To Life, It’s All Ipsi Dixit
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Summary
Jan Cox Talk 0231 – Oct 23, 1986 – runtime 1:38
Notes by TK
“You’re going to die when you see what’s really going on”. Systems with a ‘pickle’ always have an absolute, stable standard by which to judge your failure. Compare with This Thing where only your own awareness/understanding of non-movement/progress comes with your own realization that molecularly you’re still ‘you’. Life does not ordinarily produce people who are wired up to change. People do not seek change –they seek a perspective/understanding which permits what you already are to fit into the big scheme of things.
Example of use of alcohol. People say they seek change, but aren’t wired to do same. A very little Real Change goes a long way; is astounding. The ordinary understanding of what enlightenment would be is just permission to be what you already are. The seeking of a philosophy validating your forgone beliefs. Relation to: people can’t do anything that they’re not wired for; e.g., play music, write poetry or paint, But everybody nevertheless accepts as a fact that this is not true, i.e., anybody can learn to be a musician.
Example of artist or writer criticizing own earlier work as outdated, and really meaning that everybody else is wrong to see it as still meaningful, where such self-criticism is promoted as a manifestation of This thing connected. But a real understanding is this: Everybody is right. It is the sound of Life ‘frothing’. Everything is ipse dixit to Life (said without proof; self-serving). Another of Life’s masterstroke of distraction: attributing mortal (human) consciousness to higher forces (gods) –the addition of the trappings of antiquity to increase the validity. It is the ‘flying pig’ syndrome.
Life is not an enlargement or magnification of scale of human-like attributes. Example of sacred objects of a culture debated by that society as to whether it is right and proper to sell them to tourists, where the revenue would go for modern salutary conveniences, advancing the tribe into more modern status, eradicating diseases etc. A real quandary, a dilemma of old vs. new values and possible ‘too rapid’ change. But if the debate arises in the first place, the answer is already forgone. Relation to your own questions/dilemmas of “should I do so & so or not?” debates within The Partnership. There is no question without an answer.
There is a physical central control unit or processor/thermostat-like mechanism in everybody which determines their health, abilities, energy levels. It has the equivalent of a ‘pilot light’ which gives you the feeling of being alive; the so-called spark of life, divine soul. The seeking for a philosophy of life, a perspective permitting/comforting your own wired-up behavior, is the equivalent of seeking for a thermal blanket or insulator for the central processing unit/thermostat controller. After your ‘epiphany’ of enlightenment of permission to be what you are–THEN real molecular change is finally possible.
Excursion
1:36 Neuralize: why is there nothing funny about being happy? Why are jokes not about being happy?
Transcript
TO LIFE IT’S ALL IPSI DIXIT
Document: 231, October 23, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986
You’re going to die when you see what’s actually going on. You’re just going to die. If you recall my previous description, all so-called self-help systems, from religions to would-be forms of mystical activity, have a pickle. We could say that one of the Catholic Church’s pickles is confession; another is what it calls the unbroken string of authority reflected in its line of popes. Note that in any good pickle system, there’s always a stable standard by which to judge your failure. I said failure and not success because success is fairly irrelevant. For example, in the Catholic Church, if you don’t go to confession or don’t believe that Jesus saves, you have failed. In another religion, let’s say you haven’t adhered to the dietary laws. There’s a simple way to determine if you’ve failed. It may appear to be more complex than these examples I’m giving in that you are perhaps failing in three or four different aspects of the same pickle, but there is still a stable way in which to judge failure.
However, in This your only sense of non-movement is in your own awareness that you’re still molecularly you, which does not give the same immediate, specific sense of failure as a pickle system. On the other hand, if I were to say, “Everyone has to understand This, and if you don’t, you should feel badly,” then we would have a pickle. You would think, “Well, I don’t understand what he talks about; therefore, I feel badly. Most everybody understands what he says, but I don’t,” whereas having the awareness that you are molecularly still you is beyond the realm of this or that, beyond the limits of binary thinking. It’s beyond ordinary consciousness’ conclusion that “I am succeeding and moving forward,” or, “I must be moving backwards.” This transcends that standard of success in that it requires a non-pickle judgement. If you were to tell an ordinary person, “I’m not making any progress in these activities because I can see that molecularly I’m still me,” he is not going to interpret that as a very serious statement. That is not the same as saying, “I joined this group and at the heart of its philosophy is the requirement that we have to remember to say the leader’s name at exactly forty-three minutes after the hour all day long, and I can’t seem to do it.” Whether or not the person disagrees with your attitude toward this group, he can see that there is a way to judge success and failure in the group. If you say, “I have a sort of four-dimensional awareness that I’m molecularly still me,” you will not get much sympathy. I doubt if you’ll get much understanding. I doubt if you’ll even get much of a hearing, because it sounds insane, or at the very least, like it’s E-relevant.
