Eugene Halliday
Halliday was an artist, writer and musician, who lived and worked in the Manchester area of NW England. He studied the philosophies and religious ideas of both East and West; literature, especially Shakespeare and Blake; psychology, and science. He was a skilled in hermeneutics, or interpretation, of religious and philosophical texts, and taught that there was truth underlying all religions. He worked 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”.* In the 1950s he founded, with his friend Khen Ratcliffe, the International Hermeneutic Society. In the mid 1960s he founded Ishval, the Institute for the Study of Hierological Values, which offered “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”.**
Ishval’s aims, as stated by Halliday, are
The promotion of human and divine values; the study of concepts contained in the hierological traditions of all nations and peoples.
The interpretation of these concepts.
The formulation of these concepts into a mode of education such that full human value may be derived from their application.
The teaching of these concepts to all persons who desire to receive such teaching and are prepared to put them into practice, insofar as this should prove possible for them.
‘Love God and Your neighbour as yourself.’ By God is here meant Absolute Infinite Intelligent Power, containing within itself, in pure actuality, all that man conceives as valuable. Love, life, personality etc., and infinitely more than man can at present conceive. By ‘neighbour’ is meant other occupants of the universe. By ‘as yourself’ is meant that the self of the neighbour and of oneself is essentially one at source. By ‘love’ is meant ‘work for the development of the potentialities of being’. Thus, ‘Love God and your neighbour as yourself’ means ‘work for the development of the purpose of the Absolute Infinite Intelligent Power and for all its creatures within the sphere of creation.***
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* Reflexive Self-Consciousness, by Eugene Halliday, Melchisedec Press, ISBN No.: 1-872240-01-1
** Constitution of Ishval, 1966
*** Eugene Halliday, handwritten definition of Ishval’s Aims, unpublished Halliday archive
Eugene Halliday
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).
[To be continued]
Eugene Halliday
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.