Unequal Exchange
Video does NOT contain the first 5 minutes of aphorisms that is on the audio below.
November 25, 1988
AKS/News Items Gallery = jcap 1988-11-23 (0423)
Condensed AKS/News Items = See Below
Summary = needed (Sneeded )
Diagrams = None
Transcript = See Below
And Kyroot Said…
Remember this also: In the City, one particular thing has
happened to everybody.
***
Even if life WERE a soap opera, must you be a sponsor?
***
Guy stood up at a history seminar and challenged, “I, for
one, would like to know exactly what it was that went on during
the Dark Ages.” (A guy in the rear of the room thought, “I
wonder does he mean ours or his?”)
***
Although pterodactyls may be extinct, dumbness still has
wings.
***
New Logic And The Intolerable Syllogism: The dumb hate to be
called dumb. Everyone hates to be called dumb. Therefore…
***
Other day in a City gathering I heard the term, “sensory
overload”; was that from the same guy who coined “compulsive
behavior”?
***
In the City it’s ALL a ploy.
***
Everyone’s knowledge has an evil twin brother.
***
To the early-morning-informed, a shout is as good as a
biscuit.
***
Anybody that’d worry over little things’ll worry over big
ones, and, I might add, viciferous-versy.
***
Out in the barren area between the City limits and the
Bushes I heard a faceless voice raised in song thusly, “Oh, the
winds of wars ripped my drawers.”
***
A guy read, in reference to neurological rehabilitation,
that “After serious brain injury all mental efforts become a ‘big
deal'”, and he mused off to himself, “Why did they wait until an
accident to realize that?”
***
Look, I’ve told you once for the last time.
***
If you’re truly in a hurry for additional intelligence,
don’t stop and ask an alligator where he gets HIS luggage.
***
Upon hearing new evidence that cast fresh doubt on some
of the accepted history of a certain religion, one follower
noted, “Anyone whose faith can be shaken by mere scholarship had
little faith to begin with”, and a passer-by, hearing this,
thought, “If you substitute a few words here and there like
“faith” and “scholarship” you’d have a pretty fair description of
the City’s intellectual situation.”
***
Never take a drug less intelligent than you are.
***
There’s a slick-haired man just outside of Nairobi who claims
to “know what time it is”. “No, seriously,” he adds, “I mean
what time it REALLY is.”
***
The long sought Alpha-&-Omega Law of Physics was unknowingly
uttered many years before Newton, and far down the street from
laboratories and classrooms, to wit, “The king can do no wrong.”
That’s all the scientific knowledge ever gleaned, or ever TO be
gleaned.
***
One shined-up fellow declared that he was committed to
“living in Eastern Standard Time and remembering it in Pacific”.
***
If you KNOW where you’re going, it doesn’t MATTER where
you’re going.
Transcript
UNEQUAL EXCHANGE: LIFE’S GAIN
AND
THE PARADISE (OR HELL) OF UNIFORMITY
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 423, November 25, 1988
You recall that last time we met I was using the phrase, “A Real Revolutionist cannot receive pleasure from the pain, problems and uncertainties of others.” And then I refined the word pleasure, for example, a person might protest, “Well, I don’t get pleasure out of other people’s ills.”
Now that you have had time to play with this on your own let me point out something right at the heart of what This Thing is about. Ordinary intelligence cannot see that all exchanges are profitable TO LIFE. But on the human level, dealing for now with a dual basis of two people involved in some exchange — whether the people involved are strangers, friends, family members, lovers — one person in every exchange is going to feel a negative payoff. This is true for all exchanges except such instances as a passerby on the street asking you the time. Other than such, practically speaking, non-events, somebody in each exchange will be dancing backward and someone dancing forward; someone gains energy and the other person loses energy.
Let’s be a little more specific: Any exchange that is meaningful necessarily involves, at that moment, someone losing energy and someone gaining energy. Therefore, at any given time, 50% of the people on the planet feel as if they have been abused. The negative flow may only last half a second, but your life only lasts half a second, multiplied forty million times. Thus, half the time — operating at the ordinary level — you will feel a negative energy flow. At LIFE’S level there is no such thing as a negative energy flow.
