Only the Complex Can Be Simple
Video does NOT contain the first 5 minutes of aphorisms that is on the audio below.
December 19, 1988
AKS/News Item Gallery = jcap 1988-12-16 (0433)
Condensed AKS/News Items = See Below
Summary = needed (Sneeded )
Diagrams = See Below
Transcript = See Below
0433 video grab
And Kyroot Said…
If you’re the instructor you don’t HAVE to cut class.
***
Wanna know another reason for religion’s continuing
popularity as compared to some of the younger turks like
biology, chemistry, and physics? Answer: Cause religion
unabashedly deals in the terms maybe, might, and perhaps.
***
Let me put it to you like this: What could be cuter,
funnier, and more dangerous than City folks being deadly serious?
***
If you’re gonna talk loud, talk REAL LOUD.
***
My quiz of the month; fill in the blank in the following
statement: “There AIN’T no blank.”
***
Those who enjoy flattery deserve it…oh, O.K., NEED it.
***
One tale I heard said that the way from “here-to-there” is
over a high, narrow ridge made of diamonds, gold, and razor
blades.
***
Whilst poking about at his prunes one morning, a man aloud
mused, “You know, a string of bad luck is like a string of
twine”, and his wife said, “No, it’s not”, and he shot her.
***
One ole sorehead, chided for his anger and asked, “Where was
his human compassion?”, replied, “It fucking died and went to
live with the angels where it belongs.”
***
On a well versed bathroom wall I recently found this writ:
“Poets never sleep.” Now if THAT doesn’t keep you awake all
night, what will?
***
Said one City sophomore: No religion has reached its full
maturity until its adherents begin to roast one another.
***
How can anything ever explain its own absence? How can
ignorance, lack of intelligence, “make up for” its own sorry
self?
***
A fellow said that one day, whilst he was unexpectedly
happy, he heard a little voice down inside his own sweet self
softly singing, “Oh ain’t it grand to be a gland.”
***
In the City affection can come and go in a flash, but hate
is not so unjustly limited.
***
There have been reports of late that out at the East City
Beach, on dark nights, coming from off shore, just out of sight,
there is heard the sound of something gigantic thrashing about
and breathing heavy.
***
The Man stood tall and erect and in a calm, clear voice
announced, “For my last request I want wine, women, music and
dance”, and another voice replied, “No one’s about to execute
you, you don’t get a ‘last request'”, and the guy sez, “Was worth
a try.”
***
I am disturbed by the similarity of the terms “love it” and
“shove it”.
***
Near Victoria Falls there’s a Man whose neighbors claim
“thinks of things no one has ever thought of”, but they admit
they can’t prove it.
***
One City side-winder declared, “I’ve heard it said that it
takes TIME to do things right, but does that make the alternative
any easier?”
***
Never lock an idiot in the attic.
***
If you got the original, dump the copies.
***
Transcript
ONLY THE COMPLEX CAN BE SIMPLE
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1988
Document: 433, December 19, 1988
The maxim, “The simple survive and the complex flourish,” sounds deceptively self-evident. It makes sense in the City, while offering quite unexpected possibilities for those who can get beyond the initial City interpretation. Anyone with ordinary intelligence could agree, without even hearing me talk about it, that the simple do merely survive — that the common folks continue plodding on while the educated, the sophisticated and the clever seem to thrive. In the City, people can accept that, but out in the Bushes — no, no, no — that’s just child’s play. So, let me properly define the terms “simple” and “complex” for those of you interested in seeing what’s beyond City limits.
The simple are simply what they are. You can be educated, you can be sophisticated, you can be rich, you can be clever — but if you are simply what you are, then you belong to the ranks of the simple. You have no hope for change and you’ve got no future.
What is the future? The future is the opportunity to change. If you look with City eyes and conclude, “Everybody’s got a future — if I live another ten years, then that ten years is my future,” you’re insisting on remaining among the simple. If nothing is going to change, if all you do is develop a bigger paunch, less hair, a nastier attitude and less sex drive, you can call that your future if you like, but you have none from the revolutionary point of view. The simple have no future. If you are simply what you are, you are simple. You’ll survive. You may go ahead and fit into the right matrix in the actuary tables, but you’ve got no real future.
