Eugene Halliday
Eugene Halliday (1911 – 1987) was an Artist who lived and worked for most of his life in the Manchester area of the North West of England. He studied at the Manchester Municipal School of Art from 1928 – 1931, and then worked for Allied Newspapers as a commercial artist; returning for two years advanced study from 1933-34 and 1940-41(1). Halliday’s art extended beyond the visual arts, into art as ‘articulation’. He was not an academic but was an interpreter of philosophy, the scriptures of ancient religions and the science of his day. He laid great emphasis on the need to acquire an ‘active vocabulary’ through the use of etymological dictionaries(2). At some point, possibly during the Second World War, Halliday began giving talks both publicly and privately. These were on a wide variety of subjects, including esoteric material. He was highly articulate, and used his artistic skills to illustrate his points as he talked, through drawings and diagrams(3). He went on to found two societies which became registered charities: the International Hermeneutic Society (IHS) during the 1950s, and the Institute for the Study of Hierological Values (Ishval) in the mid-1960s (now known also by the working name, ‘Eugene Halliday Society’) (4). Halliday had many supporters who valued his work, which enabled him to concentrate his energies on his writing and teaching from the 1950s up until his death in 1987. Donald Lord, President of the IHS, wrote that those who knew Halliday personally, knew that “he was not one of those money-oriented teachers who present themselves as the sole source of light unattainable by their disciples”; Halliday maintained that “the highest centre of each of us is unique”, and that that which we seek is within. (5)
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(1) Source: Student Record Cards, Archive of Manchester Metropolitan University.
(2) See the ‘Rules of Ishval’, Projects page on this website - click on Show Documents for Eugene Halliday Society (if these are not visible, they will be added in due course).
(3) Sources: personal memories of the author and many members of the Society; Halliday’s published works and recorded lectures on this website.
(4) IHS, founded by Eugene Halliday and Khen Ratcliffe. Ishval, founded by Eugene Halliday with Fred Freeman and David Mahlowe. ‘Hermeneutics’ means ‘interpretation’ ( the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law). ‘Hierological values’ are the values contained within the ancient texts of all religions, such as the Bible, the Torah, Qabala, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao de Jing, and later works including Jacob Boehme and William Blake, to name but a few. ‘Hierology’ means literature or learning regarding sacred things; from classical Greek ‘hieros’, sacred.
(5) International Hermeneutic Society website.
Eugene Halliday
[Scroll up for the beginning of this section.] Eugene Halliday is not known to have left any autobiographical material, and did not speak much about his personal life. However, a few facts can be gleaned. He was born into a large family of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. His parents Edgar and Elizabeth were Music Hall Artistes (1). His upbringing was unconventional: Halliday said that his father brought up each of his children in a different religion, to suit each individual; and that he had been brought up as a Catholic (2). However, his father came from a family who were members of the Moravian Church (3). Music was, and is, important to Moravian worship, and it is possible to surmise that this may have been important within Halliday’s family – his grandfather became a music shop keeper in London, and Edgar Halliday was a music teacher in his teens, before embarking on his Music Hall career, which brought him to Manchester in the 1890s (4). Eugene Halliday himself played the violin as a young man, like his father, but through an event of unknown nature, acquired a partial paralysis of his left side, which gave him a tremor and a limp. Notwithstanding this, and being of very slim build, he was physically extremely strong (5). Halliday recounted being kept up late at night in conversation by his father, as a child (5). It is possible that the interests which he developed in adult life, may have been part of the environment of his early years.
Eugene Halliday was 16 years old when he first attended the Manchester Municipal School of Art. He studied full time for 3 years, in drawing and painting, life, costume, etching, lettering etc. Unfortunately there is insufficient information to say exactly what qualification he gained, but it may have been a Diploma in Fine Art, or something similar. He took advanced evening classes in 1933 and 1940, in Life, Costume, Natural Forms and Modelling (6). As well as his work as a commercial artist, he supplemented his income in the early days by portrait drawing of holiday makers in the Isle of Man (8) and by setting up a “cottage industry” carving and reproducing small models in plaster. This involved several of his friends, who manufactured the models in quantity and sold them in various places, such as Lewis’s department store in Manchester(7). Halliday was a fine draftsman and observer of character, some of his early drawings from the 1930s-1940s survive and have been published in the Halliday Review.
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(1) Source: Birth/Marriage/Death (BMD) Certificates
(2)Source: Personal reminiscence of the author.
(3) A Protestant Christian Church, founded 1457 in Bohemia; now a worldwide church. Reference: http://www.moravian.org.uk/pages/moravian_frame1.html
(4) Source: BMD and Census records.
