Funny Money and Deeds Well Done
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FUNNY MONEY AND DEEDS WELL DONE
Document: 42, September 30, 1982
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1982
If you have stayed here for any length of time, even if only for a matter of months, you should begin to See things on your own, things that I do not have to tell you. The reality of This Thing is that it does not operate through the ordinary churning process of faith. And you are not confined, when you develop your own understanding, to my words and descriptions. You begin to See, on your own, and for yourself. You sketch your own maps. In a sense, it is of no great importance but it is real fun. You See something, and you see that it is connected to things you’d never before Seen. You begin to expand the maps. The fun of being able to do This is priceless, and it is not available anywhere else.
I shall try to explain some of the internal workings of This Thing. It may not meet your automatic expectations of inside gossip about This, but in a sense that is what it is. Neuralize, remember without thinking, that although some of this appears to be impertinent and may not seem to be of any practical value, it is.
Neuralize, as well, why you never hear of such things as I am about to relay. Now that you have had time to Neuralize, I will tell you the answer. You never hear about the real internal workings of This Thing because nobody knows. That is why the religions of the world, the pseudo groups and pseudo prophets always refer to sky gods, to unseen spirits and voices from the dead. It does produce an aura of mystery, and it serves a purpose. But there is one good reason for the mystery: no one can explain what is going on even in his own system or religion. No one knows how it works, so no one has any gossip to relate. If such a leader could suddenly be brought beyond the limitations of his own system, if he were suddenly able to tell the objective truth about what he is in the general scheme of things, his biggest piece of gossip would be “I do not know what in the world I am doing here and I cannot understand why anyone listens to me. The world is in worse shape than I thought when I first started out, because no one has caught on to me.” But, you do not generally hear such admissions because in most cases any ordinary religious representative has gone too far. He’s got a following, he’s got a house and car payments, and it’s too late for him to stop now. That is a humorous way to put it. The fact is, he can’t quit. He just can’t. It’s that simple.
What I am about to point out, like everything in This, has no real comparison, no parallel in Life. At a certain point, This Thing speeded up to the point that I was not confronted with having to carry people for a matter of years. Let me now point out that everything that is of benefit, has a cost. Nothing is free. Suppose you found that someone had left an elephant in your back yard. As soon as you saw it, it struck you “I have always liked elephants and I’m short a pet. It is just a delight to have it. Plus, elephants cost thousands of dollars and someone just left it with this note saying ‘I know you’ll enjoy this’.” It should be obvious that it is not a free gift. Just for starters, you’re going to have to pay for its food. Although none of this would have been possible without me, and although I still keep the energy of it going, something else has developed — this group now has a certain profitability. The current now runs between some of the people here in the group itself. In other words, people have begun to See for themselves.
Just as everything has its price, as This has expanded it too has a price. But something is available in this group, and it’s different from that which is available from just me. It presents a brand new set of possibilities: there is more available quicker, if you truly belong here, because of the group, because it is not just me versus you. It is not just me carrying it. Note, however, that no one in the group is attempting to become a saint. No one takes you aside and explains exactly what I mean in my more obtuse moments. What I am referring to is that simply being around other people making effort and beginning to See on their own, has an effect, if you’re properly here. But even this profitable and auspicious development has a price, the price being that the initial energy that I was furnishing, and which I still necessarily furnish, is now more dispersed, and it takes more. Remember: nothing is free, and it always takes more.
Diagram # 005 illustration
It takes something to do This. Recall my map of there being a horizontal Line which represents human consciousness. Ordinarily a person cannot tap into the cutting edge of that Line. Remember, it is not absolutely stable — it continues to rise, to expand, but not in an ordinary lifetime. The absolute, undivided energy of Life, that fuels this expansion, is very close to what Man thinks of as the gods, great spirits, etc. It is This Thing, and people like me are outlets for it. And that’s it. But it is not an outlet’s job to change the world or go around undoing injustice and political tyranny. There is no injustice in the world. This Thing is not about changing the physical circumstances of Life, not its political, religious, or social structures. They cannot be changed. To put it another way, if someone like me who was an outlet for This, or one of the great religious leaders of times past, actually stuck his fingers into the machinery of Life and tried to produce such a change, tried to bring down the king or make himself king, it would be the end of everything. It is not up to This Thing to do or even attempt such as that.