Now let me define the complex. Those who are properly complex in the revolutionary sense are not simply complicated, entangled or uselessly engaged. That is not the sort of complexity that goes with growth. The complexity would be more like this: In your thinking — in your life, even, but specifically in your thinking — you would be direct, you would be elemental and you would be unrattled. That would be being revolutionarily complex. Being merely complicated — torn by dilemmas, entangled in all sorts of apparent opinions, theories and beliefs — is not the complexity of which I speak. Revolutionary complexity almost sounds as though it’s its own opposite because the way you think, the way you live, is direct and productive. Direct is not a synonym for simple: Here is one of the cases where the reality behind words seems to invert their content. If you could take what ordinary intelligence would call “simple” around a corner, if you could take “simple” up a level, then that would be the complex. Such complexity carries no useless complications. Such complexity is not vainly entangled in thinking about what’s seen and thought. True complexity is free of those impediments known in the City as concentrating, studying and working things out. Could you expect any less? If intelligence actually worked efficiently, shouldn’t it be some sort of light, some sort of perception that you could turn on something in order to gain some knowledge of it? Is the purpose of intelligence to be confused? Is the purpose of intelligence to be dumb?
Take several forms of the common City statement, “I’m intelligent enough to know this: I don’t know what’s going on.” An individual might put it, “I’m intelligent enough to know I’m very confused.” And whole organizations have said, “We’re intelligent enough to know this, that we do not yet possess the intelligence to tell whether we know what we’re talking about.” In the City such statements are quite alright — but upon hearing such flimflam do you not get an inkling that something is lacking in such a picture of intelligence? Or do you think that the future is infinite? Do you think that your neural apparatus is going to play out that well-known imaginary scenario of enough monkeys and enough typewriters finally reproducing, by random keystrokes, all of Shakespeare’s works? Do you think that if you live long enough, your neural patterns not only will fire, but misfire — that you can hit yourself every now and then, take a few drinks or a few tokes and eventually, just almost accidentally, the law of averages will catch up with you like the monkeys and the typewriters and you will finally get intelligent and not know how it happened? Do you believe you’ll one day be able to say, “Yeah, I was dumb for a few decades, but hell, then I got intelligent”?
The kind of direct thinking that I am calling “the complex” has a revolutionary simplicity compared to the physiological activity which goes on in the brain at City level. Direct, complex thinking radically outdistances the efforts of the City’s best thinkers. A leader in the intellectual community can stand up at a conference and read a paper stating that, “We are reaching exciting new areas where intelligence is failing us again,” and be applauded by his peers. If they want to call such as that “the march of progress,” it’s not quite up to John Phillip Sousa’s middle of the road stuff, but they’re correct — eventually things do move along.
But consider what appears to be one individual’s lifetime — are you going to put up with the City’s rate of progress? Are you going to accept the notion, “Our intelligence is proved by our admission that we’re not totally intelligent,” as the highest activity possible for your brain? You can’t put up with that and do This. You won’t live long enough to put up with that. And you don’t have to! As opposed to the useless, intertwined, Byzantine thinking that the City takes for intelligence, there is a complex simplicity — a kind of thinking that is direct, elemental and non-rattled.
Here is what I mean by non-rattled. You’ve heard the term, “Don’t rattle his cage.” I assume this phrase began with someone telling passersby at a circus not to go up and rattle the cage of a tiger or a lion. Or of any animal, for decency’s sake. But it probably began from the standpoint of safety: if a lion’s lying there minding his own business and you can get close enough, don’t rattle the cage. You’ve got no business doing that and could live to regret it. Similarly, you have no business allowing your City-level neural activity to irritate and interfere with the new intelligence I speak of.
Recall the definition I gave you recently: New intelligence would be thinking without believing. Ordinary intelligence is thinking WITH believing and it amounts to part of your nervous system rattling the cage of your intellect. Remember our definition of believing? Believing is relying on a conviction that something is true while having no proof of its validity. People in the City use “believe” synonymously with “think.” They equate belief with intelligence. (Someday I’ll speak at length about all words having an evil twin. What people normally take to be synonyms are actually mismatched twins.)
Belief has a place in the City; for example, the sciences employ a process which temporarily requires belief. Men will begin to believe something, then a certain kind of proof arrives and that “something” becomes fact. At which point it becomes almost irrelevant, as if the process we’re describing were an old fashioned cartoon and upon becoming fact, our former belief merges with the cactus and mountains of the background, necessitating that new beliefs show up, like new cartoon characters drawn in succeeding frames. When someone is apparently pushing at one of the boundaries of knowledge they point out, “We cannot offer you absolute proof, but we believe such and such.” That sounds fine at a convention of prominent physicists. But should an individual handle everyday personal transactions in the same way that a physicist investigates quarks? In the City, individuals DO pass belief along as being synonymous with some sort of knowing, and the resulting energy conversions are adequate fuel for City affairs. But intelligence, OUR kind of intelligence, cannot run on such low grade fuel. New intelligence can think without believing, without enduring the tedious cycle of cartoon characters appearing, taking center stage, then fading into the background.
