Freedom Day
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Audio = Stream from the arrow or download from the dots.
AKS/News Item Gallery = jcap 1988-02-22 (0364)
Condensed AKS/News Items = 6 minutes See below
Summary = See Below
Diagrams = tbd
Transcript = See Below
Summary
Jan Cox Talk 0364 – Jul 8, 1988 * – 1:12
Notes by TK
Kyroot to :06.
Overlapping—not only a new area —but a new area in the already known. Everything is arranged to prevent seeing the overlap; everything apparently has a distinct contour/separation; it exists between objects and between I and Not-I, and is dictated by perception. Such perceptual contouring always distinguishes only two objects –this and that –the binary.
The purpose of all organized institutions (e.g., religion) is to reaffirm/confirm and deepen the contrast of contours, not lessen them. Religion blurs the perception of overlap. The ultimate frontier/contour: I—Individuality. The prime domain of contour is the Yellow Circuit. Every language (and thought) has the contour of beginning and end (e.g., period [.] ).
But outside/beyond Yellow Circuit language with its requirement for precision in words conveying human emotion there is a requirement for distinctions even more clear cut; a blurred contour/distinction between love and hate is intolerable, whereas blurring can more acceptably occur in Yellow Circuit areas (though still a disturbance). But such necessary distinction is never satisfying—not completely effective in people’s lives; the distinctions are never absolute —rendering a purity of opposites —because of the reality of overlap!
Revolutionary vision sees everything overlapped, without clear cut distinctions.
Update of “don’t like = won’t believe”: anyone you don’t like, you won’t believe; there is no choice involved in this. Someone could speak absolute truth relative to you (obvious and certain) yet if you don’t like that person it is impossible for you to believe him; accept his info.
This reality can’t exist as a real contour in ordinary consciousness; it demonstrates the ultimate power of ‘feelings’ over even self-serving, important, profitable knowledge. Consider the internal application: the newly created Revolutionary source/aspect of you is disliked by the People of ordinary consciousness. People don’t want just the information, they want the person with it. Ideas are not enough in themselves.
Tyrannical rulers always give their subjects/people a ‘freedom day’, a celebration of liberation day related to the ruler’s accession to power. It makes the tyrant more likable–thus believable.
end 1:12.
And Kyroot Said…
A Real Revolutionist doesn’t deal much in nouns.
***
In the Revolution it’s not “who you are,” but “what you do.”
***
In the City, most all “intellectual goods” are knock-offs.
***
You must reconstruct all of City life in your own nervous
system.
***
There was this one Revolutionist who used to say that his
greatest weapon was “heat seeking consciousness.”
***
The stated, and apparent aims of City Institutions can never
be achieved.
***
The Revolutionist’s life should be a kind of avant garde
performance art.
***
To the Revolutionist, sequential reality is NO reality.
***
I heard a City person, in a real sincere voice, after
describing a certain “problem” they had, ask, “Does this make any
sense?” I wish I could have asked him the proper response, “Does
ANY problem make any sense?”
***
No change ever occurs without the assistance of D-Force,
drastic events. There be no such creature as a gradual,
agreeable revolution.
***
Out of a locker-room area in the City I once heard this
piece of a song arise, “Oh, I got a .22 caliber brain, and .38
caliber needs.”
***
Life probably pays the most attention to those who pay the
most attention to it.
***
Once heard a guy in the City say that he had to hurry away
from a brewing argument before a “fight broke out in his brain.”
***
In the City, solutions inevitably become part of the
problem.
***
If you’re mad at something it won’t speak to you…and tell
you what it knows.
***
The Past is the glue pot of officious obligations.
***
If they couldn’t talk about their lives, most People could
hardly stand it.
***
Engines, AND People have a “sweet spot” where they operate
with maximum power, and optimal efficiency.
***
A Real Revolutionist doesn’t simply want to “get-well” — he
wants to become unnaturally BETTER.
***
Don’t forget now: Talk has almost nothing to do with it.
***
Yet another sterling example that makes one so happy for the
continued existence, and support of City life: I heard one Man
announce, “Yes, we’re open 24 hours,” and another asked, “You
mean ‘a day’?”
***
If there were truly any serious sense of honor in the City,
those who bungled an attempted suicide would be so humiliated
that they would immediately kill themselves.
