Thinking Without Examples
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Summary
Jan Cox Talk #75, Jul 28, 1983, runtime 1:50
Notes by TK
Reading of papers on design of foolproof burglar alarm system to 00:26
The Aim of Life: something in me growing–an expansion of peace. Things don’t affect me like they used to. The purpose of humanity is to expand Life. You are part of the life of Life. Your Aim should be threefold: (1) I want to be more awake; feel better about life. (2) Something to be done (i.e., publicly). (3) Serving a specific purpose–a higher purpose. Realize that there is no choice but to serve Life. (4) Understand what is going on. You cannot stop at the mere reduction of suffering occasioned by The Work.
Nothing goes on in the world without the participation of the 3 forces. Ordinary consciousness sees only two. Music analogy for triads/forces: Three notes combine to create a pleasing, recognizable musical chord. Example of relationships in Group. You + other person = two of the forces. The third force is the seeming irrelevant which furnishes a new element changing the triad: Fred steals your wife–or just the mystery of “why did she run off?” Triads are necessarily constantly changing. To attempt to hold on to the old triad is the personification of second force.
Hostility is at the heart of Life’s breathing mechanism.
Protection of self: imitation of someone’s hostility toward you reverses the current and shuts them off. You go on their “don’t fool with” list. Willfully faked hostility. Don’t let anyone know you are: vegetarian, don’t eat on Thurs., don’t gossip etc. This is a form of self protection but not on the basis of being attacked; you are just ending an unprofitable mechanical energy transfer. You need to become invisible to ordinary energy transfers.
Considering as a “struggle”: a “new thinking” –thinking w/o examples; w/o forms. Question: what if the content of words is irrelevant? The vehicle, not the cargo is important. The Few help Life to think w/o examples.
The power of small habits. You can alter large habits easy enough–but small habits are all but impossible to eradicate. You must eradicate them; they should “infuriate” you to have bad habits.
Excursion
turn your plays into short stories. To be put into Group book
Transcript
THINKING WITHOUT EXAMPLES / Life has a life
Document: 75, July 28, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983
I want you to Consider something about the three Forces, the triadal aspect to everything in Life. Neuralize triads in the realm of music. In Western music a triad or a chord is three notes, taken out of all the twelve possible notes. When someone plays the guitar, even if they are playing all six strings, they usually play just three notes, repeated over and over. Someone using eight fingers to play the piano is also generally repeating three notes. Musically, (at least in the Western world), anything less than three notes is usually just a passing noise. It may be harmonic and sound pleasant, but if you have an ear for music, you can hear that the harmony of two leaves no lasting feeling.
If someone plays one note, it is just a sound — just noise — in which you cannot maintain any lasting interest. You can play two notes on the piano which harmonize, but it is not truly musical. In order to create the sense that somebody has actually played something on an instrument, or even singing, you must have, at a minimum, three notes — a triad. It is not a question of maybe, it is not a question of sometimes; you have to have three notes — a chord, a triad — before it sounds like anything truly musical and melodic.
Use the structure of music to extend your sense of the three Forces in Life. Ordinary consciousness can always see two parts of a triad: First Force — for instance, that which “I” wants to do — and its resistance, Second Force. Any time something is going on (and I might point out that something is always going on, whether you think so or not), it is based upon a triad. If you had only First Force it would be like someone walking past the piano, hitting one note and walking on. It would be a passing noise. One force all by itself can be seen in fleeting, weak impressions — such as, suppose you’re reading a matchbook cover. Before you finish, you’re interrupted by a honking horn, and you put the matches down. And you never think about that matchbook cover again for the rest of your life. It was just a noise, like the accidental bonk on a piano.
Now look at sexual relationships between men and women. These people have the sense of it being “me and you”. At some point in the relationship you may feel the pressures of the world getting to you — maybe you start arguing a lot — but notice that no one ever considers the outside world except during times when it seems to become a specific force. But it is always there, of course; there are always three forces involved. One day the woman might tell the man she is leaving to move in with some guy named Fred. Once another force is identified — in this case Fred — it seems to change the triad. What was of no consequence, unidentifiable and irrelevant — that is, everything outside of “you and me honey” — suddenly becomes relevant. It becomes: “Why do you want to go off and leave me?” The triad has apparently changed. But I point out again, the triad is continually changing. Triads move constantly. There is no such thing as a stable triad unless you are dealing with a corpse. A triad may appear at first glance to be fixed or stable — two people may be married for sixty years, but the triad has undergone an almost infinite number of changes during that time.
