With Every “I Think,” You Are Selling Yourself
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
Transcript = See Below
Condensed News = See below
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Summary
5/24/04:
Notes by TK
The Media is the only commercial activity that freely allows employees to ridicule and criticize it. Such activity can at times actually support the enterprise, adding to its efficacy in selling advertising. The only other comparable activity: human consciousness. With every self-reference, every ‘I think’, you are selling yourself to others, yet often with self-deprecation and confession in the extreme. Under the right conditions self-effacement can sell advertising. This is a prime purpose of consciousness. (37:19) #3151
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3151 The media is the only place where its employees can criticize the parent company. They’re divided into two operations: 1. editorials entertain, 2. business selling ads. Is not human consciousness selling ads every time you say what kind of guy you are? Self-effacement is one of the most popular kinds of advertising. “I’m no Einstein myself”… Can you imagine two male tigers engaging in self-effacement? You can’t have a personality if you can’t talk about you. You’ve got to talk about you or you don’t have a personality. The media and human consciousness are the only two human activities that allow it’s spokesmen to ridicule and criticize their employer.
Transcript
05-24-2004 # 3151
Edited by S.A,
I highly recommend that you examine things that normally go on in life, things that you read or hear about, and that you try to think of one of them in a way that you’ve never experienced before. That is the type of example that I’ve been discussing for the last few talks. There is another example of this, a sterling one, that you’ve been hearing all of your life. You’ve heard comedians and talk show hosts on radio and television do this. You’ve seen it in newspaper editorials as well. No one has ever pointed out the singularity of the example—so I will.
The media—including television, radio, and newspapers—are the only commercial entities on this planet that freely allow employees to ridicule and criticize the entity itself. How long would a salesman for IBM last if he talked in public about IBM the same way that comedians on late-night shows criticize and ridicule their radio or TV networks? At times, you even see this type of critique in magazines and newspapers. At any rate, you can hear a late-night comedian stand there and make two or three very pointed jokes about the lousy shows his network puts on. You can hear ostensibly sensible, serious people on talk radio roundly and vigorously criticizing the company that owns the station for exercising some sort of censorship. “Several days ago I said such-and-such, and I got a memo from those pointy-headed stuffed-shirts who run this radio station. What is wrong with those people? Don’t they know that the Constitution grants freedom of speech?”
The media are the only commercial activity that allows itself to be critiqued in this way. Big business doesn’t allow this. None of the major religions allow this. You can’t be a preacher and have your salary paid by some church, and stand in the pulpit and ridicule or criticize that church.
Remember that we will eventually connect this to consciousness, so what is it that’s unusual about the media? What is unique about the media is that they’re divided into two operations. In radio and television, these are normally called the entertainment side and the business side. In newspapers and magazines, these are called the editorial side and the business side.
Historically, and especially regarding newspapers, because they take themselves seriously, it has been considered that there exists an intangible firewall between the business and editorial sides. Those who sell advertising are expected to exert no influence over the editorial side. Offices for the two sides are kept apart, often by having the business side and the editorial side on separate floors. It is absolutely forbidden for anybody from the business side to go to the editorial floor and say, “I was out trying to sell an ad today to Bill Smith’s Ford dealership, and Smith said that one of you writers has been doing a series of exposés about Fords having a terrible problem with their SUVs rolling over and hurting or killing people. Smith said he won’t advertise in a paper that’s taking away business. You guys have got to stop it.”
Historically, news departments and advertising departments considered that the barrier between them should never be breached. Even when certain radio or TV shows are viewed as entertainment, the advertising departments still consider that wall to exist, not for any serious reason, but because often they make millions of dollars a year from the ads that run on those comedy shows. They tell themselves, “He’s one of our biggest money-makers. We’re not going to tell him and his writers what to say. If he wants to make fun of us, let him. If he wants to make jokes about the lousy food at the fast-food chain that advertises with us, and that chain wants to pull their ads off the show, it doesn’t matter. We’ve have ten other companies waiting for their spot.”