***
Never brag about anything before you have given it away.
No possession is worthy of comment until you’ve been able to
dispose of it.
***
Beware, the Master Cards of the mind.
***
Anyone at all “down-hearted” should be shot, or shot at so
as to better appreciate what real disappointment is about.
***
I hate to break the news to ’em, but the closest City folks
are going to get to building a “thinking machine” will be a
computer whose memory can’t be reached, and which resists all
forms of reprogramming.
***
To truly “act,” one must know that it’s ALL an act. (Action
without the knowledge that it’s “all an act” is merely RE-
action.)
***
A Real Revolutionist might even make himSELF uneasy.
***
If a Revolutionist doesn’t appear to be doing much, it may
be that there’s not much to do.
***
I guess the only bad thing about being a Revolutionist is
that there is no longer anything, or one to rebel against. (“I
SAID I ‘think’.”)
***
Transcript
“FREEDOM DAY”
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 364, GSIBM, July 8, 1988
Things are arranged in Life to keep man from seeing how things overlap. Things are also arranged in such a way as to give man the impression that there are very distinct contours or frontiers between everything. A piece of the secret you are searching for lies in the conjunction of those two: everything overlaps, and 3-D consciousness sees distinct contours.
Let me start with what should be the obvious aspect of it. Ordinary walking-around consciousness would not operate without the distinct impression of frontiers between stuff. Take vision: you have got to be able to distinguish between “you” and “not-you” to keep from bumping into things. There must be the perception of a difference. And everybody then assumes that the perception is reality. For someone to play with mathematics in their imagination (as they call it) there must be a distinct impression of contours: where one thing stops and something else begins.
In the 3-D world, contours would seem to be easiest to distinguish when comparing only two objects at a time. Don’t let your nervous system start mumbling about the possibility of more than two at a time. You have never analyzed it before. Even visually, in the crudest sense, from moment to moment the contours that are functionally necessary are generally limited to how many? Two. That’s it. Your car and the next car. Within a split second that car can whizz out of sight and here comes another one. But it is still “this” and “that.” It is still me and not-me; the not-me apparently changes from car X to car Y, or from man X to man Y, but the sensation remains that the only important contours are between two. Two is easiest to distinguish. I say “easiest” because there is no other word to even begin to point at what I’m talking about. I say “easiest” on the basis that two is the most functional.
Even for higher mathematics, all you have to do is be able to count to two. You have to go to school for eight years and stretch your brain, but you should hear what I am saying. It still amounts to adding two things together. You may be dealing with a new theory of subatomic particles, but the mind continues to operate by distinguishing the contours between two things at any given time. They may shift very quickly into two other things, but that is all that’s necessary.
Counting to two and distinguishing between two will get you not only far, it will get you as far as life needs you to go. How many directions, for instance, do you need? For height: up and down. For width: back and forth. If the height measurement doesn’t get it, you can move on to width. Two at a time.
Another way to look at the need for distinct contours is to consider such areas as religions, political beliefs, and philosophy systems. They very often would be described as attempts to bring people together: to make everyone love his fellow man, or to bring about a consensus for the welfare of the majority. But can you see that from another view the purpose of such institutions is to blur the overlappings? It is to further confirm and distinguish the contours between this and that, between “us” and “them.” The purpose of religion is not to bring about the brotherhood of man; the purpose is to reconfirm the distinction between religion Y and the non-Y-ists. Politics and religion is not to show that we have more in common — that we overlap. That’s what they SAY; they have always said it. But it’s not what it appears to be.
It is a continuing reaffirmation of the frontiers between nouns and verbs; between people and what people do, between people and what people think. And, I might add, the ultimate frontier: the ever popular sensation of individuality. Now we’re getting serious. The rest of it might sound like a philosophical flight of fancy, but THIS is an absolutely necessary frontier between “me” and all the dunderheads in the world. The concept of “I” is built into the nervous system of every creature that can talk, which narrows the field down considerably. (Leaving out Mr. Ed the talking horse, of course. As a matter of fact, I think he is now a vice president with our local phone company.) (It’s a joke. I’m not knocking our public utilities.)