This Thing does not resist a certain kind of undifferentiated, undivided energy. It does not even interfere with ordinary Life in general. It does interfere on a very limited scale, among the very Few, because there is a certain kind of shock that has a rippling effect. That is the kind of energy that is at work in this group, and it has a physical, quantitative limit.
The general point I am making is that the more people involved here, the greater are your possibilities. I can treat this group almost as one person who is activated above the Line of ordinary consciousness. Aside from the individual people, the group as a whole makes one more activated person. Neuralize it, because it is truly astounding. I can treat you, as a whole, as though you are a whole person and speak in such a way that half the time half of you can’t hear and the other half of the time, the other half can’t hear. Then, one quarter of the time you don’t want to hear, but you crowd around and wonder if anyone else understands. It produces far greater possibilities than if it were just me and a few people. But there is also a price: in one sense, everyone gets a little less of This as more people become involved. Everyone gets a smaller piece of the pie. This is not a negative statement, because everything is connected. If it weren’t for everyone else here, you would not be here. And if it weren’t for you, they would not be here. If it were not for both of you, you all would not be here. It is now more complex than ever, and there is only so much available: I can do only so much in one week and in one lifetime. In a sense, with more people there is a little bit less for each one. But now, that there is less of it, there are also more possibilities. It makes no verbal sense whatsoever, and it is not even true, although it sounds like it could be true. Though I say you get less, you are not being cheated, because it is not less, even though there is less of it, because there are more possibilities.
So you see, if you are ordinarily a reasonable person, you’ve got a problem. Because, even though there is less, now there is more. You’ve even got two more problems: I could say that in a sense, doing This is easier under such conditions. It is an absolute lie, but in a sense it is easier. I could also say that it is harder, because there is less of it to go around and I can’t open my mouth much wider to allow more of this to flow through. But there is now a third problem. Now that there are more of you and it is in a sense easier, though that isn’t true because it is also harder, now number three goes back to number one. In a sense it is harder because this whole thing now weighs more. Although you have got to have me — the group can’t live without me — it is not just limited to me. There are other people here who can See beyond my words and descriptions, and some of you would be delighted just to see what they See. It’s not a matter of imitating me or anyone else, but these people have a real effect. And their effect makes it easier, although I told you that was not true. But now, remember the third one — now this whole thing weighs more. It has a certain heaviness. It is not your fault, and there is nothing to be done about it; we cannot get rid of half of you, but there is, in a sense, a limit to what I can do. You might like to see me increase it, to pick up the tempo of it, but there is a limit.
It is not simply a matter of it being a privilege to be involved in This. It is not only a privilege to have the opportunity to escape your ordinary system, and to further activate yourself above the Line — it is your duty to do it. It is your duty because there is a certain cost in doing This — not just to me, but also because of what I pointed out in number two or even number one. It is partly number two, i.e., now there is less available. What passes from me to you must now be shared by everyone. Hence, it becomes your duty to Do This.
I have verbally drawn a map describing the emotional currency, a kind of funny money, a counterfeit currency, that people transfer at the ordinary level. The most superficial observation tells you that there is a certain kind of social lubricant which I’m calling a counterfeit currency. But you’ve got to watch your voices for any kind of cynicism. The voices might tell you the whole world is deluded and everyone is a fraud. After all, people say, “Good morning, how are you,” when they don’t mean it. Your beginning observations might show you that in a certain way, people don’t mean what they say, but if we were to rate observations on a scale from one to ten, that would be a one. Ordinary people have the ability, no matter what role they fill, to be what you could call “cynical.” But the reality of ordinary cynicism is based upon a kind of unprofitable, unknown awareness that things could be different. It is the routine frustration of an ordinary system. It can be explained in ordinary terms sometimes as “things are not as they should be” or “things are not as they appear to be,” but you have got to begin to See very quickly that the assumed basis of cynicism, in ordinary life, is untrue. Because everything is just as it must be.
