The Pretence of Anything is the Thing Itself
Audio = Stream from the bar below
AKS/New Item Gallery = jcap 1989-01-11 (0444) scan
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Transcript = See Below
Keyword = Dog tummy rub hand
Curation = 4D Science
Summary
Jan Cox Talk 0444 – January 13, 1989 * – 1:10
Notes by TK
Kyroot to :04
More on lower animal intellectual inability to make distinctions of separation of elements in a process (e.g., dog’s stomach vs. man’s rubbing hand) from a verb into two nouns. To a dog, “food” cannot be separated from the act of eating it. The Real Revolutionist must forge an enriched seamless spectrum between “environment” and intelligence; an unnatural new complex merger between “out there” and “in-here”.
Man the “social animal” = man engaged in additional energy transactions beyond the purely animal, i.e., talk. For instance, gourmets get energy not only from eating, but also from the talk of eating. It is man’s singular responsibility on the planet –social talk. The ultimate use of talk as extension of lower level functions is talk about oneself; living and talk- about-living (i.e., “who I am” and “what’s happened to me”). No one has any recourse in this talk; Life expects, demands and depends on it. When a Revolutionary Group refrains from talk it leaves energy available for other uses.
Everybody has some estrangement of some sort. How to cure it: act with Revolutionary pretense that things could not be better between you and the estranged; act as if the estranging event never happened. No one can withstand such pretense, although Life will effect resistance thru the other in this process which gives the weak of resolve an opportunity to abandon their course. The Real Revolutionist cannot abandon the course; must shed all estrangement.
And Kyroot Said…
Everything eventually passes into something somewhat unlike
itself, or alternately, into something quite near itself. (Helps
keep life interesting for the easily confused.)
***
Being in a marching band is no assurance you know your right
foot from your spit valve.
***
One Man sez, “I’m just a shadow of my former self,” and his
partner sez, “What an improvement.”
***
Man told his son, “Look, if you’re gonna be a pink flamingo,
don’t be so on your OWN front lawn.”
***
Another Unanswered City Question: Is there a lock on the
king’s door?
***
It’s hard to get good accommodations during a flood.
***
Men who claim to realize a deep difference between the sexes
are one thing; those who claim to understand the difference are
another piece of cheap pottery altogether.
***
There was this one guy who loved to run about and shout,
“OK, spread it all around,” and when asked “Spread what?”, he’d
say, “That’s right!”
***
In the City there seems to be two distinct levels of poetry:
on the first, the scribes are all melancholy and dour, and the
second level has never been reached.
***
Never trust a god who tells you to “get a haircut.”
***
One city guy sez the only possible reason he doesn’t like
being himself is that by so being, it keeps him from the joy and
privilege of being able to meet and get to know him.
***
In the more complex, more revealing world of rubber reality,
I offer the surprising prize of indirect disclosures. (Plus, I
can guess your weight.)
***
My latest nomination for the Safe Statement Award: Man
says, “I can foresee the possibility of some criticism.”
***
A one legged man doesn’t need a compass.
***
There’s a seamstress in Budapest with a small shop not far
from where Samuel Coleridge once lay down, who sez there’s no
real reason you should go around in public with all those rips
and tears.
***
Don’t be vague; that is, accidentally, unavoidably,
mechanically vague.
***
There’s this other guy in that free-fall city park who
stomps about shouting, “You gotta watch that stuff,” and on some
Saturdays has his half twin brother with him who adds, “That’s
for double sure.”
***
Although things are as they are, and at any given moment
could not be otherwise, ’tis also connected on around the corner
thusly: Corollary I: Everything has to be as it is, but not as
it is right this moment. Corollary II: Everything must be as it
is in its present juxtaposition, but not so in “free time.”
***
Those who pretend correctly, are.
***
Anything you got that you still owe on ain’t worth having.
***
Transcript
LIFE LIKES YOU TO TALK
AND
THE REVOLUTIONARY PRETENSE
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1989
Document: 444, January 13, 1989
I want to pick up where I left off last time — having to do with dogs and tummy rubs. I was trying to get all of you to do a trick: Think about a dog, and that he has no higher nervous system activity, cannot think and is not conscious in any way. Then imagine that the dog could be made aware of his state, and also could be made aware of how a human would perceive the normal state of a dog. Then imagine that someone comes up and rubs the dog’s tummy. So you have this hand — “Hand, see?” — and the hand comes down to the tummy and you say, “Feels good, right?” and the dog would have to answer, “Yes.” But there is an important perceptual difference between a human and a dog. A dog can enjoy having his tummy rubbed by you. But without human intelligence, the dog cannot perceive the difference between your hand and his tummy.
