Dispelling the Ten Dogmas of Materialism and Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
Temenos Academy 6th February 2012 at the Lincoln Centre – United Kingdom
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- an excerpt from a talk by Eugene Halliday — audio listening file here >>
>> Eugene Halliday speaking…
"There is a question here about God loving the world.
‘God so loved the world, God so willed the world.’
And it says:
‘Love and Being being the same force, love and will being the same force, at which point will the function change, and will to love, or love to will?’
"Now we have already said that will is the term that we reserve for initiative.
If we take a walk to the edge of a cliff, and at the edge of a cliff we decide that we'll walk over it, the point of decision is the point of will.
But once we have committed ourselves over the edge, there is no further need to exercise will to reach the bottom. It is entirely a matter of inertia, that we will reach the bottom.
"So we have to distinguish between;
Will as initiative, and
Love as another concept signifying the working for the development of the potentialities of a being.
"That L-OVE.
This ‘ove’ is the same as the egg,
L means labouring or working.
So Love actually means the power that works for the development of the potentialities of a being.
And, Will simply is the point of initiation of a change.
So we cannot equate the two together.
So this little question really has to do with the correct definition of “will”, which is initiative,
And Love which is the working for the development of the potentials of a being.
The Greeks had four words, all of which are generally translated as Love in English.
· Puthos [ a substitute word for ‘desire’. It’s the lowest level of love - see below for more clarification ]
· Eros
· Philos and
· Agape
The Puthos, or Puthotic Love, is simply the Love for genital activity.
Eros is the Love for Emotional interplay.
Philos is the Love of exchange of Ideas, of reasons.
And Agape is really correspondent with our definition. It’s the Christian idea of working for the development of the potentialities of a being, regardless of the effect of your work on yourself, but you are working for the development of that other being. And the potentialities of a being are simply the latent capacities for activity that it has.
You know that when a baby is born, it can’t immediately walk. But you know that given the proper food it will become able to walk, if it’s a normal child. And therefore you are actually loving it when you are feeding it, knowing that as a result of your feeding it, it you will eventually develop its latent capacity to walk. You know that eventually when it can walk, it will walk away from you, as well as towards you. And that when it has developed sufficiently, it will go away from you altogether.
And this is the idea of the “Love”, the Agape Love of the Christian in its true sense – to work to the point where somebody may transcend the need for you, and go away from you. And this is the sense in which the word love should be used of God. Because He as creator is only interested in working to develop the potentialities of each creature. And as all the creatures are quite different it means in effect that some of the creatures will have potentials of disobedience, and nevertheless he will work for those too. So He works for the development of “prodigals” and err he even gives birth to Marxists and things like that, that are atheist.
The Bible says about it that He can produce good out of evil.
Now we define evil as ‘that which makes against life’.
And nevertheless if you threaten life, the result is that the half-living being is stimulated to demand more of it. So that the evil is itself a cause of the good.
You know that some of the early theologians thought that the evil was a good, not simply a ‘means’ to it, but ‘itself’ a good. Which means that if you consider evil as a stimulus threatening to destroy life it can be an actual means of provoking a being to seize life.
So it cannot be said that the stimulus that makes you prefer to live is an evil thing, so that a threat against your life may be the means to your life. This is another aspect of the thing we said about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden. Adam should not have decided that some things are good, and some were evil in themselves. A thing is neither good nor evil until you define it in a situation. And then it is only good or evil relative to a defined purpose. So that you could say that a pin is very good for picking winkles[short for periwinkle, a shell-fish] or something and is very bad for sitting on. It depends on the purpose.
So this question is really concerned with a relation which depends on the definition of these two words and we should remember there are four kinds of application of this word [love] in English.
[ Types of Love – to the Greeks ]
[Puthos]
You can love err anything, you can love a new carpet, or a wall-paper, or a bar of chocolate, and so on. It’s really a substitute word for ‘desire’ there. And that is its lowest level. The Greeks saw that at its lowest level as simply the desire for sexual stimulation at the physical level. Sexual stimulation being the type of all sensuous stimulation. Freud would see it in the same way today – all pleasures – sucking a dolly baby or something to a Freudian is as much sexual as an actual sexual relation, because of the nervous relation between the mouth and various other parts of the organism. So to a Freudian there aren’t any nonsexual pleasures and therefore we could equate this Pluthotic Love of the Greeks with any kind of merely physical pleasure, the love of sense gratification.