Life does not produce people to be wired up for any sort of individual change. That is a fact that is close to THE fact of facts, close to the core of THE secret. No matter what people say, they are not wired up to want to really change, and that includes you people. Instead, what you’re seeking is a perspective that permits you to be what you already are. That includes you and any religious hero you’ve read or heard about. That includes you along with everybody else. That includes you, whether you’ve been here a long time or only a short time. You need to see what I’m talking about. That doesn’t mean there’s no escape or that you finally do begin to escape from some of it, but rather that you’ve got to get past it. In a way, it stays with you like sweat, or at least like the aroma of sweat, even if you could stop perspiring. The aroma stays with you, but you can go past it.
How can you explain the worldwide, nonstop popularity of alcohol? Why do people like to drink? In a very crude sense, it’s a form of a temporary, new perception. It produces new information/energy. But note that even after it becomes rather habitual, what it seems to offer to an individual is permission to be what he already is. At a certain level, it appears that everybody wants to change, and it especially seems as though people who believe they’re interested in This want to change. Why else would you spend all this time listening to me and trying to do these things? But people are not wired up to want to really change in the way they think they do. Not even you people.
Everybody’s wired up to say they want to change, but people are not wired up to actually, personally, individually change. That’s why change is so rare. That’s why a little bit of change will go a long way. That’s why a little pocita change will almost floor you when it begins to happen. Once you get a block or so past it, you think, “Some change has occurred. It’s nothing like I imagined in quantity or quality, but it’s staggering, and, to tell you the truth, as far as I can tell, I had nothing to do with it directly.” But between here and there, no matter what you try to do, no matter what fine things you write in your diary, what fine thoughts you think, what fine interpretations you think you’ve made of what I’ve said, you’re still not wired up to change.
What you want is a new kind of perspective, a new kind of Understanding. That seems to be what I’m giving you, but the end result is that you want to be permitted to be what you already are. You want this information, these new maps, these paradigms, these worlds that I concoct, to fit into what you already believe, and that’s it. That’s why a drink is so nice. That why talking about change is so nice. That’s why discussing so-called spiritual or intellectual or philosophical matters is so neat. You can talk about such things in a way in which it sounds as though you are changing. A person drinks several cups of strong coffee and suddenly begins to talk and expand upon some would-be philosophical article he read or upon some aphorism he plucked off a bathroom wall, and he has the sensation that, “I’m indeed changing. I’ve never had such amazing thoughts as these.”
Whether you’re interpreting philosophy books or words that I’ve said, you are seeking a kind of permission to be what you already are. That’s what ordinary people call enlightenment. That’s what ordinary people call an astounding, emotional, spiritual experience. Someone is gulping coffee in the middle of the night after years of attending lectures or reading so-called spiritual books, and the gigantic web of his four-dimensional mosaic is just right, and he has a thought that goes “pow, pow, pow,” as though he’d been shot in the head or little heart. He has this moment of beginning to see more in depth, of seeing the connectedness of things, of seeing that he’s not isolated from Life. He sees all kinds of things, based upon what he’s already wired up to be, and he believes, “I have had an astounding moment. I am now the living definition of the word ‘epiphany.’ My eyes have been opened. I’m set free.” But if you look at it in a certain way, all that happened was that the experience permitted him to be what he already was. That’s what you’re looking for. That’s what everybody’s wired up to look for, not that they can see it or believe it in theory.
I’m assuming that all of you hear quite directly what I’m saying. It’s not anything complex. If you had a kind of four-dimensional sight, if you could engage in a non-sequential, disciplined study of you, you would see that what your moments of freedom give you is permission for you to be what you already are. You think, “This is the ultimate liberation. The veil is lifted from my eyes. The weight’s lifted from my back. The fat’s lifted from my thighs. I’m free to fly with the gods,” but all it is, if you could translate it, is the message, “There, there. It’s okay to be what you are.” It says, “Hey, it takes all kinds or there wouldn’t be all kinds. That includes you, booby,” and it’s taken as being a spiritual, metaphysical moment of great freedom. “I am now on the right path. Now I’m getting somewhere.” That is everyone’s first moment of liberation, of awakening, of enlightenment, and, believe me, you’re hearing me as simply as I mean it. Everyone walks around believing, “An absolute desire, a burning rage, is driving me to want to change,” and that’s not true. I’m not trying to give you the terminal blues, but you’ll never be able to see this until you get past it.
