Separate From Your Nature
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
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Summary
4/14/04:
Notes by TK:
The attempt to awaken is the seeking of a disconnect between conscious thinking and your temperament. It is to be objective, clinical, un-entangled w/ ordinary emotional habit-nature. (45:33) #3134
Notes by DR:
The mind doesn’t amount to that much, it’s like an odometer for the feelings and temperament. To stop thought you’d have to disconnect from your nature and consciousness. What’s going on in your head? What you’re hearing is the output of the direct connection to the rest of your nervous system which reflects your nature. People want a permanent disconnect from your consciousness and your nature.
Transcript
04-14-04 #3134
Edited by SA:
Last time, I pointed out that one way to change your understanding and your consciousness would be simply to not listen to what goes on in your head. In this talk, I propose another way to look at the same issue. As always, I am not talking about the mind applying its attention to the physical world in order to solve a problem. I am talking about everything else that the mind does.
The mind is not normally the originator of anything, not even of its own thoughts. The mind is certainly not the originator of what people consider to be their personal problems. In a sense, then, the mind is relatively unimportant. When it’s not solving tangible problems, the mind is merely a counting machine, a measuring device for how you feel. If you view your seventy or more years on Earth as a trip you are taking, then the mind is like an odometer keeping track of your nervous system’s mileage.
Think about what your mind does when it is not engaged in specific problem-solving. The nervous system never stops, even when you’re asleep. You may be in bed with a stomach-ache, doing nothing except emitting the occasional groan, but you’re still traveling on your journey. As long as you’re alive, your bodily functions are running. Under those conditions, is calling the mind an odometer an ill-conceived metaphor?
The mind’s odometer-like activity—that is, the mind’s daydreaming—travels well-worn grooves or ruts on the road of your decades-long life journey. Your daydreaming has worn the grooves of your particular temperament—your nature—into your mind.
Before you became conscious enough to talk, you expressed your nature by laughing and screaming, or by wriggling your chubby little limbs. Once you start to talk, which is when consciousness really begins operating, your nature starts to reveal itself. However, the differences between you and everyone else—whether you’re shy or aggressive, active or passive—are relatively minor. By the time you are five years old, at the most, there is a limited repertoire of what men label “emotions” that show up in your mind, based upon your nature. Physically, we all look relatively dissimilar, but other than physically, humans are much more alike than they seem to want to believe they are. The genome project bore witness to that.Only two or three dominant emotions may show up in some people’s minds with any regularity. Probably, at bes there are only five or six emotions distinctive enough to deserve their own names.
As it is with feelings, so it is with thoughts. Your mind churns out thoughts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for your entire life. How many thoughts do you think you have in a lifetime? If you think, “That’s got to be an astounding number—maybe as many as the number of atoms in the universe,” then I’m sorry to disillusion you, but that is absolute mouthwash. It is true that you think all of your life, but you have the same limited number of thoughts over and over and over again. I suspect it would terrify most people if they were aware of how few different thoughts they have. I further suspect that having a vague feeling that their thoughts are limited in number is really what bothers ordinary people, though not enough for them to do anything other than distracting themselves by watching TV, opening a magazine, or calling somebody on the phone.
I’ve never sat down and counted the number of distinct thoughts I have, and I’m not suggesting that you do so. You don’t need a number. You don’t have to sit and count day after day, lose track, and have to start over. I’m sure the reality of this will suddenly sneak up and grab you around the head. That is strange, to say the least, because that’s not the way it seems, is it?
It’s not just the repetition of our thoughts that bothers people like us. It’s also the repetition of our feelings. Your own nervous system has created a small handful of ruts in your consciousness. That set of ruts is what mystics for thousands of years have called the state of “being asleep,” which is a great term, and fits the facts, but is also synonymous with being normal. What a person’s mind does when it’s not engaged in a specific task is go back and forth, back and forth in its ruts. It’s as if you’re in your car, which is on your driveway, right next to the front porch of your house of consciousness. There are ruts leading from your garage out to the street, and you are backing up and then going forward in those same ruts, over and over again. What ordinary people call their psychology—indeed, what they call thinking—is like ruts in the road that their genetic, emotional nature have created.
