Eugene Halliday

Eugene Halliday (1911–1987) was a British artist,writer, and teacher. For a large part of his life he lived and taught in Manchester and Altrincham, England, lecturing (in Manchester and Liverpool), 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, religion and the science of his day. Much of his work centred on his interpretation of the esoteric ideas behind religion. He practised and taught an approach to psychotherapy. He was a friend of the artist Käthe Schuftan, giving the tribute at her funeral in 1958.

Teachings

Halliday 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 "a will to work for the development of the potentialities of all beings." 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.