It is not that this counterfeit currency itself is cynicism. A politician walks up to you and says, “My name is so-and-so, and I would appreciate your vote,” and you think, “Nah, he wouldn’t appreciate my vote. He wouldn’t care about me if he weren’t running for office. Look at the way he’s dressed and the way I’m dressed — he wouldn’t give me the time of day.” Ordinary consciousness would say the politician is acting, that his campaign rhetoric is a sham contrived for his own personal benefit. That is not true. As long as you are held captive by such ordinary views, you are also held captive by your own ordinary voices. You don’t have to look anywhere else for the world’s biggest fraud; you’re the world’s biggest fraud. You are affronted by the apparent falsity of others because you’re captive of the ordinary belief that people are people. You are operating on the basis that there is a little person inside that politician who plans and plots, who knows what he is doing, and given the opportunity, will take advantage of you. “He ain’t glad to see me and he won’t appreciate my vote. Just let him get into office and when I try to make an appointment with him, we’ll see how much he appreciates my vote. It’s a joke.” It is not a joke, other than the fact that the whole world is a great joke. But not in the cynical, hostile way ordinary consciousness believes.
As long as you’re held by the belief in that kind of feeling which is the reality behind such words as cynical and sarcastic, you’ll not see the exchange of counterfeit currency I’m talking about. As long as you’re involved in it, you can’t See it. You must See by your own effort that you don’t have to be the end result of your internal electrical system. The current must continue to run — the voices will continue to speak, but you cannot be it. You must See that you do not have to be the voices — even if only for a short period, just enough to smell something. You must See it in yourself before you can ever See that it is true with everyone else.
The bottom line is that you cannot See what other people are as long as you think you are one of them. You cannot See what other people are as long as you take them to be what consciousness says they are — that is, “people”. If you do, then you have to take you as being what you think you are. There is no way out; you can’t See one without the other. It is as though everyone sees that the whole world is yellow, when it is simply the tint of everyone’s iris which makes the world appear yellow. But no one knows it. It cannot be explained away, it cannot be prayed away. You first have to See that, “I am part of the illusionary process.”
There is something of practical benefit — something you can use — that is related to this counterfeit currency. I’ve referred to it as the deed well done, the ultimate magic wand. It is the taking of a calculated risk, doing something apparently dangerous, but not in the ordinary sense, for any time you expose yourself to ordinary danger and injury, you are not doing This. It would be something that would be dangerous if done carelessly, .pabut you do it willfully, with extraordinary attention and focus. And in so doing, you increase your own internal pressures.
The common exchange of counterfeit currency offers prime and unsuspected opportunities for such a calculated risk. Ordinary emotions are the common currency; everyone deals in them, but everyone deals in counterfeit currency, because ordinary emotions, though they do exist, are not real.
Neuralize then, what would be real emotion? What is possible other than this common counterfeit currency? You have got to see that there is a way to get beyond ordinary emotions in one stroke of a calculated risk. All my methods are designed to lead you to the edge of the risk: not staring, not letting your consciousness be held at the Line of ordinary consciousness. All the methods of This Thing have to do with establishing something in you more durable than the common currency. But first, you have to get free from it for a second; you have to get outside yourself, you have to see that your own eyeballs are tinted yellow. You have to get beyond this nonstable illusion that there is an “I” in you that thinks, that feels and speaks for you. There is a way to profitably struggle with the common emotional currency, and it leads you to the calculated risk. I can describe, not the ultimate experience itself, but the way to get there. As far as words go, it would be like pushing a narrow board through a table saw without using a push stick. It is being able to look at people without staring at them. It is being able to look at people and not think about them. It is a calculated risk. It is a deed well done wherein you apparently handle the money and you apparently involve yourself with whatever’s going on, if necessary. (When you get good you not only do it when necessary but also if you have got nothing better to do.)
