Try Dropping and Breaking it
September 30, 1988
AKS/News Item Gallery = jcap 1988-09-28 (0399)
Condensed AKS/News Items = See Below
Summary = See below
Diagrams = None
Transcript = See Below
Summary
9/30/88 0399
Notes by WB
You cannot satisfactorily describe a fool to a fool. You cannot describe someone to them-self. But the City says yes–phrenology, psychology, astrology etc etc.
You have not fully explored something until you have dropped it and broken it and tried to repair it. You must break and misuse your internal partnership–to look around in it begins to set you free. Take what you find foolish and treat it seriously.
To break something is to see that all you say /believe to be sacrosanct and holy is ridiculous. When you drop and break it, there is no difference because that thing never fed This Thing.
And Kyroot Said…
Only a Real Revolutionist strives to remain alert to
possible additional help even when the battle is going good.
***
I heard of one ole fellow in the City who was so poor he
only had ONE delusion.
***
Men rectify their individual errors by memory; mankind, by
history.
***
Warning: Some of this material may not be suitable for
children under thirty-six.
***
One rather vain City politico asked his media advisor if it
was better to be “bloated, or mis-quoted”?
***
In the City, in some manner or the other, all talk is a
gasping-for-air.
***
There was this City guy who thought “apocryphal” meant an
“unsubstantiated pharmacist.”
***
To the average City mind all change is a perversion.
***
Never trust anyone who’s not smarter than you.
***
Another example of the City dichotomy between their reality
and perception thereof: An unranked fighter in a title match is
asked how he can take his chances seriously in light of the
overwhelming odds the bookmakers have given against him, and he
says, “All I gotta do is beat the champ, not the odds.” Almost
sounds profound. But in cosmopolitan contest, go with the odds,
not with a clever quip from a canvas-back bum.
***
In apparent response to some positive statement he’d heard,
one ole City sorehead declared, “Oh, yeah? Well, if life’s so
‘great’ why haven’t more people NOTICED it?”
***
Hell is filled with half read instructions.
***
What you may REALLY like will, by and large, probably stay
hidden from you.
***
I guess, at least on an odd weekend now and then, you could
look upon life itself — our own mortal existence, as the supreme
con game.
***
No matter what Western Union or the Postal Service may
claim, the most common means of communication is the “Whine-O-
Gram.”
***
The true genius, the ultimate audacity, is always in the
simple and direct.
***
Suffering is the only way some People can find peace.
***
In the City I keep hearing the cry, “We MUST face up to
reality.” What, pray tell, is it they are presently facing?
***
Those who declare that “the best is yet to come” generally
are hoping to cater the affair.
***
At the very least, as a temporary measure: Do it when you
can, and SMILE when you can’t.
***
…and Kyroot wrapped up: The last word has never been
said.
***
Transcript
TRY DROPPING AND BREAKING IT
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 399, September 30, 1988
You cannot satisfactorily describe a fool to a fool. Why would this be so? Can you describe anybody to themselves satisfactorily? The truth is, at the ordinary level at which people intellectually operate, you cannot.
This inability to describe anyone to themselves gives rise to a very interesting spectrum of phenomena — the behavior which states that you absolutely can. This spectrum runs all the way from the nontraditional aspects of graphology, astrology and phrenology to the more traditional areas such as religion, the soft sciences, psychiatry, psychology, and traditional wisdom itself.
All of these areas of Life say a person can be satisfactorily described to himself. Throw down the cards, read the tea leaves, “Let me see your palm.” All of these methods of describing someone are, right now, out of the mainstream, and are less than efficient to the majority of the people — the mainstream of Life’s cellular collection known as man. But there are sizable numbers of people who insist you can find out something about yourself by having someone with a special ability .paread your palm or analyze your handwriting and satisfactorily describe you to you.
These sorts of things don’t work, and therefore many people pursue them. They don’t change behavior or give new information. These methods don’t offer new holes in old things through which you can look and go, “Aaah!” And they don’t change how the person operates — how their nervous system vibrates with the rest of Life. Since that does not happen, these systems have very staunch followers.
