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Transcript

THE DAMPENER

Document:  50,  December 2, 1982
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1982           

     There is a certain fear that affects many of you -- a fear of losing control or one of, "I'm about to explode."  You may have been sitting around, walking the streets, or riding a bus, and suddenly you got flashes of, "I'm surrounded by machines -- people out there don't know what they are doing."

     This fear is not unexpected, some form of it happens to almost everyone properly involved with This.  But Life is speeding up and what used to happen over an extended period of time is now occurring much more rapidly.  What you're involved with here is extraordinary.   You're attempting to change the nervous system itself -- everything that seems to be "I" -- but not in some strange, mystical way.  This is not the work of dark forces, nor is it the work of the gods; it is a part of the natural growth of Life itself on this planet.  The attempt at such growth has always  occurred, no matter what it was called and no matter what guise it was presented under historically.  Those responsible were expanding a natural part of Life, but they were doing it on an individual basis.  In a sense this struggle is unnecessary, but a few people have no choice.  Concerning this feeling of great fright that some of you are experiencing, you have to watch to see that you're not lapsing  back into some holdover pattern or dream that you had before you met me. You cannot encourage some kind of weirdness and go lock yourself in the house and believe, "I'm about to explode.  I'll stay here, and I'll read some more weird things, and I'll look out on the street and try to see that everybody is just a moving machine."  My descriptions have been fair, but you cannot become locked into Considering only what seems to be the words and descriptions which you have picked up from me. You cannot become locked into the maps that I have drawn, and in some way feel that you  are drifting absolutely apart from Life, surrounded by a sea of absolute robots.  That's not it.

     There is a predictable, mechanical movement to Life.  By activating the nervous system above the level that humanity is operating at this given time, you are not as mechanical as they are, and you see the situation for what it is.  You have not become divorced from Life, encountering only unfeeling, unthinking, dumb robots.  You are still a part of Life.  You are beginning to see that Life is not as everyone has described it.  Life is not what the information available through ordinary consciousness says it is.  Life is not as it says it is now.  It was not as it was said to have been in the time of the classic religious teachers. Their enlightenment or my term of vertical expansion of the nervous system is Seeing that things are a certain way, but not in the sense of great spirits or that, "I'm suddenly seeing that I'm surrounded by absolute, walking robots that don't feel anything, and I've stepped into the middle of some kind of science fiction movie."

     Right now you are relying, to a large extent, on the kind of maps I'm drawing, but I've always pointed out to you that they're maps.  To operate above the Line, you do not walk around thinking, "Well, this person is merely a machine."  They are walking machines, but by being above Line-level consciousness and Seeing what that means, you have not in some way been freed from living here.  You now think you have what you consider to be problems, and you say that Life cannot be explained, and there is no accounting for why people seem to be sometimes good and sometimes evil.  There is a Seeing and explaining all that, and you are in no way to encourage these feelings of, "I almost feel like I'm going out of control" or, "I'm becoming afraid."  It simply happens at its own speed and it's proper.  I say "proper" in that I don't know how to stop it, because you are undergoing a chemical change.  To attempt This, you are undergoing a certain change in your electrical system itself, but it does not operate on the basis of some feeling of helplessness.  You're not going to be passively pulled into it.

     Mental hospitals and the ordinary world are full of people who have not necessarily ever been involved with anything that called itself mystical, but who have, from an ordinary viewpoint, "great personality problems".  Instead of undergoing psychiatric treatment or continuing their involvement with drugs, they may end up with some preacher somewhere, or now, some swami or some guru who is trying to teach something.  From an ordinary viewpoint, there are many psychiatrists and minor schools of psychiatric thought around that are attempting what seems to be rather harmless, external activities such as meditation.  People are joining religious groups that have all sorts of rules and regulations.  They try to create a communal atmosphere with the philosophy that, "It's us against the world."  A fairly accepted psychiatric attitude now is that there are many people on this planet for whom even exposure to such groups seems to encourage and intensify their psychosis.

