Audio = from video- only have part 1 - needs second half - or replace with Cassette. 

Audio Download = DOWNLOAD Jan Cox Talk 0222 from Cassette
AKS/News Items = none
Summary = See  Below
Diagrams = #93, #94 
Transcript = See Below

Summary by TK

Jan Cox Talk  0222  - Aug 21, 1986   -  runtime 1:48

More on the 'bell curve' --Life's raising and expanding of the mainstream to homogenize and include the peripheries. The Few need to recognize and locate their extremes and bring them into the mainstream ...then find/develop new ones. Example of Red Circuit exercise and extraordinary efforts by Yellow Circuit. Wars as homogenizing activity—the conquered are brought into the mainstream. The same exists at the individual level in attempts at self improvement. The Few need to have a daily awareness of effort at some activity whether Red Circuit or Yellow Circuit --conscious effort.]
  [Attacks on authority/governing bodies (gov't, family and religions) --all "bureaucracy" --from letters to editor to street corner, soapbox preachers, is the continual crying out against inefficiency of governing bodies, the holding up of examples and asking "why?". But for inefficiency to be extant requires at least a minimal degree of freedom. Perfect efficiency = slavery = no conflict. It is not recognized that the hue and cry for satisfaction/efficiency is really a call to sacrifice freedom. The Few attempt to live more efficiently; to have no choice BY their own choice. Abandonment of all apparent freedom = absolute freedom: to be used with maximal efficiency by Life; to become a "slave without a master".]
  [The 3 forces. D resides primarily in the "world of ghettos"--the seeming underdeveloped, primitive--i.e.,the periphery of the 'bell curve'. The Few need to upgrade their "internal ghettos", their "western time zones", and homogenize them, bring them into the mainstream; homogenize. Consider: wherever you live now is destined to become a ghetto. You've got to keep pressing into new time zones. The ghetto is continually, newly revealed as such --"antiques"recognized as junk, "pets" as rats. ]
  ["Grow or die" is true of  This thing too. If its not expanding Life is not using it anymore --it's not necessary anymore. The verbal efficiency thru man for This thing: Christianity's slogan/masterstroke "Jesus Saves" vs.the apparent numbing complexity of This thing. Note that This thing is not simple--but note also the complexity of ultimate simplicity. What can be done to streamline the knowledge of This thing for more efficient distribution along the lines of "Jesus saves"?]
  [1:39 - TASK: New "bombs away": Static/interference is to morbidly fascinating radio show, as _____ is to ordinary Yellow Circuit mentation. ]
  [TASK: write a poem in your head for 2 weeks, 3 x day: AM, noon, PM.

  [ATL Group sings.

Transcript

EFFORT, EFFICIENCY, AND FREEDOM

Document:  222,  August 21, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986              

     I refer you to my previous discussion of Life's bell curve.  Life continues with another, smaller bell curve at the crest of the larger one.  The smaller bell curve, at the crest, is like the pressure point at which Life is expanding.

     And connected with that, here is something difficult to put into words:  everyone attempting This has to take their "extremes" and bring them into the mainstream.  This is the message, if you can hear it, of all organized religion, of all forms of Life's evolutionary process which find a voice.  The Few are the active participants in Life's increasing attempt to homogenize and increase its own evolution and understanding, and they must find their own extremes.

     If you had to describe your own extremes, you'd come up with such things as "I'm lazy," "I'm fearful," "I'm so greedy I'd steal gold teeth from a dead man, if a priest wasn't looking."  All of you have at least two good ones.  From some area of extremes of Life's bell curve, you would all have at least two extremes. You have traits which, you have no doubt, need correcting.  But hear this:  you have got to take your own extremes, bring them into the mainstream, and then develop new extremes.  This necessity, for the Few, of developing new extremes, is missing from all the teachings that filter down to the many.  To the many, it doesn't make sense and appears to be self-defeating.  But either you create new extremes for yourself or you might as well be converted to a new religion -- I guess we'd have to call it Blandism.   Verbally, the intent of all religions is to clean up your extremes and make of you "a diamond from an old chunk of coal." But that is a mainstream message from Life to Man.  I suggest that if, indeed, you were able to conform completely to the tenets of any current religion, you'd be "the death of the party."  You would have no competition for being boring.  (It's not just funny.  There is real validity to that.)  Again:  it is not sufficient to simply clean up your extremes and bring them into the mainstream.  You must then develop new extremes.