This is not limited to sexual relationships; I only use that situation because it has an immediate, and intense effect on people. Let us say that you are Fred and you are in a relationship with Mary. If you are a woman, just put yourself in the man’s position for the sake of my example. If Mary leaves, the triad changes and Fred and Mary become two thirds of a new triad. Under ordinary conditions, Fred is always going to feel as though he has been pushed out, regardless of whether he knows anything about triads or This Thing. Fred will feel that he has been left out and that something has been taken away from him. He might say to himself, “Hey, we had a wonderful marriage and now this other guy came along and took you away from me, and I see you two out having good times, flying by in his red Jaguar convertible. You’re having fun and I’m miserable.” He will feel like he has been pushed out yet, somehow, he also feels he is going to hold onto the relationship as it was.
What Fred cannot comprehend (and what you must comprehend if you belong here) is that certain kinds of changes are irreversible. If you get stuck trying to reconstruct a triad that has changed you are asking for one thing (and you will get it). You are standing in the middle of the highway that is labeled INTERSTATE DESTRUCTION, where the destructive force is running rampant. You become part of a wide open, uninhibited conduit for destructive force.
The same thing could happen in a business. Someone might say, “My competitor ran me out of business through cutthroat tactics and undercutting my prices, and he did it deliberately. I finally went out of business, and I know it was his fault. That guy over there pushed me out of a very pleasurable, very profitable position.” It is the same as the situation with the couple, but ordinary consciousness does not see that it was a triad. An ordinary person will always continue to feel as though “A piece of me is still in there”, as though their coat was caught in the door, or as the songwriters would say, “My heart is still over there, she’s carrying it around in her pocketbook. She forgot about me, but she has this invisible connection with my heart, and she just tosses it about and laughs.”
Ordinary people always attempt to hold on. That is fine, if you are ordinary, because that creates the kind of friction that keeps everything rolling right along. But, once a triad has changed, a person attempting to do This Thing has to very quickly See that when a triad changes in a certain way the situation has irreversibly been altered. You can recognize it. You do not have to have any mystical abilities or throw down sticks and read the star charts to see it. It does not matter if you feel you had anything to do with it or not. If you attempt to hold onto a triad that no longer exists you are putting yourself out as the living spokesman for Second Force, for D Force. You are where the highway will be, and you are being paved by D Force. That’s what suffering is. If you pointed that out to people with real memory, they would say “Yeah, that is true, but I never thought about it in that way, I did not have a name for it.” It is suffering. If it was once real pain, it is not real pain any longer because the triad has shifted and that triad is no longer where it was when you entered it. You are attempting to hold onto it — you are operating on the basis of trying to get the triad back the way it was. You are saying, “If I suffer enough, if I whine enough, if I think about it, get mad and cry enough, it will get back to where it was.” You are living in funny land to believe that. You are blind and ordinary and you are helping to pave the INTERSTATE DESTRUCTION highway. You can’t unpave a highway, or undo a done triad.
My examples are of triads that would have a great impact on people. But out there every day are little triads. Everyone in Life wants to straighten out his desk at the end of every day, sharpen all the pencils, clear off the desk top, shine it and bronze it. What you are longing for is to stabilize all those pleasurable triads. Let’s say you haven’t been fighting lately with the man or woman you’re with, and it’s heaven. You might find that you wish it would be that way all the time. What you are imagining as heaven is in fact death. You want to bronze a triad and it cannot be done. You should be able to sense this. When a triad has changed in a certain way, you simply cannot freeze it.
There is nothing mystical about it. If you are attempting This Thing and the man or woman you are involved with tells you it’s over that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether or not they say it’s nothing personal, they may say it is personal. What they are really saying is, “I am packing my clothes and leaving and I do not wish you any harm, but this is it.” Unless you are going to make a living writing sad songs and suffering, that is it. You can go over there and crawl up her driveway, break windows or threaten to kill yourself, but the triad has changed. The change appears to be in the form of a person, but it is energy. You cannot reverse certain kinds of changes in triads; or, you can’t reverse certain energy flows. They flow in one direction only.
You cannot duplicate one moment of heaven, or one moment of torture. You can’t reproduce any situation. Once a triad moves, for example, to the point of someone leaving you and saying, “Look, don’t bother me,” then that is it. You should not go around saying, “Oh dear!” or plotting how you are going to get them back. Once things have changed to that degree, the triad is dead and you cannot hold onto it. You cannot hold on to a memory of a triad. Once it has changed you have to see that it is gone. You must see that the very thing holding you to suffering is the feeling that in some way that triad was completely out of your control and that if you push it in some way you can get it back. If you think you can twist it back around — make everybody come to their senses and see how they have mistreated you — you are still looking for the Yellow Brick Road.
