Of Fashion, Fads and Deadly ‘Isms’
Video does NOT contain the first 5 minutes of aphorisms that is on the audio below.
AKS/News Item Gallery = jcap 1988-12-07 (0429)
Condensed KS/News Items = See Below
Excursion / Task = See Below
Summary = needed (Sneeded )
Diagrams = See Below
Transcript = See below (ck edit)
0429 video grab
Excursion
For NP: Consider a new definition of New Intelligence–Thinking without Believing
And Kyroot Says…
The real cause of most stuff IS something.
***
In City discussions don’t be impressed if one side admits
about the other, “Well, they’ve got a point.” In the City
EVERYbody’s got a point.
***
If anything IS actually out-of-place, we’re all goners…
and I mean goners-for-good!
***
If it was the kind of secret I could reveal to just anybody,
the few-of-you wouldn’t wanna know it.
***
Over in that free-leafed City park last weekend I saw this
one fellow who stormed and stomped around shaking his fist and
demanding, “OK, where’s the plot? Where’s the plot?”
***
On one blustery, mid-winter’s morning, the man at the table
asked, “Is it cold, or is it me?”, and the wife replied, “Both,
you ninny.” “Ah,” he said. Said she, “‘Ah’ indeed.”
***
I am disturbed by the similarity of the words, “hope” and
“dope.”
***
Whilst rambling through a book of City poetry, I rambled
upon the following line, “Where my heart will lie I pray also
will lie my brain.” I do sorta wish we would dig up, and revive
this bard, and ask him what he specifically perceived as an
alternative possibility to the above.
***
As one City dude was ofttimes wont to say, “After all the
kissing, and bloodshed has ceased, will Verdi still reign
supreme?” No one seems to have any idea why this person is
ofttimes wont to say this.
***
If you can find out how to do it, or even catch yourself in
time to do so, here’s what you should do: Even in your
foolishness, be deliberate.
***
If you WERE mind-readers, and brain-hearers, how often do
you suspect, you would discover, just as the train pulls away,
many mulling about the station would suddenly think, “Ah, NOW I
see”?
***
His intellectual progeny was such that it made you glad you
lived in a singles complex.
***
A mother told her daughter never to read any 19th century
poetry within an hour after eating.
***
The fall of an Adam & Eve from an original, pristine Garden-
of-Passion was not via an apple, but by an argument. The
original sin-passion is always in the first fight between the
lovers.
***
Come on, do you think it’s actually a matter of “secret
information,” or a paucity of ears?
***
What IS KNOWN is not generally known. That is, what is known
by the Few is not known by the Many.
***
What strange creatures may have avoided the captivity of
words?
***
There IS no acceptable metaphor for a gun.
***
In the real Revolution, that which is TOO exact can be
deadly.
***
If the solution fits — WEAR IT!
***
Transcript
429F 12/9/88 Copyright 1988 J.M. Cox
No Diagrams
OF FASHIONS, FADS AND DEADLY ‘ISMS’
The complex consuming the simple is so direct and simple
that I am not disposed to say very much more about it, but there are
one or two areas that I can profitably speak about. These areas
are not simply philosophical or psychological ideas about man,
they are mathematically, chemically and physically absolute.
They are quite basic.
People throughout Life are attempting to make themselves
more complex through such activities as fashion, fads, all forms
of self-improvement and, of course, the ever popular — talking.
If and when your life ceases to continually become more complex,
you are dying. Many people are dying by the time they become
adults. In spite of that, within the life of Life, the overall
system is growing. Any system can be expanding even while within
that system, smaller, lower level sub-systems are apparently
dying. For example, food breaks down within your body. To you,
this is a positive process, necessary to keep you alive, but to
the food it is regression. On the basis of this you should
try and see that all human activities, especially the ones that
rise above the areas of minimal survival endeavors like obtaining
food, sleep, and sex, are crude attempts by people, on a personal
level, to become more complex.
In the City there has never been much of an attempt to
explain fashion; but Consider, what is fashion? All such
activities are crude personal attempts to be more complex. There
is no true complexity in the City on that basis; What is
accomplished is more like an enriched simplicity. It does not
change the way in which people die, it does not change their
position vis-a-vis Life’s memory of them, it does not change
their position within the body of Life. If it did it would not be
a fad but something permanent.
Ordinary people die at a very early age in a quite real
sense; in the sense that they cease to become more complex. One
reason I bring this up is that you can use this as a kind of
template in many areas of Life wherein human activity seems to be
pointless. You can observe what I’m describing in areas that
seem to be open to ridicule or criticism, which is one reason I
picked out fashion as an example.
I want to touch on something I talked about a few nights
ago. I pointed out that just past everything is itself again.
That was not just a paradoxical use of words, and in the 3-D
world there is an easy example. If you were to travel around the
world, what is the farthest distance you could travel? It is one
hair’s breadth from where you started; and if you knocked on your
own door what would be there? You again, of course. Scientists like
to describe the universe as being infinite with no boundaries.
Another example of the apparently infinite is that people always
believe they can change, “I can go beyond what I am,” but right
past that is you all over again. It just seems as though there
are no boundaries. That is part of the beauty of the intellect,
the use that Life makes of it. You can ask the mind if it is
limited and it will say, “I have thought about it and there does
not seem to be anything that I can’t think of.” That is tied
directly to the feeling that radical change is possible.
The difficulty with real change is that you are always,
always so close to right where you were. I refer you back to my
original description: If we let physical travel on the earth
signify change, the most radical change you can achieve is ti
travel all the way around the world and end up right on the other
side of your front door. Another example is the alcoholic with
his addiction to drinking becoming a non-alcoholic, now being
addicted to being a non-alcoholic. Right past that point of
extreme distance is you all over again.