In a sense, the most useful aspect of Man to Life itself is in his Yellow Circuit. Surely you can see that without clear and distinct contours, the Yellow Circuit could not function? The obvious manifestations and artifacts of the Yellow Circuit would be impossible: no inventions, no technology. If thoughts got all “runny” you couldn’t do anything. The Yellow Circuit would cease to exist. You might as well be an insurance salesman. There has to be an automatic stop to every thought. No one has ever analyzed this because it is not natural for the physical makeup of the brain itself to do so. Any thoughts you have only go so far. You think in sentences which begin and stop. You do not plan how long to think a thought, you just think it. (Or it thinks you.) When it stops, that is a clear contour. It could not be otherwise. You could not remember a phone number; it would just be a jumble.
To what end are things arranged in such a way? To what end are we possibly serving Life?
I just finished pushing you to see the necessity for Yellow Circuit distinctions, but how about the same necessity in those words that are meant to convey emotion? They have got to be even more precise than Yellow Circuit ideas and technical terms. Not “precise” as in “correct”: what I mean is that good and evil cannot overlap. Love and hate cannot overlap. No way. Except for a strange thing: the majority of humans in the City, if questioned in a certain way, would admit that there is something fishy in such apparent clear distinctions between emotions. They would first say that without a doubt, love and hate are not in-laws. But the fishy “something” is this: there is no such thing, through experience on anybody’s part, as complete love. The percentage of murders in the world between lovers is way over fifty percent. That includes family. The truth is that those you love, you sometimes hate; and those you hate, you sometimes love. It is simply the experience that there is no absolute clear distinction in human emotion. But there has to be the verbal sensation and belief that words DRAW clear distinction. People say it is so, but experience tells them otherwise: emotions in fact overlap.
I have pointed out that all kinds of weird, spooky, metaphysical and miraculous stuff is not inexplicable if you understand that everything overlaps. Any fool can stand here and say, “All right, you’re not me, because I can hit you. I can feel the difference between my knuckles and your chin. Plus, I’m a Jew and you’re a Catholic. Plus, I’m pretty intelligent, whereas you are a dick-head.” I am trying to suggest to you, if not tell you: it all overlaps. Everybody can see that they have conflicting opinions and beliefs. What cannot be conceived is that there is a distinction drawn in the human nervous system. Everybody has some conflict or they would not be human; they would not be serving their purpose. There is a distinction drawn, and thus it sets up what appears to be a problem: “Sometimes I hate my mother, and sometimes I love my mother. In fact, I hate MYSELF when I remember that I hate my mother.”
It takes extraordinary sight to see that there is no distinction between emotions. Of course, if you can see like that you also see the City distinctions. I don’t mean that suddenly everything just runs together. You see that it all overlaps. You see that that which other people ignore and pass off as quaint, unbelievable, and totally absurd is simply where things are overlapping, and they can’t see it.
Something else. This is so potentially upsetting that I’ll do it now since we are short on time. (In case you don’t think I know what I’m doing.) I’ve pointed out that if you do not like something, you won’t believe it. Anyone who has any business in This remembers that, even if I never mention it again; and I’m not going to tell you why. You ponder it. Any nervous system that hears that realizes it’s not philosophical; it’s not psychological; it’s not even verbal — it’s upsetting. So I want to update the upset, and it is this: ANYONE you don’t like, you won’t believe.
The obvious aspect of that would apply in, let us say, your search for a teacher. If you found the writings of someone and you thought, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” and you sold all your stuff and moved somewhere to be near them, and if you first seeing them in person you did not like them, you would not then be able to believe them. I don’t mean just casually “not like them;” there is no way to analyze it. It’s even more than not liking them on sight, because you are already overlapping before you see the person. If you don’t like someone, you will not believe him.
That’s not upsetting? That doesn’t explain a lot? I could point out some obvious and almost instant personal examples. If any of you want to stretch this a little further, certain inexplicable historical “shortsightedness” can be seen simply as just what I am pointing toward. “How could Bunky Odum have met Galileo and been so blind regarding Galileo’s experiments in .paoptics?” Simple. Bunky said, “Galileo, I don’t know why, but I don’t like you, and I can’t believe any of this shit.”
Think about it. There’s more to it than that little joke. It is a fact. In the City it doesn’t matter; peoples’ nervous systems are not arranged to deal with this information. Even if they hear what I am saying they will find it irrelevant. It cannot be a real contour in City consciousness.