Now at a certain level you have to say the dog knows the difference between your hand and his stomach — even at his ordinary level. He won’t bite your hand, and he won’t lick his own stomach the way he licks your hand.
But here’s the difference: The dog will never mistake your hand for his stomach — BUT — when the hand comes down to rub his tummy, the process merges into one thing. A dog does not separate the pleasurable process of his tummy being rubbed into two distinct components (“nouns”) — only human intelligence does that. Only human intelligence would split the act — the verb — into the two nouns, “hand” and “tummy.” What would pass for the dog’s swinging doggie door — his intelligence — does not in any way take into account or recognize any distinction between “in here” and “out there.”
Here’s an example I’ve used before. You yell, “Hey, little darlin’, time for some food!” And the puppy runs right up to his dish. But trust me: for him food does exist as a noun. An unopened can of food does not mean anything. All that exists for him is “eating” — the process. He may run right to the can opener at mealtime, but only because his system knows it’s going to be able to “eat” soon. Without human-level intelligence, a creature cannot put together “hand” and “tummy” and make that come out “tummy rub,” or combine “hand” and “food” and make it come out “eating.”
A fish does not know it’s living in water; the swinging door of fish intelligence does not include that subtlety. Man operates somewhat the same way, but at a higher level, because man has an additional responsibility in the energy/food chain. Homo sapiens have reached the level where they have to differentiate between “food” and “getting food.” A human can anticipate hunger tomorrow and call up the local grocery to see if they still stock soup for tomorrow’s dinner.
City intelligence has a swinging door that insists upon a distinction between “in here” and “out there.” A Real Revolutionist has to forge a more complex, a more seamless spectrum between what would seem to be his intelligence and the environment. I am NOT saying that a revolutionist should attempt to return to some more innocent “lost state” of man — to the time before man was subject to the “in here/out there” swinging door syndrome. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with that old story of humanity’s fall from grace and out of the garden. What I’m saying can sound like you’d be better off back in the garden, but to say that is like saying you’d be better off as a dog. You sure would be — if you want to be a dog.
If you want to go “back to the garden,” you’re asking to go backwards and, if you’re interested in This Activity, you’re also asking for a certain sort of tire blowout that may blow you right off the road. In a real way, humanity is a full twist up on the evolutionary spiral from all other creatures. And in This Activity, you have to go up, not down.
A Real Revolutionist has to forge a sort of unnatural collusion between his intelligence and his environment. You must willfully forge a new, enriched, complex merger between “in here” and “out there.” Some of you have probably at one time taken enough drugs to experience being “blown away.” People throughout history have tried to visually or verbally describe their experience of that state: they’ve written that they felt one with the universe; they’ve painted melting watches, screaming sunsets, everything running together… I’ve just told you what actually happened to them. I’ve been referring lately to the “swinging doggie door” because most of you know what a pet door is. In this context, humans could be said to be Life’s “man door.”
Another thing: various people have described man as “the social animal.” That’s very interesting, but I can take the description a step further. Humans are creatures which carry out all of the same energy exchanges that all other animals do — PLUS one more complex energy exchange. That additional energy exchange is…talking.
Take as an example one particular category of human: gourmets. Gourmets not only enjoy EATING, they enjoy TALKING about eating. Let’s suppose you had a very limited palate: maybe a doughnut and a warm beer was your idea of dinner, let’s say. So you look at those fancy slick food magazines and think, “Geez, how cheesy! Those recipes are just phoney baloney fried burgers!” And maybe you listen to a couple of chefs on TV and they go on and on and on, TALKING about eating. The conversation may seem stupid to you, but those people get energy from that activity — that energy transaction — as well as from actually eating.
Another good example is verbal eroticism, the “telephone sex,” that goes on these days. Suppose you go to a good dirty movie and the visual goes out, so all you’re getting is the soundtrack. You might sit there for a while, but you’d probably get up and leave eventually. Yet, sex is a favorite topic among talk show hosts these days. The point is, more and more people are getting additional energy not only from the sex act, but from TALKING about sex. The talking about it is a more complex level of energy transaction.
