Why Does Consciousness Appear to Ramble On?
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, transcripts are being made and will be posted.
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
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Summary
5/7/04:
Notes by TK
The source of the secret of awakening is not in consciousness, it is about consciousness. It involves consciousness. A beautiful example of this is the arising of the concept of civil law. The law is absolutely foreign to all creatures but man. It exists only in consciousness, as words/ideas. It arose out of the daydreaming state that consciousness engages in when not actively solving a problem.
The law = civilization; a civilizing influence. Primitive societies have fewer laws, cruder laws, such as religious laws. Life has caused man to develop the law, but also to despise it, verbally. To wit: lawyer jokes, based on the universal distrust and dislike of lawyers. It is a hatred of impartial judgment, which no human mind has any real desire for.
People don’t want justice, they want mercy; they want their way! The more men live under civil law, the more they dislike it. This surely is the cover for something important: a purpose Life has in so arranging it. (43:15) #3144
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3144 The source of anything you need to awaken is consciousness, but is not in consciousness. Why cannot life shut off consciousness when it doesn’t have anything useful to survival? Compare to hunger: when you’re full, gastric juices shut down. Life is directing man to produce pictures, scenarios, and whole forms of reality that have no basis in physical reality and yet the whole world accepts it. While the law is the most rational and useful of creations, it is the most hated. Why? Because it represents impartiality which no consciousness has any interest in. The more an individual lives in his head and by words in his consciousness, the more his distaste of impartial judgment, then hating the law.
What has life done to have the more civilized develop a legalistic basis. We have become the best of life through one facility-consciousness. Life purposely had man make up romantic love, religion, and ideologies, but also had it make up justice-law. One solidified part of their consciousness controls or cuts out any kind of dissent. The more men live by the law, the more their distaste for the law. The secret to waking up is about consciousness. We pass laws which make the life of man bitter and the more they bad mouth it. Anything that obvious has to be hiding something.
Transcript
05-07-2004 # 3144
Edited by S.A.
Consciousness is the source of everything that you need to awaken. When you are able to see consciousness in a certain way, then there’s not a thing that you know that doesn’t change. There’s not a view that you have, no matter how enlightening and extraordinary that view may seem, that doesn’t change. Absolutely everything non-physical in your world changes.
Without any doubt, the function that we call consciousness serves, as does every other activity, to help us survive. It seems that Life must have found it most efficient and expeditious to let consciousness keep running even when there was nothing survival-related to do. That’s why consciousness runs day and night, the same way that the heart runs. Once humans were well-fed and had a place to live, once consciousness was not constantly involved with survival, then consciousness started inventing what I call the “second reality”, which is man’s cultural world—the entire non-physical world of religion, the arts, history, literature, and all the social sciences. Consciousness, in its free time, created that dream world, in the same way that when you go to sleep at night, consciousness doesn’t shut down, but creates a fictitious dream world that no one takes seriously once they wake up in the morning. This suggests that consciousness, on its own, has gotten into the kind of mischief that created the state that mystics call being asleep, being distracted, being captive, being unenlightened.
That description fits, but what I’ve tried to point out in the last couple of talks is that there is another way of looking at this. Why could Life not simply shut off consciousness when consciousness doesn’t have anything useful to do? Think of the cells of your body. Life has so arranged itself that many cellular functions only operate when the cells need nourishment. That’s when Life has the cells start producing the kinds of gastric juices that signal what our consciousness calls “hunger”. When the body does not actually need nourishment, you’re not hungry. “Hungry” is an activity, a physical act. Certain types of gastric juices start being produced in the stomach, the stomach growls, you realize that you’re hungry, and you find something to eat. The rest of the time, those gastric juices shut down.
If Life wanted to, then whenever consciousness had nothing survival-related to do, Life could shut off consciousness in the same way that Life shuts off those gastric juices. In that case, we wouldn’t daydream, and no mystic would ever have come up with the idea that we are not fully conscious, that we’re living in a dream world from which a very few people feel the need to awaken.