Let me point to something about the terms “Consider” and “Neuralize”. I almost want to refrain from describing this, so that some day you may stumble upon a crack and see something beyond these definitions. Neuralizing is like a struggle to do something with the consciousness, the awareness of the nervous system, that has not already been programmed. To put it in ordinary terms, it is the attempt to think in places in the brain where there are no thoughts. It is to run to the end of where the computer is programmed, to get to the place where everything connects, beyond the period at the end of the sentence, even if the period says “no more information available”. You get to the end of the road where the bridge is washed out, where the state has ceased building highways, and you have to keep on going without crashing the car. When you get to the end of the road you have to make the car fly.
Beyond that, a new description I could give of “Neuralizing” would be, at the simplest level, “new thinking” as opposed to ordinary thinking. Real new thinking would be the culmination of Neuralizing. It would be to See something on your own, to be able to think without examples. If I ask you, “What is emotion, or what is anger?”, you are going to answer with an example, the internal voices will give an example. The ability to use the circuitry of the nervous system above the Line of ordinary consciousness — the reality just beyond the point of the struggle, that I refer to as Neuralizing — is the ability to think without examples.
Your voices may tell you that you know what I mean by “thinking without examples”, but you do not. Because all you can do is try to think of an example. You simply cannot Understand this with your ordinary awareness because the example of thinking without examples would be an example itself.
I am not here to produce an endless string of paradoxical statements but you should attempt to Neuralize these verbal maps. Let’s take so-called emotion, what is apparently at the heart of everyone’s problems. It is a term you hear all the time and use yourself. If I ask you to define something important such as “emotion”, the voices are going to do one thing; that is, give you an example of what “emotion” is.
(I was not going to mention this, but what if — for the sake of This Thing — the apparent content or cargo of words is all but irrelevant? You may not see any connection between that and what I just said about thinking without examples, but I strongly suggest you Neuralize this.)
The kind of consciousness that everyone dreams about and that you always imagined as enlightenment would be a kind of “new thought”. I could call it “heating”, or anything to differentiate it from thinking. It is being able to think in a way that you are not aware of below the Line of consciousness. It is being able to think without examples. Such thinking puts a serious alteration in this ordinary triad in Life because you are pushing Life’s consciousness in a way that it would not be pushed if you were not doing it. If not for the small handful of men and women attempting to do This Thing, Life itself would be thinking in examples. That is the way it is ordinarily done. That is the way everything progresses. Life’s own nervous system is expanding into the upper part of the circuitry and Life itself is becoming more conscious. Every time you can Neuralize something — every time you can cease to pass along the kind of energy that you are normally equipped to pass along — you have allowed Life, in a small way, to think without examples.
It’s as though there is a life to Life. Life itself has a life. It is just a trick for me to point to it as though Life is “out there”. You are in the midst of Life and it is alive and growing. And Life has its own problems. With that in mind, take this crude description as best you can – but don’t treat it as a strict allegory:
Suppose you have not been out running for several days and finally you say, “OK, I am going to go run.” You look outside and see clouds gathering and you know your voices are going to tell you it looks like rain. You might start to look at the clock and you know the voices are going to tell you it is too late. Nevertheless, you are aware of the simple fact that you are going running. Some voice says, “Forget the voices, I just have to. I do not like it any more than you guys do, but I have got to.” The crude analogy I want to make is that one attempting This Thing is doing the same thing to Life, not in the physical sense of running, but higher up in the circuitry. Just as you see you must get out and run, you see what you have to do to get above the Line. And if you can think without examples, it’s like a rocket taking off in the life of Life. You are then close to what the third purpose of Life is for someone involved in This Thing, because the life of Life on another level has what I’m calling “problems” of its own. It has its own laziness, D Force in action, inertia, and resistance. When you are about to be aware in the same old way you are ordinarily aware and you do not let the ordinary happen in one small place at the top edge of your nervous system, it is not unlike making yourself run when the voices say “don’t”.
