Love and Death

LOVE AND DEATH

The text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval tape 34.

We cannot examine the idea of death without the idea of the opposite of death, so we will have to examine the two ideas together because they are mutually defining.

Track 1

In English, it is fairly obvious that live and love are related together, having only one letter different. Now, love has got an O in it where live has got an I in it, and just as in the Ancient Egyptian, the introduction of that letter I signifies the individuation of a human being, so in the word live the word is referring to an individual. Individuals live, but in love you embrace something more than your own self. So if we think about love we are thinking about binding together in some kind of inter-functional relationship more beings than one. We could live, in the sense of dedicate, each one of us, our energy to our own being, like a single particle rushing through space on some journey into the Infinite, but it would not be love unless we encountered another being and began an inter-functional relationship with it. So, we will use live for an individual in the process of self-development and love for some kind of inter-functional binding relationship between more than one being. Two or more are involved in the act of love. The opposite of death, generally is life. You do not tend to think the opposite of death really is love but that is what we are going to take it tonight.

The opposite of death is Love. Live with the I instead of the O could mean death and we will see how. Death means disintegration, the final proof of death is that you fall apart. You probably know that a fairly large number of people annually are buried alive by mistake, and every time you dig up….you are nodding your head, Ghreta, every time you dig up the local cemetery to make a new motorway, you find lots of beings in coffins, hammering away! The estimation is about somewhere between two and three thousand per annum in Britain. Interesting isn’t it? I remember when I was a child, my mother said, “Don’t forget to put hot needles under my nails to make quite sure I’ve gone.” I said, “It doesn’t matter because under hypnosis you can have hot needles under your nails while you are alive without feeling it so it is not a fair test.” The only really fair test about death is corruption, absolute and complete corruption. You must definitely fall apart. Otherwise you could be kidding.

An aunt of my mother’s, being loaded into the hearse, one of the bearers, having shorter legs than the other three, the corner of the coffin hit the edge of the hearse and there was an immediate cry from within. Of course, naturally they didn’t want to hear it but there were too many people standing about so they took her inside, opened up, and she lived fifteen years after that, to the great distress of everybody about. A very unhappy release! But she is only one and I could enumerate, if I had time, many authentic cases of that kind of thing. But it doesn’t last for long, it is rather interesting to note. If you do get buried alive, it is not for long that you mourn it. Because of the lack of air it takes a relatively short time, whereas if you are dead in life, you can suffer a very, very long time outside the coffin.

Track 2

Let us define death as disintegration. The D in it signifies division. It also signifies a door. The D, the fourth letter in the alphabet, comes from an original drawing of a door. Death is a door. It is not an end, absolute, chop, finish, annihilation. It is a door from one state of being into another, and we are going to follow this argument through carefully.

You all know, having done your O levels, in the Twentieth Century that matter is energy. Matter is energy, it is not made of irreducible Nineteenth Century particles, unbreakable. The word atom is a misnomer. Atom meant ‘uncuttable’. There are no uncuttables. There are no irreducible particles. So when we think about the division, we have to think about division in a very different way from the way a materialist thought about it in the Nineteenth Century or even going back to the Greeks, the way Democritus, Leucippus thought about it. They thought, at least they tried to think, they couldn’t, but they did their very best, because you know how persistent men are when they get the bit between their teeth, when they get an idea they will flog it along the road as far as it will go, and the idea was quite simple, the human intellect works on an either or mechanism. It is of the nature of the intellect to consider a pair of ideas and say either this or that. And one of the earliest things propounded several thousand years ago was, that reality is either a continuum or is made of discontinuous particles. Let us think about it. Discontinuous particles, you can easily imagine, take billiard balls, take ball bearings, reduce them mentally smaller and smaller and smaller, until you have lots and lots of tiny, little ball bearings. Call them, if you like, primary particles. This is an intellectual act. It is not something that any one can actually do in the laboratory, it is done in the mind. If you like to call your mind a laboratory, that is all right, but if by laboratory you mean one of those actually physically existent rooms where people go and cut things to pieces, then this cannot be done. No one has located, no scientist has found a single primary particle. They have thought, they have not found. What they have found is something quite different. They have found a behaviour probability. Now, behaviour probability is hardly a physical, material entity is it? A behaviour probability, a probability of a certain kind of behaviour, that sounds very abstract, but the behaviour is of energy.

