Magic
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Transcript
MAGIC
Document: 33, July 29, 1982
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1982
Let’s take a good down-to-earth pair of opposites. True and False. No doubt about it, the opposite of true must be false, or so the ordinary mind believes. But true thinking — that process that occurs only above the Line, requires that you see not true on one side, opposed by false on the other. Real thought, real Consideration, would be to put those two together, and the opposite is the opposite of true and false put together.
Some of you periodically get anxious; you find yourself wondering if there is a be-all and end-all trick I’m holding out on you, if there isn’t some encompassing method that will finally and forever ignite you above the Line. Let me remind you that everything you’ve ever heard or read, before you were exposed to This Thing, was based upon a belief in some form of instant magic. And there are things that can be done that appear to be magic. You’ve all been exposed to the idea that people can be sort of zapped into states of supreme ecstasy. Everyone in the world is familiar with such ideas, and almost everyone in the world believes it’s possible. In fact, it is possible, and it’s easy enough. But it has nothing to do with the reality of igniting the higher areas of the nervous system.
The idea that there is some specific, ordinarily unknown magic is true. The magic is everywhere; everyone is a carrier of magic. But This Thing has to do with a certain preparation. Lest you think you’re simply waiting for me to put rockets in your roller skates, lest you think you’re biding time here until the real magic begins, think again. The magic is everywhere, even in the preparation of this Thing, and it’s already at work on you.
Consider the reality being the ideas of a person being in a state of exceptional awareness, a state where he is not pushed and pulled by his own “emotions”, where he is not at the mercy of the flows of Life. Consider that that reality has to do most directly with a certain substance in the blood. I’ve told you, and you can see and feel it for yourself, that consciousness is a pulsing electrical current. Without this electrical energy, you are dead; without its culminating at the level of the Line, you would have no personality. You would have no “I”. But there is another factor which affects consciousness. There is the blood factor, the substance in the blood which reaches the brain simultaneously with the pulsing culmination of electrical energy at the Line.
Diagram # 012 illustration
Consider not just the spine, but the nervous system itself. And Consider the flow of blood in this diagram. The spine forms a little alleyway, from the base to the brain. There is a filter box at the base of the spine, and another one situated where the spine becomes the brain. At either locale, the blood can bypass the filter and continue straight to the brain, or it can be filtered in either place. All of you have some familiarity with the descriptions from religious or esoteric literature that point to certain locales within man, for instance, that there is a seat, a center for the emotions. Or from far Eastern schools, that there is a place at the base of the spine which is the resource of man’s carnal, physical nature. And all such descriptions are reflections of something quite real.
I continue to receive questions about the Three Forces, the Trilateral Dance. Line-level consciousness cannot grasp how things can operate simultaneously in more than two ways. When I put true and false together on one side, and say the opposite is the opposite of these two together, some of you have a flashing glimpse of a trilateral reality. But if I stop and say, “Okay, tell me exactly what you are laughing at” you, if you tried to answer me at all, would have to lie. To answer you would have to go back to dealing with Line-level consciousness. If I insisted you answer you might have said, “I just realized that I had always looked upon everything my parents said as being either true or false, but then when you gave that description, and for whatever other reason, it just struck me, it wasn’t true.” But here you are again, at Line-level consicousness. By insisting that you answer, I would have diluted what you saw, I would have made you lie.
Within this flow of Forces that keeps everything moving at this level, there appears to be a force which could be called creative. If we could freeze reality, like a movie still, and isolate a certain situation that could conditionally be labeled constructive, the same frame would reveal its opposition. Then something else must exist for any of this to move. The last is the unknown force. I continue to get questions about this trilateral dance, questions such as is This Thing to be considered the creative force? There is no such thing as a true, pristine creative force in the trilateral dance.
