Jan Cox

Father  brushed more of last night’s confetti from his head, and said, “We found out that five thousand years ago there were sane, intelligent people already talking about This Thing and calling it: ‘Being asleep; living in a dream’ and you started to jump up and down, hollering: ‘Yes, yes, yes!  That’s it!  That is Exactly what it is,’ and then the book said that there was a way to wake up from that sleep, and then I could hardly control you.  You were so excited, and   we commenced to try and follow the method described to awaken.”

“Ahhhh, what glorious days they were,” (and the lad vigorously nodded).   “Glorious and yet frustrating beyond an ordinary man’s comprehension. The diagnosis of our condition was plain enough and clearly correct, and the method to change the condition was simple enough, and yet nothing seemed to go right.  For every half second of success you had, there was ninety six hours of failure; and no matter how many bursts of extraordinary understanding you had, your life in general remained unchanged.  It was as though we were sure we were sitting on a treasure chest, but could not get off and stay off of the lid long enough to fully partake of the pleasures inside,” (more rapid nods from the kid).

“After some time spent in this confounding private activity, we decided to seek outside assistance, you remember that don’t you?”  (The nods kept a’comin.)  “We went to hear some of the people who had written some of the books we read that first clued us in to the existence of This Thing, but you remember what happened right?”  (More nods from the nipper.)  “Almost within seconds did we somehow understand that they had no more achieved-The-Deed than had we, and somehow it was just obvious.  Ah, I can still remember how upset you were.” (Editor’s note, son was not actually all that bothered by the discovery, but this is the father’s telling of the story and your own hearing it by the by.  You’re not using one of those dinky throw-away neural receivers to pick it up, are you?)
 

“Yes, you were pret-tee upset, and even began to wonder if there was anyone alive who had actually experienced The Great Scratch, and understands it, (though if my recall is reliable, at that juncture I do not believe that you had begun to add, ‘understand it’ to your mental repertoire.”

J.

Day was breaking as they pulled into Biloxi, and father broke the news to son.  “There is even more I can say to you about that Certain Hunger and extraordinary way to spend your life.”

Croupiers, cuties and conga players filled the 24-hour-streets as longings for neural explosions filled the always-open younger’s head.  “For that extraordinary thing to ever happen to you, it is first necessary that ten thousand and ten other things occur.  Yet not a one of them is necessary. Think about it, and furthermore, if this be true which It is, why does not this fact alone instantly drive your thoughts straight up the wall and into new areas of great profit and wonderment?  It should and yet it does not.  Why?  For the same reason that to ever see what-is-going-on for yourself, it is first necessary that ten thousand and ten different things occur,
with not a single one of them being necessary.”

He pretended to look for a parking place, as he continued making sounds with his face.  “A faux son might think I am but having sport with words, but we have been at this too long and you know better than that.  In your lucid moments you understand that all words are soccer balls, and the only thing that matters is your net so, I’m going to be broadcasting at one hundred thousand clear channel watts.  It’s up to you not to be trying to receive on a cheap pocket radio.”

The elder swerved to miss one rain filled rut, running them into another.  Thus did they switch streams in mid metaphor.  “Toss out the rest of those plastic pearls,” he said to son, wanting to take care of the car, in that it was theirs and they were rental.  “When we first read that people long before us, had been bothered by an itch inside their skull that no available verbal powder would cure, and you immediately cried out: ‘Yes! That’s it! That’s exactly what I’m going through!’ We anxiously read on and discovered that they had even given it a name.  ‘Yes!’ you shouted.  Finally I’ll know what this thing is that so delightfully, is almost driving me mad!’  (Although if memory serves, you did not at that time include the word, ‘delightfully,’ but I’ll let it go),” 

J.

As they proceeded on their morning walk, Father said: “Since you’re still recovering from pat’s hurricane season, we’ll let minor discrepancy slide.” (and with the appearance of a new water puddle, slid, they did, right into this).  “Then, (you remember), every other day you would privately threaten to abandon the whole thing, just give it up by gawd!  Hell, why drive yourself crazy?   Maybe it’s impossible; maybe no one’s ever done it!  And yet our desire was so strong, the whole idea so fascinating, that no matter how you threatened, we could never keep it from our thoughts for long.  And yet about all you seemed to get from all your efforts was frustration: a second of something resembling, or foretelling, success, always followed by hours of nothing!  

