Jan Cox Talk 3167

If You Are Conscious of It, You Are Not Thinking…

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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.


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Summary

6/30/04:
Notes by TK

Consciousness will do almost anything to keep from staying home alone. Consider: consciousness invented the x-ray machine, a century ago, which can discover a cancerous growth in the body today, and of which the individual consciousness is totally unaware! Consciousness can know what it doesn’t know!! (albeit, by a very circuitous route).

Individually, consciousness doesn’t know what to do, but collectively/culturally it does. Consciousness is only competent in face of a physical problem to solve; otherwise it is impotent and will do anything to avoid this condition. It avoids being naked consciousness by submerging itself in other peoples’ thoughts (oral, written or pictorial).

Being awake is being just consciousness: solitary. There is no conscious answer to the question: “what were you thinking, to do/say such and such?”—other than: “I have absolutely no idea!”. Consciousness will never answer so. You can only know what you’re thinking if you’re conscious of it; if you’re conscious of it, you’re not thinking! (61:00) #3167

Notes by DR

Jan Cox Talk 3167       Consciousness will do almost anything to keep from staying home alone. Consider this route-the human brain, the part we call consciousness, and the doctors find something like a tumor early enough to do something about it. Nothing in you physically knew you were sick. Consciousness invented the x-ray and that field of medicine 100 yrs. ago and human consciousness saved your life while consciousness didn’t even know you were sick, and even the ‘creator’ didn’t know it was there. That’s not possible.

Consciousness spends most of it’s time not knowing what to do, other than solving a physically based problem that can have some success. How does it handle it: by never being alone, by always seeking some distraction. Consciousness has memories. It will do anything other than to just be conscious.  (You can only know one of them, conscious or unconscious.)

There is a sure fire test to see if someone’s awake: someone brings up a particular episode and you ask, what were they thinking? And if they answer anything, they’re not.


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Notes by CFish

Jan Cox Talk 3167 – 30 June 2004

Begin: News flash: “Consciousness will do almost anything to keep from staying at home.” If you pursue that, off on your own, something will hit you. Side note: Without the cortex we could not talk. But it’s not distinct from the human mind.

05:00 Consider someone on a routine visit to a doctor being diagnosed with cancer, though he is symptom free. The doctor had a routine X-ray performed and was able to see the disease before the individual was aware of it.

Now consider the route modern medicine had to take to be able to see something that an individual consciousness was not aware of. Imagine the route the Xray machine had to take to see the cancer that saved your life.

10:00 Human consciousness, inseparable from the human body, and maybe more than a few cells at the cellular level, knew you were sick when the individual consciousness did not. Human consciousness saved your life.

It is delightful to see. Collective Human consciousness figured it out before individual consciousness did. Reasonably, it shouldn’t happen that way. Consciousness knows something that it does not know.

Consciousness had to go around in a circle, maybe it took a hundred years to make the X-rays work, but there you are not knowing you are sick directly, but indirectly human consciousness thru the X-rays discover the tumor.

15:00 Going back to the headline “ Consciousness will do almost anything to keep from staying at home by itself.” Let’s say you are sitting in the doctor’s office alone, expecting bad news and running thru all kinds of “bad news scenarios.”

Maybe you remember your aim (ex. self remember) to be “more conscious,” but the mind is still caught up with things that are not the aim. I suggest instead of the term, being “more conscious,” it is, “You are, or you are not, conscious.”

20:00 You have to be conscious to know the other state is not conscious. So at this moment, you have to be aware, that the only thing in you is “consciousness.” Consciousness of the brain is not spooky, and it is not metaphysical.

Consciousness, if you notice, anytime you want to notice, spends most of its time, (Jan pauses here longer than normal) “not knowing what to do.” Picture being at the doctor, after reading an article about symptoms of a terminal illness.

25:00 Thinking that you have the symptoms described, what has consciousness been doing since reading the article, besides saying to itself “I may be dying?” Consciousness has spent all of its time “not knowing what to do.”

The only time it is free of the feeling (not knowing what to do) is when it is trying to solve a physical based problem, where there maybe some success. It’s a variation of the topic “man is constantly trying to fix stuff.”

So when consciousness reads about symptoms of a life threatening disease that matches their own, consciousness cannot do a thing about it. Except maybe call the doctor, but personally it doesn’t know what to do.

30:00 Consciousness is not loaded with first hand knowledge. (ex. tv news, wars, taxes, etc that are threats to health and wealth.) But how many of these threats do you know about thru direct experience?