Instead of our normal state of daydreaming being due to consciousness running amok, the other way to view this is that Life intended for man’s consciousness to produce a dream world. That’s what I have been suggesting in the last two talks. The first of those talks was about broken love affairs, and love itself, playing a huge role in man’s consciousness. That notion is an accepted part of our reality, even though it is clearly not true. In the last talk, I moved from the romantic to the political, and pointed out that throughout the ages, and right now especially, we have the more civilized part of the world—in our time, the Western world—making excuses for other parts of the world. We say that they believe in holy wars and engage in behavior such as attacking our embassies because they have a different religion and a different cultural mindset from ours. We act as apologists, justifying their behavior, rather than simply stating that they’re not as civilized as we are, not as civilized as the planet’s current maximum standard.
Here is a puzzle for you to consider—the more civilized a group’s consciousness is, the less they are driven by the red circuit. That is, the less they resort to uncivilized behavior to settle disputes. However, the more civilized a group’s consciousness is, then the more they act as apologists. The less they can say that the problem with another group is that they’re less civilized than we are. I suggest that Life simply will not allow men’s consciousness to hold such a view.
Life is directing man’s consciousness to produce whole scenarios created from intangible ideas that clearly have no basis in physical reality, and yet the whole world accepts them. I’ve discussed romantic love and politics. Here is a third example that is most prevalent in the world’s more civilized areas, and is something you are no doubt familiar with—the hatred of lawyers. What that really represents is a hatred of the law. Without any doubt, the law is the most humane and rational creation of man. There’s not even a close second. I’m sure ordinary people, ordinary consciousness, would say that religion is the most humane of all of the institutions man has created, but religion is not even close. Religion is barbaric on the individual level when it causes people to feel bad about their own imperfections. Religion is barbaric on the group level when it inspires groups of men to kill other groups of men, not over anything tangible, like land, but over ideas. Over nothing.
The less civilized a group of people are—that is, the less their lives are directed by their conscious thoughts and the more their behavior is directed by survival instincts—by the red circuit—the fewer laws they have, and the less hatred they have for the law. They may actually have greater respect for the law than more civilized people do. Look at the groups that I was using as our contemporaneous example last time, but remember that the names of the specific groups are irrelevant.
I used the example of the Arab civilizations, practitioners of the Islamic religion. Those are the areas of the world that are currently burning our flags, terrorizing us, and denouncing the evils of Christianity and Western civilization. Those people have fewer laws than we have. Most of them are living under forms of tyranny, which is the exact opposite of living under law, because the point of living under law is that a group of men get together, decide on laws, and always write the laws down. If they write down a law that says, “You must not kill a fellow human,” then if somebody murders your son, the murderer will be tried according to the law. That is very different from what might happen if you lived under a tyrant. If a murderer appealed to the tyrant for clemency, and the murderer was one of the tyrant’s friends or relatives, the tyrant might refuse to punish him.
We want impartial laws, so that we can read a law that everybody agreed on some years ago, and that grants no exceptions. The law says that if you kill somebody, you must pay such-and-such price. You must be put in jail, or you must be killed. There would be no asterisk, nothing saying, “This law holds unless you’re the tyrant’s relative.”
At any rate, the Arab countries live less under laws than we do, and oft times, they will have great devotion to what law there is. Sharia law, composed of commandments based on interpretations of the Koran, is the only law to which most religious Muslims align themselves. Those religious Muslims don’t hate the law. Just the opposite—they are devoted to their religious law, and the fanatics among them are ready to die for that law.
Imagine a gradual continuum from those who are less civilized, and who do not hate the few laws that they do have, into the more civilized, who have an overwhelming number of laws. In the United States, for example, there are publishing companies that operate day and night just to produce a new pamphlet every day that attorneys subscribe to in order to keep up with all of the new laws and the new interpretations that the courts have given the laws.
The more civilized a group is, which is to say the more an individual member of that group lives in his head, then the more his life is directed by the ideas—the words—in his consciousness. The only place a law can exist is in your consciousness, because the only place that words can exist is in your consciousness. They can write the law down. They can chisel the law in marble and cover the front of a judicial building with it. They can bring children to the building and say, “Here, in all its magnificent impartiality, is the law by which we civilized, intelligent people live.” They can say that, but the law doesn’t live in the books where it’s written down, or in the carvings on the buildings. You’ve got to have consciousness to either read the law or to hear it read to you. To hear the law say, “Thou shalt not kill,” you have to have consciousness, or else you would never know that it’s either illegal or immoral to kill. That’s why we can’t stop alligators from killing humans. Alligators don’t have consciousness, so they can’t understand words.
