Waiting in the Slaughter Queue
Audio = Stream from the arrow, download from the dots
February 25, 1988
AKS/News Items = none
Summary = See Below
Excursion / Task = See Below
Diagrams = See Below #319
Transcript = See Below
Diagram # 146 video grab
Summary
Jan Cox Talk #319 ** Feb 25, 1988 ** – 1:34
Notes by TK
There is no such thing as gradual, agreeable, peaceful change of any kind, although it can appear so. Life names things to render them available for study. Label = death, but for the apparent benefit of advancing knowledge. To kill a verb, make it a noun. The Real Revolutionist already has enough nouns –just lacks the organization to completely distribute them. Lack of ‘strength’ = lack of organization. New division of the 3 circuits into upper and lower from a line drawn thru Blue Circuit. The upper circuitry is in a different time zone than the lower although existing coevally.
Note that nature uses all creatures without compassion. Everybody sees and accepts this, yet nobody can see that man is no better off at nature’s hands. Without upper circuitry in man there would be no questions of morality, of premature or unjust death. The Real Revolutionist should not fear death –but he should be mad about it; righteously indignant for the waste, that he is to be used by Life and thrown away.
Man has a cellular-level knowledge of death, yet this plus lower circuit needs are insufficient to drive man to move as Life requires. Therefore there are now upper circuit versions of these lower level non-verbal needs: they are the hungers for position, rank. Social groups are held together by fears of loss of acceptance/position. There is a use for Revolutionary anger/madness in The Few; it is a proper, non-hostile anger. It is the absolute dismissal of all non-physical hungers; to take nothing personally that Life would have you take so; to see impartially.
Example of the fascination/fear/hate generated in the ordinary by ‘unrepentant’ killers. They seem unafraid of death, undeterred by the worst penalty of society: the death penalty. They have the cellular-level knowledge that Life will deal death anyway and are seemingly lacking in upper circuit hungers that drive the ordinary. They are thus out of the ‘noun’, out of the bell curve, and disliked by Life.
Another example: bankers/lawyers etc. are universally/historically disliked because their occupation is the apparent epitome of useless effort –non-productive physically; but they are closest to Life’s growth. Ditto with distrust and dislike of advertising: the selling to the upper circuits. The lower circuits are not driven by advertising. The Real Revolutionist can make his life a form of warfare; eschew the impotent defense of the ordinary. Boredom is an unnatural manifestation of knowingly awaiting slaughter by Life.
The magnitude of difference between men and women is greater than any even suspect.
1:51 end
Excursion
- 1:34 Epilogue. for new people– Refinement of the “Look around” excursion: add smile (look left, smile; look right, smile in any new space.
For the next 17 days refuse to read or hear advertising of any sort.]
Transcript
WAITING IN THE SLAUGHTER QUEUE
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 319, February 25, 1988
Tonight I am going to talk about something I’ve never talked about, and for people hearing this at other times and in other places, this would not be reading material for someone brand new to This. So you may in the consider setting this one aside awhile.
Ninety percent of everything that I do with any of you people, whoever it is, is wasted. No great change ever takes place on a gradual basis and especially by passively listening to me talk a few times a week. There is no such thing as a gradual, peaceful, agreeable change. Never. In the city that is one of the reasons that everyone tries it. If your consciousness is so tied to ordinary affairs that you stubbornly believe you can only work on yourself piecemeal, you may be terminally citified.
In the ordinary world what passes for real change is exemplified by the habitual drunk who kills his wife in a car wreck, loses his driver’s license, goes to prison for DUI, and becomes a teetotaler. It takes something drastic and always disagreeable. Think about how much you complain when you’re planning to move to a new city; about how you’re not sure you’ll be able to continue to do what you’ve been doing, that you won’t find the kind of friends you like, etc. It is no more than the fear of any change. Nobody likes it. But every few years in This activity, it is as though you reach an upper circuit menopause; and it has happened again. All of you, male and female, have almost died again. And I am almost filled up with it.
