WHICKER’S WORLD

Text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday, 31:7:1977 Ishval Audio number 35

Track 1You know I don’t like this machine don’t you because it makes a horrible noise, makes me very hot, both of which are very selfish considerations, so I shall martyr myself for a moment!

Supposing we do a sign like this; that is Chinese for a man, just an ordinary man, that is the important thing. Now the Egyptian for the same thing used to be that. You see the Egyptians were rather precise about anatomical form. It is a pair of legs with feet on. The Chinese were graceful so they did not mind the legs swinging into the feet and it made a very nice pretty cursive form. Which do you prefer this formalism of the Egyptian or that subtle, aesthetic of the Chinese ideograph? Well those of you who like the Chinese are a sensuous lot of self- indulgers and those who like the Egyptian are a lot of square, solid blockheads!

Supposing we accept that this is shorthand for a man, a pair of legs. Why would they choose a pair of legs? Because there are not many bipeds on earth. You know there is the cassowary and the kiwi and an ostrich, one or two other bipeds apart from man, but Aristotle says man is the featherless biped. So for shorthand, it is quite convenient to draw a pair of legs. And then, supposing you see that pair of legs and you know it represents a man, what part of the man does it represent, his going power, his standing up power, his divisive power, because he has got his legs separate? You see the problem with translating an ideograph is that you can produce thousands of different translations, all correct but all referring to something totally different. The going power, the standing power, the divisive power, the mark of the man who can stride and measure. Any sinologist looking at that can give you a translation of it and unless you read all the translations and the others that are not yet made you would have not grasped the depth of the idiographic meaning. Hence read ping for pong is quite permissible.

Now I will wind it back a bit and show another structure, which we were talking about a little last night. This is the human being again. This time I have not drawn a very quick, cursive form. I have drawn three circles and a connecting line and three symbols we call letters, but these same things that are letters to us could be drawings of something to somebody else. This red circle represents the zone of your red dragon appetite, the zone of the tummy, the thumetic nature of the Greeks means red appetite. And at the top there is a blue circle. I have done it blue because blue is a cool colour and symbolises your intellect. I have put a P in it and the P, (to us a P) could be a drawing of something quite different could it not? If you saw a P, how would you translate it? What would it mean? (laughter) Now, now, now! Stop anticipating. Well, there is a thing in the dictionary of a word called penalty. It means to remove the genital organs of an offender. You see how tricky this problem of translation is. The penile code, which may be in the nose and it may not, according to whether you have been fighting in Korea or Bermondsey. Now, in the middle I have put an O and I have tried (tries to draw this O) but the pen had dried up, which is very symbolic. You see it is very important in Sufi philosophy, the esoteric philosophy of Islam, to utilise every so-called accident, and the part in the middle that I have drawn, has come out faintly and I could not have been better if I had done it faintly on purpose, because it represents an invisible field of power. An invisible field of power and I have written an O in it but that same letter O could be simply a circle and a circle could mean a zone for consideration. It could mean a zone locked up, it could be a zone circumscribed or it could be a letter O, but if we ask ourselves what the letter O means, when we form a letter O in the mouth, we have to make, as far as we can, a spherical form, otherwise we won’t get the O. If

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we make it too tight and wiggle the lips about and try to say O, it does not convey precisely the sphere that we want. And if we say it with a rounded mouth, O like Shakespeare’s wooden O, the theatre in which he played, we are getting near to the significance of that two-dimensional letter which has length and breadth and no depth on the surface of this perspex, we can translate it into a three dimensional sphere of influence. We could then say that this zone here which represents the chest on the human being, is the centre of an infinite field of Sentient Power, S P. Observe, sentience, sensuality, sensuousness, sensibility, these words have the same root, sentire to feel, to know and yet I have not put it in the feeling centre, in the heart. Now we are going to see why we haven’t because when feeling is at rest, that is – making no judgement, that feeling is not manifest.

Track 2There is an Infinite Field of Sentient Power, Sentient Power, but it can go into a state of perfect equilibrium called Pralaya in Sanskrit and in that state, it would manifest nothing. In science, in physics, it is called maximum entropy where all the energies of the world are conceived to be asleep, to have balanced themselves out over infinite space, and because of their equal distribution there is no outstandingness. Outstandingness, in English, from Latin, is existence. To exist is to stand out. If all the energy is perfectly equably distributed, nothing stands out. That state is called pra la ya. It means that the positing of differences, PR, the pra, has laid itself down and gone to sleep. Now we know that power can do this because we actually do have a capacity to go to sleep.

What do we do when we go to sleep? We deliberately remove the differentials of consciousness. We try to darken the room, we close our eyes, we try to get silence and we hope that no kippers are burning on the landing below, that is if we live in those kind of digs. I don’t know whether you have been enjoyed playing in the theatre and been on tour, because, if you have you will know what I mean about the smell on the landing. It is anybody else’s meal except yours, creeping along without permission and getting under the door and creeping into the bed and disturbing consciousness. And this is tremendously important because if you have personally cooked that kipper on your floor, you can sleep in it quite happily because it would have been your will that had cooked it. You can make a mental note that every time something occurs because you personally have willed it without impedance, that is bliss, even if it is a kipper on the landing. But, if somebody else cooks the kipper, the same kipper, same shop, same price, same condition, all night, last year’s deep freeze, it will smell horrible because it is not your will to encounter the kipper at that moment.

Track 3Sentire, to feel, is also the basis of to know. You would not think that a Chinese word would be similar to an English word would you? An ancient Chinese word, kuang and k-now, in English, are actually the same word. To see, to observe, to k-now means to fasten, to seize on, to grasp, a content of consciousness.