Now if we believed in the little ball-bearing type view of the universe, we will call that the granular aspect of reality. The ancient Persian name for that was ahriman, if you like to spell it it A H R I M A N, ahriman, granularity, it is the view, the doctrine, that ultimate reality is made of particles of some kind, which are eternally separate and cannot be further reduced, you cannot break them down, and this is an intellectual construct, it is nothing that any one has ever found. It is an idea of a possibility, it is not an actuality and in straight opposition to this was the other idea of the continuum. If you would like an image of the continuum then you could take the image of the ocean as you see it, when it is not breaking up in waves, which curl over and become spray. If it becomes spray you could think about granularity, you could think about little particles of water, little droplets. But before the spray occurs you see undulating mass of water, never mind what the physicists said, in the Nineteenth Century, that water was made of little particles which were reducible to some elements in an atomic scale, that is not true, the H2O view was a simple convenience, but think of the movement of the water, think of it not breaking into spray, think of it undulating, and think of it as a continuum. A continuum is something that continues, goes on and on with no break. The M at the end of it signifies a substance but the substance does not signify separated particles. We have to get these two concepts quite clear, the idea of a particular universe, a universe made of particles which are totally separate which were called atoms. But, unfortunately, the atom was split, and there were protons and neutrons, mesons, electrons, and so on, all these different so-called bodies, which on examination turned out to be behaviour probabilities of energy. They were energies.

Track 3

Now the same physics which was trying to believe in this, also taught that energy is indestructible. Now, if the particle is supposed to be indestructible and it turned out that the particle is energy, and the energy is indestructible, then we have to get a new concept. Now the concept that energy is quantised, that is called quantum theory that energy is necessarily quantised, that it is granular and that each little particle of energy, little packet of work possibility, is there, on its own, separate from others, this view of reality, the idea that even energy is in little packets, if those little packets were discrete, were like little balls, like little ball-bearings, we will have the same problem that we had with the atoms. Now at one time, when they talked there were unbreakable particles, they had the problem, how do the particles cohere together in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal, in the human world, how do they manage to hang together? Some very naive thinkers said well they have little hooks on them, and they made models actually, they made little bearings and they put little hooks on them, then they put them on a tray and shook it and they found that sometimes, the hooks actually caught on to each other. They immediately said, “Aha, the beginning of integration, our hypothesis is correct.” But, the more they examined this the more ridiculous it became because in the living beings, this hooking on process goes through various highly complex developmental stages. If you think of the ovum of a living being and the sperm, coming together and co-operating and developing from that form, through various primitive forms until it finishes up as a modern baby, think of the complexity of the hooking on process to account for the regular development in millions and millions and millions of lives. The hypothesis would not hold together, even if you said the particles were really energy quanta, little packets of energy, still they had to hold on to each other to produce a highly complex organism like a living human being. Think, therefore, that the energy quantum is a behaviour of a field of power.

Now when we talk about a field we mean a zone of influence, a zone in which, if you put something, something will happen that does not happen somewhere else, and think to yourself that the zone of influence, say of the Solar System, is such, that a force of some kind goes right through it and is powerful enough to hold all the planets in their orbits. That in fact all the planets that go round the Sun, are held by mysterious invisible force and constrained to go round in those orbits. Extend this to include the galactic system, the whole star system, the universe itself, think of that as a great Cosmos, an orderly system of power. Then think to yourself, if we view this power as not made of particles, then all the phenomena, all the behaviours, all the events, all the beings that occur in it, must be viewed as modalities of that power. Now, science, in viewing energy, is forced to think, that energy, as such, is indestructible. You can des-struct, that is, undo the construction of something only if it is made of separate quantities, either old style atoms or new style quantities of energy. You cannot des troy unless the thing has been troyed. You cannot subject a thing to destruction unless it has first been constructed, and the struct part and the strict part means to impose a restriction. A restriction on what? On the field of energy under consideration.

Track 4

Think therefore, as clearly as possible, that you have two views of reality. One is the discontinuous view, and because the letter R vibrates, we will say, let the letter R represent the vibratory, discontinuous process and let the letter L represent the continuum view, put the two together and you have the word real. What is real is necessarily, a continuum, the L function, modalising, that is producing apparent differentiation, the R function. Reality is that which differs as a modality of that which does not differ. That which does not differ is the L; that which does differ is the R. Now the R there corresponds exactly with the ahriman of the Persian ancient religion and the L function corresponds with the concept of the endless, the boundless, the akarana, the non-discrete. And the non-created, remember the word ‘create’ means to arc, to draw a circle and that a thing is not created until you put a binding line round it; that if you consider power without lines round it, then you can consider the non-create. Using a, privative alpha, the letter A before a word as in a-social, a-moral, the A means ‘not’. Amoral, not moral, asocial, not social, is in karana, from kra, to create this continuous process, karana meaning a creating process of a continuous binding or arcing, put the letter A before it, a-karana, A KA RA NA. That means the not-created power and as create means draw a circle round it, then the created is in the realm of the letter R, it is in the realm of the discrete, it is in the realm of the particle. In so far as you have a body, which is distinguishable from the body of the person next to you, you are functioning like the letter R signifies, you are differentiating from the other bodies.