     Now all of you, of course, are beginning to see and understand that that's just, "Flowers bloom, flowers die, and trucks have wrecks."  It's just the nature of the way things are, but you have to get closer to the reality of this struggle.  This, in a sense, is "insane", but you are not doing anything profitable when you begin to See something that tastes new and you allow it to lapse into, "My mind is on a merry-go-round, and I'm beginning to feel dizzy."  Just stop it.  Don't just let it run its course, and don't go away and sit down and drink a whole lot of coffee and smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and decide a shot of alcohol was justified.  Just stop it.  Go do something quite ordinary.  Go throw yourself back into the hands of the ordinary world.  Go out to a restaurant and talk to the most common person you can find.  Stop a bum lying in the street and ask him, "How're things going?"  Some of you have mentioned physical aspects; I am aware of all of this, but if you find something that seems to be physical, like your heart's pounding or you feel dizzy -- just stop it.  Do not look at your upper Circuit and think, "Can I check with myself?  Is this driving me crazy?  Why is my heart pounding?"  Just stop it.  Where the sensation seems to strike people immediately is in the upper Circuits; "My mind is beginning to wander, and it's not going to come back." Just stop all of that; it's of no profit.

     There is an absolute shock that is going into all the Circuits.  The lower Circuits, especially the Red one, work on the basis that you've got to have a certain kind of minimal, basic, physical sanity.  You can't be drinking alcohol.  You've got no business smoking three packs of cigarettes a day or drinking twenty cups of coffee a day.  You've got no business not getting enough sleep.  You've got no business lying around and not feeding the body exercise, but it's nothing all that complicated and nothing that's mystical. My rules are nothing but absolute, minimal encouragement of a certain kind of physical sanity.

     Many of you were convinced that the basis of This Activity would involve the emotions, that surely This would be involved with trying to save humanity.  I pointed out, whether or not you could hear it in the beginning, that humanity does not need saving.  There is nothing to save.  If you're going to pursue This, what you've got to do in the beginning is stop the unprofitable handling of emotional currency that continually misfeeds the Circuits.  You've got to stop dealing with these kinds of negative emotions, and some of you should begin to see this beyond words now.  I've pointed out numerous examples of these kinds of negative daydreams.  Maybe you're standing at a checkout counter and you look down at the headline that reads, "Fourteen Families Killed in Apartment Building Fire."  You immediately groan, "Ohhh."  Then you want to go talk about it, but you can't do that.  The reason you can't is not simply some traditional moral one, but has to do with the absolute, physical, chemical, electrical effect of such behavior on the nervous system.  All these Circuits have a kind of memory.  To read about people dying, or for you to talk about how you nearly died, or for you to continue to recount all of your hardships, whether you do it verbally outloud or just to yourself, creates a kind of very low level but ordinary excitement.  You let it run through the Circuits, you handle it, and you take it as being you; but it is not real excitement.  It is merely a form of excitement that is acceptable among humanity, excitement that creates the continual feeling that there is a continuity along the horizontal line of Life, that, "Yes indeed, we all have problems."

     When it gets to another Circuit there is no way to rationalize this.  There is no way I could tell humanity they should not indulge in what seems to be any kind of negative daydreams -- that is no salvation for humanity.  Ordinary people cannot even hear that.  If I could somehow trick humanity and make them hear that, I'd blow everything up.  But for the Few attempting to expand above the Line, you have got to see that that kind of apparent emotion is always tied either to negative memories or to negative expectations which are just an extension of your negative memories -- the expectation that things are going to get worse.  "What if my husband leaves me?"  "What if I lose my job?"  "What if I find out that I'm about to die?" Then, when you first become involved with This you are struck by the sensation, "I'm about to lose my mind. I'm beginning to see things, by god, just as you said.  I turned around and the whole subway was full of machines that looked like people."

