“I” Is Not the Enemy
NOTE: Jan modifies an exercise at 1:38
AKS/News Items = none
Summary = pending
Diagrams = See Below in transcript #008
Transcript = See Below
Transcript
I” IS NOT THE ENEMY (Nor Is It an Ally or Even a Close Friend)
Document: 63, March 24, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983 Diagram # 008 illustration
Some of you should have had small glimpses by now of your mechanical fascination with what you assume This Thing to be. I have, with specific intent, attempted to disavow for you these imaginary fascinations by making This appear to be extremely practical; almost everyday. And so it is. But let me remind you that This Thing is more astounding, more mystical than your wildest dreams. All your life you’ve assumed that there are other ordinary people on this earth who Understand many things: the priests understand the nature of the gods, scientists understand the nature of the universe, psychologists understand the workings of the psyche. But with one good glimpse above Line-level consciousness you Understand more than all the psychologists, priests and rabbis together. Because you no longer operate at that same level. At such moments, you see that all of your life you’ve been “I” and there is no “I” inside, not as people think. All of your life, to use a crude description, you never saw the icebox or the piano right next to you. You see that all of your life you’ve been part of a great game wherein the players do not understand the rules: they are not even given the rules because the rules continue to change as the level of consciousness rises. And there is no one outside the field to yell down, “Hey, you people are playing an imaginary game.”
There is a continuing justice as you begin to be physically and mentally alert in a way that cannot be taught, in a way that is, by and large, forbidden because it is simply not necessary. All of you had dreams of receiving extraordinary abilities, supernatural powers, dreams of touching the gods. Tied to the sensation of incompleteness inherent in Man, the continuing drive of “I should be doing better”, is the desire to see the exotic; to believe you’re on the edge of a supreme external mystery. That is why churches and sham groups require great external displays of mystery and ritual. And they serve a very real purpose; they serve as a Line level reflection of the true mystery of This Thing. But at that level, attention is directed externally: hope, mystery, a power that lies outside the system.
But the real mystery and mysticism of This, when it exists, exists in you. Not “out-there.” Does the extraordinary non-verbal question of “What am I doing here?” or “What is This?” ever strike any of you? The most astounding mysteries, the greatest scientific discoveries, the instantaneous works of art are all right within the nervous system of Man. It is not that one begins to awaken the nervous system above the Line and suddenly birds will fly out of the air and serenade him or that hostile waitresses will suddenly come to their senses. That fall, up rather than down, does not bring a state of imagined psychological refinement of what you are now. You become conscious on a different level. You can sit in a restaurant or walk down the street and the whole universe literally exists in your consciousness. You can know things you have no business knowing, but it’s nothing to impress anybody with. It’s no longer a game. You are conscious on a different level, but you can learn from a comic book. Because the reflection is everywhere and the source is no longer important. Those figures in history who really Understood did not have to travel to India and Egypt to study. Everything astounding is right above the Line. And when you get above the Line, you see that everything below the Line is also astounding. When you can learn from everything, it matters not who said what or the nature of the circumstance, because you are operating on another level. It’s not an externally fed mystery, not a certain something that suddenly brought you to your senses.
The old idea of not throwing pearls before swine had it’s validity. And it still does. But let me update it to read: you should not pour out your energy into a negative drain area, which translates simply to: there are times that you should not do something. It has nothing to do with imagining that you’re better than everybody else: “Since I am so intelligent and understand so much, I’m not going to waste my time with fools.” It’s not a negative reality, which would only be a partial reality anyway, and hence, an imaginary reality. When I say pouring energy down a negative drain area, I mean it in a true, objective sense of wasting your time, squared. You are throwing away something of value, something you Understand. You can see it most readily in an attempt to discuss something you Understand, to share a new Understanding, with an ordinary person. Perhaps you’re just trying to help him, but you will likely find that you lose something in the attempt. You can’t use what you See and Understand as a toy, or as an experiment. It happens even when you have the best of intentions. For instance, you see that someone you know is having problems. He’s in some kind of trouble. Of course, you want to help. You think you can help, you think you Understand something pertinent to his situation. So you say a few words. He seems to listen sincerely and you try to relay something that you had seen on your own that was to you of an exceptional nature. By all appearances you’re seeking to do nothing but offer him a different perspective; but as soon as you feel that drain, you are throwing pearls in the mud. And you cannot do that, because there’s a limited amount of pearls. Energy that you let drain out, even in the guise of attempting to help someone, cannot be retrieved past a certain point. Not only does the other person not hear it, but it can, in a sense, interfere with your own Understanding.
