Habit, Placebos, and Fake Mysteries
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Summary
Jan Cox Talk 136, Dec 6, 1984, runtime 1:54
Notes by TK
What purpose is served for Life that people have a stable, dependable, predictable, unique personality? Yet there is an intrinsic dissatisfaction with same: “I’ve got to change; I’m a creature of habit”. Magnetic field surrounds the brain, fences in consciousness control an individual “I”. Relates to connections between brain cells, the positive/negative complementary interplay. The positive, activated portion of the brain = personality and has its negative unseen counterpart which makes the activated part what it is. The apparent intense complexity of “personality”, psychological factors, consciousness is really just the biochemical control strength of the magnetic field surrounding the brain.
Habitual behavior patterns exist in individuals and in humanity at large (related to generation span–20 yrs.); it is a kind of wave form. Applies to This Thing also. Serves as a stabilization factor. Example of artist always feeling behind the new wave of creativity. Question to Group: How could This Thing be presented to public audience in an absolutely new way? The shocking realization is coming: “My god, I’m sane!” The danger is not that I might go crazy…it’s that I can’t go crazy!
“States” as the temporary accidental activation of irrelevant circuitry. There is a parallel for The Few but it is not temporary (although it comes and goes) or accidental. You cannot be a “perfected me”.
,Ancient Greeks: “God talked to me” everybody hears voices, but they take the voices to be themselves if they are sane, stable, singular personalities. They don’t hear god speaking anymore –“I hear myself speaking” indicates the growth in Yellow Circuit.
The closed system, self-fueling nature of everything. Example of weather systems; origin/generation and development. Predictable and utterly doomed to repetition. A self-fueling circulatory system (SFCS) is always doomed to predictability, repetition and habit. Man is a SFCS. Neuralize the necessity of new food; exotic nourish.
Cross circuit influences. Effect of say, added pounds to body on Blue Circuit (more aggressive, irritable); alcohol’s affect on listening to music; standing vs. lying down to read or transact business. Unseen connections.
Why does all news seem to be bad news? Why is it that the only news that generates interest is always bad, to greater or lesser degree? How could This Thing then, be presented in a totally good news format?
The “placebo effect.” Hypochondriacs visiting Doctors, given sugar pill and feel better. Seen as “nonexistent” –nonfunctioning activity. Inexplicable and negative.
Reading of comments/questions: Blood level connection carries a feeling of inescapable obligation. Nonverbal. No explanations. Other circuit connections are of lesser intensity. |
Life’s creation of “great mysteries” which never will be solved. A necessary energy transfer. All are variations of the “how did I get here?”; “what is existence?”; “where’s god?” questions. They serve a purpose.
Transcript
HABIT, PLACEBOS, AND FAKE MYSTERIES
Document: 136, December 6, 1984
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1984
Habitual behavior exists at the very heart of everything that survives at the ordinary level of consciousness. Even some of you have noted that no matter how excited you were initially, or how much you seem to benefit from This Thing, you keep falling to a very mechanical level of behavior. I’ve talked about this in all sorts of ways, but you should pursue something within yourself that you can feel and see in Life. It can be absolutely astounding.
An experience which strikes someone as being one of the world’s great mystical states or a real moment of epiphany is like “so what” thirty minutes later. Throughout the so-called mystical literature of the ages you’ll hear tales of people who have had accidental, temporary short circuits of their ordinary wiring, which appeared to be moments of enlightenment…but led nowhere. Their writings and comments which followed asked, “How can I get this state back?” The people mouthed such ponderings and musings as, “There must be something wrong with me. At one time I apparently found favor with the gods and they opened the door for a second. I had a blinding flash and it has kept me unsettled for months or years. What have I done that they won’t give it back to me? The general feeling is that something’s wrong; that something’s amiss. The voices in you may say the same, after you’ve experienced something. But simultaneously you should be aware that that is a most efficient way for things to continue to expand in a way which ordinary consciousness will not perceive.
I heard someone speak about abnormal psychological conditions and the appearance of “multiple personalities” and that such a person represents a mutant strain requiring appropriate treatment. Life spoke through this psychologist and mused over the fact that the norm is a person who has a stable, predictable and singular personality. The psychologist concluded by asking a rhetorical question concerning this normal personality: “Although it’s undeniably true and is the way things should be, why is it that people have such singular, stable personalities?”
It’s very easy for ordinary people to feel that habitual behavior is not the most efficient way to behave. “I’m locked into a rut. I got married at 19 and it was probably too young; but she was already pregnant. And here I am with three children and I’m only 22. My whole life is shot. I always wanted to go to Paris and study art; travel around the world on a sailboat. And now look. All I do is drive straight home from work and have a beer and sit there melting in front of the TV every night.” Man is meant to feel dissatisfied. And one of the most specific ways of expressing this dissatisfaction is to say, “Something’s amiss. I’m missing out; I’m shortchanging myself by living via habit.” I would direct your attention away from apparent psychological manifestations of habitual behavior, back to my two descriptions of the operation of the nervous system.
A magnetic field surrounds the brain. Ordinary science already knows this, but it should be of particular interest to you. Recall my description of the mind being like an open field that has been fenced in. If the brain is an unlimited expanse fenced in by human consciousness, then many areas are fenced off from you. Your individual sense of consciousness has taken this large area and fenced it into a particular configuration. You can ask consciousness if it has fenced itself in, and it will look and see no fence. It starts at one end of the barrier and runs the full configuration of the fence, comes back and says, “I have looked high and low and in every possible direction, and you’re mistaken. No fence exists.” You can’t say anything else. The fence looks out and it sees no fence. We’ll push this beyond where medical science is now.
