Knowledge Eclipses Entertainment
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
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Summary
4/5/04:
Notes by TK
Man can only discover or invent. All input to the brain is either: information or entertainment. Info/knowledge makes a new synaptic connection. Entertainment is activation of already existing connections; a re-activation requiring external input (otherwise the brain could entertain itself) and requires no effort. Knowledge intake requires mental effort.
Knowledge comes either from discovery (physical sciences, i.e., technology) or invention/creation (psychology, history, literature, art, theology). No one is informed (makes new connections) by input that is not based on discovery.
Man mistakenly commingles entertainment w/ information, considering entertainment to be a de-facto conveyance of knowledge. For the vast majority of men, the native curiosity/passion of the brain accepts/seeks entertainment over knowledge because it is an effortless modification of the banal status quo. (49:11) #3130
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3130 Knowledge/information is the establishment of a ew synaptic connection. Entertainment is not. Turning knowledge into entertainment: say “I already know that.” You can learn something that’s been discovered. You can’t learn from something created. You’re either an artist or a scientist.
Transcript
4/5/04 #3130
Edited by SA
If you think about one thing in a certain way, if there’s any good model, there are two things that men do. They discover stuff. And they invent stuff. You‘ve got the Columbuses, the Galileos, the Curies. And you’ve got people who invent stuff—the Edisons, the Mercedes, the Benzes. By the way, there are some interesting, and, of course, helpful things that you can come up with going down that line, which I will tonight leave to you.
One more thing off to the side. I sure do hope that you guys can get what I get out of such as that, being able to suddenly look at something, one aspect, like discoveries, that’s what they would normally be called, and it’s usually two. At least it has been with me. I can make it more, because you can. Any model you come up with is malleable. You made it up. You can do anything you want to, but usually it’s two abstractions. There are only two things that men can do in the so-called area of discovery or newness. That is, they discover stuff that’s already there. When Curie discovered radium, what it could do, it was already there. When we say that Columbus discovered the New World—we all know it was already there. So it’s stuff that’s physically there, but it’s new to somebody, to some large group of people. Such as, from the European view, we say Columbus discovered the New World, which must have come as a shock to the people who were already here.
But you either discover stuff that’s here, or everything else is invention. That is, you take what’s already here, and you rearrange it. But that covers everything. You either discover stuff that was already here, and of course for humans to discover things, they then must make them factual. A thing must be capable of being verbalized, which is how that thing becomes a fact. Then the thing gets studied, like with radium, and then people realize, or they compare that fact, once they describe what it is, and determine the molecular weight. And then somebody gets around to finding its place on the Periodic Table. Well, you know how it goes. But then everything else, men create. There are some interesting offshoots of that. And here is the one I was going to point to tonight: Everything that the mind does—everything that the mind takes in, apparently—is either information or entertainment.
It just so happens that according to neuroscience, what I’m about to say is symbolically valid. It’s true literally, as it sounds, and it’s true in another way, which of course is what I’m interested in. The difference between knowledge and entertainment in a very specific way is that knowledge is a new synaptic connection. And by information, knowledge, I’m not playing around with the words. I just mean them in the ordinary sense. But I have pointed out to you that you should look for yourself, and you will see that there is a continual co-mingling and misnaming between knowledge or information, and entertainment.
But I propose to you, and this is where I say that neuroscience even backs this part up, they can actually see—it can be ascertained—at least in some cases, that when you learn something new, there is—you know what a synapse is, between neurons—that there is a new connection made in the brain. That Madame Curie is sitting there looking at this thing glow in the dark. And however she got around to it, I don’t remember all the story—but she finally realized, well I’m looking at an element. I’m looking at a new substance. Then she kept looking, examined it, and compared it with knowledge she already had. I mean, she already had to have known something about chemistry to even know it was new. But at any rate, she puts together enough of present associations—synaptic connections she already has. But then, this is a new one. That’s what “eureka!” is. That’s what a discovery is. That’s why Columbus suddenly looks over the horizon, and assuming his maps were valid up to this point, he realizes there is nothing on this map. There is something new.