Let’s say you’re standing at the bus stop, and you find yourself between two guys discussing something like how atomic testing is rotting everyone’s teeth or they’re trying to put drugs in peanut butter. One guy offers his opinion, catches your eye and says, “Huh, huh? Is that right or what?” You look him dead in the eye, both physically and otherwise, and say, “Talk about it!” It is as though you accept his money; you make him feel that it has been a complete exchange, that you’ve taken his offer, but you let it drop while you keep looking at him. If you do it properly, he never knows that you didn’t actually take it.
It is a struggle, but not only a struggle. It will give you a taste of the deed well done. It will give you a taste of the difference between being a driven, drafted, incarcerated, chained up, participant in the great human drama, and in being something else. Remember, though: you are still on the stage. I’ve never promised to show you a way out of this “vale of sin and sorrow”. What happens is that you are actually there, still on stage, still standing at the bus stop. Everyone still passes the currency around — it still flows everywhere — but you are simply a sham.
It is a matter of total insincerity. Under the wrong circumstances, that almost sound shocking, like something to be avoided. But when you taste it, you understand that there is no such thing as total insincerity. Compared with the ordinary world, total insincerity (if you know how to do it) is total sincerity, because no one else can be sincere. At Line level, no one is capable of consciously perpetrating a sham.
I could say that people seem to have different kinds of personalities that are in charge of passing along certain kinds of energy. And there are those who are in charge of being insincere fakes. But what you do not understand is that no one at the ordinary level has a choice, even if he appears to be insincere or out to trick you. A couple of obvious examples are politicians and salesmen. A good salesman cannot be identified with what he is selling. He cannot be identified with what ordinary people call the truth. But he is not evil or immoral, nor is he insincere. Really good salesmen have no choice; they cannot be otherwise. You can’t take a salesman in the midst of his pitch and make him See the importance of telling the truth. If you ask him point blank, “Don’t you know that the claims you are making for your product are not true?” the best he could say is something like, “Well, sure.” But, it makes no sense to him. Such concerns are immaterial. He could just as well turn to you and say, “I see you have yellow eyes. If I put my head on the desk and count to ten, will you stop having yellow eyes?” If you told him to stop doing what he was doing he would not know what to say. Can you glimpse that there is absolutely no way in which a man can be objectively, from the viewpoint of This, a fraud? There are no such things as frauds in Life.
I am trying to point you to that which I described in passing as being utter, unrestrained, unconditional insincerity. If you could See that the whole world is insincere, that is, that no one is in charge of what they do, and if you were totally, willfully insincere — do you See the self-consuming circle taking shape? The difference eats itself up. It’s called understanding. When people can be totally insincere, nothing affronts you, you can handle anything. People want to hand you the currency of, “Don’t you agree with me?” and you reply, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” “What do you think of so and so,” — “I don’t know, what do you think?” It’s as easy as water off a duck’s back.
You can use it in personal relationships, you can use it with other people when something is at stake. If you struggle to always agree with others, no one notices. It does not matter if you are out with a group of strangers, or with people you know, no one notices. You can stop talking about yourself and no one will ever notice. If someone does notice, it’s because you made him notice. All you have to do is to keep turning the attention back to the other person when he asks what you think, and he forgets all about you. I’m not describing a psychological trick. I’m describing a calculated risk and it can be very useful when it gets down to what is of great importance to you, to “I”. People operate on the basis that their “I” and your “I” are involved in some kind of plot. Some kind of confrontation, some kind of discussion. People operate on the basis that you deal not just on the currency they are passing about, but with this “I” inside them that has its hand always open to receive and transfer, that wants to make change with Canadian money instead of American money. But with ultimate, total and unrestrained insincerity, there is no such thing as counterfeit money. There is a common currency that is accepted by everyone in the world: not because everyone is deluded, not because it is a trick, but because that’s the way it is. A man attempting to do This Thing cannot deal in that currency. You cannot continue to take it and put it in your pocket and think you have something. You have nothing. You have an electrical charge. You’ve been handed preprocessed food.