(5) Source: Personal reminiscence of the author, from conversation with Halliday and also with Barbara Lamb, a contemporary of his who knew him from teenage years.
(6) Source: Student Record Cards, Archive of Manchester Metropolitan University.
(7) Source: Personal reminiscence of the author and others.
Eugene Halliday
[Scroll up for the beginning of this section.] Eugene Halliday was a British artist, philosopher and teacher. For a large part of his life he lived and taught in Manchester and Altrincham, England, giving talks, running groups and giving personal tuition to a large number of interested people. He was a gifted artist, a writer of books, plays and poetry as well as possessing a profound understanding of philosophy and religion. Much of his work centred around his interpretation of the esoteric ideas behind religion and he also practised and taught an approach to psychotherapy.
He gave the term "absolute sentient power" to what we would call God and said that sentience and thus consciousness was an inherent quality of this power and by extension of all substances and created beings. Beings, including ourselves are modalities of this power which we feel as a field of energy, from which and through which we are informed about ourselves and the world. The goal and purpose of life is to grow towards an awareness of our true nature which is not different from this field and the absolute sentient power itself. This consciousness he called "reflexive self-consciousness" (resec for short). The force which calls and drives beings to work towards resec is Love – which he defined as "working to develop the potentialities of being". Because of his own understanding and wisdom he valued individuality and encouraged others to discover their own valid way to reveal reflexivity to themselves. His extraordinary breadth of knowledge allowed him to interpret ideas from a variety of sources and made him a true renaissance man.
ISHVAL:
Eugene Halliday's work was wide ranging in scope, and he brought together into a coherent whole concepts from hierology (sacred texts), art, religion, philosophy, psychology and science. From his insight into human thought and motivation, he stated that no school of thought has access to the only truth about reality, that no one religion possesses the only true path to the divine. "Each great philosopher has been a doorway for a part of Truth" (Reflexive Self-Consciousness, p 4). In 1966 he founded the Charity ISHVAL, the Institute for the Study of Hierological Values, the objects of which are: a)The promotion and propagation of the principles of Truth in all Religions in order to achieve unity in interpretations of Sacred Writings between all denominations and mutual understanding and practice of the principles of Truth in a true spirit of ecumenism. b)The instruction and education of all persons desirous of learning in the study of hierological values in relation to religion and philosophy for the better appreciation and enjoyment of art and science and the purpose of life.
Ecumenism and the principles of truth in all religions:
Halliday's ecumenism was of the most universal variety. While at the core of his teaching was the concept of the primacy of Jesus Christ, it came from an inner understanding of the nature of Love, and transcended the bounds of any religious orthodoxy. He had an integrated view of the development of world religions. "India's religion (Hinduism) is non-historical, concerns itself with the Eternal Recurrence, the Great Cycle, Days and Nights of Brahma that endlessly follow each other: Yoga is aimed to break the cycle by releasing the individual from Manvantara into eternal Nirvana." In Judaism, a select group of people were separated from the mass of animal-men and subjected to pressures which led to the attainment of group consciousness; their commandments were negative "Thou shalt not". Jesus Christ "presents the first true individuated person able to stand against the elect group". The commandments of Christianity were positive, "Thou shalt love". Having taught his disciples, he left them "so that they too may find themselves and become authors of their own being". "In Islam is no barrier of race or colour or class. The goal was not the individual as such, but the individual-able-to-relate-to-all-beings without self-loss or regression". "The one Eternal Religion which Hindu thought intuited appears in its historical aspect in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as Law (Father), Love (Son) and Illuminative Knowledge (Holy Ghost). The Fourth Revelation (Maitreya) will but put these three together as of equal validity in the cosmic plan." (The Halliday Review, Spring 2006, 'Religion – Eternity and Time')
Central concepts in the work of Eugene Halliday:
Advaita, or non-dualism -
Halliday's philosophy is non-dualist, as in the Hindu concept of advaita, expounded by Adi Shankara and other advaitin philosophers. Advaita is sometimes described as a monistic philosophy, but Halliday is careful to distinguish it both from monism and pluralism, as a description of the nature of the universe, and our relationship to 'God' or 'absolute sentient power' (see above) (A.S.P.). "Infinity is not comprehensible in a monistic concept, for monism implies circumscription, which is encapsulation or finitisation [making finite]. Non-dualism and Non-pluralism refer to the Infinity of the Absolute Sentient Power (A.S.P.), the infinite modalising activities of which generate all noumena and phenomena. Monism is an attempt to grasp in a knowable concept that which is of itself unknowable, for to know is to finite form within the A.S.P." (Contributions from a Potential Corpse, Book II, p 101)
According to Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, Brahman (God, or the Supreme Cosmic Spirit) is the only reality; Maya is the illusionary power of Brahman "which causes the Brahman to be seen as the illusory world"; the Atman (soul or self) is not different from Brahman (see Wikipedia article Advaita Vedanta).