Right now you’re trying to piece all of this together, and what you’re looking for you can’t see. Your partnership says, “There might be a little bit of truth in what you’re saying, but it’s not true to a large enough degree to have any relevance to me,” and you’re wrong. What you’re trying to come up with is a philosophy that fits what you are already wired up to believe; what you were born to believe. You want permission to go ahead and be what you already are, whether it’s hotheaded, hardheaded, overcome by jealousy, stupid, always suffering, or always feeling hurt. You’re looking for a philosophy that permits those things, a philosophy that fits into that kind of life. To you, right now, that would be enlightenment. That’s when you would say, “Ahhh, you brought me along, you finally got me here, and I realize the kind of mental gymnastics and emotional arabesques you’ve gone though. I finally see.” The first time that happens, that’s not true. All it is is you coming up with a philosophy that fits what you already were wired up and forced to believe. That’s the way in which your own circuits molecularly react to incoming energy. You finally find what amounts to a map, a philosophy, a set of beliefs that fits over what you already wanted to believe, and you then have permission not to change. Can I make it any simpler? Okay, if you are a narrow-minded, bigoted, pigheaded, clumsy glutton, what you’re looking for from me, from religion, from some swami is a kind of map that will suddenly fit into your Yellow Circuit, a kind of spiritual, intellectual, philosophical map that fits right over what you already believe and permits you to be what you are, i.e., a narrow-minded, bigoted, pigheaded, clumsy glutton. That’s your moment of awakening.
People generally believe that within certain, reasonable parameters people can acquire abilities in almost any field, that given a certain amount of interest in music, for example, anyone can learn to play the piano well. And that’s simply not true. They believe that if they found a good teacher and applied themselves, they could learn to sketch or draw well. They think, “Well, I only know how to draw little stick figures, but I’ve always been interested in art. I might like to be a painter. I could take some classes and at least learn to sketch well,” and it’s not true. They believe other things as well, such as, “I can become a better person,” but let’s stick with good, hard examples. Not just anybody can learn to play an instrument.Not just anybody can learn to paint. Not just anybody can learn to dance in a way that people would think, “That meets my qualifications to be called dance.” The average person with his average mental and physical faculties thinks, “If I had an interest in it, I could take up a musical instrument and play music.” If I said, “Alright, everybody can do it, so go do it,” a number of you wouldn’t be able to do it.
Some of you, to use everyday terminology, have no musical ability, and nothing will change that. Some of you could spend three or four hours a day, five days a week at an art institute or fine arts college taking sketching and painting classes, studying perspective and anatomy, and no matter what you did, no one who has an eye for design, an eye for the arts, would ever look at what you created and give you spit for it, not even if I said, “Everybody can learn to do that,” and you replied, “Rah, rah, rah, let’s go!!” Life says that, assuming you’re not colorblind, assuming that you’re not spastic, assuming that you don’t have faulty hearing, you, too, can learn to play the piano or dance or sketch well enough that others could correctly identify that, “It’s a picture of somebody reaching up in a tree, holding up a pig to eat acorns.”
Let’s say that I ask you, “Did you ever dance when you were going through school?” and you replied, “Naw, I was always embarrassed.” So I say, “Alright, we’re going to set up a series of ballet classes with an excellent instructor. We’re going to do some stretching and aerobics, and then we’re going to get into actual ballet. I don’t care what you look like physically, within three months, all of you will leap across the stage and look graceful. All of you can do it.” You would think, “Alright, everybody can. I just never gave it a good shot, but here’s my chance.” But some of you would go through all the classes and would still move like you were tied up in a potato sack or had terminal gout in both feet. Yet the accepted fact is to the contrary — that graceful dancing is possible for everyone.
It’s not true, but it’s an accepted fact in Life’s body. If it were not, can you see the kind of jitters it would cause in Life’s expansion? The growth of Life would be that much more limited. To say that people are what they are and that not much more is possible for them would inhibit Life’s growth in certain respects, so Life has wired up people to believe collectively that they can learn to do almost anything that anybody else can do, which of course makes them feel better individually. A person thinks, “I can take up the piano at the age of sixty, after I retire, and become good at it. I had an uncle who finally bought a piano, and he got to where he could play pretty well.” It’s just a collectively accepted fact that people can learn to do new things, that they can learn to change, that they can expand themselves into fields in which they have displayed no talent thus far. The truth of the matter, though, is that if you’re not talent-wired to do it, nothing’s going to change that. You cannot somehow learn to dance if you’re not wired up to dance. But Life has wired up people to believe that they can do it when they can’t. What a master stroke. If men were allowed to believe that it’s impossible for them to do things, look at what that would do to limit other aspects of Life’s growth. So what people do is like blowing up a balloon to the point that it’s going to burst, and what happens is that it deflates and turns into nothing, or they suck all of the air out of it and it gets so big that it swallows them. It’s as I said: you’re going to die when you finally begin to see what’s actually going on.