I have used the example before about the Europeans taking over the North American continent. (Of course, we are not talking about politics now, or any sort of right or wrong; we are talking from an anti-relative viewpoint.) The Europeans, your forefathers, can say they played a great part in the external expansion of humanity. All the great technological revolutions, the advances in democratic, civil and personal freedoms have taken place on this continent. The colonization of the continent has advanced humanity. But all you have to do it put yourself in the position of the American Indian, and the situation was anything but creative. The European settlers trampled and destroyed everything that existed. This Thing as it is expressed in humanity cannot be truly called the creative force because there is no such thing as three forces operating out there in life. To say that something is creative, or conservative, is all conditional.
Hold your attention up as high as you can, and Neuralize anything that ordinary humanity would perceive as having been a constructive change. No matter what you pick out as an example, you have already tacitly identified an observable status quo and you’ve identified it as being detrimental. No matter what example you pick as an instance of creative change, you are saying there was first a detrimental, unacceptable situation.
There is no such thing, as three distinct forces — there is no such thing as an absolute creative force — because, in the second before you observed that creative force, it was playing another role.
I’ve mentioned before that there is a place where all three forces are combined. Within The Life of Life we could call it the bottom line. But we could also call it, in our present context, the Master Force. It is all three forces in simultaneous operation. If we use the yin-yang symbol as an example, it is not only the two opposing symbols but that which encompasses the circle and two opposing symbols.
Many of you still find yourself in your moments of ordinariness, wondering what This Thing truly is, what astounding magic lies at the source of This. Recall the diagram of the open & closed systems where the bottom line is the spark of creation itself. But that spark is the combination of all three forces into the master force. The master force is continually exerting itself through all of Life. But it’s only outlet is man. And this poses a question in answer to the question of what This is all about. For the Few, the only answer and the only question is whether you will eventually discover that magic does indeed exist; that it moves through all of Life, moves most pertinently right at the Line, at the end of your incomplete Nervous System.
The question becomes, are you going to serve Life by letting its energy flow through you in its prescribed mechanical manner; are you going to let that certain substance be drained at the Line. Will you continue to starve your possibilities above the Line only to feed just enough energy left, after the substance is drained off, to dream, and imagine, “How great it would be if I knew the secret, how great it would be if I knew there were a secret, how great it would be if I weren’t so upset, if I weren’t in such a hurry.”
Another way to describe This Thing is the attempt to let the master force flow through. I would call it the creative force, except that Line-level consciousness would want to know creative as opposed to what?” Ordinary consciousness can operate only on the basis of comparison. But This Thing is creative in the sense that it is direct, unqualified outlet for the master force. And the master force is the energy of Life itself, in growth and expansion. It can expand through no other creature but man, regardless of what psychologists today might tell you about the abilities of chimpanzees or rats. It takes no great insight to look around and see that there is nothing else on the planet, besides man that shows the least inclination to want to change. Nothing else is irritated, nothing else is in a hurry. Rocks, trees, hamsters, none of them are neurotic. Everything serves a purpose; the master force moves in everything alive here, but man alone is outlet for the energies of Life’s expansion.
It is the motion, the pushing of this Force that produces a feeling of “I’m on the verge of seeing something astounding, of feeling, of being something astounding. But I’m always on the edge…” It’s expressed even in ordinary Life in artists or musicians, talking about how “something in me just has to get out. I have something I must tell humanity. I can’t get this symphony, or painting, down just right. But when I do, the world will stand and salute.”
The always elusive magic chord is the master force. The energy of life growing is the basic purpose of humanity being here. For those who have stumbled into This, the question is, will you continue to serve out your days playing blood filter, transferring energy in that certain way you call your personality, your habits, either bad or good, your “I”, or will any of you run the risk of turning this master force loose within you.