See if you can catch a quick glimpse of how things may be upside down. It’s a description I’ve used before (and I was being charitable because ‘upside down’ accounts only for three dimensions). There are things in Life that appear unquestionably logical to the Line-level consciousness of all of humanity. Take for example, a news commentary on the development of outer space weaponry. The commentator delivers a speech saying, “We are now going into the twenty-first century of self-destruction”, and he concludes with, “warfare moves into space, into what humanity had hoped would be the last frontier of peace.” It sounds extremely logical. Any man on the street would have been proud to say that. Now listen quick if you want to hear “upside down”: on what basis do they expect that space was going to be the last frontier of peace? There is no basis for that, absolutely none. On network radio a commentator points out what appears to be the height of reasonableness and there’s almost a sad sigh over the madness of humanity. “Now it’s going into space, there’ll be floating death-stations, when we expected space would be the last frontier of human peace.” Nothing could be more illogical: How could anyone expect to have peace in space when there’s not even peace on earth. So what is the basis for the statement? All of you at Line level, and everyone else in the world agree that “at least in space there would be some chance for peace”. But do you see that it is absolutely upside down? It has no logical basis. In an objective sense, there is no premise for it. Look around. Look at history. Look right down in your own nervous system and you see that war and hatred abound. But something else is afoot. Men are continually forced to say that the great hopes for peace are now dashed. But what great hopes for peace? How, given the history of life on this planet, can anyone expect peace? Neuralize it. Where did this come from? It serves a purpose for these sounds, these so-called ideas to be forced out of people’s mouths. They are conduits for Life’s energy: it is Life speaking of tomorrow, whether it be the next day or a thousand years from now. Humanity is the unknowing spokesman for the way things will be. But can you see that what passes for logic by ordinary human standards has no basis? While This Thing, which sounds almost insane to Line level ears, is absolutely logical.
There are people that say they can read minds, or read the future. And there is some basis for this in reality (again I point out that humanity cannot simply invent something). It’s captured your interest at some time, which is entirely natural. How could you not be interested in someone who’s in touch with a dead Yugoslavian coal miner who can tell you the future of the stock market? It’s very captivating to Line-level consciousness. What logical basis is there for belief in such predictions? All the religions of the world say something about life after death: true believers go to paradise, infidels go somewhere else; a man who has sinned x number of times returns to life x number of times… The majority of humanity believes that there is life after death, but on what basis? In the past I have described This Thing as being the height of illogic and insanity and described ordinary consciousness as reasonable and sane. But all you have to do is shift your eyes just a wee bit — and they change places. This is not a trick, but rather it is a way of seeing that all of humanity, including you at Line level, believes things to be true and logical which are not. It’s a way of Seeing the nature of true mystery, and that the mysteries are everywhere.
When ordinary consciousness says something is illogical, what it’s tacitly saying is it has an accepted premise, a set of opinions or accepted facts, an internal arrangement, into which this information does not fit. When ordinary consciousness judges something to be illogical, it’s saying it cannot be true. You have seen your system’s continual involvement in judgements of one sort or another. You hear a comment on t.v., or you overhear two people at a bus stop, or read a newspaper article and it’s: “That’s not true” or “That’s nuts, it’s not logical.” What the nervous system is stating is: “the premises that I have already accepted to be true and factual do not fit with what I have heard.” But then see if you can remember the example of the floating death stations and the commentator who expected space to be the last frontier of peace. It sounds so touching and reasonable. Yet there is not one modicum of evidence or experience in humanity to justify it. Has that commentator never read history? Is he a raving maniac? Where has he been the last 40 years, in a closet? Doesn’t he read the papers? Doesn’t he ever get angry? To claim “space is the last frontier of peace” is, from one viewpoint, absolute insanity. But it is logical insanity, it is accepted insanity, and the vast majority of humanity agrees with him. Because the vast majority sit right in the middle of the mechanical flow of consciousness. And that’s all that’s possible at Line level: the uninvestigated acceptance of the food that comes down the pipe.