The law is the most humane, the most rational, the most useful of everything non-tangible in the world of man. We in the West have got what appears to be a never-ending supply of laws, but the more you move into the Western world, the greater the hatred you find for the law. The basis for that hatred is that the law represents impartial judgment. The more consciousness means to your life, the greater is your distaste and your resistance to impartial judgment. Everybody cries out, “Justice, we want justice!” but nobody actually wants justice. What everybody wants is mercy. People will pound their fist on a table and holler, “I demand justice!” No, they don’t. Not one person of ordinary consciousness is interested in justice. What they want is to win.
Imagine an ordinary man saying, “You and I found this pot of gold at almost the same time. I believe I might have been a step ahead of you, but fair is fair. I’m bigger than you are. I’ve got a knife, and you’re unarmed. I could take all of the gold, but we all want justice. I’ll split the pot of gold with you.” No doubt you realize that that is not the way the world works.
If there is any direction in which we can say man is headed, that direction is the gradual civilizing of everyone, and the gradual takeover of society by the law. Civilization can be defined by the degree to which it is legalistic, by the degree to which men live by laws that can be put into words, and not by the whims of some dictator who sees you doing something he doesn’t like, and without a word of justification, cuts off your head.
To be civilized is for someone to see you doing something illegal and tell you, “We have a law that forbids that,” and for you to be conscious enough to find out what the law is, and to learn that if you break that law, you will be punished. The more that people live in that way, the more civilized they are. That’s why Life is pushing even the less civilized parts of the world toward becoming more civilized.
Now, for the question. Think about the Genesis story, the point of which is that humans became conscious. Adam heard a voice, heard words in his head. Once that started, consciousness invented the wheel, agriculture, television, penicillin, the windmill, the internal combustion engine, blah, blah, blah. But when consciousness is not inventing and has nothing else to do, consciousness makes up dreams about gods, and about the sun being pulled through the sky by a chariot, and about what happens to your spirit when you die. Consciousness tells you that although your body lies there and rots, and the maggots eat you, you are not actually maggot-food. No, you disappear into another world.
I still say that we are the best example of Life that we know of in this entire universe. In fact, the living things on this planet are the only example of Life that we know of, and we humans are at the pinnacle of everything alive on this planet, including all the microscopic creatures as well as plants, insects, birds, animals, and fish. We humans are, without question, Life’s best example, and we have become the best example through one facility, one characteristic, one function—consciousness.
Consider whether Life just lets consciousness run, and consciousness harmlessly makes up fantastic stories on its own. That description appears to fit the facts better than any other description I’ve heard, but what if that is not the case? There is another view that I can support more strongly, because it makes more sense.
The second view is that Life uses consciousness to allow man to make his life more survivable, that Life purposely had men make up all the ideologies—philosophical, political, and all the rest, including the concept of romantic love. Life had men make up religion and the idea of God being some unknowable figure who came up with the idea of creating the universe and living things. More specifically, Life started pushing men to work together to become civilized. Life had consciousness make up such concepts as justice and the law, the idea of groups of men agreeing among themselves.
As always, you can observe this going on in the conscious part of your own brain, because in less-civilized people, and even in ordinary civilized people, one part of their brain—of their mind—runs the rest. One part of the mind controls all the other potential of their consciousness. That is what being asleep is. They have only one state of consciousness—one mindset, to use the common, popular term. One frozen, solidified part of their consciousness eliminates any dissent. That part keeps any other voices in consciousness from ever saying, “What you’re thinking about could be correct, or it could be just the opposite.” With ordinary consciousness, that does not occur, not in an individual and not in groups of men. That, of course, is the ultimate punchline to all of these talks.