A magnetic field surrounds the brain. It defines and controls the individual “I.” What you’re dealing with is a combination of electrochemical transfers occurring between the brain cells themselves. Medical thinking states that the neural transfer of information is a chemical process: it ignores the electrical field around each person’s individual brain. An electrical charge marks the difference between the negative and positive neural connections within you. These positive and negative charges are the parts of your brain which are activated: they choose what you think, feel and believe in. The corresponding part of the brain which isn’t activated is of equal size and weight, and is a direct reflection of the charged section. It appears as a negative would to a print.
Medical science has isolated chemical elements, neuro transmitters, which allow information to pass from one brain cell to another, ultimately dispatching it to various parts of the nervous system. To medical scientists, the idea of consciousness and its connection to the brain still falls within the world of the occult. They can’t see that consciousness is directly connected to the brain, because that would be a system attempting to comprehend itself at its own level, which is impossible. Somewhere along the line in these past few years, some neurosurgeon or investigator of brain processes has announced, “We will probably never fully understand the connection between human consciousness and the physical brain itself.” He accidentally told the truth. The connection can’t be seen by the ordinary level of consciousness.
I refer you back to my discussions of the substance in the blood. Each person’s brain is set up in a particular firing pattern. It’s fairly accepted that identifiable chemicals act as neuro transmitters from one cell to another, each neuro transmitter affecting particular cells. If the wrong chemical substance or transmitter jumps from one cell across the gap to another, nothing will happen. I’m not offering this as a definitive statement on neuro transmission, but this description will serve our purposes for the present. It’s said that these transmission paths are physically tied to each particular person, either genetically determined or influenced by various external factors such as physical activity. Line-level consciousness accepts that, although consciousness and the brain are in some way tied together, a distinct difference exists between the physical workings of the human brain and the apparently complex workings of human consciousness. If the brain is rendered inoperable, a person’s consciousness becomes inoperable. But human consciousness can take it no further. The fence can neither see it’s own operation nor discover any useful information about itself.
After all of that, do you have any passing fears or glimpses concerning this great complex thing that you always assumed to be you; or which the voices or neuro transmitters assume to be themselves? At Line-level consciousness the neuro transmitters say, “I’m Fred (or Mary). My, what a complex creature I am. My brain and other genetic aspects seem to be fairly normal. I don’t appear to be insane. I can add and read. But look at the great dramas of my life, the enormous pressures to which I’ve been subjected.” Who among you has a fleeting glimpse that everything you are driven to take as holy or uniquely yours can actually be examined under a microscope?
Thousands of years ago religious zealots cut out people’s hearts. While the heart was still warm, they would anxiously cut it open to find the spirit. A modern parallel to that would be to search for consciousness by examining the brain under an electron microscope. Do you suppose that those looking have the right chemicals reaching their own brains to enable them to see the truth, to see consciousness? It’s all there right in front of them, but they can’t see it because the substance in their blood is extracted just as it should be. They can see the firing and measure the electrical activity of the brain, but that singular, invisible thing called consciousness is beyond the ability of Man to see at the ordinary level with ordinary eyesight.
Many who undertake this struggle experience, to varying degrees, such thoughts as: “I’m going crazy. This is so much fun, but sometimes it feels as though my head may be about to become an example, in a paradigmatic way, of the Chinese art of fireworks. I just know it’s going to explode in every possible direction, and I will never be able to put it back together again. I don’t even know where it will go.” It seems to you to be a kind of psychological pressure, but in fact the chemical balance inside of you is beginning to change. The magnetic field that has always maintained you is changing: the field which has produced an ordinary, useful citizen with a stable, predictable, permanent, single personality is changing.
The basic charge of the magnetic fields, the positive and negative charges within the brain itself, determine a person’s opinions, ideas, and sensation of the self as an individual. When one is actively involved in This Thing, that magnetic field begins to weaken; it begins to get loose. You begin to think things that a second before were unthinkable for you. They weren’t unthinkable because they were bad: you aren’t suddenly having thoughts of killing your mother, but the types of things that comprise your individual, invisible personality in action change. You move beyond what your personality would normally be talking to you about internally, and the pictures it would ordinarily see are replaced by glimpses beyond the area of the fence. But justice prevails. There’s a tempo or schedule to this change which I’m very familiar with, and although it keeps changing and getting faster, the change doesn’t all happen at once. It happens to a point where it’s almost as much as you can stand, and it snaps back. It’s as though the magnetic field had a weak spot in it, and some of the chemical and electrical energy flows over into a place where you’ve never been before.
There is a continuing need, among those involved in This, for new energy, new excitement. This Thing runs, like everything else, in a wave pattern which is manifested individually in each participant. Every time someone hits the bottom of the wave, they want to ask me: “What can I do? I’m absolutely sold that this is where I belong. I don’t even question that you know exactly what This is and everything that you’ve suggested for me to pursue has been just right. But it seems as though you haven’t told me anything real exciting to get me going in the last few months. Or if you did, I didn’t Hear it. So now I’m taking the time to ask you. Maybe I wasn’t listening good, and if so, I’m sorry…but can you give me a quick trick?” I can, at any moment, give you something that’s a frightening shock. I’ll even tell it to you; and I’m telling you for a reason. You can take a slight time out as I tell it and Neuralize it on your own. I could say, “Tonight’s meeting is going to involve one thing: a necessary, frightening shock. I’m going to pull ten names out of a box at random, and those ten people are to get up and leave once and for all; and that’s the end of it. I never want to hear from them again. I don’t even want to see them: I don’t care whose names I pull out. I pull them out, call out the ten names, and that’s the end of tonight’s meeting.” Now according to your Blue and Yellow Circuit voices which concern themselves with how This should operate, this could sound, to say the very least, harsh and unjust. But are you sure? Anytime anybody wants a trick, I can give them one that’s an absolutely frightening shock. But the trick may be, “Get out of here. I don’t ever want to see you again.” How’s that for a trick? That’s explosive material that has every potential in the world for Doing something. But is that not almost too drastic? Surely it is.