You cannot even call it hours of failure – it was not failure in the sense of trying to throw a basketball in the hoop and missing.  Your effort toward a visible goal did not succeed; the ball did not go into the net.  You failed in your effort, but the lack of success in The Grand Endeavor is like not showing up on the court to even throw the ball and better than that, you are not even aware that you did not show up.  All you have to do is remember to show up in This Special Sport and you have instantly damn near succeeded.   Ahhh, what is there to compare!”

 

“But somehow we hung on.  We did not quit and you did not go crazy, and then one day, you remember that day?!”  (And son’s head near about fell off, from excited nodding yes).  “It finally hit you square between the appropriate eyes/I’s.  After years of being asleep and hating it, and after a lifetime of studying the matter in your personal life – to such a depth that you, (in all objective modesty), may well have understood what ‘being asleep’ means better than all the recognized masters and teachers of same.  One day it suddenly struck you full face that you did not have the slightest idea of what, ‘being asleep’ is.  My God! What a moment!  You realized that you did not have any idea what the term even meant – and that neither did anyone else.  Whoa!  Neither CAN anyone!
 

The mind is literally not capable of understanding the idea; an idea that came FROM the mind! How can such a thing be possible!  Better still, how come no one realizes it?”   Father was now so exuberant that potholes were avoiding him.  “And then right, righteously then, is when the whole smear hit you.  You suddenly saw WHY thought cannot understand what, ‘being asleep’ means.  Even though it alone is responsible for noticing the condition and naming it; in spite of this, thought/you/your mind has no conception whatsoever of what, ‘being asleep’ is – which is what ‘being asleep’ IS!”

J.

The elder slowed momentarily, (as he would sometimes pretend to do), tossed the boy his antonymous costumes and pushed him toward the door.  “Yeah, I know: it would be real easy to take what I have said as metaphorical, but you would be strikingly in error. 

What I described is plain, simple, clear and obvious fact, if you persistently look right at it, and have the potential to ever see it.  All of the thoughts, plans, methods, tricks, ideas and schemes you have regarding changing the condition of your consciousness from one of distorted sleep to enlightened awakening, is nothing more or less than an attempt to create something totally out of nothing.”

He shoved the kid out into the street as they joined the secret second line.  “Note that I have not said that it is impossible, but I double-damn guarantee you that it is, until you realize for yourself exactly what it is that you have been unwittingly attempting to do:

 Make something out of nothing!
Is there a sweeter song than that?

 
 
  …(and don’t forget to tip Tina).”

J.

The tubas were getting louder along with father.  “How can a person who is asleep shake their self awake?  How can a mind that sleeps, wake itself up?  One of mind’s most significant features for the few is that it consistently looks for and expects to find wisdom always outside itself.

By nature, the human mind, wants-to-know, and by instinct does it believe that what it does not know, some other human mind does.  Some other human mind can know how to grow corn and build a mill, but no other human mind knows anything about the human mind, or about any of the multitude of things it has invented, that you do not know.  But those ordinary minds outside our family are forbidden to realize this, for if they did, civilization would collapse!  No more culture, no more art, no education, religion, history; all story telling shot to hell!
 

To help keep man from having to face the fact that his ‘self’ is but the anthropomorphism of thought, his mind is programmed to believe that anything he wants to know, and does not know, some other person’s mind does.  (And you think I can be abstruse and elusive; a dance team long before your time.)

Regarding all matters intangible, no human who’s ever lived ever knew any more about any of them than you do this very instant.  A bullet proof, wells-fargo-fact: man knows this is so, but is routinely made to act like he believes someone else.  He CAN know the very things he knows men cannot know.  I tell you my boy, it’s enough to make a drummer get a haircut.

And speaking of that, no matter what they call it or how they verbally cut it, how they try to camouflage it, trying to awaken, enlighten, or ‘change’ in any other described fashion: your condition of consciousness, mind, spirit or self is the snipe shooters struggle to make something out of nothing.  It is to sew the invisible man a new suit and thus bring him into being.  I swear, it’s enough to make a blind man on a float shout to the essence of life as he passes, ‘Show us your tits!’”

J.