35:00 Constant and indirect threats, that are only known to consciousness, (thru the news/media) and individual consciousness doesn’t have any idea what to do about it. And how does consciousness handle it?

By never staying alone. Consciousness immediately looks for outside stimuli to put itself back to what mystics call being asleep. I say it looks for outside stimuli to keep it from being “conscious.”

So, do you know why you seldom see folks in a doctor’s office by themselves? (last few years I’ve had some experience with this) Companionship is not it. It’s because they need someone to talk to.

40:00 The talking part of consciousness, the part that makes us human does not want to be alone, which I say is the true “being awake.” Forget the extraordinary, enjoyable, enlightened experience that sometime come and go.

“Being Awake” is the conscious part of the brain stopped/naked, in the sense, “its just itself.” “Just Consciousness” by nature, is what consciousness does not want. (my term: does not want) It’s naturally repelled by “just consciousness.”

45:00 Look and see. Will the talking part of the brain not do anything except be “just conscious?” To see that is to see everything. Then you understand every fucking thing you have ever thought about.

Consciousness totally submerges itself in other people’s thoughts. Consciousness has memories and it cannot be pushed into a corner and suddenly be “just conscious.” That is the way I think about it nowadays.

Just being conscious is being awake. When you see it, there is nothing else to call it. You are either conscious (which is consciousness) or you are not. If you are not conscious, you can’t know it.

50:00 If someone asks “what were you thinking” and the answer is anything but “I have no idea” they are asleep. The only way to know what you’re thinking is to be conscious. And if you are conscious, you are not thinking. 1:00:35

Transcript

06-30-2004 
Edited by S.A. 

You can’t really isolate anything that is part of us physically, including consciousness. It’s incorrect to say that consciousness is a discrete part of the brain, because the parts of the brain are all one big interconnected mess—pardon the technical terminology. Not a thing about you is absolutely distinct from the other parts of you.

I’m going to describe one more time the prime example of what I’ve been trying to explain. You may hear this and think, “That’s kind of funny. That’s ironic.” But it’s more than that, I give you my word. Remember, we’re talking about the part of the human brain that we call consciousness, which is located in the cortex. Without the cortex, we wouldn’t be conscious.

Back to the prime example. Some cancers have no symptoms until it’s too late to do anything, but are sometimes found accidentally, through an x-ray or some test, while there is still time to eliminate the cancer. Let’s say that as part of your annual physical exam, you have an x-ray that shows a mass. A biopsy shows the early stages of lung cancer. They remove the mass and very likely have saved your life, at least for the moment. That x-ray found something that your own body would never have alerted you to until it was too late. Therefore, modern medicine saved your life.

That scenario is very common. Consider what happened. Modern medicine—all medicine—is an offshoot of human consciousness. There’s nothing natural about medical science. All of medical science and medical practice came from consciousness. Madame Curie discovered radiation, which made x-rays possible. She found that if she put her hand on radium, she could see the bones in her hand, but it took decades before human consciousness finally developed an x-ray machine. Imagine all that it took to develop an x-ray machine. A man didn’t accidentally develop an x-ray machine in the same way that he might have accidentally invented the wheel—physically, using his hands, virtually without the use of consciousness.

Move up now from Madame Curie’s time to the present, when an x-ray showed a lump in your stomach or your lung early enough that they could operate and save your life. Here’s the point: you had no idea that you were sick. Your consciousness didn’t know you were sick. But a hundred years previously, human consciousness started on a circuitous route that ended up with you having an x-ray. A radiologist interpreted that x-ray—radiology being a field that human consciousness had to invent from scratch. That radiologist’s consciousness had gone to medical school and spent a total of twelve years training to be able to read your x-ray and to say, “That is very likely a cancerous growth. We must biopsy that immediately.”

Human consciousness saved your life yesterday with that x-ray. Human consciousness is a part of your brain, a part of your nervous system, an inseparable part of your body. And yet none of your body appears to have known that you were sick. At the cellular level, unless you had a complete breakdown of your immune system, some of your white blood cells, or the B or T cells of the immune system, must have recognized that there was a mass of cells that didn’t appear normal. But you, the conscious part of you, had no idea there was a problem.

