Nothing Causes Anything
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Excursion = See below
Summary
Jan Cox Talk 76, Aug 4, 1983, runtime 1:40
Notes by TK
[tape volume variable in spots near beginning]
Reading of Kyroot papers. 0:10
The expected structure of Reality. The Afghanistan story. The altering of the structure of your personal reality. The expected is the expected. Relation to E/C (exciting/calming) gate limits. The extremely unexpected becoming reality in forced circumstances almost immediately. What is too different can’t be true.
The feeling of great depth and complexity to “me” is totally undeserved when you can see. What is consciousness?: a physical, material reality. It is like a movie screen; a reflection of what you are aware of. No observer, just the screen of consciousness; no depth.
Form and energy: all forms are the result of previous energy; true of consciousness as well. Consciousness between animals and humans compared. Heredity vs. Environment as energy vs. form. All environment is product of genetics. New energy forms (information) can’t be too radically different or it can’t be ordinarily ingested. The form/template must closely approximate the existing template of your own personality/energy transfer mechanism.
Comparison of human and animal consciousness –Yellow Circuit difference: creates illusion of continuity to a pulse-like discontinuous process. Energy runs to the “end of the line” of the circuit in the brain and results in the sensation of “I”; a continuing feeling of “I am me”.
Two types of people: assertive and submissive. Example of two men meeting on sidewalk: one is aggressive (“get out of my way”) and the other submissive (steps aside) but feels guilty.
Nothing causes anything. Everything causes anything. Everything causes everything. Yet all operates on the Cause/Effect premise.
Heredity vs. Environment = Heredity. You are environment. Fish/water analogy.
Ignore all “phenomena” such as lights, colors etc. when doing The Numbers. Ignore everything you can’t control.
What does the statement “they let their heart rule their head” accomplish for Life? What is the reality, the possible energy behind it?
1:25 Personal comments to Group
And Kyroot Said:
Jcap 1983-08-04
You do indeed seem involved in a mighty battle, but it is ultimately a struggle with a foe illusionary, (although, only apparently so).
The trick of ” not telling yourself what you’re doing” is in
keeping the new knowledge and effort just outside the reach of the ordinary awareness of the established circuitry.
Everything ultimately resolves itself, (whether you, my ole darling, see it or not).
Almost anything one can normally think, say, or do is a hinderance
to This Thing you seek
to accomplish.
The older you get in ordinary time, the more surely each morning,
does 2nd Force call your name during the work line-up.
The idea of a motivating unconsciousness in Man is an unrecognized
admission that he does not know why he does what he does.
All possible lateral areas below The Line must be activated for
the proper support of vertical growth.
To properly pursue This Thing, one must learn to force their own
private and willful
finalities.
If, as humanity is want to repeat, “Love is a hurting thing,”
then all ordinary human behavior should be a continuing cause for
celebration.
At the ordinary level, you must first recognize the truly necessary,
then ignore it.
You must seek to become conscious in a sub-supra-atomic fashion:
in no certain place, with no particular movement.
To Awaken to This Thing, you not only can have “nothing to hide,”
but you cannot even feel as though there is, or should be, anything to hide.
Just between us, what I am really bringing to you is a new kind of
religion: but not a religion of man-the-mass, but of man-as-energy
….and you still fail to grasp the enormity of it all).
Forever and ever Mankind has proclaimed it their duty to
“be themselves” …
…all I want to know is
“what’s stopping
them?”
(Or do we overlook
the obvious?)
And yet another rhyme from my bag of brine:
What can you say to a blind man? What can you show the deaf?
The gods will only hurt those
who try and hurt themselves.
I think it would serve us well to periodically recall, repeat and ponder
humanity’s motto:
Let us all stand, with hands over our mouths and recite together the
pledge: “IT’S NOT MY FAULT”
Excursion
TASKS: 1. Write down what seem to be appropriate topics for possible public phase. 2. Blind/deaf exercise at shopping center. Consider: What basis do these senses make up the movie screen of consciousness? How does the changing/reduction of the sensory field change your perception of the movie screen?