Since father and son considered this particular weekend their private, Anti Mardi Gras festival, the elder declared, “Time to strip away the mask and face our own surprising face.  I threatened to tell you and now we’ll see, that no paper pater I be. Trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing,” and the neighborhood brass band began tuning up in preparation for the impending parade.
  

“I have broached this matter before, obliquely and subtly, but the days of youthful gingersnaps and childish mimicry have fled, (least they’d better flee!), and it is for us to confront these thirteen lucky words head-on and dead-eyed.  He suddenly leaned close in to the lad’s face and squintedly sneered, “Say, didn’t you once play your evil twin on The Young and the Unbearable?!”  It was a query which thankfully went unanswered due to the increasing din in the street.

 
Father took a deep breath and raised the volume, (not to mention quality), of his speech to match their surroundings and continued.  “The one fact you never find in all the words of all the would-be-ers regarding this curious conceit of our family tradition is that trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing.  The truth is: you are not trying to change a mental state of sleep to one of being awake.  For a ‘condition’ to exist, there must be something to be IN the condition, and there is no such ‘thing’ in you to be there.  The condition that IS the something, (or for the benefit of evil twins on the opposite coast, the something IS the condition).

The Invisible Man struggling to keep himself from having to face his actual condition by an endless expression of concern over his wardrobe; that’s who you and all amateurs at this are (not to mention everybody else on the planet).”  A flag boy ran by, could the Indians be far behind?  “A common rebuke amongst mortals is ‘Control yourself!’ Indeed, the distinguishing mark twix thinking-man and instinctive-beast is his singular ability to control his behavior.  To be civilized rather than savage is to have yourself under control.  So too to be awake and enlightened rather than asleep and confused, but how is such a thing possible?
 

How can YOU control YOUR self, if your SELF is subject to YOU controlling it.  Its condition would already be as men say it should be.  If water had the potential to teach-itself, or make-itself  dry, it would perforce BE dry, and not wet.”

J.

The mundane world’s so-called “thinkers” amount to this:  amateur painters in the Louvre, making copies of the Old Masters …‘cept in this instance, there are no actual Masters, only the amateurs.  The only artists shown in established galleries are those of the Ouroboros School, (cannibalria generalus; plagiarirus incestius),  and by so doing is the public spared disruptive outrage, and the march of progress kept civilized.
 

The few born in a straightjacket, who feel they are living in a fog that those around them do not notice, cannot tolerate an inner reality so constricted.  To realize their special aim requires unfettered creativity in thought, but there is none to be found; not outside their self – not out there amidst everyone else in the parade.   The degree of creative thought they actually need to reach their goal would be thought totally unconnected to any thought they had ever had before.  It seems literally impossible given the physical dimensions of this universe, (as perceivable by mortal minds, at least).  There is no such thing as a thought that is totally independent from every other thought ever thought, but by god that is precisely what it takes to ever awaken yours from the ignis fatuus realm in which it is now stifled.

It is necessary and yet seemingly not possible.  How can you have some thought that is not at least partially imitative-of and connected-to thoughts which men have already had?  It really does sound impossible until you consider it more carefully.  What kind of thought COULD be completely unrelated to any thought you or anyone else has ever had before?  What possible kind?  But there is one, and its operational reality is coded in the very sentence rhetorically questioning the possible existence of such.

The thought is right there amidst that jumble of words.
Grab it!  It’s the only creative one there is.



What kind of snake indeed could swallow itself so completely that not nothing is left, but rather the full explanation of its prior apparent existence.

J.

In man’s mundane mental world there is no creation sans imitation, which is why, to some, it is so redundant, boring and unenlightening, but which is how routine minds are kept from disintegrating.

Outer physical reality has a natural consistency upon which man unthinkingly relies.  His inner mental reality, upon which he also much depends, has no such inherent coherence.  A man knows that the rocks in his yard will be the same today as they were yesterday, as will their atoms.  But from one day, one minute to the next, he has no such assurance that his wife’s attitude, or even his own, will be likewise concordant.

Outer reality has a natural consistency.  Man’s inner reality has none.  It must be begot, and in this mental realm there is no creation sans imitation.  An arrangement that both allows for change while not severely disturbing the status quo.  The only part of that of interest to the few is the fact that it restricts change and thus the explosive mental expansion they crave.

