Change by Playing in the Irrelevant
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Summary
Jan Cox Talk #328 ** Mar 29, 1988 ** – 1:37
Notes by TK
Triads: 3 legs present, only 2 seen. The only way to change anything is thru the irrelevant, unseen third leg –thru E force–otherwise everything simply happens to you willy nilly. This is connected to medevesqo –treatment by the impertinent, by irregular methods; unknown methods. Example of shaving your head to solve some marital difficulty. Connection to not staring.
There is a way to see the internal struggle/partnership as a specific struggle between the genetic tendency to stare and the need not to stare. This is another aspect of lower circuits against upper circuits’ need not to stare; lower circuits need to stare, are built to stare, whereas the upper circuits are not satisfied with that level of stimulation: get bored. The attraction/joy of sports and travel is its conflict with the tendency to stare. Stimulation = need not to stare; thinking = need not to stare. But note that thinking is also staring, but at a higher level. Religion seeks to prohibit staring via the Ten Commandments.
Paradigm presents 1:00 to 1:37 end.
Transcript
CHANGE BY PLAYING IN THE IRRELEVANT
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 328, March 29, 1988
If something you learn about is of no use, then of what use is it? I want to point out another basic aspect of the triads, and how they are tied to “Medevesqo” (The cure of something by investigation). But, if this is not of any value, you missed the point.
Everything is a triad in that it is supported by three legs. Anything that you can perceive, anything that you can hold in your consciousness has three aspects and yet ordinary consciousness can only see two of these legs. The third, unseen aspect is that which would seem to be irrelevant and unconnected to the object or situation at hand. The way to use the knowledge of the triads is to teach yourself about them and then make yourself go out and play in the irrelevant. That is how to change things. If you stay locked into the Line level bifocal conflicts, the Line level dichotomous dances, nothing happens.
You stumbled across me because you wanted to make some kind of change in your life and you couldn’t find the way to do it. These changes might have seemed drastic or mundane, and yet you found that you didn’t have the energy, the right kind of direction to make them. Can you see that no one operating at Line-level consciousness can directly make any change? Unless you are playing with a knowledge of the triads, playing in the irrelevant, everything that happens to you simply happens to you; you do not have any say in the matter.
If you see the top of this diagram, it appears to be a binary figure. If I cover up the base of it, it appears to have two feet. Actually it has three feet, though you can’t see it when looking at the top. This represents, in a very crude and opportunistic fashion, the fact that anything in your life that you want to change seems to involve only two aspects. There is “my desire to change,” and, in apparent opposition to this desire, there is “that which prevents me from making the change.” Some ordinary examples: “My desire to lose weight conflicts with my propensity to eat three dozen doughnuts at a time. If I wasn’t addicted to nicotine, I wouldn’t have trouble quitting smoking. If I didn’t have some inherited weakness, I would cut down on my alcohol consumption. If I wasn’t so in love with her, I wouldn’t put up with the way she treats me.” At Line level, no matter how complicated the situation appears, it can always be distilled down to two opposing elements.
There are in fact three elements, three winds that keep everything moving on this planet. The above diagram is an example/reflection of how an apparently binary situation is actually a triad. You ask, “Where’s the third part?” To Line-level consciousness it seems insane, but what is left is everything besides the two elements seemingly involved in the problem; the third part is the realm of the irrelevant.
I mentioned “Medevesqo,” the curing of problems simply by investigation — hit the side of the TV set and it works; make an appointment with the doctor and the malady goes away. The doctor may charge some outrageous price to stick his fingers in odd places, and says, “That will be $175.00, and by the way, you’re fine,” and you suddenly feel much better. You know for a fact that such examples of Medevesqo occur all the time out in Life; can you see how such a method may be applied internally, inside your own head? Line-level consciousness may say, “I do investigate. I’ve worried about my problem, my job, this unprofitable relationship,” etc. You should realize that everybody worries and analyzes their problems — without success. It is simply not the correct treatment.