I have pointed out to you before that there is no way to beneficially study something that is still, though everything in the city tells you otherwise. The ultimate way that ordinary life stills and kills things and people is by naming them, so as to apparently make it possible for them to be better studied. Life makes men do its dirty work, as always, by setting them about the job of labeling each other. The apparent purpose of the naming is to benefit the institutions that are supposedly helping mankind. “We’ve got to drive a pin through you like a caterpillar or a butterfly to study you, but don’t worry, it won’t hurt.” It’s true you’re not getting hurt in the lower circuits, you don’t feel it physically, but consider what the study of astrology, numerology, religion does to the Yellow Circuit. As soon as someone agrees to become the client of a psychiatrist, even if they were sent by their family or friends, they have been rendered immobile from the viewpoint of This activity. One might as well be a poor possum out in the middle of the highway when the headlights hit — and there you stand, immobilized. You go to an astrologer and become your birthday. You pay them money and say, “Who am I? Help me to change.” “I’ll be glad to. Now, exactly when were you born and what time of day, so I can look it up in my book — for a small fee.” All you’ve got to do is submit yourself to being named and you’re killed — and it is never noticed.
The way to kill a verb is simply by proclaiming it to be a noun. The headlights of ordinary existence keep you immobile, staring into them until that final crunch — until you feel the eighteen wheeler run over you. And let’s not forget the main noun-ing organization: it is self-definition. Everybody wants to name themselves, everyone wants to noun their lives by being able to tell what kind of guy they are, tell who they are studying with, tell what their career is. And you define yourself as a loser.
Here I’ll point out to you again another reason why This is so strange and unnatural, and why it goes absolutely, apparently against the grain of everything, when actually it does not: It is simply running like a parallel line to Life’s growth in the midst of Life. The kind of secret and exotic knowledge that people dream about is not exotic or hidden — it is simply running parallel to what’s going on. For instance, you’ve got parallel knowledge in you. What you know in your brain cells you don’t know in your kidneys. No one finds that strange at all. Of course, you never even thought about it, but the cells in your kidneys have important knowledge that your brain couldn’t duplicate. Your brain can’t clean out the body. If your kidneys break down and you expect your brains to take over, forget it. But there is parallel knowledge going on. From another viewpoint the brain knows things that make what the kidneys know look like, what? Yeah…child’s play.
Another aspect I could tie this to would be the reality of the apparent food shortage. We all know in our time and place that the hunger problem in this country is not a problem of growing enough food. The problem is organization. We have the nouns (the food) but we don’t have the verbs — we don’t manage to distribute it. Now remember I am not in any way pointing out something wrong with society because nothing is wrong with society. It has always been that way and always will until further notice.
But to use that situation again, the nouns, the stuff, the things, the food are always in supply. What is lacking is to be able to organize and “verb” what appears to be the nouns. Life is not arranged to do that. Then let me point out that, laterally speaking, you’ve got enough nouns, enough stuff in you right now to really get up to speed with This. But you are not organized to distribute it properly in you, to use it. You’re starving to death from the viewpoint of the Revolution.
What I mean by laterally speaking is to constantly be aware of the flip side of whatever you do and think; to be aware of believing the opposite of what you now seem to believe. That would be lateral expansion. That would be the organization and distribution. That would be feeding the hungry in you now. It would be a miracle. You would not be the same person anymore. That kind of distribution would bring an unnatural balance — one that Life did not require of you. It would bring about a balance in your circuitry up in the basic genetic level of what you think and feel and from there it could go to an expansion, to a lateral expansion. It is then possible that it can become an explosion and open up the higher areas of the nervous system. Here is a drawing for you:
The top ring is the Yellow Circuit, or so-called mind, the next is the Blue Circuit or so-called emotions, and the bottom is the Red Circuit or so-called body. The line drawn through it separates the upper circuitry and lower circuitry, if they could in fact be separated. The Blue Circuit seems to tie your thinking and body together. Historically, everyone else calls this separation the dichotomy of mind/body or of psychology/physiology. Here we will call it the upper circuitry and the lower circuitry. They exist simultaneously in different time zones, just as it is ten o’clock in Atlanta and simultaneously 7 o’clock in California. Neither one is right or wrong. They simply both exist.