     Consider the process occurring with the extremes of Life itself.  Throughout history, Life keeps taking the human molecules known as (for instance) Jews, Christians, and Moslems, and puts them together in a closet to see what happens.  More or less what happens, of course, is that they kill each other.  When you open the door there are quite a number of dead bodies, as well as live ones screaming that the gods will punish them for killing.  (Not withstanding that the so-called gods are the ones who threw them in the closet to begin with.)

     No one can see what war is.  But notice this:  every time war does happen, two diverse groups get thrown together.  They kill a lot of people on each side, and what happens when it's over?  A big group of them intermarry.  The result is that you don't just have Kingdom X and Kingdom Y.  As each fight ends the X people become more "Y-ish" and the Y people become more "X-ish."  It is right there for anyone to see. But, of course, nobody can.

     In order to develop your own new extremes, there is an extraordinary effort required.  The term "superhuman" has been trampled by the ordinary to the point that it now connotes an effort on the order of praying 25 hours a day, or fasting for seven years nonstop.  Superhuman effort, actually, is closer to the effort required to do This.  For example, perhaps you swim for exercise.  Let's say you can do a mile in a certain consistent length of time.  It takes a certain effort to do it and you feel good and tired when you finish.  What you should do at this point is to increase your effort.  You can change the kind of energy expended by going about it harder.  Try and swim faster.  You find that you don't get more tired; you get less tired.  But you have to increase the effort in a specific way:  beyond the habitual.

     To apply this to the higher circuits, consider pursuing the study of something you abhor.  Art fits the bill for some of you; for others it could be mathematics.  The special effort is to begin studying math on the basis that you will become proficient enough to make it through one of the college level aptitude tests, like GRE or LSAT.  Expend the effort to be able to go through the math section and understand it; perhaps even go beyond that.  It might take two years, or it might take two months, once you get past your genetic resistance.  That sort of effort is closer to a profitable, extraordinary effort than attempting to pray 25 hours a day.  The new extremes have to be new extremes for you.

     Now, I could dictate new extremes.  To some of you, it was quite extreme when I said that to be personally and consistently involved in This, you must get at least 45 minutes of exercise a day.  Giving up alcohol and drugs, and getting exercise, are not going to create some extraordinary moment of epiphany, but those activities do set up a kind of necessary background.  Drinking and taking drugs take one cost out of the blood and another cost out of the nervous system.  Just look at anyone habitually involved with those materials.  It takes a toll on the nervous system, and eventually it takes a permanent toll.

     It's kindergarten time when I insist you have to exercise regularly and enough so that it requires effort.  Forget about having a mystical experience as you fly down the street in your running shoes and shorts.  You are just creating the proper minimal background.  You should be constantly pushing it though.

     There should be effort on a daily basis, whether it be directed at your Red Circuit activities or those on a higher level.  There should be a daily awareness of the effort that your personal endeavor takes.  With the right people, it gets past the point very quickly that the chosen activity is a burden.  It should not be a source of worry.  And you have to keep pushing the boundaries of the path you have taken.  For most of you, that effort has nothing to do with your phoney-baloney job or with having to pay the rent.  Forget about that stuff.  That's just what your forefathers and foremothers got for messing with the gods.  That is not special effort; it is an extreme of being alive.  (If you can find a way out of that, I'm all for it, but extraordinary effort concerns something you personally have initiated.)