Transcript
NOTHING CAUSES ANYTHING: EVERYTHING CAUSES EVERYTHING
Document: 76, August 4, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983
Neuralize the term “reality”. I assume you know that all the way from the apparent beginnings of recorded history — which is simply the history of the Yellow Circuit in Man — right up to the present, people have played with the idea of “reality”. Philosophers (ordinary people driven by the Yellow Circuit) have historically mused over such ideas as, “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Nowadays such musings are reflected, for example, in subatomic physics; wherein a scientist’s observation seems to directly affect the phenomenon he thinks he’s observing. What, then, the scientist asks, is “reality”? This whole range of pondering is a part of Life expressing itself through humanity. Now ordinary people, of course, do not go around pointing to things, asking “Is this actually existing apart from me, or am I a part of it?” Ordinary people don’t involve themselves with that. Everyone is simply a channel for Life to flow through. They take “themselves”, their reactions and their perceptions very personally — as they should — their sense of “I” being at the center of everything.
I am going to try to get you to consider that there is a nonmystical, nonphilosophical, non-theoretical aspect of the reality in which everyone lives, an aspect which no one takes into account.
Let me make up a story for you. Do not take it as make believe — try to willfully use what people call “imagination” to conceive of the fact that what I’m about to describe could happen. It would take very unusual circumstances, but it physically could happen.
Say that you and your sexual partner, for some reason, decide to take a trip to some obscure part of the world. It is a fairly dangerous, war-torn area, yet somebody agrees to slip you in. They say that you will probably be alright. So through some sneaking around at night somebody gets you over the border and into a fair sized village where you will get to partake of the thrill and excitement of actually being around the local people. There appears to be someone in charge at the village — a chief — and let us say that he finds himself attracted to you (telling this from the woman’s viewpoint). And so there you are, in a strange environment, accepting his hospitality. Within a night or so, you and your partner have some food with him and he brings you into the main house where he lives. After some good alcoholic beverages, dancing and singing, you and your partner go off to bed. The chief then orders someone to sneak in and kill your man in the middle of the night, and he instructs others to, at the same time, fire off guns and run through the streets screaming.
As the two of you go to your room, he sends along servants who tuck you in and ask if you’d like a midnight snack. By the time they leave and both of you go to sleep, someone leaps through the window and cuts your man’s throat. You wake up hearing gunshots and see a figure running out.
Imagine in a willful way that this scenario was “real”, and further imagine how you would feel at this point: you are suddenly awakened in an alien environment, amidst a great commotion; guns firing, people screaming, and your partner is lying dead in the bed with you. There is shouting everywhere, but you do not know the native language. Suddenly somebody rushes in. You remember having seen him standing next to the chief and he seemed to be the chief’s right hand man. He is outraged. As he grabs and hugs you he mumbles something about a new uprising and how lucky you are that you didn’t get killed. He rushes you back to the main house and tells the chief what has happened. The chief is outraged as well, and tells you about the great turmoil going on, and how lucky it is that you are alive. He swears that he will find out who did this but, “Right now”, he says, “the main thing is everyone’s safety.” He tells you that he is being attacked from many quarters and the only safe place, at the moment, is there in his house. He hustles you off to his bedroom assuring you, “Stay here and you’ll be safe.” Then he runs outside and directs his men to continue running around the house, firing off their guns and yelling.
This same story might happen in a different way. Say you were a captured warrior and the chief decides that you have information and skills that he needs. He has heard your name before; he knows that you are an important and intelligent leader of your people. Perhaps he treats you almost as an equal, telling you he hopes you will cooperate because he does not like bloodshed — nor does he wish to resort to physical torture because it would be an insult to someone of your obvious stature. And you respond, “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t cooperate. I am glad, however, to see that at least I was captured by a man of honor, decency and intelligence.” “Well, I respect your refusal to cooperate,” he says. “I would probably do the same thing. As long as we have captured you, I will at least treat you well. And I’d like to have join me for dinner later tonight — I’d really enjoy talking with you. In the meantime, though, I’ve got business to attend to, so we’ll have to lock you up until then.”
