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62. Man pursues the formal knowledge of the ultimate cause of phenomena. From his ideation tendency he seeks form, and from his initiative he pursues cause, which for him is the ultimate initiative.	158
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63. While man pursues idea and initiative causal power, woman seeks satisfaction in the embodiment of these in the relation she experiences with man at the concrete level of her feeling and body existence.	160
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64. The feeling awareness stressed in the female is orientated away from merely abstract considerations towards concrete personal and particular relations, towards subjective emotional involvement of one person in another. This subjective tendency opposes and complements the male determination to fix the objective limits of things, events and relations.	162
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65. Woman tends thus to live in subjective, personal, particular relations, as man tries to live in objective, impersonal and general relations. This fact is one of the most fruitful sources of misunderstanding between man and woman.	164
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66. An example may illustrate this. A man tends to think that once a formal declaration has been made of a relation between himself and the woman of his choice, the relation should now require no further attention, no re-statement or corroboration. He accepts the formal declaration as evidence of the existence of the relation. He assumes because of his own stress of formal mental processes that the woman will likewise accept the declaration of the relation as equivalent to the relation. He assumes that she will therefore proceed with all those relational activities for which he committed himself into relation with her.	168
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67. The woman, however, with her feeling stress and material body-orientation, has a different view of the situation. She has no intention of assuming the relation to exist simply because of the man's verbal declaration to that effect. She wishes the relation to be felt, not merely ideated or thought. She wishes the relation to be personal, particular, concrete and substantially factual, an existential relation, not an abstraction owing itself only to words.	170
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68. Especially from her stress on her material body (the ground of her motherhood-potential) woman desires that the relation between herself and her man shall be materially established. It is not accident that Mater-ial is so spelled. The mater or mother principle dwells in the concrete material world. It is essentially matter-orientated, mother-centred and earth-bound, as opposed to the power and knowledge orientation of man.	172
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69. Let us re-state what we have said so far. The whole human being has four basic qualities, which we may express in various ways. We may call them spirit, mind, soul and body; or initiative power, ideo-rational function, affective or feeling response and mass inertia; or free intelligence, rationality, feeling awareness and material vehicle. These modes of expressing the facts, with many others, are all equally valid in their ultimate significance.	176
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7. Power to initiate change we may call simply "initiative". Power to formulate we may call "ideation". Power to feel we may call "sentience" (from Latin "sentire", to feel). Power to resist change, which is mass inertia, we may call "substantiality", or in a certain sense, "body".	22
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70. Because similarly constituted beings have not a high stimulus value for each other, polarisation or sexual differentiation was evolved in order to raise the stimulus-intensity of relations, and thus accelerate humanity's evolution. The goal to be reached is the regaining of absolute awareness, the awareness of the Absolute Sentient Power from which we derive, and which awareness was lost in the veiling of consciousness implied in the descent into material manifestation in a finite body vehicle, a descent symbolically expressed in the myth of the Fall of Lucifer and of Adam.	178
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71. Exactly similar beings may conjoin or fuse without great change in their level of awareness or response-capacity. But the less similar are the beings entering a relation, and the less easy is the assimilation of each other's stimulus content, the more the level of awareness of the relation is raised, and the greater the likelihood of self-awareness and subsequent self-examination. Relational difficulties tend to force self-awareness on the partners in a relation, a self-awareness which, if positively affirmed, may accelerate man's evolution to the level of the absolute awareness which constitutes his ultimate goal and self-fulfilment.	182
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72. All relational tensions and difficulties tend to accelerate evolution provided that they do not require a greater energy expenditure in adaptive responses than the receiving organism possesses. It is a good thing, therefore, from the evolutionary point of view, if we expose ourselves to tension situations and relational difficulties to the full extent of the energy we have sufficient for adaptive responses.	184
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73. Self-awareness may be either positive or negative. In its negative phase it is pre-absorbed with its own impotence or ineffectuality. It is morbidly self-centred and tends towards pathological states and disease of mind and body.	186