I said that you should not receive pleasure from other people’s pains. I also pointed out that “pleasure” is not the real word. The real word is profit. You cannot profit from someone else’s pains, problems or uncertainties. Three dimensional consciousness will maintain, “There’s no way that I can profit from other people’s problems.” If you personally do not feel an energy loss from the exchange, whether you are looking at a wreck on the highway or listening to gossip about your ex-husband or wife, you profited, and you cannot do that and do This.
Do you get any glimpse why there is no objective, continuing standard of propriety or impropriety? No matter what is going on, there is always a negative energy flow to one of the parties involved. Let’s say your hero is the Pope, and you won a contest and the prize is 20 minutes with the Pope. Do you realize that when your audience is finished and you leave the room, you or the Pope will have experienced an energy loss? Even if you looked at him as the greatest spiritual being alive, still he may make you lose energy. Or, conversely, you may make him lose energy in the exchange. Does it matter to Life? No.
Hence, City consciousness cannot decide what constitutes a good interchange between people. How should we treat one another? Of course, the oldest idea going is: Treat people the way you want to be treated. But that only works half of the time.
What consciousness, with its provincially slanted reporting, cannot perceive is that Life profits (receives pleasure) when somebody commits murder. Back at the level where we live in the City there is no way to justify the madmen of history, the injustices of life, your loved ones becoming cripples or the continual, unsatisfactory state of your love life. If you’re going to look for the justice of it all at the local level, you’re wasting your time.
Look at your own digestive system, in charge of breaking down all of the proteins and fats and carbohydrates that go into your body. When you eat a plum, your system assaults it. Your stomach mutilates the sugars and carbohydrates in the plum in order to convert the energy into useable forms. You have killed the plum.
On the level of you in toto, the exchange is beneficial. There is no question of morality. But on the plum level, murder is taking place. If the carbohydrates of the plum could cry out to you they would say, “Hold on a second so we can speak to you on this matter of justice!” Assuming they could speak up and get your attention, what could they say that would make any difference to you?
If the plum could speak it would ask you to stop. From the plum’s viewpoint, falling into your digestive system is a negative payoff. If you could hear this report, then you would have the opposite view. You might even tell the plum, “Hey, you may cease to exist as a plum, but in the end, we both benefit. You will become part of my brain. The parts of you that pass through me are just going back to the ground where you came from originally. Nothing is going to disappear; nothing is going to be wasted.” None of this has any meaning to a plum, though.
That same situation exists for ordinary consciousness because it cannot perceive that Life finds pleasure in all that is going on. When Life finds no pleasure in some part of its body, that part ceases to exist. Remember, “pleasure” means profit, and all energy exchanges are profitable to Life. As long as what you eat makes you richer, stronger, then it’s profitable. You are going to benefit; the food’s going to keep you alive. This is true at Life’s level also.
Ordinary consciousness cannot perceive that Life absolutely benefits from every energy exchange. But at the primary level (for our purposes tonight, involving two people) the very definition of an energy exchange precludes an equal payoff. Life cannot profit from such a nonoccurrence. Trying to live off of equal exchanges would be similar to trying to subsist on Nutra Sweet — nobody can live on diet cokes. There is nothing in them to feed you. Trying to live on no calories is comparable to what would happen if there were energy exchanges without negative flows. In other words, Life would be doing that which was moot — committing a form of suicide. Whatever is going on in Life involves a conversion of energy; there is a movement of energy from one place to another. The place that just lost energy — even if only for a millisecond — experiences an energy drain. And there is nothing to be said to the “losing” participant at that level, because at that level that participant is correct to say, “I have lost energy; therefore, this exchange was not beneficial.”
Life itself, if it could be as conscious of you as my scenario of your being conscious of the molecules of the plum, would say, “I understand why you’re saying this, but you are wallowing in a parochial view of things. You are engaged in putting a local spin, a back yard slant on international events. You can’t see the full picture.” And your answer would be, “What picture? All I know is someone is stepping on my privates. I’m getting cheated.” That’s true: at that level that IS all you know.