This is how to do it: it is treatment by the impertinent; playing the irrelevant brought down to a medical level. You use irregular methods, because a Real Revolutionist would have absolutely no faith in the City’s medical establishment. You know why? Because everybody has already handled it. (I’m not simply talking about “medicine.”) The commonly available treatments are just that: common. The proper use of Medevesqo is the use of impertinent methods. You have to be your own physician. You can’t treat yourself with any treatment you’ve ever heard of. If you have heard about it, it won’t work.
Whether you describe it this way or not, your dream is to cut out all the problems: you are trying to smooth out the lake; flatten the lumps under the carpet. “If I could just stamp out two or three of these problems of mine, I wouldn’t need to listen to anyone talk or read any more books on self help, or find a psychiatrist who will take food stamps.” Medevesqo would do it if you knew how. There is nothing that you have ever looked into adequately, because you have never looked into it correctly. I know it seems insane, and you might say, “I have thought about my problems. I have diagrammed them like sentences, thrown out the I Ching sticks, talked to astrologers, sat down by myself to try to solve them. So don’t tell me that I haven’t investigated my problems.” I am telling you that. How else can you explain the fact that you’ve never found a solution to them?
I told you about the TV repairman who said that he repaired the majority of the TV sets by hitting them. As soon as the person left the store, he hit the side of the set and it worked. That was it. Another example: you take your car in to the mechanic. You come back and he says, “Well, I’m not sure what it was. But I looked everything over and the problem’s gone now.” In a sense it is impertinent, illogical, irregular; it doesn’t fit and yet it happens constantly. It’s not something metaphysical or out of the twilight zone. This happens all the time. There is a way to investigate a problem that will cure it.
I’m using “cure” in a rough sense, from a more fourth dimensional view. You must investigate in a way which you have never done. You have to go for treatment by the irrelevant. What you call a problem is you running around a central point: you and then the resistance to the problem, or you and the cause of the problem. The treatments available are flawed and incomplete. Once you are aware of that, you See that the information readily available, what everyone else believes, proper treatments, proper ideas, proper philosophies, are morbifically flawed. The information will never give you enough data to make any change.
Another definition of “Neuralize” is, “To study something without picking it up.” When Line-level consciousness studies something, it picks it up in two hands; it turns any potentially extraordinary information into binary data. You are locked into a position of having flawed information — information that is at least fifty percent lacking. This is not an evil plot on Life’s part, it is the way things are arranged. (Well, at least not a plot directed at you personally. How about that? I know that makes you feel a lot better, doesn’t it?)
If you have a problem, a situation that needs a resolution, there is one thing which you can always do, no matter how intractable the whole problem seems to be. You can always do this and you will be doing something in a Revolutionary manner: Do something irregular or impertinent. Now, when you start to do the impertinent, it has to be in some way directed toward the situation. It has to be “acknowledged” by the participants. Let us say that you can’t break up this dance that you and your sexual partner have been going through for months or years. Do something absolutely irrelevant, such as (from a male viewpoint) announce to the woman, “I’m going back to night school, three nights a week, to study accounting.” But you have to hate accounting. It has to be irregular, impertinent, something that’s not part of your problem or your discussion. It can’t be in response to something she has been saying for years, such as “Boy, when are you going to quit that crumby job working at the service station, and make something out of yourself?” It has to be a new area, something that hasn’t been though the mill. It might be something as small as getting your head shaved. If you do something impertinent to the situation, even if it is just for a few seconds or minutes, the situation will change. You have taken a situation, which is always supported by a triad, and fiddled with the unseen leg. It’s as though you’ve been standing on a platform with three legs you don’t know about, and you begin to shake it. For the first time in your life, you’ll have some sense of power. You did this thing which was insane, and the other person gets their mind blown out. But for the first time in your life, you will have almost done something. If you stay where everything is known, where everything is predictable, where everything is considered to be important, where only certain actions are possible, you are going to stay in that troublesome situation. The way to shake it is to play in the irrelevant. That is the way to change it.