But in attempting to Neuralize — to remember something without thinking about it — you are not limited to the mechanical re-living and re-chewing of the same food over and over. Ordinarily when you think about your current sexual partner, something reminds you of something else, the same images spark the same associations, again and again. But let’s say you’ve felt fleetingly that something else might actually be going on here, something other than the way you’ve always thought about this particular relationship. If you try to wrestle it down or put words on it, if you talk to yourself about it, it’s the same as throwing pearls before swine. To Neuralize means that you don’t go with the original premise, even when it’s unstated. If you put words on it, you’re back in the kingdom of ordinary consciousness. And it can and will talk back saying, “That’s illogical”. And that can easily kill a nascent Understanding. Once a conclusion is reached, the energy is out, because everything in your nervous system is in agreement. You have then become humanity, agreeing with whatever insanity comes down the pipe. You must attempt to keep your considerations floating — maybe for hours, maybe for days — you must keep yourself on the edge of seeing a new spark. It’s not a matter of figuring it out, it’s not a matter of conclusions. When you let it hit the nervous system where it makes an absolute instantaneous judgement like, “that’s irrational,” then you have taken a very fragile potential, something not inextricably connected to your nervous system, and you’ve grounded it out. With ordinary people that is what passes for understanding: “Well, you know I was wondering about that until I realized it was a classic reflection of that great Freudian case having to do with Mrs. X in Vienna in 1927.” A conclusion has been reached and the potential has been grounded out. Neuralizing has no beginning and if it has an end (which it doesn’t) nobody knows it but you. When you think you’re beginning to see one little piece of something, to Neuralize it is to not put your hands on it. That is, to not let the nervous system suck it back down. Don’t take your system’s word for anything. You must have some idea by now that everything you’ve ever done — all your Line level attempts to wrestle with your psychology, to study your mind, to think only serious thoughts — none of it produced energy for growth. It is all Line level captivity. And it is the ultimate in negative energy drain.
Consider the following seriously because it is close to a major league secret: what you take to be yourself is not the enemy. I can move all of you closer and closer, continually refining the maps, but there are certain things I (or anyone else who might be in my position) can never tell you. There are things you have got to See for yourself, places only you can go. How much I can tell you has to do with a certain economic expenditure, with not throwing pearls before swine. I’m not saying that you’re all swine or obviously I wouldn’t be talking to you. I am tempted to draw you closer to a major league secret but it can’t be wasted. So, consider seriously that this system you call yourself is not the enemy. Neither is it an ally or even a close friend. But there is no enemy within the lower circuitry. Everyone feels as though This Thing will get rid of their uniquely atrocious habits, tempers, fears and jealousies. The basis of this assumption is the universally accepted belief that there is a devil, an enemy, inside. The basis is the same no matter the language. Whether it’s “demons forcing me to have evil thoughts and lusts” or, “I have psychological problems and traumas that were caused by the way I was treated as a child”. It’s all the same, the descriptions have changed as the level of consciousness has changed, but everyone feels, everyone has always felt, as though there’s an enemy within. And everyone thinks they also have a good part, a godlike part, a part that says, “I drink too much and I’m going to quit” or, “I am no longer going to hate my mother”. It seems evident to people that there is a good part and a bad part, because the good part can identify the bad parts. But there is no enemy. There is no bad part, and nothing has happened to you that hasn’t happened to everyone else. I’m not restating some form of pop psychology. What I want you to consider is not whether your temper might not be as bad as you first thought — that’s all irrelevant — but rather Neuralize the intrinsic feeling that you have an enemy within the lower circuitry. What seems to be you is not an enemy. “I” is not the enemy. It simply is.
Someone recently asked with some concern whether engaging in conscious theatrics was lying. I’ll respond on the basis that what he meant was whether it is some form of ordinary lying for him to consciously do something, to act in a way that is not his ordinary role. Let me begin by saying that very few of you really have any ability to consciously engage in theatrics. You may now find yourself, under the right conditions, at least able to keep the tiger at bay, to withhold some of your immediate automatic responses. But don’t give yourself too much credit for being able to consciously choose a role and play it out. Regarding the person’s question, first you should Neuralize what is meant by lying among ordinary people. What would be the truth? Not lying is everything taking its preordained course. Say a man enters a restaurant and hollers: “Miss, will you come over here and wait on me. I’m in a hurry. Can’t you see? Don’t you care about your customers?” And she looks over and offers a short-tempered response. On the ordinary level people claim that you shouldn’t lie. The customer says, “Doesn’t the customer relationship mean anything to you people? Don’t you even care if I am in your diner?” People might call this telling the truth? But what do they mean? The only thing that can happen, does happen: one transfer unit (the customer) transfers energy, the other unit (the waitress) responds in the only way she can and also feeds energy back. Everything will take a preordained course, within given limits. But conscious theatrics would be to absolutely lie, to not transfer those energies in your habitual manner. The basis for it, though, as I’ve tried to point out in numerous ways, is that you can’t do another any harm. Stay out of people’s way. And that’s the closest you can now come to conscious theatrics: keep your hands off other people. Look after your own affairs. Don’t harm the flow of ordinary life. I might add that any of you who are still concerned about lying are in for a great relief when you glimpse that from the Line down, no one has the ability to either lie or not lie. To believe that people can either lie or not lie is to live at Line level. It is to take this other person to be a responsible, solid something, as if there were a little “Fred” inside of him. What you are literally dealing with, however, is a nervous system that is constantly charged, that constantly transfers energy within extremely limited preordained parameters. That there are such parameters, such limits of reactions, is what makes people apparently recognizable individuals. People say, “I’ve known Fred for years. And you know, I can predict the way he’ll react, and know the kind of books he likes. I know Fred.” And they don’t know what they are saying. They’re describing a very small set of patterns, of reactions that are constantly replayed. No matter where a person goes, whether he’s in India, San Francisco, or Timbuktu, he will replay the same patterns. It’s not the environment. It’s the limited abilities of the circuitry to hear, see, move, to take in, and transform energy. A person will be drawn to and accept only the kinds of energy that are appropriate to the structure of his circuitry. It’s not that there’s a “Fred”, but that there is a small limited parameter of possibilities to what he can take in and how he can transform energies. You have got to be down at Line-level consciousness, you’ve got to be playing the game to believe that another person can lie or not lie. Once you See, you’ll Understand in moments what takes me a half hour to describe verbally.