In the 3-D world the situation is inescapable, you just
can’t see it with ordinary eyes. This is not some spiritual curse
or intellectual weakness, it is the way the 3-D universe is
structured. Rather than this being a curse it is the supreme
safety net, the ultimate fallback position. Life does not have to
retreat, it can let things go forward, even in an apparently
unprofitable direction, and if they go far enough, what happens?
An alternative way to look at what I have been saying about
people not being able to change is that people can change but it
does not do them any good because then they can’t stop changing,
they just go on changing until it gets to a point where they are
right back where they started. The alcoholic becomes as addicted
to being a non-drinker as he was to being a drunk. Change never
goes just a little way, it keeps going until it becomes itself
again, which is another reason you can’t see real change. It
takes off and you think things are changing and then something
happens or you forget about it, you think, but what really
happened was that it just went back to where it was. Of course,
something else does happen over the fabric of real time. In a
sense, things do change over time, or growth would not be
possible.
Now for something competely different. In ordinary affairs of
people, organizations, institutions, no one knows all of the laws,
by-laws, rules, directives, or principals relevant to the
organization. Let’s take as an example the United States postal
service (you know of course this is not any kind of attack on
postal workers or the post office). Say you went into the post
office and asked a question like, “Can I use a Canadian stamp to
mail a letter from here to Canada?” If you asked five different
people it’s possible that you could get five different answers;
and if you played the game, without any hostility, and asked the
post master to look it up, he might not know where to look, and
if he does, he might not be able to interpret it. Going past all
of that, here is the question that no one ever asks: If no one,
including the nominal head of the organization, involved in this
activity knows everything about this organization, how is it
possible for them to achieve success, just by the city level
definition?
How is it possible for anything to operate, much less be
successful, when not one participant knows everything that should
be known to make it operate? The post office is just an example,
there is much more to it than that. If you want to see some real
smoke blowing, go to the Pope and ask him some questions about
the basic structure of religion. You understand, rules are not
there just to harass people, rules come about organically from
Life telling some group of people that this is the kind of thing
you have to do to keep this going, because Life needs it going.
There is no exception to this, no affair of man in which any one
individual knows everything that has to be known for the process
to function; and yet they function. How can this be?
This brings up a possible connection to something else I have
talked about. I have pointed out that in the affairs of man, the
organizations, institutions — all activities ranging from the
delivery of goods to the delivery of services — things do not do
what they are purported to do. The church does not eradicate sin,
police and laws do not eradicate crime. They can not — if they did
succeed it would self-defeating and they would go out of existence.
I want to try and enrich the possibilities of you looking at
this phenomenon. Consider that no thing can do what other people
say it should do. That may sound like what I originally said, but
it’s different. No thing, and no person, can do, not just its
stated purpose, but it cannot do what someone else says it
should do.
This is another mathematical fact, and I am going to tell
you why. The reason for is the unrecognized difference between
verbal reality and “that other one.” The verbal reality is
whatever people say, whether you agree with it or not, but then
there is that other reality; and they can’t be the same or they
would not be different. By the 3-D perception of the ordinary
intellect, people involved these two realities can not
satisfactorily coincide. If they do seem to merge it is a short
lived phenomenon, they just disappear and you forget it. If the
two realities did begin to merge there is no telling what that
might lead to, it could lead to the end of all your problems, of
everybody’s problems.
Think of the ramifications of this mathematical fact. On a
personal level, no matter what you say a person should do, they
cannot do it. Forget any thoughts about there being an objective
somebody out there, and there is some reason they can’t do it.
There is a verbal reality and then there is another reality —
and they do not coincide.
Let’s take this to another level: The too complex cannot
meet the too simplistic. That is a second order of me pointing
out that verbal reality cannot merge with that other reality.
They are different and if they become the same they are not
different any more. If you can begin to see this you will no
longer have much faith in you being “out of sorts.” You never
have noticed it but everybody is out of sorts all the time;
humans are just lucky that everyone’s peaks and valleys don’t hit
at the same time. If you begin to see that this is literally
true — that the reality of anything cannot do what your verbal
reality says it should do — some of you are going to be sans a
serious hobby in your life.
Anything your nervous system says other people should do, they
cannot do. That’s a fact. As I said, the two realities do
sometimes merge, but when they do you don’t even notice it. Your
nervous system does not respond to things that go right. Science,
religion, politics and the six o’clock news are based on “things
are not as they should be”; those are the only things people
notice. But soon as you say something should go in a certain way,
it cannot; and if it does that is the end of your participation
in that dual reality. Who remember’s when things go right? No
one. If things go right all the time you have death. You must
have movement, resistance, for life to continue.
I want to say a little more about something I talked about
not long ago. All “isms” of any kind that have ever been thought
of — nationalism, racism, denominationalism — from politics to
religion — give the ordinary intelligence the impression of
living in a larger house. Ordinary intelligence gets the
impression that its indoors is bigger than it actually is because
it has comrades. This kind of thing is necessary in the City, and
all ordinary attacks on isms in the City are simply one verbal
reality attacking somebody else’s verbal reality. It does not
matter what the verbal reality from one view seems to be. If you
are going to do This you cannot fool around with isms.
There are and have been small pockets of Life’s body that
say that one or another ism is bad and that it should be stopped;
but “that other reality” has been going on simultaneously with
the verbal reality and you will please note that even though
people say it should stop, it does not stop. You should
understand that if you were suddenly given the power to do away
with, let’s say nationalism, that tomorrow something would take
it’s place. If you are alive your nervous system is going to have
these feelings, but a Real Revolutionist cannot be a follower or
a joiner in any ism. You simply can’t pursue it. Not that any
particular ism is right or wrong; in the City, ism’s are
necessary. But out in the bushes, they are deadly.