Your mental mood—whatever is going on when your mind is running on automatic ramble—is being determined by your individual nature. You have only a handful of basic mental states. It takes a little effort, but you can observe the reality of this. Let’s say that you wake up one morning and you’re feeling not-quite-right, physically. You may have a slight digestive discomfort. People do not normally try to analyze why they’re feeling out of sorts, but surely it’s a feeling that seems normal and familiar. You tell yourself, “Oh, no, I’ve got indigestion again.” That physical state will likely establish a state of mind in you that will persist for hours, unless something occurs that triggers another part of your temperament.
It could be that despite how bad you feel, you have to go to work. Somebody drives past you on the expressway and throws in your direction a digital version of some sort of bird. Your nervous system has access to your eyes, to all of your senses, and that nervous system, ignoring your indigestion, reacts according to your nature. One person’s nervous system might become frightened of the other driver, while another person’s nervous system might lower the car window and scream back insults. Or perhaps you’re walking along, and a mugger jumps out of an alley. Some people might be scared to death. Other people’s nervous systems might incline them to leap at the mugger, even if he’s got a gun.
That’s about the limit of people’s responses, isn’t it? If somebody is cursing at you from a passing car, your response doesn’t tell you anything about yourself psychologically. Your response has nothing to do with your childhood, other than that you were a child of your parents, but your response does tell you everything in the world about your genetic self—or perhaps you thought I’d understated earlier when I said that there are only five or six primary human emotions. Have you ever thought about why in many cases there are only two political parties in any given area, or only two competing religions? Generally speaking, everything can be divided into a binary struggle in which things are either yes or no, true or not-true.
Back to our main topic—if somebody flips you a bird in traffic, or shouts at you, or you get a headache on top of your stomach-ache, those experiences will slightly alter your state of mind. I’m not going to drive us crazy with minute details, but by “state of mind,” what I mean is that within you there is a small repertoire of sound bytes and visual images—a repertoire of thinking— that goes along with your indigestion.
Perhaps you are experiencing something that has no ready verbal description, and the closest you can come is, “I just don’t feel like myself.” That is obviously a figure of speech, because who else are you going to feel like? You don’t wake up feeling like King Kong or Queen Elizabeth. However you feel, the feeling is yourself, and I’m sorry, but the time during which you don’t feel like yourself will still be subtracted from your seventy years.
Wanting to wake up is wanting to cause a disconnect between your nature and your consciousness. Wanting to be civilized is a watered-down version of the same struggle to disconnect consciousness from your nature. When a man introduces you to his wife, you don’t want to tell him, “She’s a hot looking babe. Mind if I sleep with her?” You know you shouldn’t say rude things if you want to fit into civilized company, nor should you say aggressive things. If you’re standing around at a diplomatic party with some of the world’s leaders and the Prime Minister of Finland bumps into you and causes you to spill your drink, you shouldn’t turn around and say, “Watch it, you blithering idiot!”
No one, including major mystical schools, looks at it precisely that way, but the idea even shows up in religion. You could say that the Golden Rule is the basic dogma of all the world’s major religions. The only way you could possibly live by the Golden Rule—to do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is to be able to disconnect your consciousness from your nature, at least momentarily.
You can do very little about your temperament, your nature. That is a magnanimous way of putting it. If someone says to you, “I don’t know why I’m always so angry,” turn the person to face a mirror, and say, “Is that you over there in the mirror?” When they say yes, you reply, “There’s your answer.” Nevertheless, it appears that people have always had a vague sensation that they can separate their consciousness from their nature. This is not just a dream of mystics. In some very subtle, watered-down manner, the idea of separating nature from consciousness is reflected in men’s idea of being civilized and civil to one another, in the idea of being religious, and in such everyday ideas as the notion that if you get mad, you should count to ten. If you asked somebody why you should count to ten, no doubt they would respond, “To give yourself time to calm down when you’re mad.”