Some of his soldiers then take you downstairs and begin beating on you like a bad dream. You hear one of them mumble, “Don’t hit him in the face, hit him where it won’t show — we don’t want the chief to see what we did to him.”
After they beat you for a few hours, one of the men you saw standing right next to the chief earlier, rushes in and is horrified. He begins slapping the soldiers around. Then he grabs you, takes you back to the chief, and tells him what happened. The chief is outraged. “Arrest those men!” he yells. He turns to you and tells you, “The state of siege under which we are living here, the varied allegiances of the different people under my command — I cannot keep up with all of my men…”
Now without dragging this out, let me just say that at this point your awareness tells you that the chief knows what’s going on. You know that he told his men to beat you and that now he’s acting like he has rescued you. He asks you to sit down beside him and summons a beautiful woman to wipe your face. While she attends to your cuts and bruises you suddenly see your former attackers. You thought they’d been locked up, but you see them smiling in the back of the room. Some form of your awareness tells you that this is some kind of game.
In both of these stories, even in the case where you do suspect the chief, the reality which you were accustomed to expect and react to was altered in such a way that the chief becomes your benefactor. The very person who was in charge of beating you or killing your lover now becomes your comforter. He is there to protect you and continually shouts out orders like, “I won’t have this! Find the man who killed her husband! I don’t care if we have to spill the blood of every man in this army! And so you could end up in bed with him — whether you were attracted to him or not — feeling like this was the only place to turn.
I am telling you: willfully use your imagination. You are in a completely unfamiliar and stressful situation. You are thinking, “I am one step away from having my throat cut and here is a man protecting me. Except he is the man who cut my lover’s throat.” And in the second case, there you are, maybe even aware that, “This is a trick he’s pulling on me. His people take me downstairs and beat me up under his orders. Then he sends someone else to rescue me. I just know he’s doing this, yet when I’m brought back up, he’s outraged, shouting curses and threatening his army, while wiping off my forehead. He has me sit beside him and eat with him.” Then later that night he says, “Well I’m going to have to send you back to go to bed. We’ve got nowhere else for you to sleep and, after all, you are a prisoner.” Back downstairs, it’s torture time again. His men beat you again, and in the morning he finds out once more and he’s outraged anew.
I am telling you that you would end up with your reality altered in such a way that the piece of consciousness that told you the chief was behind it all would be extremely short lived, to say the least. By the second beating and the second rescue your awareness of, “Hey, he’s doing this to me and I’m not going to fall for it,” would be forgotten and you would be the chief’s lap dog. On the surface he would continue to treat you as an honored opponent, almost a guest, yet you would begin to be truly imprisoned. Your perception is now narrowed down, altered, focused on the simple task of staying alive. This reality is now your reality, and it is your jailer.
Again, try to willfully imagine that the circumstances and behavior depicted in these stories are possible. Then, Neuralize anew the word “reality”. I am not referring to what seems to be your internal, personal reality, not the reality which is argued over by philosophers and scientists. Consider that there is a definite framework to one’s reality that is neither imaginary nor theoretical. It is a structure wherein the expected is expected; a grid system where you are where you are supposed to be, where you are accustomed to a certain set of experiences. There is a finite spectrum to what is “real”. This “spectrum of reality” was not caused or formed by you, nor was it imposed on you by your so-called environment; in the same way that you cannot help how tall you are. You can think of it in these terms: within each individual’s nervous system is a physical mechanism, a “gate” which monitors the level of excitement and/or calmness possible, much like a thermostat. This E/C gate determines and regulates how much fear or excitement you can stand: “Yeah, I’ll ride on a roller coaster, but not one that goes in a loop. I just know that would be too much for me to take”. By the same token, to stay alive there has to be a certain amount of calming. But beyond a certain level, the organism must be stimulated again.