You should be able to get glimpses of a habitual neural firing pattern existing in each individual. The pattern varies from one part of this planet to another; from one group of people to another. Everything a person does fits into this habitual pattern of internal neural firing. The neural patterns of humanity in general are locked into a twenty year generational span in the external 3-D world, a period wherein worldwide events appear static or slow moving. When upheaval does occur, such as wars or other worldwide shocks, it seems to happen overnight. But this is not the case. One day Hitler says, “We’re going into Poland tomorrow,” and it seems as if the war suddenly comes into force. But with a cursory knowledge of history, including World War II, you can See that things simply don’t happen overnight. The events of World War II didn’t suddenly conclude with, “It’s all over. The Germans surrendered.” It ain’t all over. As soon as the war was over, forces were regrouping themselves. Our previous ally, the USSR began to act as soon as the Germans surrendered. The forces rearranged themselves and our previous ally suddenly began acting suspiciously. The feeling was, “I don’t believe we can trust these people.” The neural patterns run within a certain time span.
Habit is a necessary stabilizing ingredient in Life. Consciousness looks at habit and sees isolated chunks of reality; things seem stable and habitually blah for a period of time, then something exciting happens, but soon the blahs start again. This process of boring habit, broken by occasional, infrequent bouts of excitement, has kept you relatively stable all your life. So now, you’re forty years old and bored still, but don’t worry — you don’t have that much longer to be bored stiff at this level. Your pattern of habitual behavior will be brought to an end in a dramatic way and in a very distinct manner known as “Hello Tombstone.”
Someone here who’s connected with “the arts” pointed out that all of their life they seemed to have missed the boat in the field of painting. In their lifetime one or two schools of art took over by storm, as the new rage: “Here’s the new American art. Here’s the guy and look at what he’s done.” The person pointed out that as soon as they saw, in the horizontal sense, what was being done they’d say, “Oh yea, I can paint like that. I’ve even doodled around and sketched stuff like that.” But every time something new came out in their field, they were always behind. Always. Sometimes they would even criticize this new school of art or “hot new thing.” Finally after being exposed to the art long enough, they were mechanically won over by it, claiming it to be a new and valid direction that art was taking. But by the time they came to their senses, agreed and were ready to join in, it was too late. A brand new school of art had already emerged. They asked me if it’s possible to improve upon these circumstances. Could they begin to sense or feel a new wave coming in their area so that they wouldn’t be behind it? Now that sounds like a decent question: on the surface it sounds like I could give some beneficial or profitable answer to it. Well, I will, but it’s not what they expect.
I’ll speak more or less of the horizontal level, the way things work out there in the mechanical grid. Everybody is behind, except the one person who’s an outlet for this new wave. The ordinary person perceives the need to improve: “It takes me three years to catch up in music, art or literature. A new school emerges; a new thrust in my area of interest, and it takes me two or three years to see it. I see what is taking over and I want to get in on it. But I’m always behind. Surely I could sharpen my senses, my perception and I could feel a new wave coming instead of two or three months or years afterwards. Maybe just a day or so after it started…and I’d jump in.” You’ll always be behind. The only person who isn’t behind is Charley Parker, at his time, or Van Gogh, Hemingway, James Joyce — the outlet himself. I’m just speaking of the ordinary level, where new things emerge in some field. The father or mother of the school of music or writing appeared and everybody else was behind.
Maybe some of you have heard of John Coltrane, a tenor saxophone player. He was looked upon as a person who single-handedly took jazz music in an entirely new direction. Immediately afterwards many Coltrane imitators appeared, but all of them felt as though they were behind; whether they became a Coltrane-type sax player in a year or in a day. Even the guy who did it only one hour after Coltrane himself still felt as though he was behind. This phenomenon may not appear to have any practical significance but it does. At the horizontal level everyone other than the person who is the outlet for something new feels, “I’m behind.” In any particular instance, only one person can be close to the ordinary creative or progressive thrust in Life; that true avant garde right at the head of that newly directed advancing column. Every other what-person feels, “I’m always behind.”
At various times I’ve mentioned that This is going to have to go in a different direction; that I have to expand or contract it. Surely, you think, it would be within my power to know and decide exactly how to do that. I have continually asked you to consider what you would do; how you would present This Thing in an absolutely new fashion. That is a very sticky task. You start off thinking about everything that’s already within your nervous system — religion, new age philosophies, things you think I’ve said in the past — and you believe that will make This Thing flower out in a new fashion. But how can you do it in you? How can you think anything new? It is likely that you’ll experience an expressible fear when it strikes you that, “Up until now I had no idea that I can’t think anything new. Everything that I believe is brand new is actually a rehashing of everything that I know; I can’t think outside of that.” That’s a fright you have to look forward to; yet that entity which can think nothing new is the very thing which psychologists point out as being a stable, singular, predictable personality. It’s of absolute necessity in the ordinary world. Being confined by that personality is, by and large, a definition of sanity, and humanity, quite correctly, says, “Thank goodness I’m not insane.” Yet being ordinarily sane is the very thing that will become a shock to you. It strikes you that, “I’m so sane that unless some extraordinary circumstance or forthcoming explosion occurs, there’s no danger of me coming apart. The real danger is that I can’t come apart! I come home after I’ve heard him talk infused with new energy. A few things, phrases, the way he put it…I could tell it was about to spark a brand new jump from one cell to another in a different way. It wasn’t just the words, but I know generally what he was pointing at and it was so surprising. I’m going to pursue this.” And pursue, pursue, pursue…one day it strikes you, “I’m pursuing a merry-go-round. It seems as though I’m taking in some kind of new information, a new term, a new description and I am about to leap into a new direction that’ll blow my mind apart. But I’m afraid that I probably couldn’t blow my mind apart with an unlimited supply of dynamite!” The shock isn’t that you may go crazy or come apart: it’s how can you get yourself apart and expand beyond Line level?
