Finding That Last “Cookie”
The following recordings are from Jan’s final years, when his voice was diminished and he spoke in a low whisper. Some listeners may find these tapes hard to listen to, or difficult to understand. Thus, as another option, read the transcript below.
Otherwise, turn up the volume and enjoy! Those who carefully listened to Jan during this period consider that he spoke plainly and directly to the matter at hand, “pulling out all the stops,” as he understood that these were to be his last messages to his groups, and to posterity.
Summary = See below
Edited Transcript = See Below
Condensed News = See below
News Item Gallery = None
Key Words =
Summary
2/20/04:
Notes by TK
There is an emotional element/feeling to the intangible world of man that makes it impossible for men to accept that it is absolutely separate and inconsequential compared to the physical world. There is an emotional satisfaction accompanying the intangible world that is based on Life’s own pleasure w/ same.
Awakening requires that the last vestige of emotional attachment to the intangible world be abandoned. It would be very interesting and potentially profitable for a man to discover what that last vestige is. To find that one holdout synapse that rejects enlightenment: your crazy-spot. (43:51) #3111
Transcript
02-20-2004 #3111
Edited by SA
At the heart of all of my talks for the last several years, all of my models and descriptions, has been the fact that we humans live in two worlds: the physical, tangible universe and an intangible realm. There are things that you believe you know, and then one day something changes, and you see those things in a whole new light, and it’s astounding. It’s liberating.
The first corner to turn on the way to waking up, to enlightenment, is to see that half of the world in which man lives is hard-wired, hard-nosed physical reality, but the other half of the world is stuff that man imagined. Man didn’t make up the physical elements of this planet. The physical elements were here when we got here, but intangible reality was not put together from elements that were already here. Everything in intangible reality, men had to make up.
It’s easy enough to say that the intangible world doesn’t exist, because it certainly doesn’t exist in the same sense as physical reality. Nevertheless, there is an emotional element to the intangible world of such an intensity that it is impossible for ordinary people to see past the emotion and grasp the fact that the physical and the intangible are two entirely separate realms, and that man lives in them both. Ordinary people make no operational distinction between eating and praying. Not realizing the distinction between the worlds is a very good description of being asleep, being unenlightened, being ordinary.
The emotional aspect of the intangible world is nothing surprising. In the past, I’ve said that neurons are fed by hormones, so the intangible world is not something that men’s minds simply decided to make up one day. Another way to look at this is that the blood that runs through you carries all of Life’s information to your brain, so that everything in your brain came from your liver, your stomach, and the rest of your body. You can say that religion, being intangible, doesn’t exist, and yet religion did not come from nowhere. Religion came from man’s physical reality, from his body’s physical reality. Religion came from Life.
That is the emotional reality of man’s intangible world, of all these things we made up—politics, psychology, religion, morality, nationalism, economics, everything listed in a college catalog that’s not a hard science. Art, literature, philosophy, sociology, from a physical view, are all nonexistent. They exist only in men’s words and thoughts, and nowhere else.
When I say those things don’t exist, I’m not being theoretical. Those things are just the electrical activity in our brains. All of the concepts that we talk about, that the whole world talks about—of supernatural beings, psychological forces, gossip about movie stars, the moral lessons contained in the latest mystery novel—compared to a rock, compared to the dirt on the planet, all of that is strictly theoretical. Those concepts have no weight, no mass, no physical existence. There’s no way you can measure them. They’re in no way objective. They may be entertaining, and some of them, such as believing there’s life after death, seem to make people feel good, but from our view, they are all meaningless.
You can treat intangible matters as sound waves. Consider them as broadcasts that Life sends into our brains, and it’s as though each man gets a slightly different broadcast. People in general have an emotional attraction, an emotional attachment, to everything that can be considered part of man’s cultural realm. Men are not drawn to the affairs of their cultural world for strictly intellectual reasons. There is a real attraction that comes from Life. Life likes what it has created in man’s cultural world. What Life has made up is not only present in the world of ordinary men, but is also present in people like us, and it’s present in a particular way. I’ve just made up an ancient story to explain this. Are you ready?