In this middle zone of the chest, drawn faintly by divine accident and coloured purple, because purple is made, pigmentally, to an artist, of blue and red, we mix the blue and red together and we get purple, the colour of royalty. The blue means intellection, intellectuality, know-how and the red means activation, application of know-how. The two together are purple. The purple is the colour, the phallic colour of primary initiative. There is a funny word called puce, which is considered to be a very obscure word in the dictionary and a very obscure colour out of the dictionary. It refers to phallic drive. It is the primary head of all being where the head means the power that actually divides, Hè ad, in some parts of the country they would actually pronounce that word he ad. Does anybody know what part of the country you go to hear the people amongst the populace in country districts saying, “he ad” for head? And they are actually giving you the original pronunciation of that word, he ad, head.

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Now Hé is the symbol of life principle itself and would correspond with this heart field not making a judgement; but the ad as in Adonai, Lord, means the ability to divide. So we can say this purple, this red and this blue, in the purple state, are not yet polarised. We could say that this chest centre actually has hidden in it, blue and red, intellection and sensuousness. And when it comes into the world in the body of a child, that feeling focuses into the body and it experiences the body as a restraint, as a restraint on Infinite potential activities. Your body is a system of restraint. It has an integument, a skin, that stops consciousness spreading infinitely and it has sub-divisions of cells, each cell with a skin, which stops the consciousness spreading. So that by means of the skin round each of your organs you can actually finite, limit, restrain, constrain a given function. So that by the skin around the kidney, you are able to confine kidney functions; by the skin around the liver you confine liver function. And this confining process depends upon the generation of skins. Every cell in your body has got a skin. Every group of cells has a super skin round the little skins and all of these skins have a big thick skin around your whole body, the integument that holds you together and allows you to conceive yourself as separate from another zone enclosed in another skin. So we have to say this mysterious O means nothing, not a thing, and, all things in potentiality. So the O there gives us the idea that there is an infinity of possibilities.

Track 4I was talking to a mathematician today and I wrote an equation down S = Pn + S. And he looked at it and said, “That is mathematical rubbish.” So I said “Translate it into mathematics.” He said, “It must mean zero equals Pn plus infinity.” I said, “Is that rubbish?” He said, “No, no, that is alright,” and I said, “In this equation here you have written the whole of Buddhist Philosophy in one equation.” Now Buddhism is a very interesting religion which is claimed by deep thinkers not to be a religion at all because it dispenses with the idea of a God outside you, and instead of using a God, it uses the idea of a full void. What does void mean? V is developmental potential, oid means form. Potentiality of form is the meaning of void.

Now when I wrote this equation S = Pn + S, I translated it, “The observing Sentience equals the precipitations of the same Sentience to the nth number, but because S equals subject under consideration and P equals predicate, and no amount of predication, that is rational statement about a thing, can possibly exhaust a thing, I have to put back the S, say plus S, plus S. So, the equation, as a psychological equation, is quite sound. The subject equals predication to the nth plus that of the subject, namely its wholeness, that has been left out by discussion. When you analyse the thing, do you not cut it into bits? Any dissenters, mentally? You consider the parts of the being. When you consider the parts of a being, have you not taken the being away from its wholeness in order to consider the parts? Do you not leave out of consideration during an analysis, the wholeness of being? So if you said, “My girl’s got eyes of blue, I never cared for eyes of blue, but she‘s got eyes of blue and that’s my weakness now!” Predication – about 1924 I think!

Now, when you predicate you cut the wholeness of being intellectually. You do not cut the reality with your words, you cut the categories of consciousness. The reality remains what it was. So, the S, the subject matter, which is the Infinite Field of Sentience, is in no way cut by the intellectual, analytic activities of the human being, so we have to write the S again. But, it did not make mathematical sense in the ordinary way, but when he thought about it, it actually meant that it adds up to nothing. The statement means nothing. It is a superior type of tautology. It defines itself in terms of itself. But, this nothing is Infinite Sentience itself. It is the S, Sentience, and it climbs up from the field that posited the S and predicates about itself.

Now predator, what is a predator, does anybody know what a predator is? It is any kind of being that seizes upon another being to extend its own life, like a cat, a tiger, a lion, jumps on a deer, then the tiger is a predator. Now this is the same base, to predicate, to be a predator, or in German, a prediger, that is, a minister of the gospel; is to seize on an opportunity. When you predicate, that is when you make an irrational statement about the infinity of possibilities in the universe, have you not done so for some purpose? If you predicate you have a purpose. If I say my friend Trevor there, I predicate and say Trevor is my friend. I predicate friendship. Now I have a purpose in so doing. What the purpose is I’ll leave you to WHICKER’S WORLD 3

guess. It might be that I know that Trevor is physically fit and a P.T. man and he knows about Judo, and he can do a forward flip and land quite easily on his back and he might take me with him! Maybe I’m trying to persuade him that he is my friend so that he does not practice any weird judo on me. Maybe. And unless I say what my purpose is, unless you are clairvoyant, you won’t know. But, if I do predicate at all I am up to something. I have a purpose, P for purpose, P for predication, P for positing, P for principle and P for pain that makes it necessary for me to have a principle.