Consider what might happen to reality if the framework of one’s internal expectations/limitations were upended, if the E/C gate were overloaded. It would be a triple understatement to say that things would quickly become very bizarre, or, to your normal perception, “unreal”. In my story, your living reality is now isolated to one small, hostile village. The chief, who has engineered your predicament, has become the focal point of your existence; you now feel a certain gratitude and indebtedness to him. What is actually going on here? I would hope, foolish though I may be, that you realize I am speaking of much more than exotic villages and tyrant chiefs.
Within each individual there is a feeling of a kind of personal depth, an inner complexity to oneself, that — once you see it — is totally undeserved. It is the sensation of consciousness, the feeling of, “I am in here, complete with all my thoughts, dreams, feelings and contradictions. What a complex creature I am!” I have talked before about a thin veneer of civility; how about a very thin veneer of consciousness? Try to feel, literally, physically: What is consciousness? Forget the feeling of “I am in here” for the time being and actually attempt to look at what seems to be your consciousness. Ignore the internal voices hollering, “Consciousness is spirit,” or “It’s my soul!” Remember, no system can observe itself at its own level: consciousness cannot explain itself. So disregard all internal comments on your observations — simply try, as you’re walking down the street, to suddenly turn your attention on this thing in you that is called consciousness. Attempt to get a feel for what is actually, physically going on in your head at that moment.
Scientists may attempt to describe consciousness with explanations about sense organs transmitting electrical impulses to various parts of your brain. But what is actually going on? You don’t have to study neurophysiology. You must simply be strong enough, exceptional enough to attempt to observe what’s going on inside. There it is, right there — you don’t need another book; you don’t need to go to med school — it’s right there. Look. What is it that seems to be going on? One analogy you may come up with initially (although you should not limit yourself to it): is that consciousness is like a movie screen; it shows one thing, then you look away and it shows something else. And like all movie screens, it has no depth. Now, if the movie screen is indeed consciousness, then who or what is doing the talking when a person says, “I am conscious. I have thoughts and feelings, you know.” Is it the movie screen talking or is there in fact a Fred or Mary in there looking at the screen and commenting about what it sees? Do you have a Fred or Mary in there that’s looking at the screen and making judicial comments, criticisms, little asides? No ordinary person worries or thinks about this, but if I presented this question to somebody in a succinct manner they would come to the conclusion that, “Yeah, there is a ‘me’ that is conscious.” I could probably lead them a little further and say “So there is kind of a ‘you’ in there that is aware of the screen, watching everything going on and hearing all the sounds. And it is able to comment upon it, criticise it and analyze it.” And the person would say, “Yeah, that’s right.”
But if your desire is to pursue This Thing, you will be confronted with the following astounding reality. If you try to watch what seems to be yourself apparently watching this screen, something very strange happens. I am trying to leave you with a strong hint: at the ordinary level of consciousness, there is no screen and viewer simultaneously. What seems to be consciousness is consciousness. There is no viewer in there. When you try to observe yourself being conscious, the internal movie screen simply shuts down. It goes blank. An ordinary person would get absolutely nowhere with this. But someone who is attempting to activate the higher areas of the nervous system would find it extraordinary rather than bewildering or annoying. They would be pleasantly shocked; it would strike them that they “had never realized…”
Attempting to view your own consciousness simply halts the flow of “you”: the screen goes blank for a moment. You look away and it pops back up. There is no little Fred or Mary in there watching the screen — there is no ‘you’ in there. Everything in the ordinary circuitry is built to say otherwise. It feels a depth in there. It feels that, “It is me observing and reacting to reality on this screen of consciousness.”