Sometimes people actually do what I have outlined, and they write me, “This is not what I expected, but I have no complaints.” It’s never what you expected. What ordinary consciousness expected is no change. “I’m a sorehead, and I expect to go to my grave a sorehead. In fact, if I live long enough, I’ll probably be even a bigger sorehead. I’ll put on weight, even care less about my personal appearance, won’t mind speaking right up, and will probably complain more than I do now.” That’s what’s expected in the City. It’s also expected that if you do the irrelevant to the situation, you won’t accomplish anything. Of course, true change always goes against any “expectation.”
Anytime you bring in the E force, the third element or third leg that’s supporting a situation, the situation is going to change. The situation will change in a way which you don’t expect. “You don’t have to worry about cooking me dinner on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, because I’ve enrolled in night classes and am going to become a CPA.” The next morning you get up, and for the first time in years she’s made you a nice breakfast, and a little rose is on the table. She’s very quietly smiling and humming; packing her clothes. And it’s the first time in as long as you can remember that she isn’t complaining and raising hell. At first it might suddenly strike you that, “This is some kind of sarcastic comment. She doesn’t believe I’m going back to school, or she thinks I was drunk or stoned or something.” Then it strikes you that this is no act; it’s the nicest she’s been to you since 1972 when you first met. She says, “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was trying to keep breakfast warm. I bought my ticket and am going back home to stay with my family for awhile. No, don’t drive me. I’ve already called a cab. If you’re ever near Omaha, give me a ring.” She gives you a little kiss on the cheek and says, “Bye.”
You said that you couldn’t get out of the situation. You were fighting with a tar baby. You couldn’t split up and couldn’t stay together. It strikes you, “Well, that’s not what I expected.” But, I can also guarantee that you’ll have no complaints with the outcome. Even in something as simplistic and crude as “the battle between the sexes,” there is a third force: the irrelevant.
I must remind you that there is no such thing as C, D, or E force. Something may be seen as C force by one person, and as D by another. The German attitude towards their attack on Stalingrad was that it was C inspired. But the Russians saw it as D. Religious stories preach the idea of good and evil; the belief that there are pure, absolute forces running loose which you have to get in touch with. And there are no such things.
I could call C, D and E, “One, Two and Three,” “East, North and South,” or give them the names of three colors. The names, the labels, are insignificant, because as soon as you begin relating to the name, I have to change the map. Don’t get caught up in the definitions of the forces, just realize that there are three elements, three forces, three legs, three inputs supporting anything that your consciousness can conceive of. Line-level consciousness can only see two forces.
If you’re politically oriented, you might say, “The great struggle throughout the life of Man is the struggle between the desire for freedom and the desire to be tyrannical; the class struggle.” There seems to be just these two aspects. But can you see that there are people that are not directly involved with this apparent struggle? They’re just bystanders, and you ignore them. You have less respect for these people than you do for the enemy; the bystanders seem irrelevant. Yet you could not have the problem if it weren’t for this third leg.
You see the unsatisfactory relationship between you and her, you and him, but the two of you couldn’t have a problem if it weren’t for the third force; all that seems irrelevant. How could you have any relationship if it weren’t for cornflakes, BMW’s, the Trump Tower, Omar Khadafy, Mother Theresa, for the Greyhound Bus Station, tires on buses, drivers of buses, pay toilets. Were it not for all of this, you would not have “you and her.”
From the viewpoint of Line-level consciousness, this all sounds nuts: in the City you can’t See this. But you can get to the point where you See the two combatants, and you See all the non-players, or the irrelevant. You have to play with the irrelevant to see how irrelevant it is. The irrelevant will just shock the britches off of you, because playing in the irrelevant will change things. When you stay within the confines of the expected, with the obvious participants, nothing happens. There is no real movement and so you feel as if you’re in a grid lock; that you’re weak and don’t know what to do. The ordinary response to this feeling is to read another book on it and maybe try again to work things out. Or maybe go back to drinking, so you don’t have to worry about it as much. But nothing will ever change unless you work with the irrelevant.
