The Meaning of Meaningless Babble
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
Transcript = See Below
Condensed News = See below
News Item Gallery = None
Key Words =
Summary
3/26/04:
Notes by TK
Mind, when not problem solving is a date/accounts book. The book is founded on audio input w/ memory. The power of sound: the said fills the content of the date/acct book. It is bothersome, irksome, driving. This is Life maintaining its internal vitality. Therefore do men continually comment on what has no physical practical import/purpose for their lives.
Consciousness aids in the survival and growth of Life Itself. This is evident in the constant, pervasive audio chatter of all men including that in the brain. Thought/speech written and uttered is life-instigated for its own benefit—not for an individual’s benefit. The driving principle: dissatisfaction of consciousness w/ its own content, thereby keeping itself roiling and participating in Life’s larger flourishing vitality. (40:57) #3126
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3126 People talking-they are dissatisfied with their consciousness and will say almost anything-say anything-but it’s life keeping a very specific part of its virtual innards-man’s consciousness- active and viable.
Transcript
03/26/04 #3126
Edited by SA
People make specific complaints about aspects of their consciousness, but I ask you to consider that people are by nature dissatisfied with their entire consciousness. Excluding the part of consciousness engaged in problem-solving, which takes up very little time in modern life, men go to great lengths to replace, even momentarily, their state of consciousness. Replacement is often done through resorting to entertainment, and the entertainment industry, from cable television to movies to publishing, is now one of the largest combined operations in the world. Despite the serious attempts of some academics to interpret the psychological, social, or political attraction that entertainment has for people, all forms of entertainment exist to serve one purpose—to give men something with which to alter their consciousness.
If you look a bit deeper, there is something else of interest. Although you could say that the primary purpose of consciousness is problem-solving, the second most significant and frequently used aspect of consciousness and the mind is memory, so that you can solve a problem just once and remember it, or someone else can solve a problem and tell you how to solve it, and you’ll remember their explanation.
If your consciousness is not solving problems, it’s primarily serving as a date-book and an account book. Consciousness is a date-book because the body by itself would not remember to go to the dentist on the seventeenth of next month. Consciousness is an account book to keep track of everything that people owe you, figuratively speaking—all the ways that you’ve been verbally mistreated.
Biologists tell us that man depends on sight for his primary orientation, but there is something about sound that men do not normally consider. Although you certainly can have fleeting visual memories, your mind’s memory and accounting functions are overwhelmingly an audio experience. Regarding the general workings of consciousness, visuals come and go, but audio is forever. When you’re running through your accounting of who has been rude to you, you generally remember verbatim an insult you heard thirty years ago, whereas the visual memory of where it was said, or even who said it, can fade very quickly.
There is a great deal of auditory material in your consciousness that seems to serve no practical purpose because it is not involved with problem-solving. If you remember things that have been said to you that you found offensive, and if you notice how much of that type of memory fills your consciousness when you’re not distracting yourself by watching movies, reading books, or daydreaming, you should understand why I propose that men in general find consciousness unsatisfactory, even though they don’t say it. They may admit that they are bothered by a certain recurring thought, but other than that, men do not seem to notice that they are dissatisfied with their consciousness in general. If I made such a comment, they would simply shrug it off.
Excluding its problem-solving aspects, the rest of consciousness is, on the surface, the meaningless tongue-wagging that goes on among men. Life will not let ordinary people look at consciousness in this manner. If we can see that much ordinary behavior is clear evidence that men are dissatisfied with their everyday state of consciousness, what can we make of the fact that there are these audios going on in our heads that serve no useful purpose? How can we expand that, to survey the world of sound among all men?
I propose to you that dissatisfaction is the audio part of consciousness, that the sound of human speech in consciousness is what men find unsatisfactory—what they are rattled by, bothered by, annoyed by, irritated by.
Those additional modifiers would probably be spoken regarding a specific instance. Ordinary people might say, “I don’t like it when my wife starts haranguing me about cutting the grass,” or, “I don’t like it when somebody goes on and on about how much they hate conservatives, or liberals.” Look deeper, and it’s not the specifics men don’t like. It’s the apparently meaningless conversation with which men engage each other, as well as that which goes on in each person’s consciousness without the need for an active conversational partner.
Why do men do it? Nowadays, almost all the reasons that ordinary minds might propose would be psychological. They might say that their parents didn’t listen to them enough when they were kids, so as adults, they’re always flapping their gums, or that they don’t have any particular physical skills, and they know they’re not great beauties, so they blather to get attention.