In the normal play of man’s inner reality there neither is, nor can there be, anything literally original, and ergo, truly creative.  Everything new is derivative – an altered imitation of something extant.  The actions of atoms are consistent from moment to moment by nature, while those of men’s verbalized thoughts, (the only ones of even apparent significance in their lives), seem so only by the repetitive use of familiar ones.   In the Arts periodically pops up attempted resistance via painting that represents nothing in the outer reality;  music not confined to local scales and harmony; writing that is gibberish and nonsensical.  But such are mere momentary notorieties and never become accepted: the familiar marches on.
 

Everyone is in favor of this.  No one wants to wake up every day not knowing if water will still be flowing downhill and out their showerhead, or if electrons will still be acting in such a way as to heat their toaster; or if the personality of the person they went to bed with last night will be the same one they find their self faced with in the morning.  Nothing would destroy a man’s sanity faster than being in a world in which everything he expected to happen, failed to, and the only world in which this treat exists is man’s mental one.  Thus, it is of overriding importance that everything which asserts creative, be in large part imitative.

J.

For the few with that special itch, this ongoing, routine human activity means nothing, proves nothing, and leads to Nothingville.  But unless you see it for what it is, you IS part of it.  It is a 360° scene which, if you look at it normally, will stick to your eye/I-balls and make you blind.

It makes no difference to a Real Rebel if other people claim/believe they know why interest rates fluctuate; why wars start; the purpose of life; why some people are so stupid; what happens after death. An air conditioned man with his own outdoors fish to fumigate understands that what other humans are made to say, that they believe they know about any and all matters which they can talk about but cannot physically touch, has no bearing whatsoever on his cookout and search for exotic food.  The onliest instance in which pretending-to-know-when-you-do-not affects his existence is when it occurs in his own backyard.

If you truly want to remain ignorant, just keep noticing how ignorant everyone around you is. Just keep mentioning how even experts and world leaders act like they know what they are talking about, but that you know better.  They don’t fool you!  They’re all a bunch of idiots and frauds!  Sure they are, but that IS man’s second reality; from an immediately meaningful perspective, that whole world is a fraud.  Who is going to keep such a world going other than frauds – willing frauds.  Stop being one yourself and their existence will cease disturbing you.
 

In one sense, those who long for the awakening/enlightenment are reacting to a feeling of theft; that the routine conditions of man’s mental life have stolen from their mind.  Stolen its innocence, its pristine-ignorance and original capacity for extraordinary joy, and forced it to imitatively adopt a façade of claiming to know things which it and you clearly do not know.

Being asleep and unenlightened is being pretend-ignorant;
 being awake is the real thing

J.

Every accusation against man amounts to one thing: his believing he knows that which he does not.   (Save theft), every condemnation man can or ever has leveled at his fellow creatures, (that they are stupid, asleep, unenlightened), all indirectly and unwittingly point to the one thing:  man’s believing that he knows things which he does not.

The only accusations non-thinking creatures make always concerns theft.  Theft of what one creature physically possesses, (food, territory, mate, or its life), and the complaints are physically registered, transiting the mere animal sphere.  The accusations unique to man always concern something non-physical he claims to possess – knowledge.  Without clearly realizing what they are involved in, men constantly condemn one another under a variety of verbal indictments,  but they all boil down to but a single pimple:  men believing that they know things which they do not.

A man will peacefully accept that another man knows nothing about plumbing, as long as he admits it and does not attempt to pretend otherwise.  Unpretentious ignorance is always acceptable everywhere, but what men are unknowingly made to find verbally intolerable in one another, when they believe they sense same, is a person insisting they have knowledge of a particular matter when, to the accuser’s eyes they clearly do not.  This, however, is a quite limited and forcefully subjective game amongst the ordinary, and leads no one to new insights and discoveries.  The sport is confined to an endless cycle of: accusations, defenses and counter accusations.

One man’s thoughts cause him to say that a second man’s professed political beliefs are foolish and without rational foundation; that he does not know what he is talking about.  He does this without him ever questioning the basis of his assured-felt accusation, not that he would find one if he looked for it, any more than one could be discovered for the beliefs of the second man which he condemned.

Regarding matters in man’s non-physical second reality, experts exist only by pretending to know things they do not know, and those who listen to these experts, know that they do not know, but they pretend not to know that the experts do not know.  No two way pretending, no world of culture, entertainment and civilization.

J.