Track 5When we consider an O here, in our chest, we are thinking about a feeling not yet committed to manifestation and we put that O up here and we say that the infinity of reality can be adequately represented only by zero. Zero is an interesting word. It means zeal to differentiate, an absolute will to control, to rule. Now, in modern physics you have exactly the same thing. You have a space-time-power continuum and space is curved so that you represent space-time-power continuum with a circle. It is nothing, No Thing. Thing means finite. It is not finite, it is not a thing, it is Infinite but it is infinite purple, infinite Sentient Power. When you use that word purple look at it. It is made of PUR is it not? Pur as in Singapore, it means city, a rationalised structure, civilisation, and PLE means ple means folded. You know there are what are called com-plications, that means ‘with folds’ in civilisation. Pur-ple, the purple means rationality and playing about. Here is playing about in the S and there is the city,

civilisation, posited pi-rationally in the head. So this nothing, this not-a-thing, this Infinite Sentient Power which is not a thing, comprises within itself all conceivables whatever. There is nothing, not-a-thing not included in the real significance of zero.

Track 5If we then look at Buddhism, we have a word sunyatta a Sanscrit word, sunya, void and this void is intelligence. We know that all human cultures have come from the same source. Supposing I write that word ‘sunya’ and divide it like this (sun ya) and I read it like that, (ya nous). I have read ya nus, ya nous - affirm intelligence. The void is pure Infinite Intelligent Sentient Power. It is the magical continuum of the Alchemists. It is the space-time-power continuum of modern physicists. Yanous means affirm intelligence. There is nothing, there is no thing, not included in that which is called the void.

We move about in what we call void, space, don’t we? There is a bit of space up the aisle and a person can get up and move up or down the aisle because, apparently, there is not a thing there. But if you ask science whether there is not a thing there, science will say, “Sorry, we could have said that into the late Nineteenth Century but we cannot say it any more because it is full of power.” But where there is a body, say like friend Gerhardt or Marghanita, where there is a body, the power is turning round and demarking that body by its rotation. And, where apparently there is no thing, the power is not there apparently rotating, it is lying doggo, it is being quiet, it is going into pralaya. So then we would have pralaya where there is apparently nothing, there is entropy, and where there is a body of a living human being, we could say there is manuvantara, that is, the law of manifestation, the counting, the evaluation of being. So,the that mysterious word, that void, that sunya, means the very fullness. You have another word in Christian philosophy, pleroma. That same word means exactly the same, means the very fullness where there is, apparently, emptiness.

Track 6Now, this is the whole basis of what you were talking about with H N function and the po. There is a higher world represented by H and there is a lower world represented by push. Simply H is a ladder, the eighth letter symbolises hierarchy of intelligence, create intelligent differences, and at the other end there is a po which means ‘push’, never mind the hierarchies, just thump everybody as you meet them.

You go down the road, you intend to go in the supermarket and there is a coach going by covered with gold knobs. You don’t like it. It happens you have greater strength through eating much spinach and you WHICKER’S WORLD 4

go up and you push over the coach. It happens that Her Majesty is in the coach at the time and therefore, there converge upon you a lot of gentlemen called Bobbies who proceed to beat the daylights out of you, because you are a straight, ordinary, simple, uncomplicated, honest pusher. Any honest pusher who has not got any complex mental processes, gets quickly locked up.

Now, you observe that they have a word there, that po function for the exact thing, concept that we have used here PO, the zone marked with principle. Why should it be that they have used for a straight pusher the same sign that we use for principle? Because, ultimately, the only principle is push, but there are ways

of pushing. There is a straight push and there is a curly push. One straight push, one curly push.that is the origin of the word is, straight push, curly push. Straight to the point like a councillor from Manchester who tells you the plain truth about the reason the rates have gone up. He is lying in his teeth, but he has a straight-forward voice. If he worked very hard it would become as good as Vic Feather’s was. The sign of power, - say what you mean

outwardly and mean what you say and then you will be great but never, for ever, really mean what you say, otherwise you will be out of a job immediately. Subtlety, deviousness, is an essential part of civilisation.

Now we take that I and we just put the little top on it like this because that is the sac, bag or container of all the information that is applied with this rod of office. You always have a sac, a container. In our case, for ideas it is the brain and for children it is the scrotum. But it is still a sac and it contains powers, information and you have to have the information before you can apply the rod of authority, and then you are required to apply the rod of authority subtly or you will be in trouble. Why? Because everybody has the same potential of authority and if you were blatantly authoritarian and made your statements openly, with force, then other people would start reacting by forcing you and that would produce chaos. Therefore, speech was invented to circumlocute the straight push.

Track 7Now, when we look at this POS, we can say the O is the first state, but strictly we ought to write zero for it, and this sentience as experienced by the baby is the second state, but to the baby is its first experience. And then, when it has had its first frustration or pain it rises up again and posits a third state which is the second state for the developing baby. We start with zero, with the field of Sentience. We mobilise it and in so doing divide ourselves, because we are infinite, we are eternal and yet when we do something our infinity becomes finity. We finite ourselves in an act. If you fight somebody and you deliver a right hook, you have finited, for the time being, your mode of activity into hooking with the right. If you give a straight left you finite it with the straight concept. Infinity becomes finity. The unlimited becomes limited by doing something so that the ‘do’ with the letter D in it means to divide yourself from your infinity in the act of doing. What happens then when you divide yourself in that way, you fall if you forget that you are infinite. You are a field of infinite possibilities, a field that can, in principle, do anything, posit anything; but the moment you do some thing, if you allow your consciousness to identify with it, you can conceive yourself to be such a person. So that a boxer who goes into the ring and wins a fight with a right hook, knocks a man out, if he is praised too much, he will try to knock the next fellow out with the same right hook and he may become a right hooker. And then somebody who observes the way he boxes can devise a method of avoiding a right hook and will defeat him because he has forgotten his infinity of possibilities and posited a particular mode, a way of gaining success. When he gains that success in that way and identifies with it, he loses his infinite potentiality, his pure voidity. When you lose your voidity you have fallen onto a particularised form of action, which action can be studied by other people and they can devise a method of dealing with your mode of activity. But, if you wipe out as soon as you have won a bout, if you wipe out your mode of victory and return to your primordial voidity, you have an infinity of ways that you can actually fight the next time. WHICKER’S WORLD 5