Let me jump around to something which sounds different, but is still connected with my previous discussion: the topic of staring and not staring. In the City, people feel a struggle going on; a kind of internal warfare between good and evil, true and false, right and wrong. I’ll tell you something which gets dangerously close to the big “S” word, which I can’t talk about: The Secret…
There’s another way to look at this inherent strife or struggle in you, and that is that the struggle is between the tendency to stare and the need not to. I am not playing with words; I’m referring to a literal, material description and manifestation of your genetic structure. Now that it has a Yellow Circuit, the organism has a need not to stare. This struggle between the tendency to stare and the need not to could be seen as a struggle between the manifestations of the older, lower circuits and the younger, upper ones. I’ll give you some examples to trick you into getting a glimpse of this.
Let’s look at sports, and the joy of feeling the body moving. The basis of this joy is that such activity conflicts with the tendency to stare. How about travel? What is the real joy of travel? It’s very short lived, but it conflicts with the tendency to stare. Most people can’t stand much of it, though. Perhaps you’ve gone to a new country or city and felt uncomfortable after awhile. You travel to Freeport or Paris and it’s impossible to stare. It can reach a sort of overload point; you don’t know how to describe it, but you might say, “I didn’t like the people. Everybody was rude.” It’s almost as if you had all the newness you could stand, and you have to sit back and stare awhile. You are made to stare and yet there is a need in the total organism to not stare. It is a basic conflict that I’ve never stressed.
The thinkers of the world condemn TV, and they don’t know why. They describe it as a vast intellectual or cultural wasteland; garbage for the mind. But that’s not the problem. It is just a manifestation of the Yellow Circuit condemning staring. Every other reason is misdiagnosis: “TV doesn’t inspire or educate you.” It’s staring. Notice how it works, however, in that the same group of people might tell you to spend your time more efficiently reading a book and…what?…stare at it.
As soon as Man had an upper circuit, he had the need at times to not stare. And yet in the City, how do the upper circuits get fed? By reading or going to hear a lecture; by staring. What do the lower, nonverbal circuits do? A recent study showed that the average dog spends something like 84% of his hours sleeping — which is an extreme form of staring. But what does a dog do when he isn’t napping? He stares. When he doesn’t stare, he’s dancing backwards with you. Take a lion in the wild. When he’s not hungry, he’s either staring or sleeping. If he hears somebody encroaching on his territory, or it becomes time to hunt, he has the need not to stare; now the lion becomes a warrior, just as a human does under those circumstances, and he can’t stare. When on the offense, or even defense, you have to be aware of what’s going on: you have to at least look around. You have to case the joint, and you can’t do that and stare.
So the organism has the need or tendency to stare, and it still gets through Life. The president stares, clergymen stare, your mother and father stare, Einstein stared…and humans still live an average of 72.5 years. You can stare and still have a reputation for being an intellectual, a great artist or thinker. In fact, the great statue of “The Thinker” is doing what? He’s just staring for all he’s worth.
You have to recognize this struggle; this tendency to stare and to not stare. I’m being very direct; there are no psychological ramifications to this, and I’m not trying to insinuate anything. Try the “look around” method: whenever you walk into a room or new area, look around. It’s almost impossible to remember to do this. It is nigh impossible to remember not to stare. I could tell you that someone is going to shoot you if you don’t look around when you enter a new place; or I’m going to pop out and award you with a thousand dollars if you do remember it. But, it’s still almost impossible to remember because the organism has the tendency to stare. The organism doesn’t feel it’s necessary to look around. “I don’t have to look. If I need something, I’ll simply turn around and stare at it. Everything else is irrelevant.” That’s why we have bifocal consciousness; a center field of vision and peripheral vision. Everything else “out there” is irrelevant.
Throughout history religious teachings have condemned such things as hatred, anger, greed, jealousy. Do you know why this is so well accepted? They make you stare. This is not known in the City, because it isn’t necessary information: Every one of the ten commandments, of the “thou shalt not,” are things which make you stare. It is just something to consider — not to stare at.