Jan Cox Talk 2550 - A Proper Reaction to Thinking

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Transcript by DC

Jan Cox Talk 2550  : July 12, 2000
© Jan Cox, Jan's Legacy 2014.
These notes prepared by DC on 2/21/2008 from audio file.

Suggested title : A Proper Reaction to Thinking

Begin:  Just in private to you guys out in the other cities...the 23rd of September will be the Saturday of St. Quantums, and I was thinking it sure would be nice for all of you people out of town who could to show up down here.  I don't mean to give you the blues and I don't mean it as some sort of a veiled hint, but due to what happened to me, we never know whether I'll be here to see you again or not.  Plus a couple of you out there I've never even seen before.  Why don't you come down?

01:12  [Reads]  Everything ever said deserves to be ridiculed.  Man seems to live by doing and to live by thinking and talking.  And while doing is essential to survival, thinking and talking are not.  A man could, in fact, survive solely by doing if he were removed from an environment wherein thinking had been made an integral part of everyday life.  So, doing is essential;  thinking is not.  Actual survival is in doing, while thinking is either thinking about essential, survival-related doing or is thinking about nonessential doing that is merely entertainment or is thinking about things that are total inventions of previous human thinking.

02:05  [Reads]  Anything that's said or thought by anyone deserves to be ridiculed.  Thinking is intended to assist doing in matters of survival.  But thinking can also interfere with essential doing, such as in being mentally someplace else while carrying needed water and tripping and spilling it.  Note:  things men do may be laughed at but only what they think deserves to be ridiculed.

02:33  [Reads]  Doing is instinctive while thinking is second order instinctive, often appearing to be as much influenced by the external man-made cultural environment as by the internal physiological one.  But do take note that the trick term herein is 'appearing to be'.   Reminder of our main topic, anything anyone says and ergo, thinks deserves to be mocked and ridiculed.

03:02  [Reads]  Subtopic:  Ideas that can be offended should be offended.  If you believe that a particular idea is true and you cannot see how it deserves to be insulted and  offended, then you believe an idea that is a lie.  Ideas that can be insulted should be insulted and the more impressive they sound the more they deserve to be insulted.

03:25  [Reads]  Most people spend most of their time thinking about doing.  Mystics think about thinking.  And those that go beyond being mere mystics think about all the time they wasted thinking.

03:38  The real topic...here it is.  I say quite seriously that anything that anyone's ever said deserves to be ridiculed...there is no term that adequately covers what I mean...

05:39  Looking at man as just working by instinct -- everything stays alive by instinct, and instinct is obviously essential...with humans, we can apparently do something no other species can do, and that is think...

09:05  What men do oftimes gets laughed at...slipping on a banana peel...but I say they do not ridicule it.  It takes thinking...talking.  Ordinary people only....jeer at one another...on the basis of nonessentials:  thinking, and ergo, talking, that men only ridicule other men's thinking...

11:00  Are you sure that anything ever said deserves anything other than ridicule?

11:09  Whatever you first hear...whatever gets you going adequately along the lines of finally realizing what This is all about, the whole idea of trying to awaken...to begin with, you have to take something sincerely...I said the cardinal rule in rock climbing is do not let go of what you're holding onto until you're holding onto something else...but the paramount rule in wising up, climbing up the sheer wall of understanding, is just the damn opposite.

12:16  One of the ways of assisting yourself of turning loose of what you're holding onto now...is to ridicule what you're holding onto now.

13:41  When do you know what I mean when I say that there is something highly suspicious about passionate sounding voices...I hear me doing it standing here, constantly...I can tell myself I'm trying to help stir it up a little...

14:53  In one sense, it becomes more and more fun...It's not the same kind of excitement that it was when I was twenty years old, but then again, nothing is...

17:05  Very few people are fanatical because very few people are passionate about anything that's not essential...there's nobody out promoting or preaching the benefits of eating.  They're preaching the benefits of eating at Joe's Cafe...people only sell that which is nonessential...deriving from the mind...

19:39  There is something very deserving behind what I mean by "deserving of ridicule" that's even moreso when what's being said is moreso passionately...the more urgent sounds the talk...the more deserving it is to be ridiculed.  It may be one thing...to ridicule someone running for a local seat on the city council...but it's not in the same class...as an utterance by the pope.  That's deserving of greater, deeper, more vigorous ridicule.

