Only a Wie Bit of the Brain is not Mechanical
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
6/2/04:
Notes by TK
You can only preach to the converted. Nobody can be converted to anything; you are born converted, everybody is already converted to the matter at hand or not. The answers to all questions come from the reactive conscious part of the brain. It can initiate nothing. There is no ‘you’, no ‘I’, it is the conscious part of the brain (CBP) speaking in reaction to the foregoing impetus. It is a known, physical part of the brain that can be rendered inoperative with the stroke of a scalpel.
This part of the brain knows it is mechanical, yet also knows it is more than that since it can know its plight. This is the basis of the idea of ‘free will’ and it goes no further than that for the ordinary. The conscious part of the brain is responsible for all technology, but it is not any ‘creative genius’: it is pure reaction to a particular problem. (44:55) #3155
Notes by DR
Jan Cox Talk 3155 You can only preach to the converted. But no one is converted. Everything you really liked, you liked the first time you heard it, touched, tasted it. Some of the things I’ve said, as soon as I said it to me I knew it. If you’re answering questions you’re sleeping, you’re talking about yourself. The conscious part of the brain is reactionary which is what being asleep is. But its not 100% or it couldn’t know that. All of this is about one thing: the place where all thoughts came from, that operation for every intention is absolutely reactionary. It is disgusting, infuriating. You drop a piece of bread in a toaster and what does it do? It toasts the bread. It’s not a thought you have, it’s a reaction. You can’t have a reaction to anything somebody said and that reaction be anything awake.
Transcript
JC 06-02-2004 #3155
Edited by S.A.
We can only preach to the converted. Everything that you like, you liked when you were first exposed to it. You can read documents that are two or three thousand years old, and immediately recognize that they were written by someone like us, another person born converted. Contrarily, you can never be converted to liking a thing. When people are talked into something, they’re not actually converted. They know that, and their “converter”, if he’s got any sense, understands that as well. If somebody from a particular religious or political group has to put their arm around you and say, “This is so important. I’m telling you for your own good,” and they spend some length of time telling you why you need to join them, you will not be converted. You might join, but only under duress, and probably not for long.
Maybe in high school a teacher tried to convince you to join the Latin Club or some other group that didn’t interest you. If somebody tries to convince you with intellectual arguments, and if you do finally agree, you know at the moment you agree that you aren’t going to stick with that. On the other hand, if the first time you heard, say, country music, you liked it, then that was that. If somebody later tried to convince you that you should listen only to classical music, then even if they talked you into going to a symphony, they didn’t win you over.
The first time I read that man is asleep but could wake up, I didn’t think, “Interesting concept. I’ll finish reading this book because I want to see what intellectual arguments the author makes.” As soon as my brain heard that man was living in a dream, my brain said, “Yes!” I was converted. That should tell you something. Not about me—about you. Everything that you really like, you liked the first time you heard it, tasted it, read it, touched it, smelled it. People don’t seem to notice this, yet they have a term to describe it. They say, “He’s just preaching to the converted.” Someone might say, “No need to preach to me. I’ve already been converted.” You were born converted. Nobody has ever converted you to anything. That surely should scare you, or to put it another way, that should wake you up.
Long before I realized fully what was going on, I began to decry responding to personal questions. I continue to discourage you from talking about yourself at all, which includes answering questions. Years ago, it struck me that if you are answering questions, then you are sleeping. You’re sticking a screwdriver into your own brain. At that time, I had no basis for that understanding. I couldn’t point to a book in which the author explained why we shouldn’t answer questions. Nevertheless, I said that when somebody asks you a question like, “Why do you like classical music?” your response should be, “Why do you ask?” If the person then says, “I’m curious,” you ask, “Why are you curious?” If somebody says, “I saw you come out of Republican Party headquarters. Are you a Republican?” you respond, “Why do you ask?” If they then say, “I’d like to know,” you reply, “Why?”
Keep that going, but not in a hostile manner. Be as impartial and as cool as possible. Your goal is to put an end to their questions. Within two or three minutes, that game will end—unless, of course, you pick the wrong person to do it with, and they punch you in the nose. Of course, that would still be the end of the questions. They’d punch you in the nose and then leave, because no one can stand this type of response for long. There is something about interfering with the question-and-answer game that is highly disturbing and will literally drive people to distraction.
Nowadays, the greatest pleasure that most ordinary people could experience would be to appear on their favorite television show and answer questions about their preferences. They would love to have Oprah, or Doctor Phil, or Jay Leno sit them down and say, “What’s your favorite song in the world? What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? What’s your favorite book? What was your favorite class in school?” This is kind of frightening, but if you gave all the people in the civilized world their choice between that kind of interview and sleeping with their favorite movie star, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the majority would pick being interviewed. In you, however, it should be innate that something is not right when you engage in answering questions about yourself.