You should not consider yourself as divided into thinking, feeling, or other such divisions. It is a form of trickery, but use the terms Red, Blue and Yellow circuitry. When you explore the notions of terms such as thinking or emotion, you are stuck in the world of examples. To think in examples is to think in forms. The “new thought” I refer to amounts to thinking in energy. When you can activate the nervous system above the Line of ordinary consciousness, you can think without examples. It amounts to perceiving the energy and not the form. An example is just a form, that’s all. You must try to find a new way of thinking, to activate your nervous system above the Line and be able to think without examples. Then the only thing you are left with is what This is about, that is, the energy behind This, not the form of it. The form of it is the trickery. The form of it is trying to get everyone to move their position. The trickery is in attaching some importance to these descriptions and words, latching onto them and trying to figure it out. That is necessary, but it is only a process. There are no answers and there is no secret book. Simply ask yourself: “How can I think without examples?” From the point of view of This Thing, anything less is not thinking. The use of examples is not using the Yellow Circuit; it is the Yellow Circuit using you — just as you are not in a bad mood when you are in a mood, but a bad mood is in you. You are like a tunnel and what you call emotion flows through you. You do not have thoughts, thoughts have you. The only way to get closer to what would be the proper use of the Yellow circuitry — to push right up to the Line of ordinary consciousness — would be to Neuralize from all possible angles that real thinking would be thinking without examples.
Something else you should Neuralize is that what is smallest is the most mechanical. Everybody walking this planet — yourself included of course — has small habits, whether it be leaving the toothpaste cap off the tube or leaving the lights on. Part of the power these habits have over you is that some voice in you always disapproves of them. Maybe your father told you to always turn out the lights because it wastes money, but you figured out that you can leave the lights on all day and all night and it only costs twenty cents a month so you just leave them on. Yet, every time you walk past a room with the lights on some voice in you says something about the light being on. You cannot continue to accept such energy expenditures.
On the other hand, note how easy it is to handle what seem to be big habits. You can take a man who espouses some radical political idea, some unusual notion about a worldwide bank conspiracy putting fluoride in the water while plotting with people from another planet. You take a guy like that, offer him a good job, and tell him, “Look, out there when we were laying brick people got used to you but if you come in here, you are going to have to wear a suit. You will be making three times as much money and you just can’t go around talking like that.” The guy will start thinking, “Triple what I ever made? That will get me out of debt and they are going to give me a car and I can smoke cigars at work and I don’t have to put up with the rain and mud.” Under the right conditions, you should know that he’ll easily give up talking about bank conspiracies and people from other planets during working hours, right? He can just sit in his office and listen to people express all kinds of political views that would have had him fighting when he was laying bricks. All he has got to do is look at that cash register ringing up his salary, and it’s easy for him to sit there and say nothing. But, you can’t get the guy to quit picking his nose or playing with his mustache like he’s done all of his life.
You can see this in yourself, and you should be absolutely infuriated by it. If someone offers you a job and tells you you will make lots of money but you should not mention your age or your religion, it is easy to do. But it is the small things — the more mechanical — which should infuriate you. It is the little clumsy things you do that the voices comment upon. Forget about any sort of objective basis for turning out the lights or putting the cap back on the toothpaste tube. What is significant is the voice that tells you the habit is unacceptable and you should not do it any more. The voices go on and on and on and it should infuriate you. It should doubly infuriate you that you won’t stop this by turning out the light and putting the cap back on the toothpaste. Maybe you are at the point where to a large degree you do not express hostility, but you pick your nose and leave the top off the toothpaste and you ignore that. It should infuriate you to have these continuing voices when they can be stopped.
To carry it one step further, you should also see how this reflects upon ordinary consciousness. The smallest piece of something is that which is the most mechanical. The level of ordinary consciousness is the smallest possible reflection of what could be potential consciousness — the smallest possible reflection. Ordinary people cannot be less conscious, they cannot afford to be any less conscious. Everyone is at least as conscious as is possible while still fitting the definition of being conscious. If ordinary people had any idea of trying to increase their awareness, they would understand that and maybe say something like, “It’s true, one little drink of alcohol and I’m totally out of it. I can’t fool around with drugs, I can’t get into great discussions that make me angry because I am treading a fine line now. I am just barely conscious enough to pass for being an ordinary person.”
Although consciousness does increase within the life of Life, ordinary humanity is just minimally conscious. Seeing that in yourself should infuriate you. Ordinary humanity is at the smallest possible level of consciousness because that is the most mechanical level. It has to be that way within this greater system. You cannot have people running amuck. You cannot have a thousand people on this planet attempt to do This Thing. It would be like the liver going off and deciding, “Hey, I think I’ll go over there and start fooling around with the kidneys and show them how to really operate.” Life would not tolerate that. But, within yourself, it should infuriate you that, “Yeah, I can shut up where I work and never let anyone know how old I am, but I can’t stop doing this little thing over here. I can deny all kinds of great things — apparently stop all kinds of mechanical manifestations of myself — and yet for thirty years I leave the lights on every time I walk out of a room and for thirty years I hear voices somewhere in me disapproving of it.” It should infuriate you. If you do not Understand this, stop these small things and then you will see why it should have infuriated you in the first place. A person should not have any “bad habits” — by your own definition, by the definition of the voices within you. You should not have any. Anything that the voices disapprove of and you continue to do, should infuriate you, and you should stop it. Then you will See something. If you stop it and you do not see why you should have been infuriated, you should really be infuriated! If I were you I would then pack my clothes and leave town. I would run, as fast as I could.
