Talent

an excerpt from a talk by Eugene Halliday

Eugene Halliday:

Because God is only interested in people that show a profit.

Christ is very clear about this.

You have talents. If you merely bury them in the ground -that is, identify them with a material body, you will have them taken off you.

But if you can show a five-pointed profit, that is, a profit from your five-senses, He will give you another five to go with it.

If you can show a ten profit or a hundred profit, He will give you as much as you give Him.

And you can continually make profits. You know, ‘it is the first million that’s the hardest to make’.

Yoga is actually giving you the key to making these profits.

The technique of overcoming the appetite is therefore entirely one of realising that it is only overcome by breaking the tyranny of the ego concept.

Give up the idea that this is an individual thing to be overcome by an individual. Break the identification; but do not break the fact. [that is, allow the ego to be, while at the same time, break dentification with it.]

Question:

Please define “talent”.

Eugene Halliday:

‘Thanks’. ‘Ta’ ‘Lent’ is ‘seed’ and Ta. Da is the same word [as Ta]. It is Russian for ‘Yes’; but it is the base, ‘to give’, from which we get ‘datum’. It [Talent] means ‘the given seed’.

‘Seed’ means ‘potential’. ‘Len’ is the same as ‘lin’ which means ‘Weave’, and ‘Lan’, Lancashire, and so on …. Lincolnshire. It is the old name for flax. It means a ‘weaving’ something. ‘T’ is the cross.

So when the ‘everlasting-arms’ cross and spin on their intersection, they weave and bind together. Cross, weave, bind together. That is the seed which is given.

‘Da’ is another name of D or God, the giver.

Any talent you have is simply the natural result of the intersection of forces that have brought you into being as an individual.

To bring those talents out, all you have to do is impede serial thinking.

As long as serial thinking is going on you are still identified with your education. Your education has come from outside. You have been told as a baby: should, must, ought, Do X. You have been given verbal forms about it. You have been made on guard about it. So most of your energy is continuously watching in case you infringe the social taboos.

Take this energy that is always watching, to see if you are going to get caught, and focus it on your feeling.

Initially, you might have to retire into a dark room so that what you do there will not shock you. As you gradually become aware of the forces within your body as you allow them to express, you might be able to switch the light on -preferably with a rheostat on it.

When you become thoroughly able to look at yourself in the full light of consciousness, your serial thinking will stop.

At that point you will become aware of cosmic forces intersecting within and their intention with you. You become aware of the weavings of powers that are being established and crossed in you and that have been given to you.

Question:

This word ‘talent’ and ‘genius’ seem to be closely related.

Eugene Halliday:

They are very closely related because this word ‘ge’ means ‘earth’, the ‘n’ means ‘motion’, point ( i ), power (‘u’), issue (‘s’).

A genius is simply the spirit power in the point emerging by moving from the earth. That earth, that ‘ge’ is the same little dark dot that we started with when we wrote the word ‘good’.

A genius is a being that breaks down his own earth, the earth of his body, and by penetrating into the mysteries of his own sensorium, brings OUT OF HIMSELF, instead of out of the environment, the hidden powers that are vested in him.

This last part of the name is the same word that we use in our hermeneutic symbol. It means ‘Joshua’, (Jesus), ‘affirmation saves’, the ‘issue of power from the point’, and so on. It means ‘Jesus’. This ‘gen’ or ‘earth motion’ is generation.

Talent can only be brought out by penetrating to the mystery of a rotten education. By rotten education, we mean an education that contains within itself the meaning of its own disintegration.

You know that factually lots of parents worry continuously about their children not learning things that the parents have forgotten. So that the knowledges that those parents fought for when they were kiddies has corrupted and disappeared and is considered of no account by the grown-ups; yet through sheer inertia, they drill the kids to acquire this same rubbish.

To detect that it is rubbish and throw it away and not to try and impose this on anyone else -to learn how to stop serialising and feel the intersecting forces there, and let them express.

I mean this literally. Go in a dark room so you cannot even see yourself. Take the furniture out so you don’t do something funny like bang your elbow, and feel for what is in your body, and let it express. Have half an hour of it. Warn people if they hear funny noises to ignore them. If we had a soundproof room in this house it could be done under control conditions. But if it cannot, then you can do it at home, alone.

You can feel in the dark, so that you cannot see yourself. [seeing will paralyse, feeling will mobilise]

If you see yourself in a mirror in broad daylight, or even electric light, you will not dare to move because the visual stimulus will stimulate the memory of the times you have been told by watching eyes, “Don’t do X”.

Learn it in the dark – and then gradually turn the light up until you can bear to look at the facts.

Don’t try and see it too quickly, because from excess of light, darkness.

If you were to try to do the kind of exercise we are talking about outside the public library in Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon, you will feel inhibited.

Therefore, Jesus said, “Pray in secret and your Father who seeth in secret will reward you openly”.

Eugene Halliday circa late 1950s Liverpool, England.

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