As always, childish descriptions and explanations of man’s secondary world do fit. Counting to ten when you get mad works because it creates a momentary disconnect between your nature and your consciousness. Explanations of God fit in the same way. They are childish explanations, because when people are talking about God, they’re actually talking about their own minds.
People tell one another, “When you’re frightened, pray.” I’m sure that it would pass muster to tell Christians, “If you’re frightened, say the Lord’s Prayer.” The childish version of how that works is, “God will hear your prayer and calm you down.” That statement fits the facts, but explains nothing. Saying a prayer works the same way as counting to ten, trying to remember yourself, trying to endlessly repeat a mantra, or trying to picture the face of Buddha. They are all efforts to create a disconnect between nature and consciousness. You could say the multiplication tables and it would have the same effect, but nobody would do that.
Back to my main topic. Whether you think of This as awakening to some other state of consciousness, stepping out of a dark inner cave into an area of light, or pulling your consciousness from some internal captivity into a liberated state, they all are one thing. Whether you call This learning the Great Secret, achieving enlightenment, or accomplishing the Great Liberation, they are all one thing. You’re attempting to create a disconnect between your nature—whatever that is—and consciousness. Everybody wants the experience, but most people won’t make an effort to get there. People like us want the experience enough to try and do something about it.
We want to wake up permanently. Every person who ever said that their biggest aim in life was to achieve enlightenment is saying exactly the same thing—we want a lasting disconnect between our nature and our consciousness. If you can see that, then a way to go about it is to not pay attention to your feelings, because what you’re feeling is the output of the direct connection between your consciousness and the rest of your nervous system, which reflects your nature. The way to achieve the thing called enlightenment is to ignore whatever is your nervous system’s natural reaction, which you didn’t have a thing to do with. Let that be your method. Don’t fight it. Don’t argue with it. Don’t waste your time trying to analyze your feelings.
I repeat, you are trying to create a disconnect between your nature—your feelings—and consciousness. You can dress that idea up in all sorts of mystical metaphysical flim-flam and throw in lots of spiritual sheen. But what a person with our wiring is attempting to do is always the same. Becoming awake, or becoming more awake, is a slow and difficult process, an almost impossible, and literally impossible to describe separation or disconnect between your consciousness and your nature.
Perhaps your nature is to have a delicate digestive system. You wake up for the forty-thousandth time with that indigestion, which directly produces a general state of mind, of consciousness, and an emotional state that accompanies it. The two are connected. You’re out of sorts, and you’re in that mental state as soon as you awaken with indigestion. If your aim is to awaken permanently, stop and realize, “All of this is caused by the way I feel. I’m going to forget the way I feel!”
You can disconnect what goes on in your consciousness from how you feel. There’s nothing metaphysical about that disconnection, or else counting to ten would not get people over being angry, and saying the Lord’s Prayer would not get people over being frightened.
The point is, there is nothing to be gained by trying to analyze your nature. That’s why I don’t ever talk about people’s natures. The only thing you can profit from analyzing is what goes on in your mind, because you can do something about that. You can wake your mind up. You can bring your mind out into the light. You can, relatively speaking, set your mind free.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
PRISON’S ECONOMY IS UNKNOWINGLY BASED ON A TWIN CURRENCY
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Tracking The Only Medium Of Value To The Dedicated Escapee
April 14, 2004 ©2004: JAN COX
A father said to a son:
“You should find it interesting how strongly do those who don’t know what’s going on dislike hearing everything divided into things that can be touched and measured,
and those that can’t.”
One man muses: “Everyone talks about thoughts, and everyone speaks as though they know what thoughts are, but the fact is: no one knows what thoughts are;
is that neat and weird or what?!”
Indeed, it is the very sort of thing which, if pursued by the few to its finale,
would make their current condition of consciousness impossible to maintain.
On one world: everyone rides on the backs of everyone else —
except for those who trip — they get worshiped.
