The Eugene Halliday Podcast

Episode 9 - Desire and the Ego

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 25th September 1977. 
Eugene responds to three (3) questions; namely: 
1. Can desire be stilled? 
2. How does one intelligently use the egotism with which we are burdened? 
3. What is the origin of all true religion? 
A key takeaway from the talk is "...if we listen to ourselves internally in the innermost, we will always find we have an intention to evolve towards freedom, towards greater self-awareness and towards greater creativity." 
Eugene describes the manner in which desire, enlightened egotism and world religions assist us in this task.
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net. 

Episode 8 - Reflexive Self-Consciousness

Talk recorded in Liverpool, UK. 
Eugene discusses 'Reflexive Self-Consciousness', which is understood to be at the core of all of his teachings. 
Consciousness itself is philosophically undefinable. Consciousness is that in which things exist and are defined. The things are defined, but consciousness is not defined; nor is it definable. Consciousness is an immediate awareness by a conscious being, by a subject. The object of a subject is something that the subject has made actually by its own power. 
Reflexive Self-Consciousness can only be known by the person who has it. 
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 7 - Love and Death

Talk given on 29th June 1975. 
Eugene begins by saying that to examine the idea of death he has to examine the opposite, because they are “mutually defining.” However, the opposite of death is not ‘life’ but ‘love’. The word ‘live’ refers to the individual (the ‘i’ signifies ‘individuation’). The word ‘love’ requires another being, two or more are needed. Death means ‘disintegration’, and in this sense, death of the physical body occurs when it disintegrates.
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 6 - Philosopher’s Stone

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 25th May 1986. 
We begin by examining the meaning of 'stone'. Eugene suggests approaching it from the idea of: S means ‘Spirit’, T means ‘fixation’ or ‘crucifixion’, N means both ‘negation’ and ‘intelligence’. The fundamental idea in ‘ST one’ is that all matter is really spirit, self-fixated and when this stone is discovered it will confer immortality on the owner. The word ‘philosopher’ is defined as: lover of ‘soph’, of wisdom. ‘Soph’ reversed is ‘phos’ which means ‘light’. So ‘soph’ actually means the word ‘light’ turned around and back to its source; i.e. reflexive awareness.
We each know lots of things, but can we say that we know that we know them? To be reflexively aware we have to be able to say that we can will, what we feel, what we know. To be reflexive is to be able to say: “I don’t only know it, I know that I know it; I don’t only will it, I will that I will it. That is the highest function of any conscious being; to be reflexive.” 
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 5 - Body Wisdom

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 24th July 1975. 
Eugene delivers a talk about the wisdom in the body, and not of it. Wisdom is defined as “total knowledge in its simultaneity.” Anything less may be knowledge, but it is not wisdom. We have extensive knowledge of the body from the world of empirical science, but the accumulation of this knowledge does not give us ‘body wisdom’.
Taking a body to pieces may give us information about it and make us feel clever that we can do this, but the exact opposite is to observe and understand that what the scientist has “discovered” was already in it. “If you examine the brain of a frog, what astonishes you is not your own cleverness, but the cleverness of the intelligence that made the brain of the frog.”
This second way is far more ancient than the scientific way and reveals the innermost soul of the being examined. Whatever organism we examine, we can say that the forces that produced that organism must have been involved into it. Every part of the structure of a living being is a wonder of intelligent organisation, and behind both structure and function is energy. Energy means “in work affirming,” en-erg-y(a). Somehow, this energy can cause a chameleon to change colour and a plaice to disguise itself from predators. Somehow, it can cause intuition in humans, and all the complex, mental processes that we are capable of. All are functions of energy, manifesting in the organism. 
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 4 - Life is Hard

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 29th September 1985. 
Eugene responds to an audience member who states “Life is hard and ends in death.” 
‘Hard” = HRD =Hierarchical, Discriminative, Division. “The ‘universe is hard’ means that...there are differences of power and discriminative ability.” People are different in all manner of ways. They do not think, feel or will in the same way. “No two individuals are identical in any respect, that is the meaning of hard.” 
Everybody believes that death is certain, but what is it? It is the leaving of the life-principle which animates the physical body. He gives the example of a dying sparrow; the eye is bright and then suddenly “ceases to shine.” A moment before there was a consciousness looking out of the eye, and now it has gone, departed. That consciousness does not move to a different spatial location, so we cannot say where did it go?It has simply ‘detuned’ its “hierarchical, discriminative power”, it has stopped its focus on that body.
Instead of saying a person has died, we should say that they have withdrawn their interest from that body. 
(Note: The last 20 minutes of audio is not as clear, due to flaws in the original recording. It may be beneficial to listen to the podcast after downloading a transcript from www.eugene-halliday.net/download_transcripts)

Episode 3 - Goodness, Truth and Beauty

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 23rd February 1975. 
We begin by considering the three-part man. Truth goes into the head, Beauty in the chest, and Goodness in the belly. Truth is perfection, as in a perfect circle, or a perfect straight line. A circle includes and excludes. It includes a finite amount of space and excludes an infinite amount. It is a synonym for rota, form, shape, sphere, eidos (idea), and for True. When we think we encapsulate forms, shapes of experiences, in ideas. If all of our ideas correspond with the external forms we see in the world then they are true ideas. This is how a sane person can operate in the world. 
The entire universe is arranged by rotation: electrons orbit their nucleus, planets orbit the sun, which orbits a central point in the galaxy. Simultaneously, every body is spinning on its own axis. “This turning around a centre is everywhere the same, so the one, universal law is rotation.” Whenever a circle is drawn, the ratio of the radius to the circumference is the same. “So one law rules all form.” This is the basis of classical philosophy. 
A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 2 - Enlightenment

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) in 1974.
Eugene compares Eastern and Western approaches to 'enlightenment'. The terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ do not refer to geography but to the human body. The East is the consciousness in the centre of our body, the West is the body itself, the physical world. The sun, the light of consciousness, rises in the East and shines to the West, the physical body.
Since the Renaissance, we in the West have taken the empirical approach to understanding ourselves. In the East, the mystical, introvert discovery of the centre of consciousness has been the tradition. Consciousness depends on a containing periphery, an integument, a skin, which allows discrimination between outside and inside. The periphery is the demarcation line between consciousness inside and outside. It is the resistances of the boundaries within the body that gives rise to consciousness. Without this body of resistances we would not be conscious. The universal energy that flows through all bodies becomes conscious as it flows through resistances.A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.

Episode 1 - God as Projectionist

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 28th February 1982. Eugene introduces the analogy of the projectionist in the cinema. When we hear the word ‘God’ we should forget all we have been taught and just think “Generative, Intelligent Power.” The Universe we know is entirely energy, power at work, and this power is sentient.A transcript is available at www.eugene-halliday.net.