There’s an old myth from the Far East or the South Pacific that says that after you die, you face a judgment day. You arrive at the place of judgment and a Great Cosmic Force tells you that contrary to what you’d been taught, you will not be judged by what you did when you were alive on Earth. Everyone is welcome to enter Heaven, which is the same as saying that everyone is welcome to become enlightened. The Cosmic Force says, “All you’ve got to do to enter Heaven and become enlightened is to empty your pockets and leave everything of Earth, of your previous life, behind.” After each man empties his pockets, he’s instructed to walk through the gates of Heaven. What the men aren’t told is that those gates are actually a gadget that will detect anything a man still carries of his life on Earth. As each man walks through the gate, alarms start to blare, and that man is barred from Heaven. It turns out that almost everybody is barred from Heaven, because almost everybody holds onto some tiny remnant of their lives on Earth. Everybody holds onto one little cookie, one little thing that they can’t let go of. They tell themselves, “It’s just a tiny piece of cookie. The Great Cosmic Force will never know,” but when each man passes through the gates, the machine detects his cookie down to the smallest crumb, and he is barred from getting into Heaven and waking up completely.
There’s a specific example that’s tied to this subject. In an earlier talk, I mentioned that nobody ever knows exactly what I’m talking about, but I don’t mean just what I say. It could be what you say, if you understand completely what’s going on, and you start talking to other people about it the way I do. Nobody would ever understand exactly what you were talking about.
That statement goes a little deeper than just an abstract metaphysical reality. Through the years, I’ve had people who attended my public appearances come up to talk to me, and I’ve gotten letters and emails from people. I’d get an email, and it would say, “I listen to your talks and I’ve read all your books, and I just want to tell you that I know exactly what you’re talking about. You’re using a coded language as a metaphor for the great international banking conspiracy.” Or they’d say, “I really enjoyed learning from you. I have never heard anyone discuss so clearly the secret cabal that runs our government.”
As astounding as that is, I have yet to have anyone talk to me, even someone who’s been listening to my talks for ten or twenty years, without something similar happening, even if it’s not as extreme. I have never seen it fail. It will turn out that they still have one cookie clutched in their hand that they won’t turn loose of. The cookie they’re holding on to is commonly some political, religious, or cultural matter. They’re very upset because they have an absolute conviction that the practitioners of a secret cult of big-eared people are out to get them because their ears are too small. In other words, in one corner of their universe, they’re nutty as a fruitcake, which is to say, they’re ordinary.
As I understand it, getting rid of that cookie is a very gradual weaning process. I suggest that it would be useful for you to find out which cookie you’ve still got in your pocket that won’t let you be fully awake. Let’s say that you and I are talking, and you tell me, “You made me realize how much of life doesn’t exist in any real sense and that freed me from a lot of it. Now, I don’t worry about stuff the way I used to. I don’t take that kind of thing seriously, and I just try now to look out and study life and blah, blah, blah.” That all sounds fine, and you may think that you now have a truly clear understanding of all the things that ordinary people spend a large part of their lives fretting about—but look again. Look very, very closely. You may not be there yet.
I don’t mean to overdo this. I don’t mean that this one thing will necessarily keep you from waking up, or at least getting most of the way there, but it does show where your genetic temperament is nailed down. I can think of another image, of a whirlwind around your spine. As the whirlwind spins, it creates something like a magnetic field that holds your narrative in place in your conscious mind, in the conscious part of your brain. The whirlwind also holds the emotional content of your particular intangible world, of your personal narrative.