The many people throughout history who have accidentally fallen into an extraordinary state are those who experienced the master force above the Line. Drugs can produce a similar experience. But in both cases, these people can never see that the magic is inside; they are invariably forced to look outside themselves for an explanation. “The gods flew me through the universe,” or “Wow, where did you get those mushrooms.” You all dreamed, when first exposed to This Thing, that I would perform instant magic on you; that I’d take you in a closet and reveal a secret, that I’d zap you into a higher state of consciousness. But if I did, I would be doing you no favor. If I did, you would be no different form those people who experience such states accidentally. Such experiences are not permanent ignition of the higher system, and when it was all over, you would be no better off than you were. Your only explanation, to yourself or to others, would be “the gods have spoken to me.” Or you’d think I’d pinched a certain nerve and suddenly you could see. Suddenly you were crazy, unplugged from the systems of mechanical life. In short, you would feel — you would be — dependent on me to reproduce the state. You would have no understanding of what had happened, and you wouldn’t be able to do it for yourself.
Magic moves everywhere. You are magic. Magic lives within everyone. But This Thing is a specific nervous system preparation. And without it, without the proper and necessary readiness, any encounter with real magic will ultimately come to naught. Without the preparation of This Thing, you would have no choice but to attribute any such experience to something external, whether to me, to your fathers; religion or to a strange book. And in so doing, you would have killed the experience.
Real mystics — those who understand real nervous system magic — are never famous. Those who are well-known are those who accidentally got a glimpse above the level of the Line. And they write about it, they talk about it because they don’t know what else to do: they don’t understand what happened, and they can’t repeat the experience.
Once your system is fired above the Line, you’ll see that part of the preparation is a process of loosening your ordinary connections. In a sense, you are driving yourself crazy. So when you do experience the extraordinary, you are tied to nothing at Line-level. You won’t be held down by imagination, you won’t attribute the experience to me or anyone else, you won’t have to explain it, you’ll call it neither this nor that. Because the experience the magic, lies beyond imagination; it lies beyond the binary operation of Line-level consciousness.
It is probably a fair statement to say that at least 99% of you, before you encountered This Thing, experienced moments of unusual awareness. It can happen ordinarily, accidentally, through fatigue or stress, through drugs. Any number and combination of factors can produce the feeling that you’re on the verge of seeing something new, but again, without the proper preparation, it is both true and false to say that ordinary people ever rise above Line-level consciousness. It is false in the sense that such an experience is truly irrelevant to the person to whom it happens. That is, it does not produce true, sustained growth or objective benefit. And such a person must later treat his experience on the basis of a sad, disjointed memory. He must explain it in terms of his Life-produced connections: “My third eye was opened”, or “I talked with the masters. For however long it lasted, I loved everyone in the world.”
And such people are left with a certain kind of conviction that almost amounts to fanaticism. It serves a necessary purpose in the ordinary world. Libraries are full of books written by those who are driven to talk about their (to use ordinary language) mystical experiences. They can talk, they can write thousands of pages, but they don’t understand the experience, nor can they repeat it. And it’s these books that could have produced in you — before you met me — the feeling that you were on the verge of a mystical experience of your own. But Consider this fanaticism: if you had taken it a step further — if you had actually tasted something truly unusual, you wouldn’t be here now. You would have joined the league of the talking, writing fanatics; you would have become victim of your own conviction.
The books continue to be read, 2,000 or 5,000 years hence. People feel that it is meaningful, that it’s beyond reading true romance-and-confession magazines. It all has a certain ring of reality to it, people feel it produces a real effect. But the effect comes from that conviction, from that power of fanaticism.
To do This Thing, you must be free. You must be able to say goodbye to a certain part of the system. But before you can say good-bye, you have to See it. And you must develop the right equipment to See it. You can’t study the stars through a microscope; a system cannot see itself on its own level. You must find a place within you, a piece not normally used, a piece that has heretofore been irrelevant, a piece that serves to purpose in the Line-level system. That is the piece that allows you a certain distance. And the development and use of that piece is the reality behind the attempt to study and observe one’s self.
If ordinary consciousness is all that’s available to you, if you operate only from the Line down, then you have no possibility of change. None whatsoever. It’s not my theory, it’s not my opinion. It’s simply fact. If that’s all there is to you, then This Thing does not exist for you. And real change will forever be just a dream. It’s titillating Line-level gossip, and it will never produce true growth. Because your system can’t be aware of itself at its own level. It is only that rare piece, the piece that is irrelevant to everything that exists at Line-level, that can See the system at Line-level.