So no one ever feels, and correctly so, that they have been satisfactorily described. And yet people insist that such description is possible and has been done, while knowing that’s not true. There is a reason for this — no one else is capable of describing you to you. Only someone with the ability to correctly survey himself could see how everyone else is wired up. And that would put him in the position of being on higher ground — a situation that does not occur in the City. If someone had the ability to describe himself, of course, he wouldn’t. Such a person would simply see what’s going on, and would understand, “If I describe you to you, you won’t be able to hear anything.”
So in the City people cannot be satisfactorily described to themselves. Everyone would agree it’s possible that there are some people who are such fools not even their best friend, or rabbi, or priest, or relatives could describe them to them. In the City, everyone lacks the ability to ignite the upper end of the nervous system in a way that would allow them to see a seamless universe, to have a continuing unseamed awareness of Life. So they can’t stretch this example of someone being a fool and take it dangerously close to themselves. There is no understanding that the waves are now lapping up at the gunnels — we’re all about to be swamped unless we deny it. And so everyone in the City would say, “Maybe a fool can’t be described to himself, but the rest of us aren’t like that. In fact, I’ve worked all my life on studying myself!” And if a person could Hear, he would put his ear over the edge of the boat at the rail, and hear the waves lapping. He would realize that rather than being far away, the island of fools is close enough for him to reach out and touch land.
People believe that there is some quantum step between them and someone who could be described as a fool. What’s the point of having periods at the end of sentences? What is the whole point of the illusionary feeling of conclusions? And, of course, the great word “but.” Someone can say, “Alright, we can say that about fools, BUT we have a different situation when we talk about ordinary sane people like myself.”
My purpose is to not to bring final judgments against human nature at the ordinary City level, but all of you have to See that under ordinary conditions you cannot correctly or satisfactorily be described to you. It has never been done. I come dangerously close. I say enough things that you never thought — about people — that may make you say, “A lot of that applies to me. I never thought about or heard about that before, and I’ll never hear about it anywhere except here.” But still you’ve got to realize you’ve never HEARD anyone who took you aside, at the ordinary level, to tell you about yourself. You had to agree with those who were apparently your superiors when they said such things as, “Your bad temper is causing the problem. Do you hear me?” You had to say, “Well, alright, that’s true.” Or they said, “You’re jealous, you’re greedy, you always want all of your playmates’ toys and that’s the basis of all the fights you get into. Do you hear me little one?” And you said, “Yes, I do.” And they replied, “Well, as long as you hear that and work on it, you’ll do better.” You agreed, but you walked out feeling, “I haven’t been described!” You just HAD to agree!
Look at the other end of the spectrum for a second. Some people in Life’s body — not the majority — are already wired up to feel discontented with the mainstream of Life. All they need to do is to find another person or a book which says, “The main line life of man is a mess,” and they immediately say, “That’s it!” More than likely, the book is about astrology or UFO’s or is called Atlantis Still Lives, the type of book that says if you don’t like the way life is running, you’re probably an unknowing descendant of somebody from Atlantis, flying saucers or flying cigars. A certain type of person reads that and thinks, “Yeah.” Life is wired up in a small section of its own body, its own intelligence, to make people believe they’re certainly on the right track because they’re downtrodden, laughed at, and in the minority. They feel that religion is a “crock” and that people who say they know what’s going on are full of it. But there’s got to be an answer somewhere — right? So then they stumble across astrology or some obscure philosophy or cult; they read a little and find out the cult was persecuted — laughed out of town. The siege mentality says, “The oafs, the fools of life, don’t understand what we’re doing. Some of them suspect our activities, and it frightens them because we’re on the right track with astrology!” So ridicule seems proof within itself.
But let me give you another fact — in the City, anything that won’t work is acceptable. It doesn’t matter if you are in the mainstream of the bell curve or on the fringes. We’re not talking about This, but you need to see the kind of wheels under this big foundation that’s you — the wheels that rolled you up to This place. A lot of you keep trying to drag this foundation in along with you. You have the sensation of being in the great Trojan horse, and when I open the door and let you in, you want to roll in and keep the horse with you. You want to keep your City wheels. And it just can’t be done. I don’t have to say, “You can’t come in here if you still believe you’re talking to your dead mother,” because you just can’t.