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74. In its positive phase self-awareness is actively engaged in furthering the process of self-discovery. It aims at the attainment of permanent self-reflexion, the gaining of the reflexive self-consciousness which will establish the self as a vehicle of the Absolute Sentient Power, source of all being, which works incessantly for and through evolving nature for the creation of such vehicles.	188
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75. Ultimately life aims at permanent self-preservation, at immortality, and the only way to gain this is by acquiring absolute assimilation power and adaptability, both of which in the last analysis depend on full reflexive self-consciousness (resec).	190
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76. If we are to become able to adapt to every conceivable situation and to assimilate every conceivable stimulus, (the pre-condition of immortality), our awareness must be raised to such a level that we shall be able to detect immediately any change in any environment, and our adaptability and stimulus assimilation power must likewise reach optimal level of efficiency. To this end we must be prepared to expose ourselves to whatever stimulus situations may be necessary for the development of the capacity we seek.	192
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77. The kind of relation which most tends to expose to our awareness the parts of our being most needing development must obviously be an intimate one. The most intimate of all relations, the relation which exposes the greatest number of our characteristics in the relation is, of course, marriage.	196
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78. In marriage a man and woman expose their beings one to the other on every plane. Not only is the heart involved in the relation, but every element of the organism, every function, spiritual, mental, psychic and physical. Here body, soul, mind and spirit must meet in reciprocal exposure for the attainment of the highest goal, the development of the reflexively self-conscious being, the resec being whose awareness is so immediate in response that nothing whatever in any world, in heaven or on earth or beneath it, can find him unready. Such a being of immediate adequate response has the absolute security which is immortality, the power to subsist and function perfectly in all possible worlds.	198
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79. If we do not gain understanding of ourselves, if we do not attain full reflexive self-consciousness, the awareness of every aspect and function of our being, if we do not gain immediacy of adequate response to every conceivable event or situation, whatever else we gain we shall not gain the one thing which alone rescues all from vanity, that is, immortality, the power to resist disintegration and death absolutely. Without immortality all other attainments are ultimately vain, for when death comes all achievements are laid to oblivion in the grave.	202
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8. Initiative, ideation, sentience, substantiality. These are the four basic elements of the human being. If the first two (initiative and ideation) are stressed we refer to the being as male; if the second two (sentience and substantiality) are stressed we refer to the being as female.	26
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80. The Absolute Sentient Power, infinite and eternal source of our being, for which the great religions and philosophies have coined many names, aims at no lower level than itself. It purposes to go down into manifestation through the great mother, universal matter, and to return through its highest evolved creatures to itseIf. Man, as one of its highest evolutes, has in himself the potential of this return. It is a divine imperative in him that he develops this potential into actuality.	204
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81. Man can return to the absolute level of reflexive self-consciousness only because he derives from that level. "No man ascends to the Father but he that came down from the Father."	206
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82. Let us consider the way down, that is, the way into manifestation or creation. Before creation, or beyond the level we call creation, the Absolute Sentient Power in the Infinite Eternal is in no way limited, determined or circumscribed. We call the ultimate source of all things the Absolute when we consider it in itself as it is when all created forms are washed away or absolved from it.	210
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83. When all that we call formal manifestation, the finited order of the universe and all its limited forms and functions, is considered as washed away, there remains only the originating causal power of all these things. We then say that the Absolute Sentient Power of the Infinite Eternal remains in itself as a pure infinite actuality without any finiting or limiting process. Creation itself is a finiting process, that is, a process in which finite or limited things come into existence, It is because creation is a finiting process that we say that creation is the way down, that is, the way to a fall of potential. The deeper the entrance into material existence, the less power manifests as free power and the more it takes on the aspect of mass-inertia or substantiality or body-determination and mechanicality.	212
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84. The word "create" indicates something of this. It is derived from a root "kra" which, read boustrophedon, gives also "ark" or "arc". Not to be deceived with a flat earth image the completed arc gives a circle, which is an easy-to-represent symbol on a plane surface of a sphere, the sphere being the ultimate or original type of all created things.	214