It is of benefit, if you belong here, for you to attempt to See that the common currency of exchange is a counterfeit money. It’s monopoly money and people clutch it and hold it, they cherish it, fight over it, and cry over it. And it is not real. It does exist — it’s in common circulation, but when you can See, you See it is not real. And you can play as though it is real, because you understand that it is of no consequence.
I am not unaware that your nervous system below the Line rebels against my use of the word “insincerity.” It wants to holler out that what I’ve just described tramples upon every decent, humane emotion. But it’s not true. If you could be totally insincere, you would be closer to being truly religious than you’ve ever dreamed. You must be totally insincere, because ordinary sincerity requires confrontation and conflict. That is the nature of it. How else can a Christian know he is a Christian or not a Jew? All you can know ordinarily, is that everyone else is not right. That’s how you know you are right. It’s always “me” against a world full of idiots and con men. That is ordinary sincerity. And everyone’s system from the Line down must believe in its own sincerity. If you don’t watch yourself, your ordinary system will complain about my description of total insincerity. Your voices tell you that surely This Thing points toward goodness, toward holiness, toward sincerity. But you must See from an objective viewpoint, that the ordinary conception of sincerity is just as counterfeit as any other currency. This Thing is the name of Life. And Life is not brotherhood and peace and good times. Life is growth. It is the Forces pushing at each other, pulling at one another. That is what being alive is about. That is what growth is about.
Can you hear total insincerity would in fact be sincerity, because you would no longer be simply transferring a certain kind of mechanical energy? You would no longer be engaged with the fact that, “I know what is going on and you do not,” or that, “I know what is proper and you are misguided,” or, “I recognize the truth when I hear it whereas you must need a hearing aid, and I am here to be sincere about it. If I were not your friend, if I weren’t sincere, I wouldn’t point out the error of your ways. After all, what are friends for?”
Now your question should be: What are people for? It is not just “what are friends for” — to help you get out of the ditch or show you where you are wrong for your own good. That is what is ordinarily referred to as sincerity. That is conflict; it is the tension that exists in every living thing, including Life itself. You must be able to See that this is counterfeit money. And it is the natural tension of connection in a living body, in the same way that the cells are connected within your body. There is a connection between everyone at all levels, all the way from political leaders to a drunk about to cause an automobile accident. It is everything happening at one time. It is the Life-of-Life, the great machine in which everything is connected and everything that moves affects something else. The real trick is keeping this description of insincerity in midair, not letting it find a resting place in consciousness. What passes for sincerity is: “I am here, I stand for something, I have a background and I can identify myself. I can tell you my religion and all sorts of opinions. I can tell you in deeds and words about everything from my hair and clothes to who I am and what I stand for”: that is being sincere. But that is being ordinary. That is being what you were before you got here. It is neither good nor bad, but it is incomplete, it is dissatisfying. In being totally insincere you would never engage in identifying yourself, even internally. To be sincere is to be engaged with the ordinary money of Life, whether its expression is agreement or resistance.
The currency is always in use. It is always passed about. That is the nature of being alive. But when you find that piece of consciousness, the one possibility for Life’s energy to find its way beyond the ordinary level of your system, you can float above the ordinary action, while giving every appearance of joining right in. You stare and you do not really stare. You appear to apply your full attention to the other person while not even thinking about him. What you’re doing is observing your ordinary self thinking about him. You nod, he leans over and you lean over. He says, “What do you think?” and you say, “Give it to me, pass it on.” He hands it to you and you look him dead in the eye, and he never notices that you just let it slip through your fingers. It is built into all of you at Line level to rebel against what I call total insincerity. I could call it something else. I could call it “the great cosmic consciousness” or “level number three” and then perhaps it would not sound so shocking. But I want you to See that total insincerity is unknown to the ordinary system. The ordinary system immediately thinks that it would be bad, that you’re cheating people. On the contrary, what you have created, in a certain sense, is a very minute break in the magnetic field that draws everyone together. It will not be of great lasting benefit to people at the ordinary level, but it does give them a moment of breathing space. It is very minute and it is gone almost instantly, but you have interrupted the flow of current.