Remember, you cannot describe a fool to a fool. And there are ways in which you cannot mess with Life. Fooling around with Life is not just messing with the external. When you try to roll on those old unworkable wheels, you’re not only tampering with yourself, but with Life as well. That kind of action produces no results. That’s why it’s acceptable in the City. If you think that there are some great religious secrets hidden in the bowels of some religious organization, there is as much secretive stuff going on in your own bowels. Does that satisfy you? Is that good enough to make you realize, “You mean I’m respecting and dealing with and trusting and dreaming of people who are not smarter than I am?” Now you’re getting close! If you have any doubt about whether anyone is smarter than you or not, there is the answer! And if that doesn’t strike you clearly enough, try putting it hand in hand with my pointing out that in routine City affairs — New Age stuff, mysticism, metaphysics not exempted — anything along those lines is acceptable in some portion of Life’s body as long as it doesn’t work.
If you have even the slightest ability to be my Fictitious Reasonably Insane Person — to use just the ordinary workings of the brain — ask yourself, “Has anything I’ve pursued by reading, by daydreaming, by studying had any effect on me?” The answer is NO! Have any of your dreams of strange and mystical activities in any way benefited you? If you say “yes” you don’t belong here. I’ve got nothing else to say to you. Because I’ve already stated, “You cannot describe a fool to a fool.” If you have personally benefited from any of the kinds of activities I’ve described, I can’t imagine why you would put up with this kind of vague, almost insanity on my part. Go away! You’re too good for This! You’re too everything for This!
Let me point out, in a multi-dimensional sense, the kind of futility of almost everything in the City vis a vis doing This individually. In the City you are made to believe that there is a place where certain kinds of activity will lead. And that’s not true — there are no conclusions in any field. There do come continual, surprising, untimely ends to certain streams of energy. Which, in a sense, means that institutions, systems, beliefs — all the activities of ordinary men — never reach the goals they’re purported to be striving for. You need to see inside of you — not just out there — that religions cannot produce truly religious people, by their own definition. Nobody can. Psychiatry cannot cure people. If any of these systems worked, they would self destruct. They would be putting themselves out of business.
What I’ve just described is only the flesh of the matter. To add the muscles and bones under that is to See what would happen if all of these institutions could really do what they say they intend. Remember that the words “religion” and “psychiatry” are sound waves. The dream of what they are doesn’t exist. Whatever you think they are, they’re something else. What happens is that the energy in the form of the word “psychiatry” goes out in a sound wave and people hear it. They repeat it. Then some denounce it and some support it. Some people want to throw psychiatry down and stomp on it; some want to put it in a balloon and send it up. Some want to marinate it overnight. All of these things occur, and so psychiatry — not the word but the energy — continues to bubble and move along.
It’s not possible for me to tell you the purpose behind any one line of energy. If you could Hear it, I could tell you. You’re simply going to have to See how Life is using the reality behind the word psychiatry, and everything attendant to it, which I tried to describe — the marinating and denouncing and approving of it. Life still needs the reality — the energy — behind philosophy, religion, ideas of good and evil. If it did not these would all be in that great land where the dinosaurs play. So these things aren’t going to self-destruct right now. There’s no sign of it. But notice, a part of the flow of energy of philosophy, religion, psychiatry is the fancy cooking in which people marinate stuff. You don’t have to approve or disapprove of something. Whatever it is, is already percolating. And whatever Life has percolating, Life needs.
I want you to see that the same sort of movements are taking place in your head. That’s where you seem to have the problem of living. You keep thinking, “There are all these things I keep planning and replanning. The plans don’t work, so I try to think up new plans.” That’s all a crock, because you’re thinking the same thing over and over and over again! But every night you slip into the great world of Hades and go down to the river and take your sip. So, in a sense, you die every night and forget, “This may be Tuesday, but I’m living the same life I lived on Sunday and Monday.” Nobody remembers that! You’ve got to See that inside of you there is no surcease from this forgetfulness, because if there were, that would be your demise. If a certain worry held by a large number of people could be stopped, over the long range, it would be the death of a certain line of energy. And if it were simply stopped in you individually, you would die. You must See that. The ordinary workings of the human intellect, which I call City consciousness, cannot be changed. People cannot educate themselves out of it. They can’t pray their way out of it. They can’t have faith in such a way that they will get out of it. They’re there. You can enjoin, you can attack, you can preach, you can exhort, but none of that will change the level at which they’re operating. And internally, in what seems to be your relationship to you, if this repetition is all you do, you cannot change the level at which you operate. You will always have a kind of continuing spiral, or in duller cases, a circle, of guilt. Under ordinary conditions there is not going to be any peace for you. For most people, suffering is the only way they get any peace. Most remain stable as a result of thinking, “I’m on the verge of going nuts!” It’s as if everybody together is stumbling in a way that makes them seem to stand upright — like those plastic penguins that go down an incline. Your little group — your community, your religion, your family — stands shoulder to shoulder — or front to back — so close that you can’t really tip over. Everybody keeps going. Nothing miraculous will ever happen at that level. Nothing can be abandoned there. There’s nothing to work on or change.