As new people are exposed to me and these ideas, I continue to receive questions about those people in life who seem to say or do the apparently extraordinary. Someone will say to me, “Hey, this person said something so astounding that surely that’s proof that he’s involved in this same kind of activity. Right?” He might be referring to a rock musician or contemporary novelist or artist. The most recent example of this was somebody telling me about an artist who was discussing an upcoming retrospective of his work. The artist was talking about work he did ten years ago during his Chartreuse Period. (He could just as well have been a musician talking about his Neo-Revival, Inverted, Post-Bop Era of a few years ago when he was recording on the Squash Note Label.) The artist supposedly said, “I don’t even like to talk about that period of my work. To tell you the truth, what I painted back then is outdated. I mean, I was serious, I was sincere, but you know what? In my life as an artist, a true artist, those pieces I did are already passe. I’m beyond that point. In a sense, I’m almost ashamed of them.” That sounds potent. That sounds as though the artist speaks with unusual understanding. Someone may point out to him that people find those paintings of his Chartreuse Period to be attractive and meaningful and that there’s now a whole body of artistic criticism based upon it, that that body of work is important. He might still insist, “Those paintings are old hat. Look at what I’m painting today. Buy my new paintings. Look at all this work I’m doing. My work from the Chartreuse Period is out of date. It’s already meaningless. I’m moving on.” What he’s saying is that everybody who disagrees with him is wrong. I’ll leave it to you to jump from this painter and the arts to areas concerning human behavior, beliefs, philosophy, and feelings.
The real pot hole is that he is saying that everyone who disagrees with him is wrong. There is a world of difference between him and the few people who can learn how to see in a four-dimensional, multi-time-zone manner. The latter can see that everybody, yes everybody, is right. Life is continuously frothing and bubbling, and everybody is right, including this artist who says, “My work from that period is outdated.” Those who say, “Naw, that work is still meaningful” are right. Those who say, “You have expanded the spatial depths of internalizing man’s evolutionary age,” are right. Those who flip on the television and hear this kind of discussion going on and say, “Bullshit!” are also right. Everybody’s right. You can hear Life frothing. But you cannot hear life frothing if in some way you have punctuated the infinite comment down to the point that anybody’s wrong. Then what you hear is non-frothing. What you hear is a smooth surface.
Don’t get hung up on my saying that I was responding to people asking about specific figures out in life because that’s way beyond the point. You can like James Brown’s singing, Picasso’s paintings, or you can enjoy reading fiction written by an author who’s since died, but realize that when anyone on this planet, no matter how genteel be their manner, no matter how oblique be their approach, no matter how ersatz be their intellectual perspective, points out that anybody is wrong, the frothing has been cut off. Don’t bother to ask me, much less yourself, “Is this person on to something?” You think, “Well, look at this great body of work he’s produced, plus, on top of that, he seems to have an almost enlightened response to his critics.” You have to make effort to see beyond the obvious. When the artist says, “The public that’s excited over my series of paintings centered around a man who falls in love with sawhorses is incorrect because those works are outdated,” the frothing has stopped for him. Absolutely everybody is right. Everybody is not sort of right; everybody is not almost right; everybody is right. When everybody is right, you can Hear the frothing. Everything is ipsi dixit to Life. It’s self-proclaimed. It’s an unproved assertion, like a guy claiming, “I am God.” That’s an ipsi dixit statement. He himself said it. To Life, everything is ipsi dixit. Everything. That includes what I just said. If you could in some way change your molecular structure such that every time the blood reached your brain and hit Line-level consciousness you remembered that to Life everything is ipsi dixit, you would be getting close to seeing that, “I have never wanted to change. What I wanted was permission to be what I am and what I believe is right,” which, as it happens, fits right in. Whatever you say, whatever you believe, is ipsi dixit to life. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got credentials. I’m telling you a four-dimensional fact. Absolutely everything is ipsi dixit to life.
Remember I’m still not telling you that the body of Life is really the big guy, and that we’re simply little cells in the big guy. But, to use an available analogy, if I could hold the microphone down and you could hear the rumbles of my stomach or the rhythm in my chest or the creaking in my knees, to consciousness, to your own consciousness, those sounds are ipsi dixit statements. They simply are. They are unproven, self-serving statements. Whether the person talking is a religious leader, a deranged psychopath, or your own partnership, whatever is said in the body of Life is ipsi dixit, and that’s a fact, Jack. But until you get to the right part of town, that doesn’t really have any great pertinence to you, not to mention that you can’t seem to remember it. It’s ALL ipsi dixit to Life. So you think, “That concept could have some allegorical meaning I guess, but how about some of the specific things that I know, especially some of the important things that I’ve written down so I wouldn’t forget them because they’re the kind of thing that I want to live by?” I’m telling you, to Life it’s all ipsi dixit.
Another master stroke, another kind of master distraction blow that Life deals man, is having him attribute mortal-like consciousness to his gods. Ordinary consciousness cannot conceive of this direct fact, and when it says that it can, it’s already lost it. It cannot see that it’s connected to anything. Ordinary consciousness cannot see that all notions of higher forces are limited to the flying pig phenomenon.