As I said, I’ve seen these cookies over and over again. I’ll sit over coffee with somebody who had been listening to me talk for twenty years, and who I assumed was on the verge of waking up. The conversation goes on and on, and finally he says, “Out of all I’ve got from listening to you, what stands out is how you really clarified my vision.” I hear something like that, and I know the cookie is about to peek out from that man’s pocket. The man continues, “You made me understand that the Chinese only opened up restaurants in America to slip in some kind of trick chemical that’s going to weaken our wills so they can control us,” or he says, “Your talks made me truly understand that we’ve got to kill all the red-headed people in the world, because they’re trying to take over the educational system.” Whatever the man tells me, it’s at about that level of insanity.
I’m exaggerating, but not by much. The things that people tell me are quite bizarre, considering that these are people who have gone partway down the road, who have gotten close to truly seeing what is there, but who are still clutching one cookie, which is all it takes. One idea stemming from man’s intangible world that some person takes seriously is enough to keep that person’s vision clouded.
It’s crazy, in the sense that if that cookie controls your consciousness, you will never see exactly what’s going on. You will never achieve enlightenment. It’s that simple, I guarantee. Your view may be, “I’ve got that down now. You talked about it enough, and it finally sank in that all of these things that people say are important, the entire cultural world, is just meaningless. Now, I see it for what it is.” I will bet, though, that if you talk long enough, your cookie would eventually appear. This is not because of anything personal to you. It’s not because of your intelligence. It’s because of the emotional content that Life has us feel.
Life didn’t have us make up the intangible world for no reason. I can see all sorts of purposes that the intangible world serves for Life. I’ve described how men, after they had figured out farming and domesticating some animals so that they had a reliable food supply, finally had some free time that wasn’t devoted to sheer survival. The men sat around a campfire, and consciousness, since it’s always running, started making up stories, but it’s not as if those stories had no connection to anything else going on in us.
The only things that we daydream about are things that are hormonally based. We daydream about real stuff. There is always an emotional element in everything that man makes up, even the wildest novels and the most obscenely meaningless movies, full of blood and guts and with almost no plot. You could look at a movie like that and say, “A twelve year old could write a better plot. That plot is just an excuse for plastic body parts and fake blood to fly through the air.” You could treat movies like that, books and magazines like that, as though they show consciousness gone amok, with no connection to reality—but you would be wrong. There is an emotional factor in all of the intangible world, even its sleaziest representations.
What I’m saying can be useful to you if you make a careful self-study. Your cookie may be as simple as holding on to some aspect of the religion you were taught as a child. That wouldn’t be surprising, because of how closely religion is tied to death, and to people hoping that there is another life after death. There may be some small piece of your childhood religion that you still don’t believe is fiction. You’d never thought to analyze it. You hadn’t even noticed it. If you can figure it out, you will see that the piece of religion you’ve been holding on to is not an idea, but a feeling that some aspect of religion is important, because it’s your only hope for an afterlife. I’ve seen many times that people are not aware of feelings like that. Your feeling may be triggered by words you hear or by something you see. You may drive past a church that looks like the one you used to attend. Suddenly a feeling arises in you, and the feeling is not about seeing religion for what you now know it really is. No. For that moment, at least, you are religious. That feeling is neither right nor wrong, but it shows that you’re still asleep.
I am saying again that there is still a piece of you that is ordinary. I don’t make judgments about people who listen to my tapes or come in person to hear me, and if a person keeps coming back, I assume they’re already awake, or on the way to awakening. I accept them as being like me. Then, twenty years down the road, we’re sitting together and that person’s conversation is lulling me into a nice state of thinking how great it is to know him, and he suddenly says, “I always knew that the Tasmanians wanted to take over the world and that they’re trying to enslave our minds. Listening to you has made that so much clearer.”
I suggest to you most strongly that every one of you has got something you’re holding on to. Your cookie may be connected to a fear, to a sense that there is some group of people that Life identifies for you, who are so far off the moral or political or religious path that they are dangerous to your well-being.