This thing is an area of Life which manifests itself in different ways at different times. In the past, one person at a time was the central outlet through which this was channeled. Other people collected around that opening. One particular aspect of the present time which makes it interesting is that religion is no longer the proper basis for This Thing. Many of you still have voices in your ordinary consciousness which say, “Yeah, this is still religion. He makes jokes about God coming to Cleveland and looking up the Pope’s dress…but this is still religious.” And it’s not, because religion is already a part of the established patterns in your brain. This Thing deals with development of new, nonhabitual pathways in the nervous system. In the past, these new pathways were introduced by prophets who heard the “voice of god.” It was right for its time — it caught people’s attention and had an effect.
A progression took place and the form of religion expanded in different directions, affecting different areas of this planet and Life. It touched different races and nationalities and it expanded with the growth in the circuitry of humanity. But that form won’t do anymore. Trust me, I’m telling you a fact. The form still exists. Churches are still in business; people are claiming to be brand new new-age teachers or gurus with new interpretations of the Bhagvad Gita or the Koran: and it’s still based on some person claiming to have a more direct connection with the gods. Whether religious in an organized sense or not, that form is now part of the Line-level consciousness of all humanity. It’s accepted at Line level that a god somewhere outside the system periodically sends down people to bring a new message; or speaks to people that are already down there. But that absolutely will not work for This anymore.
More can be learned from this information. What if I did take that religious approach? What if I told you, “I’m going to tell everyone that I’m the brand new messenger from the gods?” But it can’t be done. What Life is demanding is that something new be started. I don’t mean an absolute cutoff, since that doesn’t exist. If it were absolutely brand new, it would be too drastic and would not take effect. But a frightening shock is always needed in order to shake up habitual behavior. By behavior, in this case, I mean humanity’s religious beliefs; its concept of itself and its purpose. The nervous system must be shaken, but if the message is too abrupt or shocking, no one will hear it. No one is capable of hearing it.
You wonder, “Why is it that I seem to keep falling into the same trough of the blahs? Two weeks ago I felt so excited and enthusiastic and in fact saw something on my own about me and my connection with Life. I stayed up for two days, walked and ran…and that was only last Tuesday. And right now suicide isn’t that far away. It’s nothing in particular; there just doesn’t seem to be any particular reason to go on. How can this be? What’s wrong with me?” Nothing is wrong with you. But don’t expect that I’m hiding some secret trick. Remember I can give you a trick. I can give you a trick individually or to a larger group by pulling out ten names at random, and telling them to get out. What a shock that would put into those left. It would be a while before any of you asked me for a trick to put a personal shock into your system. But it wouldn’t last till judgement day, because pretty soon, at a different level the same stagnant feeling would surface.
Many of you experience an agitated desire that, “I would like to have great moments of epiphany. Couldn’t you just whip it on me and I’ll worry about whether I like it or not. If I don’t like it, I’ll let you know…but give me one.” “Mystical states” amount to no more than accidental, temporary igniting of irrelevant circuitry. That’s all they are, literally. Such states are irrelevant to routine existence. “States” may qualify for being underlined with a capital “S,” but they’re merely a temporary ignition of irrelevant circuitry.
A parallel exists for people pursuing This: The difference is that it isn’t accidental and it isn’t temporary. The apparent state seems to come and go; even though for a while you can’t foresee when it’s going to happen. When it does happen, you can’t look around and say, “Oh, I know what caused that. It’s because I meditated and fasted for four days. That’s surely what did it.” No that would be ordinary; that would be a temporary, accidental ignition of irrelevant circuitry. Would-be mystics say, “Aha, I read holy books, at least three a day for ten years and then one day it happened.” So all you have to do to recreate that state, if you live that long, is go back and start all over and read holy books. But, sad to say, it never works the same way the second time. So all they can do is write a book on what they experienced. For someone involved with This Thing, igniting irrelevant circuitry and experiencing accidental “states” is useless. You might think it’s fun, but it would have no more lasting real effect than smoking pot. In a sense it’s true that everyone who pursues This Thing has been through stronger mystical states than anybody you’ve ever heard about, except you didn’t notice it. It isn’t the same as reading two or three hundred pages about a guy who traveled here and there and prayed and tortured himself…pulled his hair out and went without food. Then one day, wham, something happened. For the next hundred pages he tells you how indescribable it was; how wonderful; how he’s all in favor of it. He may write a follow-up book to this, so be sure and keep his address. He says, “Hooray for it, everybody should do it. It’s what the gods intended.” To the ordinary circuitry that sounds like the proper description of an extraordinary state. Whereas the process of real change may occur without notice at Line level. Does this make any of you want to ask, “Who took all the fun out?”
