The Ultimate Metaphor
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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Key Words =
Summary
5/19/04:
Notes by TK
A man tells a story about being diagnosed with incurable cancer; resolving to direct his consciousness to fight the physical malignancy since that had been left undone by the normal functioning of his body. He assiduously, consciously exhorts the immune system T-cells to attack and kill the cancer invasion. Not as a last-ditch stand, but as a good idea per se: effort worthy on its own merits—heretofore untried in human endeavor, and effected on the basis that there is no part of the body that the brain is incapable of communicating with, perhaps benefiting, for an extraordinary reason.
The man feels immediately better with this regimen, but found that he soon was deflected from this salutary activity by all the usual petty distractions of mundane living; that he was incapable of carrying out this life-saving, all-important work. Thus, even the pressure of imminent death is not sufficient to short-circuit the inertia of ordinary mentation!!
There is no reason that consciousness could not completely dedicate itself to this endeavor with nonstop obsession and maybe have inexplicable success, yet it cannot even try! But if it was given some mechanical, grasping-at-straws technique (pushing a button constantly to deliver some quack-recommended, miracle-cure medicine, for instance), that, it could do. What else does a man need to know about consciousness? (53:16) #3149
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3149 You find out you’re sick and you tell your immune cells to go over there and kill the tumor and you start telling yourself to do that with full determination. Then shortly you forget despite the intense need. Wouldn’t you talk to your immune cells ceaseless, relentlessly? And suddenly you’re back in the same old consciousness.
Transcript
05-19-2004 # 3149
Edited by S.A.
A man—let’s call him “Mr. M”—told me a story that is right at the center of everything we’ve been talking about. Mr. M’s doctor sent him for a CT scan, and a malignancy—a cancer—showed up in his lung. He was told that the type of tumor he had was inoperable, nor was there any known chemotherapy or radiation treatment. The doctors said that the tumor would eventually kill him.
Mr. M went home and thought about his situation. He knew enough about human physiology to understand that his immune system should have taken care of the problem. Most educated people know that the immune system has two roles. First, everyone is constantly breathing in toxins, bacteria, and viruses that could cause cancer, and the immune system is in charge of keeping those contaminants from damaging the body.
Second, the immune system is responsible for sending out killer cells to destroy body cells that begin to grow in an unnatural way and to mutate into a cancer. Periodically throughout everyone’s life, they might develop cancerous cells, but when their immune system is functioning correctly, it will spot the unruly cells and send out killer cells to destroy them. The killer cells can’t be fooled, because malignant cells do not have the markers that identify them as part of your normal physiology. Malignant cells can’t camouflage themselves. It’s as if they wear a sign that says, “alien.” That makes them easy for the killer cells to locate.
When cancer does strike, it’s because something has gone awry in a person’s immune system, and the killer cells have not been sent out. Mr. M was sure that his immune system was still functioning, even after his diagnosis, because otherwise, he would have had many other problems in addition to the cancer. His doctors also did a test and agreed that his immune system was functioning properly, and should have been perfectly capable of taking the necessary steps to eradicate the mutant cells. They did not know why his immune system had failed at its job.
Mr. M admitted that he had felt discouraged when the doctor told him, “There’s nothing we can do to fight this kind of cancer. It’s going to kill you.” When he left the doctor’s office, he was down in the dumps, but when he got home, he started researching medical literature about the immune system. He learned that there is no area of the body, down to where blood and oxygen enter the cells in your little toe, that the brain can’t reach in many ways—electrically, chemically, through the nervous system, through the intricate hormonal system. There is no physical operation that consciousness—mental intention—can’t reach. Your mind can consciously affect your respiration, your heartbeat, even your blood pressure. The most accepted theory is that in the normal course of things, the brain—that is, consciousness—sends out specific directions to various bodily systems. The brain might tell the hormonal system to increase or decrease production of a specific hormone, or tell the immune system to fight off a particular virus.
A cancer begins as a tiny clump of unruly cells that are growing in a non-standard fashion. Mr. M’s immune system had worked properly all of his life, spotting such abnormal cells and killing them. Through his research, he learned that killing cancer cells was not a big deal. The immune system’s killer cells would puncture a malignant cell, and the lymph system would flush away the material that had been inside the cell.
Mr. M thought, “My immune system let this cancer happen, but now my brain, through the power and beauty of consciousness, can fix this. After all, consciousness developed the science of medicine. Consciousness thought up the idea of x-ray machines and then built the machines. My doctor’s consciousness went to medical school. The radiologist’s consciousness learned how to read x-rays and CT scans, and diagnosed my cancer from a CT scan. Now my consciousness knows I have a cancer. Consciousness, the smartest part of a person’s body, the most intelligent thing in this whole universe, now knows about the cancer. ”
Mr. M thought, “The immune system is part of the brain, or maybe the brain is part of the immune system, so if my brain tells the immune system to kill those malignant cells, why wouldn’t that happen? As the voice of my consciousness, I am going to speak to my immune system and to my killer cells. No, not just speak to them. Order them!”