20:59  Other than religion, what would be more deserving of ridicule?  I have one area in mind...Remember now, we're discounting the few times in one's daily life that what is said...has to do specifically and only...to some survival-related essential area...they always have to do with the physical world...with real things, things you can actually touch, things outside the mind. We're discounting those few things because that is, I still propose, the initial or the basic purpose of the mind part of the brain -- is to assist the rest of the body...in survival. To be able to think, to be able to remember so that we're not relying upon automatic instinct...we can store memory abstractly.  We can change our behavior based upon past experience, or even based upon what we have heard from other people...

24:35  All of that held in abeyance...everything else a human has ever thought and said, anything that a human can say and will say deserves to be ridiculed...

26:19  You move from one area of ridiculousness to a new one...

27:38  There is no such thing...nothing even resembling being deluded...outside that one small area in our brain where thought takes place...

33:09  When I first started this and was a little more aggressive...I'd say, "You've got to come to lectures...I'd pick out a 'nerd'...that prototype...'but you're going to have to go out and get a job as a mud boy..." [or]"Go ask for Ed [at Ed's Gym] and tell him that you want to take up body building"...I had people that never came back...

37:37  People don't really change...taking into account aging...and if you're timid...that'll never change...you cannot change what you are temperamentally;  you cannot change your nature...but you have got to have...changed your behavior, that is, struggled against what you are to ever get anything out of This.  Because, for one thing, what all of us are, is dumb...while believing otherwise, which is why everything that you've ever said or thought deserves ridicule;  not from me, from you.

39:00  It deserves you finding out what I mean;  it deserves you looking into it...that's one of the things I think about when I hear me being so passionate...

39:35  How about Lao, the Tao Te Ching?  It doesn't come any better than that, as far as I'm concerned.  It deserves to be ridiculed..."the Way that can be said and described is not the real Way."  That brought me to my knees;  that helped me...more, I think, than anything I ever read or heard for years and years and years and yet it deserves to be mocked...after you're once impressed by it.

40:20 Let me try another approach...if you believe anything is true...something that you hold dear...an idea, a view...you are harboring an absolute lie -- if you don't realize that it deserves to be ridiculed...

43:13  I was sitting there at the typewriter in the act of writing...and it suddenly hit me that everything ever said deserves to be ridiculed. And believe me, I did not look down...at what I had in my typwriter and think, "Well, except this."

43:59  Assume I took that one idea and I held it in my head.  It was filed away that "Anything ever said deserves to be ridiculed."...I would constantly remind mysef of it (or be reminded of it by myself in some strange way)...I would be having some important thought and I would simultaneously realize, "Well, that deserves to be ridiculed."...I didn't fall into some sort of mental self headlock...there was no argument...no estrangement...

47:44  All ideas -- the sub-topic if you will recall from my readings fifty minutes ago -- all ideas deserve to be insulted...a variation:  any idea that can be insulted should be insulted...if someone can say something about your idea [any that you still hold onto] and it offends your idea...check it out.  Offend it.

51:14  This is not the point of the night, but I can't resist putting it to you this way.  One of the purposes of trying to take to your own heart that I mean something quite potentially useful in pondering...the idea [of ridicule]...is to realize that there is no such thing as an important thought.

53:00  Anything any human says if it's not about food, sex or somewhere to sleep cheap for the night -- it is not important.  It has no meaning whatsoever other than the meaning the mind gives to it...It's what being asleep is.

55:30  You have never had, nor has anyone, an important, a meaningful thought.  But since This Thing, since doing This is entirely in thinking, in a sense, it is moreso...than religion.

56:10  It is singular.  There is nothing else exactly like This...some religion...some philosophical activity can sound like it...but if you are what I call a mystic, then This is singular.  And I say that on the basis that This in a singular way has to do, as much as possible, entirely with thinking...the whole struggle for it happens entirely in the cerebral cortex.

57:14  If that be true, which it is, then how do you like considering the fact that there is no such thing -- never has been...and never will be -- as a meaningful thought?...And I'm talking to us, the few people like us on the planet...the whole thing takes place in the world of thought and I say to you that there is no such thing as a meaningful thought...that there is no thought that has any significance whatsoever.

58:00  And see, if you've got any mental reaction to that, you're proof positive...

58:30  Ridicule is not the last thing.  But it is the proper reaction to anything going on in the mind.  It is the proper reaction to anything that any human has ever said -- if you find what I mean in yourself.

59:30  The more impressive it sounds the more it deserves to be ridiculed...you're not ridiculing it, you're thinking about it!  "Well, let's see..."

01:00:14  Most people spend their life, most of their life, thinking about doing...they're thinking about physically doing things;  that's what they daydream about.  Mystics spend most of their time thinking about thinking...as opposed to doing...but there's a third group:  those who get beyond being mere mystics.  They think about "How much time I wasted thinking."

A statement so obviously deserving of ridicule I will stop there.