     That's true, but they're humans, and you cannot sit there and imagine that the person next to you is beginning to look like a science fiction character, that in some way his skin looks metallic and his eyes are flashing.  Just take your little face and go slap-slap and say, "I am crazier than I thought."  They are still human beings.  A real extension above the Line is not what ordinary people believe to be mystical states wherein you hear voices and see spirits or things that are not there.  History is full of pseudo-groups whose people say, "I'm seeing your aura, and I can look at you and tell that your great grandfather was a one-legged gypsy and that you probably are going to have liver problems before you die."  That is not mysticism.

     The reality of This is simply to See what is to be seen.  People are absolute, walking nervous systems.  They are absolute machines (and from the Line down you are a machine), but they are still human.  To begin to Expand above Line level, you See what is going on outside of the programming that is in every one of the Circuits, and it is absolutely astounding.

     The kind of fear and the kind of excitement that some of you are beginning to suspect is all true -- it would just absolutely blow your face away.  I don't even like to talk about it to any great degree because I can say something like that and it tells you nothing.  I can say that it's the ultimate excitement, and a part of you goes, "Oh boy," but that's still nothing.  Once you See it, it is absolutely astounding, and then in a few minutes (although not literally minutes) it's no longer astounding.  It's, "Here it has always been and nobody sees it.  It's so obvious and yet, I would never have seen it."  But it's not that you see people as machines or science fiction characters.  You now see them for what they are, and my maps are no longer of any value.  It's not a matter that you now see people as walking nervous systems with little toupees and glasses on.  You first understand the purpose of the maps, then you understand that the maps are just, and then you understand that the maps are no longer necessary.  No words are necessary.  There's no way to describe what you now See.

     This Activity does not entail some period of suffering, with feelings that have been translated down in your own Circuits as, "This is some sort of test" or "The gods put us all through this," and you get edgy. You indeed have moments that literally feel like, "I'm going to go crazy," but you don't go crazy, and you cannot encourage this feeling.  When you feel as if, "Right now, this is about to get out of control," stop it. It will stop itself, but I'm telling you now that if it starts, just stop it.  Go take a cold shower, go run, go stand on your head, go stand on your feet.  Go talk to somebody ordinary.  Go try to find somebody here in the group.  There is no way that you can profitably encourage or stay in what seems to be a mood wherein you feel as though you believe you're going crazy.  Does that sound encouraging enough?

     You have images from the past that you've picked up in Life, images from pictures, photographs, movies of some guru, and from your imagination in reading mystical literature.  If the general consciousness of humanity were to be grabbed and squeezed, a fair description among even those who think they're interested in mysticism would be that, "Those ancient teachers, even though I didn't meet them, obviously had to be very weird."  That's true, but not in any way that you can see.  Of course, historically they can be made weird, such as people now accepting the story that a certain teacher, if indeed he lived, was not even a man, but rather was a piece of the gods who dropped in for a visit.

     I can assure you that once you can See, you still have got to live.  You still have got to operate.  You've got to become, if you understood what I mean, a supporter of the mechanical world, because you understand there is nothing to attack.  Nothing is wrong.  You know that:  "If I can help somebody that falls down, I'll help him.  If I see somebody hungry and I've got food, I'll give it to him, but I'm not here to help people.  People are not looking for an answer.  People are not looking for change.  I will not step on people, and I will not get in their way.  I will not support or encourage anybody to take a nap, and I'm not going to harm them."

     The way Life runs in general is such that about all that's required is a good, hearty smile and, "Press on.  I'm all in favor of you.  Don't hurt yourself."  Yet you imagine all sorts of weirdness concerning your mystical heroes and what it would be like to operate above Line level.  You imagine that if you expanded the higher portions of your nervous system you would mumble and speak in arcane and unintelligible ways, and you would be holed up somewhere.  You imagine a guru living up on a mountain in a castle and that someone would have to interpret everything he would say, that he couldn't look after himself, and that he would trip and fall and slobber on himself and forget to eat.  There are certainly people like that, and there are people like that that pass for gurus.  There are people like that who can't even get a weekend pass out of the hospital.