If you try to think of the greatest higher force that you can, what can you think of? Imagine I were to say to you, “Alright, make up your own gods. I mean, it’s just a joke, something to do while we drink a couple of beers together. Let’s have a little fun and have you come up with your own version of higher forces. You can name them anything you want to — Admore the Great or Felicity Flippo. Okay, you claim that you’ve never fallen for all those old religious stories and mythological tales about gods. Alright, if there were a god, if there were somebody behind all this, describe what he or she or it would be like. Forget all the stuff that religions teach. Just have a little fun and tell me what these higher forces would be like.” What you’re going to come up with is a flying pig and that’s all. You’re going to attribute mortal consciousness to the gods. Maybe you’ll change it around and instead of having a flying pig, you’ll have a tap-dancing pig, or instead of a flying pig, you’ll have a flying giraffe, or if not a flying giraffe, then a giraffe on roller skates. You are still going to attribute to the god human-like consciousness.
Consciousness cannot deal with the concept of higher forces. Even if it hears what I’m saying, it says, “Well, I hear what you’re saying,” but it doesn’t go beyond that. Collectively, humanity is wired up to believe that there is some kind of something/somebody outside of life that affects what’s going on. Even if you say you reject the religion you were raised in as a child, you still have a specific, genetic background that determines your awareness. It’s irrelevant to say, “I’ve rejected it.” When you hear the word “god,” you have a particular notion that’s based upon the background of your genes. What exactly is the god of your religion? Of your father’s religion? Of your grandfather’s religion? Note that religions have not clarified the notion of a god. The older the religion, the more replete it is with ritual. Every two hundred years the leaders put on another layer of clothing, another hat, more jewelry. The weight of it all becomes heavier and heavier. They discover that the language used in their religious services seems too removed from the common man, so they change it from Latin to Albanian or they quit talking altogether. To ordinary consciousness it all seems to reek not only of antiquity, but of validity. It’s a kind of occult validity. You think, “Surely there’s a true, mystical connection between these religious leaders and the gods, and perhaps a little of it will spill over onto me by being here.” But the gods that they say they are worshiping, the gods that they say have revealed information, the gods that they say are ruling the destinies of their group, tribe, or community all have human characteristics. No matter what color the gods are, no matter how old the gods are, no matter what sex they are, and no matter what religion the gods said they originally spoke in, their consciousness is human consciousness. They’re flying pigs. The gods sound as though they’re something out of the ordinary, but all they are is two ordinary things stuck together — wings on pigs.
Don’t see what a master stroke it is? Everyone is wired up collectively to take this very seriously. Of course, in a real sense, once you understand what religion is, it is serious. But the notion of gods as you’ve always heard it is of the same importance as the sadly missed American Football League. Collectively, over eons throughout the history of the Yellow Circuit, human consciousness has conceived of, believed in, and accumulated these rituals to the point that they seem to be unassailable. They say that the gods have spoken to Man, that the gods have come down and revealed themselves, that the gods have even interfered with or helped in the affairs of Man. But to them the consciousness of the gods is the consciousness of Man. No matter what name they call them, their gods get angry, they’re greedy, they’re forgetful, they change their minds, they’re indecisive, they’re full of retribution, they threaten people, they scare people, and so forth. Then certain other parts of Life’s body are wired up to have a few ordinary people ponder this and think, “Well, that’s very strange. It’s almost inexplicable,” and it’s not.
It’s inexplicable if you believe that somebody somewhere is wrong, but when you can hear the frothing, you understand that everybody is right. When you see that people attribute human qualities to their gods, you get a notion of “Ah ha!” and you hear even more than the frothing. You can hear molecules in Life’s own body. It almost sounds like some of the bubbles are laughing. The consciousness of Life is not simply a reflection or magnification of human consciousness. No matter how much it may sound like it at times, anthropomorphism is not the name of the game. It’s as close a word as you would find in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean anything. The word “steel-belted” isn’t too bad. Or “unction.” I’ve always liked “unction,” and of course “faux pas” is one of my all time favorites.
The other day I heard an anthropologist talking about certain sacred artifacts — little statues — that a group of people make in a certain part of the world today. These statues have to be made under certain conditions. The moon has to be in a certain position. The people have to undergo a certain purifying ritual. They can work on producing the statues only during certain hours of the day. They make these statues and then they break them in a religious ceremony, after which the statues have to be burned and destroyed. As far as the anthropologist can tell, these people have been making these statues for hundreds of years, and the statues are very important to them. Now, however, through some fluke of fate, a tourist passed through the village and stole one of the statues, which eventually ended up in a museum somewhere. Seeing the statue in the museum, certain tourists began to look up this tribe of people, asking to buy some of these statuary artifacts from them.