Human consciousness discovered that you were sick when even your own consciousness didn’t know you were sick. That is real magic, real science fiction. Human consciousness saved your life. If the cancer hadn’t been found until you had some symptoms, it would have been inoperable. You would have been within months of dying. Human knowledge that no one actually had saved your life. That is agonizingly delightful. You almost can’t get your conscious hands around that, which may be why nobody ever talks about that, or even sees it. By everything we call reason, it shouldn’t have happened that consciousness knows something that it doesn’t know. Consciousness had to take a hundred years going around in a circle in order to discover that you are sick.

No one would have known that you were sick without human consciousness, yet they didn’t even know you were sick directly through human consciousness. It wasn’t as if a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or a year ago, human consciousness suddenly developed to a point that once every thirty seconds a neuron—a piece of your consciousness—clamps onto a white blood cell and travels throughout your body checking for abnormal growths. Consciousness has never learned to do that. Consciousness had to invent x-ray machines to do that—but that’s not possible. Somebody created something that wasn’t there, and that creation knows something that its creator doesn’t know. That is not possible.

Another side-trip: My recommendation of what I’ve been trying to describe for the last few weeks gets higher and higher. One of the reasons why this is so struck me yesterday. Like any other method that people have devised to try and wake up, you can practice this anywhere, but this has a singular feature or feel to it. Imagine that you’re sitting alone in a doctor’s office, waiting for the results of some test, and you suspect that you’re going to receive some very bad news. What would your consciousness normally be doing? Your consciousness, which has been working at trying to wake up.

You would not be trying to self-remember, not trying to count your breaths, not even trying to observe your mind. Using the non-patented method that I’ve described by saying, “This is Brain talking,” you would just be aware that, “There is nothing in me that I can call me that is not my brain.” You don’t have to think those words once you get a feel for this, but you’ve got to find out for yourself how to do this.

If you’re using one of the time-honored methods, such as trying to constantly remember the name of Buddha, or trying to remember yourself, there you sit, with your consciousness running a mile a minute, skirting over all kinds of possible scenarios. You suddenly remember that your aim is to awaken, to always remember yourself, and you realize, “There I am again not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” You think, “Why am I messing up again? What’s the problem with trying to self-remember? What makes it so difficult for me?” You have gotten caught up in things that have nothing to do with actually being conscious.

The way I would suggest you look at this is that you’re either conscious or you’re not. I wouldn’t even use the term “more conscious”. Either your brain is running automatically, as it is intended to do, and you’re not conscious—or you are conscious—and you have to be conscious to know that the other state is not conscious. That is, you have to at this moment be aware that the only thing in you is consciousness. Consciousness of the brain. This is not spooky, not metaphysical, not spiritual, not divine. This is your brain.

Back to tonight’s subject. Consciousness spends most of its time not knowing what to do. I repeat, consciousness spends most of its time not knowing what to do. Let’s say that you’ve had a strange pain for a while, but you’ve been ignoring the pain, telling yourself it was just a sore muscle. Last night, you read an article that stated that the type of pain you were having could be a symptom of a potentially fatal illness. If not for consciousness, you wouldn’t have been able to read that article. You would not suddenly be concerned that you could have a serious illness. The next morning, you call the doctor’s office, and when you describe your pain to the nurse, she says, “If those are your symptoms, you need to come in today.” You think, “Oh no! She knows I’m in big trouble!” Thanks to consciousness, and consciousness alone, you now are thinking, “I might be dying.”

Let’s say that you had read the alarming article at seven o’clock last night. It’s now nine o’clock the next morning, and you’re waiting in the doctor’s office. You didn’t sleep at all last night, and so for fourteen hours, your consciousness has been worrying, true, but more specifically, your consciousness has spent the past fourteen hours not knowing what to do. That is the way your consciousness spends most of its time. The only time consciousness knows what to do is when it is trying to solve a physically-based problem about which it could experience some success in figuring out a solution.

There is an enjoyment to solving a problem. If your refrigerator quits working and you figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem, you’re happy that you have refrigeration again, but beyond that, consciousness gets to enjoy the pleasure of being freed from not knowing what to do. In an earlier talk, I pointed out that men’s consciousnesses are constantly trying to fix things. A variation of that point is that consciousness spends most of its time not knowing what to do. Your consciousness reads an article that describes symptoms that match yours. Consciousness now thinks, “There’s a good chance I could be seriously ill.” Your consciousness figured out that you might be ill, and your consciousness can call a doctor and make an appointment, but beyond that, your consciousness doesn’t know what to do.