     From a certain level, all of human behavior -- everything going on in the world that seems to be a product of human thought, feeling, and activity -- can be spotted in the six points where the circuits crosstalk.  Now, I could draw a line through those six points, a line that does not actually exist as a plane driven through the Circuits, but, for our purposes, divides them into the need for the Circuits to be excited and the concurrent need for them to be calmed.  You would then be faced with what I intend to hint at most strongly, that there are twelve different types of people.  This idea is reflected in the old stories of twelve disciples and in many other stories throughout history.  Some of you, at first, might have attempted to think that there are people driven by one primary Circuit, but there is no such thing as someone running off just one Circuit, whether it be the Red, the Blue, or the Yellow.

     Consider why there seems to be almost a limited number of types of people.  Why is it that almost all of you have had occasion to meet somebody and he or she is almost identical to somebody else you know?  Let's say you're walking down the street, and you're watching somebody walking along.  He's walking a certain way, and his head is held a certain way.  You don't even think about it in the ordinary sense.  You simply walk up and say, "Hi Fred!" and it's not Fred.  Consider that the six points where information is crossfed is the basis of what seems to be the individual types of people.  What originated in one circuit now bleeds into another and then is further cut into the need to be calmed and the need to be excited.  I'm suggesting to you that you have the basis from which to Consider why this number twelve reflects the apparent, specific notion of the number of kinds of people in the world.  If that is not enough encouragement, let me offer something else.  I have had occasion to refer to the bricklayers of the world, the "Alabama" in everyone, those who are apparently the walking guts of the world.  In general it would seem they are physically oriented men.  Anytime such a description is used and you are attempting to listen sincerely, the first thing that strikes you is, "Alright, I can understand that there are physical people in the world -- football players, ditch diggers."  Then I point out that just because somebody is more physically centered in Life does not mean that he is active, strong, and trim.  He can be a fat slob who hardly ever leaves the couch, and when he does, it's only to get another beer and to change the television channel.  Now consider that there are six places that continually are bleeding information mechanically. Then consider that that is out further into two, the two being the exciting and the calming system. 

     There is a dampener that is continually in operation in everyone.  It's in operation in all of humanity, but individually it manifests itself like the thin, internal membrane of an egg.  If you could break an eggshell carefully enough, it will all hold together by that internal membrane.  This dampening factor is like that membrane.  It moves.  It can give a little, it can contract a little, but it is the home of personality.  This dampening control field is the combination of how the wiring, the circuitry in you, has been activated and then held in check.  What appears to be your personality is resolved from it.  Consider your feeling of always looking for something new.  "What can we do?  What's a new show?  Where can we go tonight?"  That's not just within you.  Just look at life. Everything falls within a certain parameter, a certain boundary of being predictable.  If it gets too unpredictable, you can't stand it, the circuits will not take it.  If the source of the unexpectedness seems to be a human, they simply put that human away.  You can see these limits everywhere, in the news, on television, or you can go to a movie or go hear a band.  Someone says, "There's a movie I recommend without reservation.  In fact, I'll go back with you to see it again.  I can't even tell you what it was like, it was so unusual."  And it will not be so unusual, or it shouldn't be to most of you people by now.  I'm not making any would-be, artistic critique of movies, but in the ordinary world, once you begin to see it, that which is called "new, surprising, stimulating" is not, because it is a very small realm.

     There are no surprises.  The news is the same thing every day.  They change the names, or they say, "Here is a brand new movie" or, "Here is the hit t.v. show of the week" or, "Here is a brand new band that's taking music in a new direction."  Now if you're an ordinary person, you have to live within that context. There is the appearance of a small, continual range of new excitement.  "I did like that movie.  I've never seen a science fiction movie where they made up people from outer space to look that gruesome.  Ooh, I'd never seen anything like that."  However, you have seen something similar to what you've seen before, something familiar.