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Track 7In Zen Buddhism you have the concept of no-mind. You have the same thing in Chinese Buddhism and the same thing in Hinayana Buddhism in India, the concept that your real enemy that finites you is having a mind, a mentational process that thinks linearly, serially. Now because we have been trained with language, with letters in an alphabet or with sounds in an ideographic structure, because we have been trained to think by means of symbols and because the symbols are taught to us in a book, one after the other, a habit of serial, linear mentation is set up in the mind. And after many years of thinking in this way, you will find that most people, and I mean most people that you meet in human society, will actually not only think in that linear way. They will believe there is no other way. How many of you here believe that there is another way of filling the voidity of the unconscious other than by thinking linearly, thinking serially? Already we have some potential wizards amongst us! Actually, any woman knows what I am talking about but that does not mean that she knows reflexively what we are talking about. We are talking about a mode of apprehension of reality that does not depend on linear word forms. There is a mode of knowing which does not depend on thinking in terms of ideas which are based on words learned from outside.

Track 8When you acquire a vocabulary as a child from your parents and later from school, the vocabulary given to you has something to do with the purposes of the teacher, something to do with the establishment in the human being of a linear pattern of procedure. So that you are taught to get up in the morning and to go and do something for so many hours and then come home and get a meal and then, having had it, to go out to a place of entertainment and then to come home, drunk or sober and to go to bed and repeat the next day. Now, by the establishment of this cycle of behaviour, civilisation is created and maintained and without that civilisation we could not have the possibility of freedom because that civilisation is the primordial way whereby we get out of chaos and establish a stable reference from which we can then proceed to move freely. In the chaos before the establishment of civilisation you cannot move freely.

Just imagine primitive peoples, say two million years ago, food gathering in the forest and they have spread out by reproduction so that the forest is full of people, and they are all looking for food. What happened when encountered each other? When they saw the blackberries on the bush, did they immediately say, “After you,” or did they rush for the bush? The tendency was for them to fight for the available food. So there was a chaos. There was a situation in which any man could be beaten to pieces by any other man or any tribe defeated, perhaps exterminated, by another tribe.

Like motorway cafes?Like, imotorway cafes, yes and generally speaking the coffee would be in the same degree of cleanliness. So that in fact, there had to be established a civilisation, that means an order of procedure.

Now you started with Taoism, Trevor, we might as well take the same basis again, China. The opposite of Taoism is Confucianism and Confucianism was the system of rules for establishing a civilisation. And once the civilisation is thoroughly established by Confucianist training of the child, when the child becomes mature enough to recognise the value of its routine procedures for maintaining the non-chaotic serial order of civilisation, then it was allowed to go to Taoist school where it was studying how to be free. In Confucianism you are taught to have a mind, which knows the exact size of everything. The exact size of a fork, a knife, a spoon, a ring to wear, shoes, platform soles, whatever it was, everything had a legitimate, ritual size and shape; and thus civilisation was given its form. But, when that form had been thoroughly established, then the few people who were ready, who were no longer children, no longer needing the civilisation because they had understood it, they could then go, like Confucius himself did, to Lao Tse. They could go to Taoist school to learn freedom. That does not mean they immediately rush about and smash society. It would mean they would then move about deviously within society so that they did not upset the social rule, but nevertheless they themselves transcended it. They did not break it. They

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lived sinuously amongst the rules without disturbing the rules and without being conditioned by the rules and that is the Taoist way of living.

And that way of Tao is summed up in that very first verse of the eighty-one chapters of Tao Te Ching. The Tao, the Way, the Tao, the Way the universe operates, that can be named, is not the true Tao, is not the true way. If you can name it, it cannot be true because naming is already limiting, finiting, defining, designating. So the Tao that can be named is not the true one. So what is the true one? The true one is the one that cannot be named.Well, then, how do you refer to it?You refer to it as the nameless.

Track 9Now in Sanskrit you have a term, nama rupa, where nama means name and rupa means form. Nama refers to your mental content and rupa to the form of sensible experience You name the form of your experience and in the process of naming them you wrench them out of the context of their infinite association and you cut down on the infinity of their associations, you reduce them to finitude, to limitation in themselves, in their parts and in their relation to other parts.

So, as soon as you name, if I say Trevor is a boy, hmmm – now immediately the association in most minds is, well Trevor is equipped – with a terrible impedance because he is a boy. And women and girls are not so impeded, they are free. They have nothing where he has something and his something is always getting him into trouble because it is only a half-truth. The thing that he has is always looking for that which it has not and what it has not is nothing. The P seeks the S. It seeks sensuous experience, experience and verification of principle. The man has a principle, he has an appendage and the pending, the immanent danger, which he has encountered, the memory of it has risen up from his sensuous experience and posited itself in his head as principle. And it conducts his life for him and restricts him and makes him, like Brutus, an honourable man. So that, men are tremendously limited because they suffer, and I mean suffer, our impassive relationship to principle, the limiting factor on sensuality. But woman has no such limiting appendage and therefore she is not in any way limited, but the I in the letter S signifies male rigidity and and the adherance to principle, and the S signifies serpentine deviousness of the woman. So that by her deviousness, she can actually escape the rigidity of the principle that obsesses man. Man actually believes and has found, over thousands of years, that if he has no principle no other man will trust him. But, by the same law, the dialectic of Tao, if he has got a principle, no woman can trust him, because the essence of her being is that she is like the void, she is free, absolutely. But she cannot express her freeness within a civilisation the rules of which are built by man. So woman will tell you it is a man’s world. She means it is a world made rigid by principles and so she has to move about like a Taoist amidst a Confucianist world.