[ Eros ]
Whereas in the case of emotional love, Eros, you can be tied to a person for no physical reason whatever, and for no rational reason. But you can say well, I feel that I must sit with that person. I don’t know why, but there it is. I feel better in his company than I do when I am not. So that would come under the heading of erotic love, emotional.
[ Philos ]
Philosophic Love is the love of a mind for another mind’s contents. You find two people and this person says, “I like him. He has a nice mind”, meaning full of good ideas, and so on.
But those three loves are all for gratification ‘by’ the lover. The lover is seeking his own gratification, either physically, emotionally or rationally.
[ Agape ]
In the agape love, you are not doing any such thing. You are actually working for the development of the potentialities of the being that you are loving. That is you are actually working on that being to develop its potentialities.
And the word WILL we reserve simply for the point of initiation of a change. So that if we say FEELING AWARENESS is the background possibility of WILL, then what we are saying is that feeling, when mobilised, at the point of mobilisation, becomes WILL, or we apply the word WILL only at the point of initiation of the change, and not otherwise.
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The spiritual man is in danger in many ways, but most of all he is today in danger of losing his belief in his own freedom of choice. He is surrounded by organisations which aim to suppress the very idea of freedom. And not least among these enemies of freedom are those groups of thinkers who believe that freedom is a myth, that human beings are only complex machines, that choice is an illusion produced by a brain that itself is but a machine that cannot help throwing up, amongst its other products, errors of thought, amongst which the idea of freedom is declared to be one.
But it is not only external organisations and groups that are the enemies of freedom. There are also inner enemies, of which two are chief; preference for pleasure over pain, and inertia.
Inertia is defined as the tendency for any kind of action to continue unless acted upon by some external force which can change the mode of action. All fixed habit-patterns come under the heading of inertia, and we all know how hard to break are long standing habits.
Preference for pleasure over pain seems at first glance to be a good thing, but if we look at it a little more closely we can see that this preference can, under certain circumstances, lead to trouble. Any fish caught on the hook by the bait that concealed it can serve as a lesson for us. The world is full of "hook situations" carefully concealed by bait of various kinds. Here is another occasion for anxiety. We are offered things in attractive wrappers, which, when the wrapper is off, prove themselves of no use to us, and sometimes might do us harm.
And pain itself, or the threat of it, may be merely a way of intimidating the unthinking person. In the ancient world figures of great monsters were carved and set up at the city gates, or at the entrances to tombs filled with precious things, with gold and jewels. These monsters inspired fear in the minds of unenlightened beholders, and so kept safe the tombs' treasures. Some of these monsters, witnessed by our ancestors, have left traces or imprints of themselves in our minds, still strong enough to charge some of our dreams with anxiety and fear.
Somehow, if we are to conquer anxiety, we must re-evaluate our ideas about pleasure and pain and what they may mean in any given situation. We must teach ourselves to distinguish between "hook" situations covered with pleasure-giving bait, and the situations in which real happiness is possible. And we must learn to distinguish false "monsters" of stone or fabricated frightening ideas, from really dangerous beings who might have power to do us real harm. "Fear not those who can harm the body, but after that have no more that they can do; but fear those who can harm the soul."
We know how the physical body can be harmed; by breaking its bones, cutting, crushing or bruising its tissues and organs, or by poisoning it, etc. How can we harm the soul?
A soul may be harmed by the destruction of its belief in its essential spirituality, for this spirituality is its freedom. To undermine a soul's confidence in its spiritual origin is to cast doubt upon the whole meaning of its existence. Any idea that, once inserted into the human mind, can destroy the soul's faith in its own eternality, its divine origin, has put into that soul the most unprofitable of all anxieties and fears; the fear that perhaps God and Truth and Eternal Life and Universal Love are mere fictions of a badly put-together mechanical brain, itself but an accidental falling into temporary relation of a merely material aggregate of atomic particles, senseless and destined at some point in time and space for disintegration.