As always, forget about Bunky and Galileo, because they forgot about you. Consider the inner, personal use of this: who are you going to believe? Forget about me right now. Those of you who are irreversibly addicted to This do not have to like me. If it were strong enough to interfere you’d be gone by now. But internally, you are trying to develop a new part of your nervous system. As many of you can already feel, ultimately there has to be a piece of you active in This. Something has to happen. Either that or I’m going to have to carry three hundred people on my back to the grave. (Which I’m not going to do, because I don’t believe that. That is, because I don’t like that and I don’t believe that they are going to make me do that.) The point being, some new part of you must begin to take the old part and lead the dance. In other words, someone in you begins anew to tell you stuff. If you don’t like him or her, you won’t believe it.
Lest you think that there is a possibility that some new aspect of you will develop which you won’t like, look at it this way. Consider the ultimate power of feelings over even self serving, self preserving knowledge. There’s no contest. Knowledge will take a back seat every time when you get to that ultimate extreme when ordinary City reality is about to turn the corner…that is, if you don’t like the apparent source of the information. No matter how important the information seems, no matter how pertinent and pressing, if, once you hear it in a certain way, you do not like it or its source — you can holler forever about wanting “the truth,” but you will not believe it. You can say you want it all you want to, but you will not accept it.
It is not that people are looking for “the truth”‘ as they used to call it. What they are looking for is a person who has it. That’s why it seems so frustrating to find an apparently meaningful book, and to discover that the person who wrote it is dead. People don’t want THE INFORMATION; they say they do, but they’re leaving out the part about the person who’s got it. The information is not just something floating around. The nervous system has another order of attraction in use: the distinction between goods and services. You don’t want information, you want the person who’s got information. That’s why books won’t get it, and, of course, that is why there are only books available in the City.
That is why, when you find a book which does seem to have valuable information in it, the person who wrote the book is dead. Always. Or else he is in jail or senile.
You should find it topographically interesting that the very area which would seem to be most distinct — knowledge of real importance to you — can be rendered unbelievable if you do not like it. Everywhere you look there seems to be always something that keeps anybody from completely liking either the information/services/verbs or the source/goods/nouns.
I want to mention something else. Tyrannical rulers all over the world give their people — who the said rulers have subjugated — a “freedom day” to celebrate. All of the tightest, most tyrannical of societies have some version of their “liberation day.” But the people do not go out and march with cynical smiles on their faces.
Now, away from it you can always find those who have crossed the border, or reporters and social critics, who decry such celebrations. Little chips have to come off the machine or it would die — the bell curve has to have fringes. But if you think that marching at gunpoint in celebration of freedom is a farce, you missed it. Everywhere in the world is a “freedom day,” and the more it is controlled by a tightfisted leadership, the more vehemently the people seem to celebrate. Isn’t that delightful?
And isn’t it wonderful that it has absolutely no pertinence to you personally and internally? None, right? But let me ask you a musical question. Let us just say, for the sake of 3-D reality, and for the sake of drawing clear contours and distinctions, that you live next door to a tyranically run country and that you find their celebrations of freedom open to a great deal of criticism. I ask you: does this “freedom day” make their leader more likeable, hence believable? You see them marching happily, saying, “Hurray for our leader! Thank god for freedom! Before our leader came along…” — but perhaps it doesn’t matter what it was like before he came along. It may be part of dim, hoary history; just as you can’t really remember what happened to you years and years ago. You just kind of “grew up;” you went through your teen years without getting arrested for any serious felonies, and you vaguely remember a tyrant involved…his middle initial was “H” (Hormones). But he kind of calmed down, and you’re not sure who the original tyrant was.
Does having “freedom day” by any chance make a tyrant more believable when he talks about freedom? Forget about countries and all that. Think about your fellow man. “How can my neighbor live like that? They keep saying they know what they’re doing, and they’re idiots. How do they keep a job?” You don’t understand. Everybody celebrates freedom day, and nobody is sarcastic about themselves. People do not look at themselves in the mirror and laugh. In the City, people see nothing funny about being captive. They see nothing funny about being pushed at the end of a rifle into the freedom day parade. Nothing. And it’s hilarious.