Now all these are polarisations of the human being from a primordial Infinite Sentient Power Field by self-polarisation, that field itself polarises itself, it mobilises itself in sensuous seeking for pleasure and in so mobilising itself it leaves its infinity and posits a finite course, no matter how bent, no matter how devious, it is finite. It posits that course and then, through persistently following it, it identifies with it and forgets its infinity. And then it comes up against frustration because it has finited itself. In the very act of self-finiting has come self-refutation because actually, that sensuousness wishes for infinite sensuous enjoyment. But by committing itself to the process of finite self-sensuous seeking, it has limited its mode of gaining its satisfaction.

Track 10So there is the creation of P out of S, by the frustration and the pain of frustration, sensuous self-seeking for delight has posited a principle, a limiting principle. That is to say, when you seek this pleasure, when you seek your sensuous delight, you necessarily commit yourself to a particular type of activity and a particularisation means limitation, finiting process, and this is frustration, and this gives you pain, and then this pain, you throw it backwards and up and it becomes your brain. It becomes the box in which you hold WHICKER’S WORLD 7

recorded, all the memories of the painful situations that you have suffered and these painful situations, in their totality, are what men call, principles.

Remember O P S, ops as in optics. The eye, the observer, there must be an observer of the infinite process otherwise the Infinite process would not comprehend itself. So, Infinity posits a finite observer and encloses that observer in a skin, and having done so, Infinity positing it, establishes a behaviour pattern through that being, through that human individual if you like, through the animal, through the plant. But as far as we are concerned, the individual human being is a centre through which Infinity operates and establishes a mode of procedure which becomes habitual, and this habitual behaviour becomes a limiting factor which frustrates the being that has been finited in the skin. And from this frustration, from this finiting, arises pain and from the pain, the verbalisation of principle, and principle means that which if you obey it, you can avoid the pain. Now the only way you can avoid certain kinds of pain is by not having the pleasures that give rise to the pain. So there is a dialectic inside the human being. The human being is an O, a pure voidity which is a potential of a polarisation. It is a being that is able to move towards sensuous experience, delights, pleasures, and a being that can turn itself through pains into principle to control itself. Now, both of these processes, the sensuous S function and the principle P function are polarisations of the human soul, which can never be eliminated. That soul is a zone of eternal Infinite Sentient Power. You cannot eliminate it. The souls of human beings are eternal because they are simply zones within the only reality, the Infinite Sentient Power. And this polarisation occurs within simply because it is this purple being, this being that knows that if it does not restrain itself in some way it cannot control the effects of its own actions. And the means whereby it controls itself is by establishing principle. The principle is nothing but the record of all the ways in which you can be frustrated. But, when you establish these principles clearly, then you can avoid, you can reduce to the void, many of the negative undesirable effects of the pursuit of the sensuous, the S. If you remember that you are a trinity, that is to say, you are a feeling field of Sentient Power with a capacity for self-mobilisation towards sensuousness and towards principled consideration of the results of this sensuous pursuit, then, in remembering it you have comprehended the whole process.

Track 11In the Bhagavad Gita it says a mnemonic sentence, WORSHIP IS CONTINUAL REMEMBRANCE. Call

that Wicca for short. Worship is continual remembrance. Will, Intelligence, Consciousness, Discriminative Rulership, will, intelligence, consciousness, discriminative rulership and call it wicr (wicker) and then tell yourself it is wicr’s world and mean it. This word wicca, an old name in Anglo-Saxon for a parliament of intelligent beings. Let us put it on a shield like this and divide the shield like that. On this side we have the word “Quick,” and on this side we have the word, “dog.” Ca there is the base of the word ‘canine.’ The whole shield says Quick-dog.

Wicca. On the sinister side you have the dog, the faithful, the tail-wagger, the lamp-post spoiler, and the analysis in those days is very simple. There are two kinds of bipeds that go about dressed, those that behave like dogs, we call those ‘cynics’ which is Greek for dog, the cynics, the unbelievers, and on this side the quick that Christ refers to when he says the quick and the dead.

The Wicca was a method of thinking about social relations. There are masses of people called dogs and they behave like dogs. They rush about in packs, they defecate and micturate, if there is not any room in the toilets attached to the football ground, they will go in somebody’s back garden. There have actually been reported, complaints from citizens who have found that at times of vast meetings of the dogs, that they have had to clean their gardens up. Supposing you have a nice musical get-together on the twenty-first of June, on the summer solstice. You might have a hundred thousand people playing guitars and there has kindly been put up, by the local council, three toilets. It is a real problem isn’t it? It sounds trivial but if you find that the boot of your car has been used, and I know a case where that actually happened and you know how easy it is to get into car boots if you WHICKER’S WORLD 8

WillIntelligenceConsciousnessDiscriminativeRulership

know where to where to buy your keys and they are cut for the car. If it is the usual kind of car you can always go into the shop and buy a key to fit it can’t you? A friend of mine actually had quite a shock one day when a fellow friend of his, who let a flat over his shop and found out that the flat had been sub-let by the tenant so that there were eleven people living in this flat. When he told them they had to go and after much disagreement they left, and he went in to see what damage they had done, he found that every draw in the chest of drawers had been filled, had been used for defecation and he was astonished until I explained to him that the southern Irish are not terribly fond of the English. And then he understood it. This is a slight payment for British oppression of Ireland years ago. The marks are still there.