It is time for me to speak about the purpose to Life. After a certain period of involvement with This Thing you may begin to wonder about the purpose to all of This. There is a distinct lack of rules and laws as I’m conducting it here. Further, you cannot hold onto any notion that you do what This Thing requires for some sort of reward, recognition from the gods or whatever you might have at one time imagined. I rarely mention any purpose to This, I just leave things vague in terms such as “if you belong here” or “if you have the need for This Thing”.
If you do belong here you will find that after a while you feel a certain kind of relief. It is not necessarily constant but you do realize, if you belong here, that This Thing is what you have been looking for. You begin to feel a certain kind of new balance. You’re not as frustrated over or upset about your own voices. Forget any sense of great mystical information. You simply begin to feel good. But then you begin to speculate “Well, now what?” It is not that you reach a certain point #4729-A; it’s the discovery of a new annoyance; “I can basically cope with Life now beyond what I could have before. I have not adopted any religion, and no religious leader needs to constantly comfort me.” You no longer worry about whether or not anyone is mistreating you.
When you are correctly involved in This Thing it begins to affect your nervous system. You begin to feel on your own — in a kind of nonspecific voice that has a ring of certainty to it — that nothing is wrong. This happens regardless of the fact that the voices still catch you. At times you still feel, “I am in a mood,” (which, as I have mentioned, is more correctly described as “a mood is in you”). Life is just not as serious as you once knew it to be.
It is as if someone has given you light beer instead of regular beer. You find that you cannot get as mad or upset. But then you also begin to wonder if that is all there is to This Thing? “Is it just to make me feel better and better? Will I just expand this and become increasingly laid back?” You approach a different kind of question regarding the purpose of Life. The purpose of humanity is for Life to expand on this level. That, quite directly, is the purpose of Life. But you begin to wonder — once you see that you no longer have great dreams and nightmares — why you have gone through all this.
There is a purpose to This Thing. It is not a game. There is a threefold purpose. The first purpose is that which originally brought you here, that is your personal interest and Aim, your interest in an imagined superior state of consciousness. That is what properly brought you here. That Aim is not foreign to Life and you are not isolated from Life. Just because you are involved in This Thing, do not picture yourself as some sort of cancer cell running a muck in the body of Life. You are still in the life of Life, just as everyone is. There is no way out of this system — right now. Your Aim to expand your awareness is not foreign to Life, nor is it selfish, nor does it run contrary to Life’s Aim. There is an inherent resistance to This Thing, and if it happened on too large a scale, then Life would be in trouble. This Thing is not for all of ordinary Life: its appeal will always be very limited. But it does serve a purpose for all of Life. You are not in some way a strange sheep way out over the hill with the flock of all of humanity at the other end of the field. You are not over there with strange designs and strange dreams that are disconnected from the ordinary flow of Life. The first level of purpose to This Thing is your personal aim to expand your level of consciousness. You realize what little you see now, and you want more. You realize that you can begin to understand in ways that nobody else could ever understand before.
The second purpose is in what I do and what you do. I am not here to just continue talking to you. It is rather vague, but the basis for my talking to you is that something else must be done.
The third purpose is even vaguer than that. You are serving a distinct purpose within the life of Life; you are not serving the same purpose that everyone else is serving. You do serve an ordinary purpose, in part, because you are going to transfer energy as long as you are alive. You are going to eat and you are going to be eaten; you are going to take in and transfer certain necessary kinds of energy. You have to do this at a bare minimum in order to physically stay alive. It is never a question of being absolutely separated from Life. But for one of This Thing, it becomes a matter of discrimination. You must deal with a different level of energy. It becomes a matter of you not taking the ordinary energies — which, by and large are unavoidable in certain parts of the circuitry — as you would if you were operating at your ordinary level. You are serving a distinct purpose. The third aspect of it is that, beyond words, there is no choice to what you are doing. It is a nonverbal knowledge of another purpose to This — not just your own purpose and not the purpose of anything we may do.
Do not ever forget your own Aim, that is, your aim to be all of the time like you are some of the time. That is always the first Aim. The second aim is that which I am apparently directing outside of you. The third one — did you Understand what it was all about?