It’s Not About What You Know But What You Feel
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
11/22/04:
Notes by TK
At any given moment you only know what you think and how you feel. That is the sum total of what you are. The aggregate of all your life experiences to date has nothing to do with it. The totality of memories is not the substance of your being, although men believe otherwise. The way you physically and/or emotionally feel impacts what you think. What you think seems to be about what you know; but what you know is how you feel and what you’re thinking! (34:11) #3227
Summary #2
3227_112204
Audio of Jan Cox 22 November 2004
Copyright Jan Cox, Jan’s Legacy 2022
Notes by Cfish February 2022
Suggested Title: “The Certain Man Struggles Mightily in Secret – For Nothing in Particular – Yet Gains All That his Heart Ever Desired.
Begin: I would propose to you that at any given second “you” consist of two things: How you feel and what you’re thinking. And consciousness is filled with things you know that you don’t know. Consider seeing something as complex as ”what you are” as how you are feeling at the moment.
If you ask what is your intangible/spiritual/mental sense of you, to ordinary consciousness, it consists of total life experience. (ex. over the age of 21) It sounds correct. But people are not the culmination of their total life experience.
It could be partly a result of some of their conscious memory but ordinary mind confuses experience for conscious memory. We have memory of experience as do all animals. But it’s not in the brain, it’s in the muscles.
05:00 To differentiate thought from experience, memory from experience is in the muscles. (ex. slip and fall after an ice storm) Though it may register in conscious memory/thought, it’s not stored there. After a muscle memory, thought may picture the slip and fall.
So at any given moment “what you are” is how you feel. Most ordinary people, not suffering from physical disability/disease, under ordinary conditions, feel most of life within a limited range. Not too good and not too bad.
10:00 So most of your thinking is not affected to a discernible degree. A bad case of the flu will have a distinct impact on thinking. You can’t go to work and all you want to do is whine. When a personal threshold is crossed only then do you become aware of being sick affecting thinking.
Even though it’s not talked about. Most of the time, ordinary people are not aware that what they are feeling is affecting thinking. Most of you listening are probably feeling nondescriptly. You’re not angry at anyone and not in physical pain.
15:00 Not feeling anything in particular is reflected in your thinking. It seems to be an everyday you. I can’t resist pointing out there is an observable gender difference in the everyday you’s. Men generally present an image of being steady.
An everyday beige, the kind of wall color you find in a cheap apartment. Women do not seem to have the same innate inclination. At any given moment you are composed of how you’re feeling physically and emotionally.
And “you” also consist of what you are thinking. You can’t prove it. Neuroscience will give serious lip service that the way you feel can affect the thinking. Psychology wants to speak of pathologies of the mind but not the study of the mind.
20:00 It’s insane on the surface to only study the pathologies of the mind. It’s like only studying the illnesses of the liver without the study of the physiology of the liver. I encourage you to look at why Psychology would study the anomalies v. the physiology of the mind.
Thinking that you should look and investigate that at any given moment your unanalyzed sense of you is not your sense of you. It’s not how you are feeling. Because a quick survey would show you’re not feeling anything in particular.
25:00 You could have chronic pain but if it’s chronic you’re no longer aware of it. But what’s your sense of you if you’re not feeling anything in particular? Physically or emotionally you are either hurting or not hurting.
Then what else constitutes the sense of you, of being alive? It’s just what you’re feeling and thinking. Everyday feeling and thinking, nothing in particular feeling and thinking, v. the emotions of a family member dying – what you are thinking is controlled by how you feel.
What thinking seems to be about is what you know. But the mind is filled with things you know – (What else can it be filled with?) The mind is also composed of what your thoughts are but no one can say what your mind is.
30:00 You could say the mind makes thought possible. Mind is like an empty box with thoughts being things thrown into the box. Read: Your mind is full of things it knows – that it does not know. That could be worth a second look for those who enjoy the mind.
What is it that makes up the feeling of you being alive – of you being you? The ordinary moments when “nothing in particular” is going on, just suddenly stop – you don’t think about the you, you love. But what gives me the ongoing sensation of me? I say it’s how you’re feeling emotionally, physically, and what you are thinking. 34:11
Jan’s Daily Fresh Real News (to accompany this talk)
WHAT YOU HEAR IS WHAT YOU KNOW
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Ideas Beyond The Grasp Of Automatic Association
NOVEMBER 22, 2004 © 2004: JAN COX
A Clutch Of Conversations.
___________________
“Even local reality has to admit that a few days out of town makes everything
seem better.”
“You mean when you get back?!”
“Clearly you’re a home-over.”
“Pa pa: what is a home-lover?”
“A creature with consciousness becomes a lover of many things which it
cannot rationally explain. You gotta love it.”
A man whined to his doctor:
“But I was born like I am – how can I ever do anything about it?!”
“You can’t – but you could not whine about it.”
“But that is part of the way I was born.”
“Oh.”
“Pa pa: How do you get to be a healer?”
“In man’s intangible world: by saying that you are.”
“Can you then do people some good?”