To wrap it up, let me state it again really crudely. I want to be sure that you’ve got this. There are people just like you, and if there were a scale to measure how awake a person is, then those people would be ninety-nine percent awake. Let’s say that consciousness is made up of a hundred synapses. Those people appear to have an awakened understanding of everything intangible. Ninety-nine of their synapses give an objective-sounding analysis of religion, politics, morality, culture, art. But they still have one synapse in charge of one statement, one view. That view might be, “Don’t lie to me and say there’s no God. That ain’t funny. That’s dangerous. And it’s not true. Don’t do that.”
That synapse won’t let go of its last cookie. It’s like a line from an old blues song that says, “Now don’t you talk about my mama!” There’s one cookie that everybody’s got, and if it’s not about religion or the fear of death, it’s about the international banking conspiracy. “Yeah, I’m wide awake about all these other ninety-nine things, but hey, that banking conspiracy, that’s for real. Don’t you talk about my banking conspiracy!”
I’m not saying that this one thing will keep you completely asleep, but it does have a hindering effect. If you are aware of your cookie, you may be looking at it mathematically, and figuring that ninety-nine of your hundred neurons now see everything as it really is, and so they outweigh that one crazy neuron. It doesn’t come up that often. It may only show up if you drive past a certain church. Then suddenly that emotional element that is at the basis of religion kicks in.
There is a reason why Life had us invent the idea of religion. Life gets something out of people’s belief in religion. If you still have that cookie, then ninety-nine of your hundred neurons may see the intangible world for what it is, but you’ve got one that is blind, because Life has some sort of emotional attachment, some need that is served by your cookie.
There is a cookie at the heart of the intangible world in general, and in all of us individually. As I said, that cookie is not floating up there in your head completely detached from every other thing going on in you, all of your feelings, your fears, your enthusiasms, your pains. The physiological reality of your body is not disconnected from the ideas that your brain creates when it receives Life’s broadcasts. There is a real connection. The blood that’s coming from your stomach and your liver and your lungs is the same blood that nourishes your brain. All feelings end up in your brain, in consciousness. But until you see them all, until you bring them all out, until you get down to that one hold-out synapse, and grab it and–if you can find it– you’ll know what to do. I don’t have to describe it.
You’re probably thinking, “I heard what he said, but I know that doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have any such hold-out synapse. I don’t have any cookie crumbs that I won’t let go of.” If you follow my advice anyway, and search for your cookie, I guarantee you an interesting expedition.
I’ll put it to you another way. People of your wherewithal have got no right to be crazy in one little, bitty place. It ain’t right. How about that? It ain’t right for a man mostly awake to still be crazy in one place. It ain’t fittin’ and it ain’t right. You know it ain’t. Find that cookie, and deal with it.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
ICHTHYOLOGISTS FAIL TO FIGURE IN
THE NOT-FISH FACTOR
IN THEIR STUDY OF FISH
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Reminding The Few That One And One Still Often Makes Two
February 20, 2004 ©2004: JAN COX
Mused one man: “If you can’t draw what you want in one continuous line —
you don’t really know what you want to draw. Humm…………same with ideas.”
A bit later the same guy further reflected:
“It’s surprising how much money you save if you don’t want anything,”
(him understanding that he was thinking money, metaphorically).
Greed is destructive — except in a certain area of consciousness.
At the border of one state a spokesman declared:
“We as a people are smarter than we realize,”
and from the adjoining territory came a voice that proclaimed:
“WE are dumber than we realize,”
and a chap passing overhead in a cool air balloon mused:
“Hostilities should commence shortly —
and thus will be spawned: man’s spiritual and intellectual worlds.”
(“Am I to assume that the terrain on which he looked
bears a real resemblance to the cortex?”)
One chap congratulates himself on being married for sixty years to his consciousness without one of them killing the other.
(“Killing,” he adds, “being open to figurative interpretation.”)
In man’s cultural reality: the prevailing position toward plagiarism is that
if the thief in any way added to what he stole — no robbery took place.
(Your take of this might be altered if you figure in the fact that
to survive in this realm — no other attitude is possible.)