The question that the anthropologist posed was, “Are times changing perhaps too drastically for these people? Isn’t selling these statues to tourists too drastic a change?” He pointed out that certain members of the tribe are now aware that there is a market for these statues. New questions have arisen among the tribesmen. Some say, “We could develop hard currency. We could install plumbing in our homes. We could buy medicine for our people. We could bring ourselves closer into contemporary times.” Others say, “But look, we’ve been making these statues under certain secret conditions for hundreds and hundreds of years and have used them only in our religious services. They’re an important part of our culture, an integral part of our religion, a part of our social fabric. We shouldn’t tamper with them.” The anthropologist asked, “Is this too drastic a change for them? Are they letting themselves be pushed to change too quickly?”
It would seem as though there were a real question. If you were sophisticated enough, you could look at it from two different perspectives, with advantages and disadvantages on each side. The money from the tourists would help them buy antibiotics, clean up their environment, and obtain pure water. All they have to do is sell statues. On the other hand, their sacred religious rites would be altered, and their very way of life would be changed. The question is, will selling these statues to tourists be too drastic an action for these people, or will it in fact improve their lives in such a way that this minor infraction of their heretofore spiritualistic rituals would have been worth it? The answer is simple. As soon as the time arrives that such questions arise, the answer is foregone.
Anytime there seems to be a potential change going on in some part of life’s body and there seems to be a question regarding whether or not a particular change is beneficial, the answer is foregone. The anthropologist says, “It would mean a great change for them, and in certain areas their lot would surely be improved, but there are other aspects that would obviously have a negative payoff. Maybe there’s no answer to this. Maybe any decision would be premature.” If the question arises, you have the answer.
Now forget all about religious artifacts. Forget all about “out there.” Questions seem to continually arise in you. “Should I do such and such? Would it be too drastic? Perhaps I’m being premature. Perhaps that’s asking too much of myself. Or, if I did that, what would that do to me in other areas? What would that do to my social life? What would that do to this and that? Something in me seems to say that I should do this, but another part of me points out that there could be negative ramifications. Since it just came to my mind, I probably shouldn’t make a decision right now. A decision would be premature. I’ll have to wait and see if an answer develops.” As the midwestern mystics used to say, “Duck flop.” If the question has arisen, the answer is foregone.
“Would it be too drastic a change for the tribe to sell their religious artifacts to tourists? It may be many months, if not years, before they have an answer to that. The people in the tribe are debating it and are setting up a special council that’s going to meet the first part of next year. They’re going to have to vote on it, and they’re going to call in some of the shaman from other tribes to offer their opinions. They have a lot of work to do before they can reach a decision.” Once the question is forthcoming, once the question is formed, the answer is foregone. There is no question without an answer. I don’t mean that the answer is hidden somewhere or that the answer will come in tomorrow’s mail, or maybe next year. If there is a question, there is an answer. If you don’t believe that, you go out and find me a one-sided coin. If you’ve got a coin with heads on it, you’ve got a coin with tails on it. If, in discussing your own internal tribe, your own partnership has a question, the answer is foregone. You can set up all the blue ribbon committees you want to. You can decide that it’s too soon to give an answer. You can decide that you need more “data.” Some of you could even decide that you need more “datta,” and some say “toh-mah-toh,” but we in this part of the country are off, off, off Broadway, so we don’t have to pursue that line of reasoning, unless you say, “poh-tah-toe.”
Now let’s go back to some physiology, since I know things that nobody else knows. Although you ordinarily do not have the perception apparatus to see it, there physically exists in everyone what amounts to a secret, central processor. It’s a thermostatically controlled unit, and it’s literally in everybody. The inability of Line-level consciousness to presently see it accounts for, among other things, the inability of science, within certain parameters and circumstances, to decide when people are dead and when they’re alive. It’s also tied directly to you being wired up to be what you are, whether you’re musically adept, clumsy, shy, bullheaded, or sad. This processing unit determines your health. You were born with it operating. It determines your energy level and your abilities. Inside the thermostatic aspect of it is literally a pilot light that tells you that you’re alive. When that light goes out, you don’t know whether you’re alive. The processor can still be working enough that blood is flowing, breath is going in and out, but the pilot light is out.
Some of your forefathers recognized this processor and called it the soul. It seemed so strange to limited consciousness that they called it “a spark of creation,” “a spark of the divine,” or “soul.” Believe it or not, I’ve not changed the subject from the very beginning. You and everyone living, struggling, coming here, listening to these tapes, and trying my methods, think that you’re trying to change, whereas I pointed out to you that’s not really true. You’re seeking a kind of new perspective.
You say you want a new philosophy, a new spiritual paradigm, or, as someone said to me, “new theories.” What you want is to find someone who seems to have a belief system that fits yours, a sort of insulating wrapper that could immediately fit over your control unit. As I’ve said, it is in your control unit that your health is determined. If you’ve been weak all your life, your answer is right there in that control unit. Those of you who seem to be passionate toward life, who seem to be immediately capable of friendship, who seem to be extroverted, tied right in there to the thermostat is the kind of heat exchange you have with other people. If we could say there were a norm thermostatically, then there are people who are set cooler and people who are set hotter.
