Life Is a Contact Sport
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Summary= See Below
Transcript = See Below
Diagrams= #81, #82 See Below in Transcript
Summary
Tape 210, May 29, 1986, runtime 1:45
Notes by TK
Comments on pessimism and inertia that can manifest in This Thing. But “Life is a contact sport” and you are a player regardless of your desire to avoid contact. Everyone must have the feeling of needing an explanation–it is part of Life’s need/use of man. Anything you “know” to be undoubtedly true, but you dislike, you don’t really know. Any experience you can remember that has any negative element in any degree, that is less than fully satisfying, means you were not in full contact with that experience when it happened.
For the ordinary, everything fits this category. The Few have no memory, for there is no past to remember; nothing unsatisfying. All of man’s activities have “been catered”; none have ordered but “remember” that they did when explanations for the dissatisfaction engendered are required. E.g., “I ordered appetizers…but not chopped liver…ugh!”
Return to time zone analogy. This Thing is a time zone east of Greenwich, England–a time that doesn’t exist yet. Reference diagrams 81, 82. “Tectonic time plates” capping off and releasing energies of three different time zones that can be physically felt as centered/acting on associated parts of the body. The “Voice of Reason”–the voice of contemporary man–speaks always from the current time zone, but your center of gravity, your root, of action/behavior is always a time zone west. This is the basis of guilt and dissatisfaction.
Group comments/questions. Is “good enough” good enough? You must understand what attention a particular circumstance deserves; must know how much is enough. The ordinary constantly feel their behavior is not good enough. Look to the question “Where am I in Life’s body? as corollary of a cell in your own body asking same question–that is similarly dissatisfied with “not good enough”.
Transcript
LIFE IS A CONTACT SPORT, AND
THE TIME ZONES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Document: 210, May 29, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986
After you have had some time to consider the ideas I have presented, it may well appear that I have painted a very pessimistic picture. That, if everything I am saying is correct, Life is “locked up,” arranged in a manner which cannot be changed, and in which no one can change. Those kinds of feelings are understandable. For some people it goes beyond pessimism; they begin to feel that if nothing can actually be done, why even get out of bed? If I could tell the whole world, “Quit struggling — you just think you can make decisions,” melancholy would reign. (I guess it would be worse than it is now.) If you find that the initial feeling of pessimism passes into a feeling of terminal inertia — that you can hardly get out of bed — there is some validity to it. It is quite understandable, my caveats not withstanding, to feel that all I am speaking of is different ways to see that everything is locked up and no one can change. But that is not the point. This Thing does not lead to a form of pessimism; it does not lead to terminal inertia.
Life is a contact sport, whether you want to play or not. The closest ordinary Life gets to avoiding this fact is through monasteries and hermits. However, notice the number of people who actually go sit in monasteries. It is fairly safe to say that at least once you have wished you could live on a desert island to “get away from all this,” but you did not do it, and not because of any weakness on your part. Life has very little tolerance for recluses. People are made to be in a contact sport. Energy cannot be transferred and cells cannot be fed within your body unless everything inside of you is in a contact sport.
In the same way, the purpose of man in Life would not be fulfilled if Life were not a contact sport. I do not mean contact simply in the physical sense. A person is in contact just by looking at someone else. There is contact happening even when there is no apparent purpose to the energy exchange. Two people can be talking and both can be aware that neither is interested in the other, yet the exchange continues.
You would be making a foolish mistake to think that every person in the game is constantly demanding an explanation of what is going on. That would be like every cell in your body demanding to know the origins of its nourishment. Do you understand that if such a thing occurred, the whole organism would lapse into disintegration? Life is a contact sport, it does not and cannot tolerate each and every cell demanding an explanation as to what is going on in the game. This is not to say that men do not feel an itch to understand what is going on, but there is no real demand to know. That is why men seem to be satisfied with the external authority of religion, psychology, and science.
People are not wired to be able to judge themselves, so they seek an external, if slightly unsatisfactory, explanation of Life. (This is not an attack on religion or science — they are as important as the National Football League or the vegetable section at the supermarket. They are as important as anything else.) People are not wired up to conceive of the simple fact that if there is an objective, external gauge by which we should be measured, why can’t they see it?