At the ordinary level, the screen IS you. There is nothing else, no depth, no complexity, no projectionist. You can’t get back stage behind the screen and find somebody doing hand shadows — it’s all right there. All you’ve got to do is turn and look at it in the right way and it goes away, shuts off. The projector becomes black and silent for a second. As fleeting as that is in the beginning, that is the astounding unbelievable truth of what ordinary consciousness is. But for a long time in attempting this, you get only tiny glimpses of this fact here and there. I have to keep reminding you, suggesting to you, hinting about what might be the ramifications of this, because as soon as your little glimpse is over, “you” are back in business: there is that feeling of great personal depth again, of “I’ll analyze this. I will really ponder and think about what it is that I just saw on the screen, what my consciousness just revealed to me.” Remember, there is no person plus consciousness. There is only this very thin veneer, all it takes to show a movie on. There is no depth to it; there is no complexity.
For years now there have been arguments and debates out in Life over whether or not the portrayal of violence on television contributes to real violence out in the world. There have been those who say, “Violence on t.v. is simply reflecting the violence in the real world.” “Nah,” the others say. “No sort of statistics are going to prove to me that violence on t.v. does not contribute to children believing that violence is an acceptable way to deal with their fellow man.”
In the ordinary world the bottom line to this sort of debate is heredity versus environment. You may think this debate is something new that’s happened only in psychology, but it also happens in religion — they just call it something else: “Is man born evil or have the gods in some capricious manner turned loose evil spirits to tempt him?” However, modern Man usually poses the question in this manner: “Are people actually born as some sort of blank slate, with the totality of their experience/environment forming them into a Fred or Mary, OR are people born predestined in their genetic makeup to become Fred or Mary, regardless of what happens to them as they grow?”
You may expect me to answer that it could be both or either one or both put together and divided by three. But in this case you’re wrong because there is an answer to the question of, “Is it the environment that is shaping and forming people or is it heredity?” I’ll give you a hint, it is not the environment. Consider that all that appears to be environment stems from a genetic source. Now remember, “birth”, “heredity” and “genetics” — those are just words, and you must look beyond words.
Let’s say that at least 50% of the people in the world would argue, “The prime formative affect upon the human personality is experience. Here for example, is a person that was beaten as a child. His mother left him in a garbage can when he was six years old. Don’t tell me environment has no effect. It wouldn’t matter what kind of genetic strengths he may have had. Look what has happened through the pressures of the environment — there’s your answer.” Such things do happen in Life, yet you must see that there is a deeper level of description to the question of environment versus heredity. Without knowing it, people are talking about form versus energy. This is the answer: all forms are the result of the previous energy. All apparent environment is given shape by genetics. All previous births, all the possible combinations and expressions of heredity, have produced what seems to be this instantaneous environment. Consciousness itself is a part of this genetic expression, and cannot see it: a fish cannot comment on the water which surrounds and flows through it. And so, from the perspective of ordinary consciousness, the environment is what is “giving me problems”. No one can see that what appears to be the form and structure of reality (the environment) is not actually what is happening at the moment; it has already happened. Form always follows energy. Energy births form.
Let’s see if you can stretch this out a bit further. An ordinary person might say, “One of the benefits of human consciousness is that one can scan the future and perceive the consequences of their present actions. Humanity — at least civilized people — continue to progress because of this unique ability.” Remember that you can test any aspect of consciousness in the laboratory that resides between your ears. It’s all there, all you have to do is look; and you will find that there is no way to scan the future. Ordinary people are not talking about the future. At the ordinary level of consciousness, all that can be apparently perceived on the internal movie screen is but a slight alteration, if not a direct replay of what has already happened.
Imagine that there is a template or pattern to every piece of information, every opinion, every feeling that seems to be a part of consciousness, and it can be depicted in a certain way. If I could truly draw it you couldn’t see it. So I’ll draw this:
Remember, this is not a mere drawing; there is a reality behind it which physically exists in your brain. For example, if you heard a specific word, any word, and we could photograph the pattern of connections and branching associations made in your brain at the instant after hearing that word, we would have a kind of “template” for that word. Perhaps the word was “sex”. At the moment you heard it, there might be all sorts of considerations — your idea of sex when you are full, when you hadn’t had sex in 24 hours, when the humidity was less than 40%, when the temperature was under 85 degrees. And then let’s say we could photograph how it looks under all the current conditions.