Only amongst rats can rats live — same for rat synapses.
The nest life provides for the collective is constructed of both the collective,
and its subsequent reaction to the nest.
(“Is this why you can’t really get away from life?”
Is this a trick stupid question?)
When the publicist for one man’s city would start one of his frequent press conferences he would quickly stand and say: “I’ve had enough of this “ — and leave.
An easy way to cut in half the time you’re normally hypnotized
is to not think about other people.
To start off the day on the desired note,
one man would often spring from bed in his one room cabin —
look excitedly all around —
then yell out: “Okay! — where’d you hide all the elephants!”
(Certain features inside his brain always find this particularly humorous.)
A man with a world wide reputation for being able to find people lost in the wilderness is discovered to be responsible FOR people getting lost.
City Hosting Tip.
If the tempo of the party gets threatened by guests’ demands for cynicism,
and frustration, tell the band to play the song:
“Change Is Just An Illusion Anyway.”
If you’ve been identified as a critic of man — you’re a dumb one.
Men become married to the collective before they even get a chance to be virgins.
(“That’s why there is the activity talked about here, no?!”)
One of the park philosophers pitches his opinion that it was man’s deity
who provided the term: goddamn —
as his contribution to the overall acknowledgement of life’s inevitables.
In city eyes/I’s: any progress is some progress……….and no progress is also some.
A good short idea is the same as a good long one — just shorter.
If it weren’t for words: a thoroughly civilized man wouldn’t have much,
(and forget-about a sleeping one.)
How A Certain Matter Has Been Approached Elsewhere.
A man shot himself dead in the head —
then never displayed any acknowledgment of what he’d done.
One little ruffian in city park barked:
“Singing: ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’ won’t make you a ball player,”
and a second scalawag said: “It won’t make you a singer either,”
and a third kid standing nearby wondered: had there had been a third voice
in this story — what kind of metaphor would he have made of it.
One guy (who bristles at being called a: sorehead,
but insists rather that he is simply: an objective realist)
says that most city fun seems to consist of:
getting drunk —
falling down and hurting yourself —
then healing back up.
(Is this perhaps a form of: trick progress?)
Mostly when his brain phone rings, this one guy doesn’t answer —
(he says most are just unsolicited calls trying to sell him something).
At the reading of the deceased father’s will, one of his hazier children
(who had long loved to say that he: “Lived a life of symbolism”)
learned that he had been left a bunch of symbols.
(He subsequently wondered if the old man’s death had been a trick one.)
A metaphor stretched far enough becomes like cotton candy:
then you eat it — and it becomes metaphor again.
The certain man (from the real menu of but words and dirt) consumes only the latter.
An elderly chap notes:
“It is surprising how easily you can come to terms with hormones when you get old,”
(which about clears the books — since with most,
neurons cease being a bother way before then).
Spying.
Those who get on the inside react in two different fashions:
one group says nothing about it —
while the other shouts: “Hey look! — I’m on the inside.”
(To be precise; the second group is composed of people who only once
got a brief glimpse of it.)
“Might this be why they act like that?”
Might.
Thanks to the freedom of the city’s incorporeal marketplace,
and the ever shifting needs of the individual consumer,
it is now commercially safe to say: “No one-size bullet is right for everyone.”
At the earliest possible time, one father began telling his son:
“If you ever need help — come to me,”
but whenever he would do so the elder would rebuff:
“It’s every kid for himself,” and after thirteen years of this the boy said:
“If all you were ever going to do was tell me that it is: ‘every kid for himself’ —
why did you bother in the first place to say that if I ever needed help
I should come to you?”
The old man laid a hand on his shoulder and replied:
“I thought you understood how this works.”
(Today’s wrap is):
Everything affects everything else —
and the ordinary believe that so does every body — everything else.
This is why you never see photographs of the awakened man with a son. (Or eating words.)
J
P.S. On his left hand one man had tattooed: “With The Exception Of…”
and on his right: “There IS No Exception Of.”