Track 12Now it is against that kind of behaviour that the civilised try to defend themselves. Today we call it vandalism, don’t we? Don’t we now actually think in terms of vandalism is more or less likely? I remember the time when it was a surprising thing if you went to a cinema in town and you parked your car in a side street and it was surprising if somebody broke into it. Now it is surprising if they don’t. And does not everybody actually accept this as part of civilisation’s protest mood that we actually do have thousands and thousands of people busy protesting by smashing any restraining influences that they come across.

Now this analysis was made a long time ago and the wick, the quick, the wick in the candle that controls the rate at which you burn your life force. To be quick, to be conscious, to be an individual, to have self-control, that is to be on the dexter side of the shield, the right side. And to have no control, to be stimulated from outside, to be reduced to fury by the losing team happening to be yours, to be reduced to violence by a slight difference of political opinion and generate disturbance about a union quarrel, and people get beaten up, doesn’t this happen? Of course it happens. You can’t listen to a news bulletin any single day without hearing of some violence somewhere in the world. Now how is it going to be cured? Not by curing other people, other people don’t cure. The only way that it can be done is by each individual deciding to examine his own polarisation, because he too, is a bit of a dog, given the opportunity and he too is quick, when he remembers to be. And he has the slogan, WORSHIP IS CONTINUAL REMEMBRANCE. Remembrance of what? Remembrance of the fact that he is a will, he is an intelligence, he is consciousness, he is discriminative self-rulership.

By this process of self-control, any individual can fit himself for pure is-ness. He can be an I; a being that is reflexively self-aware, and he can be an S, he can be devious. Christ says to you, “Be harmless but be wise as serpents because you are living amongst dogs.” You are living amongst beings that will tear you to pieces unless you are subtle in the way you behave, the way you express yourself. You can see perfectly easily, you cannot convert another person from outside by propaganda. It has got to come from inside. From outside can come an exhortation, but as the Bishop of London said a few years ago, two thousand years of exhortation have produced precisely no effect. Exhortation from the outside does not do anything of any worth or any permanence. It can only come from inside and that means that the individual has to recognise in himself that polarisation of his own being, the separation of that huan and that po, the separation of your hierarchical consciousness from your simple pushing nature. This separation must occur. You must analyse yourself to see that you have actually got a hierarchical awareness of the necessity of a differences of level and you also have a tendency to push and that these two are separate functions. They are not separate essences in the continuum. They are separate functions, in fact, in a time-matter-body world. You can think without moving physically, you an feel without moving physically and yet you can also think, become heated, become emotional and emotion can run into your nervous system and release nervous energy, contract muscles and make you move. There is a real meaning in separativity of function because by that separativity you gain self-control, and by that self-control you gain total self-determination. You go from your pure nothingness to voidity of pure Sentient Power, to positing a world that you define clearly as worthy of positing. Instead of living in a world posited for you by other beings with their own interests, you will design a world and posit that world yourself and you live in it. And, to posit that world requires you to think, in principle, very hard, and the principle you come up with is that if I posit a world that other beings object to and know about, they will oppose me, they will defeat me. So I WHICKER’S WORLD 9

must posit a world that is acceptable to other beings. And yet somehow, that same world must be a world in which I can live, in which I can create, in which I can express myself but not so crudely as to create the opposition that would destroy my expression.

Track 13Now we live in a universe that today is not theoretically but actually demonstrably, power. The Nineteenth Century material atom has gone. Only a few lazy fuddy-duddies believe that matter is matter in the unbreakable sense. Matter, today, is a wavicle of probability. It is nothing but a probability, a tendency, it is not an established permanent fact. The reality is energy. The reality is power, the reality is sentience, is consciousness. Now consciousness is a catalyst. That is, when you know a thing, it alters the way of approach to that thing. It alters the behaviour of the world as you become conscious of what the world is, because you approach the world in a totally different way. When you have a different consciousness of reality, you approach consciousness, present it to the world and the world reflects the content of the consciousness and the world changes. So that you do not actually deal with the same world when you are conscious of it that you were dealing with beforehand. Because before you were conscious you were dealing with inertia and when you are conscious you are not dealing with inertia, you are dealing with initiative. Because then you initiate, you do not act habitually so that you don’t continue to preserve the old world, you act with initiative and you change the world. The world is changed, the world is kinetic, the world is dynamic, the world is creative - if you know it. But if you do not know that the world is dynamic, kinetic, creative, you think that there is a world that is unchangeable, and act according to those laws.

That rather funny scared comedian, Descartes, divided the world into mind and matter, as a result of which, for over two hundred years we have suffered from a concept that there is a world which is ruled by unalterable law, and all that science can do is study the world, learn the laws and obey those laws, and those laws are rigid, absolutely, and up to the end of the Nineteenth Century most intelligent, religious people said the laws are established by God and are therefore permanent. But that left no room for freedom at all. But the function of God is to create free beings not bound beings, creative beings and therefore all laws, without exception, that science has discovered in the last two and a half thousand years, those laws are elastic. They are flexible laws. They are laws of tendency, they are not rigid laws of matter, and that means that even a material body, so-called, can be influenced by the intelligence of the human being.