So knowledge—even if somebody just tells you something that you’re interested in, say you’re in school listening to a lecture, and it’s about the physical world—the knowledge is factually a new synaptic connection in your brain. Entertainment is something else. Entertainment is the activation of already-existing connections. That’s why when you go to a movie or turn on television, you don’t learn anything. That’s not the purpose. You’ll resist it. If you want to be entertained and you happen to flip on a PBS station, and it’s some guy lecturing on mathematics, some college course going on, you’ll jump right off of it. Entertainment, if you go to a movie or pick up a magazine or a book, reactivates some already-established connection or connections—reactivates already-established associations that you likely wouldn’t have reactivated on your own. Because if you could do it at will, you or anybody, then they would have no need to ever be entertained. Literally. Your mind would be more fun. Well, more fun wouldn’t be the point for most people. But for us it’s more fun, I suggest. At least it would be as much fun if you could do it yourself.
Find your way out of that. Find an exception to that. In other words, especially if the mind is looking outward, seeking something, everything the mind seeks to feed on can be divided into either information or entertainment.
And now I add to that model and say that there is a quite specific distinction, one that I’d never mentioned in my original model: that information is the establishment of a new neural connection between two neurons where there had never been a synaptic link. That is when you have learned something new. There is now a new connection. Aha! So you learned something new. With entertainment, you do not learn anything new.
This, by the way, is another way of looking at, or explanation of, a lingering so-called problem that men have been observing for thousands of years. And it’s still a popularly discussed subject among educators, is the difficulty in getting some children to learn some subjects. You can think back to yourself in especially high school, when everything was a required course. Think about it. Subjects that you had no interest in. Whatever it was—mathematics, chemistry—if you think back, you didn’t even try. That was the problem. If there was something that interested you—history, psychology, the social sciences—whatever they call them nowadays—or maybe a music course, it seemed to be learning and you can, in fact, learn new things, but it’s based upon the fact that you already have synaptic connections in your brain that concern a subject that let us say they’re calling “history.” There are already connections, however you got them, in your brain.
I don’t mean it’s magical. I mean that you already picked it up at home, or off television, or some sort of more childish reading when you were in elementary school. But if you get to high school and there’s a course in history, and some part of it interests you, you start learning things because you’ve already got neural connections. With boys it could be warfare. The course covers Alexander the Great or the great Roman generals. The conquering of Europe by the Caesars. But you’re not learning things that have been discovered. You’re learning things that have been created. Can you even call that knowledge?
But if you’re going to learn chemistry—one of the differences between learning and entertainment is that learning—taking in knowledge—requires effort. Not heavy lifting. But it requires mental effort. And everybody knows this when it’s pointed out. That if you want to learn chemistry or mathematics, if someone is teaching a course in a classroom, for your mind not to simply be entertained, but for you to take in information, requires actual effort. You have to give your mental attention over to what’s being taught.
You can sit and watch a TV movie, and say you watched it, and most of the time have been daydreaming. You can read a novel and be through with it, and lay it down, and somebody says “Did you already finish it?” And you say “Yeah.” But a large part of the time, you daydreamed. Your mind was not on the novel. Your attention was not always on your eyes going back and forth on lines of type. You weren’t “entertained” by the novel.
This is getting into what I mentioned several nights ago. You could sit there and read the novel, sit there and read a gossip article out of a tabloid newspaper. You picked it up to be entertained. You picked it up because you’re dissatisfied with your consciousness, which is on automatic ramble, and you would prefer someone else’s consciousness. Almost everyone does. So you do not pick up the gossip article for knowledge.