Is there any other business that would allow one of their salesmen, or anybody else who speaks for them, to joke about the poor quality of the business? Surely you have never called a business and heard the operator say, “McFastFood Headquarters, home of the world’s greasiest and crummiest burgers. How may I direct your call?” No, you have never heard that, but NBC and CBS will allow a comedian to make endless jokes about the crummy taste in shows the NBC or CBS bosses have.
Before I get to my main point, I refer you back to my opening comment that this is not about me bragging. I’m telling you about an activity that I can’t recommend more highly, if you can figure out how to get yourself to do it. When one of these things hits me, it has tremendous benefit to me, including a quite refreshing effect throughout the nervous system. I may then use it metaphorically, to try and explain it to you, but it will only benefit you if you can figure out how to apply it to yourself.
Here is something we’ve been hearing all our lives. Everybody hears it. The comedians mean it to be heard. Ofttimes they will wink and gesture, to be sure that the audience understands. “You do realize that I’m laughing at my network. I can make a joke about one of the other networks, because they’ve got their share of rotten programs. But hey, don’t we have the worst! That’s why I’m biting the hand that writes my own paycheck.”
A newspaper writer will say, “I’m aware that my exposé is about one of our large advertisers, but we want our readership to know that we serve the public good. It’s our responsibility to point out restaurants that serve rotten meat, or automobiles that have a propensity to roll over and harm people. We want you, the reading public, to know that we’re on the job, reporting useful news.”
For the people who own the newspaper, reporting useful news is not their newspaper’s purpose. The purpose of their newspaper is to make a profit, in the same way that NBC’s purpose is not to entertain people, but to sell ads at a profit. The way that TV and radio sell ads is by entertaining people. The way a newspaper sells ads is by enticing readers. After all, people don’t buy a newspaper for the ads. They buy it for the content that the reportorial staff reports on and the editorial staff creates. That’s why people read the paper—but incidentally, they’ll see an appealing ad, and go buy a car at the dealership that placed the ad, and then that dealership will buy more advertising.
This is something that you have been exposed to all of your life, and not only have you probably never thought about this, you’ve definitely never read about it. I highly recommend that you pay attention to this. This is not about you taking sides. You’ll never be able to do this if you let yourself fall into the hands of your ordinary consciousness, wherein you take sides and become partisan, because then all you’ll do is laugh along with the comedian. The comedian might make a joke at the expense of the network, and then throw in something like, “Look at the kinds of Philistines that run businesses. They’re not like us hip people—like me and my writers and you, my audience. All those business managers are interested in is business, business, business. They’re the kind of people we would never bother to associate with. Phhhht!”
When you listen to that, you can’t let yourself say, “Yes, how true,” or you’ll never learn anything. If you’re reading an article in the paper criticizing some big company’s business ethics, and all you’re doing is saying, “Yeah! Yeah! Those people don’t care anything about us, the little guy, the public,” then you can’t ever do this. What I’m suggesting is that you do something entirely free from all of that. If you can see this for yourself, it gives your nervous system a quite unusual boost. It encourages awakening to suddenly realize that this is the only activity in the world that freely allows its employees to publicly stand up and criticize it, even ridicule it, without restraint. Seeing this sort of thing on your own comes with my absolute highest recommendation.
I just said that the media offer the only commercial activity in the world that permits public criticism and ridicule. Out of the thousands, or tens of thousands, of items on the Labor Department’s list of all of the known professions and businesses, is there anything else that does the same? Isn’t it amazing to think that only the media allows this?
Wait—is there really only one human activity that permits self-criticism and self-ridicule? What about human consciousness? Yes, consciousness does the very same thing, and not even for a profit, because consciousness is not selling ads. Oh, is it correct that the voice that apparently speaks for you from your consciousness is not selling ads? No, consciousness does sell ads every time you say, “I.” Every time you describe what kind of person you are. Every time you say, “Here are my thoughts on the matter.” That is to say, you are a media activity.