To change the apparent subject in reference to “Who took the fun out,”…did anybody squeeze anything out of me pointing out that people experience guilt over having sexual daydreams? I sort of rhetorically, if not musingly asked the question, “Would any of you be prepared to confront the daydream by experiencing it?” What you’d find is that the apparent excitement was in the fear or parallel guilt about it. If you actually went and did it, lived out the daydream, you’d find: “Well, that’s nothing like I thought.” And then after you’ve done it, you can’t even go back and imagine it anymore. You can go back and try to get that kind of stimulation back, but it’s like, “Well, they killed Santa Claus again. Is there no end to the string of disappointments to which I must be subject?”
Do you see any comparison there? Well, everyone has a sufficient number of neuro transmitters, magnetic fields, and wiring potentials to have had enough imagination about what This Thing is and what it might lead to tomorrow. Everyone has enough of those neuro transmitters to be disappointed squared. The transmitters are still there in most of you, as in the voices that wonder, “When is he going to tell us the real secret? When will he turn out the lights and put on the special clothes: and a neon symbol will begin to float down. Then he’ll say, ‘Alright folks, this is it. I’m going to count to three and it’s going to be bingo time.'” It’s fun for people to imagine what This Thing might be. Such as, “I will meet somebody or find a secret word or ritual. It will be everything I can imagine. I’ll be everything that the gods want us to be; but I will still be me. I’ll be me, but I’ll be in some way a perfected me.” Ordinary consciousness can’t Understand this but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have something change and it still be the same thing. “Well I’ll be me, but I’ll be better.” No, a better you is something else. “I’ll be a more godly me.” No, that’s something else. You can’t be you and be a more godly you. You can’t be you and be a more perfected you. You can’t be you and be a more flawed you. Notice how this idea just doesn’t fit anywhere in your consciousness. It will flow through like a sieve.
How about a passing shot? Speaking of mysticism, can you see that as the Yellow Circuit began to stir or develop in humanity, men began to believe that the gods were talking to them? Most of you are well read enough; think back to your college days and your studies of the Western version of history (that is, how the Yellow Circuit progressed in Western Man). Back 2500 years ago it was common for people to believe the gods were talking to them. You may think, “They were superstitious, ignorant…it wasn’t like 20th century American.” Are you sure of that? Of course, no sane person would admit to hearing voices. Only people who are locked away for their own good sit around hearing voices. But that’s not true, is it? Everybody hears voices; if you’re sane, if you have a stable, singular personality, the voices ARE you. Think about it. The day of the Greeks isn’t over. Remember, time isn’t simply a linear reality in the body of Life. The people heard voices as the Yellow Circuit first began to stir. They began to hear voices and they attributed those voices to gods. But when we look back, ordinary consciousness says, “Well, those people were dumb. I mean it was a very early time; people didn’t have a true understanding of religion.” It isn’t surprising at all that the respectable people, the thinkers of the day, the leaders discussed quite freely, “The gods talk to me. I hear voices.”
An ordinary person might say, “It’s good that we have progressed. Through our tax monies we’ve a place to take care of those poor unfortunate people who say they hear voices of gods. Yet some people are left out here in the world; outside the padded cells and the fences. Take Uncle Charley who believes that God’s talking to him. Isn’t that terrible! Thank goodness for our sanity.” Eh what? Are you sure that that’s any sort of four dimensional progress? The voices are still talking, but ordinary sane people don’t believe it is the gods. I’m not being cynical, but now it’s to the point where good, sane people no longer hear gods speaking to them: “I hear myself speaking. I’m a conscious, thoughtful, fairly well educated person.” But, I ask you, what’s he going to say next?
How about another glancing blow to the ordinary patterns of circuitry? This has to do with self-fueling and the appearance that the system we live in is by nature closed. How many of you have ever had the shudder that This Thing cannot be a closed system because it has to be eating something? Take the example of weather systems. You can turn on the TV and a weatherman will say, “A low pressure system with some cold arctic air is coming down from the Rockies. It’s making a fairly normal sweep; coming down in an easterly direction through the plains. No other systems are present to interfere with this system. This foretells of some very cold, very unstable weather hitting the Gulf Coast and the entire Southeast within the next forty eight hours.” Where did the first system, coming down from the Rockies, come from? Most of the systems and weather in the U.S. comes from the Arctic. It travels a certain path and combines with the gulf stream and movements of the winds across the face of this planet. But where does it start in the Arctic? Without me giving a lesson in meteorology…in one dimension we’re looking at a cycle of the planet: it feeds itself through evaporation and causes weather systems. The weather hits the ground and turns into potential new weather. We’ll just leave it at that for the time being; as a continuing cycle of weather systems.
The weather is absolutely predictable, though not day by day of course. (An aside: can you See Life tolerating a very questionable level of efficient transfer of energy by having professional weathermen saying what’s going to happen tomorrow? End of small joke.) The weather is absolutely predictable, but taken in small increments it’s distorted. A weatherman can point out, “We’re in bad shape: we’re six inches short of the rainfall for our average.” And it isn’t true. They can isolate a part of reality and say we have six inches less rainfall than we did last year, or for the last two or three years. If they look at a small fragment of time they can say, “The weather’s taking a very unusual turn,” and it isn’t. You can isolate a period of horizontal time and say, “We’re six inches short of rainfall.” But then you can look at a similar period of time a few years in the future and it will appear as if we have too much rain. Consciousness isn’t continually aware of this taking place. If it were, we’d have no feelings of doom concerning the weather or anything else. The weather is absolutely predictable: it’s a self-fueling circulatory system. It’s going to do the same thing over and over and over, notwithstanding the ideas of various what-people writing new books about the Greenhouse effect on this planet, or how the new fossil finds tied into the last Ice Age may predict that we’re on the verge of a new Ice Age. The scientist declares, “Read some of these figures that I’ve accumulated over the last five years about events in Siberia and the frost line in Australia.” And, sure enough, you read those figures and your consciousness stays right there where his is; and you get the shivers. You want to look outside and See if indeed a glacier is coming up onto your lawn. Notwithstanding those isolated spurts about going on here and there, the weather is predictable: it’s a self-fueling system and it’s doomed to do the same thing over and over and over.