People of course tell a tale. Another person might ask, “Why do you read those trashy gossip things?” You say, “Well, I like to learn what politicians or movie stars are doing.” People use the term “learn.” Or “I like to know. I like to learn what’s going on.” Nothing of the kind. Because you’re not going to learn anything. You have neural connections already established in your brain, and you’re going to have some of those connections stimulated. That’s why you read the gossip article, the novel. That’s why you turn on television. Because you know there’s a very good chance that you’re going to be entertained. Which is to say, you’re going to have already-set-up neural connections reactivated that would not have been active without these stimuli.
To take in information requires actual effort. And the mind could deny that until you compare it to what I’m describing as entertainment. And then, if it didn’t strike you immediately when I say it requires effort, surely the stark juxtaposition between the two gives you a whole new view.
To me, it explains why some people have trouble learning some subjects in the settings where they are more or less required to, such as high school. You have a subject—say, algebra—that you find it almost impossible to learn. And the reason is, you do not make the effort. For genetic reasons, for purely congenital reasons neurally, it requires effort. It requires concentration. It requires you to focus your attention in a way that is too demanding on your part. And you say to yourself, “I show up in class, I try my best.” But it’s requiring effort that you’re not making.
There could be other classes, as I noted, that you have no trouble getting through. You may even have classes, let’s say in the social sciences—sociology, history—that you might be able to more-or-less daydream your way through, to listen to the teacher ten percent of the time, to just glance through the required reading. In quarter after quarter, in subjects such as that, you could probably make B’s. And if the truth be known, for a whole quarter, you probably didn’t “study” for thirty minutes, because you already had neural connections regarding this area, and you’re entertained when you hear it—what little you might listen in class. And then you can have a test, and you’d know the answers, because you find the subject entertaining. You did not have to make an effort to learn it. It did not fit the category of “knowledge.” It was entertainment.
There are people devoting large parts of their lives to studying, to “learning,” psychology, sociology, history, theology. It still buggers the mind. It just seems like theology’s the one area that Life stood right out in a field, naked, with Bozo the Clown shoes on, going “phhhht” right in front of people, and all of them just looked past it. But nobody will admit they see it. That’s theology. Not just religion. Religion serves a legitimate purpose. But it’s like Life, once it saw what men would put up with, that that’s when Life stripped its clothes and stood right in front of everybody. I’m just being silly. But it’s like Life decided, “How far can I push this?” And that’s when Life came up with the last “ology” in the social sciences. Theology. Then, after men put it in their college catalogues, I guess Life’s last ditch stand—they already had religion in the catalogue, but theology became a post-graduate course—to me that was Life saying, “Well, if they don’t see it now, I give up.”
I apologize for wasting sixty or eighty seconds. But I’m telling you, Life has got a hell of a nerve sometimes. But who am I to say?
There are people studying subjects, but the subjects themselves were not discoveries. Now you can study chemistry and you can gain knowledge. You can gain knowledge. It takes effort because it will require that you put together new connections, in the same way that discoveries themselves require that you do something you haven’t done before. Sail off across the Atlantic, where nobody had gone before, as far as Columbus knew. Keep studying this glowing rock like Madame Curie did. You don’t just look at it and go “aah” and throw it away. It requires effort. You have to focus your mind, hold your attention.
So if there’s anything that you’re going to learn, you or anyone, if it’s knowledge, it is something that has been discovered. If it hasn’t been discovered, then it was created by man. History was created. Psychology was created. Theology was created. Art was created. Literature was created. If you study those subjects, they do not fit the criteria for knowledge. Because psychology, sociology, theology are not based upon something that a human discovered. People created those subjects.
And it’s not even a creation on the level with Edison. Because to say he created the light bulb is not true. He took things that were already known. He had the basis of the light bulb, him and several people, supposedly, for ten or fifteen years at least. And he and his associates spent that ten or fifteen years testing every possible combustible material they could find to use as a filament that would burn long enough to make it a useful product. But the point is, he didn’t discover glass, he didn’t discover tin, he didn’t discover magnesium. He didn’t discover anything else that ended up in the light bulb as we know it. He created it. But at least you can trace it back, that all of that was ultimately derived from things that were discovered. Now you discount those, which are the world of science, and you get into the world of the arts, which is damn near the world of the entire population of the planet.