I once asked some of you when you first arrived to write down what you considered your main problem. The responses were either not real problems, or they fell into the category of needing more strength. It was put in many ways: that you couldn’t tap your full artistic abilities, or finish projects, or choose courses of action. There is a way in which to see lack of strength as simply being a synonym for a lack of organization. When you speak of your lack of strength, your lack of power, all you’re saying without knowing it, is that you can’t organize your faculties, experience, knowledge, and feelings to do the things that you want to do. You feel as though there is a trick I could give you to stop smoking or quit getting so mad. You’ve got everything necessary to do the trick. If you had 4-D consciousness you’d have no “bad habits.”
Alright. As I said, I am very close to taking an axe to this whole organization and everyone involved here and in other cities. So I’m going to talk about a subject in a certain way that no one has ever heard. To give you one word about what I will talk about, the word would be “death” — but be warned, I’m not talking about death as you’ve ever thought about it. I’m just using words, names, even the words that are associated with verbs that are available in the city, to try and lead you in a parallel direction. Here it is: Consider all the anxiety Life seems to voice through everyone about Man’s inhumanity to Man and other creatures and how there is the notion that we’ll all be punished some day. Then look at “nature’s” animals and how they use each other, and how nature uses them. There is no compassion in any of it, but man does not complain about a lion murdering a deer. The concept of compassion exists only in the upper circuitry of Man. But notice he doesn’t find it odd to complain about the heartless behavior of his lower circuits which are wired the same way as the animals “out in nature.” An ordinary person can’t see that Life treats Man exactly as it does animals. If man had not developed upper circuitry there would be no question about whether we were in the same absolute condition as all other creatures. “Eat or be eaten” still applies to you, but the upper circuitry provides the idea of morality. The upper circuits don’t have a true sense of morality, but there is the word, there is the topic of discussion. And in Man, there is the unique knowledge that he’s going to eventually die.
There is no profit and no proof in fearing death for any of you, but rather you should be mad about it. I’m not talking about people in the city. I’m talking about you people. You should be righteously mad that whatever efforts you make here on this planet, no matter what you do, whether you do This or not, you’re going to be slaughtered. It’s just a matter of time and everything that you have done here is going to be wasted. They can’t put it in the grave with you. Now I mean much more than I’m saying about death, and don’t let your ordinary circuitry believe I’m saying that everything you do is wasted. The subject of death has nothing to do with morality, and it has nothing to do with any idea that you have about life after death. You do not know anything about life after death, and if you believe otherwise you’re an idiot. Now there is some knowledge about it down at the cellular level, but it does not come out in any manageable, reasonable, understandable form in Man’s upper circuit. No one in the city knows what happens after the big D.
Taking that as a given for a few minutes: Life takes all of you, it births you, it grows you up, it uses you and it cuts you down, it slaughters you like a pig. But in the meantime, while you’re waiting to get into the slaughterhouse, it makes you dress up for the occasion. You all stand around in the slaughter queue worrying about what other people who are equally blind and frightened seem to be thinking about you. This is not some new form of pessimism. I am talking about much more than what it sounds like, but you are being used. You, me, everybody. And when it gets tired of you moving the way you do, when you’ve served your purpose, it has you quit moving, it kills you. Until then you have got to keep moving, or you are not spreading energy and are not fulfilling your purpose.
Simply keeping yourself moving, simply feeding, sheltering, propagating yourself will not really keep you going in a contemporary world. Today it takes very little to simply exist, and the demands of simply existing are not enough to motivate you to do anything. There are upper circuit versions of those primary needs — the new ones are hungers for position in the pack. Look at your money problems, for instance. None of you, if you are sane at all, have a money problem that has to do with keeping you alive. The hungers are now coming from the upper circuits, as they should. In the city today, you have got to want position, or you wouldn’t keep moving. You would die. You would become an unprofitable hermit.