Track 14We live today, when we have daily debates and arguments on radio and TV about ESP, about extra-sensory perception, about the possibility of poltergeists, about the possibility of telepathy, the possibility of dowsing, finding water with hazel twigs and so on and that many, many people are sceptical about these things and think it is rubbish, because they are old-fashioned people and out-of-date. The reality is that sensitivity increases the more you use it and the more you use your sensitivity, the more flexible become the principles until finally you can actually adjust what you previously thought was gross material, fixed reality, by an act of will. Now in that case, you do not need to be tyrannised over by any preconception that your educators have imposed upon you because you can reconceive yourself. That means you are essentially creative, right down to your bones. You think your bones are the most solid things, the most naïvely thought realist thing in your body, the bones are real, you can knock bones, you can break bones, those are really real. Muscles are nearly as real and glandular secretions are not quite so real and emotions are even less real and abstract thoughts are even less real. So there is a whole school of nominalists who said abstract thoughts are really nothing except names. But they are all energies and when you manipulate an idea you have started to manipulate the world, a world, so that when you get an idea and you emote on the idea, you charge the idea with feeling, the feeling creates chemistry in your body. But, it does not only create chemistry in your body, it creates chemistry in anybody’s body who gets near you, and I don’t mean near you spatially, I mean near you emotionally, so that a person in Australia now of a similar idea and a similar feeling to you is actually, emotively in contact with you. And it could happen that you would get a message from the other side of the world simply because you have changed your mind and changed the effective charge on your mind and in the process, you have changed the constitution of the world, right WHICKER’S WORLD 10

down to the bones, right down to the mineral world, the so-called rocks, the unshakeable, the everlasting mountains. They are nothing except power vibrating in a certain way. They are modelable. There can be landslides, there can be earthquakes, there can be all kinds of marvellous things starting their changes at the level of initiative. Now initiative is a gift, a talent of the human being, evolved in the human being through the Infinite Sentient Power, which, in religion is called God.

Track 15God, that Infinite Field of Power, has posited in the human being, initiative, the power to change things. He has posited in the human being, sentience, sensibility to his own condition, and therefore He has posited in the human being a creativity that does not exist at any other level either below or above. The angels are not so complex as the human being nor are they as free as the human being. An angel is already circumscribed by the plan put into it by the Absolute Sentient Power, by God, and the human being is mixed partly of the earth, the fallen earth, the diabolic, and partly of the Spirit of God; and therefore, by contemplating his own devilishness, his own diabolical intent, his own sensuality, by contemplation of these, he creates tension inside himself that does not occur at any other level. Man stands exactly half way between God and the Devil, between Free Spirit and bound basalt, the rock formation. He is the between, he is the middle, the middle man, between infinity and finity, between the unlimited Sentient Power and the limited finite, sentient mind inside the skin of a human being.

Track 16So therefore, man is a most peculiar being, a being with a high potential of creativity which he seldom realises and when he does, the rest of them are astonished. They look at Michelangelo’s David and they are astonished. How did a man do it? He did it by studying principles of form and by calling upon his sensuous enjoyment of the principle. Instead of having the principle fighting the sensuousness and the sensuousness fighting the principle, he had the sensuous enjoying the principle and the principle guiding the sensuous, just as surely as the violinist guides his fingers over a fretless keyboard to find the note he wants, by sensitivity, which he knows is there by principle.

My friend Len over there, who makes music come out of a double bass, has a long piece of string and he can put a finger on that string and produce a note, the note he wants. Does he measure it? Do you start from the nut with a measuring tape Len?No. I don’t.How do you find that note?Just feel it.You just feel. That is a fact. If he had to measure it with a measuring tape, could he play? Would he have time? “Excuse me conductor while I find this, Ah there it is.” He could not do it. But in fact, he can go very fast and he can give you a rhythmical counterpoint to something else played by another instrument and how he does it he doesn’t ker-now, except that he feels it. And this feeling is very mysterious. Have you ever actually measured along that fingerboard Len?Never.Never and yet you can find the note you want. Isn’t it funny? You can say, well of course, empirically, he must have measured it at some time when he was a boy and he looked at it and remembered where it was and therefore he can put his finger there. But that has not happened. I’ve never met a player of a fretless instrument who has measured his finger-board and decided where he is going to put his finger. But, by a curious process of self-sensitisation, he has found his note and he can feel where it is even with is eyes closed. Now how is that?

When I was a little boy my father was teaching me piano and he put a sheet over the keyboard and said, “Now find C sharp two octaves above middle C.” I could not see any keys, I had to go like that, there it is. So it is all the same to me whether there was a sheet over the keyboard or the room is in total darkness. Once you sit down, you feel the width of the piano and the whole thing is structured like a field. And that

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is how a professional musician plays more expertly than another person who does not actually trust the power of his feeling.Now this is the same thing. Music is called the type of the arts because the rules of all the arts are sort of derivative from the rules that govern music, space, time, power. The space between notes, the silences, the time, the tempo in which you play it, the power, how heavily you strike that note or pluck that string. Space, time, power are the principles governing music. Space, time, power are are the principles ruling on a chessboard. Anybody who plays chess without space-time-power consciousness is not a good chess player. You must be aware of the sixty-four squares you have got to play with; you must know that a Queen is roughly eight times more powerful than a pawn at a certain stage of the game; and that a Rook is half of the Queen at a certain stage of the game, we are dealing with space, time, power. And if you were to sit down and write the possibilities of every move, you would never move, and in match chess, ordinary match chess, you have to make a move every five minutes. So there is a power in the human being and that power is accessible. But, how do we get at it?

Track 17We have been trained in civilisation in a Confucianist manner to keep the drains under the road, et cetera, et cetera. All these social conveniences we have been trained in a linear manner by means of words. So we have a vocabulary of words taught to us in a linear way and these keep us on a linear track. Now, as long as we are thinking linearly we are not thinking wholly. And we have a mind that thinks linearly but we have another called a No-mind, meaning non-linear limited mind. No linear limitation. This mind is the Gestalt mind; it is a mind that comprehends universal patterns. It is there and it can be got at. How is it got at? Very, very simply. You do what the Japanese would call sitting in Zazen.