Everything you perceive to be your problems is you. And there is no escape from them. Problems are a by-product of being alive, i.e., of being an unfinished system, and our expression of them is an expression of your ignorance of what you are. It is all the frustration of “There’s something in my trying to get out. I have a mission, I want to be something else, something more. Something in me needs pacifying.” It’s simply the nature of the system from the Line down. And it becomes part of the ordinary game to expect that system to “study itself”, to engage in self-analysis, to undertake an inventory of your good features and your bad ones, to try to straighten up your act. It is the game of the ordinary, no matter the name it goes under, because nothing can change at that level. The Line-level system can have no awareness of itself. “My problems are the very things that keep me from progressing in This. It’s my bad temper, my laziness, my greed, my fear. But at least I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the problems are, and I know, without a doubt, that one who had awakened his system above the Line would not have such a scummy personality.” It’s pseudo-system busy work, and it’s easy. It’s easy because it produces no change, it takes no effort and it’s endless. The priest, the psychiatrist, the guru hollers, “My friends, none of us are satisfied and none of us are perfect. And we know the problem. You know the enemy, now go forth and do battle!” But no matter how much battle you do, the problem never ends.
“You quit drinking?”
“Yes.”
And you used to smoke fifty-two packs a day, But you’ve conquered that.”
“Righto.’
“Mighty fine. But what about that temper?”
“Well, I’m working on it.’
“And the nightmares?”
“Well, only an occasional one.”
“Plus you’re still afraid of dying. Right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Well, nobody’s perfect. But as long as you’re still working on it…”
It doesn’t matter how much progress you’ve made. Your Line-level system will never see the end of it problems. It cannot perfect itself because it is an outlet for Life’s growth, and everything it does, including its expression of dissatisfaction, is a part of its perfect operation.
Which makes no sense at all to ordinary consciousness. How can a scummy personality be evidence of perfection? But ordinary consciousness can’t See it. It’s not its job to See it. It’s job it to be it. I’ve mentioned before that there are people who are less dissatisfied, those who appear delighted to play the game. Those who seem well-adjusted and superbly equipped for Life. Politicians are a shining example, and up-and-coming business tycoons. And I point out again that such people — those who are apparently the least dissatisfied with Life and themselves — are the most dangerous to This Thing. You should be able to see it as a confluence of two of the Forces. Historically, it is represented as a conflict between the secular and the spiritual, between the world of Caesar and that of the gods. This Thing, when it operates most efficiently, does not permit such confrontations, but the possibility is always extant. If the head politicians — the governor, the mayor, etc. — of this state were listening in at the keyhole right now (even though we don’t have a keyhole), they wouldn’t like it. They wouldn’t know why, they wouldn’t be able to even say why. They just wouldn’t like it. And from their viewpoint, they would be right. From their viewpoint of protecting the mass of humanity from too drastic a change, this is indeed dangerous. Though, of course, it isn’t dangerous in the least: the majority of humanity would never head the message of This Thing.
In a sense, such people would be more comfortable if they discovered us in here plotting insurrection. They’d like it a lot better if we were building bombs to overthrow the government. “Oh — its just a bunch of crackpots. No problem. We’ll just go in and hit a few heads, take a few license numbers. That’ll break it up.”
But This Thing would be regarded as being truly dangerous. It would do no good to ask them why. Anyone who understands anything doesn’t ask why. “Hey — we’re not hurting anyone. Let me explain. Perhaps you’re laboring under a misconception, Mr. Police-chief.”
What Mr. Police-Chief labors for is Life, for the controlled growth of Life. And he labors quite properly.
The feeling I’ve described, the feeling you and everyone else in the world has experienced of “there is something in me that wants to come out; there is a greatness that wants to be expressed”, is simply the master force seeking expression in man. It runs through everyone — magic courses in every nervous system alive on this planet. So all the dreams of man, all the verbal descriptions of all religions, all words of wisdom are true. It’s the master force continually pushing itself higher in the nervous system. And everyone feels it. The Few of This feel it especially, and they are the only ones who have the possibility of doing something about it.