All of you are artists, more or less. Most humans are artists. They’re not scientists. It doesn’t mean that you do not learn and have knowledge. Because an artist will learn. He’ll discover things about painting, if he’s a painter. About rhythm, if he’s a musician. No matter what sort of natural interest, what sort of talent you have, if you are really smitten by the muse, then you’ll read or go to school or discuss with somebody, and you will learn things. You will even discover things. If you are trying to write some complex music—a symphony—or just trying to write, you might discover a chord that was new to you. You’d never played that chord before and flatted the fifth of the chord, the whole chord together, right in the middle. It doesn’t mean that somebody else hadn’t done it. But you discovered it, and it will make a new neural connection because you are actively involved.
But now leave that, which is still a small part of what humanity does. When you’re seeking entertainment, you’re listening to music. You’re going to a museum to look at paintings. You’re reading a piece of literature. You’re watching a movie. You are not learning. You are not engaged in making movies with a possibility of discovering something about a camera, about lighting. All that’s happening is that some of your already-established neural connections are being activated. Once humans get out of required schooling—a case of high society or high school—the reactivation by outside stimuli constitutes almost the entirety of adults’ so-called “thinking.”
There is a quite juicy little special trap for people like us, people who are wired up to be attracted to the notion when they run across it that man is not as mentally insightful as he could be, he’s not as conscious as he could be. That he’s living in a reality that’s distorted, that’s dreamlike, but that through certain efforts he can achieve an enlightened state. Then the juicy little—well, I’ll call it a trap. I was looking for a more modest synonym—is to believe that you can learn something new about what you’re trying to do. And yet when you start, that seems obvious.
Let us say that you discover the term, “man’s asleep and can awaken.” Let’s say that was the description. The most common one. So, based on what I just said, your mind would say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Because I do have to learn something. If I already knew how to awaken, I would do it. If I knew how to achieve enlightenment, to enlighten my mind, enlighten myself, I would do it. So what I need is to learn something.”
Now recall the model I pointed out to you. The only way you learn something, the only thing that qualifies as knowledge, is something that makes a new neural connection in your brain. And for that to happen, it must be something that someone discovered, or that you discover, and it makes a new connection. But do people think, “Well I’ll go out and discover how to awaken, like I’ll find a rock that glows.” No. You think, “I’ll find somebody who knows how and I’ll learn how from them. I’ll get them to teach me.”
I remind you, based on this model, which I invite you to dispute, that the only thing you can learn, the only thing that is actual knowledge as opposed to entertainment, is something that has been discovered. All knowledge is based on discovery. All knowledge is the verbal telling of a discovery. Everything else is mental, neural entertainment. It affects neural associations that have already been activated in you. It’s a neural path down which you have strolled before.
The movie you’re watching, the magazine you’re reading, the lecture you’re listening to either entertains you, or it doesn’t. For you to think that you’re being informed about something that was not derived from discovery is a hollow belief. Someone who did not discover what this is all about, but they were taught it, and they offer to teach you, they might as well whistle Dixie in your ear. Or they might sing Wagner in your ear, for those of you who are masochists.
There’s some special place in Hell, I’m sure—at least in the Germanic Hell—just waiting for some of you. I’ve warned you before, the way you keep bad-mouthing Wagner, but it’s your business. You’ll pay someday. And what your personal Hell will be is pretty obvious, isn’t it?
I bring this up not because I’m fearful that any of you people by now are going to fall into the hands of some metaphysical mountebank, but in your own head—for you to read something, for you to replay something that you have read or heard, and believe that entertainment is going to turn into knowledge is simply foolish. It is not going to happen.