What if Life purposely had consciousness continue to run even after the times when it has nothing to do that is related to survival? Consciousness would just drift off into daydreams. It was that kind of daydreaming that produced the idea of the law, of “Let’s agree beforehand not to allow certain behavior, because if we do allow it, we can’t live together as a group.” Consciousness invented the law from nowhere, from nothing. No other animals have anything resembling the law. The law is as foreign to the rest of life in all of its forms as religion is, but Life had men create the law, and is pushing groups of less-civilized people more and more into living by the law.
Here in 2004, right now in Iraq, the temporary government is saying, “We have got to establish laws. We have got to become a nation—a group of people who live by the law, not by some dictator’s whims, and not even by some religious leader’s interpretation of a religious idea. We’ve got to agree to laws, vote on them, write them down, and then accept them and live by them. That’s what we’ve got to do so that we can settle down, become prosperous, and walk the streets in safety.”
Life is pushing those Iraqis there. Life has made men’s consciousness create the law, and the more you live by the law—that is, the more civilized you are as an individual—the more civilized the area in which you live. But as soon as Life has men create the law, Life makes men have a distaste for the law. Think about that. Life has men create the law, but the more important the law is in their life, the more Life has men berate the law. Think about lawyer jokes, about people saying that all the courts are crooked, that Congress is nothing but a bunch of lawyers passing laws just so to keep themselves in business.
People badmouth. It’s the norm. Some new law is announced on TV in a bar, and you expect somebody at the bar to ridicule the law. Yet, the law is obviously of more and more importance these days. I’m not a soothsayer, because I’m not a complete idiot, but based upon what’s gone before and what’s happening now, the world is more and more controlled by law. Religious law has always been there, but more and more, Life is having men look to civil law, which has nothing to do with religion. Yet once a group of people are living by civil law, once they’ve established impartial judgments, then those are the people who verbally assail the law.
That may not be an accident. Life may be doing that for a purpose. In that case, it would not be correct that man’s consciousness, when having nothing better to do, independently and accidentally wove a fantasy world of spirits and gods and morality and life after death—the religious dream that has afflicted humanity. Why, then, is it that the idea of religion and many other intangible ideas had a different effect on us few would-be mystics, an effect that makes us struggle and try to awaken from this dream?
The view I’m presenting to you now is a flawed statement of fact. The statement is that Life, operating at our cellular level, as always, and working its way up to the most civilized version of cellular life, which is our neurons, the cells in our brains that produce consciousness—that Life has purposefully made our neurons develop the law. Then, as soon as consciousness develops the law, and the more consciousness agrees with and lives by the law, the more Life leads us to verbally deprecate the law.
There is a secret there. I don’t mean a secret to put into words, but a secret that points as clearly as it can to my earlier statement, that waking up has to do with consciousness, but the secret to waking up is not in consciousness. It would be easy to think that the secret to everything is somewhere in the recesses of your mind, waiting for you to dig it out. No, there is no secret in consciousness. The secret to waking up is about consciousness.
This is just another beautiful example, because it’s very intricate and yet quite blatant. I can say that life as we live it here in the United States would be nothing like it is were it not for consciousness, were it not for civilization, but also, more specifically, were it not for the law. Had we not agreed to live by the law, we would no doubt be struggling under a tyrant, somebody who would control your life—him and his goons, his paid soldiers. You would walk out your door not knowing what would happen. The goons might rob you, or shoot you for sport, and you could do nothing.
Without law, life is literally uncivilized, yet it is truly strange, the idea of men agreeing to not do things that they want to do, because when you’re hungry and you see food, you want to grab it, regardless that it’s on somebody else’s table. The law is quite bizarre. We all agree beforehand to not do some of the things that we really like to do, so that we can make life better for everyone. Then, the better the law makes someone’s life, the more he badmouths the law. Is that not the most blatant secret in the world? Anything that obvious has got to be hiding something. Anything that irrational that’s accepted by everybody else on the planet has got to be a cover-up for something astounding. Ponder that.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
CITY TO ISSUE REPORT ASSIGNING ULTIMATE BLAME — (AT A LATER DATE)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Info That’s Hot NOW! (Assuming You Are)
MAY 7, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
(Note: All events & conversations reported here occur in a small space: one you could hold in your hands.)