Here’s something I’ve spoken about previously. You’ve not fully and properly explored and experienced a thing until you’ve dropped and broken it. In the City this is true, and in the Bushes it’s true at another angle. In the City it’s true on the basis of nobody knowing what they’re doing. Everybody “hurts the one they love.” In the City nothing seems to work out. It’s always a matter of, “Hey, I didn’t mean to do that!” Or, “Wait a minute, it’s not MY fault!” Remember all those? In the City, a person who saves their money to buy a car they’ve always wanted, feels as if they love it. But, in a sense, the flavor of ownership — of you and this new car — is part of a system. Ordinary people do not feel that final, almost organismic relationship until they wreck the car or split a fender. When they hurt the thing, they realize how they’re tied to it. This happens to everything from material possessions to relationships — which is why “you always hurt the one you love.”
In a sense, ordinary people deal with romance as just a form of domination — perhaps without a gun or without violence. Domination is love in the City. Instead of just accepting the short definition, I want you to look “out there,” and also internally at ordinary relationships. No one has analyzed or spoken about a relationship in this manner before. But you meet a new person, a new sexual mate, and you think, “Ahh, this is as good as it’s ever been, we have so much in common, we even like the same food.” A few weeks go by and it’s still as if the relationship hasn’t taken. It’s like a vaccination that you can’t feel until what has happened? Until your first good fight. The relationship doesn’t “take” until you have “dropped it and broken it.” Then it appears to take on some kind of “real human passion.”
All of what I’ve just described is true in the City. But if you stop there you’ve put a period in the wrong place. You’ve used “but” where you should have used “and.” As strange as this seems, you have not fully experienced something until you’ve dropped and broken it. But that’s not the end of this. I didn’t say drop and break it permanently, or drop and break and leave it. In the City, they’ll pick it back up and put it together or they’ll just keep a piece of it and go on.
Now let’s jump into the Bushes — the area which should be affecting people properly born into and attracted to This kind of Activity. In the Bushes you’re bringing in another dimension. But there too, you’ve not really explored something until you’ve dropped and broken it. But in the Bushes you have to willfully misuse something. Since the Bushes have no language other than similes and metaphors, I must point out that I don’t refer to “misuse” in a negative sense. What needs to be done is to take the relationship you have with something — all the way from an object to a person to the kind of internal puns, bridges, systems — the relationship you have with your own partner — and “break” it.
You’ve got to interfere with the relationship. You’ve got to operate in such a way, even if just mentally, that you are in a sense misusing the relationship. And this action begins to shake you free, and begins to put you in a position of no longer staring at the thing you think you’re supposed to be watching. You begin to look around it. One way to do that, even secretly with yourself — not necessarily observably — is to take whatever is apparently foolish and unworkable and treat it seriously. And, of course, vice versa. Not only is there a vice versa, there’s something else.
One of the ways to shake free of something is to drop and break it. Of course you do not do this dropping and breaking externally enough, under the wrong conditions, to be fooling around with Life. You don’t go to your job and say to the manager, “You know what? I was just thinking, on the way to work, this is the silliest company! Did you ever think about how silly the whole concept of having a company that’s in charge of advertising is?” Don’t do that.