And while we’re on the subject of belief, remember that thinking without belief includes thinking without NON-belief. If you’ve got belief, you’ve got the viable potential for non-belief, and either one can connect itself to what should be your intelligence. If you rely upon one part of a combination — good and evil, up and down, right and wrong, moral and immoral, believing and not believing (relying on something for which there is no absolute proof or denying something for the reason that there is no absolute proof) — if you are tied into either pole of a duality, you are tied to both extremes. And there’s no use saying, “Sometimes I do let belief color my thinking, but at other times I stop it when it goes too far.” You can’t stop it! You might as well say, “I’m going to jump in the river but I’ll only get wet on my left side.” If you will rely on part of a story, you’re stuck with the whole story. The part you think you can deny is always potentially true for you. If you let belief OR non-belief rattle your intelligence you have relinquished the revolutionist’s right to think properly: part of you will be convinced of things for which there is no absolute proof. And this is not mere semantics. You spend your life (along with everyone else) falling into such a pit over and over again. Every time you stop, under ordinary conditions, and believe that you’re thinking about something, you’re not doing anything! Not anything in the sense of This Activity.
Let’s invoke my artificial, but not unfair, description of man being cut up into three overlapping areas: the physical (i.e., observable motor activities — the body in motion in 3-D space); what everyone calls the emotional life; and the highest end of the nervous system right now, the intellectual realm. Keeping this temporary map in mind, let me point out a couple of things. You can do physical things with almost no intelligence. You can conduct your life almost entirely in the physical realm, like my good old bricklayer, or you can be engaged in some small physical act, like an accountant out digging up a flower bed — in either case the intellect stays out of the picture. You can also be emotional with almost no intelligence. But you cannot be intelligent without intelligence. So now I refer you back a few paragraphs. How can you mix non-intelligence in with intelligence and say, “Well, I’m intelligent?” How can you say, “I’m thinking about it?” No, you’re not! You think you’re thinking about it and you’re thinking at City level.
If you will mix “something I have a conviction about” with knowing something in the revolutionary sense, you’re an idiot. You may be a City thinker, but you’re an idiot. You’ve got an idiot locked in the attic and you don’t even know he’s there, much less how to get him out. You holler, “Are you an idiot up there?” and back comes the reply, “Are you kidding? It’s me!” And you go, “Oh, that’s right, ME.” If that’s you, why the hell have you got him locked in there? Why don’t you turn him loose? Of course, if you tried to turn him loose — if you knew how — when you said, “Alright, the door’s open, you can leave now,” he wouldn’t budge.
The simple are the vast, vast, vast, vast majority that are going to survive. Just a handful of people might be able to embrace the complexity necessary to flourish. The simple cannot change and they’ve got no future. The complex appear simple in a totally different sense of the word. The complex are not encumbered by the cage-rattling of the part of the nervous system that deals in things that are not known. “Well maybe they’re not known, but I’m almost certain they’re true.” Welcome back to the City. Or worse, “I know in my heart they’re true.” Such vague fumbling has nothing to do with intelligence even at City-level, and has NOTHING to do with the new intelligence I’m talking about. Consider the futility of me trying to encourage you, to trick you into actually getting somewhere, when all the while you’re dragging this ungodly invisible monster. Have you ever been to the outer banks of North Carolina late in the fall? On dark nights you can go out on a deserted beach — you can’t see, but you can feel, you can hear above the breaking of the waves — there’s something gigantic just off the beach — thrashing about and breathing real heavy. Do you see the absurdity of me trying to drag you along while you remain chained to your beliefs? Anything less than intelligence is not intelligence.
Let’s turn to a prime example of the direct, complex simplicity I’m describing. Thinkers throughout recorded history have pointed out man’s inability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood. Hindu and Greek philosophers wrestled with this problem. The Christians labeled it a spiritual deficiency. Later the psychologists suggested that our senses may delude us. Anybody who has passed for intelligent in the last 4,000 years would agree that it is indeed a sticky problem. Do you know why man’s inability to distinguish true from false presents such an apparently difficult question? Because there is no difference! Is that not a kind of exhilarating, convoluted pristineity?