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85. Although for economy's sake we refer to the Infinite and Eternal Absolute Sentient Power simply as the Absolute, we must not fail to remember that by the Absolute we do not mean a merely abstract concept of the source of all reality but the very fullness of the Infinite Eternal Absolute Sentient Power itself as the pre-analytic origin of all created things whatever, which nevertheless transcends creation absolutely.	216
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86. The Absolute before and beyond creation is an infinite, eternal, non-dual, sentient power. By non-dual we mean having no duality, no two-ness, no self-contradictions in itself. Whatever it is, it is infinitely, that is, not finitely, without limitation.	218
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87. Having no limit before the beginning of its creative activity, the Absolute has yet no object on which to centre itself. It is infinitely sentient and yet knows nothing, for prior to creation there is nothing for it to know. Also, because the Absolute is power as well as sentience, not only has it nothing to know prior to creation, but also it has no object on which to exercise its power.	220
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88. With its infinite sentience, before creation, the Absolute feels its infinite power as an unlimited potential of creative activity. It feels this as an infinite, unformulated yearning which creative activity alone can assuage. This is why it is said, "God is Love", and "God so loved the world. . ."	224
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89. The Love of the Absolute is the will of the infinite eternal sentient power to develop its infinite potentialities of being. But this love can fulfil itself only in infinite creative activity, and creative activity implies the production of finite beings. A finite created being is in fact simply the finiting process of the absolute in the place of that being. The implications of this for individual created beings are of the greatest significance.	226
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9. If the female elements could be wholly eliminated from a human being (which is impossible), such a being would be a being possessing only initiative and ideation, having no feeling awareness or substantiality and therefore no body or stable centre of reference. If the male elements could be entirely removed from the female that being would be a being of mere feeling and substantiality, a sort of passive feeling substance unable to do anything except wait for some force outside to act upon it.	28
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90. Every created thing or being is, by the fact of its being created, brought into limitation or circumscription. A line of force is drawn round every created thing to separate it from every other created thing. This circumscription is the origin of the symbolic circumcision of the chosen for out of the infinity of possible forms of existence only certain of these are worthy of perpetuation to eternity.	228
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91.	228
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92. The Absolute is not a thing, not a finite or limited substance. Because it is not a thing and yet is the source of all things, we have to say that things are created out of nothing. A thing is merely a finited zone of activity within the infinite no-thing, which is the Absolute. The word "nothing" is simply the negation of the word "thing". As a thing is a limited function of the unlimited, a negative zone of restricted activity, it is correct for us to refer to a thing as negative. If then we negate the negative, that is, eliminate a limited being, what results is the re-affirmation of the unlimited Absolute as it is before creation. Two negatives here make a positive, as they do grammatically.	236
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93. The Infinite Absolute creates within itself, not out of itself, for there is no outside of infinity. This is why we say, "in him we live, move, and have our being".	240
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94. The Absolute creative activity is a process within itself, whereby it produces finite or limited forms simply as functions of itself. Wherever the Absolute Power sets up inside itself a rotation zone or impulse centre, there by that fact a being comes into existence. The word "existence" in its origin implies the creation of a zone of rotation, a wheel of force, or a point of affirmation of power.	242
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95. We must here note a very important point. Wherever a portion of the Absolute Power, a quantity of energy, is totally involved in the production of a finite being, this being cannot observe itself from outside. Its energy is wholly involved in its being and thus leaves none over with which to look at itself from outside and to initiate changes in itself. This means that of itself it cannot evolve to a higher level of being.	246
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96. A being whose energy is totally involved in its self, in actualising its being, cannot see itself or evolve to new levels, or create new character-emergents. It tends always to repeat the same cycle of functions in the same way. Its being is its actuality; its actuality is its being. Because of this, if significant change is to be introduced into such a being, there must be some force available from outside itself, which will act upon it to produce the change.	248