The word ‘Hieros’ used to be used for a person who, today, we would call a ‘priest’. Yet the two terms mean very different things: It is “a change from consideration of power, as such, to reason.”
There are two ways of looking at human motivation. One is to assume that it should be based on reason, and the other is that it has no need to be rational “whenever it can get away with being irrational.” In the past, men of power could impose their will on others by brute force. There is no reason to believe this has changed. Only ‘mutually assured destruction’ prevents it. He thinks the present youth will become “fed up” with peace. They are as reactive as they always were and can swing from pacifism to becoming warlike very quickly. He refers to Mao Tse Tung and Kruschev and imagines a world after a third, world war; the world’s population halved, and the survivors living in scattered groups across the globe. (Nuclear war was looking very likely at the time.) He asks: “What is the function of the intelligence of those people, how much will they know about what to do?” What would be needed is a group of people, in every major area of each country, sufficiently intelligent to lead those groups and establish some sort of cooperative arrangements. (He asks for a show of hands to indicate if anyone believes nuclear war can be averted.) Those of us left will have a duty to lead the people who are left. (The rest of the talk is about the human condition and the use of power.)
A human being is a modality of energy. The body is an object of reference, and within it, the processes of thinking, feeling and willing, are also modalities of energy. In the human this energy can “determine its own course” because we have free will. He uses the letter H to represent a ladder. The symbol is ancient and means ‘Ultimate Power’ differentiated by its modalities. The universe is power and this power is a continuum, it has no parts. “Whatever it does, in any locality within itself, it is the sole authority for so doing.” All problems have solutions only in terms of power modality. “A person who has no power…is at the mercy of any other zone of modalising power.” The dexter side of the H represents power in its fullness, power that knows it cannot be beaten. (He writes ‘have’ on this side; on the other side, ‘have-not’). If we have power in thought, feeling and action, we are on the dexter side. If we are deficient in any of these, we are moving towards the sinister side. In politics, the right-hand side is Conservative, Labour on the left.
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