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Tape #2625 recoded January 01, 2001
Notes by CF
Begin: Somebody wrote me and made me think of something in a certain way in which I had not done previously. It inspired the daily news a few days ago. He had made reference to me in his letter. (We all know by now I am not very impressive. I am not impressed by me. I am kind to animals and in direct conversations I never hurt people’s feelings. That is not impressive and that should be minimal.) The guy that wrote to me was an artist. A writer. He was familiar with me, my writings, blah blah blah. He was aware no matter how great an artist he eventually repeated himself. He said I continually appeared to stay fresh. He gave me two questions. Why he had not become famous or published? (He went in to some detail.) The second part, the more important part, was how did I stay fresh? How could I advise him on staying fresh and struggle against the repitition of himself.
04:00 The first part I discard. No one can predict that. There are to many variables in life to predict the future. Only idiots do it. Now to the real question. I am not trying to quote it. He was dissatisfied. He had been satisfied with his art and his originality and yet he got no interest from publishers. He mentioned the daily news and how did I manage to do it.
09:00 Here is the answer as far as I know it. You have to do one thing. Please yourself. Except…But..I will use him. .I wrote him and said you can only please yourself. I also wrote that “I know as soon as you read this you will have thoughts immediately that say “I already do that.” And that I suggested it is otherwise. He would not be concerned about it otherwise. Most of you can here the genuineness of what he is saying. He had read Gurdjieff and was familiar with the term waking up.
12:00 What I mean is you must have no conditions, no reservations, nothing else in mind…. For instance when the people here in Atlanta, attending on a regular basis began to diminish greatly I knew why. It just began to happen. I use to solicit questions. I hardly do it all now. My consideration for you now is “I hold back a lot.” I do not consider that misdirecting. I play it by ear. For instance, a few nights ago I commented what a shame you were not awake. That you were hungover. It is not your fault. It is my fault. What I mean is I did not please me. The real point is if some of you were pleased when the night was over. But if I get through and I did not please me (I do not rehearse or write this down) I have nothing to expect. I normally please me. That is the answer to the man’s question.
15:30 You have proverbs several thousand years old saying “You have to be true to yourself” or variations of that. From one quite real point i see “waking up” as living a life that only pleases you. There is a sticky point as always. The ordinary people agree to it and say they do it. You cannot show or talk them into seeing that’s not true.
16:53 When you are part of the herd, mentally, when the herd moves, you move. It is the same thing as physically being in the middle of the herd with a like-minded cow but when the herd shifts, you shift. The idea of being true to yourself, ( which is to wake up. )is as good as any proverb but it still has the same verbal quagmire with ordinary people. Our thinking is not constructed to see this verbal quagmire.
19:00 The possibility of not taking your plagiaristic mind, your cannibalistic thinking, of not taking it seriously, it is the only possibility. That is what waking up is. The rest of this is bullshit. It is not right or wrong. If you say the world is asleep and I am not, you are asleep. It is not an attack. It is smoke. “True to myself” What self? “True to my beliefs” If someone asks you something and you know it will make them feel bad and you will say it anyway you are irreversibly asleep. It is not wrong or right. It is the illusion of “What I think is What I think.”
23:00 If you have seen to the bottom of man’s secondary reality then you can be true to yourself. You have a different self to be true to. Everyone else has a non self, a herd instinct to be true to. All of us under ordinary conditions “being true to yourself” is whatever you do.A subordinate asks how her hat looks and you say it is ugly. The boss asks you how the same hat looks on her and you say it is lovely. We have a “self” (under ordinary conditions) as the moment dictates or as the herd moves.
25:00 It is no different than a fish is from water. Being awake is you recognize, Well, I am a fish and I am in the water. Then you can be true to yourself. If you will take this seriously, my use of the word seriously, (all of you who are seriously interested in this sort of thing is an artist of sorts) if you will look, look at yourself, you can find something.
26:00 Whatever you do up to a point, you do it to satisfy you. (It may satisfy someone else. That is why I do not like this sentence) You can think you are doing it and you are not. He would not have been asking me these questions if he were past this point. He may written me to say hello.