Halliday's concept of 'A.S.P.' is related to the Hindu concept of Brahman, and to the Greek philosopher Anaximander's aperion, the 'limitless or boundless' source of the world. "The Absolute is an infinite sentient power, an eternal continuum of motion. Because it is sentient it feels its own motion. Its motion is the content of its sentiency. It is from this fact that is derived the principle that says that a being knows only the modifications of its own substance; or consciousness is aware only of its own modalities" (Reflexive Self-Consciousness, p 10). Individual beings are rotatory motions, or modalities, within the A.S.P., and are not-different from It. And not only individual beings but all phenomena: "Ultimately we have to say that all things we know, all the ideas we think, and all the feeling states we experience, the totality of phenomena of all worlds, are merely modalities of the motion initiated and sustained by the Infinite Sentient Power we call God" (Contributions from a Potential Corpse, Book I, p 25).
Reflexive self-consciousness is a concept, related to that of enlightenment, formulated by Eugene Halliday during the 1940s-1950s in England.
Eugene Halliday made a lifelong study of art, religion, philosophy, psychology and science. From his understanding he formulated a coherent set of ideas. In his seminal work "Reflexive Self-Consciousness", he sets out the nature of consciousness and its relation to the world of phenomena, being, and mankind. From this he explains how consciousness itself can become "reflexive". By this he means that consciousness becomes completely self-transparent and continuously aware of its own presence and nature.
He says that when observing a thing or situation we can promote this reflexive state by turning our own consciousness back onto itself. "It is the self, which is consciousness itself which is observing this thing, this self I am, I return to the self." By placing our nature as observer at the heart of his work, Halliday sets out a method by which to liberate ourselves from object-identification, which locks us into a cycle of conditioned reflexes, pleasure pursuit and pain avoidance.
Halliday examines the meaning of the related terms sentience, consciousness, feeling, sensation, awareness. All are related, and to some degree interchangeable; all refer to "that in and by which we know what we know, and that we know". He sees consciousness as a fundamental quality of being and not, as some materialists would suggest a product of complexity in matter derived from evolution. Halliday states that if we do not posit sentience or consciousness as a property of that source which is present "from the very beginning of creation or evolution, we cannot find a point later at which we may logically introduce it".
This assertion may be challenged by those looking for proof. Halliday explains that if we ask ourselves what this statement means, we can only say "we know what we mean. Consciousness is its own evidence" (p. i). He then goes on to say that we cannot indicate what we mean by one of these consciousness-related words "without appealing to that in us, which corresponds with their significance, that is, to that in us which knows that it knows".
He sees a complex structure of cells, such as the brain, as "a vehicle for the expression of the complex processes of consciousness" and not as the origin of that consciousness. No matter how complex the arrangement, consciousness cannot arise from the biochemical interactions of a large number of non-sentient particles.
Halliday posits that the ultimate source and origin of our being is sentient and conscious. He sees this origin as an infinite field of sentient power. Halliday compares the activity of this infinite field of sentient power, the source of all beings, to that of the sea. Its internal movements, its waves, create vortices within it, which give rise to all the observable phenomena of the world. Atoms, molecules, cells, plants, animals, mankind, human beings, all are formed within this infinite sentient field, and all are sentient. There is no non-sentient level of being. Thus agreeing with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead when he said "there are no dead gaps in Nature". This infinite field of sentient power, which is the ultimate source of the universe and all within it, is the Godhead of the theologians, the Absolute of the philosophers.
Halliday says that the true nature of the self is consciousness itself. As beings with physical bodies, we are conditioned by the limitations of our sense organs, by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain and by emotional charges in the records of our experiences, so that we often behave in a reactive manner as if we were no more than animals, with no free choice. If we learn to remember the nature of our true self, and our source in consciousness, we can free ourselves from this enslavement and become human, capable of free choice and action.
Before evolution, Eugene Halliday posits an "involution", whereby the motions of this absolute sentient power creates the universe and all the beings in it. Consciousness tends to fall into identification with beings, down to the grossest physical level of the mineral world. Through the process of evolution, sentience evolves through mineral, plant, animal and human to rediscover its true nature as Consciousness itself, at one with the infinite field of consciousness. This return of consciousness to its source, is the Reflexive Self-Consciousness of the title of the book.
"Reflexive Self-Consciousness", by Eugene Halliday, Melchisedec Press, ISBN No.: 1-872240-01-1 (Available through the Bookshop and Halliday Archive pages of this website.)