Here is the bottom line: If it’s something you’ve already thought of before, it may be entertaining, but if you think it’s informative, you’re wrong. You’ve only got two choices. You’ve got to discover how to wake up. Or you’ve got to have somebody who discovered it themselves tell you as best they can. Columbus went back and told Ferdinand and Isabella all about, “Well, I kept sailing out towards the sunset.” He described the people and all the plants, and how the weather was different. They were entertained by what he said. But the only way that they would ever know the Bahamas is if they got their sorry royal asses up and sailed over there themselves. Columbus’s help could have been great. It may have been, in fact, the only way that they would have ever gotten there. So, by him having discovered it, he actually did something. And so what he has to pass along can be knowledge. They could take what he said, and the sightings that he’d made, and they could follow his map.
And so what he discovered, and what he gave them, was knowledge. And they could sail, using his instructions, and they could get there. But they would have to do it, still. Anything else is entertainment. And one way that people get out of making effort is to turn knowledge into entertainment.
The way people turn knowledge into entertainment—they don’t realize what they’re doing—is quite simple. They say, “Oh yeah, I knew that.” That’s all you have to do. Of course there’s the other, classic way: You don’t pay attention. That’s what you do in class. They make you go to algebra when you’re not entertained by it. You do not want to learn it, and it’s not entertaining. So you simply don’t listen. That’s the classical way to turn knowledge into entertainment. But the other is, like if you’re trapped in a one-on-one conversation for whatever reason, out of courtesy, or because it’s somebody in a position of authority, you don’t want to just walk away. And they’re in your face, trying to convey to you what they believe is information, but it’s something in which you have no interest—the way you handle that is you let them go for just a few minutes, and you go, “Oh, I appreciate it but I knew that already.”
Plus, the brain has this capacity that by saying that to yourself—there are no words really to describe this, but I know you people will get it—even though you know you’re lying—that is, your brain knows you’re lying—just saying “Well, I knew that already,” is like forgiving yourself. You’re sitting in algebra class in the 10th grade and the teacher says, “Some of you people—and you know who you are—are not going to be promoted this year unless you shape up in algebra.” And you say to yourself, “That’s me. I’ve got to do better.” And you know you won’t. But you say, “I’ve got to do better.” Which is “I knew that already. Yeah, I know you’re right.” Then the mind can forgive itself for not making an effort. All it’s got to do is walk down a path it’s been before. “I knew that already.” And you didn’t know that already. You didn’t even listen enough to what the teacher said to decide if it was something you might have wanted to learn. But you heard just enough, and you said to yourself, “Oh no, it’s got math in it.” And your mind begins to glaze over while you try to keep your eyes looking at the teacher. And you let it go on for just a couple of seconds, until you realize where it’s going. And you go “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know that. Appreciate your point, but yeah, I knew that.”
That’s as though you slipped up behind yourself in algebra class in high school, and you realized you weren’t paying any attention, that it takes more effort than you feel you can give it. And it’s like you walk up behind yourself invisibly, pat yourself on the back and go “There, there old boy. That’s ok.”
The mind will entertain itself, and forgive itself for not making any effort to learn something, even when the mind already believes “It would be to my benefit to learn this.” Everything else is merely entertainment and is not open to question. And once you see it this way, even at this late date, it will save you some vexation. Some wasted—if nothing else, probably feelings resembling guilt—that “I should be doing so and so,” that “I should be paying more attention to such and such, or I should go back to reading certain kinds of books. I should be listening, even, to my memory of my past readings. I should be listening to my own mind when it’s just repeating things that I say I know.”