Mr. M started immediately to demand that his immune system eliminate the malignancy. He looked at this not as a last-ditch effort, not as “What have I got to lose?” He wanted to take an active, participatory approach, as if he were beating on the side of the immune system’s trailer, shouting, “Wake up! Go get that malignancy! This is your job! You slacked off and let this happen. Now you need to fix it! Go kill those cells!”
He began talking to his immune system and his killer cells incessantly. He silently talked to them at work, while he was sitting at his desk. None of his co-workers knew what he was doing. When no one was around, he even spoke his orders aloud. He told his immune system, “At the top of my left lung is a lump. Send your killer cells over there and make them wipe out the cancer! Those cells don’t belong in my body. The killer cells must do their job and destroy those cancerous cells.” At every opportunity, Mr. M would walk outside, or go to the bathroom, and talk even more intensively to his immune system. He’d say, “You killer cells, do your job! Get in there and wipe out those cancer cells! You let them get out of hand, but it’s not too late. Go kill them!”
Once he began talking to his immune system, Mr. M immediately felt much better. He couldn’t believe that his plan wouldn’t work. What was his immune system going to do? Not listen to its own brain, its own consciousness? Mr. M felt like a man who knew why his car had been making a noise, went out and bought the parts, opened up his owner’s manual, read the instructions, and then plunged in and did the repair. He felt great!
“But then,” Mr. M said, “even before that first day was out, something almost as terrible as the original diagnosis occurred.” This is a sad tale. It hurt me to hear it, and I hate to relate it to you, but I must. Mr. M realized that very quickly after he’d started talking to his immune system, longer and longer periods of time passed before he remembered to keep talking. He said, “I know that I’m dying. I’ve got one hope—to convince my immune system to kill the cancer cells. Yet somehow, I found that my mind was back to its old habits—talking back to the radio, or talking back to what the president said on the news this morning. My mind, my consciousness, which is my only hope to stay alive, is back doing the same old garbage. First that broke my heart, but in a couple of seconds, it made me so furious I could hardly stand it! And now, I don’t know what to do.”
Mr. M’s situation presents a beautiful task to take on. Picture yourself as having been diagnosed with a fatal malignancy, and for a full day, try to talk to your own immune system. Sooner or later, everybody ends up pretty sick, and if you learn to talk to your immune system, you may be able to stave off a serious illness someday. So, imagine that you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Now, spend a full day telling your killer cells, “Go get those bad cells! Destroy them!” Tell that to yourself all day, without stopping. If you did have an incurable cancer, if that were the only possible thing you could do, wouldn’t you want to talk to those killer cells non-stop? “Go kill those cancer cells! Go kill them! Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!”
Look at this task as Mr. M did—as a positive, proactive effort. Why not? If your mind tells your immune system, “You know how to do this. Send out your killer cells, and destroy those malignant cells. Do it!” there is nothing in the immune system that would give it the privilege, the power, to say, “Nope. I won’t do that.”
Don’t approach the task thinking, “I’ll try it if you say so, but if I were dying and they said there was nothing I could do, this would be no better than an atheist praying. Like an atheist suddenly saying, ‘God, I’ve always believed in you. I was just kidding when I said I didn’t believe. Please cure this.’’ ” Don’t look at the task that way. Look at it the way Mr. M did.
Mr. M told himself, “This will work. There is nothing known to be damaged in my immune system. They gave me a full physical after they found this, and everything else was running perfectly. I certainly don’t feel sick. As terrible as the word ‘cancer’ sounds, a cancer is just a clump of misbehaving cells. Doctors say that happens all the time, and people’s immune systems almost always get rid of those unruly cells. There is no reason why my immune system can’t send out killer cells and destroy my cancer. My brain has the power to do that.”
If that were you, wouldn’t you do that ceaselessly? Go ahead and try it, and see if you don’t become infuriated when you fail at the task. Of course, you have an excuse. You know you’re not really dying. Nevertheless, try this task. I don’t want to put a hex on you. Maybe you can succeed at it. That would be surprising, though, wouldn’t it, since you’re just pretending? Mr. M is actually dying, but even he found his mind running back to the same old daydreams. His mind started making fun of someone who walked into his office with an out-of-date haircut. His mind was rolling its eyes and laughing. Mr. M would suddenly realize what his mind was doing, and think, “I’m dying! I was supposed to be telling my immune system to kill those cancer cells. How could this happen? Why is my entire consciousness being taken over by this foolishness?”