Now, think to yourself, there is an infinite ocean of power represented by the L, that this infinite ocean of power is intelligent. Its symbol is light. Then think, that this light, bending through space, like a serpent, is creating in its wave motions, which intersect because it is travelling through itself in all directions, it is creating apparent points of intersection, the intersection of waves apparently produce points. You probably notice that if you sit on the end of a jetty near the sea, and watch the waves coming in, waves might bounce against the jetty, bounce against the boat, be reflected from the jetty and the boat and where these reflected waves cross, you suddenly see a vortex appear, a spin, and it travels about in the water like a little entity on its own. Now it is not really an entity on its own is it? This is the most important thing we can understand, it is not a real entity in itself on its own. It is a behaviour, which appears to us to be on its own. We see a vortex spinning and it is travelling through the water and it might travel through another space between the boat and the jetty and encounter some other vortices from other articles in the water. And all these little zones of vortical spin can behave as if they were entities, but they are not entities and nobody believes they are entities. They believe that the water is spinning.

Now, if we could remember that there are no entities whatever in total reality, other than illusory ones exactly of the same order as those little vortical spins. If you could see your bodies under the appropriate type of instrumentation, you would find that every part of your body is spinning, it is simply energy spinning. Electrons spin round your protons and all these are spinning in their own peculiar ways, and if they did not spin they would not exist. To exist and to rotate are the same thing. If you don’t rotate, you don’t exist.

Track 5

Now here we have the continuum L, the discontinuous appearance R, but the R is only a vibration of that which is signified by the L. Now your tongue is called a lingua, isn’t it? It is a linker. Say the letter L and wipe the roof of your mouth with a luh and then just do this very rapidly, rrrrrrr and now you see immediately, that differentiation arises in your mind when you do that trilled R, but when you do the L it seems as if you are joining something, luuuuuh, can you feel that conjoining, that hanging on, luuuuuh. Feel the difference between the L, which means to conjoin and therefore to belong to the continuum, and the vibrated R which means to create differences. Now we are going to use this letter L for life and love, and the letter R we are going to use for disintegration equals death. If the R triumphs you fall to bits. If the L triumphs then you capture and hold a zone of power.

Now let us consider the continuum is power and this power is sentient. Sentient means that it feels itself, power actually feels itself to be power. Now if it kept absolutely still it would feel still, if it moves, it feels motion. If it moves in a wave-form, it feels on the bend, a tension process.

Let us have a look. If we got a piece of rubber and bent it like this, in the act of bending that piece of rubber we have compressed the inner curve and stretched the outer curve. That is most important to remember. When we bend a thing in that way, we produce a zone of positivity inside the curve, and a zone of extensibility or stretch on the outside of the curve. That means to say if we got this rubber and bent it right round into a circle, like this, then the centre would be positive and all round it, it would be negative or stressed all the way round. Now the positive means that you posit or put something there. Pos sit, this sit is the same base, funnily enough, as stand. S Tsta, to stand and sit are the same word. You sit and stand by simply taking up a place and compressing the energy into that place. But in the act of the compressing the energy, you have taken energy from the environment to posit it. You push energy towards a centre and you are taking the energy from the surrounding environment in order to posit it. We said before that there is a pair of opposite ideas in any idea that you care to consider. We see that if we posit a particle or a complex of particles, which we call a body, a zone of intensification of power, at the very moment we do so, we have done two things. We have brought into existence, into manifestation, something that was invisibly extended in the field of power but we have also isolated it from the surrounding field. So, if we have an intensification zone of a field of power, we have produced, apparently, a being, an existential entity, posited it in the field and abstracted the power from round it. Now we have said that all power feels itself, it is sentient, there is no non-sentient power. So, if this power concentrates itself, contracts onto a centre, it contra acts with itself in the contraction and in this process it becomes aware of itself as an existent felt entity, but round it, it is feeling an exhaustion of space. There seems to be less energy round it than there is posited in its being so it will tend to treat the exhausted space around it as a vacuum, as a void, as free space in which it can move. Let us be quite clear about that, that if we contract energy, we feel intensification of existential being, but also, we also feel around it, voidity. So we have brought two things into being, simultaneously. We have gained the existential reference point but we have lost being awareness around it. We gain and lose simultaneously. You would not think a simple thing like that would occur in the Book of Genesis and that because of it God would say, “Don’t presume to say what is good and what is evil, because what you are now calling good, namely existing, is depriving the field around you and making it look like empty space when it isn’t.