On one world (before the male scientists discovered hormones)
they falsely fingered women as the source of selfish cunning.
Neurons are unquestionably the only ones able to dream of what may be
over the horizon, but they are also by nature, normally unable to hold a
constant realization of what a horizon is made of:
(a matter of no consequence to men not actually going anywhere,
but a specific sojourn inhibitor for a few.)
Conversation.
“What power does man have given no other creature?”
“To commit suicide.”
“Close.”
“Okay: the knowledge of what it is.”
“Closer.”
“Got it: the knowledge of death so that he could then conceive of suicide,
and the power it brings him.”
“Do you ever ponder the strange things that men lump under the concept: power?”
A father offered a son this everyday advice:
“When talking to ordinary people about city affairs: if you can’t be sincere —
pretend to be.”
Brushing aside a reading recommendation said a chap:
“If I was interested in fiction — I’d review my memory of my life.”
From The Rebel’s Perspective: Another Disadvantage To Being Ordinary.
Only those with backs can suffer at the hands of: back stabbers.
A man who learns only from experience will never learn enough to wake up.
In truth: it is not what men find unclear that troubles them — but rather the obvious — which they perforce are forced to pretend they don’t see.
Were you asked if you would do anything differently could you live your life over,
and you say yes, (or even respond for that matter) your consciousness of
what is actually going on with life is still being remotely controlled.
One guy’s view:
“They run credits at the end of a movie for the same reason they recount a man’s life
at his funeral: to protect the producer from assault until it’s too late.”
In show biz you’re not good until more people than your manager think you are,
(not like how your mind operates from your vantage point [if youse ordinary.])
A chap notes: “One thing no religion wastes its time mentioning is: thinking.”
(“Yes,” agrees another, “hormones tell me all I need to know….
[although I must admit — nothing I can think about.])”
Said a father to a son: “You should have thought of that before you died.”
(Note: A good son benefits even when he doesn’t immediately comprehend.)
Political Outrages.
The presence of two partisan minds in one land/head
presents a potentially explosive situation.
In the run of city affairs it is believed that men can be hung by their words
easier than they can by their neck.
Everyone is concerned about falling asleep at the wrong time —
but they are at the wrong time.
A man popular in prison never hears a quote concerning him that he doesn’t like.
An empty closet cannot be slighted.
Corollary: The less you understand the more you need to dress up.
Knowing you’re going to die is a common experience;
realizing that you may die knowing no more than you did when you were born
is not quite so widespread.
Most men know better than to introduce their second wife to their first
for the same reason they don’t commingle dissimilar ideas in their mind.
Soliciting another’s opinion is like enticing an elephant to piss on your foot.
Ordinary men/minds always tell more than they know
while the man who actually knows can never tell all he knows.
Even if they could be verbally limned, some things an awakened mind sees
would take more than a lifetime to describe.
“It’s always a question of efficiency, no?!”
What’s-possible is more like it,
(and of course the IMpossible being the height of INefficiency.)
There are three identifiable levels of human seriousness:
ordinary seriousness;
super seriousness, and:
men-on-a-mission.
Sex (And Other Non Physical Stuff).
Only those aged out of the game worry about its roughness.
A man with sins to confess will never finish.
From a rebel’s perspective: History is a record of the mind’s torpidity.
After years of confinement: prisoners will commonly find the sight of
near naked thought downright erotic.
Meaningless games never want for players.
Definitions.
Freedom: A destination,
Escape: An activity;
thus is the animated rebel concerned with the latter.
Genes frighten anyone with any sense,
(which is why men are so loath to talk about them.)
All prisons have names — to increase their captiousness.
Fact.
You can’t fool a dead man.
One form of captivity is to have fun at someone else’s expense.
In prison conflicts: to be non aligned is to be above them.
Conversational Quiz.
“What do you call purveyors of fiction?”
“Novelists?”
“No you ninny — humans.”
Thought can be a ladder — but high places continue to frighten most minds.
J
Free-Form, Floating Fact For Use In An Unlimited Number Of Circumstances.
In many places — they still do.