The magnetic field is the motivating energy behind Life, and it is visible in what seems to be certain types of people attracting other types of people, certain types of people drawn to certain jobs, homes, etc. It is all a magnetic field created by the kind of energy running through that particular person. When you hold yourself above the common counterfeit exchange, you affect, on a minute level, the power of that magnetic field. Someone tells you how terrible things are and you say, “I know, I know.” You are supposed to be getting upset and angry, the story builds up to the final point where he hands you the money, and it’s your turn. You’re supposed to take it. You are supposed to sit there and seethe and say, “We won’t put up with that. They can’t push you around like that, not my friend.” He runs through the whole story and gets to the punch line, the end of the sentence where he lets go of the energy and you’re suppose to take it. But do you understand that he never really lets go of it? Under ordinary conditions, a deed is never well done, there is never a final stroke of a magic wand because the currency is alive. It is energy, and at the ordinary level, you can’t let go. You’re never satisfied. The deed well done can be accomplished, if you know how, in total, utter insincerity. When the machinery of things plays itself up to a certain point, someone hands you the money and you drop it. It is a deed well done, because when you are totally insincere, it is then done with. It has nothing to do with enlightening other people. That can’t be done. But as opposed to sharing someone’s counterfeit currency — if you listen to his story, but do not get engaged with the transaction, you did a deed well done. And you have momentarily given a quite ordinary person a chance to breathe at least one free breath. You have, in a sense, brought down the power of that magnetic field.
Everyone recognizes that there are crackpot ideas floating about in the world, ideas that every educated person would reject, such as that the world is flat. But everyone feels that such ideas are basically harmless. And on the other hand, there are certain things that everyone feels should not be interfered with, such as the emotions. There has to be the ability, an ordinary person would note, to ascertain between that which would do you harm and that which would not do you harm. They would note that crackpot ideas are not that important, but the ability to discern something harmful is pertinent and valid. But everything at the ordinary level has the same validity, although there is a reason that some things, such as emotions, seem to be more important than others. To Understand is to begin to See that what is normally referred to as “emotion” is of no more importance than a wild crackpot idea. There is objectively no difference and it endows a sense of freedom to see that. Emotions have more power because they are closer to the seat of each person’s existence. Emotions are the tenor, the tension, that is brought to bear upon everything, and that connects everyone. It is the healthy tensile strength between all the individual cells, between all people. That is what appears to be ordinary emotion. And they are necessary — to wit, without them, you would be dead. But the idea that there are good and bad emotions — ones you can trust and ones you cannot trust — has no more validity than any other common belief. Under ordinary conditions, you cannot do a deed well done. You cannot say goodbye, you cannot make a decision. It is as if everyone has stepped in chewing gum and drags it about the rest of their lives. A deed well done is to be able to say no, to say yes, to either absolutely mean it, or to be totally insincere, which is all the same thing, at least on a verbal level.
Ordinarily, it is almost unknown for anyone to do a deed well done or say goodbye. Someone asks you for a decision and you say “no”. But you don’t forget it. You might change your mind, or stall for time; you worry about your answer and what people will think about it. There is no end to it and there is not supposed to be an end to it. It is the transfer of energy between cells within the body of Life, but it appears to be circumstances and interactions between people. It is the nature of Life that is how everything gets done.