So-called conflicts are heat exchanges. Life contains everything from disagreements over football teams to philosophical arguments to religious conflicts, all the way to armed warfare between peoples, between Red Circuits, and it all has to do with heat exchange. There are people who are dying to get on stage. “I want to be a guru, too.” “I want to be a tap dancer.” “I want to sing.” “I want to play.” “I want people to look at me and go ‘Wow!'” Then there are other people who say, “I couldn’t get up on stage. I’d die. I had to get up on stage once when I was a cub scout or brownie, and they told me I had to make a speech, and I almost died.” The heat exchanges, the flows of energy between that kind of person and other people, are such that he is an audience. Wanting to be an audience and not get up on stage is tied to his thermostat.
Or, a man tells me: “I can’t seem to open up to women. I read magazine articles that say women want more intimacy. They want men to show them some affection, and I just can’t do it. I try, and I’m clumsy, and to tell you the truth, I forget about it. Women put up with me for about two months, and then they move out. Can you teach me to be a better Lothario?” He’s not looking for that. He can say that he is. He says, “Every time I see a questionnaire in a magazine that says, ‘Take this test and find out how you can change yourself to be a better male lover,’ I take it. I use their suggestions, but it doesn’t help. Can you give me a suggestion?” He is not looking to change. He is looking for a philosophy, a new perspective that will allow him to be what he is. It’s back to his central control unit, the very thing that humanity has wanted for all these years to call “a soul” or “individuality.” Poetry, and religious literature are full of the concept that we are individuals are important. Last week I was trying to get you to have some continuing grasp of the fact that, under ordinary conditions, there is no person in you. There is no person in anybody. There are molecular reactions. People don’t learn something new. People don’t stop and say, “Let me decide what I’ll do.” You’ve got to be ordinary to believe that, but it’s almost impossible not to believe that. Getting freed from it is what all of This is about. You think it’s about other things, but you’re going to die when you find out what This is actually about. You’re just going to die.
You think This is occult and mystical and indescribable, which it is, but it ain’t indescribable for the reason that you think. There is no individual in you or in other people. For you to believe that, I must say again in all sincerity that you and I both have wasted every second that I ever spent with you. As alien as it sounds, as discomforting as it is to the partnership, as nearly impossible as it is to believe for any length of time, there is nobody in anybody. There are molecular reactions that they cannot change. They’re not that much different from a dog. If you believe that there is a solid person inside of people, that shows that you know nothing about what’s going on. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to die when you find out what’s going on, because you ain’t even close to it, and that’s the most charitable understatement that I’ve probably ever made.
What has always passed for some kind of cosmic, holy spark, some form of true individuality, is literally a central processor. Based upon the way that you are already wired up, based upon your own genetic patterns, it makes your temperament what it seems to be. It takes in energies and processes them. You can say, “I’m trying to change. I want to change,” but you are not really wired up to change. You are wired up to seek out a philosophy.
Let’s say that you read an Ibsen play or a Shakespeare sonnet or a comic book, and a line seems as though it really wraps up the meaning of life. “Treat your fellow man as you want to be treated.” You think, “That’s it. That says it all. I’ll change. I’ll work to get to that place.” It’s not true. If that indeed does become the dictum of your life, all it has done is fit in to what you already are. Your processor was already wired up that way. The temperature gauges were set that way molecularly. So you have your moment of epiphany and think, “Free at last, free at last, I can finally be me. I can be a fat dumb ass. I can be a clumsy dullard. I can be a greedy glutton, and it’s alright. It’s heaven. I’m awake. I’m enlightened.” Well, I’ll say this. If that ever happens to you and you remember what I told you, you will then have the potential to See something. But it can take many, many years to ever realize, “Up until now, I have not really tried to change. I believed that I tried. I could have sworn that I tried.”
When you experience those first moments of thinking, “I’ve found freedom. I’ve found that idea, that philosophy, that expression that says it all, and this is where I’m going to devote my energies,” you can be sure that you’ve just found something that fits your present philosophy, your present view, and it’s very simply a perspective that permits you to be what you already are. The simplicity can throw you. You ask, “Well, if everybody is what they are, why aren’t they satisfied?” You just can’t see it. You can’t See it until you can Be it. You can’t see it until you go through it. There are many, many things that you cannot do. There are many, many things that you cannot be. And “many, many” will be my second most charitable comment tonight. You can’t really become different until you find out that all notions of change, of enlightenment, are exactly as I’ve described them to you. No matter if other people seem to be devoting most of their attention to getting rich, to pursuing worldly external goals, while you seem to be pursuing internal, nonmaterial goals, everybody says, “I’m trying to change. I’m trying to better myself.” But they are not, and neither are you. Everyone is wired up to be dissatisfied, and everyone is wired up to believe that they can do things that they can’t do. To do otherwise, Life would be limiting itself.