Do you know why the conscious part of your brain wants to wake up, to achieve enlightenment, to experience the Great Liberation? The conscious part of the brain is nothing but a reaction machine, but there is a tiny piece of consciousness, a part of the metaphorical placenta held over from when the brain first gave birth to consciousness, and—this should be impossible, but that little piece of what is otherwise a totally reactive device somehow knows that it is only a reaction machine.
The conscious part of the brain should not know that it’s a machine. A machine should not know that it’s a machine. We don’t like to think about living organisms being machines. If they are spoken of in that way, we always consider that to be a deep metaphor. We say our heart is like a pump, but you don’t really think of your heart as being made of steel parts, as a cold piece of machinery. That’s your heart! That’s part of your body! You can say that animals run on pure instinct, but you don’t think of a tiger or a house cat as just a piece of machinery. Yet if something is purely instinctive, that means it’s mechanical. That thing has no freedom in what it does any more than you can say to your toaster, “I’m going to drop some orange slices into you, and I want you to make juice.” A toaster can’t change its reactions and make juice. All you can do is put in bread and have the toaster react by toasting the bread.
The conscious part of everybody’s brain is purely reactive, which is what being asleep is. Being awake is knowing that. Of course, if you don’t understand what being asleep is, then you don’t know that that’s what being asleep is. See how that works? If you can see this, then depending on your temperament, this will make you sick, or infuriate you, or even break your heart. The whole process of trying to change something about yourself—your state of mind, your state of consciousness—all of that, from beginning to end, is the conscious part of your brain knowing that it is purely a reactive operation and struggling to change that.
Consciousness could not be one hundred percent reactive, because if so, consciousness couldn’t know that it is a reactive machine. This is not an exotic theory. You can look at anything that’s purely mechanical, and by definition, if that thing is entirely mechanical, then it would have no way of knowing that it is so. Nevertheless, the conscious part of our brain somehow knows that it is only a reaction machine. In ordinary people, this causes no grief because it is just part of being alive and having thoughts—but in people like us, somebody had to think of this originally and put it into words. That somebody once managed to both see and describe this is an inexplicable miracle. After that, people like us simply hear or read that man is asleep, in the dark, held in captivity, in bondage, and we immediately think, “Yes! That explains it! I get it!” As soon as we see or hear that, we are converted.
You never hear this expressed as directly, as simply, as possible. All of this is about one thing—that the conscious part of your brain, the place where all thoughts originate—is completely reactive. That part of your brain can initiate nothing. You can’t start a thought. If you do, you have interrupted the flow of consciousness, which is the same kind of flow as with questions and answers.
“Why do you like chocolate?”
“Well, my mother used to . . . blah, blah blah.” That answer is all right.
“Why do you like chocolate?”
“I don’t. I hate chocolate.” That answer is fine.
“Why do you like chocolate?”
“Don’t ask me anything else!” Still fine.
“Why do you like chocolate?”
“Who the hell are you?” That’s fine too.
Whatever you respond to the question is fine, because you responded. It’s difficult to say what’s not fine, because I’ve got to respond to the question. I know why this is not fine, but you need to see this for yourself. Then, of course, you’ll never trust anything again as long as you live. This is sickening, disgusting, when you can see it with your own two eyes. That may sound dramatic, but I’m being honest. You feel that you are constantly analyzing, constantly thinking. A few frivolous thoughts might be tossed in throughout the day, just to keep it light, but primarily, you consider that you’re involved in deep thought. What you consider to be you—you thinking, you analyzing everything from the most important issues all the way down to graffiti scratched on a building or a poster tacked up on a telephone pole—is not you thinking.
It is heartbreaking, bone-rattling, disgusting, to realize for yourself one simple thing—a thing that is thoroughly undeniable for people like us. If you keep looking and you tell me you don’t see this, then either you’re a liar, or you weren’t born converted and you’re only listening to this talk because you have a bizarre infatuation with the tone of my voice. If you keep looking, this is right in front of you. Look at your last thought. All that thought was, all it was, all it was, was a reaction to something that happened just before you thought the thought—a reaction to something that you either heard, read, or previously thought.
This is as simple, as crude, as non-mystical and non-metaphysical as can be. I’ll never forget when I realized this. I thought I’d gotten down to the rough cob of things already, but I was shocked to realize that all that the conscious part of my brain—which is me—all that the conscious part does, every thought that I have, is a reaction. Every thought that everybody has is a knee-jerk, mechanical reaction. You don’t ever have a thought. When I talk to myself, I can no longer call those things thoughts. I gag at that word.
