Eugene Halliday
Eugene Halliday (1911- 1987) was a significant and yet largely undiscovered artist, philosopher and teacher of the 20th Century. 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 centered around his interpretation of the esoteric ideas behind religion and he also practiced 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 to this 'field' and the 'absolute sentient power' itself. This consciousness he called 'reflexive self consciousness' or '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.