Self-effacement, by the way, is one of the standard forms used by commercial advertising agencies. In advertisements, self-effacement seems to require judicious use. You see very little of it, but when you do, and it works, people talk about it. Once or twice a year, an ad will appear that makes fun of a product, and that ad will be memorable enough that even comedians will use it in their material.
At any rate, you practice self-effacement when you say, “Of course, I’m so dumb that just the other day I did such-and-such,” to get people to chuckle so that you win them over. If you can get somebody to laugh along with you, not at you, then you have sold them an ad. Let’s say that you’re talking to a close friend, and they recount some stupid bit of behavior by someone else who isn’t present, and you both laugh, with an edge of hostility in the laughter. You both are ridiculing the other party. Then it’s your turn to say something, but you leave behind the aggressive mode and move into a buddy mode with your friend. You confide to him, “To tell you the truth, one time I was so stupid that I did such-and-such.” If he then laughs along with you, you have sold him an ad.
That is one of the saddest, most pathetic forms of salesmanship, and it’s one of those things that ordinary people never comment on, although surely some psychologist somewhere may have noticed it and written an academic paper. Well-known people—the president, people who pass themselves off as intellectuals, deep thinkers, serious people—can depend on using that technique. In the midst of a sermon, a rant, an attack on the stupidity of another person or group, they’ll suddenly engage in a fast bit of mea culpa. They’ll say something like, “Of course, I’m no Einstein myself.” You hear that sort of thing all the time, and it is a sales pitch.
Tigers are very territorial animals. Let’s say that two male tigers accidentally meet in a clearing, and they engage in a kind of conversation, primarily through body language, using their ears, their whiskers, their stance. Can you imagine two strange tigers coming up to each other and one of them in some way engaging in self-effacement? The tiger suddenly begins acting very strangely. He might hold his head down and bat his eyelashes as if he were saying, “I look big and mean, but sometimes I’m just a little timid pussycat.” Can you imagine that? Even if the tiger doesn’t mean it? Maybe he’s decided, “This other tiger looks as if he’s tougher than I am. I’d better try and win him over before he jumps me.” Can you imagine a tiger engaging in any sort of self-effacement? Or a moose, or a gorilla, or a dog?
Who but man—who but a conscious creature—would ridicule himself? You’re your own NBC, your own New York Times. You speak for your own corporation, and your consciousness, the part that is normally called your personality, your “I,” has got to talk. People who are born mute—meaning no offense to any mutes listening to this—don’t have a personality in the ordinary sense of the word. If the mute person is somebody you get to know, or a family member, they may certainly be likable. Assuming they’re literate, they may write witty comments on paper, but if they don’t have any paper and you don’t know sign language, how could they demonstrate a personality? About all they could do is smile and show that they’re laughing silently. Is that enough to show that they have a personality?
Furthermore, you can’t have a personality, even if you do talk, if you never talk about you. You can have the beginning of a personality if you agree with somebody else’s rants and raves and criticisms. If you said, “Yeah, yeah,” every time they laughed at somebody else, you wouldn’t have demonstrated a sparkling personality, but the person you agreed with would no doubt find you a quite tolerable conversational partner.
Nobody ever analyzes this, but for people to say that you have a real personality, you have got to talk about yourself. If you don’t, people might say, “He’s a mathematician, a lawyer, a doctor. He seems to know his business, but he has absolutely no personality. If you want to know anything about medicine, he’s got the answer. But other than that, wow, is he boring! Just nothing to him.”
I was going to leave you with the fact that it’s as though the employer in your brain not only allows the public voice that speaks for it to ridicule and criticize it, but from childhood on, it knows, or it learns, to encourage your self-effacement. The employer in consciousness says, “Go ahead, make fun of me—that is, make fun of yourself. Go ahead, it’s OK.” Your employer knows that under the right conditions, self-effacement, a term that sounds better than “self-ridicule”, can sell advertising. It can sell you or me. It can make us seem more personable.