29:00 It is not hard to see after the fact. In most aspects of your life you are taking in to consideration what other people think. It is normal and people do not realize it.It is a valid description of being asleep. Your body is going to be what it is physiologically. Your mind can say I should not weigh this much. Your weight does not hear your thoughts say you need to lose weight. It is in the realm of thinking that people are not true to themselves. You are only trying to affect something that is imaginary to begin with.
36:00 The conversation, the voiceover, the monologue, going on in your own head which you forget is a voiceover and you take it as being a dialogue of you reflecting on you and others and it is no such thing. If you try to be true to that voiceover you can not get anywhere. It will not awaken you. Years ago I described an awakened man is someone who could say something and walk away from his sentence and forget it. There is no period to a sleeping man’s mind. There is a comma. There is no satisfaction.They look outside to the rest of the herd and say ” what do you Think?” If you are not popular you are not satisfied. There is nothing wrong with that. It is the way things are in the secondary world. Physically you cannot eat once. You have to eat continually.
40:00 In the secondary realm there is no conclusive satisfaction. Getting your complaints to stop is the closest you can get to satisfying yourself, to being more awake, to being more enlightened. You cannot change life. You cannot change what you are. You can operate within your limitations and talents. Consider it may not be as obvious as you think. Your brain says “Well, I strive constantly to be honest and straightforward.” If you look you will see that is a lie. You are monitoring the potential reaction to the herd. It is this huge network of 6 billion neural connections (Your brain) and they are all tied together. Indirectly they are all tied together to the other 6 billion people. It is energy flowing and life being alive.
45:00 It is silly to say you have a thought. A thought goes through your head. It is a feedback system. A reaction in one mind is connected to the reaction to the other’s mind. It is not individual. I am, in my brain, mechanically, naturally, and inescapably a preening, stupid, clumsy cow. (Conditionally it comes and goes) I am in the midst of a herd, and without them I do not know what would happen to me physically, but there I am. See that and that is the end of it. At least you do not get metaphorically trampled trying to believe that you are going to get out of it. It is refreshing to see this for yourself.
48:00 If you understand the situation, and you do it to please yourself you are not going to hurt anyone else. You are extremely mindful of your environment. You realize you are in the midst of a herd. It takes real looking. It is part of our nature. In your thinking, a self balancing and self fueling network, your thinking is being influenced by the rest of the world. It is being influenced by the other 6 billion minds. That is what ordinary thinking is. Your consciousness is only operating on what is available to everyone else. I assume you see what that will get you in the way of understanding.
Jan’s Posted Daily Fresh Real News
January 1, 2001.
Everything that has no physical existence
also has no objective standards,
thus about them,
men have a multitude of conflicting opinions.
Everything that exists only as a concept
is forever subject to unending criticism.
To be ordinary is to not only have a brain
pre-programmed to be full of criticism of the world of concepts created by mans brain,
but to also accept them as naturally valid.
The few, on the other hand,
are distinguished by the fact that
another part of their brains conscious activity
simultaneously finds something un-ignorably peculiar, and questionable about this species-wide phenomenon.
To be an ordinary, sane, sophisticated,
and well-informed human being is to have a mind full
of thoughts concerning how the lives of human beings could be undoubtedly made better if certain changes,
quite obvious to your thoughts, were implemented.
From each mans individual view,
and from that of humanity’s collective one,
the veracity of this is beyond question;
the mind of every normal man of this planet easily sees ways in which life would be improved for everyone if but certain changes were made in the way men run their lives.
Via this inherent mental position are beneficial alterations gradually affected in mortal affairs,
but such is not occurring in the manner conceived of by ordinary minds.
What troubles a few men and women,
here and there throughout human history,
(even should it not be so understood),
is that their brain is not completely sold on the critical
ideas that it itself naturally produces.
To be human & ordinary is to have thoughts that say — something is not right;
to be one of the few is to have thoughts that say something is not right about the thoughts you have that say something is not right.