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What, then, is the Self? Here we use a capital letter to show that the Self to which we refer is not the object- body self careless thinkers think when they use the word "self". The real Self is not a finite body. It is pure freewill consciousness. The implications of this in every field, physical, psychological, and spiritual, are tremendous.
The careful thinker, penetrating into his being to discover to what he refers when he uses the words "I myself" knows that the Self is a free- will consciousness, the ground and possibility and actuality of all being, yet itself transcendent of being. (The word "being" may properly be used only of what is circumscribed, and consciousness as such is not circumscribed and therefore not properly called a being).
Consciousness and will are not two factually separable entities. They are two aspects or properties of the Absolute. Consciousness is that aspect of the Absolute in which objects appear. Will is that aspect of the Absolute which initiates change within consciousness or its objects.
From modern psychological theories the word "consciousness" has derived a rather restricted meaning. There it is opposed to sub-consciousness or to un-consciousness. We may remove some of these associations by using a less common word, the word "sentience". This word implies feeling sensitivity and sense. It is from the Latin "sentire", to feel, to know.
What modern psychology tends to say about the sub-conscious and un-conscious are levels of the Self in which verbalisation is either minimal or non- existent for the individual.
There is no absolutely non- sentient level of being. The Absolute source of all beings, the ultimate reality, is itself eternal and infinite sentient motion. Whatever it produces or creates it does so within and of itself as its functions. Nothing, therefore, exists but in and of the infinite eternal sentient motion, which considered as cause is called power.
The sub-conscious and un-conscious are therefore not to be thought of as non-sentient, but only as not closely linked to verbal forms, not levels of analysis and synthesis of the contents of the field of sentience.
Verbalisation of experience helps to sharpen and clarify and organise the content of consciousness.
Prior to adequate verbalisation or logical definition the field of sentient motion must be conceived of as in a state of chaotic flux; yet this flux at its own level, viewed as absolute motion, must contain the forms of the infinite wisdom.
- an excerpt from Reflexive Self-consciousness by Eugene Halliday – full text here >>
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1. Only the uncreate spirit shall be worshipped and served.
2. Before the beginning was the No-thing which is beyond all words and deeds.
3. TO BE or NOT TO BE is not His question. But TO ACT or NOT TO ACT.
4. A power with potential capacity to feel itself cannot actually feel itself unless it encounters a resistance to its effort. Upon this fact depends the solution of the whole problem of human evolution.
5. Man is a modality of sentient power, a way in which universal energy manifests itself to itself.
6. Universal energy can act particularly only in the particular; that is, only in the individual being which serves as a point of focus for the universal.
7. Infinite power, if it were to remain infinite, would not manifest itself to itself. Whatever its infinity of possibilities, these would remain eternally hidden in the mystery of its own infinity.
8. But such an infinity would not realise its capacities; it would be in a state of infinite inhibition. To itself, as a power able to feel its own condition, it would experience itself as totally self-frustrated.
9. Such frustration of its own potentialities for action would be to it what we, in human terms, would call total intolerability.
10. We have no grounds for thinking that the infinite power should have remained in this state of infinite inhibition, and we have the evidence of our own presence in existence to demonstrate that it did not do so.
11. We are all ways of expression of the infinite sentient power. Whatever the motivating principles of our actions, they are derivations of this infinite power.
12. Our rules, where rules exist, are finite copies of the rules of the infinite.
13. The most obvious of these rules is that every motion initiated within a field of power begets another motion acting in the opposite direction. This second motion, the reaction to an initiating action, is the means whereby a latent capacity to feel becomes aware of itself.
14. If it were not for this reaction to our initiating action, we would not be aware of our existence.
15. We owe it to this motion of reaction that we have whatever sense of identity we possess.
16. Insofar as we treasure our own self, our sense of being an individual being with some purpose in life, we are logically required to be deeply thankful for those oppositions which we have encountered, as the very means by which our self-value has been brought into being.