Built into humanity is the notion that things can and should change; this is part of the purpose humanity serves, all the way from you trying out a new sexual experience to the establishment of a new theory on the origins of the universe.
If someone asks a man, “What do you think of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe?”, all the information, opinions, all the pros and cons the man has apparently collected concerning the Big Bang theory, are reflected in the instantaneous pattern of his reaction to the question.
Consider that for new information, new experience to become absorbed in one person or in groups of people to the point where it becomes apparently a part of a new structure of reality, the new pattern has to be very, very similar to some existing one. There cannot be an abrupt change in the existing framework for new information to be absorbed. It gets a little tricky here, because there are examples in Life of what appears to be a radical, abrupt shift in humanity’s collective perception of reality. You must look closer in a specific way to see that such changes are not radical, they are in fact just slight variations of a set pattern. For example, Man used to take for granted that the earth was the center of the universe. Some person, or persons, eventually suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. They may have so-called empirical evidence based on their observations of celestial movement, and there follows an intense period of intellectual warfare between the two camps, wherein the new ideas of reality begin to be accepted. A radical change, right? Well, consider that any apparent “thing” contains its own unseen opposite. Consider that any opinion or position has its own template or pattern, and if you were to trace through this same pattern from a different direction, you may find yourself at the opposite position (opinion), even though the physical template is unchanged.
Inside your nervous system resides the patterns for all the thoughts, feelings, and opinions that make up ordinary consciousness. Each of these interwoven patterns branches out into two main areas within the brain, and these two areas of the same pattern can be described in these terms for the time being: that which is accepted as true and proper, and, on the other side, that which is not accepted, that which is apparently opposite and untrue. This is why some idea or theory within humanity can, over a matter of horizontal time, apparently flip flop, where that which was true is now untrue and vice versa. Can you see that this is not a big change? There is no such thing as radical change possible on a large scale; it is only possible inside a few extraordinary people.
Consider that these two areas of “true versus untrue”, these two conflicting forces, are necessary. Without them nothing would be resilient enough to be remembered. Nothing would be real without its opposing force; it has to have something to push against, to stand on. One cannot replace the ordinary patterns that seem to be one’s consciousness with something new because the “something new” has to be almost the same thing as that which its apparently replacing or improving. A person may feel that something new has happened to him or he feels differently about himself after reading a particular book or whatever. But the pattern of the ordinary state of consciousness of that person after reading the book is the same as before reading the book. A tiny line of the template might have shifted slightly, or one segment that was negatively charged may now be positive. However, the pattern itself hasn’t changed; it is only the apparent “result” that has been modified.
Now see if you can follow this. Ordinary consciousness, that which seems to be this screen, these patterns, the continuing process of internal analysis telling you what you feel, see and think, what seems to be you observing all of this — continually, over and over, comes to a stopping point. People have asked me if there was some direct way in which one could compare the consciousness of a human and that of an animal. While there is a kind of consciousness going on in animals, what is lacking is the activation of the Yellow Circuitry.
There is in Man the sensation within the Yellow Circuitry that: “This consciousness I’m perceiving, this movie I’m perceiving, is continual. It is connected; it doesn’t stop or jerk; I see people move and talk in a flowing, uninterrupted manner.” This is not true. Forget your perceptions of people walking and talking in Life. I am speaking of how consciousness physically operates. It is continually firing impulses which run up to the Line of consciousness, where they stop. It fires over and over, and it stops over and over. But the Yellow Circuit has a mechanism called “memory” providing a built-in continuity to it: “I am continually conscious. I can see somebody get up and walk, I can see somebody raise their hand and say, “I disagree with you.” I can see my whole life as a continuing panorama. As far back as I can remember it has been a continuing flow. The movie never stops, even when I go to bed.” But look in your internal laboratory; you can see that consciousness operates in a sequential fashion. It is continually firing and running to the end of some line. There is a continuing series (back to discussing this in apparent “forms”) of decisions, judgements: “I agree with that,” “I don’t like this,” “It’s getting too hot,” “I am nonverbally aware that somebody bigger than me just walked into the room.” The impulse continually runs to the Line, physically, in the brain, and stops. Yet you get the feeling it has continuity to it.
