Jan Cox

A visitor appeared at a man’s residence and said, “I want to invite you to a party at my place,” and the man said he would be pleased to attend.  The visitor then said, “But let me warn you about a few things.  It can get pretty noisy, with all sorts of meaningless chattering going on,” which the man said would be alright. 

“And sometimes heated discussions will break out,” which the man said would not bother him.  “And sometimes this leads to a sense of confusion sweeping over things,” which the man said would not be surprising.  “And there may be drugging going on and over indulging of many varieties,” which the man said was okay by him.

“And it is quite possible that a fight may break out,” and the man shrugged his understanding of such things.  “And before it is over, there will probably be some sexual activity,” to which the man smiled and nodded his acceptance.  He then asked the visitor, “What time should I arrive?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he replied, “there will only be you and me.”
 
 

                             …and as always, it all occurred inside of one man’s head,

                                                    inside of every man’s mind.

Is the best way to represent reality by metaphor or is it the only way?  The fact that reality seems best represented by metaphor and symbol, should suggest something regarding the nature of what men’s minds call reality.

J.
 
 

The temperamental mind cannot grasp that thoughts are fungible.  Life has men continually critiquing the contents of their thoughts, rather than studying the thinking process itself.

Life clearly has no interest in men waking up to what is actually going on.  (Random example): Life moves men to scrutinize and criticize the programs on TV, giving no attention to the effect television transmission itself has on the brain regardless of content, (same with writing, and conversation).

What matters in man’s second reality is always the vehicle – not the cargo.  Always the medium, (which is always thought), and not what the thoughts seem about.

You dream in your mind not because of what you dream about, but because ordinary consciousness has no story telling resources of its own, and constantly looks without.

You dream because your thoughts look away.  You come out of the dream by redirecting your attention, searching for thoughts within which are unique – not fungible

J,

If The Following Were True,
It Would Totally Explain, In A Startling New Way,
Everything You Need To Know Concerning The Serious, Critical Views Of Life
So Common To Man.

One man, to keep himself alert and on track, pretends to himself that everything other people say that annoys him, they do so solely for that purpose.  Although this may sound simply fanciful at first, be assured that for the few, it can be a most potent, eye opening tool.

Try it on yourself.  Every time you are suddenly alert enough again to come-to-yourself mentally, and realize that your thoughts were again, just then, operating in their automatic mode, and making critical comments about some other human’s thoughts, and treating it all quite seriously, say to yourself:

   “I am the only person in the world who takes what they say seriously;
   everyone else is playing with my mind and laughing at me,
   constantly saying things that they do not mean,
   just to watch a gullible idiot like me take them seriously and get upset.
I am the only person on the planet not in on it.”

If you do not understand that this could literally be happening –  and that if it were, you would have no way of ever realizing it, then you do not have even a scrap of a good suspicion regarding the bottom-of-the-barrel role  thought plays in the thing humans call their life.

J.

Your pancreas does not believe there is a better you, nor does your liver, your lungs, knuckles or spleen.  Only your brain, and only one particular part of it, is the only part you can hear talking. Life has conveniently arranged for that part to provide the sensation of there being a “you” in there to hear it.  What would be the point in having Willie Tyler without Lester, and versa vice?



Only in your head, in what ordinarily passes for, “fully conscious thought,” do you have any notion that there is another you in you, either repressed or quiescent.
 

Since this is the norm, there is no basis for believing anything to be amiss in man – not with ordinary men, but for the select few born with that Certain Hunger, falling prey to this world wide game-of-pretend will prevent the nourishment desired.  You will forever attempt to feed a nascent mouth that does not exist.  You will attempt to discover and quicken a body that is not there.  You try to uncover the other side of a moon that has no other side.

 

The opposite of you is not some other you,
and the opposite of being asleep is not being awake.
The opposite of being asleep, is understanding what the term means.

