Video = none
Audio = Stream or Download from black bar below

AKS/News Items = none
Summary = pending
Diagrams = See Below in transcript - #01 , #24
Transcript = See Below

Transcript

BECOMING PART OF LIFE'S PERMANENT MEMORY                 

Document:  61, March 10, 1983
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1983                       

     Everything you have always taken to be life and "you" is simply not what you think -- not what you presently perceive it to be.  When you begin to get glimpses above Line-level consciousness you See this and you simultaneously Understand that what I am about to describe is not to be taken in any kind of negative fashion.

     Having tasted freedom, you see that existence at Line level and below is like being in a swamp.  It is not that everyone is covered with mud and slime, and the whole world is running amok.  Rather, as reflected in Man, everything is unfinished and, under ordinary conditions, there can be no fulfillment.  There can be no satisfying knowledge because ordinary consciousness can never see more than two forces in action at once.  Your life seems to be one dilemma after another, with nothing ever completed.  It is exactly like living in the midst of a worldwide swamp and ordinary Man, from bricklayer to philosopher, can find no way out. From the Line down, everyone is looking through a kind of fog, feeling as if they are fighting an invisible foe made of super glue.  Everyone's voices say, "We should take this sticky little opponent and do so and so."  But by now, even if you have not yet glimpsed the Three Forces in action, you should have some understanding of the first two forces.  Anything that seems to be First force -- any decision, any intention, anything that is attempting to move -- for that to live more than an instant, it must have resistance.  From the Line down there is always resistance to any attempt to change.  But from the Line down is exactly where ordinary people believe that change can take place, shoulder to shoulder with the foot soldiers in the swamp.

     Let us look in a slightly different manner at ordinary attempts to change.  At Line level and below, the circuitry could be likened to an old time telephone switchboard. Everyone's board is equipped with a certain number of holes to plug wires into and in everyone, from the Line down, a wire is plugged into each and every hole.  There would be literally no way a wire could be disconnected from a hole and left hanging without doing actual physical damage.  All the holes have to be filled and no new holes can be created, hence, the only possible change available is to exchange the relative positions of wires in the holes.  The kind of change that an ordinary person conceives of amounts to no more than exchanging the wires going into two holes.  That is all that can occur.  The same circuits are still there and at best there has been a slight rerouting, but from the point of view of This Thing, such a change is irrelevant.  We are back to my story of the alcoholic who wrecks the car killing his wife and child, and who is seen the next day beating the drum for the Salvation Army.  They took the wire out of the hole where he was a drunk and routed it into the hole where he was a non-drunk, and some other wire was put into the hole where he was formerly a drunk.

     Now consider what happens when you suddenly stop using alcohol or caffeine.  You should by now have personal, literal experience that as far as the lower circuits are concerned, when you change one thing it affects other things that you may never have suspected.  None of the lower circuit changes which people contemplate are possible in the pristine fashion they envision.  Any change, if actualized, has unsuspected far reaching effects.  Can you see any connection between this and the continual opposition which always accompanies any idea of change?  Consider patterns of your own that you have tried to rearrange -- I have never come out and denounced people's efforts to change, but you should be able to see down through your own nervous system that, in a very real sense, nothing from the Line down can effectively undergo any real radical change.

     Turn your attention now to an expanded map of the two apparent flows in a person. (Beyond the various historical explanations ranging from demons possessing people to the recent idea of an unconscious aspect of the human psyche, there do seem to be two flows in operation.)  I pointed out something which I called the Primal Flow as opposed to the apparent flow of what seems to be yourself, a personal flow.  The flow that appears to be oneself has continual running daydreams and not one iota of energy ever seems to be available to act on them.  Once you catch sight of these daydreams from a certain perspective you should ask yourself the nonverbal question, "How have I abided these dreams?  How have I sat, stood, and lain down all my life with this going on, and I have never questioned the fact that I cannot pursue any of these dreams?"

     There is this flow which seems to be your individual self with all of its apparent hopes and desires and then there is this other nonverbal flow which seems to operate somewhere else.  This other flow, the one I have called the Primal Flow, has been called everything from "the gods" to "the unconscious."  It seems to be in continual conflict with the personal flow, and the net result of the two flows seems to be non-action. This process can be observed in everything from one's personal relationships to one's avocation.  But there is also the occasional possibility of particular interests and areas in you when the two flows are not in conflict.  All of you who are properly attracted to This had the potential to have been almost anything in the way that your particular master template was stamped out by Life.  You could have filled nearly any hole in the fabric of Life, and in the same manner you will find that there is at least some small area in you where the flows are more or less in alignment.  It might be tinkering with a motorcycle, or playing the guitar, sitting around drawing, or making a dress.  It's not important what the activity is, but all of you should look for such areas in yourself -- find out that there is something that you like to do, something that you simply enjoy and there is no explaining it.  When you are doing something of this nature, when the two flows are close to not being in conflict, the less you require an audience.  The less you must show someone what you have done, the less you must seek approval or shirk possible disapproval.  You may find that there is no explaining it, but if nothing else is going on, you would just prefer to put on old clothes and dig in the garden and play with petunias -- you would just as soon stay there until you drop, or it gets too cold or too dark.  You should all be looking for the very distinct difference between this type of activity and that which fills the rest of one's normal existence.

     When the two flows are in alignment in you there is a very different taste from everything else that operates in the horizontal world.  This difference extends to things which everyone is forced to say are important such as, "We have got to be concerned over the political climate of the world."  Or, "We cannot go around blind to the fact that there is an insane nuclear arms race which could result in the destruction of us all."  There is something in everyone which agrees to these types of horizontal concerns, but this agreement is no more than a variation of the age old fear that the gods are going to get you, or that you had better do right or you will pay for your transgressions.