Let me be more specific about the rattling of the cage. Your nervous system has two parts you can become aware of: You feel as if there is one part that talks and something else that listens. This is what I sometimes refer to as the two voices at the higher end of the nervous system. These two parts are the basis of such notions as spirits talking to people, intuition, the subconscious mind and dreams of gods. We’re talking about the brain itself — what ordinary people call intelligence — the mental life of man. One of these potential speakers rattles the cage of the other one. It is as though one part of the nervous system tempts, torments, challenges and tries to direct the other part on the basis of, “Well, do you believe this?” And all this time the other part of the nervous system is trying its damndest to actually think, to make the nervous system operate at optimum efficiency — trying to tell the other part, the part that can talk, “Well, dammit, shut up.” But an ordinary person can’t get any internal peace and quiet. The noisy part of the nervous system continues rattling the cage, beating a stick between the bars, questioning, tempting and tormenting. “Well, how can you prove that to me?” The tormentor doesn’t deal in proof, he deals in belief, and he continually rattles the cage of intelligence.
If you were really “thinking” in the sense I mean, your thinking would have no connection to belief. If you could put into operation this intellect that I’m talking about, the one complex enough to be elemental and direct, so that you could just look at things and not get rattled — if that was in operation then what you believe would just evaporate. Your sad background, the traumas in your life, beliefs in your apparent culture and religion, family schisms — all the bruises, all the subconscious motivations and hindrances that you ever thought you had picked up — all that would be nothing more than background noise.
Then you could simply look at things and see plain information. In this way you would see things other people don’t see. This has nothing to do with secret knowledge — the information is right in front of everybody all the time. It’s just that nobody can see it. You’re supposed to discuss things, think about them, talk about them, weigh the pros and cons. Such City thinking amounts to an unproductive hobby. Out in the Bushes thinking is not a hobby, it’s a way of life. And out in the Bushes we’re talking real thought, new thought. Unimpeded by rattling cages.
As long as we’re turning the simple into the complex and vice versa, let me give you another good example: The Audiophilic Allusion. The trend in home stereo equipment is to take the basic three elements of a sound reproduction system — source, amp and speakers — and add all sorts of outboard gear such as equalizers, expanders and compressors, extra speakers and surround sound. You can easily spend several times the cost of your basic system on extra gear to make the sound more lifelike, according to your tastes. Even the cheapest stereo setup you could put together probably includes a peripheral component or two. If you’ve got a few bucks and you like to play music loud, somebody at K-Mart’s going to at least sell you a fifty dollar equalizer. So we have people with all kinds of budgets adding on outboard equipment to process sound. Now in every field there’s going to be a bunch of nuts. In this particular field they’re known as audiophiles — they go, not to K-Mart or anywhere else for extra processing devices — they go in the opposite direction. They’ll take all the built-in control knobs on the amp — bass, treble and tone, for instance — and set them at neutral. The audiophiles’ story is that the sound should come out as the gods intended — that it should not be fed through any extra processing. There is a philosophy that’s been around for a couple of decades, that when it comes to really reproducing sound, the heart of what you’re dealing with is an amplifier. A true audiophile has already dismissed all the EQs and compressors and expanders and reverbs and so on. It’s literally impossible, but the audiophile would say that all you need — the ultimate amp — would be a straight wire with gain. Gain, as you might already know, refers to volume control. The idea behind this hypothetical ultimate amp is that when you run current through any sort of circuitry you’re adding distortion, whether you hear it or not. (The audiophiles don’t even care whether you can hear it — that’s the point of being a fanatic in some field.) Intellectually the audiophiles are picturing paradise for them — the minimum distortion possible. (Of course they can’t ever get into what happened in the studio, and the mixing. You can’t fool around with somebody’s hobby, you’ll ruin it.)
Can you see that in a sense the kind of complex thinking I was talking about would be like a straight wire? Lean, out of debt — debt-free intelligence. That kind of intelligence would be a straight wire with gain. Almost no distortion, no cross talk in there. (Cross talk is the term for music picking up noise from stereo components, florescent lights, the AC line and the like.) The music comes out pure! The thinking comes out pure! You’re not dealing with beliefs, you’re not dealing with all of the apparent noise and distortion that everyone else is forced to deal with in the nervous system. The brain itself is producing the same kinds of problems as those nut audiophiles see in the world’s best amplifier. It handles 10,000 amps and it still puts out noise. The sound from the amp does not come out exactly as it went in. What goes into ordinary intelligence through the senses — say you’re looking at a group of people doing something — or somebody talking to you — does not play in your intelligence in its original form. Perceptions get distorted to some degree — there is this kind of cross talk, this kind of noise that is added. The new intelligence that I’m talking about would be almost a straight wire with gain.