Those explanations are, at best, superficial and do not explain anything. Not only is there no question that consciousness helps man survive, but consciousness is what puts man in his unique position and gives him the easy life he has. There’s no doubt that consciousness is our primary tool for survival. A hundred years ago, the lifespan of humans in the U.S. was half what it is now. Our lifespans didn’t increase because our bodies got stronger in the last hundred years. It was consciousness, the mind, that learned to identify and treat disease, design sewer systems, and solve other health-related problems.
This may sound tricky, but you can never see what’s going on until you realize that Life itself is alive, which, in a crude way, is what men have attempted to realize with the idea of a god or gods. Men create gods in their own image and the god concept is a weak, diluted version of Life is alive. The idea that a god directs human affairs won’t work if you are trying to wake up, because interposing a personified god removes Life from itself.
Once you see that there is such a thing as Life, and that we are simply part of Life’s life, then, as strange as it might sound, it’s not difficult to realize that human consciousness doesn’t just aid man’s survival. Human consciousness aids Life’s survival.
I’m not going to try to describe how human consciousness aids Life. I don’t think that’s possible, any more than I can describe how Life itself is alive. I can say that you can not wake up, achieve enlightenment, realize the Great Liberation without realizing that Life itself is alive.
It appears that we humans are Life’s best work, Life’s most vibrant, most active product. We are in a state of constant growth and expansion in various ways, physically and otherwise. That is what I mean when I say that we are Life’s greatest work.
I’m not bragging about man, or about myself or you as individuals. Once you see that Life itself is alive, and that everything’s alive that’s part of life—ferns, worms, dogs—all of them are obviously serving a purpose or Life wouldn’t have them as part of Itself, but nothing even comes close to what man is to Life. We are obviously Life’s best, and possibly Its only, outlet for creativity, for growth, for expansion.
Once you see that, then you can realize that consciousness is Life’s best survival tool. You can observe this endless talk in a non-critical way and see that dissatisfaction with consciousness is firmly rooted in dissatisfaction with the constant noise in consciousness. The pictures, the visuals, play little part in your head. It’s the audio, and primarily the audio between people that I say is the foundation on which this dissatisfaction with consciousness rests. It’s the endless chatter that has no practical purpose.
Once you note that for yourself, once you can hear it, you don’t have to study it. You hear it in other people when they are continually talking about matters, oft times quite passionately, using hand gestures and pointing fingers in other people’s faces. Once you catch on to this, you realize that objectively, it’s a sham. People are not even interested in what they’re discussing in a quite interested-appearing manner.
Look at the chatter that goes on in your head day and night. How much of it is actually of interest to you? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent? Dare we even consider zero percent?
Try to catch a glimpse of the clatter, the chatter that your consciousness was engaged in just before you looked at it. It was probably one of a menu of old sound bytes that you repeat and repeat. You turn around and catch one and look at it, and consciousness gets filled up by you looking at it, and the chatter stops for a moment, but you know what your consciousness was just saying when you looked. Tell yourself, “That thought was just running on mechanically, with no words as best I can recall. I was snoozing and consciousness was just churning it out. If I brought that thought into controlled consciousness—if I wrote the thought down on a piece of paper, turned it into a coherent sentence like, ‘All politicians are crooks,’ then I could look at it.”
We’re not examining the validity or veracity of the thought. That’s irrelevant. Once you wake up, you realize there is no veracity to it. The idea that there is veracity to any of man’s second reality, that there is some way to judge whether it’s true or false, or worthwhile or not, is laughable—though when you’re caught up in it, it’s not laughable. It’s pitiful.
At any rate, look at the sentence you’ve written down. You wrote down a thought that your consciousness had without your permission or your active participation. Look at that thought. Are you interested in that thought? Ordinary people might say, “Sure am!” Are you interested in that thought?
That thought of yours is part of man’s collective reality, and it is nonsense. Consciousness is serving Life’s survival purpose. I’m all in favor of government, politics, and elections, as you and any other enlightened person should be. You should be the biggest supporter of civilization that could be known. Not for the reasons that ordinary people say they support those institutions, because ordinary people are living in a dream, but you realize what’s going on. You should be the first one to cheer when ordinary people holler, “Let’s hear it for the dream world!” Your cheer would be totally insincere. You are insincere most of the time anyway—but that’s another story.