Friends and neighbors, for the last five talks, I have been directing your attention to consciousness, to that part of our physiological activity that talks inside our brain, and that has more power than any other bodily function. As far as we know, consciousness has more power than anything else in this universe. I don’t know whether you give consciousness sufficient credit. Think of this: for thousands of years, man’s mind has been overcoming the power of the universe. As just one example, consciousness has been overcoming gravity ever since man invented the water-wheel.
Consider something as powerful as death staring at a man, and leaving him only one hope, which is that his immune system can overcome a small lump of cells. Mr. M pointed out the cancer to his immune system with its killer cells. If you were Mr. M, wouldn’t you expect your consciousness to do that task with every breath? With every thought? Go ahead and try the task, and see whether very shortly, instead of doing something that your life may depend on, your consciousness is back to laughing at the man with the mullet haircut.
What else do you need to know about our ordinary state of consciousness? Assuming you agree that staying alive is one of the most important things there is, what are we to think when, even under the most extreme of pressures—impending death—consciousness has the power to make the immune system kill the cancer cells, but does not do its job?
Here’s another possibility—what if your doctor said, “There is a treatment that you’ve got to self-administer. We will hook up a patch to your chest, close to the cancer. There is a wire that leads from the patch to a little button. You must press the button once every second that you’re awake. You’ll know when you do, because you’ll hear a little click. You have to do this for up to two weeks, but if you do it, then your immune system will eradicate the cancer. You can eat, watch television, read, even go for a walk, but you’ve got to carry this button with you, and click it every second.” Surely you’d say, “I could do that.”
I just heard somebody’s consciousness say, “That would be different.” Remember this also: consciousness is the biggest, sneakiest liar and self-deluder that we know of in this universe. At any rate, try the task, just for a day. Treat it sincerely, as you treated the tasks I used to regularly assign. Picture yourself inside the story Mr. M told. You went to the doctor and he said, “You’ve got a cancer in a spot where we can’t operate. There’s no other treatment. There’s nothing we can do.”
At this point, that cancer hasn’t spread, and is just a small group of cells in a specific location. That’s the sort of thing that by every known bit of medical knowledge about the human body, the immune system should be able to destroy. Wouldn’t you tell your immune system to kill those cells? Wouldn’t you assume that if you devoted your consciousness to that task for some length of time, your instincts would take care of everything else your body needed, and leave your consciousness to its single task. Your instincts would tell you when to eat, to relieve yourself, to sleep, so there is no known reason that your consciousness could not devote itself fully to saying, “Go get that cancer! Go kill those cells!” Your life would depend on that, so wouldn’t you assume that eventually, your immune system would do its job?
We’re not doctors, but you’re sufficiently well-read to hear my rhetorical question. Is there anything known about the operations of the human body to indicate that your immune system would not eventually follow your instructions? Of course, your immune system doesn’t have ears, so we’re not really talking about words, but by having your consciousness repeat and repeat, “Immune system, roust out your killer cells! Killer cells, do your job,” you are activating that part of your brain. Your instructions are putting pressure on the immune system to move the killer cells from the bone marrow into the lymph system, so they can travel to the malignancy.
We know of nothing that would stop the immune system from finally submitting to your orders, nothing that would prevent the immune system from eventually killing those unruly cells. Yet, try it yourself as if your life depended on it, and see what experience you have.
I always meant to make up a task like that, such as that your king sentences you to die next Saturday at noon, but somehow, you save his dog’s life. The king is grateful, but he doesn’t want to just set you free, so he tells you that if you will press a certain button every moment between now and Saturday noon, then you won’t be executed. Between now and Saturday noon all you have to do is go click, click, click, click. That’s all you have to do—if you can.
I never got around to writing that story, but then, Mr. M told me this one, and his real-life story was better. What else do you need to know about consciousness? Well, I say that you need to know a little bit more, which you might learn if you do this task. You really should.
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
ESCAPE REMAINS A POPULAR FAUX CITY TOPIC
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The Secret Blueprints Of The Sham Prison Walls
MAY 19, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
You are not a true rebel and independent thinker if you still think of your ideas as
a minority position: a special voice of sanity in man’s mental wilderness,
for to do so requires that you see humanity’s majority views of life as being dangerously in error — which marks you as just another routine dunce.
The way to always tell if your ideas are even worse than merely wrong
is that you feel they alone are necessary to (if not save life on this planet)
to set man back on his proper path.
To know that your thinking is correct and everyone else’s is not
is to unwittingly realize that you’ve been duped;
you’re still just dreaming that you know that you’re dreaming.
Hormones vs. Neurons.
Every time the farmer kills another wolf in his corral he says:
“That will send a clear message to other wolves, and potential cattle killers
that we won’t put up with this type of unacceptable behavior.”
(The full headline of this should have read:
A Little Humor Concerning: Hormones vs. Neurons.)