17. If we thoroughly understand this principle, we shall be able to bring about that peculiar change of orientation of our mental energies, the metanoia, the change of direction of energy application which, if faithfully followed, leads inevitably into total self-determination and freedom.
18. FREE TOTAL SELF-DETERMINATION is what is meant by "spiritual creativity".
19. It cannot be attained without the willed conscious embracing of the great law of the Infinite Sentient Power, source of all beings.
20. This law is the law of the AFFIRMATION OF ALL NEGATIONS.
21. We are to bring ourselves to be able to say 'Yes' to everything to which naturally, as to our pleasure mechanisms, we would prefer to say 'No'.
22. The things to which we tend to say 'No' are the things which oppose our will. But it is precisely these things that make it possible for us to know that we have a will.
23. Thus it is to those things that resist us that we are required by our own intelligence to be most grateful. That is if we have the insight to prefer wholeheartedly to become in reality that which otherwise will remain hidden inside us as an eternally unsatisfied potentiality.
24. Opposition, however it comes to us, in whatever form, is the means of the discovery of our true self-creativity and ultimate delight in existence.
25. Opposition," says William Blake, "is true friendship." Perhaps it would be safer to modify this to "Good willed opposition aimed at the disclosure of essential truth is true friendship." But here we have to make ourselves aware of the danger of falling into the position of the "do-gooder".
26. There were two against man, now there are three.
27. Ye are Gods? But which one of you has desired to become what ye are?
28. Is the spirit not freedom? Is the spirit not fire? Yet what have ye done to burn yourselves free?
29. This world endures only for the time's sake and for yours.
30. My kingdom is in eternity.
31. The truth shall make you free.
32. Before the beginning of Time, which Time is but rotation, there was stillness in the spirit. And the spirit brooded within itself. And it was dark, which signifies that it slept, and was not yet arisen and gone forth. And there was then no thing, for THING signifies what is brought to a substance. Substance signifies power standing in its place. And because there was no THING, therefore it is called a void. That void was as a hunger and in it there arose the spirit to make something to appease its hunger.
33. God so loves the world that He gave His only begotten Son for it. Because it appeases His spirit's hunger.
34. Because I come forth from my Father I am called "SON". Yet because my light goes forth from me I am called "SUN".
35. Happy are they who believe because they see, but happier still are they who have not seen, yet believe. If I had not believed before I saw, then could not my light have come to be.
36. What God is, He was and shall be. How then, shall God escape God?
37. Truly, my brothers, God has His cross. For He IS. Therefore must He speak, or keep silent. Think ye that this world is other than His spoken word, spoken to break the silence in His heart?
38. Not dialogue but DIOlogue is the first discourse.
39. Ye philosophers, which signifies, FORKED-TONGUES, and ye scientists, which signifies ONES CRUCIFIED IN THE EYE.
40. Which one of you by taking thought can add one inch to his stature?
41. Which one of you perceives the inmost working of his mind? Or of his body, perhaps?
42. Men, which signifies COUNTERS.
43. There is a tree with its roots above and its branches below. Have you counted all its roots and branches?
44. There is a river of blood which feeds that tree. Have you counted all its tributaries?
45. This tree and this river are in your body.
46. But, say the wise ones, Though we have not counted all, yet have we counted many.
47. In the Spirit's house are many mansions. Why do ye leave some of them out of account? Know ye not that ye thus destroy your wholeness? And your holiness? Therefore I say to you, count all, OR COUNT NOT AT ALL.
48. Ye lovers of counting, why do ye not count well? Know ye not that ye are yourselves counted? Counted and found wanting?
49. Know that your god Mammon will count it against you for your false counting. Ye think to become rich by counting, but ye shall become poor. By what ye rise ye fall. And by what ye live ye shall die.
50. Heaven is power and earth is power. Heaven is free. Earth is in bondage, a will against a will locked, till its purpose be fulfilled. Then shall ye deserve freedom.