     Whatever you do, it can't be a burden.  It can't be a dark voice saying, "Oh no, later I have to..." Whatever you do, it has to be extraordinary:  something you have specifically started to develop as your extreme.  Without that, even in This you tread water.  You will get to a certain point and stay there.  You will begin to have "the bland face" at times.  You then are back taking a nap with the alarm clock hidden in your underwear.

     If you do make daily superhuman effort -- you deserve a day off.  That is one thing I like about religions.  If you are out swimming two or three times a day, or are up to your ears in differential equations, take Sunday off.  In case I never made that clear.  All the old spiritual heroes did, I assure you.  You take that day off.

     I will now apparently move to something different.  Magazines, newspapers, media commentary and barroom conversation are replete with complaints about the bureaucracy of government.  These complaints and satires have been going on for a very long time.  The media have always been full of stories of wasted money:  an agency is established to help some group of people, and everybody's brother-in-law winds up on the payroll -- the agency never having helped the original group.  Then the newspaper opinion pages become filled with outraged citizens denouncing this foolishness and deceit. "Every time you have to deal with the government, even in the smallest way, you feel you are drowning in inefficiency."

     State government is not the only governing body subject to this complaint.  Without complaints about family, we wouldn't have psychiatry or psychology.  Without complaints about our neighbor's behavior, we wouldn't have religion.  There is a feeling wired into everyone that things are not working at the height of efficiency; that governing bodies generally are inefficient.  What is the basis of all this inefficiency?  No system seems to do what it proclaims it was set up to do. 

     A smoothly functioning, efficient governing body would require one thing no one can see or take into account.  If this efficiency were to happen, it would require a minimal degree of apparent freedom. (Everything which you imagine would be good and positive, I am lumping under the word "efficient".)  The more you had that efficiency, the more you would also give up, in the widest sense of the word, apparent freedom.  Ordinary consciousness cannot see that.

     Take away freedom and you get efficiency.  Take away all freedom and you get efficiency that is unquestioned.  Then a system will do exactly what it says it will do, and it will do it very efficiently.

     I assume that even if you are new to This, you understand I am not talking about religion, politics, and the family.  I am talking about you.  Can you see any connection between this construct and my earlier one about continually creating new extremes?  When you bring in your extremes to the point that they become the "mainstream you," they are no longer extremes.  You will understand it when it happens.  It's as though a bad habit has gone away, and you don't really think about it until someone points it out to you.  Again, can you see any connection between that and the relationship between efficiency and freedom?

     Let's go back to religion as an example.  Your first thought of religion, once you figured out why your family was dragging you to church, was:  "Somebody knows the answer."  You knew that the parental governing body was inefficient because otherwise they wouldn't blame you for stuff your brothers and sisters did -- they'd know you were telling the truth.  Then you saw religion and you figured, "That guy standing up there knows what's going on."  Until, of course, you tried to go around and talk to him after the service.  Then you (and many other people actually) think, "I hope there are gods, because this clown doesn't know anything."  Until that point you had been willing to pay the price of apparent freedom for the satisfaction of knowing that someone knew the score.

     In essence, the church says:  "Here is efficiency.  What could be more efficient than the gods themselves?  These old gods, outside it all, made everything and know everything.  And this is their organization, here in this life."  Religion tells you exactly what to do.  Nobody can do it, though; the efficiency never comes to pass.  But notice what people are prepared to pay.  The way things are ordinarily structured, they are prepared to give up freedom almost completely.  Humanity is wired up and prepared to apparently give up all apparent freedom in return for apparent efficiency.  It just has not reached that point with the many.

     People attempting to do This are also attempting to live more efficiently.  They are attempting to be used more efficiently by Life.  What you are prepared to do, without having any notion of it, is to give up freedom.