You felt fine thirty minutes ago. Now you don’t feel fine at all because of consciousness. Consciousness has made you feel non-fine, because consciousness has been told that you’re dying. Nothing else in you told you that. How did it happen that you have been made to feel non-fine? Thanks to consciousness we have x-rays, and the doctor’s consciousness looked at your x-ray. His consciousness told your consciousness that you’re dying, and now your consciousness feels doubly non-fine because it knows that you, and therefore it, are dying, but your consciousness doesn’t know what to do about that.

If you keep rolling this around in the palm of your consciousness, something will hit you that’s astounding. I don’t know what to call this. All I can say is, it is far more than my description.

You turn on the radio and hear that there’s a war going on in another part of the world that could begin to affect us here in our country. You know this through consciousness, the same way that you learned that your symptoms indicate that you may be dying. Think about all of the troubles, the dangers, the threats, that you know about only through consciousness. In today’s world, how many threats to your health or your wealth do you know about through actual experience rather than through reading or hearing about them? Any at all?

Your consciousness hears, “The president is proposing a ten percent increase in taxes.” Your consciousness shouts, “No! I’m barely surviving now! If I pay ten percent more taxes, I could lose my house!” Does consciousness know what to do about this proposed tax increase? Certainly not. Somebody could say, “Start keeping up with which congressmen vote for that tax increase, and four years from now, you can vote against them.” That’s like the doctor saying, “We looked at your x-rays. I’m sorry, but you’ve got inoperable stomach cancer.”

Back to our main point. Consciousness spends most of its time being aware that it is loaded down with knowledge of potential threats, although certainly not always threats as serious as death or taxes, and not knowledge of the sort that comes from feeling a tiger’s jaws on your neck. You don’t need consciousness for that knowledge. A gazelle in the same condition knows, “Danger, little gazelle. Danger!” For humans, though, there is never a shortage of dangers and threats known to consciousness. Unless you live as a hermit, with no newspaper, radio or TV, you are surrounded by constant broadcasts about dangers and threats in the air, in the food, in the water, and behind every door. Because these dangers are not immediate physical threats, they are known only to consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t have the least idea what to do about them.

How does consciousness handle the knowledge that it has no solutions? By never staying alone, never permitting itself to dwell on that rather large flaw in its functioning. Consciousness constantly looks for outside stimuli that will, as mystics would say, put consciousness to sleep—or as I say, to keep consciousness from being conscious.

Do you know why you almost never see anybody in a doctor’s office by themselves? If there are a hundred patients waiting to see a doctor, there will be two hundred people in the waiting room. Everybody brings somebody with them. If I ask why, ordinary people would say, “We’re social animals, and people like having companionship.” No, they’ve got other people with them so that the other people will talk to them and thereby keep their consciousnesses distracted. There’s a TV blasting away and there are magazines scattered all through the waiting room for the same reason. If you’re sick, do you really want to read Sports Illustrated or Better Homes and Gardens? Sure. You’re thinking, “I may be dying, but I’m just fascinated by this magazine article with a smiling Martha Stewart telling me how to make my kitchen happy.” Nevertheless, those magazines are there for a reason. If the person you brought with you goes to the bathroom, your own dog of consciousness will chase after happy kitchens and read that article, even if only to laugh sarcastically. The article is serving a purpose, doing exactly what it should be doing—keeping your consciousness from actually being conscious.

There you sit, having every reason to believe that your doctor is going to tell you, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, but you’re dying.” That’s what your consciousness is faced with. The rest of your nervous system, your body, your brain, is blissfully unaware of this, because you’ve got no symptoms. But consciousness, the thing that makes us human, the thing that is you—consciousness brought somebody to the doctor’s office with you. You want the other person to keep talking so you don’t have to think. People know what to do in this situation. You’ve told your friend how serious this is, so he knows what to say. “Hey, it’s probably not that bad. Anyway, they can work miracles nowadays.” Either that, or he babbles on about anything else at all. As long as he’s talking, your consciousness will listen to that talk, as opposed to focusing on the knowledge that it is probably dying, and it doesn’t know what to do.

Consciousness does not want to be by itself, which I say is what is meant by being awake. Forget other extraordinary, quite enjoyable, and enlightening experiences people have that come and go in the brain. Here’s what being awake actually is: the conscious part of your brain, stopped. Consciousness naked, alone, by itself—but that is exactly what consciousness, by nature, does not want. Consciousness is repelled by the possibility of being naked and alone.