     If you and another person were watching a movie or listening to a band, the person next to you might find it exciting, whereas, on the contrary, it may be calming your circuitry, which would be explained normally as the fact that they liked it and you didn't.  So it is not that there is something -- a movie, a book, an idea -- that is exciting in itself.  Within the scheme of Life as it is now, that something may be serving the general purpose of what seems to be change, but it is always based upon the familiar.  The unexpected has to be tied, in the ordinary sense, to the familiar in the same way that a line simply separates two sides of a coin.  So once you do begin to See, in a sense there are no surprises.  Nothing is going to unexpectedly happen in life.  If we had a radio turned on there would not suddenly be a voice on the radio announcing, "Bombs will hit the following cities within two minutes...Baltimore, Los Angeles, Atlanta..."  It won't happen.  That's not the way things happen.  That would be too unexpected, and the unexpected does not happen, not in that sense.  The unexpected has to be tied to the familiar.  The situation would have to gradually work up to where everyone would be almost prepared for a bomb to drop on us, but it would not be with only a two minute warning.  That is totally, unacceptably, unexpected.  Even if such an announcement did come over the radio, everybody on the planet could say, "No, that's too surprising," and believe it or not, all the bombs would go away.

     There is much more to the division of this continuing dampener surrounding the circuitry itself.  It allows a continuing series of pulses by which the nervous system is being excited and then being calmed, and being excited and being calmed.  You continually are presented with what appears to be the slightly unexpected.  "What are the new fashions this year?" or, "Why don't we go to the Virgin Islands over the holidays?"  However, the experience also has to be tied to the familiar.  You will not go to the Virgin Islands and see people who look like outer space creatures.  You may say, "Let's go to Mexico.  I've never been there.  They speak a different language.  It'll be so unexpected, so exciting."  However, it will be exciting within very, very definite limits, or else you won't even perceive it.  You couldn't stand it.  If it is too exciting, too unexpected, the system will not accept it.  This has much more to do, as you surely suspect, than with books, movies, or trips to foreign countries.  It is all tied to you.

     Below the Line, you're locked within a dampening sac from which there is no escape.  If you were an ordinary person and if you could escape, all you'd become would be crazy from the ordinary viewpoint. You would not be able to function in the ordinary world.  You'd serve a purpose of course, that being that you'd take up one of the beds in the mental hospital.  But there is this continuing need for excitement that nobody can analyze until they begin to see it.  Ordinary people have no cause to analyze it.  "I want something new.  I want to be stimulated.  I want some excitement."  Nothing can help it, and they don't even see it.  The unspoken part is, "I want excitement, but -- within reason."  The new and exciting still has to be tied to the calming effect, to the familiar.  It cannot be so exciting that the normal pulsations, the normal actions of the dampener that seem to be your own personality, cannot come back to the calm mode, rest awhile, go back to the excited mode, then back to the calm mode, and so on.  

     Another definition of the reality behind This Thing is that of absolute, ultimate excitement.  Excitement at such a level to the system that there is no calming counterpart.  You have created it yourself.  The excitement is above the Line, and everything below the Line is the calming effect.  Several of you have pointed out you feel that you're about to experience some absolute, uncontrollable, falling down laughter, for example, while watching a funeral go by or listening to two people talking.  I know the feeling well, but do not fall on the floor and laugh.  It's almost as though a feeling is sneaking up on you that "I may get so excited that there's no turning back.  I don't know where I'll go."  Of course, you're right.  I told you where you will go:  above the Line, and then it's every man for himself.