     Try to Neuralize that a little further.  What would be the ultimate freedom?  The ultimate freedom would be to have no choice.  It would have to be no choice by your own choice.  By this, I don't refer to ordinary religious conversion wherein a person becomes an unconditional follower of religion X.  It might appear that such a one has given up all apparent freedom, because religion X is complex enough (they all are) to take care of your life from the time you wake up in the morning until the time you go to bed.  That apparently would be the ultimate freedom:  if you were actually doing what Allah (or whoever) wanted, day and night.  "Check with the Holy Book; whatever it says, you do."  And some people attempt to do that. People will do just as Life has them do, but those who become involved with This Thing quite specifically find the by the book approach unsatisfying.  Something would appear to be missing from the "slave of god" scenario.

     Back to the ultimate freedom which is This.  The question might arise:  "What am I a slave to?  Who am I answering to?"  That is the point at which verbal description breaks down, because it is almost as though you are a slave with no master.  That apparently there is no master; no governing body.  I might add that I have always attempted to short circuit any perception that I am an ordinary form of governing body -- that I am your father or some kind of priest.  I have always tried to shock the newly arrived nervous systems into realizing that I am not what they expected, and This Thing is not what people expect.  This Thing is not what you dream of.  Anything you can dream of is zucchini.  It might be zucchini mixed with corn, but it is still zucchini.

     (The most efficient thing I've found to do for these people, firmly entrenched in their zucchini dreams, is to come out right away and drop kick a zucchini.  Then we take a short break while our zucchini lovers leave.  Then I tell the corn lovers to leave, because it is only a matter of time.)

     How can you be a slave to something if there is no master?  How can you be a captive of something if there is no captor?  How can you have given up freedom to something which does not seem to be devouring your freedom?  And you think Life is not interesting?

     Another apparent change of subject:  consider again the Three Forces (C, D, and E) which are always in operation.  Within this normally unrecognized framework, there always seems to be a D for every C. Can you take a quantum glimpse and see that apparently D resides mainly in the world's ghettos?  D seems the most active in undeveloped neighborhoods, underdeveloped areas, and ancient time zones.  A murder will make front page news in a high class resort area, but in the ghetto it may not even make the paper.  (Please keep track of my use of "seem" and "appear."  Surely you know I am not speaking of neighborhoods and ghettos.  I am speaking of something else.)

     You have to be able to move your consciousness into a multi-level, multidimensional universe to understand that different time zones exist simultaneously with other time zones, both in humanity and in you.  You should see that an elite, plush resort can exist simultaneously, in the same space and time, with one of the world's great undeveloped ghettos.  It exists that way.  As soon as you pass the city limit sign for that plush resort, if you look on the other side it says "ghetto."  It's in layers.  It's as if you have alternating ghetto and oasis of paradise.

     It would appear though, that most dastardly and harmful activities happen in the world's ghettos.  How many murders happen in elite seaside resorts?  Once every 20 years maybe, but it takes them 19 years of talking about it before they can bear to have another one.  But in the world's ghettos, you can't even begin to keep track.  It is not coincidental that what appears to be D seems to be so deeply rooted in underdeveloped neighborhoods.  Do you see any connection between that and the extremes of the bell curve?  The concern of the Few should not be about getting into a dangerous neighborhood, but about the dangerous neighborhood getting into you.  Everyone is wired up to carry around a ghetto.  There is an undeveloped neighborhood in you that only you will venture into.

     Another thing:  the ghettos of the world, and the ghettos within people, can be seen as a "western time zone."  That is, a time zone right behind you.  When you step into a ghetto, you are stepping into the three-dimensional past.

     In a quite real sense, whatever ordinary consciousness calls "evil" is simply a time zone west of the one which makes the judgement.  I keep pointing out to you that you could not exist, and Life could not go on, without what human consciousness calls "evil and bad."  In the ghetto it is not "evil and bad."  Those living in the ghetto do not see mugging as bad.  The attitude in the ghetto is, "If I don't hit someone and rob them of their money, I don't eat.  I need to do that to stay alive."