Now you can surely see that there are lower levels of energy exchange than human. What a worm does, for example, is very simple, but very necessary. Then you have a bird, who not only eats worms, but spreads seeds around so we all have plants for food — which is pretty important, unless you know something about carbohydrate exchange that the rest of us are not privy to.
But in a human, there is a singular energy exchange that exists in no other species. Talk is not useless and not unimportant. It is an energy exchange on a unique level that humans do not share with any other creature. So, no matter how stupid some talk — or almost any talk, by now — may seem to you, it is not stupid. You may think gourmet-ing (talking about food) is about the silliest thing you could do. To sit there and look at a full-page color picture of Rocky Road Ice Cream. “What’s the use of LOOKING at it?! If you’re going to look at it you might as well have the real thing so you can eat it!” But there is an important energy exchange going on.
How about this one. There’s a corner with a stop sign where you pull up and witness this incident: One car squeezes by like a streak and almost hits another car. And the guy in the second car screeches to a stop and then bangs on his horn, even though the first car is already long gone! Looks stupid, right? Wrong. You’re witnessing an energy exchange in which one of the participants is missing.
If you think gourmet-ing or talking about sex is weird, how about sports books? What could be dumber than paying to fight traffic and sit in the cold to watch someone ELSE exercise? And THEN, if that’s not enough, you go out and buy a magazine with pictures and talk about that very game you just watched. Or you sit down and eat pancakes with your sports buddy and talk for hours about the game…AFTER it’s over. “Geez. Look at that photo — did you see him make that jump shot?”
You can look at all the functions man and the other primates perform, and there’s not much difference in most of the activities — everything mostly has to do with the food chain (eating, being eaten, etc.) But then you have the “human intellect,” and that’s something different. The human intellect talks. Don’t be fooled: if it doesn’t talk, it isn’t up to the level of human intelligence.
Look at man’s additional functions this way: all hobbies, no matter how weird they seem to you, are layers built on top of the “animalistic” rest of the system. They can all be traced to a lower level: sports to exercise; pornography to sex; gourmet-ing to eating. Collecting stamps is a sort of higher extension of the old primitive pastime: hoarding food for bad times. No hobby springs forth out of nowhere. All this — what I’m calling “intelligence” — springs from something more basic, some function satisfying a need, which is just being carried beyond the level of the original need. You can say, “Hey, you have to have some sex, or the race will die out.” True. But beyond that, for humans, sex and many other activities have become a little more than that — they’ve become REcreational. We now have a situation where people “talk about” and recreate what previously happened down at a lower level. So the human level of energy exchange is higher.
You should already know the masterpiece hobby in the City: talking about YOU. Even if you don’t have any other hobbies, you’ve always got that one. “I’ll tell you what kind of guy I am… I don’t have any real hobbies, I know you’re asking me about that right now, and you’re right, I seem to be a sort of man without a hobby, but that’s just the kind of guy I am.” Don’t worry — he has the ultimate hobby.
There is a kind of global drama going on. Even people who seem to have no consuming interest in any particular part of life — those without “hobbies” — are going to TALK about life. You and everyone else are wired up to continually talk about living.
Anything you think I’ve said before about talk — if you took what I said as an attack on “useless talk” at times — you were correct. But remember also that Life needs this energy exchange. Life is depending on people to talk about life as much as they live life. Also notice, you did not have to learn to do this. If you’re so cheap as to say, “Well, my mom talked a lot and so do I,” forget that. LIFE talks a lot. Life likes to talk and Life likes you to talk a lot. Notice how strongly your own molecules are wired up to talk — you feel strange if you DON’T talk a lot. You feel compelled to continually talk about what has happened to you.
Consider all the strange groups throughout history that have staggered around and then huddled together and created a community based on — what? NO talk. Not talking has an effect. I’ve sometimes suggested little excursions to various people in which they were to refrain from talking for a while, or pretend they couldn’t talk. But there is no real benefit in cutting out talk altogether, in the long run. It’s useful to see something sometimes, but talk is important and is part of man’s responsibility. Talk is a way of getting energy from activities that have already happened, things that are already past. Memory, for example, is a way of eating things that have already died and been buried. But still, in the City, talk is like intelligence’s evil twin brother.