     Someone asked once whether anything other than imaginary pain could be in the decisive circuit.  No. Now remember we're speaking in an artificial manner because it's not possible to separate one circuit, but if the extreme upper circuit could be separated, it would not feel pain.  However, now you have this situation:  as long as it's within the mechanical system, it is continually being crossfed information from circuits that can feel pain.  I could also drag your attention back to the question of fear that continually arises.  I know several of you found it intriguing when I pointed out that there is truly only one kind of fear. If you could artificially cut off and isolate the Red Circuitry, you would see that that is the only proper place for fear.  However, Man can no longer do that, and fear now feeds into the other circuits so that under ordinary conditions you can find no way out, and you feel, "I am afraid."  "What are you afraid of?"  "I don't know."  "I can't help you or give you any advice if you don't tell me what you're afraid of."  "I don't know.  If I go into a room full of people and I don't know them all well, I get afraid."  "What do you think will happen?"  "I'm not sure."  "Do you feel like people are going to attack you?"  "I don't know."  "Do you feel like they're going to ridicule you and laugh at you?"  "Yeah, that's possible."  "Do you feel that when you walk into the room a lot of people think, 'Why did he show up?' or when you leave the room do you feel that maybe they're all criticizing you?"  "Yeah, maybe that."  "What kind of fear is that?  How can you explain that?" The person can't.

     What you will discover yourself is that for someone attempting This, there is only one proper fear, and it comes from the Red Circuit.  Anything else is mishmash.  Anything else is imagination.  Anything else is a form of engagement, a form of sickness.  If we could isolate the Yellow Circuit (which we can't), in the same way that it can feel no pain, it has no pain.  It also has no fear.  There is nothing that it has to fear.  Of course now the Yellow Circuit can talk about, "I'm afraid of being sick, I'm afraid of dying."  What you should try to consider now is that the Yellow Circuit, which talks about what you're concerned about, what you're fearful of, or are hurting over, has no relationship to those things.  Those things have no relationship to the one circuit that is touching the Line of consciousness of humanity.  You begin to see what a beautiful arrangement it is, that everything is indeed upside down and backwards.

     Now let me point out something I've already mentioned.  You should really try to push yourself beyond the level of thinking of the Three Circuits in some kind of isolation.  Where they cross is where some dangerous information lies.  You should be able to see quite clearly, once I point it out, that the sense of impending doom is based upon the fact that each and every human being knows he's going to die. Despite all dreams of resurrection or reincarnation, everyone knows that every human that ever laid down and died never got back up!  Everybody knows that.  Everybody.  By now you have had your mother or father die or lost somebody on the horizontal blood level whom you felt as though you dearly loved.  If you haven't it will happen, because it's going to happen to you.  There is no escape from it.  The basis of this impending doom within each person is based upon one circuit knowing this, and were it not for that particular circuit, there would not be an impending sense of doom.  Of course, then you would not be human, but you would still die the same way that animals and insects die.  They do not have the particular circuitry for them to have that kind of memory.  There's no way animals and insects pass information along. They're still going to die.  They'll die at the same kind of rhythm that you will.  Can you get a glimpse again of the beautiful justice in the way the machinery and the circuitry are arranged?  The Thing that's in charge of dying can't remember it in the way the thing that feels impending doom can.  In a sense, they could not be further removed from each other.  One of them is in charge of dying, and the other one seems to be in charge of knowing about it and worrying about it.

     Some of you express what seems to you a kind of sadness.  From the way you're looking at things through the kind of maps I'm describing, it seems to be a kind of sadness, but it's not.  It is no more a part of the process of expanding the nervous system than is the kind of fear that, "I'm going crazy" or, "The whole world is a bunch of dumb machines."  I fully understand the basis of this feeling of sadness.  As sincere and real as the feeling may seem, Understanding has nothing to do with this feeling of ordinary sadness.  Try to hear what I said.  The feeling is not just something you made up, and it's not some form of private insanity that you've got.  You might describe it as, "Things just seem so sad."  The feeling is real enough, but I'm telling you it is no more real and no more important than your desire to hate people.  Just because something seems to be natural, just because something seems to be there, does not mean it's profitable.  The feeling is within all of you, along with your dreams of serving humanity, of walking with the gods and being the most decent person on earth.  By now you have got to have some kind of objective, periodic glimpse of the fact that inside you is Attila the Hun.  You're a mass murderer.  That's neither here nor there.  You have these feeling of sadness in an ordinary sense that, "I'm beginning to see that life is a bad joke" or, "People are machines."