Again, I am pointing at the very heart of the difference between what I am calling new intelligence, and what seems to be the inexplicable nature of Life, why people cannot answer questions for themselves and come to any hard and fast conclusions.
As a quick aside, let me ask you a rhetorical question: Should I call this a “New Intelligence” or just “Another Intelligence”? If you had a 4-D, or even a 5-D view of reality then you wouldn’t see this as a new intelligence. It’s the same stuff that all the great so-called spiritual figures of history spoke of. Of course, if we could bring any of those guys back from the grave to hear me speak their reaction would be, “This seems to be what I saw, but it’s moving too fast for me. Let me get back in the ground.” It’s new and it’s not new. Perhaps I should call it an alternative intelligence. (“Intelligence” is a better word than “consciousness” for your efforts here. Everyone has a nonverbal understanding that they are not as intelligent as they could be — Life has come up with the word “consciousness” that apparently refers to something outside the operations of the upper end of the nervous system.)
The ultimate profit is the ultimate pleasure. Pieces of this pop up throughout history, such as the epicurean motto: You only live once, so eat, drink and be merry — what the hell. You’ll notice, however, that such ideas are not the slogans of any of the major religions.
“Eat, drink and be merry” is a low level, low intensity reflection of Life’s profit being the ultimate pleasure. But back in the City you’re stuck with your pleasure being someone else’s pain. At the binary, City level of existence, when two people dance, one person is always dominant (gaining energy) and the other is submissive (losing energy). The dance/exchange actually goes in two directions, but once it’s over one person always feels a negative flow. Above the 3-D level — beyond the arena of local reporting — your understanding of the feeling of being cheated would be, “Yes, yes, at one level that’s true enough; yet at Life’s level such a feeling is incorrect. Life always profits.” Then, if you were so foolish as to say to a city dweller, “Listen, all of Life is pleasurable,” half of the people at any given moment would say, “You’re a fool. You are getting pleasure from my pain.” If you pursued such folly any further, you might say, “No, no. Look, Life is growing, and in each exchange one person apparently gains at another’s expense. So if you apparently lose in one exchange, later you will gain at someone else’s expense.” But City consciousness only remembers the instances where it apparently lost energy. Once you see that, you understand why you cannot “help” anyone. What you may best be able to offer ordinary people is nothing. Leave them alone.
You must see that profit is pleasurable, but not at the ordinary level of perception. It never will be seen at that level. Think back to the plum you just ate. That plum is staring death in the face. Imagine if you were actually able to look down at that half-digested plum in your stomach. That’s probably where they got the idea of fire and brimstone…the wailing and gnashing of teeth…
Ordinary intelligence cannot see that all energy exchanges are profitable and pleasurable to Life. When one is operating with a local slant on the international news, such information is moot. If I could find people in the City who could stretch their intelligence enough to temporarily see what I am saying, I might get them to admit, “Okay, theoretically, I guess you could be right to say that Life benefits no matter what happens. Assuming that the universe is one giant organism and that organism is healthy and growing, then I suppose that all energy exchanges could be some form of Life eating — I guess Life could be simply moving energy around in it’s own system. Theoretically, on that large scale, all movements are profitable to this big organism.” Even if they seemed to have some perception of the possible international implications of what I’m saying, they would immediately go back to the local reporting level. That is, “It looks like the OPEC ministers are meeting again. I hear that will make the front page news in all the big-city papers, but here I am, editor of the local gazette in Nosehair, New York…do I care?” The only way you care is if the gas prices are going up a nickel. “Now, that means something! It’s going to be a negative energy flow (higher gas prices) for all of us here in Nosehair, so now I’ll report it, now I’ll think about OPEC.”
The only way news gets reported at the local level is when an apparent energy loss is involved. What is most news? To the reporter it seems to offer an upcoming, if not immediate, negative energy flow. All news, generally speaking, is bad news. “The heads of the oil producing nations are getting their act together finally, and the only importance for us is that our gas prices may go up.” That is the nature of the City. Such local slants on international events pass for being intelligent, insightful and sophisticated. But local reporting will get you nowhere. It will keep you at City level.
