Life’s Sleight-of-Hand
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
5/10/04:
Notes by TK
The export of cultural defects—e.g., fast-food/obesity to less civilized societies—is not our fault. Nor is it the fault of the gaining society. They are humans just the much as we are! It is Life’s fault! But the more civilized life becomes, the less Life will allow men to make objective note of human nature, particularly less civilized behavior/nature. Life will not allow the straightforward reference to modern conflict as being the less civilized against the more civilized.
Explore this reality: Life has a large segment of itself (the uncivilized) condemn another segment of itself (the more civilized) while that segment cannot condemn in return! The civilized cannot verbally use the lesser segment’s defect against it—i.e., can’t say: “your problem is that you’re uncivilized”, which is the governing, baldly obvious reality of it. It’s like the uncivilized live in a dream world that the more civilized must give lip service to. Why does Life do this? The heart of the great secret! (36:41) #3145
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3145 Examples have to do with consciousness, not with the example. Life will not let it be said by the more civilized to look at life as one organism. The film of all life covers this planet and speaks with several voices. There’s the more civilized voice and the less civilized, but they will say anything but that.
Transcript
05-10-2004 #3145
Edited by S.A.
I remind you that what I talk about has to do with consciousness, and not with any specific example that I discuss. The last several times, I pointed out that when we Western people, who are currently the leading edge of civilization and technical progress, refer to the differences between us and the groups that have declared themselves our sworn enemies culturally and religiously, then Life, through our consciousness, makes all of us, from our presidents and prime ministers to our popes and our leading preachers, say that the problem is that Islam and Arab culture are very different from our religions and culture, and we are not yet worldly-wise enough to understand and fully appreciate those differences. Life does not permit us to say, or even to think, that we differ from those people because they are not as civilized as we are.
The example I’m about to offer is not the exact opposite of that example, but if you move slightly to the northeast and turn the prior example inside-out, you can view a situation with which I’m sure all well-informed people are familiar. Periodically over the last thirty or forty years, some social observer will point out that a previously primitive and fairly isolated people who were living off what they could forage, fish, and hunt, were lean and healthy and had no major endemic illnesses. Then they were exposed to Western fast food, and within a short time, they all became dangerously obese, and began suffering diabetes, high blood pressure, and a host of other illnesses that can accompany obesity. In less than a generation they turned into unhealthy blimps. Now they go swimming up to cruise ships, yelling, “Throw us a cheeseburger! Throw us some fries!”
Our public commentators wring their little chubby hands and tell us, “What have we done? We introduced fast food to these people, and we have ruined their health. When will we quit adversely affecting those primitive people by forcing them to accept our culture?” In other words, Life makes us take the blame for what less-civilized, previously healthy and happy-go-lucky people do to themselves when they encounter our culture, rather than letting us note that this is how human nature works, how human tastes work.
After World War II, and primarily in America, industry and technology went from producing war armaments to developing a plethora of consumer goods and a variety of new pastimes. That is the period in which fast food restaurants were developed. A few people whipped up french fries and hamburgers loaded with new flavoring and extra fat, and Americans tasted that so-called food and said, “Wow! Ambrosia!” As a result, Americans are now the fattest group of people in the world.
Nevertheless, what happened to all the other people world-wide was not our fault. We did not force the people in New Guinea or Tahiti, who’d been living off of poi and seafood, to eat our fast food. As soon as they tasted that food, they reacted just as we had. When the Indians out in the jungles of Brazil tasted that food, they threw away their spears and their fishing poles, and ran toward the villages that had fast food restaurants. They said, “No more coconuts! We want cheeseburgers and fries!” That happened all over the world. The French, as soon as they tasted fast food, said, “Phooey on frog legs and all our other fancy dishes!” The French government and the guardians of French culture even tried to outlaw American fast food, to keep it out of their country.
The point is that we did not ruin those people. We did not force them to eat our fast food. As soon as they tasted exceptionally-greasy french fries cooked in pure hog fat, people all over the world went wild. That is a fact, but Life will not allow its more civilized people to point that out. Life makes the more civilized people take all the blame upon themselves.