Now can you shift from the weather to another great system spelled “MAN”? If something can be identified in three dimensions as a self-fueling system, with a circulatory pattern of self-feeding, then it’s predictable, stable and doomed to repetition. It’s a walking, floating or circulating habit; and it’s serving a very distinct purpose. Might not someone have a fleeting curiosity of what would happen if you stuck a new piece of weather into the system? What if you could get some new food or nourishment into the so-called psychological food chain of people? You continue to eat the same Life over and over. You think the same thing over and over and over…and over. You even have the same dreams. Everything is the same thing over and over. You can be driving along with the sun shining, feeling great and you hear on the radio that a person won fifty million in a lottery. So you daydream about what you would do with fifty million dollars. But you’re going to be shocked, because your daydreams are the same daydreams you have right now: it won’t go any further. “If I had fifty million dollars I wouldn’t be living this kind of sawed-off cement block life I’m living now…nooo. It would be one unending party of new thrills and excitement.” You could turn and look inside at the circulatory system, the firing patterns, the thing that seems to be you in action as you daydream about the money being handed to you. And your daydreams will be limited to the same things you’ve always daydreamed. In a three dimensional sense, as long as a system is self-fueling, it’s doomed to absolute predictability: or, for those of you with a continuing religious inclination, it’s doomed to eternal sin. Try to Neuralize the possibility of inserting fresh information, new weather, unusual nourishment into the weather system; into the psychological food chain — to get new information into what would seem to be absolutely locked-in RAM. Without doing that you will be forever looking for a new trick!
How many of you begin to have glimpses on your own of a continuum between the most mundane aspects of existence and those in the psychological, personality area? For instance, have you ever put on a few extra pounds that you didn’t need and become aware of how it affected your Blue Circuit? It can produce a subtle, but quite real and almost instantaneous new level of aggression, hostility or self-pity. If that’s too obscure, how about some closer examples that are near and dear to most of your hearts. How about the difference between listening to music sober or after having a few drinks? Or how about the difference between listening to music standing up or sitting down? How could anything as everyday as the laws of gravity have a direct effect upon the unique circuitry of this wonderful creature, You?
This applies to more than music: next time you’re sitting down reading a novel or something, try and remember to stand up somewhere for awhile and read. I guess all of you sense that something different would happen. Try it. If you find yourself at home trying to conduct periodic business calls on the phone, stand up and talk about important business. How could something like putting on a few extra pounds, have a direct effect upon your inner circuitry? Where’s the justice: where’s the spiritual and psychological justice? And yet the feeling at Line level is, “I’m very stable. I can depend on myself. I’m familiar with my limitations and know what I can and can’t do. I may not be the world’s greatest person, but I’m pretty dependable. People know where I’m coming from.” Then without noticing, the person becomes testier over the next two weeks; while also not noticing that they have to release their belt another notch. They may note the need to cut down on their food intake and not notice an effect, or any connection with that behavior and their Blue or Yellow circuitry.
What wonderful creatures. If all of that has any validity, where is real stability? You might think that based upon what I said there is no absolute stability. But, then again, see if you can make yourself go crazy. Of course, it’s quite common for all of humanity to have fleeting fears that they may go crazy or come apart. Alright, try it on purpose; go ahead and try it. Go ahead this Saturday: rent a hotel room in another city under an assumed name, and try to go crazy for twelve hours. Give it your best effort. Grit your teeth and really try. But of course if you try, it won’t work. How is it that this continual, fear exists; that, you might lose your mind? That, had you not discovered This, you would have gone to pieces by now? Alright, now I’ve given you the opportunity. I’ve pictured it and painted it in all sorts of ways. Go away, close the door, grit your teeth, put on your best clothes, whatever it takes to get you going…really get down to business in the privacy of your own little room somewhere and try to come apart. Right. You can’t. But why?
This has no connection with my barbed wire electrical fence, or with a magnetic field around the brain, does it? You say, “I could come apart.” Ok, willfully come apart. I can guarantee, if you come apart I can put you back together. If you can do it by yourself, call me and I’ll come to wherever you are. So don’t let that bother you. Just lock the door from the inside and if you really get it apart and can’t get it back together, call me. Rest assured, it won’t be permanent. It sounds funny because you haven’t seen the fearfulness of it. You try but there’s nowhere to go. You try but you can’t move. As long as you try to come apart, you can’t come apart.
How about a couple more about ordinary Life. This is my variation of the proposition that there’s no such thing as “good news.” It said on the front page of the paper that the temperature will be in the twenties tonight. Now don’t just say that the weather news is important because some people might want to bring in their tomato plants, or wrap up their water pipes. Forget all that. Why is it that this news is worth a headline on the front page of a metropolitan paper? Tomorrow afternoon’s paper won’t say, “Tomorrow it will be in the sixties;” even if it were unusual for this place and time. It won’t say, “Tomorrow it will be in the sixties,” but it will say, “Expected to be in the twenties by tonight or tomorrow.” This isn’t a joke. Is it that the only news anyone wants to hear is the apparent three dimensional bad news? Even if the people hear it and say, “I didn’t want to hear that,” they still wanted to hear it. The only news that qualifies as being news is news of doom. From gossip to headlines in the paper, the video media: it’s all bad news to varying degrees. If you kept reading the article, it might give a side note, “The weather office in this part of the country also finds it surprising that they’re expecting it to hit the sixties tomorrow.” But that will be the final paragraph on the third page. The headline is, “It’s going to hit the twenties.”