51. Heaven is above, earth is below. Only that which is from above may go up again.
52. God became man that man might become God.
53. Knowledge is a now-moment balanced precariously upon a sword-edge between what has been and what will be.
54. Wisdom, however, is in eternity.
55. Knowledge becomes empty in the moment of its fullness.
56. But wisdom is a full void, an M and 0, a mother of all things. Verily wisdom is an egg of gold, goose-laid, and white, as a clear light in a crystal ball.
57. It is not light, but your darkness which is the cause of your assembling together.
58. Pain is a no-saying to all new beginnings. An Ayin and a Peh, of which thou knowest not yet.
59. Have ye not sufficient courage to relinquish my light and go into the darkness again alone.
60. Because ye have not yet sufficient courage therefore ye know not what MERIT is.
61. Is it not written, Ye are Gods? Behold, I am God, and so are ye. Yet are ye but little gods and merit little.
62. "MERIT" signifies, to arise with one's own will and to take up one's cross till the woman shall say, Be it unto me as unto the handmaid of the Lord.
63. MERIT signifies to command the woman.
64. Woman is as water and earth, which together are called CLAY.
65. There is yet too much of your mother in you. Too much of heaviness: too much of darkness and despair.
66. This mother and this woman and this virgin are one, and that one your own body.
67. Within yourselves is your will, which is not yet even wish. But will to wish, and with your will ye may yet impregnate your mother, and thus bring forth your child.
68. I created myself, yet not without my God, which is spirit, but within and with Him. I and He are one.
69. There is no new thing under the sun. But I say to you I am the sun, and my Father, with whom I am one, is above it.
70. If then thou art a creator thou canst make something new. Yet God's creation is infinite. How then can there come to be anything new?
71. Wilt thou make of spirit what is not spirit?
72. Ye have not known DIFFICULTY. Therefore ye know not what POWER is.
73. POWER is that which overcomes, which EQUALITY does not. Wherefore your equalness likes not the word DIFFICULTY.
74. DIFFICULTY is a will against a will. Will is spirit.
75. Spirit is power, in which this kingdom consists.
76. Will is spirit which labours to spirit's end.
77. Where the treasure is, there is the heart also.
78. Within myself I broke my thousand wills a thousand times and then and then again I broke them. And I turned within my turnings and my turnings.
79. Time is but a turning Wheel spinning upon itself the times to weave and to infold.
80. As long as man shall desire to have the pleasant for good and the painful for evil, so long will he not escape his fear and so long will he be in bondage. For his desire and his fear are a will against a will.
81. We know that he does not yet love perfectly. For perfect love casts out fear.
82. Love makes strong. Yea, love is greater than death.
83. Love is not only for what is, but also for what may become.
84. Does the husbandman love the fruit for the fruit's sake, or for the seed? Or does he love the seed for the seed's sake only and not for the fruit?
85. I love only what springs from freedom, which is itself spirit.
86. I love only what is given without reckoning the cost.
87. What has a beginning must have an end. And when the beginning meets the end then shall there be time no more.
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Excerpts from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche
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"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
"All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape."
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
Eugene Halliday on Nietzsche continue >>
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A poem by David Mahlowe 1997
and drawing by Eugene Halliday
David Mahlowe is the long-time friend and Editor publisher of Eugene Halliday's collected works. A fine actor, artist, thinker and tireless worker, some of his works may be found at www.davidmahlowe.com
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IF BRAHMAN, THE UNDETERMINED, contains the highest determinant, Ishvara, this must be itself in some relation with Brahman as its ground. The Brahman as ground of Ishvara, the highest existent, creator of the world, must be such a ground as has in it such a creator. Ishvara is therefore established as the highest existent being in that it is inside the absolute (Brahman), dependent upon it, and justified in its dependence. If there is to be worship of an objective personality, Ishvara is that. If there is to be worship of what is above Ishvara, as that above is the absolute (Brahman), it must be worshipped as the source of Ishvara, the universal object, for if worship is to be done, some object is necessary, and Brahman considered as nirguna is not an object, either of worship or any other relative state. EH-PotCorps I-81-2
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IF THE CREATOR IS CONSCIOUS and spiritual, how does He produce in Himself that which is unconscious and unspiritual (matter)? For either we must say that the conscious creator can produce unconscious matter, or we must say that matter is not unconscious. What is matter? It is a substantial rotation within consciousness. Is it aware of itself? This depends on to what we refer when we use the word "matter". If by "matter" we refer only to the rotation within consciousness, we are thinking abstractly, and must, therefore, conceive the action of rotation apart from the consciousness in and for which it exists. In this case we must say that "matter" is unconsciousness. But this is merely to say that the words "matter" and "consciousness" have different referents.