Ordinary minds cannot satisfactorily explain exactly why things seem inherently — not right,
and why all attempts to correct things
never conclusively do so,
nor can the thoughts of the few explain exactly,
(even to themselves),
why they are unable to fully embrace this
majority view of things.
(Although the ordinary do not notice it thus), it could be said in their regard that:
Being constantly critical of things is hell,
but then for the few you would have to say:
Being uncomfortable as an unwitting host for unrelenting criticism of things, and not understanding what any of it is really about
is doubly hellish, (or at least, extremely annoying)”.
(In case you have not noticed),
there are a lot more people who claim to be seriously interested in being enlightened, and awakened than pragmatically are;
for every thousand who wave a map,
one actually making the journey is surprising.
The rest are satisfied with just having acquired a new,
somewhat exclusive basis for an additional feeling that — something is not right!
but they never seek to get to the bottom of
that very sensation.
Saying: I am intelligently dissatisfied with life
is proof of no intelligence;
saying: I am dissatisfied with my views of life
is the initial distinction of the few,
but without a person eventually realize that they
do not personally understand the nature of their dissatisfaction,
no change within them is possible;
the furniture in their dream rooms can be rearranged,
but escape from the rooms themselves will forever evade them.
Hearing that, Nothing is wrong in life
will accomplish nothing;
what will produce results is a full bore investigation of what is behind yours & mans natural belief thus.
Without a comprehension of the machinery,
no pondering of the intangible products coming off the assembly line will ever reveal anything useful.
Being ordinary is having a necessary, mental illness;
the belief that something is wrong,
and everyone has treatments to suggest,
but no one even has the right diagnosis! —
want to know why? —
because there is no right diagnosis.
The proper diagnosis would be your personal diagnosis of what causes you to make such diagnoses.
A man on the way to awakening is a doctor amidst his routine diagnosing who is suddenly thus struck:
What am I doing here in this phony white coat making these meaningless diagnoses?
The time when useful advice about a matter
would in fact — be useful
would be before the matter occurs,
but since this is not how life works —
everyone ends up in a dream world,
one fractured with faults.
It then is a question of whether a man can,
after-the-deed-is-done,
properly diagnose the basis of the initial
MIS-diagnosis that brought him to where he is now.
The “basis of” — not whatever verbal, mumbo-jumbo
made up the misdiagnosis.
The continual bouncing back & forth between
being in your old, natural and unwitting mental state,
and momentarily in one wherein you see the folly of the old one, and to which you long to never return,
but without ever understanding what is going on,
is like having a doctor visit you, time and time again,
after you have just died, again and again and again.
All right boys & girls: can we all spell,
world class frustration?..okay then,
can any of you see a narrow side street named:
Not at all necessary?
and do you recognize that street as being your
brains own ability to damn near conceive of what it is
doing by way of its self-reflections,
spelled out in YOUR mind as — thoughts,
thoughts with an overall sensation that,
— something is not right.
To be without an individual understanding of what life, and being a human alive is about
is to be in the position whereby the
automatic thoughts endlessly passing thru your head
act as a doctor,
standing beside your bed,
offering a never ending stream of useless diagnoses,
and meaningless advice,
as you lay there passively nodding your head as though you appreciate the efficacy and insight of his idiotic comments.
Which is the greater idiocy:
the voice-over in your head to your life — or
your taking it seriously?
One rulers position:
Assurances to all — security for none.
Men should be constantly assured,
but yet should never FEEL secure.
This is what makes them — REAL men.
You should be such a ruler to your own domain.
JAN
P.S. We are starting a new feature for our readers:
the establishment of: J.C.s Inner Circle,
whereby, if you are a member, for $9.95 per month,
I will not tell you what is going on in my private life,
nor anything about me.
Those who do not understand a matter
will offer endless examples of it.
No one understands what “being asleep” is,
thus they offer endless examples of it.
The correct understanding of “being asleep”
is understanding that it only exists in examples of it.