To have a parochial view you’ve got to be chauvinistic in the full sense of the word: “If it doesn’t affect me and my cause, (and of course, your cause is to stay alive) it’s of no importance. What do I care if a bunch of guys over in the Middle East get together and make oil deals — unless I end up paying more at the gas pump. Then they are doing me wrong.”
Though quite adequate in the City, local reporting is the very thing that you’ve got to escape. You cannot continue to take the plethora of information coming in from all over the world and distill it down to the level of local reporting: “I can read all this information and separate the wheat from the chaff.” The wheat is always on the basis of, “There is a dance going on and someone is losing. That’s all that’s important.” I’m telling you, it’s just the opposite.
In the City, they pay people to analyze and comment on events and what the analyst gives is a more localized report. Commentators apparently distill the news in order for it to make more sense, but it makes less sense. Less and less information is passed along, and in the City this is equated with increased intelligence.
Here is something else. As I have hinted previously, the prime purpose of power is to establish and sustain order. But ordinary intelligence has an idea that results in what I’ll call “an irony of order.” A prime example can be found in religion –they all have some version of an afterlife; the big payoff of paradise. The idea is that in paradise there will be uniformity. Of course, they may throw in other attractions such as free soft drinks and a James Brown show once a year, but the common denominator of every religious idea of paradise is uniformity. Without exception, every religion believes that heaven will be peopled only with their own members. It can’t be otherwise, but no one sees irony involved. What is held in the City to be the ultimate in “good times,” the ultimate order of paradise, is the ultimate death. From the viewpoint of This Activity, uniformity is death.
I’m using “paradise” as a religious idea of the ultimate payoff, but this holds true for all “isms” and “causes” this side of the grave as well: “If only everyone would hold to our creed or political persuasion, things would be better right now; the world would be a better place.” That is, the world would be uniform. All organizations are chauvinistic; they all have their own cause, and they all believe in uniformity. Remember, those of you who need to be reminded, there is nothing wrong — Life needs all of it.
Ordinary man sees uniformity as the ultimate order. When you’ve done all you can and you’re in the presence of the gods, you’ll receive the big payoff: describable by one word — death. Whoops, I meant to say uniformity…
Another aspect: Parts of Life’s body will attack other parts, accusing them of being cults. Some established religion will cry out that another group is turning its members into fanatical, blind servants. These attacks are not analyzed in this manner, but here is what they are really saying: “From our provincial viewpoint, you are carrying uniformity too far.” Such attacks notwithstanding, the ultimate form of order for man is uniformity.
Remember, I said it was the irony of order. From our view, uniformity is the death queue. Become uniform and you’re done for. There is no uniformity Here. Revolutionary activity produces no clones. But the viewpoint of the City dictates that all men believe they will eventually become uniform (that is, we will all become one with our great leader, one with the mind of god, all of like mind regarding the tenets of our system, etc.). Otherwise men would not attempt change in the first place. The City feeling must be, “Yes, there is at least a chance that I can finally become uniform. If I could just become a real religious (fill in the blank), there’s no doubt, all of my mundane personal problems would become inconsequential.
This Activity is a mutant in Life’s body. Uniformity here equals death. There are examples of what I mean out in Life. I’m going to use apparent political examples, but don’t choke on them. They are parabolical springboards; This is not about politics. There are areas in Life’s body, commonly referred to as marxist/socialist societies, that are based upon uniformity. Everyone in such places dresses alike; the cities look like they are painted in monochromatic color schemes. You can look at movies of these places and wonder how anyone can live there and avoid a terminal case of the blues. You should be able to smell — just from watching a film — that those societies based upon social uniformity are dying.