Look at your own consciousness. Will it not do anything except be just consciousness? When you see that, you understand every other thing you ever thought about. Consciousness totally submerges itself, loses itself, hides itself in other people’s thoughts. That’s why you take somebody with you to the doctor. That’s why they turn on a TV set in the doctor’s waiting room. That’s why they put out all those magazines. If none of that is available, you can listen to the other people in the waiting room talk to each other.

Even if you’re alone in the waiting room, with no distractions whatsoever, have no fear. That will not force you to wake up. Years ago, somebody suggested that it’s easier to awaken if you become a recluse, but consciousness always seems to turn into behavior. Believing that becoming a recluse will help you to awaken is the same as believing that a certain behavior will help you to awaken. “If I change my diet, if I don’t drink, if I worship all the gods, if I light candles, if I go to visit a sacred place—that specific behavior will result in awakening.” Nice try, buddy. Nice try.

At any rate, if you’re there in the waiting room alone, consciousness has memories of whatever it was last thinking about, and those memories will trigger a cascade of thoughts. There is no way that consciousness can be pushed into a corner, or accidentally stopped, so that it is just conscious. Maybe that term doesn’t sound right to you, but that’s the way I think about it nowadays—being awake is consciousness just being conscious. When you see this, there is nothing else to call the state of being awake. If you call it something else, you’re describing consciousness being non-conscious.

You can bring on the state of being awake, but it’s worse than holding an eel, because consciousness covers itself. I don’t like to say that consciousness starts thinking. People picture it that way, and mystics say, “My consciousness went back to sleep because it started thinking about what I was feeling,” or, “My consciousness was captured by the mechanical thoughts I had.” All of that is true enough, but that’s superfluous verbiage that gets in the way of you seeing this for yourself. You’re either conscious—which is just consciousness—or you’re not. Only you can know this, but you can only know one of these states. If you’re not conscious, you can’t know that.

To conclude, there is a sure-fire test of whether a person is truly awake, enlightened, conscious. Bring up a particular episode in that person’s life and ask the person, “What were you thinking at that time?” If they give any answer other than, “I have no idea,” then they’re not awake. If I were starting over, I would create a mystical system based on that one sentence, and say, “Think about that, figure that out, and that will wake you up.” Think back to something you did that you’ve lived to regret. Ask yourself, “What could I have been thinking when I did that?” I guarantee, you will not remember.

That is not just a casual comment. Psychiatrists and psychologists frequently ask their patients something like, “You regret what you said to your mother ten years ago, and you say that it now gives you bad dreams. What were you thinking when you said that? What was going on in your mind at that time?” Maybe a sports figure breaks a world record. A reporter races up and says, “What was going through your mind at the moment you made your record-breaking high jump?” They ask a fireman, “What were you thinking when you rushed back in the building to save that child?” They ask a military man, “General, when you looked out there and saw the opposing army, realized you were outnumbered, and still ordered your troops to charge, what went through your mind?” Virtually everybody walking this planet—sports heroes, firefighter heroes, a general running a battle, the president, your parents—will all come up with answers. But anybody who gives any answer other than, “I have no idea what I was thinking,” is asleep.

I hate to end on a sour note, but can you imagine any human on this planet being interviewed for any reason—a king, a prime minister, a Nobel Prize winner, a common person, anybody—a reporter says, “Holy cow! What an experience! Tell me, sir, what was going through your mind when that happened?” Can you imagine you will ever live to see them interviewing somebody, and he says, “I have no idea what I was thinking”? If you imagine you’ll ever live to see that happen, you probably have a brain tumor. Isn’t that kind of funny?

Surely you’re not going to wait for them to interview all six billion people on this planet, with the expectation that somebody will finally say, “I don’t have a clue what I was thinking.” Consciousness will not do that. If anybody watching one of those interviews was conscious, they would know that at the time that person did that—whatever it was—that person was not conscious, and therefore doesn’t have a clue what he was thinking. The only way to know what you’re thinking is to be conscious, and if you’re conscious, you’re not thinking—but you can only know that through personal experience. You can only know that through the personal experience that we classify as being awake.

You now know what consciousness is. If anybody else in the rest of the world knew what consciousness was, then years ago, when the first human asked a second human, “What were you thinking about when you did so and so”, and the second human described what he claimed he was thinking, some other humans would have said, “That’s not true. You were thinking something, but you don’t remember what that thought was.” Nobody ever does that, for the same reason that nobody ever answers, “I have no idea what I was thinking.”