I started setting this up several talks ago, when I said that what you consider to be you is the conscious part of your brain. You are not thinking—the conscious part of your brain is thinking. You are not talking—the conscious part of your brain is talking. There is no you, there is no me, there is no I. There is nothing in you right now. When I say that I want so badly for you to realize this, that is not coming from my soul, from my spirit, from me. Everything we call us and ourselves is coming from the conscious part of our brain, the physical part that can be cut off by the wave of a scalpel, by anesthesia, by an automobile accident or an ordinary night’s sleep.
Every well-read person knows that all consciousness is located in the thin covering around the brain where all thought is produced. Scientists and surgeons learned this by accident. Shake a person under anesthesia, a person knocked out, a person in a coma, and say, “Can you hear me? Are you there?” No, nobody’s there. If there’s no consciousness there, there’s no person there. If that thin covering is damaged, there’s no consciousness, no thought, no sense of me. Accepting that takes a bit of doing. You can practice telling yourself, “This is the conscious part of my brain thinking, not me. Me is only a small part of that organ in my head.”
Down in the part that is not conscious, the part that is absolutely mechanical, the brain does a great deal of really mellow stuff, such as helping to keep you alive. Look at what the mechanical part of consciousness does. Every thought the mechanical part has, is simply a piece of toast that’s been dropped into a toaster. As soon as the bread hits the coil, the toaster does what? The toaster toasts the bread. What did you expect? What else can it do?
The part of the brain that produces consciousness is involved in a ping-pong game, and all that the conscious part of your brain can do is pong. There has to be a ping, and then you pong. You might furnish the ping yourself, but people prefer for the ping to come from outside, and therefore we have movies, books, conversation, video games, ping-pong games, or questions and answers. Ordinary thinking is toast dropped into a toaster, is you dancing with yourself. I can’t describe this more simply. If anybody else has ever said this, or even realized it, they probably gave up trying to describe it, because in the mystical field this description of thought, this understanding, is not common knowledge.
My standard description used to be, “Our brain doesn’t want to recognize what thinking actually is,” but there is more to this. All of human culture is evidence that in some weird and impossible way, the conscious part of everyone’s brain realizes that it is all but totally mechanical, but that there is a wee, tiny bit of it that is not mechanical. In ordinary people, all that the realization amounts to, all that they do with the realization, all that they’re born to do with it, is to have an extremely vague, diffuse awareness that a tiny bit of the brain is not mechanical. That is why the conscious part of the brain made up the idea of free will. That idea collapses if anyone tries to rationalize it. As soon as the conscious part of someone’s brain starts defending the idea we have free will, then the conscious part of another person’s brain will immediately, using questions and answers, run the first person’s consciousness against a wall and disprove free will.
If you read widely enough, you will find that throughout world history, there have been people who, at around the age of twelve, have been able to shoot holes the size of a rhino’s behind through the ideas of various world-famous philosophers who claimed that what distinguishes man is that we have free will. Of course, those twelve-year-old kids have not been ordinary kids, but our sort of kids. I suggest that is why many cultures came up with the idea that you become an adult at the age of twelve. Jesus went into the temple at the age of twelve and challenged all the rabbis. He began to question them, probably about whether man has free will. Those rabbis got so angry that they drove Jesus from the temple.
I take that story as an apt metaphorical fable. That story, and all of human culture, is proof that the conscious part of everybody’s brain knows that it is mechanical, but also knows that it is not totally mechanical. The proof is the very fact that the conscious part of the brain recognizes that it is mechanical. Nobody tries to do anything with that awareness except make up stories. Even when they try their best to do something with the awareness, their best amounts to diddly squat. People trying to wake up are the only ones who actually attempt to do anything with this awareness, but most of them are stumbling around in the partial dark.
One of the basic things to see is that every thought you have is not a thought you have. It’s not a thought that you have. I can change the emphasis in several places in this sentence. Here’s the basic one, which I’ve been using for the last year or so: “It’s not a thought you have.” There is also: “It’s not a thought you have.” Or: “It’s not a thought you have.” That is to say, it’s a reaction.
When this hits you, you’ll kick a chair. Don’t let a cat be around, or any small animal—an armadillo or anything—because you’ll be liable to kick the animal too. You’ll be mad as boiling blood—but also happy to finally grasp that your brain doesn’t have thoughts about something but only reacts, and every reaction is a snore. Every reactive thought is an absolute form of sleep. You can’t have a reaction to what somebody said—even if that somebody is you—and your reaction have anything to do with being awake.
When the conscious part of the brain is doing its very profitable work, which is developing technology, what is that? How did consciousness do that? Still only by reaction. The conscious part of the brain saw that if the water down in the creek were to move up the hill to where the soil was rich, crops would grow, so it figured out how to move the water up there. The conscious part of some man’s brain didn’t need an original thought to accomplish that. Technology of all forms—medicine, all of science, everything that man has created, invented, developed, came about how? Metaphorically, poetically, you might say, “Through creative genius.” That is, you might say that man’s mind, his creativity, is his genius, but that is not the case. People can say Edison was a creative genius, but that was only the conscious part of his brain reacting to problems.