Now I’m speaking strictly in the area that ordinary people would consider metaphysical. Mystical. With more ordinary people, spiritual. But mystics believe, “Well, at one time I memorized two hundred pages of Buddha’s words, of The Perfumed Garden, of some Sufi text. I should try and remember that. I used to try and repeat it to myself. You’d take that as being the conveyance of information, that your mind is involved in learning. But you can only learn something that’s been discovered. You can’t learn something that’s been created. You can memorize it. And in the ordinary sense, you learn it. That’s what happens when they hand you your PhD in theology. You’ve learned theology. But what have you learned? Nothing. You’ve learned someone else’s entertainment. And you obviously found it entertaining or you couldn’t have done it. Because it didn’t require any effort. And it didn’t require that anybody discover anything. Not you. Not the person teaching it.
It’s quite simple. Whatever you’re doing in life, if it does not require a lab coat, a microscope, an atom smasher—something along those lines, if it doesn’t require that, then whatever you’re doing is simply mental entertainment.
That kind of narrows it down, doesn’t it? It holds true in most people, in large segments of their life, or in their life taken as a whole, that at any particular time, whatever they’re doing, they’re either being a scientist or an artist. Maybe an artist in the passive sense. But that’s what they’re being. If you’re not trying to discover something, then you’re simply wanting to be entertained by something that somebody else has created. Not that they discovered. If you’re in the mood to do nothing, you will not flip on TV and leave it on a lecture on physics. And you certainly do not go out for the night and say, “Let’s go to a movie,” and try and find one that’s a documentary on physics. That is not why you go out. You don’t go to a club expecting, in lieu of a band, a lecture on physics.
I hate to leave it sounding like a real condemnation. It’s just simply a fact, even though I still say that the brain has but one emotion of its own, and that’s curiosity—that is, the ability to be interested in something new. And look what the mind does with it.
I can’t say there’s anything wrong. It’s the way Life has made everyone. Just look around you. People who are not perfect examples of this, people whose life is fanatically devoted to some science, are striking anomalies. Of course usually the more they’re devoted, the more eccentric they become—people who won’t talk about anything but mathematics, or whatever their field is. That’s all they’re interested in. That’s all they do. Their work is their life. But as we all know, they’re exceptions.
Everyone else—look at what their mind does. It has a native passion, a native emotion of curiosity, and it can grow. I’m just talking about in an everyday sense, not about waking up. The mind can grow. It can become stronger. It can actually learn things. But it’s got to be things that the mind discovers. And that requires effort. The only other thing the mind can do is be entertained. Look at how we’re programmed, at what most people put up with between the two. Look at what the mind, simply put, is satisfied with.
I don’t know about you, but I’m depressed enough. I think I’ll stop.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
IF THE ORDINARY IS MUSIC TO YOUR EARS — THE SONG IS ALWAYS THE SAME
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Outlaw Anthems For The Extreme Outsider
APRIL 5, 2004 ©2004: JAN COX
As he sat high on a cliff, reflecting on the many mortal affairs, a man mused:
“Why is it that the most mundane, and untalented of men are the ones most concerned that life is always primed to snatch from them the abilities and insights they dream they have, but do not actually possess?!?” — and life broke into his reveries, saying:
“Why don’t you mind your own business — if you’ve got any.”
An Intellectual Probing Via A Questioning Dialogue Conducted By
Two Earthly Scientists Who Also Happen To Be Music Lovers.
“Is history — pre-recorded?”
“Is DNA — already laid into place?”
“Ah! — but even a man with a known number of CD’s in his collection
still isn’t positive which one he will be playing at ten o’clock next Friday morning.”
In a certain cellular scenario, one nucleus noted:
“Here, in this wide open land, there is room for any and every thing
(except of course for freedom-of-will, or anything like that).”
Life immediately caused his neighboring counterparts to shout him down,
and back into the silence proper to such matters.
Part of being civilized is in a softening of man’s animal heart.
“Is this another reason for saying that an awakened man is not fully civilized?”
Being heartless is not merely what the ordinary call it and know it to be.
How Mind Works Via A Conversation.
“What do you think are the odds that there is someone working for
the Treasury Department whose name is Money?”
“Okay, first level with me: do you already know that someone does?”