In light of all this, Consider how miraculous it is that everything works properly. It’s a miracle that you can say, “Can I have a loaf of bread?”, and you do indeed get a loaf of bread. It’s a miracle that you open a jar labelled “peanut butter”, and it actually contains peanut butter. It is a miracle. Why did it not turn out that when you ask the clerk for bread, he pulls out a pistol and shoots you. Or, when you crank your car, instead of running like an automobile, it spits out french fries or takes off like a rocket? The miracle is that everything is predictable and that everything works within certain predictable parameters. Forget about looking for anything weird or mystical. The ordinary, the predictable, is what is miraculous. It is a miracle that you get in your car, crank it and it starts. It is a miracle to open a jar of peanut butter and find that there is peanut butter inside rather than a troupe of dancing giraffes. It is a miracle that everything happens the way it seems to happen, as it is predicted to happen. It is because the energy continually flows and there is ordinarily nothing to stop it. There are, ordinarily, no deeds well done. There is, ordinarily, no end. You break up a love affair, but is that the end of it? No. You want to keep in touch with the other person and know how they are doing. You think about the places you have been together, you walk into your house and expect to see him/her sitting there. Can you suspect the kind of freedom that you would feel it you knew how to cut the flow, if you could be totally insincere, if you understood that one thing is as good as another and that nothing at the ordinary level is of any consequence in so far as your aim to do This Thing? It is all fodder. It is all necessary, but it is all to be used for your calculated risks.
You can construct your own ultimate magic wand and in a single stroke, be done with a particular energy transfer. But of course you have to make your own wand. You have to fashion the stick just right, with one whack, for it to be a magic wand. You can’t take time to look for a how-to book or to find a blueprint. You cannot whittle it to perfection. You cannot ask another’s opinion as to whether your wand is properly proportioned. And once you do it, you can’t back up and take another try. You have only one shot.
And you must understand that there is a difference between a clean scalpel and a rusty pocket knife. With a clean, sharp scalpel you are able to go “thwack” and cut something and that is it. You find that it does not hurt. You can, with one stroke, make a clean cut. But a rusty knife will not produce a deed well done. If your blade is rusty, you’re constantly saying, “Let me call you later.” If it’s not a clean cut, a deed well done, you’re continually faced with, “Uh-oh, is anybody still on the third floor, or did they move the Biology department back to — tell them to move part of the equipment up to the third floor and leave the heavy stuff till I get there later.” To do that is to constantly cut and never get through.
Just as with the magic wand, you have to have the right knife, and you also have to use it in a single stroke. You have one shot. It is not fearful, you simply have to know what you are doing. Once you do it, once you go “thwack” the knife is gone, the wand is gone and you will never find another stick like it. You have to be able to do it in one clean swoop. That is a deed well done. That is a calculated risk that paid off. Everything that a person says, thinks and does is a hindrance to activating the upper part of the nervous system. Everything that ordinarily happens, everything which just flows through you, the process which does itself internally, whether it takes form in thought, action or words, is a hindrance to This Thing. Because the operation of the Line level system is based upon the handling of that common currency. When you are ordinary you only see the world that everyone else sees. And the world everyone sees is a world where things are important — and what is important is what they are talking about. One’s decisions seem to be extremely important; what one says next seems extremely important. But it is not — not if your aim is to do This, to activate your nervous system above the Line. If that is your Aim, you must See that ordinary life is neither important nor unimportant. It just is, and it is to be seen. And you can begin to See it by taking calculated risks.
You will find out that there is nothing to fear in Life. The only real fear is physical danger, and that is not really most people’s problem today. But there is a real physical fear, the body’s awareness that it must defend itself. Other than that, there is no such thing as fear. Anything other than physical danger is all a form of funny money. It is all counterfeit currency, but everyone accepts it as real because they have no alternative. There is no real currency in circulation at the ordinary level. If there were, no one could see it, no one could handle it. In a sense, you in your attempts to be totally insincere, come closer to experiencing true, real emotion than you could ever imagine.