As I said, this example is a variation of my previous example, wherein the fundamentalist Arab Muslims slash themselves with knives and beat themselves bloody while hollering, “Death to America! Death to the West!” Life forces its most civilized people to play apologist for the less-civilized by telling ourselves, “Their culture is so different from ours that we just can’t understand them.” In the version I am now presenting, the less-civilized people taste fast food and instantly are smitten by it just as we were. They quickly become obese and develop other health issues. Then, Life forces us to take responsibility. “How can we undo this terrible thing we’ve done to those poor primitive people?”
That is ridiculous. If you literally tried to keep those people from eating fast food, you would end up having to chain them down. They have developed a taste for this food, a taste for our culture, a taste for technical progress, a taste for civilization. The West, but primarily the United States, are the cutting edge of civilization. We are Life’s best manifestation, at least on this planet, because the more civilized we are, the more time we have, thanks to technical and medical advancement. Our lifespan increases. Food production becomes easier. Survival becomes easier.
We have everything that all of those other cultures need. Because of that, they hate us, and some of them admit it. They say, “How dare you be able to afford all the novelties and the gimmicks you have? We must destroy you!” Then they imitate us. We forget, because we’re now at least a generation away from the introduction of fast-food culture, but we instantly loved that stuff. The more calories, the more fat the fast food has, the more that all humans love it. Yet, Life has us taking responsibility for damaging those people, as if in some way we were evil-doers because we let them taste these horrible french fries that we can’t get enough of. “Why did we let these poor, innocent people ever taste these devilish foods? They’ve become fat-balloons just like us. This is all our fault!” No, this is nobody’s fault. If anything, this is Life’s fault, because Life produced human taste buds.
The point that I encourage you to pursue on your own is that Life will not allow any of this to be pointed out. This is just one example, of course. As people become more civilized, Life less and less wants them to point out, in a straightforward manner, objective truths about what we call human nature. Life will make the more civilized continually blame the less civilized people’s foibles on our part of humanity not taking into consideration their part’s history, their eating habits, their cultural differences.
Conversely, the less civilized you are, the less restraint Life places on you. Life will allow less-civilized people to make comments that are quite direct notations of human nature. Life is safe doing that because who listens to those people? Nobody. They don’t even listen to themselves. They want to listen to the more-civilized. Those people still alive in the less-civilized areas of the world are quickly losing their traditional myths, which are rapidly being replaced by Western ideas of Freudian psychology. The world’s primitive people are adopting our ideas in less than a generation, and not just through first-hand interactions with more civilized people. They are also losing their traditions because of exposure to the internet and satellite television.
Everything I’m talking about is observably true. I’m simply describing what’s going on, and telling you that Life, through man’s consciousness, is engaged, during your lifetimes, in a major shift. What had been a gradual change over the last five thousand years has vastly increased in speed, even within the last five years. Not long ago, I talked about the filmy substance of life, and particularly human life, that covers this planet. Some areas are more civilized and technically advanced than others, but we’re all living contemporaneously on our planet, and due to modern transportation and communication methods, we are more and more closely tied together. A hundred years ago, the United States was much more advanced than people in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, but that did not result in any great conflict because there were no telephones, no televisions, no airplanes. Even though we heard stories—true or not—about what was going on in less-civilized parts of the world, those places were very distant from us, and not just spatially. They were like other worlds, like something out of the Arabian Nights. Their lives sounded almost fictional to us.
Back in 2001, some very uncivilized people hijacked our very civilized airplanes and flew them into our very civilized buildings in our most civilized city in the world, Manhattan, and within minutes, killed thousands of people, all while cursing us, cursing civilization, and more specifically, cursing the most civilized areas of Life. The conflict, the antagonism, the friction is between the less civilized and the more civilized. That has always been the case. Why will Life not permit us to point that out in a straightforward comment?
Such obfuscation is obviously necessary to Life. Wars over land were fought in the days of the Greeks and the Romans, and that type of warfare still goes on. There are tribal fights over land going on in the jungles of Ecuador and Zambia right now. Once large groups of people in the West became civilized, however, their fights ceased to be over land. They passed laws about land ownership, and they agreed about what the words of the laws meant. The ruler gave out deeds to land as a reward, and a man could sell his land deed to another Greek or Roman or Persian. That’s when people started fighting over intangibles—over which is the “right” religion, the “right” form of government, the “right” philosophy.