How could This Thing be presented in a totally good-news fashion? What if I say that I’m going to buy thirty minutes of television time and you have to write the script and it has to be totally good news. Those of you whose liver doesn’t already go into a short quiver can try it. It has to be all good news from the word go; from the downbeat when the show starts to my final comment. Try it. You don’t have to write it; just sit there right now and try it. Try the first sentence, the first word or two. At Line level, everybody’s consciousness wants to come out with some version of, “It’s a good thing I’m here; that the gods sent me. Yes, I know how you feel. I know how things appear…” But how can you get past that first part? How can you do away with the bad news premise, that things are wrong and need correcting? How can you start the down beat, like in a song, and have the down beat be anything other than bad news?
How about another example that all of you have heard about? It’s called the placebo effect, and it has gone beyond sugar pills. Life has begun to take note of the effect in general. General practitioners have determined that they can find nothing physically wrong with a high percentage of the people that come to their offices. I read that a physician or psychologist questioned some patients going to the doctor. Let’s assume that they measured and 53% of the people that enter a G.P.’s office with a physical complaint are checked out and nothing wrong can be found. They do an exit poll survey 48 hours later and ask, “Do you feel better now?” And the people say, “Yes I do.” That’s in a broad respect what has heretofore been referred to as the placebo effect. I could make all physicians aware of this saying, “You can’t find anything wrong with 53% of the people that walk into your office, right?” “That sounds right.” “98% of that 53% go away and feel much better within 48 hours.” “Well I didn’t do anything. I just checked them. It’s the placebo effect. It was their imagination. They had some kind of psychosomatic complaint when they came in.” The physician’s attitude being that in some way the patient is to blame: they see it as a mutation of the way things should work. “I’m a doctor: I’m in the business of doctoring. I’ve studied for it; I’m prepared to doctor and I want to see people who need a doctor. Half of the people who come in here don’t need a doctor. And you tell me that they pay their money and in 48 hours they’re glad? 98% of the 53% that didn’t have anything wrong with them now say that they feel much better?…and they’ve recommended me to their neighbor? Good grief, why don’t they stop this? This isn’t in the mainstream: this isn’t part of the of the healthy body of medicine.” But it is. “Those people are nuts. I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t know the term for it, but those people shouldn’t waste my time. I have sick people to attend to and these people come and they’re not sick — which is bad enough. Sure they help pay the rent, but they’re not sick to start with. And now you tell me that they’re delighted with my treatment and I didn’t give them any treatment! I spent 14 years in school. You’re telling me that I could bring in my brother-in-law who is a bricklayer have him poke around on 53% of the people, look at them, tell them to spit into a cup, urinate in the glass, and then he’d walk into the other room, wait for 5 minutes and come back and say, “I don’t find anything wrong with you.” And you’re telling me that 98% of the people would get better?” The doctor feels that something’s wrong here and these people should be blamed and attacked: something should be done about this. A seemingly imaginary illness. But there’s no such thing as a placebo effect. That is the treatment.
The general attitude of humanity is a belief in some kind of “out there” in a known system and framework. In this case the framework is doctoring; the wonderful world of medicine. “I’m trained for it. I play one part, the patients play another. And now we have these mutations coming in: the non-sick people who get cured by me giving them non-treatment. We should be able to extract them from this whole loop system of medical treatment, and get these people out of the way.” No, no, no. They’re part of the system. The doctor feels like, “They’re wasting my time. I’m doing nothing.” Nay, nay.
There’s more to it than that or I wouldn’t have brought it up. Can you glimpse this as an example of ordinary consciousness chopping up the 4-D world into workable categories. I was using the mouth of my fictitious physician, saying, “Wait a minute, I’m trained to do one thing and patients should be trained to be sick. We get together and I help them if I can. But these people aren’t sick and then they get better by me not helping them.” The physician has chopped up 4-D reality into “What should be. There is a binary dance between me the healer and the people that are in sickness. But they’re on one side and I’m over here. Don’t tell me that pseudo-sick people get well because of the things that I didn’t do.” He has chopped it up, and that’s necessary in Life, but it isn’t necessary for you. You have to See otherwise. That what he did is part of the treatment. His actions were part of being a physician; part of the health dance. And yet it’s looked on as being something that’s outside the proper stream of medical care. Once you get a glimpse of this process of division, you See that it couldn’t be further from the truth. They are denying the treatment that they’re giving; the part they’re mechanically playing. According to statistics, the part that they’re playing to the majority of the people who walk through their door is to say, “You aren’t sick.” If you pursue this too far, everything you might suspect in theory will come together and make sense. Nah, forget it.