Excerpt from an introductory genetics textbook used in another land:
“The past can drive the human mind crazy —
especially in the present (in fact some experts claim: only in the present).”
To actually get anywhere in the rebel’s attempted journey you have to ignore where your ordinary thoughts say you’ve been; that’s why when the real-deal-man suddenly
shows up in that certain place no one knows where he came from or how he got there.
(“Is this the reason you can’t be told how to wake-up?”)
Combined Geology & Proverb Update.
Nothing not found laying on the ground is ever what men say that it’s cracked up to be.
To a son a father suggested: “Start compiling a list of the things men enjoy,
but would not have were it not for thoughts.”
In the physical, genetic sense: there is no ultimate freedom from the herd,
but there is liberation possible from accepting the hoof beats of the many
as being the sound of your own thinking.
The conventional cows of the collective know not of this difference so for them,
there is no difference (in essence men tacitly proclaim):
“What the prevailing belief momentarily happens to be in my community
just happens to be my belief also” —
for an ordinary life, a man’s consciousness cannot operate otherwise.
By their shared genes, all men fit-in physically, and by shared ideas,
they do so in a mentally based, social sense: Democrats with Democrats,
Christians with Christians, Holsteins with Holsteins, and so on.
To know what is going on is to be internally — the supreme outsider.
“Is that what makes this activity such fun, pa pa?”
“And portable as well.”
To check on his progress:
one man at unexpected times calls himself on the phone
just to see if he still recognizes his voice.
Men find their greatest relief from the stress of being alive and ordinary in talk:
words about matters which have no material reality are routine men’s
supreme comfort,
while on the other hand they can be the certain man’s most salient stumbling block,
(not to mention, annoyance.)
“Pa pa: How does that most shaky of constructs, man’s-collective-intelligence, manage to hang together?”
“By those involved pretending that it is meaningful.”
A Heretofore Forbidden Explanation Of A Common Household Matter.
Contrary to the prevailing foolish folklore: mice do not get killed in spring traps because of their desire to get the food placed there, but rather they knowingly sacrifice themselves to the contraption because they know that humans expect it.
Empty people always prove full of themselves.
There is a grander trick than making an elephant disappear, or sawing a person in half: keeping aging, squinty-eyed, pissed-off, gradually-weakening hormones
from completely swamping your neurons.
Fact: For every question man can pose there is an answer —
“Yes,” agrees one well seasoned man,
“and I increasingly find them all highly irritating and unacceptable.”
One group in another galaxy believes that death is simply the inevitable climax to
a life of anger and criticism.
(“If you ask me: all aliens are idiots.” Spoken like a solid, patriotic sheep.)
Men believe that their strongest allegiance is to either their nation, culture or religion, but not so: such are but the reflections of the sole underlying fidelity:
that of their mind to the thoughts that magically pass there through.
“What a scene to behold my boy: smoke from a train that alone propels the train.”
“But that is not possible, father dear.”
“What can I tell you.”
To help sustain his progress:
one man never answers a phone call from the past —
or takes seriously a contemporary one from an ordinary minded person.
Physically: everyone is eventually a victim;
intangibly: the ordinary minded are multiple times.
Initially many people appear that they may do all right — then they get serious.
At the ferociously independent level necessary for the certain man’s aim:
the purpose of thinking is to think — not to find proof of something.
What the mind sees is never necessarily what it has the tongue say it sees.
The Geography Of Weather.
Illusions are not confined to the optics.
A father noted to a son:
“While those with no blood on their hands can write best sellers about murderers,
and stay-at-homers can author successful books on space travel,
no one not awake can write about it in a way that will interest people who want to be.”
“But that very thing appears to continually occur?!”
“So! — what can I say.”
At odd moments during otherwise conventional conversations,
one man will periodically throw into the discourse:
“Of course what you see before you now is but an abridgment of the complete me.”
To entertain himself in the only way possible:
one man reads only his own work.
J
One guy says: “Have you thought about the possibility that only a Liberated man is completely dead?”