The special better-you of the few is not the antithesis of your present you, but is your present you experiencing the totally unnatural realization of where the feeling of “you” comes from; what its purpose is, what its capacity is, and why the Dodgers have such trouble with right fielders.

The few do have a better person in them – in their brain – in their consciousness somewhere amidst all the thoughts.  This better-person is the person reading these words this very instant, and who is thinking: “Well, where IS this person?”

                                                                …cozy, huh?

J.

 
The brain’s overall message, (without it going into detail), is that the better person within you, will more or less be the opposite of the person you are now, with a corresponding change in consciousness and thought.

 
Men never achieve this goal of the mind.  No one can actually be a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, etc.  Just as no man can be totally Civilized, the programming in man’s brain to believe that should and can be achieved is nothing less than the energy propelling the dual, interlocking realities of the physical and the non-physical which, combined, make up the life of man.  It is the striving that matters, not the achieving.  The irrepressible striving to bring forth the better person in your brain, or equally acceptable, the thinking-about-striving with the awareness of when you are not and the subsequent mental regret – this too is the-striving.

No one’s brain knows what the better person it believes is in it is like.  Thus do men turn to sources outside themselves and accept their descriptions, life somehow managing to keep their brains from facing the fact that the extrinsic institutions to which they look, (religions, universities, the arts, society), are creations of their own brains.  The same brains that did not know what the better person is like in the first place, but since men never achieve the realization of the better person, this does not matter.

If in truth you are never going to be able to leave town, then it makes no difference whether your dream is to go to Siberia or to Santiago.   So men’s brains are allowed to imagine that the better person within them is whatever their brain imagines it to be, and no one is ever disappointed or disillusioned, since no one’s brain ever actually produces this NewMan.

Without you comprehending this, even the illustrious, insightful few waste energy and mental time, occupied in a dream-endeavor.  Consider the situation fully and frankly.  There is a thought inherent in your brain that says, and to which your brain seriously listens, that there is a better person in you.  Although it does not note this specifically, it does not know what this better version of you/it might be, and, (as proven by human history and your own life), it cannot produce.  Life forces almost everyone to ignore these realities, and pay lip-service-acceptance to the original sensation cum theory.

J.

Everyone’s brain believes there is a better person in there than the one now showing.  The religiously wired see the situation as there being a more spiritual self, hidden under their sensual one.  The civilly programmed see it as there being a more cultured version of their uncouth persona waiting to be developed, and the fews’ view is that there is a more stable, insightful and individual form of consciousness lying dormant within the din of their ordinary state, (which is also man’s natural one).

In practice, men believe that the discovery, activation and nurturing of this better self requires outside assistance: the teachings of a church, formal education;, lessons from the arts, the guiding influence of social norms.

Man alone is programmed in his neural wiring to believe that he can be better than he perceives himself to be.  None of the other purely instinctive creatures are made to consider that they could in any way be different from how they are, but with consciousness comes thought and civilization.  And the more civilized a man becomes, the stronger becomes the thought that says he should be that better person the thought says is within him. The operational perspective is that, although the better self is private and personal, it can only be realized via public, collective enterprises.

A man’s natural, genetically/temperamentally tied consciousness produces thoughts that are not individually his.  His brain is the medium for thoughts that all of humanity share.  There are variations from man to man, but the major themes are the same for all.



Each man believes that the better self somewhere inside of him is unique, and will have views of life that are totally different from their prevailing ones.  The religiously wired believe that their realized, spiritual self, will totally repudiate the routine life of the flesh.  It is the thinking of a Religious Person, (the better person). will be the complete opposite of mundane thinking, and the culturally inclined conclude that the consciousness of a sophisticated man will be the antithesis of a less civilized one, and the would-be mystical expect that enlightened perception will see white where everyone else sees black.

J,

None of this can be proven, or even profitably shown to the mind that everyone is born with.  It would be gold medal insanity to tell an ordinary person that all of the thoughts they have about spiritual, cultural, social, artistic, political matters are fungible.  The minds of collective humanity would scoff at such an idea, (should they even take notice of it), as well life clearly intends they should.