     In a sense, what Life is trying to do is to pull the extremes of its bell curve into the heart of its bell curve. To take the old time zones and pull them together into the present time zone.  It has been trying to do that as far back as the Yellow Circuit can remember.  It is a form of attempted homogenization.

     Where you are now living will eventually become a ghetto.  You grew up there and are used to that environment, but after a certain serious time in my "finishing school," you will begin to look around and see that all of that antique furniture is junk.  All those pets are rats and roaches, and the old homestead is indeed a ghetto.  When you see this, you realize you have to enter another time zone.  And you cannot rest there long; you have to keep moving into new time zones.  You will see that you are constantly finding yourself with a newly revealed sense of ghetto.

     You know it's time to move when you start hearing smug voices:  "There's been a lot of progress here -- I'm not nearly as prejudiced, fearful and prone to anger as I was."  Not to give you the blues, but for a certain period of time you have to see that those words are not true.  You simply shifted over from one ghetto to another.  You have simply realized that what you formerly thought was acceptable action, feeling or thought might as well have been labeled "D" because it was destructive from the view you have now.

     This is all a continual, positive expansion of Life's own life.  This Thing is bound by the same absolute laws and demands that bind everything else in Life's body (more or less).  One of those laws is that atrophy will take over.  Things usually become stagnant.  Ultimately it becomes a case of "grow or die." You have to keep expanding a little.  If anything is not expanding, then Life is no longer using it.  At that point, it is not necessary and it just goes away.

     Another something.  Surprisingly enough, what probably is the most efficient verbal thing Life has ever said through Man came out through religion.  As much as I pick on religion, I must compliment Life (if it needs any compliment).  Because in the area of so-called Christianity, it created a master stroke.  All religions have lengthy written works describing themselves, but you get to a certain point in Christianity and voila, it's down to two words.  (Coincidentally, Christianity is the world's religion.  They are number one; they have next to no competition.)  Two words:  "Jesus Saves."  The hottest ad agency on the planet should eat its heart out.  It's the height of efficiency -- two words.  All you have to do is believe that "Jesus Saves," and that's it.

     There is, built into everyone, the genetic desire for a simple, efficient way to satisfy this itch of being alive.  It is as much in your genes as DNA itself.  And the clarion cry which attracts the most attention in the mainstream comes down to that which is most simplistic on the surface.  "Jesus Saves" is the beginning and end of the subject.  There are people around who will say, "Yes, that's true.  I was a worthless drunk, but when I realized that Jesus saves, I became a new person."  And it is based on one thing:  "Jesus Saves."

     Now, what can be done with this information?  Where can you go with it?  Don't try to start a new religion...you've already lost part of your audience as soon as you say, "We've got the New Religion, and it can be summed up in three -- count 'em -- just three words."  A large number of people would go, "Hey, give me a break."  And they would leave, because they already have "Jesus Saves."  The need for greater efficiency equals growth.  And the greater efficiency comes about at the expense of apparent freedom. And the cost -- the explanation -- is down to two words.

     So what does Life do with such as This Thing?  When I have in no way shown any inclination to come up with a "Jesus Saves"?  How coincidental is it that a religion which can be made into a governing body, and can be summed up in two words, seems to have over half the world's people following it?  Then you could ask, "How did you get involved with This?  Where do you fit?  Where does This fit?"

     It is fully as complex as many of you see it now.  But then you see that everything is all connected, but connected in such an astounding way that there is really nothing to say.  You almost forget about it.  It has then become the beginning of a new ghetto, but at the time you see it, it is astounding.

     And there you are, a receptionist on a beet farm, and you see it and realize, "This is amazing."  It's another piece of garbage that you were carrying around just disappeared, and there is really no reason why.  You have less options left to be dumb.  You have less options left to be an unthinking part of Life's nervous system.