The continual chatter between people, the blather that some people write and other people read, is all the same. From actual conversations between people discussing sports, politics, or religion, to the other extreme—the monologue going on in your consciousness about the same subjects—it is all almost entirely meaningless to the speakers. Once you recognize this in yourself, you can hear it in other people.
You’ll hear somebody say, “I’m going to speak to you about the morality of our teenagers because it troubles my soul when I see the great danger they’re in.” The speaker simply has no interest in what he’s talking about, which is why I so often used to write about ventriloquists. The speaker could be a world-famous figure, a theologian who is an expert in the psychology of teenagers. He’s saying, “This topic is dear to me because it’s so important in today’s time,” but you can tell that he might as well have a gigantic, invisible hand right up his spine like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Sometimes you can see it in people’s eyes, almost as if they are pleading, “I wish I were somewhere else. Anywhere else. I wish I didn’t have to stand here and go mi-mi-mi-mi-mi.”
The lack of meaning has nothing to do with the speaker as an individual. It’s not that in secret the speaker is a great sinner, and therefore he’s losing his taste for religion. Nor does his area of expertise have anything to do with it, because religion is no less, and no more, a phony-baloney subject than is psychology, or morality, or whatever the latest movie theme is. Religion, politics, entertainment—there’s no difference.
The subject of someone’s talk doesn’t enter into it either. A congressman says, “I’m here to speak on Senate Bill 215, which is a very important bill,” and you can hear that he has no interest in that bill. What I want you to realize is that humans have no interest in almost any of this. What interest is there to have? None. In that case, why are people engaging in this sort of empty chatter? Because they’re dissatisfied with their state of consciousness, and they will replace it momentarily with almost anything.
If you look at yourself, you will see that you blather on constantly, either out loud or in your mind. Whenever you’re not making a willful, conscious effort to wake up, then you’re in the state I’m describing, and you are a victim of your own consciousness.
More accurately, you’re a victim of having your consciousness run a red light. The continual chatter is meaningless, it’s meandering, it’s random, it has no point, it explains nothing, and it proves nothing, but it’s Life keeping a very specific part of its vital innards—human consciousness—active and viable. Life has you momentarily replacing your consciousness by saying something that you have no interest in, and since the person you’re talking to will grasp at anything to momentarily replace his consciousness, he will listen to your comment on a subject in which you have no interest, and he will respond to it with a comment in which he has no interest. His dog will chase your car.
You went to a movie because it gave you something to briefly replace your unsatisfactory state of consciousness. You were interested in the movie when you sat there watching, because even if you didn’t like it, it momentarily replaced your consciousness. Did that movie have any meaning to you? Does any movie have any meaning? Does it have any significance to your life? No. You don’t have any real feeling about the movie.
A day later, you’re again dissatisfied with your consciousness, and you run into a friend, which gives you another chance to momentarily replace your consciousness. You say, “Have you seen that new Matrix movie? What a great movie!” Your friend says, “I thought that movie was terrible!” Neither one of you has any interest in what you said. You might as well have been going “guh, guh, guh, guh, guh.”
An ordinary person would laugh at my comment, and say, “I really enjoyed that movie. I may go see it again.” People say about some movie, “It changed my life,” and they say it with as straight a face as the Pope says, “You’ll go to Hell if you don’t repent.” They say it just as seriously, just as forcefully—and they don’t mean a word of it. They’re not even interested in it.
Life has men continually making meaningless comments about matters that they have no interest in. It’s hollow talk, but it serves a purpose. Each of you gets some partial relief from your own consciousness, and that keeps a vital part of Life’s innards active and viable. If Life had a giant hand, and if Life ever had the time, then Life would pat you on the head for being a world-class babbler, a rambler, a motormouth. Life would slap you on the shoulder and say, “Good boy,” for Its own reasons. So next time you’re running your mouth—well, I see you can fill in the rest. I don’t have to finish it.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
BALONEY PRICES IN PRISON HOLD STEADY
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Meaty Stories Sans Fat
MARCH 26, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
One guy proffers: “You may be making some progress if you’ve reached the place where no amount or type of advertising will make you want something you didn’t.”
(“Sure glad this applies only to deodorant and gum.”)
One old sorehead finally became really pissed when it fully struck him that
since you know you are going to die — pessimism is a complete waste of time.
(Boy! — was he mad!)
On some planets they still say: “Just getting started is the hardest part,”
these words however, are just the start of it.