Belief — anything less than actual knowledge — has no place dancing with knowledge. As far as thinking goes, you should be almost stripped — you should be ready for combat — you should not be carrying around anything extra — no backpack, no mementos, nothing. You don’t need any extra gear to think correctly. In an intellectual sense you should be a “lean, mean fighting machine.” Almost a straight wire with gain, that’s you. There is a kind of lightness to it, a kind of directness — in a sense you lose a whole lot of intellectual fat. You no longer have to continually wrestle around trying to shift your weight and get your gut above your pants, thinking, “Well, some of the things he talks about I can almost think about, but then…” What you’re saying is, “Then I’ve got to dance with my own fat.” Or, “I’ve thought about this and I’m not sure I believe all that…”
I never asked you to believe anything. I’ve got nothing to tell you to believe — I don’t believe anything! Nothing. I don’t even believe This. Because if you can believe This, then you can disbelieve it. Maybe not the same exact part, but that doesn’t matter. If you’re going to believe part of something then you have set yourself up with a debt that’s got to be paid. You can’t take gifts from the City. Don’t let ’em pin medals on you. Don’t let ’em give you anything. Because if you’ll believe one thing then you’ll believe something else. If you believe some part of This (which I’ve told you, don’t), then there’s no way out, none. You’ve done yourself in because the mathematics of the City is going to catch up with you. If you believe something I tell you, then sometime there will be something you’ll have to disbelieve. You and I will have gone through a number of years together and nothing will have happened. The .painevitable mathematically ordained non-belief will rattle the cage of your existing intelligence.
Let me introduce one more particular, the great ESR: the Exaggerated Sense of Range. The ESR is a specific way in which the nervous system, man’s intelligence, believes it can do more than it does. For instance, I can say people do not change. Why is that not common knowledge? Why can’t you even remember that all the time? The ordinary nervous system hears that people can’t change and says, “It’s not true. I have evidence in my life to the contrary.” This is the ESR in operation and here is how it works (there’s nothing exotic or complicated about it): Everybody can respond to the statement, “No one can change,” by pointing out that, “I do not think the same way every day. I do not feel the same way every day. I get in a new environment and I think differently. I’m a different person at home than I am at the office.” All of these replies are true enough — but the ESR is still present. The ESR works because ordinary City intelligence has no continuing sense of time. At City level, consciousness does not operate in a continuing 4-D environment. Thus, City consciousness cannot take into consideration that although what it said seems valid — “I don’t think, don’t feel the same way all the time.” — the range of variation amounts to having only two or three chords that play over and over again.
“There’s the key of E flat, my everyday key. And there’s my A flat minor, because I do have a temper, people can push me too far, I’ve got a short fuse. And there may be a kind of passing key or chord — perhaps a G seventh.” The nervous system at the ordinary level sees the two or three keys as a more extensive range than actually exists: “In a 16-hour period I can be caught up in fuming, then I can get over it — I can have a good laugh, I can go out and run, and I am not thinking the same way any more.” Since there is no continuous awareness of time to simultaneously contain all these little shifts, ordinary intelligence can’t see it’s repeating the same chords over and over. You habitually believe there is a whole lot more to you than there is. A whole lot more. And I’m not merely referring to your doing the correct autopsy on yourself and looking in there and seeing there’s nothing but blood and guts and pretty yucky at that:
“Where is ME?”
“You see the blood?”
“Yeah.”
“You see the guts?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s you!”
Beyond that kind of too-physical a description, in what would appear to be the nonphysical realm of thought, of personality, people have an exaggerated sense of who they are. They think, “I can feel different ways, I can have different thoughts — I’m a complex guy.”
As long as you continue to believe you’re more complex than you are, it’s useless to continue to believe that you’re involved in some kind of struggle to change. You don’t like one of your modes, you don’t believe you should feel a particular way, and you think some great change has occurred when you go from one chord to another. You are simple. You’ll survive, but you won’t flourish. You’ll play the same two or three chords over and over until you die.
Only the complex can be simple and only those who are consciously simple can be complex. Real complexity doesn’t appear complex.
But it is.