     The words which run through your circuitry seem to go hand in hand with this kind of feeling of sadness, but just because it seems to be there doesn't mean that it's real from This viewpoint, or that it's profitable.  There is nothing to be sad over.  If you're confronted with a person who is lying hurt in the street or somebody who's hungry and you can feed him or you can help him, do it.  You run far afield to ever think that isn't proper.  For awhile it seemed as though I've had to attack certain parts of the circuitry and kick around some of your cherished dreams of what were good emotions, but you are absolutely off in a ditch somewhere if you think it is not your supreme obligation to help anybody who can actually be helped, not on the basis of "I am here to help you See," but to feed somebody hungry or to pick up somebody who fell down.  However, that has nothing to do with this kind of mechanical feeling of sadness. You're simply back to glancing at headlines.

     That feeling of sadness serves a purpose.  You people have got to start expanding the way you Neuralize things.  That sadness is not some delusion put upon humanity.  It serves a purpose in that it keeps things going, and it is necessary.  Everybody suffers from this to a certain degree, but there seems to be a large segment of humanity directly tied to negative imagination:  tied to the past.  If I allowed, many of you would complain that when you are with your parents or your grandparents all they want to do is talk about the past.  As soon as you get home for the holidays, your mother starts immediately saying, "Oh, sit down, I meant to call you.  You'll never guess who died," and she tells you the latest victim in the family who died.  Then she'll tell you, "Uncle Joe died, and his wife Mary is so upset that I don't think she can come to the funeral.  They may have to put her in the hospital."  While beating up the cake batter, she turns around and asks, "Does anybody want coffee?" and then she'll continue to talk about what horrible shape Mary is in.  Now family is a good example, since I've tried to make all of you see this kind of extraordinary connection you have with blood kin and how you have to give up any struggle with them. You think, "My own mother, my own father, and all they talk about is the past or death and destruction.  My mother gets through talking about who died in the family, and my father will say, "Are the communists still putting fluoride in the water where you live?"  He tells you that there's this great conspiracy that they're going to take over, and they're going to ruin us all.  He says, "We need to shoot everybody who doesn't look exactly like us."

     It is not some extreme weirdness or some stupidity on their part.  You cannot see the full picture which is as necessary as there being a transfer of oxygen.  It is serving a distinct purpose which will be quite well served, to say the very least, if you sit there, smile, and not listen to their talk, but try to see what it is.  Try to see for yourself that there is something in you that has been struggling with your parents for the last five days, ever since you decided, "Alright, I will go there for Thanksgiving."  You argue with your mother and father, and you should begin to see, "I argue with them almost every day, even though I'm living two thousand miles away from them.  Here I am continually arguing.  Even if I sit there quietly and say, 'Yes, Mom, yes, Mom,'  I'm still internally ranting and raving."  I am telling you that whenever you feel the least bit of criticism of them of whatever nature, it is undeserved.  There are no exceptions.  Maybe if a madman moved in next door and started killing the neighbors, I'd be all in favor of doing something about his behavior, but to hear about something going on and to immediately resist it, criticize it, and comment on it is not acceptable.  Life, in a sense without knowing any better, has given you lesson number two hundred seventy five, because nothing wrong is going on.  Your mother says, "Wait 'til I tell you who died.  Here, Let me take the cake out of the oven.  Do you remember Uncle Joe?" and you think, "This is not right.  You'll never understand.  You shouldn't talk like that.  I wish I could show you not to keep talking about death and people dying."  That's not really what they're talking about.  They're transferring energy.  They don't care that people die.  They don't really enjoy that people die, but it is necessary that they smile, whip up the cake batter, and say, "...and his wife, you remember Mary, well, she's about to go crazy.  Here, have some coffee, dear.  They may have to put her in the hospital."