Now I know a handful of you are on the verge of just hanging on the edges all your lives like a dinner dog that just shows up when he has to eat; belonging nowhere, and having no allegiance to anything, skimming along the edges: ex hippies, pseudo hippies. As you hold on to the edge of the city you can believe you condemn possessions and the rat race, but being a hippie is having a position and it is to be around people with suits and ties who will look at you and go, “Oh, a damn bohemian, a hippie, an outsider.” It is for you to get with the other hippies in the food stamp line and say, “Down with the establishment.” But you’re still part of a damn pack, you are still dealing with position hungers, invisible hungers, non-edible, non-fuckable hungers, and they are unique to the upper circuits. I am not criticizing them in the least, but they are hungers that reside only in Man, and are not indispensable to staying alive.
There is a way in which you can see that ordinary life, the bell curve of existence, the bourgeoisie, civilization itself, is held together through timidity, self loathing, social fear, the laws of etiquette — not through physical fear. Regardless of the fact that some of you living in certain areas may believe that there is a chance you’ll get robbed or mugged, physical fear is not your fear any more. It is way down the list. All of you who are civilized and square enough to be here have a fear of being laughed at far worse than you do of being mugged or raped. You fear losing face. You fear losing your current position, or not being able to rise up. You fear losing your position in the pack of the city worse than you do the possibility of somebody breaking into your house and cutting your throat. You may not recognize that just because I say it, but it’s a fact. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what your background is. Can you see what life has done?
You are being used, and still you have these deep philosophical cosmic questions about, “Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life? Why do some evil people (read people I don’t like) seem to prosper and live a long time and so many good people die in their prime?” The meaning of Life is all around you.
This might as well be a farm somewhere. You might as well be a crop — everybody. You are being used, and you are going to be slaughtered. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a Ph.D. or whether you dropped out of grammar school. No matter what you do, you’re going to be slaughtered. And you know it. But in the Yellow Circuit man operates as though this were not true in order to keep things moving. If you can begin to see it, I can also point out to you that all of Man’s institutions, back in the city, the arts, religions, and if you’re going to get real tricky, notions of romantic love, and the inclination to praise nature, are like children whistling in the dark. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with sitting down in Key West and having a drink to the sunset. But to write sweet odes and think, “Ah, life is not that bad. I mean sure we got the Hitlers of the world, and the heathens, my mother-in-law, but we also have nature, birds, trees, sunsets.” Talk about being used; trying to sing praises to the very thing that is going to slaughter you like a fat pig.
No matter how nice you have been to your mother, how much money you gave the ACLU, how much you condemned fascism, how many people you said should be fed, even the most intelligent and creative insist, with a tear in their eye, upon singing the praises of nature. And you think we’re not idiots? Remember these are just terms. I’m not here bad mouthing life. Not me — I know better. I am not talking to ordinary life, I’m talking about something special for a very few people. I’m not talking about ordinary people in the city saying, “Boy, it’s hell to die,” or, “What a shame it is that Picasso died right there in his prime at ninety two.” I’m talking about a particular attitude only a few can use.
There is a kind of justifiable revolutionary madness. And here’s how I can start to describe it to you. You must understand that what drives your life, besides This activity is hunger for position in the pack. You must admit that it takes practically no effort to get a roof over your head and enough food to eat these days, even if it means staying at the Union Mission. The survival concerns your Yellow Circuit complains about are not on that level; they are the kind of car you drive, your private school tuition, the rent on the penthouse. They are all status concerns. You are being driven by hungers that are not necessary to survive. But if you are going to get anywhere with This quickly, you must see the status concerns for what they are, and then you start getting closer to what I was referring to as a new kind of madness, a new kind of anger. Once I told you that no anger is proper, now I’m telling you otherwise. Then once you really see it all, how it all has been staged and you can keep from being fearful about the inevitable slaughter, you can quit being angry or hostile or even wanting to try and wrestle it to the ground.