“Yes.”
“Okay……ahhh…….I’d say there’s an eighty per cent possibility.”
Among the ordinary: having a good memory is the same as being intelligent.
Graffito found scrawled on an abandoned artificial leg:
“Trying to achieve Enlightenment bearing an Enlightened Guru on your back
is like heavy metal with strings — george jones with backup singers.”
The sole remnant of a now disappeared religion is a small scrap of parchment
on which are inscribed these words regarding the afterlife:
“When you die, if your consciousness is not larger than it was when you were twenty, you will be shot.”
The thing about man’s religions (inter alia) is that they say you need help —
but for the rebel, do not point in a helpful direction;
they tell you to: look-over-here
when where the certain man wants to go, has no here.
Ordinary men by nature readily accept the idea that they need extraordinary help — rather than to make extraordinary efforts.
There is nothing wrong with any of man’s various means & methods to achieve
self completion — other than they don’t deliver — which they’re not supposed to;
humanity’s proper collective efforts to understand what is going on
consist of talking about it — that’s all: just talking about it.
One man commonly smirked at those he heard criticizing someone else’s intelligence who themselves mispronounced a word or got some fact incorrect,
until one day a thought hit him: that if those he laughed at knew some of the things he’d said, they’d laugh just as hard at him!
This realization so rattled the man that he did what any right minded person would do: he immediately stopped having such thoughts.
(The headline to this story was to have been:
“How The Mind Can Bail You Out Of Anything — If You’ll Let It.”
“Pa pa: would a real-deal-man man let it?”
“He might let it laugh about the whole thing.”)
Shortly after arriving at his first jazz performance, a man arose to leave,
saying to his host that he was of such an advanced age
that he didn’t have time to listen to people practice,
and in spite of all efforts, the art of that particular activity could never be
explained to him. (Well, he acted as though it couldn’t [though his brother says
he always has something going on other than what seems to be.])
Query: Who makes preparations to think?….okay then:
Who has a script to thinking?
Weather Update.
A fierce winter storm battered one man’s mind — but it didn’t care — it was inside.
(But Beware The Winds Of Discontent!)
One chap has concluded:
“When you’re short of breath there are two things you can do:
lay down and conserve what you have,
or vigorously move about to produce more.
“Yes,” injects his twin, “but how about when it comes to thinking?”
(Beware the disruption of the too close kin.)
At one time a man said to himself:
“If every day I have to reinvent my wheel — I don’t have the right wagon” —
a change ultimately occurred whereby every morning he could hardly wait to
invent a whole new wheel.
(For a while, subsequent to such occurrences, he would think: “How neat!” —
then finally his feeling shifted to: “How inevitable —
how inevitable it always feels once the thing is accomplished.”)
Dialogue.
“There are three things you can do with ordinary people:
listen to them talk; listen to them sing, or watch them move.”
“How about: ignore them.”
“I did not expect our tete-a-tete to take such an uncouth turn.”
Regarding The Allegedly Important Matter Of: Knowing Yourself .
If you are fascinated with other people — you have no self.
(Okay: you have no idea what yours is.)
With the rightly focused eyes/I’s you could say that life has let the cat completely
out of the box by allowing acting to become a most seriously discussed activity.
A son asked a father: “When I’m feeling really snappy and privately acting flippy,
and I want to extend my regards to who or whatever might be responsible:
should I thank life, or my own cells?”
“What sort of mini coma do you keep lapsing into that causes you to think that
there is a difference?”
When one man’s body would give him trouble — he’d take it out on his mind.
One way to distinguish members of the Rock Climbers League from those of the Chess Federation is that few things give ordinary men as much pleasure as
talking about themselves —
while nothing could be more boring to a real deal man.
Fleas never believe that elephants are really elephantine.
J
No one who understands what’s going on will say they can tell you specifically how to join them.
“It ain’t fair!”
Damn straight it ain’t. (Anything else?)