An even stronger form of this is self-criticism. Maybe a friend or a sexual partner has criticized you, told you, “You’ve got such a bad temper that sometimes I don’t even want to be around you.” Maybe your girlfriend says, “I can’t take this any more. Your temper is just awful!” Sometimes when a person sees that his behavior is causing him to lose a relationship he wants, he will say, “Wait, baby. I’ve been thinking about this. I know you’ve said this before, and I’ve been reading some psychology books, and I’ve been thinking about it. You’ve caused me to really look at myself, and you’re right. I’ve got a rotten temper. You have finally made me see this.”
In other words, a person will engage in what appears to be very serious self-condemnation. Why? Only to sell ads. If a man tells his girlfriend, “I’ve been thinking about this, and I do have a terrible temper. You’re right,” does he say that because, having looked at his problem, he will now desist from it? No. He only says this to keep his girlfriend, or to keep a friend, or to keep somebody that he has been doing business with. He doesn’t say, “By investigating this, by reflecting on it, I’ll stop it”? No, that’s not his intention. At that moment, his intention is to keep selling ads, to keep this person as his friend.
Back to my earlier point, if you inspect the list that the U.S. Labor Department has of a thousand or more separate occupations and businesses, you will see that out of that whole list, the media is the only listed human enterprise that allows its spokesmen to ridicule the folks who pay their salary. Of course, consciousness is not listed, but human consciousness is the only human activity that not only allows, but actively encourages its spokesmen to ridicule and criticize the employer.
I frequently say that if you see something for yourself that I’ve discussed, it will wake you up. At the very least, if you see this head-on, fully, for yourself, in your own way, how can it not shake up your consciousness in some very useful manner?
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
IN CITY STREETS THERE IS ALWAYS
ONE MORE WAY AROUND EVERY BLOCK
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Insider’s Secret Short Cut To Everyplace
MAY 24, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
A chap who identifies himself as a collector of common denominators says that
the more he pursues in his own mind, the normally perceived reality-of-things,
the more curious this realm turns out to be — which is ever further curiouser in that
all things end up proving to be just what they clearly were before you & other humans began to think and talk about them.
As children: everyone starts out thinking along a certain line — then —
they lose the thread.
The real-deal-man later learns to produce his own thread.
In trying to extract some disruptive burrs from his mind one man suddenly said:
“The difference for instance between Buddhism and Islam is that
Islam is an Arabic word,” and as always realized that he was speaking in Symbolese.
In any area outside the purely material one wherein men believe that reality exists, other than for the sound of the words used to describe it — they are misguided.
Those who deem religion a blemish on man have no understanding of his
intangible dermatology, nor special need of his inner skin to breathe.
Life As Performed In The City.
An army should be suspect in which medals for valor are awarded to men for simply not committing suicide when they find themselves in harm’s apparent way,
but do note that thus do the forces that defend man’s incorporeal institutions
operate successfully.
Part of normal human existence is to feel put upon —
not necessarily at the instant moment for any identifiable reason, just put upon
for simply being alive and conscious.
In pursuing his own personal course of clarity and preciseness,
after every thought that passes through his mind one man says: “Sic.”
Trafficking with others can make you wealthy;
doing so with yourself can make you glad.
Concern over intangible enemies (people who you perceive dislike you
for no physical reason) will nourish an even nastier one in you.
(“My neighbors in the city have roaches and in-laws — I have ideas.”)
Regardless their professed religion, everyone’s secret spiritual pleasure is in
the secret worship of Saint WhatTheHell’sWrongWithEveryoneElse.
The unstated purpose of man’s collective thinking is to keep man collective.
There is the danger that an individual cow might start thinking
independently of the herd — which cannot do any good for the herd,
whose importance clearly outweighs any individual’s
(except of course to any individual struggling to get mentally free of the herd).