What you do is look in your mind with widespread consciousness, not convergent on a particular word, not convergent on a particular phrase, not convergent on a particular sentence, you look inside your being and you still the linear process. You stop it. It was not there until your educators gave it to you and you can stop it, for when you stop that linear process the energy that is stored inside your mind, because you know your brain is full of millions and millions impressions; and yet with linear thinking, you can get at only one at a time. Yet, if you still your mind you are in the centre of an infinite field of information and from this central position all points are equidistant. There is an infinity of information present when you still the mind. Now that is called a no-mind, a void, but that void is full, it is sunya. You are affirming nous (pronounced nowse), intelligence, when you still your mind, and the more you practise stilling the mind, in stilling the mind in that way you are attaining not less information but more information. And the more you follow a linear series in pursuit of information, the less information you get because all you get is the linear associations given to you by your educators.

So, the rule is very, very simple, have a No-mind, stop linearity. How do you do it? By remembering that infinity is a big now-here. Omniscience is here-now. It is not yesterday or tomorrow because those yesterdays and tomorrows are figments. They are intellectual conceptions of the analytical mind. What they are actually inside is the universe that is immediately totally present in that here-now. We have been trained in a linear way to think that Sundays precede Mondays, precede Tuesdays and so on. You have this condition so we actually lose contact with the week as a whole. And yet, one generation tells another and by a study of the law of cycles we become aware that there is a totality of information available if you can stand still and you stand still in the here-now. Now you can only do this if you believe it and you can only believe it if you love it, because the ‘lieve’ in believe means ‘love.’ If you love the idea that there is eternity, like Vaughan said, “I saw eternity the other night like a white ring of endless light.” We are in that eternity and we are in no sense cut off from that eternity. You cannot be cut off from that eternity which is God. As St Paul says, “I am persuaded that nothing can separate us from the love of God.”

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Now, if you are moving in the right direction, if your motivation is pure you can afford to believe that you are a modality of an Infinite Continuum with a capacity for stilling the linear serial thinking process and finding instead of nothing, all things in an infinite sphere of intelligent light.How do you feel then? What is it like? Do you know that intelligent light, the light that experience says in that Bardo immediately after you die, your experience is total light and you can experience it also without waiting to die by simply cutting linear thinking. And, that intelligent light is God. It is pure consciousness which precipitated within itself this world which we tend to believe is concrete, real, enduring, permanent, indestructible; whereas, in fact, it is dynamic, kinetic, infinitely modellable by the mind and will of man as representative of that Infinite Field itself.

Track 14If you still the mind, with success you will find at certain points, your nervous system will jump. That simply means that nervous energy that previously went through some neurological pathway, has escaped out of the routine. Don’t be afraid, if you are sitting there in the process of meditation, you are sitting there quite still and you are thinking not at all in a linear sense, but you are absolutely alert, you have not fallen into stupid unconsciousness, you are very alert; and you are looking, because it is an empirical thing. This experience of the light is as much an experiment to the individual finding it as a physical experiment of a scientist in a laboratory. It is really an empirical process of self-spiritualisation.

You sit. After a time, the energy that previously went along certain neurological pathways inside you, because you are not letting it run in a linear way, the energy escapes from those nerve lines and suddenly your body jumps. the evidence, that jump, that some energy has leaked out of a habitual pathway. Don’t be scared when it jumps, and think, I mustn’t be disturbed by its jumps, if I’m not careful I’ll go back into linear thinking about the jump. If you do that you will retard yourself. When the jump occurs, say, “Nervous energy leap, back to the non-serial process.” Now, if you do this, the energy will mount, the tension across the nerves will increase and you will begin to feel more and more and more alert and at a certain crucial point, you will find, in the base of the spine a sort of heating process occurring and again, do not let yourself fall into linear attempts at analysis of the cause.

You will actually feel very hot in the base of the spine and there will be a sort of swirling smoky feeling. And then, quite suddenly this energy will rush up, and as it goes up through various knots, plexes, nerve knots in the spine, it will tend to flash out. You will get a sensation of flash, of information. Again you are in danger of linear thinking. Ignore them. The rule is, ignore these phenomena otherwise you will not get to the highest. When it flashes out, ignore it and sit looking fully alert, waiting, not linearly thinking but very, very alert. Gradually it will go. Then it will start to accelerate, it will rise up and when it hits your brain it will trigger the total information of your total ancestry, right back, prior to the human race, before all animals, plants, bacteria. It will go right back into the Cosmic Field and your whole brain will then suddenly flash with light and you will find yourself outside your skull in a sort of mass of light. And when you do that, don’t fall into linearity. Don’t get tricked and think, “My God, that is interesting, I must tell my friend Roger about that tomorrow,” because as soon as you think linearly, you are back in time, you lose it. Suddenly the light goes away and you are just an ordinary guy again and you are back on your linear process. But you do have a memory that you broke it and that can encourage you. You can start again.

The tendency, the temptation, temptation means temporal stimulus, temporal presentation, the stimulus that drags you back into linearity, into serial thinking. When you do it, fight it as soon as you can. Wicca’s world, WORSHIP IS CONTINUAL REMEMBRANCE. I will my intelligence, my conscious, my discriminative rulership. I re-unify myself and I become here-now-nothing, instead, pure observation and in that pure observation this light comes back again and with it, Shalom, Salaam, peace. You find that your spirit S and your M, your so-called material being, are bound together, L. S L M, Salaam, Shalom, peace, because you discover your own polarity is your own work. You re-unify yourself Absolutely.

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