The less-civilized groups are not enjoying the benefits of technology that we enjoy because they don’t have time to develop technology. Why? Because they’re still fighting over land and property. There is conflict over the more civilized being more civilized. The less civilized want to come in and conquer the more civilized and take the benefits of civilization—but they can’t just take over those benefits.
The barbarians, the Goths conquered the Roman Empire, and what they got for their trouble was the Dark Ages. That sort of thing has played out throughout history, and it’s playing out right now. Turn on the news and you hear it. Pick up a paper, and you read it. The barbarians invade and kill the civilized, and tell themselves, “Now we’ve got all their technology.” The local Attila tells his followers, “Go start up all that fancy equipment we just got,” but they don’t have a clue how to use the technology they just conquered. To them, it’s just a bunch of stuff. They will need to become civilized in order to use that stuff properly. That’s what is going on, but Life will not let that be said by the more civilized.
I urge you to pursue this on your own, because there is a payoff to this that I am unable to put into words. I can’t explain to you what I actually see, but I can say that it’s right at the edge. You need to look at this for yourself, and ask yourself what it’s about. Look at Life as being a single organism, a filmy substance that covers this planet and is composed of everything living. The organism is in the depths of the ocean with fish and algae, and on the land with plants, insects and animals, and particularly with humans, because we are Life’s best manifestation of itself. If you look at this film as being one organism, you will see that the human part of the organism speaks with several voices. The more civilized have a voice and the less civilized have a voice, and inside these two major voices are numerous lesser voices.
Life has large parts of itself—of humanity—denouncing other parts of itself for doing so well, and conversely, has the parts that are doing well turning verbal back-flips to keep from pointing out to the less-civilized, “Your problem is that you are less civilized than we are!” They will say anything but that. They even take the blame. They say, “It’s our fault for letting you taste a fast food hamburger. It’s our fault for letting you see a sports car. It’s our fault that now your culture is falling apart and has begun trying its best to be like us, by attacking us and trying to take what we have.”
As I said, that never works. You can’t imitate civilization. An uneducated person can’t start wearing his hair like Einstein, and suddenly become a physicist. He’s got to study physics. You can’t perform surgery the way Western doctors do if you just walked out of a primitive life in the desert or the jungle. You see doctors operating on someone, and you go in and cut the doctors’ throats, put on their clothes, take the scalpels out of their hands, and say, “Bring on the next person.” You lay the patient down and stick a mask over his face, but you don’t know how to turn on the anesthesia. You cut him open, and he screams, goes into shock, and dies. Then the uncivilized surgeons, who two minutes ago were terrorists, look at each other and say, “What went wrong? How did they do it?”
The same thing is going on in your consciousness that is going on in the “real” world. You have a civilized West in your consciousness, and you also have uncivilized semi-barbarians in there, and in the same way, what’s going on makes you live in a dream world. This is not mystical, not metaphysical. You can see this on the news. You can hear this in the words of your president, the prime ministers of other countries, the mullahs, the religious leaders. They exist in a dream world, but out there, no one says it’s a dream world. Life even makes them verbally support and add to the dream by claiming that what’s going on is caused by something that it is not caused by.
There is not just a dream inside a mystic’s head that he’s struggling against. Everybody is living in a dream, and Life is producing the dream. Ask yourself, “Why? What’s going on that I never think about?” Don’t look for an answer out in the world, because nobody out there is ever going to think about this. You can listen to me talk, but ultimately, that will not do anything for you. You have to see it for yourself. You have to keep looking at your own consciousness. When that makes you feel like you’re going in a circle, then look back out at Life, and you will see the same thing going on. When that gets dizzying, go back to looking at your consciousness, and when that again gets annoying, look back at Life.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
FUNNY HOW NONE HELD BY THE CITY
EVER ASK TO BE PAROLED
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Pointing The Way Out To Those Who’ve Only Suspected There Is One
MAY 10, 2004 ©2004: JAN COX
Two Things Not To Do.
Give a blues guitarist a wah wah pedal, or a nitwit the idea of waking-up.
For independence — a mind must be lean.
(Tip: Mental fat is the ideas of others.)
Time And The Big House.
The past is important to the general prison population;
indeed, it composes a substantial part of the walls.
Captives always hear the past talking to them.
“What does the real-deal-man hear in his head?”
He won’t say.
“What if it’s nothing?!”