The closest you can now come to conscious theatrics is to not harm people and to not encourage their ordinary condition. Even if the person wants to be insulted or wants to holler about how bad life treats him, don’t agree. Just keep your hands off, don’t kick at his machine. You needn’t preach a sermon, nor cast pearls. Just do not play with them.
In not treating oneself as the enemy, one of you noted to me that when you attempted to do this, it seemed to dissipate the internal conflict between first and second force because, as that person put it, “there was nothing to resist”. They went on to ask, “Is this why some people could be considered ‘too sane’, people such as politicians and high society folks, because they treat themselves as special friends?” It’s not just that these people are too sane, but from the viewpoint of This Thing, they can be, in fact, dangerous. Those who appear most at ease with life — their hair is always perfect, there’s a song in their heart, a smile on their lips — they are as close as you can come to finding a living danger to This. They are almost the advance troops for the status quo, if not for yesterday. They do serve a very proper role in the ordinary scheme of things. They are the leaders of the horizontal line — politicians, etc. — and if they ever see some functioning form of This Thing, they find no favor with it. They are not dangerous to Life: they are the spokesmen for the horizontal world, for the status quo, for the second force in life. And from their viewpoint, anything they can’t understand, (and politicians are not noted for their understanding) is dangerous and must be stopped.
To continue answering various questions some of you ask, someone asked whether my statement that men operated at a certain speed pertained to humanity as a whole or to the individual. I mentioned it for your individual consideration in relationship to the nervous system’s two primary modes of operation — its need for excitement and its need for calming. This is a real, physical phenomenon. I have left much of this open for your Neutralization and have offered many examples: How much fun can somebody have, how long can you keep up a hobby, how much can you drink, how much t.v. you can watch, how often do you want to be alone and for how long can you stand it before you go out shopping just to get out of the house. My description is a fair one: there are limits to what a person can stand — you can take only so much excitement, you can stand only so many days in bed staring at the walls. You can hang around a bunch of wild people and have a good time for only so long. After a few hours or days of watching t.v. you’ll suddenly say, “That’s enough. I’ve got to go out.” All of you have experienced these things. What the questioner next asks is what would be the effect if a person could significantly speed up or slow down? If you could speed up or slow down you would begin to alter the normal stability of what seems to be you. You would push at the very limits that make you identifiable. Which is why, of course, it’s almost impossible to do. If you could really do it you could alter the range of energies your system habitually processes; it would be as if you had shifted where you stand in the light spectrum. Where previously, you processed only blue energy, now you receive red. And, of course, it would alter the form those energies take: your impressions, your thoughts and feelings. You would simply no longer be you. People might say the same things but you wouldn’t hear it the same way. You literally can not be yourself while operating at a different speed. In other words, you can’t do This and still be you.
Consider again the connectedness of the circuitry regarding sickness. When you get sick your system begins to drain energy in a certain manner and progression, first from one circuit, then another and then the third. I am not going to give you the order but I will tell you that there are three distinct stages to the organism trying to heal itself via draining off energy. It will begin to wear out the body — though remember this is not the right order. Then it will affect what people call human emotions. That’s when you feel so sick that if the newsman announced an imminent nuclear attack you’d ask if the Three Stooges were on the other channel. Then the Yellow circuit is drained. That’s when you go to the phone to call the doctor and you stare at the phone book for two minutes trying to figure out why you came downstairs in the first place. Those are the three stages, and it goes in a particular order according to how sick you are.
Consider what people call psychosomatic illness. All humanity has such a concept, some version of “I”m not sick — it’s not my body that’s sick but something else that has happened.” Now let me ask if this little hypothetical scenario sounds familiar: you told someone you’ll do something; and then you decide you don’t want to do it, in fact you can’t do it. But you really can’t get out of it because you gave “your word” — and then suddenly you break your leg, or you get sick. Consider: in what direction did you get sick? What part of the circuitry said it was going to do something and what part had no interest in doing it? And then what part actually got sick when it didn’t have a blessed thing to do with the whole scheme? Believe it or not, that is a hint of something astounding.