If that sounds too exotic, how about you? What if I were to say to you, “Everything you can’t do right now, that’s it. If you can’t do it now, you’ll never do it,” and you were struck by it. In a sense, wouldn’t that be a shame? I can tell you this, Life would take me around the corner and tell me, “You shouldn’t have done that.” Of course, once you realized it, a whole bunch of you would probably gang up and come to me and say, “You shouldn’t have told us that, even if it was the truth.”
My humor aside, look at how my telling you that would limit you. Even though Life’s consciousness is not a simple reflection or simple magnification of yours, remember that there is a parallel or Life wouldn’t even talk to me. Life wouldn’t talk to humanity about this. Such talk limits Life. Life’s growth would be limited if all of humanity believed that they couldn’t change. Of course, by believing that they can change, dot dot dot, you fill it in. As long as people believe, “I can do anything. I can change,” everybody keeps trying.
When you talk with someone, you believe that you’re dealing with another person. You read the newspaper and think, “Here is Judge So and So; here’s Dr. So and So, General So and So, Minister So and So,” or “Here’s a person of substance. He has three degrees, has travelled around the globe, has written ten books, and he looks intelligent.” If you met him, you’d say, “Let’s talk. I’ve always wanted to speak to you. May I have your opinion on something? I know that you’re a fair man, a reasonable man.” You find yourself believing that inside General So and So is this whole, little, tiny general; that inside this religious leader is a little bitty rabbi or minister who knows a whole lot. The little one is up in his brain, and if the minister gets too out of hand, this little authoritative minister will say, “Nay, nay.” Of course, ordinary people don’t ask, “If that’s true, where is he in me? I haven’t got one, but everyone else does.” No they don’t.
What there is is a secret, central processor that’s also a thermostat. It tells you that you’re alive. It makes you temperamentally what you are. It makes you an intrinsic audience or performer, and through the processor itself, it determines your health. It determines the amount of energy you seem to have and the kind of passion you have for being alive. It’s the controller of what you normally think of as your talents, your abilities. It’s there. It’s physically there, whereas so-called personality is not. There is not a little person in you. It’s all molecular reactions.
I am strongly suggesting to you that this information can truly be used by you, not to manipulate people, not to use people, but in the way you relate to and interact with people. You are not simply dealing with some mechanical, reactionary nobody. Let’s say you meet a person you feel to be your social better. You look at him and think, “I’m dealing with somebody who’s more insightful, more alive than I am. Inasmuch as Forbes says he’s worth twenty billion dollars, he’s got to be a better person than I am. And he’s got seven degrees, whereas my temperature isn’t nearly that high.” Instead of that, you need to remember what I’m telling you; that what is functioning is a central processor. Some of you have seemed sickly all of your life. Some of you believe that you’re psychosomatically ill, which is duck flop squared. You can’t be psychosomatically ill unless you have “a psyche,” but all you have are molecules. They seem to feel alright, or they don’t feel alright. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in your head or in your butt or in your digestive system. This processor has determined your health. It will determine, if nothing else changes, how long you’ll live. It determines whether you chain smoke or drink alcohol or eat fatty foods.
Various scientific reports now state, “If you breathe asbestos every day, you are going to die sooner than you would otherwise,” and, “If you drink twenty ounces of alcohol every day of your life, we can statistically show that you will die on the average of seven years earlier than those who don’t drink.” So you think, “Well, there’s no doubt that the environment does play a part.” You’ve got to be able to see past that. It’s an ACBI. Some people drink that much. Some drink half that much. A lot of people don’t drink at all. A lot of people want to stop the people who are drinking from drinking. A lot of people who don’t drink try to drink and can’t. Some of those who don’t drink and see people who don’t drink never think about it. Some of those who drink wish that they didn’t drink. Some of those who drink say, “I’m glad I drink.”
You have to be able to see that everybody is right. Life is just bubbling and frothing. The processor has determined how each operates. It makes you believe that certain aspects of Life should be and can be changed, in other words, that the thermostat can be turned up or down. A person thinks, “I can change my personality. I can change my emotional states. I can change the way in which I have been emotionally traumatized,” but normally people can’t. Once you get past that point, once you have your initial moments of epiphany of discovering, “This is what I thought would be my greatest moment, and all I’ve done is interpreted this as permission to be me,” it is then, I strongly suggest to you, that TRUE molecular changes start taking place. The operation, speed, and temperature setting of your central processor changes, and that’s the beginning of magic. You don’t grow wings, but molecularly you have changed, and it is no longer that “I have found something that fits what I was,” because now what you are doesn’t really fit anything. I could say that you can’t even predict where it will lead. You may begin to do things that you never thought you’d do, truly unnatural things, like beginning to see that everybody is right. You might get to the point that you can actually hear Life frothing.