I keep getting questions about something that I’m going to address tonight. Everybody has some sense of estrangement from somebody; a friend, a relative. I mean something continuing, where if you walked into a room and saw that person or accidentally met them face to face, you’d be more than startled, you’d be disturbed. Or you may have a slightly different situation wherein you carry around a continuing sense of hatred, anger, or desire for revenge involving another person.
I get many questions about this, so I’m going to give you the cure. Not a treatment, a CURE. Here it is: The Revolutionary’s pretense that “there is absolutely nothing wrong.” The next time you see the person, just immediately pretend that “things could not be better.” There is no one in the normal bell curve of human life who can withstand that (if you’re dealing with someone who CAN, get away quick — they’re not even normally human). People simply can’t stand up under such a pretense.
You may have a situation so longstanding you think there is nothing at all that can be done about it. Right. Sure. All the “situation” consists of is an energy exchange that you’ve been feeding. Maybe your mother treated you badly when you were young and you still feel horrible about that. You’re still feeding that. Life knows that even if you’re not feeling bad about the “situation” right now, you’ll get back to it sooner or later. On your part, you feel sort of free to feel one way or another because of this little fluctuation — you don’t feel bad or think about the situation all the time — you don’t feel like you’re really ruled and dominated by it, even though you are.
Nobody in ordinary Life can withstand pretense — because if done properly, by a Real Revolutionist — there is no difference between “pretense” and “reality.” The Revolutionary pretense is no longer pretense. Or, even if it is, nobody else can tell. I’ve told you before that you can stop any situation between you and anybody — all you do is pretend that things are the way you want them to seem to be. I’m not kidding, or exaggerating. You can have a DEADLY estrangement between you and someone else, and go to them and operate on the basis of your PRETENSE that everything is all right — that things couldn’t possibly be better — and in the time it takes to snap your fingers everything will change. Oh, ok, if you can’t stand that, maybe 30 or 40 seconds, maximum.
If you and your mother were so bad together that you haven’t spoken for 20 years, and you can go up to her and hug her the same way you did before whatever it was that happened — then the estrangement is all over. I’ll take you on a little side trip here: It MAY take her a few seconds to get over the shock. And that pause — those few seconds before the start of a new dance — is Life giving you (the person who started the pretense) EVERY OPPORTUNITY to — how shall I say this? — give up the game…
Do you understand that if I could trick ordinary people to do this, it would about wrap them up right there. They’d get to that point, where their mom would say, “What????” and they’d go, “Uh oh,” and stop. And the game would go on. But you have to ignore all that. “Hey, mom, you look great! Lost a little weight since the last time I saw you, didn’t you?” Your mom might be panting with shock, half-saying, “What do you mean, since the last time, it’s been twenty years!” and still, after those few seconds or a minute are over, nobody on the planet will be able to withstand your pretense. The whole game will be over. But only a Real Revolutionist can keep up the facade long enough to make twenty years of work by Life evaporate in 60 seconds.
The Revolutionary pretense is a direct interference with the food chain, a direct interference with the dance. At that level, you can almost order Life around, because it’s not on a high enough level to matter to Life. But to you, it can be very significant. Doing this once can hit you harder than listening to me for who knows how long. All it takes it about a minute, and your pretense is now reality. Life cannot allow a pretense to be divided between, withstood by, two people at the same time. That’s just too much of a strain. So if you keep pushing, after just a little while, the energy pattern has to give.
You haven’t spoken to your mother in 20 years. Yet, if this is done correctly, she won’t be able to resist your pretense that everything is all right. “You coming over to my place for dinner? I’d like you to meet my girlfriend I was telling you about.” And after gasping a little, your mother will begin to be confused about whether you actually HAD told her about your girlfriend.
Of course, you should see that this sort of thing doesn’t happen out in ordinary life. Why? Altogether now: BECAUSE IT WORKS. And Life couldn’t allow that. Nobody does what I’m describing; the whole idea is insane. Yet all I’m describing is this ordinary little thing: hugging your mother like anybody would hug their mother…but you haven’t seen her for 20 years. What I’m describing’s not a treatment, it’s a cure. Ordinary people sit down and argue, apologize, plead, and go through a marathon session, but they NEVER do what you can do. They never do what works. When you do this sort of thing, YOU do it all. You set up the pretense, you force things in a certain direction, and after a few seconds of resistance…there goes the dance, right where you wanted to go.