Mused a guy to himself:
“One neat thing about trying to get-to-the-bottom-of-things is that in so doing
you reach a place where you no longer need anyone else to tell you:
What kind of guy you are — no! — wait, it’s even better:
you no longer have any interest in hearing anyone tell you.”
Man lives by the dual forces of needs and wants,
and is composed of physical feelings and intangible thoughts;
his needs are in the camp of feelings (hunger, thirst, etc)
while his wants are thought based;
the two can parallel one another, or be in conflict,
they can even appear to be unconnected:
this is the illusion at the center of what men’s minds see when asleep and dreaming.
To be awake to what is really going on with life is to not labor under the sensation that there is a separation between your needs and wants.
To physically survive: everyone must first be an unthinking lion;
to live as a fully functioning human: you must also hear the voice of an inner nightingale, with dreams of glory as a singer;
you must have both to be normal and civilized;
you have to privately understand the above to be abnormal and awake.
Just he says, for a chuckle, this guy named Carter calls his life: The Carter Effect.
An everyday partisan mind, by its very construct, will eventually turn belligerent.
There can be no physical peace in the jungle — not so long as the area is thriving, which is to say, as long as the creatures there are eating;
there can also be no mental or emotional peace in the city —
not as long as that particular part of man is alive and well,
which also requires that the inhabitants consume nourishment, in this instance
by the resistance-to, and rejection-of the ideas and feelings of their neighbors.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking some chicken farmers,
and you can’t develop that extraordinary promising, unused area in your mind’s
market place without first overturning the pushcarts already there which handle
naught but pre-owned ideas and emotions.
In his twenties, one man offered his ideas to any who were interested at
pre-development prices.
The collective thinking life primarily pursues through ordinary man is,
from the rebel’s perspective, morbific because of its innate and incurable infection
by self-interest, (more accurately posed): the infection of the impression that
the thoughts which appear in your brain were put there by you, and thus,
you do have a personal interest to defend them.
Being asleep (nee: stupid) won’t kill you,
but trying to protect Ali Baba’s cave can.
Those with no idea of what waking-up really is commonly believe
it has something to do with being sympathetic and helping others.
(Believe it if you can: some people do not want to be referred to the:
You Mean It’s Entirely About Me department.)
To protect the city’s stability, life does not have to prohibit any ideas that might
actually reveal to man what is really going on:
what life has done is programmed men’s minds not to hear such notions as being anything important.
The normal horses who keep the city running, charge unthinking from the firehouse when they hear the bell ring (just as they should and must),
the same situation also sends the certain man into action: studying the bell ringing.
Ideas And The Passing Of Time.
On some day’s one man’s attitude is: “The future can bite my ass.”
Defending your ideas is painting a sieve.
The certain man recognizes that his biggest debt is to the future.
Protesting the ideas of others is letting the air out of your balloon.
One man watches the clock, he says, “In retaliation.”
Trying to get others to adopt your ideas is lying to an ugly child about his looks.
On some day’s one man’s attitude is: “The future can still bite my ass.”
A speaker in city park, commenting on the eternal struggle between Truth & Error, roared: “There will be no smart alecks in heaven…..not unless your side wins…..
…..or does the other.”
Words And The Objects From Whence They Cometh.
In face to face conversations, even as he spoke and listened,
one man would be diagramming heads in his sentences.
After a lifetime of disorienting uncertainty, who but ordinary minds, when finally
told their true position would be upset by it — even if it turned out to be a prison cell;
to the certain man who knows the special way to use thinking:
all new info acts as a spur for more thinking — never suffering.
Amidst a lingering fatal illness one man mused:
“It’s weird being half dead and half alive,” and some virus in his brain added:
“Almost as weird as being half awake and half asleep.”
In city minds: some things are weirder than others,
but outside of town is something that is weirder than everything else!
Sometimes after a solo meal, wherein he had engaged in much mental business
with himself, as he would stand to leave, one man would say to himself:
“Have your mind call mine (assuming that you have one). Ta ta!”
Conversation Regarding: Harmful Ideas.
“Life doesn’t have harmful ideas.”
“Sure it does: look at all the pain and destruction certain ideas have caused man.”
“A plane flying causes stress — sometimes even breakage to the rivets.”
Partisan words and ideas are condoms to use for safe city thinking.
One fellow never looked in mirrors, explaining:
“No need — I KNOW I’m my-kinda-guy!”
The intellectually captive love to extol education and knowledge:
“I may not understand where the idea for the airplane originated,
but I have reams of figures regarding our study of its construction.”
Whatever is passing for knowledge in the city is whatever presently needs to.
Before you can out think others — you have to out die them.
One man’s pet name for the city is: Iffy-ville.
Before you can out think all things useless — you have to out live them.
J