Ordinary consciousness must run to the end of the line. Imagine that what you call your “mind” is actually an electrified fence. The fence is conscious if it is electrified — the electricity is consciousness. Now try to separate yourself and tell your mind that it has limits, it’s fenced in. In response, the electricity runs all the way around the fence and comes back and tells you, “No. I looked this way, I looked that way — there are no boundaries; there is no fence. It’s wide open spaces wherever I look.” You are talking to the fence. Another example, you cannot tell yourself, “Listen, I almost felt like I heard something in what he was saying about the fence.” And your brain says, “Alright, we’ll check it out.” And it runs through a pattern and says, “No, that’s wrong. It does not do that.” And it’s telling the truth because it ran down the path that said, “No, that’s not true” and it bounced right back with, “No, that’s not true.” “Well, try again,” you tell it. “Alright,” it says, and comes back with the same response.
Can any of you begin to conceive of what I am doing when I speak to you? When your consciousness fires and it gets to the end of the line — where the end is supposed to be — I suddenly turn a corner and drag you off the path a ways. You get to where it should have stopped and you end up taking one more step.
Try Neuralizing this scenario: You’re walking down the street and an approaching figure is coming down the same narrow pathway. The figure bellows out, “Out of my way!” There is just enough room for one person to walk by. To use ordinary descriptions, we’d of course be left with two possibilities. There is one apparent type of person (remember this is just talk about the form, not the energy) who would be driven from the Red Circuitry to react in a forceful manner to this threat of, “Out of my way!” Then there would be the second type of apparent person who would immediately stand aside and then suffer over it. Neither type is the way they are because of the affects of their environment or previous psychological traumas. Do you see that there has to be both types? You could not have all of humanity forcefully respond, nor could you have all of humanity stand aside. If you had just one of those, what would happen? Things would go in a straight line. It is required that there be a kind of resilience, a kind of balanced tension. For every warning that is cried out, “Stand aside!”, there will be those who will yell, “No way,” and return apparently the same kind of hostility, the same kind of energy behind the warning itself. And there will be an equal amount of people who will stand aside, and then feel guilty about it.
Does anyone think that I am talking about bullies walking the sidewalks of the city?
You cannot have only one force in operation. You cannot have continuing resistance in one direction because things would then go in an indeterminable, unstoppable straight line and straight lines only lead to one place — the cemetery.
Consider now the fact that nothing causes anything. No “thing” causes anything. Violence on television does not cause violence in the street. Violence in the street does not produce violent shows on television. There is no such thing as a something causing anything. Everything causes everything. Everything causes anything. There is literally nothing, no thing that causes anything, despite what your film of consciousness may say. This fact is inherent in the answer to the question of heredity versus environment. The answer to that question is heredity. There is no such thing as environment. You are it.
Take my picturization of the fish in water. You try to describe to the fish the nature of water and he will not comprehend, because the water IS him. The water must pass continually through him or he will die. There is no way that a fish can perceive of water.
You may like that picturization, but can you perceive as well that at the ordinary level there is no such thing as the environment? One may say, “Oh, sure there is. In fact the environment has made me what I am now. If it hadn’t been for the terrible circumstances in my life, I’m sure that I’d at least have gotten close to sainthood by now. But gad, the kind of trials and tribulations I’ve had!” And you haven’t. It’s like the fish saying, “Gad, this motion makes me sick. It’s up and down, back and forth.”
“That’s the water.”
“No, I have inexplicable moods. I feel unseen forces. Other fish come too close to me. They frighten me.”
“That’s the water. It’s just the natural way water goes up and down and back and forth.”
“Hey, don’t do that,” says the fish. “You’re making me sick. You’re making me bring back bad memories again.”
“But that’s you.” And then tell a fish that nothing causes anything.
“Sure it does.” says the fish.
Nay. Everything causes anything.