Where has all of the 3-D progress come from? Life grows the fastest in the parts of its body that have the most three dimensional freedom. When this country was set up, it was singular in its lack of uniformity. If you could get in a boat and row over here, you were in — as long as the natives and the insurance salesmen didn’t get you. To call yourself an American was, for hundreds of years, to say nothing. We’re talking about a lack of uniformity bordering on apparent chaos. Once you were here, there were no guarantees that you’d live another day. Right now there’s always a chance of being mugged or shot when someone robs a convenience store and you happen to be standing there reading the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. But this country is where Life is growing the fastest.
The point is that a certain level of uniformity, EVEN IN THE CITY, is death. But in the nervous system of man the dream is just the opposite. “I want to escape this terrible confusing place where chaos is always snapping at my heels. I want to go where the gods live.” And what will happen there? Uniformity. People use such words as peace and serenity, but they mean uniformity. And uniformity means death.
A fair number of those who stumble upon This Thing will write and tell me they’ve got a will of steel and I’m not going to succeed in changing them into a brainwashed slave. You are redefining the word “dumb” if you can remain here any length of time and still believe such notions. They are built into the genetic code at the ordinary level. But do any of you feel as though you are being measured for a uniform? No. If you analyzed it, you would realize that without me this whole process would fall apart, because there is no uniformity here. I’m not making little copies of myself. I wouldn’t even try, because that’s not possible.
Life is continually offering to dance with you. If you’re going to dance (as if you had a choice) and you don’t know what you’re doing then the inescapable odds dictate that half the time you’re going to get stepped on. If you are ordinary, at any given moment there’s a 50/50 chance that the exchange will yield a negative payoff for you.
If you continue to look at car wrecks, if you read headlines in the newspapers or listen to reports of impending calamities on the television, you’ll get a negative payoff. Back at City level, you might well ask, “How can cold, dead ink on dead paper affect me? How can you say there is an energy exchange with ink on a piece of paper?” All of Life is alive. When you stand in a supermarket checkout line reading headlines in the National Enquirer such as, “Four thousand killed in earthquake,” if you feel a shift in you, if you feel let down or depressed, then you just danced with that newspaper. You just exchanged energy with “cold ink on dead paper” and you LOST. That newspaper just stepped on your genitals. Energy was moved around in a split second, and the net result was negative for you.
The National Enquirer, apparently one of the most ridiculed forums of information in the City, just danced with you and you lost. A headline kicked you around. A piece of paper danced with you and gained energy. Now tell me how intelligent you are. Don’t tell me that it’s proof of your compassionate heart. Is bleeding to death compassion? Is your goal to die the most depressed person on the planet? Is that the proof you are a more intelligent being? “Yes, I get depressed. I turn up the volume when the news reports speak about fatal disasters or upcoming, cataclysmic climatic changes.” You listen to such things and say to yourself, “Oh no! I just knew it…” That should be on your tombstone. But everyone also has an evil twin brother tombstone, and that one says, “You didn’t know duck squat.”
Let me try a quick roundup of a few things. Local reporting is the attempt to make the news uniform. That’s what truth is in the City. That’s what science is. One of the basic tenets of the scientific method states that results must be reproducible. There has to be a uniformity. A scientist who formulates a new law that cannot be demonstrated with uniformly reproduced results becomes a laughingstock.
For something to be considered factual, it must be uniform. That is the definition of truth in the City. We’re back to the provincial editor of the Dinksville Gazette, distilling the diversified, international news to make it appealing to all the good folks of Nosehair, New York. To appeal to everybody the news must be made uniform. That is local reporting.
If humanity were intelligent in the way that I mean, (and in the way Life leads men to think they already are), then there would be a virtual cornucopia of diverse information available. Man would be receiving and using it all. There would be no local reporting if that were the case. But that is not only unnecessary in the City, if it could happen, it would be dangerous.
Uniformity seems to be the basis of order. It is a matter of you continuing to deal in local reporting: taking everything in and making it I-centered, or else the information is of no consequence to you.
Local reporting is useless to real, alternative intelligence. There is no uniformity that is profitable at the human level. Uniformity is death. Uniformity is a socialist/marxist regime in the nervous system. In the City uniformity’s paradise. Out here in the bushes, it’s hell.