 

It is damn near impossible to somehow finagle your own brain into realizing this, and forget-about-it regarding other people.  You are on your own, attempting to scale the world’s highest peak, which no one else even knows is there, much less what you are up to, succeed or not.

It is a one-of-a-kind liberating thrill, not unlike a child being freed from diapers and his own self poo-poo, to suddenly realize that all of your recreational, (vis a vie: serious metaphysical and cultural thoughts) are fungible.  No one of them is any more meaningfully distinct to the life you actually live, than is one grain of sand significantly different from another.

Even though senior graduation day is when you get past the inborn sensation that the thoughts you have, that are not simple representations of something physical in the world outside your consciousness, have an effect on the life you actually lead.  Coming face to face with their fungibility will at least get you out of kindergarten.                              
 
 

 …What could be more fun than to be at recess – with your eyes and head open.

J.

Not having the thought that correctly represents the effects of gravity can easily kill you, while you can live to be a hundred regardless of your thought about an afterlife.

Observably, for the brain to fulfill its responsibilities in the operation we, (it),calls, thinking, men, (it), must place or pretend to place, great value on the uniqueness of each thought it produces.
Clearly not every thought it has is important, but those which to it are, it will hold to be of singular significance and irreplaceable

“Who cares whether there are places in the universe where matter is so condensed that light cannot escape, when right here on Earth we are faced with the serious problem of so many people having the wrong thought regarding correct parliamentary procedure?”

(The hoary, eclectic metaphysical idea that men see life upside down from how it really is, while clearly outrageous, is, by some in the Bay Area, considered to be a darn good prospect for right field in coming years!)

A man with that unspeakable desire, (which was just now spoken of), to see something which his brain was born suspecting is there – (but is not sure what it is…and no one can apparently tell him…or will tell him), must, (to ever achieve anything vaguely resembling what civilians call, progress), as a starter, collect sufficient, unnatural, hard-to-obtain, (because when you look to see them they cease to exist).  Knowledge of the activity in his brain which men call thoughts, to know without any hesitation that all of those which are not representations of something tangible in the tangible world, are without substance or actual impact on the life he physically leads, and are thus, one and all fungible.

This is why each man’s temperamental mind can sing for seventy odd years, with a repertoire of only a small number of basic tunes, and never notice the unrelenting repetition.  Consciousness is programmed not to notice it, so consequently men do not recognize the fungibility of their non-material based thoughts, but rather hold them in high, singular esteem.  (A good father compliments most often his ugliest daughter.)

J.

Those who want-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-things find the thoughts that presently appear in their mind to be unacceptable, much less enlightening.  No matter what ostensible method they initially adopt to achieve the goal, it will always be based on the premise that your present mind is asleep, (or deluded), and that the aim is to awaken it from its deluded sleep.  In essence: to change what your genetic fixed, temperamental mind is, and this cannot be done, any more than a man can change his height, or his stomach’s attitude toward anchovies.

Those seeking enlightenment naturally assume that what will occur will be an enlightening of their temperamental mind, and no such thing will ever happen.  No such thing is possible. Your temperamental mind can no more be altered than can your individual, instinctive reaction to physical threats.

Those without the proper experience believe that a man, once awake, never again has sleeping thoughts, and this is not accurate.  He does not, but his temperamental mind still does and always will.

What the few call the sleeping-state-of-consciousness, is the natural and inalterable state of the temperamental mind, and waking up to what is really going on does not change that part of the brain’s consciousness.  What enlightenment does do, is activate part of the brain that is not normally involved in consciousness.  It is this new operation that is:  awake, enlightened and liberated.  Your original consciousness, (the temperamental mind), has not changed in the process.

What is different in such a person is that they now have another part of their brain consciously active to counteract the old one.  They have an alternative to the dreamy consciousness usually available and others do not.  All that ordinary men can do is grouse about what goes on in their mind – that is their only alternative.

J.