sphere. Boehme uses the term ‘turba’ for that state into which it is very, very easy to enter when we allow ourselves to become angry. Boehme says here that the devil’s power reaches only as far as the anger in us. If we allow ourselves to become angry, then by so much we are destroying protoplasm inside ourselves. It can only exist at certain temperatures, like an egg is only fertile if you don’t boil it.

Some naughty old rabbis when they were told that they mustn’t indulge their sexual appetites in certain ways, and to confine their attentions in certain periods, replied by placing their testicles in very hot water. This was an attempt to boil their eggs. Now they actually succeeded in this. If anybody would like to boil his eggs and willing to show how it can be done? [laughter] It can be done and it is a kind of contraceptive device more efficient than some other ways. But it was very greatly frowned upon.

It illustrates the fact that if you become angry you become turbulent, you become overheated. You can actually destroy your own tissue. Anybody who’s seen a person — usually an insane person — literally burning themselves away and losing weight rapidly hour by hour can understand just how it is possible to destroy tissue by this internal processes of turbulence, and how hell means precisely this held in state of the being. When the baby comes into the world it comes in with lots of little hells shadowed inside it from its parents. Every quarrel its parents had is inside it. Luckily as we’ve said before, in the absence of the external stimulus everything lapses down as far as it can, nearly to a level of equilibrium ... but not quite. But if a stimulus comes from outside similar to one that annoyed grandmother a long time ago, that stimulus can re-activate within us that shadow form, and suddenly there is trouble.

Some of you may have noticed a funny little cutting the other day, when a man was allowed a divorce because his wife had a neurosis. It’s rather a new departure. Within the meaning of the McNaughton Rules, she had not come under the definition of the insane. She wasn’t insane and therefore in a real sense she was deemed to be responsible for her activities and therefore although she was a known neurotic, she was still deemed as not insane ... responsible, and therefore a damn nuisance to hubby. Now this had come upon her quite suddenly. She’d suddenly got a cleanliness bug. She’d been alright, and then suddenly everything in the house had to be clean. Everything had to be neat and tidy, and husband found it was more convenient for him to tidy the house than to let her do it. Also she took so long in going to bed at night because she was insisting on coming clean, that hubby never got any sleep, because he wasn’t allowed to go to sleep until she was ready. And so it was deemed sufficient grounds for a divorce. And this rather broke new ground. Neurosis is a possible ground. But the point is that this woman was alright, and then quite suddenly she started wanting to be very, very clean. Now something outside had touched on some early thing inside — it might have been the actual mnemic trace of a disease an ancestor had had — and this, reactivating, says, go and wash yourself quickly.

Working with engrams

Now if the person doesn’t know it, they must do it. Because there is a very peculiar thing about an engram pattern inside us. When it is made it usually has a verbal content, and the verbal content in an engram is an imperative. It is a voice saying, do so-and-so, hit out or don’t speak or kick him on the shins or run away from home. Now, when such a zone is reactivated, the owner of this vehicle hears a definite statement inside his head, you must fly, now. Go. And it appears to him, because it is inside him, that it’s his wish. And so he rushes away. And really he is suffering from engram re-stimulation. All psychiatry and psychotherapy that ignores that fact is climbing up a blank wall.

No person from the nuclear intelligence acts like an idiot. The intelligence comes straight from the infinite, gives its orders into the surrounding soma. And the orders are always intelligent. But from the contingent relation come the painful stimuli and the creation of zones of unconsciousness and turbulence, which are piled with verbal imperative ... and they can talk nonsense. But to a person who is not aware of that inner spiritual centre of freedom, a person who is identified with engrammic zones, he is such a being. He believes that he is a suffering being. He believes he must do as the engram tells him.

To break it in ourselves is hard work. There’s a school of thought that thinks it’s possible and they tried valiantly to do it. It took years and years and years even to break through the first wall. With aid it is possible to break through it fairly quickly. This mysterious word, the guru, means this fellow who helps you to break through this primary block. The reason it’s difficult is because you need a certain amount of free consciousness to remain free, while you use some of it to enter the painful engram situation. Because if you put all your consciousness in the engram situation, you become turbulent with it and lose your feeling.

This happens in certain types of mental disorder where a person is in a highly re-stimulated condition and if you ask him in his then state to penetrate it, he gets worse, not better. Now if you have the time and he has, and he’s not physically too violent, you can keep it there, keep him in it for several hours and it will then play itself out. But usually the noise and the physical strain are so great that generally the tendency is to come out of that situation and be glad of the rest ... because it’s so noisy. To do it on oneself, entering an engram which is very, very painful — particularly pre-natals or ancestral ones — is very, very hard work. To do it with somebody else outside to help you to control and to continuously remind you of your free consciousness and your initiative centre, is much easier.

Here we have then, the return to the subject we started with: that the child when it is born, it shows strong evidences that all its early conditioning from birth is going to set the basic pattern of its life, is already suffering from another kind of pattern imposed upon it prenatally, and from its ancestors. And when we consider this: that the child which is being conditioned is being conditioned by another piece of protoplasm of the same order, which also is suffering from re-stimulation of its ancestors, you can see that the difficulty in the educational field is to find an educator sufficiently free to be able to encourage freedom in the child and not bondage. The biggest problem in the educational field is to find educators who are actually able to educate instead of suffer from the pains of their ancestors, engrammed in their own tissue.

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