When you understand what is going on you can hear other people talk,
and know what is behind what they say even though they do not.
Words (The Big Three): It’s all trivia.
The Most Recent Results Of One Man’s Investigation Of The Elusive Link Between Man’s Invented Verbal World And The Natural Silent One (summarizes he):
“If you will prop the letter ‘H’ up against a wall; turn it at just the right angle;
then step back: it will look just like a roach.”
(This could be why men worship mountains and never mountains, men.)
One City’s Survival Slogan.
The humble, honest and honorable man will prevail,
but no more often than the arrogant, deceitful and disreputable.
Prison Health News.
A sick man’s a happy man.
And a horse doctor asked himself: “Where would man’s world of entertainment be without his attraction to perversion and the crippled?!”
In the land of the real-deal there is no counterfeit humor:
what is funny is funny because of reality not being seen through the words
being employed to describe it.
There is enjoyment in man’s First, survival pertinent reality (eating and sex),
but no humor;
in his Second (spiritual/artistic/intellectual) reality
the ever present, unappreciated humor is in men not seeing it for what it is.
Being sick is not funny: knowing the name of your illness is.
(“Certainly good that this applies only to one physically.”)
Although he had casually heard the words of the song before,
when one man finally witnessed the tune: “I Did It My Way” performed live —
and discovered it was sung seriously! —
he became so alarmed that he traded his CD player for a digital wok.
One chap notes: “I could never see metaphor as being an acceptable substitute for clear understanding;
my older brother says he can’t see metaphor as being an acceptable substitute for anything,
and my younger brother says he can’t see life as being anything but a metaphor.”
Either to a party, or a test: the invitation each man is handed at birth.
“Don’t you mean: ‘seems handed?!’”
Certainly — but what does a new born bambino know.
“Don’t you mean: ‘what does anybody know?!’”
Certainly — but what would saying that accomplish.
Where the real-deal-man hangs out:
verbal symbolism is indistinguishable from silent reality.
(A condition which you bed huggers might like to be warned makes dreaming impossible.)
Conversation.
“Adjectives are for children.”
“What kind of children?”
“Extremely young and foolish children.”
The Fact.
In a far corner of every universe is a Silence Factory.
(In some however, they are running short shifts).
“Oh! — I get it,” said a guy with city-fried hair:
“What you call man’s ‘second reality’ is just the first one, made meaningless.”
(It’s nice to see people get-it — even when they don’t — really.)
You could picture the evolution of civilization thus:
from beast to man;
from man’s beastly deities to his human ones,
and ultimately from deities to a familiarity with his consciousness.
Your eyes are not completely open as long as you are in a closet with your
apparent self without recognizing that it is the closet.
(“Well no wonder so many before me have groaned that: ‘There is no way out!’”)
Who would’ve thunk it?! — certainly not the thunker.
_ _ _
Several days ago a list was reported on that apparently contained names which
were once considered as operating titles for that certain unconventional inner activity reported on here daily (and known variously throughout history as:
The Struggle To Awaken; Achieve Enlightenment;
Gain The Great Liberation, et. al.);
below is more of that list
(which the very names themselves suggest to an alert reader
practical ways of pursuing that CertainGoal.)
______________________
Human Life: An Outsider’s Perspective.
The Intelligence Accelerator.
Okay — Answer This:
Info For The Sake Of Info.
The Surprising Interruption.
The Intelligence Smorgasbord.
The Perceiving Of Cognition.
Secret Brain Sweat.
All Closets Stink.
Audacious Recognitions.
A New Awareness.
Stuff You Would Never Think Of.
An Alternative To The Slower Sequential Method.
Come Out Of Your Room!
The Thought Super Collider.
It’s Not Necessary To Cope.
We Don’t Want To Remodel: We Want To Move.
Friends Of The Future.
Truth: The Supreme Sarcasm For The Non Sarcastic.
Neuro Surgery On Life’s Mind — (Okay: On Your Own).
An Intellectual Drive-By-Shooting.
The Non Fancy Explanation Of Life.
Cerebral Poison Control Center.
It’s Simpler Than Anyone Thinks.
It’s Just Around The Bend.
Process With No End.
Action Without An Object.
Reality: The Ultimate Irony.
Beyond Maniacal.
Bidet For The Mind.
The Key To The Unknown Lock.
It’s Simpler Than Anyone CAN Think.
Hey! — What’d You Expect!
J