The Eugene Halliday Podcast

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.

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.” 

Instead of saying a person has died, we should say that they have withdrawn their interest from that body.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)

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.

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.

Talk given at Parklands (Manchester, UK) on 28th February 1982.