“Aren’t we glad we don’t have any cells in our individual bodies
with such rebellious ideas!”
Ah! — but the few do.
One man says that a fuller recognition of the inner rebel’s activity came upon him
when he suddenly realized that no matter who you are, where you came from,
what you believe, or who you appear to be,
everybody is bar mitzvahed in a suit that Life provided;
“We are all pledged to Life–
each individual’s life is committed and dedicated to Life —
you become a normal adult only when your mental world is in line with Life’s,
(as manifested in man’s collective thinking).
Here’s to you Life — and in so doing, also: Here’s to me!”
One man had a hangnail to keep his mind off his fever blister —
which he had to stop him from thinking about his hemorrhoids —
which he had to distract him from his cancer (and he had a car that frequently
wouldn’t start to help him forget about all the other stuff).
Statement Of Pure Fact: If what works with the mind
would work on the rest of man’s life he’d have it the fuck made.
Prisons are held together not by mortar, but repetition.
(Same as mental herds.)
All gradually sink and eventually drown, but sheep holding hands,
do so in an unnecessarily messy fashion (leastwise from a certain minority Ovis Bovidae view).
One man’s proposal: “Off drugs: anybody can feel bad.”
The difference between ordinary men’s thinking, and the certain man’s is greater than any differences between the many ideas about which men think.
This is another way of looking at the fact that what an awakened man knows
is not of as much significance to him as how he knows things.
(“So it’s not actually the gum balls — it’s the way you chew them?!”)
In Re The Architecture For Human Institutions.
Man’s spiritual, political, intellectual, and artistic activities need impressive
physical structures to compensate.
(Aka: Swords can do what poetry and discussions can’t.)
On one world you can be fined up to one hundred dollars for: Stating The Obvious.
Another distinction between the routine and the real-deal-man is that everyone else sees death as the ultimate form of confinement.
The collective spiritual/intellectual world of man is so short of significance
that their individual personal problems assume highly exaggerated proportions.
Inmates’ unspoken awareness of the prison’s frailty causes them to focus attention
on their own cell.
(Passengers would have survived the Titanic’s mishap had they
stayed in their cabins.)
As they get old: people pout — ideas petrify.
The problem an ordinary partisan mind has in seeing things as they are
is that its sight is that of a cross eyed man.
(“So the struggle to awaken could be seen as a search for corrective glasses?!”)
In the herd there are as many intangible realities as there are cows;
in the certain man’s consciousness there is but one.
The strange case of: Being nourished by being deprived.
(Two legs are better than one — if you’re in a sack race.)
The Silence Of The Non Sheep.
He who won’t let on,
can get on.
(Also called: The Secret Potency Of The Nothingness
When Consciously And Purposefully Applied).
A father said to a son:
“You would eventually see the nature of man’s special second reality,
and receive the liberating benefit thereof,
if you but remembered and considered relentlessly my comment that in everyone’s primary reality: ‘Materials precede measurements’ (that is):
Facts follow acts — but when facts trail in the wake of facts — then you have entered the other reality wherein nothing can be measured and objectively determined:
it is a realm of entertainment to all (even solace to some),
but one which completely befuddles a mind intent on understanding it,
and thus escaping it.
If intelligence is not strictly a personal matter with you
then you have none — not in the wakened man’s sense.
Once you turn that corner, and suddenly have your own private,
open-eyed, head-on view of: civilization; the city part of man’s mind;
and that entire intangible realm he collectively shares,
you no longer have any interest in your I.Q. score, or intellectual credentials.
The intelligence of a man-who-knows is his alone and cannot be shared
or made known to others.
( Here again you might note does life conserve the cohesion of the herd.)
“Be a wild hair,” said the brain to a synapse, “on your own time” —
which is exactly what it did — seeing that only a non partisan neural operation
has its own time (everyone else being on the clock full time for life.)
One man reputedly upon reading this decided that what he wanted
was to ultimately be done with it and be bald.
J