Diagram 81
The standard is there; I have spoken of it. The standard is that which is conducive to Life’s good health. You then have this problem: you are not constructed, ordinarily, to be able to judge what is in Life’s good health. Everyone THINKS they can judge; by and large, everyone on the planet would agree that certain things are inherently evil. But what no one understands, as harsh as it might sound, is that wars, weapons, murder, hunger, prejudice, and hatred are all necessary for Life’s continued growth. Verbally, that is almost meaningless, if not offensive, to the ordinary mind. I do not say it to be offensive and it is not literally true, but the reality of it is worse. The reality of it is this: the reality of it is the reality of it.
The awareness that Life is a contact sport can be an antidote for the pessimistic feeling some people have after having a few brushes with This. You have to keep the awareness that Life is a contact sport or Life would die. Life is a contact sport through man or man would not be serving any particular purpose and he would die. Men would be dinosaurs. (We would be worse than that, we would be things you never heard of. Dinosaurs, you see, don’t not-exist as well as they could because everyone has heard of them. The only things that don’t exist at a real level are things you never heard of. Dinosaurs, I’ll admit, don’t exist better than Edsels.)
You are going to be in a contact sport unless you become a hermit or go to a monastery, but if This Thing is what you want, you will not find it there. You are in a contact sport even if you have an intellectual aversion to it or think you should have philosophical immunity from it. You can talk, talk, talk all you want: “This is the kind of crap up with which I will not put!” And how long have you been saying that, sir? “Forty years.” Life is a contact sport and it is mechanical. But how else could it be? What else would be possible?
Everyone believes they have major complaints with Life. They believe their life is not going right and that it has not gone right as far back as they can remember. In connection with that feeling is a worldwide, shared “common knowledge” that Life is basically a series of disappointments. You can see it in yourself. If someone tells you how they were having great luck with some endeavor until tragedy struck — a part of you will respond, “Well, that’s Life for you.” But anything you know which you do not like, you do not know.
Now I ask you: how many things do you absolutely know that you find no fault with? I mean the kinds of everyday things you have learned through experience. You may profess to have learned something from experience, but if you are not comforted by your lesson, you have learned nothing. I will give it to you another way: if you recall any experience negatively, you were not in full contact with it when it happened. You were in it as much as was necessary to mechanically transfer energy. The cells in Life’s body were fed, you moved the oxygen as you should have, but if your memory of the experience has any taste of displeasure to it, you were not in full contact.
The fact is, anything you remember, you do not like. Anything you remember is less than satisfying. To put it more succinctly, for someone involved with This Thing the past does not exist. Anything you ordinarily remember: forget it. It is of no consequence. It did not really happen to you. You remember it because it was less than satisfying — your contact with the experience was on the barest mechanical level. Once you begin to expand your nervous system, you become able to eat different kinds of experience in a way which does not feed the ordinary “you.” Your nervous system will then not digest that which you were wired to digest and it will then not reject what it has always rejected. When you begin to experience Life in such a way, the past ceases to exist. All debts you believed you incurred will be gone because they never existed.
It is as though ordinary experience is a series of wrestling matches. Sometimes you get thrown, sometimes you throw others, and sometimes it’s a draw. Once you get past Line-level consciousness, you realize that the wrestling matches were all “fixed.” You were in a contact sport, all right, but there was no willful activity going on. It was “show biz” — a sham.
No one realizes it, but there is a sense in which Life is a catered affair. Men are made in such a way that they will insist they ordered it all, but you did not order it. You just never notice it unless a problem arises at your table. Every morning you get up and the whole day is catered for you and everyone else. But as soon as there seems to be a flaw at the banquet, human consciousness remembers — “Oh, I ordered this. But I didn’t order the accordion player, I simply wanted a good band. I wanted some appetizers, but not chopped liver.”
At Line-level consciousness events are noticed when the molecules of the organism become irritated enough. It is at that point that men begin to look for an explanation, but what ordinarily suffices is the notion that they ordered the meal, there have simply been a few errors in catering. The fact is, the catering service has made no mistakes. It serves everyone, from your opponents to your friends, 24 hours a day and no one notices until there is one of those continual, momentary irritations.