“In a land with no wind – you can’t bring a fan.”
On one world they do not permit people to point out the obvious.
(“Guess some places are just ahead of us in being civilized.”)
“A rebel doesn’t work for salary – he does what he does because he wants to.”
“How ‘bout: because he has to.”
“On one world they try to protect mental children from hurting themselves
with certain facts.”
“To ever get to the real bottom of things requires that one not be dependent on inspiration from others; the rebel’s motivation must come from his self.”
“But what if he wasn’t born that way?”
“Find a doctor who will tell you the truth.”
“The truth?”
“About man’s second reality.”
He teaching the course (“Medical Topography: The Primary & Secondary Aspects”) gave the class an unscheduled oral exam:
asked he of one student (in an unscheduled tone of voice):
“What is the leading cause of human illness?”
And the matriculant sought further details:
“Do you mean other than hormones?”
“Yes,” replied the professor.
“Seriousness.”
“More specifically.”
“Unfounded seriousness,” (and the entire class subtly exhaled a breath of happy relief).
“In your investigation of the case, if you discover things you can describe –
they were of no value.”
“Is that really true for every single thing?”
“Yes, for each thing – until you discover the next one.”
International Update.
Everybody likes to be put-on.
Oops! — a correction just received: it says this story was reported backwards.
(A claim most difficult to believe.)
Conversation.
“In jail is the only place ordinary people can breathe.
(More precisely: people’s ordinary consciousness.)”
“Am I wrong in my perception that half the time when people are talking about
other people, they’re not talking about the other person physically, but about their
intangible form: that verbal shadow men cast but take to be more?”
“Wrong you’re not, and if you will look deeper into what you have perceived, you will find that its ramifications reach far into the silliness that automatic-consciousness creates in men’s heads and then passes off as matters most serious.
Put another way: Nothing is more profitable than realizing that human consciousness, no matter the apparent subject, primarily talks about itself.”
With no warning, the professor of: “History: Its Primary & Secondary Features” subjected his class to a verbal quiz (quizzed he one student):
“Tell us: Besides hormones: What is the principal cause of history?”
“Sir: based on the perspectives you have presented us: neurons are the sole cause
of us having history and hormones merely the cause of there being things from
which neurons could fashion a thing they call history,”
and the whole room spontaneously broke out in a break out.
“What can you label (besides: devoid-of-any-understanding) any human who feels awe toward another human being?!”
“And you’re not including weight lifters in that?”
“No.”
“Or tango dancers?”
“Hardly.”
“Or timbale players.”
“Certainly not.”
“But all others.”
“You got it.”
“Lots of people want to appear intelligent and important and the way to do it is with a grim countenance.”
“Yeah……that’s what I always thought.”
“I notice you never talk about politics or religion.”
“There’s nothing there worth talking about.”
“Ah, but I disagree.”
“Then let me put it to you like this: There is nothing there worth talking about unless
you believe there is – and if you do then you aren’t worth talking to.”
“When I started down this road I had many things to say about myself –
let me be more exact: While I was still looking for where this road began,
I had many things to say about myself;
then once I found it and had traveled some time, I had much less to say;
now I have nothing to say about me.”
“So what does that say about you?”
“Can’t say.”
The teacher of a kindergarten class opened up their morning proceedings with
this puzzler which she assured them if answered responsibly would spread
mucho surprising light on the relationship between a man’s individual mental receptacle and mankind’s collective educational institutions that attempt to fill it,
and it went like this: “Can wearing cheap shoes cause you to have cheap feet?”
“Is it a sign that you’re waking-up when you no longer care what other people think?”
“’What other people THINK’?! – where the hell did you get such an absurd idea?”
“The frequent feelings of seeming extreme duress men experience in their intangible reality is what in part has given birth to their rituals, prayers and sacrifices.
Render unto gods, imaginary caesars.”
“That’s a joke – right?!”
“If self-reference is not good for a rebel, that makes it just that much better for a world made up of no substance – no?!”
In Autopsy class (as he poked about in an open skull) the Professor (he of tenure in both Anatomy & Urban Transpiration) noted to the students around the table:
“You can always recognize the brain of a nervous-system-rebel –
either by the presence of skid marks, or by the fact that its roads have no shoulders,”
and the class en mass, made admiring swooning noises.
“The good thing about a long-lasting laxative is that you not only get digestive relief,
but via your many trips to the facilities, exercise as well.”
“Well! Finally you’ve come up with something whose metaphorical relevance to
altering consciousness is obvious. Finally!”
“Okay: if (as you once strongly hinted) everybody does know what’s really-going-on – how come nobody ever talks about it?”
“What?! – and ruin all the fun for everybody else!”
“How can you tell that you understand nothing?”
“You talk as though you believe you do.”
“Well at least you understand one thing.”
“The cruise line on one sea has an iron-clad rule for all its captains:
They can ask no questions of passengers.
(and you wouldn’t believe its popularity?)”
“But aren’t you really talking about something else entirely?”
“Isn’t a real man always.”
J