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WE DO NOT DEFINE THINGS; things are already well defined. What we define are the limits of the application of terms. We do not say what a dog is; we say to what we shall apply the term "dog". Very great confusion has been caused in philosophy by an attempt to define things, rather than to indicate the application of terms. Either the universe of things is independent of man's definitions or not. If it is, then man can only indicate the field of application of his terms. If the things of the universe depend on man's creative power, then it is possible for him in the act of definition to bring something into being which before was not. But this is equivalent to ascribing to man the power to produce form out of no form. For if the form he produces is in any way derived from other than pure formlessness, we cannot say that he has produced something not previously existent. But to produce form from the formed is not pure creativity. For a man to be a pure creator we would have to assume him to be completely formless; but this is to make him non- existent. EH-PotCorps I-83
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THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH. This means that the word "absolute" is not applicable to that which "truth" signifies, or the word "truth" is not applicable to that which the word "absolute" signifies. Truth is form (tora); the absolute transcends all forms, therefore there is no absolute truth: or, we should not use the term “absolute” and the term “truth” for one significance, or for one referent.
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Why did God love the world so much? Because the world is His only means of manifesting His creative potentiality in actuality. God is an eternal infinite sentient power, absolutely self-aware of His own being. But one thing is impossible to Him: to cause Himself to cease to be what He is. Thus He has a problem: to create or not to create.
If God does not create, He inhibits His creative power, holds it in so that it cannot pass into formative activity. This is to bring Himself into a state of total self-contradiction, for He is essentially creative power. Because this power is sentient, it feels its own condition. Thus if this power inhibits its own creative activity, it feels itself as totally self-contradicted. A human being in a state of total self-contradiction is not happy with himself. Nor is God. Therefore He chooses to create.
But creation is formation, and formation is circumscription or encapsulation. Thus when God creates He logically must precipitate encapsulated beings. But by the fact of encapsulation each created being is separated from other created beings. Each created being feels itself to be what it is, encapsulated, made separate from all others.
Before creation there was no encapsulation; the infinite sentient power, which is God, was then utterly free from otherness. It was a pure partless continuum, everywhere throughout itself wholly itself. Whatever qualities could be attributed to it anywhere could equally be attributed to it everywhere.
Also because this continuum is partless, there are no gaps that have to be leaped, nor any barriers that have to be broken through. Thus all of the continuum is co-present with itself immediately. This means that any motion initiated anywhere in the continuum (which is power) is immediately everywhere. This is the basis of the doctrine of the absolute reciprocal interpenetration of all beings, which appears in the 'jijimuge" conception of Japanese Buddhism. It is also the basis of the possibility of immediate infinite comprehension (enlightenment) on the presentation of any motion anywhere initiated (and at encapsulation level called a stimulus).
On the occurrence of the act of creation (or encapsulation) which is an intentional (in-tension-al) act of the infinite sentient power (which is God), there is immediately possible a condition of contingent stimulation of one encapsulated zone by another. Identification with such contingent stimuli, if coincident with forgetfulness of the infinite continuum as such, in its pure partlessness, is the "Fall" state of religious systems.
A zone of encapsulated sentient power has in its vibratory motion a "memory" of all its pre-encapsulated self-motion. This "memory" is the source of a belief in a "Golden Age" somewhere in the distant past, or in the far future.