It is not possible for me to give you real Understanding of this anger in words. But I can say that it is not a matter of either approving or disapproving of what Life does to you. To See something is to have absolutely no feeling or opinion about it, and to not take it personally. As soon as you can See the procession at the slaughterhouse, you can begin to dance differently, internally. You can live in a place where no one else can — even though you can never be completely free of the conveyor belt that is taking us all to the slaughter. You will be one of Life’s food crops from the Line down as long as you live, but a Real Revolutionist can have a life of his own on the sly, out of the hands of the status concerns once he really Sees them. As soon as you can see what is going on, you can begin to plot your own life outside of that, above the Line of consciousness by being free to turn things around and upside down internally to create new forms, sounds, dances. You can do things off on the side when the overseers are not watching. You’re still going to put out soybeans, or whatever your job is, but it’s like you might make your own little match box guitar and play it, or learn to make paper, write books. In a sense you’re not really helping Life by doing any of those things, but you’re enjoying something you were not meant to have.
A few more details I’d like to point out along this line: there are those people who are centered in the lower circuits and they all exist in you. But those living primarily in the lower circuits seem to be rather complacent. And philosophers have said things like, “Educate a man and you’ve ruined him,” and, “The more you know, the more you suffer,” and they’ve been saying that since the days of the Greeks. The Yellow Circuit philosopher, being driven by the nonphysical hungers, non-edible hungers, is looking, and often with envy, at slaves, bricklayers, ditch diggers. It seems to the philosopher that all they do, when they have to, is get up, go out, dig a ditch for eight hours, get through, get drunk, try to pick up some women, then fall asleep. The next morning somebody slaps them and says, “You gotta get up and go to work or the King’ll kill you,” and they get up and go to work. They don’t ever seem to have a philosophical thought in their head. A few philosophers marvel at “The noble savage” hoping they could be more like that: “If I could be like a poor old dumb, uneducated ditch digger — they seem to be relatively happy. All they want to do is eat, drink, mate, and sleep.” But once anyone starts operating in the Yellow Circuit they can never go back. The upper circuits, in a sense, are looking at the lower circuits and saying, “Jeeze, I wish I had never left.” But you had no choice. It wasn’t your choice to make.
Consider also how people are fascinated/fearful and full of hatred towards unrepentant killers. Picture a guy that just walks into a McDonald’s restaurant and shoots everybody he can. They have him on trial and every time they ask him, “Have you got anything to say?” he looks at the judge and says, “Yeah, fuck you.” They give him three life sentences and sentence him to die four times. And they interview him right before he’s going to die and ask, “Well, how do you feel now that you’ve been sitting on death row all these months and had time to think about what you’ve done?” And he says, “More or less this (and he gives them the finger) to all of you.” There is a, take your choice, fascination, fear, hatred, etc. that a human could be like that. So let me point out from a 3-D view what’s going on behind all of that: Humans now operating in the world of the upper circuits, and that know about death, are supposed to be afraid of the death penalty. That’s what we’ve got it for. But the unrepentant killer is not.
The worst thing that we as a total organism, a society, a nation, could do to a person is what? Kill him. And there he stands and he’s not afraid to be killed. Now, look at it another way: Humanity cannot, individually or collectively, come up with anything worse to do to somebody than Life’s going to do to you anyway. “Oh my goodness, you people have decided to kill me. Oh no, I could just die.”
Another variation is in the strong reaction caused in adults over an unrepentant child. To catch a child doing something and say, “Boy, I hope you regret this because I could really punish you. I could whip you real bad or take away your privileges.” You wait a moment and ask, “Well, aren’t you sorry you did it?” And the kid stands there, silent. It’s infuriating. And worse than that, if you can follow me, is then to spank him, and he won’t cry. People do not like that. You know why? Because Life doesn’t like it. That is not the heart of the bell curve. That is not the norm, in the same way that an unrepentant killer is not.
Another example of Life doing one thing and another part of Life condemning it is the longstanding hatred of moneychangers, those people who are apparently doing nothing but dealing in money. The hatred of them is everywhere, in all societies, throughout literature, and all through history, and I just got through telling you why. The cells don’t know a “why” to it, but it is almost like the living epitome of useless effort. Money changers are doing nothing creative, they produce nothing of value in itself, they just handle money. The cells would say, “You can save up all the money you want and you’ll still die like a pig. And between here and there what could be a greater waste of time,” even though none of them can analyze it like that. “But if you were to get an education and get run down on graduation day, or start a nice business and get ruined by a major competitor,” you would at least have apparently done something.