One guy said he should be so lucky — (though who knows what he really meant?!)
All dreams of freedom are unwitting descriptions of confinement;
all freedoms vocally asserted are themselves forms of captivity.
(Escapees don’t identify themselves.)
In prison, captives take the noises in their cells to be their selves.
At a museum opening, a kid grabbed the trouser leg of an intellectual and said:
“If knowledge is actually something you possess,
then how come all those fancy-ancy kings with their rootie-tootie tombs
didn’t have theirs buried with them along with their diamonds and gold?”
(It was subsequently necessary for the pundit to have his pants cleaned and pressed.)
Once an ordinary mind has said: “There is no way out” — confinement is complete.
“O bury me not,
on the lone pre me.”
No matter their apparent age: ideas taken from others are always spoiled.
Being bound to a rotten mind,
is bound to a rotten time.
Definitions.
Captivity: A destination.
Seriousness: The journey there.
Traffic Flow.
Only in the city are there permanent one way streets —
same as how cells doors swing in but one direction —
yet few ever realize that when the door is open, the way in is also the way out.
“Why is it that thoughts won’t reveal themselves to man for what they are!”
Can you describe how they might go about this?
“Uhhh…………….I’ll have to get back to you on this.”
Model prisoners watch other prisoners —
potential bust-outs watch the watching.
Man can design no technical equipment capable of examining itself —
which is precisely what the nervous system rebel requires
to ever free himself from man’s inner captivity.
“So is it ignorance, or an inability to see that is responsible for
man’s constricted state of consciousness?”
At night in bed when you’re dreaming — your brain is imagining that it’s seeing.
“And your point is? — oh.”
With two minds it is possible for a man to see himself in a mirror:
with more — you wouldn’t believe what’s to be seen!
“By the way warden: I’ve always wondered:
Why are the mirrors in prisons always unbreakable? —
is there something the authorities want to be sure every man continues to see.”
“Good question son — nice observation, but a more fulfilling approach would be
to include the modifier: seemingly: Is there something seemingly about man
which life does not want him to be able to ignore?”
“Yeah!……..I get you warden:
Being fooled is a large part of being a good prisoner, huh?!”
“Huh?! — indeed, my lad.”
One man says he now wonders if any enlightenment is all enlightenment
since he was recently and suddenly epiphanized with the realization that the entire
Science Of Economics is made up!
(It’s rumored that his two brothers have temporarily abandoned building race cars for attempting to weld this notion to Psychology, Theology, and French Romanticism.)
(“Hey — I was going around in circles long before I met you,” noted Icarus.)
At a recent city convention one speaker was ignored off the stage after asking if any
of the attendees were considering the question of why — of all the major organs — only the brain is spherical.
Adopting a recognized: philosophy-of-life is (neurally speaking)
the attempt by a poverty stricken prisoner to protect himself.
Life As Liable To Be Led In The Land Of Medical Metaphor.
To cover the aroma of asthma one man sprays himself with cologne de diabetes.
“And this you’re inferring, has anything at all to do with achieving Enlightenment?!
Come on! — gimmie a break! (or at least, small fracture.)”
Visitor’s Tip: Being a prisoner tends to make many testy.
It’s rumored there’s a guy who says he doesn’t hold his captors
personally responsible — which of course clearly indicates that he is the only person in the entire universe who doesn’t realize who his real captor is. Jeeze!
O! — sorry — that was you, wasn’t it. Sorry.
Man’s institutions, in their making all plans of possible escape sound
impossibly complex helps keep men mostly disinterested therein.
(“To tell you the truth: it’s easier to just stay here polishing Lancelot’s armor,
and Allah’s apple than it is to try to leave.”)
Inner prisons need no other walls than man’s habits.
Since no one normally leaves, the city never has the opportunity to say:
“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”
Taking any of ordinary men’s ideas personally is the height of several things:
seriousness,
stupidity,
and captivity.
In city intellectual circles the question is always: “What causes that?”
while outside of town in rebel camp the endless inquiry is: “What asked that?”
And finally an e-mail arrived from a man who says he reads these daily writings regularly, but that if someone doesn’t explain to him what it’s really about
he is going to: shave his head; hold his breath; become an Existentialist,
and take a shot at Santa Claus.
J
The more awake you are the less interesting are the ordinary.