This "Golden Age" really represents the pre-encapsulationary, pre-creational play of the Will of the infinite sentient power which is God. "Gold" signifies the Will, as "Lead" signifies the Intellect. The "Golden Age" is the expression of the free will of the infinite sentient power, utterly unfettered by any formal considerations, as "Lead" and the "Saturnine Age" signify the state of profound wisdom resulting from the exhaustion of all possible formal knowledge gained in the experiential cycle of cosmos.
The memory of the pre-creational self-motion of the infinite sentient power is also the source of a feeling that accompanies the "fallen being", a feeling that seems to suggest that the "lost one" will finally be found again; that the Prodigal Son will eventually return home to his all-forgiving Father. This feeling is the first source of the encapsulated being's faith in the possibility of salvation from his "fallen" condition. It is the continuous background of whatever positive hope for the believer's entry into eternity he may possess, and it is the guarantee of his ultimate success in the satisfaction of his hope.
The infinitely extended formal play of the Will of God is the Logos, or only begotten Son, which by its structuralising effect builds Cosmos and all things in it. Without this Logos no formal object can attain to being.
GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD that he gave his onely-begotten Son that any one who believes in Him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.
Pot Corpse IV:88-91
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Yoga in the Western Tradition – Eugene Halliday
Most people probably think that Yoga and ‘transcendental meditation’ have little or nothing to do with Christianity. But this is not at all true, for meditational procedures are part of the Christian way of life as they are part of the procedures of every seriously taken religion. The apparent differences between the methods of Hindu Yoga and those of other religions are really differences only of terms, differences of the words used in the various languages native to the various religions.
The word ‘Yoga’ is a Sanskrit word, Sanskrit being the language used by the priests of the ancient Hindu religion. ’Yoga’ is from a root word meaning, "to join". We have the same idea in our English language in the word ‘yoke’, which also means, “to join”, The ‘LIG’ in the word ‘ligature’ and ‘religion’ had originally the same meaning, ‘Yoga’ meant a method of joining the soul of man back to the power that created the universe. ‘Religion’ has the same meaning. It would be quite correct to translate the word ‘Yoga’ as ‘religion’, or as ‘yoking’ man's soul back to God. We are not to think that because a word belongs to a language which is foreign to us that the word's meaning will also be foreign to us. ‘Yoga’ and ‘religion’ mean essentially the same thing, a procedure whereby human beings can regain their original relation with their Creator, the Supreme Creative Powers of the Universe. Let us look at the meditational procedures and techniques whereby this reunion is gained, first in outline, then more fully.
In every meditational procedure there are distinct steps to be taken. Firstly we must make a decision to meditate. Then we must withdraw our attention from the external things of the world, which would otherwise distract us. Then we must concentrate our attention inside our mind and place it upon some subject which we find to be interesting to us. Next we must think through all our ideas we have about this subject, recall our experiences related to it, mentally examine these experiences analyse them into their parts and define the nature of each part, and state to ourselves the way all these parts are interrelated. When we have finished this defining of the parts of the chosen subject,' and have noted the ways in which those parts are fitted together and act on each other, then we can pass on to the next stage of the process, the very important stage of holding together in our mind the meaning of all our procedure.
Let us go through this process again and see how many parts it has.
Firstly, we decide to meditate.
Secondly we withdraw our attention from the things of the external world.
Thirdly we concentrate our mind upon some interesting subject.
Fourthly we analyse this subject into all its parts and study these parts and their relations with each other and with the whole of which they are parts.
Fifthly we hold the whole analytical process together in an act of comprehension of its meaning.
Having outlined the meditational procedure in outline, we can now go on to examine each stage more fully.
The first stage is the decision to meditate. Here we can ask ourselves why we should meditate. What can meditation do for us that we cannot secure without it? To this we answer that meditation can do many things for us that nothing else can do. Chiefly it can bring us back into relation with ourselves. Are we, then, out of relation with ourselves? To answer this question, all we need to do is to tell ourselves truthfully whether we are fully satisfied with our lives as we live them, fully, really fully satisfied, in every way. If we can truthfully answer, '”Yes,” to this question, then meditation has nothing to offer us. Let us assume that we cannot answer this question with an unqualified, “Yes.” Then we can continue our examination of meditation and what it can do for us.
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