To drop and break something is to realize that all of the things you take as being holy or sacrosanct (or, if you don’t like those, stuff inside of you that you take deadly seriously) ain’t shit — to be technical. And until you can reach higher ground that’s the way you need to treat everything in the City. You can’t fire you at the ordinary level, so you can do this to you. You don’t have to do it in the office, or to your boss, but to yourself. At the ordinary level, you must take being a thirty-second vice-president, junior accountant here in the advertising firm seriously. But you must see that it’s all ridiculous on the basis that it’s not feeding anything “I” want. Only This Activity does that. You’ve got to pay the rent, but it’s all not serious, and you might as well drop it and willfully break it.
You might say, “Now wait a minute. There are some things I’m just not going to laugh at!” What I really mean by laugh is not the ordinary sort of laughter because it is not even tinged with, there is no microscopic amount of venom and hostility. But you must have the ability to break something and see, “I didn’t break anything. Well, I broke it, but that doesn’t change anything. Hey, I didn’t know it would work broken but it’s still working as well as before I dropped it. And when it’s not broken, it’s still not working!” You must be able to see all of that and everything off at a right angle, as well.
This is all not simply about laughing and saying, “It’s silly for me to sit here and try to work up enthusiasm and get serious about our upcoming submission to a client for a new laxative campaign.” I don’t mean that. What you must be able to See is that it’s all broken. You drop it, you break it, and there’s no difference. And even if you drop it and break it and there IS a difference, it cannot feed your real hunger. What you’re doing at City level has never fed and will never feed This. You haven’t been looking in the wrong place, or gotten the wrong kind of New Age or mystical food — that’s never going to feed the hunger you have.
It’s another piece of great misdirection to believe that the hunger you’re trying to feed by This is spiritual. To say something is spiritual is probably the supreme misnomer. Someone may be picking up one of my publicly printed books in a nice little bookstore — with Mozart playing in the background, while drinking a demitasse of capuccino. They’re in the mystical section having mystical dreams. And they read a few lines and say, “Ahhh!” They feel something that they would call “spiritual,” because they don’t know what else to call it. Humanity has never known what to call it. There is no such thing as spiritual — I don’t have time to go into the meaning of that. This is not an attack on religion. You might say I’m speaking metaphorically when I say “spiritual.” But nobody knows what it means. It is a great misdirection.
In life the belief in the spiritual leads somewhere else. It is one step from that belief into either mainstream, or some offshoot of, religion. As far as This goes, there is nowhere to go from “spiritual.” You have to turn a corner where I say, “There is no such thing as spiritual.” There is no spiritual man, no spiritual information, no spiritual help. And you say, “Yes there is. You’re using metaphors — you’re just trying to poke fun at it!” “Spiritual” is a metaphor for what? After that question, if you belong here, you are left with what I’ve been trying to hint: there’s no such thing as metaphorical. Metaphors themselves are metaphors. You ask, “For what?” “For Metaphors.” “For what?” “For Metaphors.” You can play that question and answer game forever.
What I was inferring by telling you to take the silly and unprofitable seriously and vice versa — inside your head — is that by so doing you are willfully breaking something. It’s not that you destroy something because you don’t like it, but by dropping and breaking it you free yourself from the kind of established, almost inescapable systematic connection between you and the thing, you and the belief, you and the idea, you and the feeling. In the City you’ve got no choice, you’re always dropping and breaking things. But in the Bushes you’ve got to break things on purpose. You’ve got to make yourself do it.
Here are a couple more little things. I’ve said that the proper way, in a real sense, to watch something, to guard something, is not to look at the thing but to look around it. You must have a real, in the true sense, 4-D peripheral vision of something so it cannot be attacked. Then you can see where it connects with other things, where other things want to connect with it, where it could be assaulted or stroked. To guard something — whether it be a person or an idea — you’ve got to have some kind of perception of the envelope, the moving environment around the thing.
Does it strike any of you that part of what I was telling you about looking around something rather than at it, is another view of Neuralizing? What about my telling you to think ABOUT something not to think ON something? Neuralizing tries to get you to look, to See things without staring at them. I’m not just talking about visual sight, of course. It’s possible to Neuralize — to remember something without thinking about it, to handle something without touching it, to think about something without thinking about it. That’s all the same, except in the areas where it’s somewhat different. Some of you will be relieved to discover that when you look at things without staring at them there is a certain kind of relief from “I” sight.