I am going to refer to a number of questions I have been asked regarding emotions and the possibility of what I am calling real emotions. One of you recently mentioned a feeling of closeness, an extraordinary connectedness to all living things — trees, animals, insects. All of you should ultimately feel something like this. There is, as you might suspect, a very real physical emotion between all animals. There is, simply, a connection between everything alive on this planet. There is a connection between anything that transfers energy. Once you begin to get outside the ordinary system you will feel it a bit more. You may never get a dog, but there is a physical level of emotion that is quite direct and that you should be able to feel, and dogs are a wonderful example of this. It is true to some extent with very small babies. Of course, as they grow older everyone becomes involved with the banking system of mechanical and unprofitable (from the viewpoint of This Thing) emotion, with the transfer of mechanical energy. But there is a connection between everything alive, and you should not engage in hunting or fishing or killing insects. If roaches were eating up all your food and posing a health hazard in your home, I am not saying you shouldn’t get rid of them. But you should feel no enjoyment whatsoever in killing an insect. I’m not going to wallow in any kind of pseudo-mysticism, but I am telling you that in a real, physical sense, you are a brother to little woolies and worms. Don’t let your imagination get you, but the truth is that in a sense you can feel something more direct and more in the nature of brotherhood with a beetle than you can with ordinary people, and that is not an attack on ordinary people. It does not mean that the whole world is depraved and insects are better than people. It is simply that there is a very direct, quite physically-based emotion between you and an insect that is not normally available between you and an ordinary adult, an ordinary person.
Someone else asked if true emotions are those in which one can be involved and at the same time be impartial about. That is not a bad way of putting it, but the words are almost self-contradictory. I’ll give you one definition of real emotion, at least for now: a real emotion is one that does not support your ordinary condition. It makes no sense to ordinary consciousness, but it is a fair and true description. Which means that almost everything that you currently can do, think, say and feel is a hindrance to the activation of the upper nervous system, because it all supports your ordinary condition. If, on the other hand, you could conceive of anything which would not support “things as they are”, you could conceive of life above the Line.
You have no business identifying yourself in Life. there are parts of your circuitry that tell you that it is proper to show what a virtuous person you are, or that you are of a certain religion or nationality. But I tell you that there is no profit in it. If you continue your efforts with This you will eventually see it on your own.
This Thing has nothing to do with being identified as a proper son to your forefather’s religion or heritage or nationality or anything else. It is not proper to identify yourself in any way. There is something in everyone that squirms at that. Everyone feels there is some validity and importance in their nationality or religion, and in where they came from. But that is being tied to the past. That is being ordinary. That is not a deed well done. The Few who are truly of This Thing have no past. I don’t mean that your parents and family simply disappear. They are the past lives in the lower levels of your nervous system. But it becomes no more important than a faint noise in the basement. It becomes as irrelevant as everything else at Line level. At the ordinary level, people are driven to identify themselves. You can see it, and you should continue to try to see it, both generally and individually. It is part of being on the playing field of Life, it’s part of what keeps the game in motion. In other words, it supports your ordinary condition. Some things in Life may seem more precious than others — some currencies seem to have more validity than others. But such appearances exist only at Line level. And everything at that level is just as impertinent and irrelevant as everything else. The more you hold onto your past, the more you identify yourself, the more you solidify your ordinary connection in the Grid. And the harder it will be for you to change. If everyone in this room were activated beyond the ordinary level, it would be almost a sea of blank faces, or non-identifiable, good-humored, wide-eyed faces. And everyone could engage in continual and total insincerity. Believe me, no one in Life would ever notice. It has nothing to do with religious, racial or nationalistic concerns. Such insincerity has got nothing to do with the town of Babel. These support your ordinary consciousness and true insincerity is extraordinary.
The great and wonderful power of being totally insincere is that it does not support your Life-produced role. As with everything else, there’s an element of trickery that’s not included in my descriptions. I don’t tell everything. Part of the trickery is that you have to do it. You have to See that it takes tremendous and constant effort to do it, and that if you could do it all the time, you would no longer be you. So there you are. You can either waste your life attempting the willful foolishness of This Thing, or you can go ahead and “Be Sincere”, like the gods intended you to be. You can stand up for what is right and denounce that which is wrong, or at least denounce that which you do not understand, because it has to be wrong. You can denounce that which you are kind of unclear about or that which you have never heard of. After all, if you’ve never heard of it, it must be denounceable. Then again, you can forget all that. Forget your past and remember to be totally insincere.