Why is it that every time someone asks you about a flaw at your banquet, you have to explain? “Well,” you say, “someone misunderstood me.” No one is wired up to press further. You might hear someone say, “Oh, yes. I ordered this. But as you will note, there has been a slight mistake.” Your routine response will be “Yes. It happens to us all. I know what you mean.” That is commentary, not understanding.
Next I am going to take an ordinary description of time zones and make it allegorical. On a global map there are time zones delineated by longitudinal lines. Humanity came up with the idea to help him find his way around the globe. Starting in Greenwich, England these north/south lines are repeated every l5 degrees and each line represents an hour.
The allegory is that I am not speaking about geography. Everyone believes, no matter in which part of the globe they reside, that they are in the present time zone — that they are “what is happening.” No matter their time zone, they believe that they are evidence of man’s superiority to carrier pigeons.
This Thing would be in a time zone which is yet to exist. You could not find it on the globe, but it truly exists in a different time zone. There are stories that have followed certain men throughout history; after they died people began to believe they were sent by the gods. What is closer to the truth is that they were walking anachronisms. Their consciousness was from a different time zone, but existed simultaneously in the then current time zone. They were telephoning Los Angeles from New York.
Within Life’s body things operate at different speeds. The rate at which skin cells die, as compared to brain cells, puts them in a different time zone. The rate at which something receives food dictates its sensation of what “contemporary” is and how fast time is going. Different cells would have different perceptions, if they could, of their origins and life span.
Everyone believes they live in contemporary time, but they do not. Let us say you are a middle of the road person living just west of avant garde. West of you is where the right-wingers, conservatives and reactionaries live. Your feeling would be, without understanding it, that they are living one time zone behind you. And it would be a fair description: for you they are living in the past. If we stepped into a community of conservatives, we would see that they thought of themselves as being in contemporary time. To them liberals are operating in a time zone that has no bearing to real issues. To people in the conservative time zone, liberals are attempting to fix things unbroken — to unsettle the status quo. I hate to tell you this, but that is going on in your own nervous system.
Diagram # 082 illustration
I am going to draw a two-dimensional map and try to explain it three-dimensionally, but that will still not illustrate the extent of it. The picture is of a human and around him is drawn three moving plates, or planes, of time. They are like rings around a planet. The plates represent sensations of three time zones: one of them seems to be right now, one seems to be a sensation of the future, and the third seems to be what drags you into the past.
The plates are stacked on each other and move at different speeds. At times you would be more aware of one than the others, and at times they seem to hit particular parts of the body. The plates move continuously, mesh, boost and suppress energies, but they are operating simultaneously, in three different time zones. At times you can feel quite specifically that within you there are three simultaneous realities of time and you carry them with you. You can feel, for instance, that under certain conditions the plate of the past is hugging a certain part of your body. You can feel the future time zone hover in another part of the body, and the third one rests in the parts that remain. That is enough of a hint. It takes a certain internal eyesight, but you can see it.
What appears to be an imbalance in the world is not recognized for what it is. The apparent injustice is due to the existence of different time zones. The people living in areas of poverty and inefficiency are living in a time zone behind the primary contemporaneous time zone of the planet as a whole. They have to be there. There is, further, a long range pendulum effect: in another 1500 years that time zone will have shifted and become the primary contemporaneous time zone. In l500 years, your current locale could be the spot on the planet where there is tragedy after tragedy, famine after famine, and mad ruler after mad ruler.
Part of the basis of so-called guilt is that everyone feels that their center of gravity is just west of “right now.” “Right now” is the voice of Life, the voice which wants to expand the limits of the nervous system. You and everyone else are “one hour behind” and that keeps people dissatisfied. That keeps Life moving.
What I am trying to do is take information/energy from a future time zone and make the information sound as if it could be true right now. The transforming of this future energy into today’s information has been the basis of This Thing throughout history. Everything below Line level, going west, you can understand. But what if you could find a time zone that does not apparently exist? It is not on any map — it is east of right now. I have to tell you that this particular time zone is “mystical” because you cannot identify it. But there, you can understand everything which has taken place up until now and you can understand what is going to happen tomorrow. And you do not have to consult an astrologer. There, I suggest to you, feelings of pessimism and terminal inertia do not exist.