And you call yourself conscious! I’m shocked! Not to mention, very disappointed! Stop it, or I’ll tell your mother!

Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)

THE DOORS ARE NEVER LOCKED
IN THE MORTAL PRISON (UNNECESSARILY)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Few’s Secret Key — In Plain Sight
JUNE 30, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX

As believed by certain ancient people:
there is a magical number that explains everything,
but fittingly enough, the number and its power cannot be put into words.
(“It’s just as well they are long gone, or they would be faced with modern man’s
total dismissal of anything not reducible to verbal description;
this is how humanity was able to get beyond the world of mythical gods & dragons.”
“How so?”
“By saying that they have.”)
Mind is the supreme package of doctor and patient in one;
no need for anyone to leave the room for further reflection or consultation
for the complaint to be registered and the diagnosis made;
if an engine doesn’t know what’s wrong with the carburetor – who will?!
“But isn’t it possible for mind to be given too much credit?”
By whom?

Things spoken of critically cannot be changed;
matters described as broken can never be fixed.
(Man’s Wondrous, Intangible Realm of Affairs Spiritual, Artistic and Philosophical.)

Contra knowledge – not ignorance, but: contra knowledge always has its appeal.
(Same as how shadow plays are popular in prisons.)

The mental condition of would-be city intellectuals can be summed up in the words: Dead – but without conviction.

The true mythical king is he who has no foes and can thus never be defeated.
Mere earth bound minds are gravitationally unable to grasp the merit, utility,
and stratospheric grandeur of the tale that sentence tells.
A fruit divided against itself will forever stand.
(True Mythical Parody.)

One anxious, alert chap traded in all his prayers, dreams, and mystical gizmos
for one dead-on drummer to set the tempo for his personal efforts.

The mental condition of would-be city sailors can be summed up in the words:
Dead in the water – but in water that is itself lifeless – so! –

“Three bells and all’s well – ya’ll.”

The Determined Man’s Mental Position.
“If I didn’t think it – fuck it.”

Offenses And Malfeasances Of The Head.
The only crime or transgression possible for mind is to remain captive —
and thus squander its potential.
Note: the squirrelly feature of the certain potential of mind herein continually
alluded to is that with normal humans it is clearly intended to not be acted on.
(“Even if it is really there, you mean?”
Yes.)

Everyone received an initial extraordinary education — which they have forgotten.
(“Mentally, you mean?”
Right again.)

Notes one man: “It’s a good thing that failure to prosecute a talent is not a felony.”
(“Or,” adds his partner, “the collapse of a certain sort of cellular memory.”)

The mental condition of would-be historians & soothsayers can be summed up
in the words: Dead in the present moment.
(“You’re really talking about the activity inside one man’s thinking, right?”
How right can right be.)

A philosopher king tried to entice a chap who many believed understood uniquely
what life is about, into verbal debate by asking:
“Is there any chance you could be wrong in your thinking?”
“No, because to be so you must first think you are right.”
(“All right! — hasn’t this gone far enough?!”)
The nearest thing to wrong doing possible for the certain man’s mind would be for it
to behave as though there IS a: far-enough any where in its thinking.
Only routine thought, driven by instinct to be seen as sane by its peers, fears:
falling-over-the-edge:
the man crazy-hungry to get to the-bottom-of-things however, salivates at the idea.

Conversation.
“One nifty side to learning that you’re dying is you no longer have to be
concerned about your health.”
“Does this have its reflection in realizing that you’re living in a dream?”
“Maybe.”

When his nervous system was really humming,
one guy reminded himself of his favorite childhood sweater.

From The Non Partisan Dictionary.
Thoughts: The demons of the non religious.
…..(Okay: For everyone of ordinary consciousness.)

The special enjoyment of having a secret cannot be fully savored
if yours can be discovered by another.

After his physical needs are met: man looks for entertainment –
and he looks to his mind –
since that is the only place TO look.
(Easy to see when noted – most difficult to remember later.)

A shadowy figure visited the prince and inquired:
“Would you betray the king for a castle full of gold?” and he replied:
“There is no amount of wealth that would turn me traitor to my beloved liege!”
“Would you betray him to be known as the bravest of all warriors?”
“Nay!” responded the regent.
“Would you betray him in exchange for the reputation of the world’s wisest man?”
“No,” he answered.
“Then would you betray your sovereign for the sake of you assuming his powers?”
“Now you’re talking!”

J