Never has anyone ever had an original thought. Try to give yourself a totally original thought. Go ahead, initiate a thought that in no way is a reaction to a previous thought. Do it!
If you think you did it, all you’re doing is reacting to my challenge. This isn’t a game, by the way. I’m just doing my best to get you to see one thing, and when you do, it’ll make you so damn mad—well, I just hope I’m not around when that happens.
I was going to try to wrap this up in a nice phrase, but why should I? You’d just react to it. All right, all right, the tape’s over anyway, so in conclusion, let me just say this— [silence]
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
THE BACKGROUND TO TODAY’S STORIES — SAME AS YESTERDAY’S
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Noting Of The Normally Un-noted
JUNE 2, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
Every day is a holiday when it is dedicated to the certain man’s Special Plan.
To be alive is to be predisposed — to know this is so is to be on-your-way.
Everyone has selected as their king someone they do not know.
(‘Course they really just accepted him as a fait accompli,
but men do so like to pretend it was them who put him on the throne.)
The ole man told the kid: “If you don’t grasp that city life is all a matter of commerce,
dig on why the following statement is valid:
‘If you turn something you really enjoy into a business, you will ruin it for yourself’. ”
(The nipper didn’t wanna think how this might somehow apply to his head life.)
The clumsy never realize that just being alive is a kind of unheralded spatial activity.
Surviving is a balancing act; a hundred yard broken field run;
a single handed triple play (and not only physically, by the way).
Looking For The Primacy (In All The Bum Places.)
From a plenary perspective: in man’s intangible reality all matters are collateral.
(“My spiritual and mental stuff will stack up against yours any day.”
“So will everyone else’s — including any more I may adopt.”)
The way man’s cultural realm survives (since it has no substance)
is by constantly changing (which men take to be growth and progress).
“You know: if anybody other than humans tried to pull such a stunt —
they’d be laughed out of town.”
“Yeah, and it’s a good thing their thoughts don’t attempt to do it too!”
“I trust you were being sarcastic.”
Definition.
Advice: Cheap substitute for thinking.
Prisons love a cheerful giver — and receiver.
A happy captive is a _____ captive (no modifier).
In many lands the only form of treason is praise for the ruler that is too subtle,
or oblique.
(Amidst the tangled web of neurons a voice can always be discerned:
“I didn’t get to be king for nothing!”
Another of life’s interesting features: Nothing is what it is for nothing.)
One man in his burgeoning attempt to become seen as his neighborhood’s philosopher-in-residence thinks his best effort thus far is the idea that:
“Only those with nothing to live for — have a reason to live.”
(While he privately admits he is not sure exactly what this means,
he says he is also not certain that is important in his line of work.)
Though life can think through anybody,
the certain man takes his outlet to be one of singular significance — to him.
— — —
We now break for this Public Service Announcement.
Those who are helped by Public Service Announcements
should just remain in their cells.
(You’re not going any where any way.)
— — —
News Concerning The Here-&-There Aspect Of News.
A thing is only true in the locale where it is true.
In Re Neural Locomotion.
A mind with its own legs is a wondrous thing to behold.
(Leastwise to its possessor it is.)
Only a man who has actually gone too far has — gone too far:
thinking about it won’t do it.
To ordinary minds: original thought borders on gibberish.
Only thinking that has gone too far is real thinking.
True talent does not necessarily operate sequentially.
If it comes where you expected it — it ain’t real art.
(And clearly unrelated: all that one man will say is that:
he is not going to mention it again.)
The Ultimate, Though Unspeakable Prison Story.
Those who escape — go nowhere.
It is reported that on one backward planet they have replaced the words: anger, criticism, stupidity (and all their synonyms) with the term: the supernatural.
(“Why is it referred to as backward for gods sake?!”)
Those who escape go no where: those who stay — go blind.
So advertises one man:
“My tapes and books are of great benefit to those who’ve had a mini stroke or want to.”
One city (in apparent response to recent stories reported thereabout)
has hung up a large banner above its major entry point which says:
“If You Don’t Like What You Find Here, There Is A Simple Solution:
Don’t Pay Such Close Attention!”
(Is that being considerate and helpful or what!
[And to think that some still accuse urban areas of being heartless!])
Another feature of life on the outside is that
everything can be noticed equally without any downside;
there are no phooey-filled martinets to be propped up & placated.
“In your head, you mean?”
Precisely.
J
Medical P.S. Most men add three inches or more to their consciousness by escaping.