But simultaneously, you’re all prey to a certain periodic fear that comes of your own efforts. “I’m going crazy. If everything that seems to be me gets eradicated, then what? I can’t even be sure of what I’m thinking anymore.” And we’re back to my question that answers all such questions: will you live out your Life-produced role, will you forever more transfer the same energies in the same ways, or will you let the master force through that one wire. Will you concentrate everything on that one possibility? If and when you do feel the master force charging through the wire, you’ll have no more questions about “what’s going to happen next?”
The diagram of the flow of blood reflects a physical reality. It reflects the process that is man’s and Life’s growth. The history of all humanity, including the specific history of your own development, is contained in your own spine. It is a gradual, nonlinear process, but its phases are nonetheless distinguishable, to one who knows what he’s looking at. All previous systems, including all religions, have referred to man’s division into certain centers: that there is a home base for the operations of the body, an area that churns out the emotions, and likewise a center for the thought processes. There are no such clear-cut divisions in the body of man. But you can see it all, if you can See the development of your own spine. We could measure a certain length from the base of the spine and properly say that for this period of time, for this period of your development, the body was totally in charge of the organism. It would, by the way, be a very short period of time. And then what you ordinarily consider to be the emotions become active and viable somewhere above this base line of the purely physical activation. But what we deal with now, at this stage of Man’s development is where your sense of “I” is centered. And methods designed to affect the body and the emotions are useless to produce growth and understanding now. Because such methods attempt to affect the lower portions of the nervous system. And that’s no longer where growth occurs. Working on the body will not effect true vertical growth. Likewise, there is no way to directly effect growth through working on the emotions. Not letting yourself be a common carrier of ordinary emotions is as close as you can come. And it all helps. But working on the lower system will never produce true growth above the Line.
This Thing always operates right at the apex of man’s development. It always operates at the horizontal line of ordinary consciousness, where man currently feels his sense of “I”. Though you still feel This to be a kind of spiritual quest, it is not — at least as you have always conceived it. This Thing is the ultimate religion, but not as you now think of formalized religion. The only place that This Thing exists, the only place it speaks, the only thing it speaks of it the extreme end of the nervous system’s development, no matter the particular time and place. But the extreme end, where “I” speaks and is heard and felt, is not divorced from the lower system. That’s why the rest of you must be in fairly respectable shape if you’re to actually extend yourself above the Line. I have required a certain amount of exercise in the past, as well as prescribed the eating of dead meat, taking drugs and the use of alcohol. None of which had anything to do with morality. It’s simply that the body must be in a fairly balanced condition, it must be fed, it must be capable of utilizing its quota of energy profitable. On the other hand, if your lower system is not in this certain minimally healthy condition, then it will extract more of the flow for its use. It will require energy that would otherwise have been yours to use to bet yourself above the Line. But that’s all you can profitably do for the body. There is no physical trick that will ignite your system above the Line, there is no magical state of perfect health that will produce a state of perfect consciousness.
Likewise for the more spiritually-oriented methods. Good works are good works, no more and no less. And the attempt to “overcome my hateful, hostile emotions,” will certainly occupy a lifetime. But you’re still not dealing with the proper part of the system. The world is full of people attempting to do good works, with people attempting to work on themselves physically. But it will never bring them close to This Thing, because This Thing lives at the extreme end of the system. It is what is now referred to as the intellect. But you should know that this is not purely intellectual endeavor; it isn’t a course of instruction. But This Thing lives always where Life is growing through man, at its point of outlet in man. It lives where the current finally runs out, where it bounces off the Line and gets analyzed, named and compared. It’s as if the whole force of the universe is trying to push out that little crack in the Line, through that one loose wire. But you simultaneously feel the full force of the universe on top, keeping itself down. That is what is known as justice. It’s balance. It’s Life’s controlled growth, trying to get out and holding itself down at the same time. But you, the few of This, are the little pores that let it out.