There is a widespread, historic hatred of those people whose profession is just in dealing with moving stuff around, that is, the moneychangers, and of what that represents. I’m suggesting to you what it really represents, and people don’t know it, is the epitome of a wasted life. And yet, from another view, it is the epitome of those working right in Life’s pocket. I assure you, if there were an afterlife, and there was a god, there’d be bankers all around him. And he’d pat them on the head and say, “Good boys, very good boys.” They are very necessary in the city.
A modern version is a kind of distrust, if not hatred, of advertising. This does not come from those being driven more by the lower circuits. To the bricklayer standing at a bar, advertising doesn’t mean a lot, he just doesn’t care much. But people being driven more by the upper circuits, sophisticated people, are the ones that now cry out about “what TV advertising is doing, turning our children’s brains into mush.” And in the extreme, those people even refuse to watch TV. At the cellular level that is not yet able to speak in the city, there is a knowledge that 99% of advertising is selling stuff to the upper circuits. You don’t need to be sold on the idea of, “When you’re hungry, eat.” You don’t have to be told to go inside when it’s raining and real cold. But you do have to be told to move to “such and such condos.” And the so-called lower economic classes, or people driven more by the lower circuits, have a kind of non-understood knowledge of that.
Life is arranged so that in the city the sociologist would say the bricklayer finds advertising of no use to him because he has no money to buy the sports car in the ad. But actually the bricklayer nursing a cheap beer at the bar is not saying sour grapes to the TV ad. He just isn’t being driven to acquire it very much. History is full of stories where the poor bucolic lad inherits money or finds a fortune and what happens to him? What happens is nothing — he’s still being driven by his lower circuits.
You might ask the bricklayer, “Hey, wouldn’t you like a new Corvette?” He might answer, “Sure, you want to give me one?” But for him to go out and spend a large part of his life trying to get one, and to fret about, “If only I had one, I could pick up a better class of waitresses,” is out of the question.
There is a way in which a few people can correctly see their personal lives as a kind of warfare over whether they will simply do Life’s bidding between here and the slaughterhouse floor, or whether they learn how to plot and plan. Are you going to remain impotently defensive about being Life’s soybean plant, or will you develop a real defense against being an outright, total slave? Regardless of the apparent dominant/submissive dance among humans, you need to see that compared to Life, all of you are a bunch of wimps and there is no way out.
I get many questions about boredom. Could any of you see boredom as being a proper, although not understood, manifestation of awaiting slaughter? People attempt to describe it other ways or believe it is something personal, that you don’t have enough interest, or that you have a thyroid problem, or psychological problems. But you need to see that we are here as slaves on a plantation fulfilling certain functions for Life. You are moving energy — you, Attila, Abraham, your mother. When Life is through with you, you will be slaughtered, and it is past any analyzation that you could verbalize to see that boredom is a non-extraordinary manifestation of awaiting slaughter. And I’ll add, boredom is not really the right word, because it has a negative feel.
Before I conclude, I want to say one more thing, that I’ve never said. I’m inclined to address this more to the men than women, but as always all of you can get something out of it. It is this: There is a wider, deeper difference between men and women, and especially sexually, than any of you have ever even suspected. And as always I choose my words very carefully, even as impotent and misleading as words could be. You men have never even been close to suspecting the difference. The women have a slightly different view, but what you suspect, what you find to be a functional difference between men and women is a 3-D reality in a 4-D world. All of you will whine to me and whine to yourself, and believe you have been hurt in relationships. I’m just going to tell you one more time; the difference between men and women is so deep, so radically different, that there’s not a man among you that has even suspected the magnitude of the difference. And in case that didn’t give you a hint yet, you might say to yourself, “Perhaps that is why I have never seemed to have made any progress in trying to deal with women.”