     You do not see that everything is just right.  A quite necessary, specific transfer of a kind of energy is going on.  It is stability.  It's as though Life is closed in upon itself, and everything is in balance, continually shifting a little this way and that way.  Life itself operates within the dampening effect, and things move and shift.  They pulsate.  They get a little excited, and they get a little calm, but there is a continuity to it all.  I have absolutely told you in no uncertain terms that you must abandon all forms of apparent human aggression, hostility, and negative imagination.  Since there is no way for you to ease up to it, I just tell you in the beginning that you've just got to stop it.  Eventually you find out, though, that you can stop speaking with hostility.  You've got to find out that there's a kind of unprofitable transfer of energy that doesn't have anything to do with morality -- it has to do with literal, physical, chemical, and electrical changes in the system.  You cannot let the circuits continue to deal with that kind of memory, to deal with that kind of energy.

     Somebody once asked if it's possible that the decisive or even mid circuit, rather than the Primal circuit, could create what would amount to actual, physical manifestations of an illness, that is, if it could be isolated directly.  That is what I was referring to when I said there is a reality behind the idea of psychosomatic illness.  I've told all of you that you don't have a right to suffer, that in This you have got to abandon the right to suffer.  Then try to consider that there is a place within the circuitry that is in charge of being physically sick, because everyone does get sick.  There's no such thing as health.  That's one of the minor, foolish games that continues.  People are eating only certain kinds of foods or starving themselves or they're buying special equipment to manipulate their bodies.  These kinds of things have always been around.  They are attempting to do what is impossible.  They think, "I will help myself into a higher state of consciousness."  Such activities are a harmless hobby, and Life just readily agrees with them.  Life says, "No problem there.  Keep it up."  Of course, nothing's going to happen.  Those kinds of people are not going to live any longer.  They may indeed have fewer colds, and they may indeed say, "I feel much better since I quit drinking this" or "since I started doing this."  They may say such things and mean them, but they're not going to live any longer, and they're certainly not going to expand above the Line, because they're dealing with the circuits that can't expand vertically.

     Consider a circuit in charge of suffering, in charge of defending the body, keeping it alive.  When I say, "You have no right to suffer," the you I'm talking to is the you, that resides in a particular circuit, and it indeed has no right to suffer.  Its suffering is, in the objective sense, imaginary.  It's misquoting information.  It is information that's bleeding through the wires to another part so that you have this feeling similar to impending doom.  You think, "Things are terrible," and if you could isolate that circuit quickly and say, "Why are things terrible?" it would go, "What?  Did I just say that?"  When I say you've got no right to suffer, I'm talking to a particular you.  I'm talking to the you that's the only one of any consequence, assuming that we can get the rest of these circuits more or less in some kind of semblance of working order.  You're not going to vertically expand any of these circuits below the Line.  Nobody can.  But that's one of the great, continuing dreams out in the ordinary world.  That's the basis of almost all religions throughout the world.  They operate on the premise that, "We'll learn to do magic.  I'll be able to read minds.  I'll produce money, walk on the water, fly through the air.  People I don't like will go 'phft' and die."

     There are people who still believe that, and I don't mean just isolated people.  Some of you believe that.  Your circuitry believes, "That's what I'm after."  Of course you wouldn't say, "Do that to my enemies," but rather, "Make my enemies see the light."  They are just variations on tree god worship.  It hasn't changed a bit and is the same thing it's always been, the same thing it was ten thousand years ago. You've just changed the names of it so it seems to be more up-to-date.  So those "you's", if they indeed existed in the circuits in charge of it, do have a right to suffer in the same sense that they have a right to get sick.  Part of their job is to be sick and then to get well, to try to hold you together.  But when I say, "You've got no right to suffer if you're attempting This," I'm talking about a particular you, that is, a particular sense of "I" that lives in the circuit that has no right to suffer.  It is suffering by proxy.  It is suffering by accident.  It is suffering by worldwide accident.