A question has come up: “How do you know if you’re being conscious in your concern for someone you care about?” Let me point out that in the ordinary sense, two distinguishable connections exist between people who care about each other. One is the blood-level connections between blood kin. In times past you may have felt a state of psychological estrangement between you and your parents. All of you have to get past that. You must be past the point of entertaining these voices, regardless of whether you feel like going back and falling at your mother and father’s knee and begging for forgiveness for your imaginary sins. That isn’t important. You should begin to have a feeling that your psychological complaints between you and your parents are as mechanical as anything else in the world. Beyond those voices, you should be able to feel a blood-level connection; a feeling of inescapable relationship. A crude example: you might hear somebody in a fictional piece of work say, “Listen, my son is a mad-dog killer. I know he did it. He’s raped and robbed: but I’m still going to have to sell the house and get him an attorney because he’s my son. In theory I wouldn’t spit on him or give him the time of day. I don’t even want to be around him. But here I am about to sell the house. I don’t have any other choice.” That comes out in the world of literature and there’s a reality to it. The feeling I’m hinting at doesn’t have to surface as more overt, positive feelings between you and your parents, or other blood kin. But once you can get past the Line level mechanical estrangements between you and them, you’ll experience a feeling of inescapability which can’t be discussed. It’s neither right nor wrong. “I can’t justify what I’m doing or talk myself out of helping my uncle. I know him: if he wasn’t laying there half dead right now, he’d pick my pockets. I know all that. But it’s like I have no choice.” You pick him up, carry him to the hospital and pay his bill.
That is perhaps a crude description, but that level does exist. You can’t describe it; it’s of no benefit and you can’t expect to win jewels in some crown in an afterlife over it. It’s simply there and you do yourself a quite real injustice to try and go against that inescapable connection. It’s nothing to talk about: you have to do what you have to do with them.
Does anybody remember the question? “How do you know if you’re being conscious in your mechanical concern for someone else?” Here’s a quick verbal outline of the non-blood connection. You might ask if your attraction to someone is Real, or if it’s instead a mechanical, magnetic attraction. I’ll turn the question around: Can anybody do good and expect nothing? I mean nothing. Can you do good for a person right in front of their eyes and get no reaction or even notice? Believe it or not, that was the end of my comment.
Occasionally someone will ask why the “great mysteries of the world,” ie., Atlantis, pyramids, Stonehenge, etc., have never been solved. Everyone has some feeling for these “great mysteries,” but what’s the difference between that and, “Where is God?” What’s the difference between that question and, “Where does everybody go when they die?” Or, “Where did I come from? Why am I suddenly here? Where was I before I got here? What is the number before one?” In a crude but quite real way, Life has always produced these kinds of fake mysteries. I’m not going to sit here and verbally tear apart specific mysterious examples: but is it not curious that Life produces these apparent mysteries that nobody can answer? How do you know it’s a mystery? We could count the individual strands of wire making up the suspension supports for the Brooklyn Bridge, and if I added the number of individual wires that have been bound together, I could claim they equal the number of years that a particular prophet actually lived. If it didn’t equal that, I could make it equal something else. Or if it didn’t equal that, I could make it equal something else. Or if it didn’t equal the number of years he lived, it could equal the number of hours he lived minus his hat size. And if that didn’t work, it would be the number of hours he lived minus his hat size and multiplied by 12,674 (which coincidentally is the same number of stones that is reputed to have paved the main walkway leading to the head temple in Atlantis).
Now you talk about a mystery! That mystery goes into many epochs of time; into many different areas. And it’s true down to the last decimal point! Of course, if I published this fake mystery you’d actually have ordinary people researching the lives of the people who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. “We see in the photographs of them that something’s highly suspicious about the way the designer wears his derby. It turns out that he was born on a farm that was reputed to be only ten miles away from a house that many people said was haunted.” Life has a purpose for these mysteries: Energy is being transferred. Why is it that these great mysteries exist and not one has ever been solved? Isn’t that weird? People look at the pyramids and say, “My word, you said they were built when? That doesn’t make sense to me. I read books where other people have said this couldn’t have been done with the technology available at that time. And another writer over in Persia who was known at that time saw strange things in the sky. I know the stories about him drinking, but forget that. He used to see strange things. What if people from other planets came who had the ability to levitate these stones? Would that not explain it all?” If that’s true, where are those people? But beyond that, why couldn’t there be an ordinary explanation for what the pyramids are doing here? Those mysteries always abound; and as I pointed out, they’re simply variations of the question of the ultimate mystery, “How did we get here?” These stones bring the question down to a more interesting level. “Here are these stones and you have this guy who wrote 2,000 years ago. He said that he actually saw Atlantis. Well, he didn’t actually see it, but he had a brother who talked to a sailor who saw it. So it isn’t just a story. And the whole city just disappeared. Whew, that’s spooky.” Well what’s spookier than being here?
Why is it necessary to have these stones propped up in northern England where “if you look at them in the right way the Sun or constellations shine through them. You can lay down on your back and look up and the stones will do certain things.” There’s a need for these great fake mysteries: they serve a purpose. Why do we have these great fake mysteries that have never been solved? Well, they’ll never be solved. If they are, you’ll forget all about it. They will no longer be great mysteries. It’s serving a purpose. But these mysteries hold no importance or mystery to a person involved with This. There is no food there.
I’ll talk a bit about the mechanics of attraction between people. Someone asked, “How is it that attraction appears to exist at times on only one side: that is, someone is attracted to a person not attracted to him. This would seem a dead-end situation, or inefficient use of Life’s energy?” One person is attracted to another person and finds out after some length of time that the other person doesn’t seem to respond at all. But something is still getting transferred and I’m not talking about an accidental something. Some of you have felt at Line level, that you’re not personable enough: you’re ugly or nobody likes you…whatever. Some of you have been involved in a hard wired pattern all of your life where you’ve found yourself being attracted to people who have never returned it; and you feel that “Something’s wrong with me.” This pattern hasn’t been a waste of energy: energy is being transferred. Down at “I” level you’ll say, “I’m trying to establish a relationship and I don’t know what’s wrong. I keep finding myself attracted to people that don’t seem to return it.” At Line level, down on the grid position, the person doing that is serving a purpose. Energy is being transferred.