     Everyone is prey to this type of ordinary, horizontal flow under the right conditions.  I can even evoke it in you while we are sitting here.  I can tell you ahead of time that what I am about to demonstrate is no more than a satirical game and yet in a matter of moments I could draw your attention in a certain direction.  All I have to do is tell you that, "It would take only a small miscalculation for there to be a nuclear holocaust, such as almost happened recently.  In case some of you were not aware of the fact, in recent months there was some kind of breakdown in the early warning system and they almost sent out some armed nuclear warheads.  All it would have taken was the merest additional mistake and we would have been done for.  Imagine the types of people with their fingers on the buttons, and the multitude of electronic and mechanical equipment that could fail.  We could just blow everything up.  I mean it's easy to sit here -- you think everything is all right -- but think of the fright if right now we suddenly were to start hearing sirens and turn on the radio -- suddenly a voice comes out of the radio and says that without any doubt it is about to rain bombs on this country."  I assure you that if that were to actually happen, your internal complexion would change.

     Now can you feel what I am saying?  This is in no way an attack on you, but all of you should have some feeling of how prone consciousness is to this type of horizontal flow.  Everyone has an opening for that kind of flow down in the regular PBX board.  It is based on the fact that Man knows he is going to die. All concerns that Man is going to destroy the planet, ruin the ecology, or pollute the air so that the planet turns on him are just icing on the cake.  When you are dead all that is irrelevant.  There is a hole in the board with the plug that says, "You are going to die."  Everything else is an attempt to avoid this hole -- concerns that we all have such as watching out for environmental poisons like asbestos, or that we have to find a so-called cure for cancer.  On the ordinary level there is the unspoken message that if we can finally lick cancer, everyone will live forever.  But I assume that all of you are astute enough to know that even if there were a cure for cancer, everyone is still going to die.  There remains that place in everyone's PBX board which responds to doom saying.  Of course, as you get your consciousness closer to the Line it is possible, in a sense, to ignore the doom and destruction part of you.  But it is not a simple matter of being able to reach down in your circuitry and rearrange your basic nature, of stopping a born coward from being a coward, or grabbing the flow of an overbearing person and simply diverting it.  Only death will change such tendencies.  All of these flows are built-in to you, and the only possibility for real change must necessarily lie in another direction.

     Consider the manner in which this description of the two flows is more correct, and at the same time, more simplistic than any description that Life has to offer concerning ordinary Man's continuing feelings of ambiguity and helplessness.  Life is full of stories of, "I am attracted to men or women that obviously mistreat me, and when I get mad and leave them I suffer so much and get so lonely that I go back to the clubs and wind up with the same type of person again."  Such plexuses of behavior are understood so vaguely that if psychologists or psychiatrists were backed up to the wall verbally they would admit that, "It is too complex a field for anyone to sit around and discuss in that manner.  The human psyche is in reality a very vague animal, and I must tell you in all sincerity that the so-called art of psychiatry is still only in its infancy.  Oh, we do some good, but there is no real explaining the individual natures of all the people on this planet."  Of course there is, but not to ordinary man who has accepted the view that each person is a separate entity.  Ordinarily people are stuck having no alternative to the belief that each person contains a complex miniature being inside -- that there is a little Fred in there who has seen good times and bad, and has developed into a very complex little creature manifesting all the various behaviors of the human animal.  On the ordinary level, all sophisticated people share the belief that this little creature lives in the brain and is responsible for his actions.  You say, "I think I'll have a cup of Sanka -- I'll go get a paper and see what's on at the movies tonight and maybe I'll go to the movies."  You, of course, are ignoring the questions:  "Why does a dog turn around three times before he lies down?" and, "What are you going to say next?"

     Ordinary perception would have it that information, if not immediately arising from the personal flow, is at least immediately transmitted to it.  Such a little "me" living in the brain would be only one part of the story.  It would be a description of the horizontal lateral flow -- but that is not the flow that keeps you alive.  You could live without this lateral, personal flow, although you wouldn't be conscious even in the ordinary sense -- they would have to prop you up in chairs, feed you, etc.  It is the Primal Flow which arises from somewhere else that you cannot live without, and it flows through you in a diametrically opposed direction to the lateral flow.  It is not a matter of one being good and the other bad, or vice versa, it is simply a matter that there are two flows extant in you and they are normally in opposition to each other.  One is verbal, the other is not.  One is the basis of all literature and discussion, the other is like Old Man River: he just keeps flowing along.

     Because of the different purposes of the two flows, they can each only look in one direction.  They have different strengths and they operate at different speeds.  Now I want you to look at something else. Even quite ordinary persons have observed that intellectual memory operates in what can be safely described as two different fashions:  short term and long term.  For instance, you can look up a phone number and remember it long enough to place the call, but if two minutes later you needed the number again, you would have to look it back up.  That is commonly called short term memory.  Then there are things with a certain importance which get stored in what is called long term memory.  So it is that you can recall certain phone numbers which are twenty years old once your memory is jogged.  There are those things which seem to be permanently etched into your memory as opposed to the things that you can only remember while you are actually using them.

     In the host of This Thing, on the scale of Life itself, there is memory, and I am going to tell you what it is to be ordinary.  To be ordinary is to be part of Life's short term memory.  And now I'm going to tell you what it is to attempt to activate the upper circuitry.  In doing so you are attempting to make yourself part of Life's permanent memory.  Under ordinary conditions when you die Life has forgotten you.  Can you conceive of the fact that sixty years to a man could be only two seconds to Life?  If you are ordinary it is as though Life had the very real need to look up a phone number and you were it -- it remembered you for the necessary two seconds which for you was sixty or seventy years -- and as soon as you were unplugged, it forgot you. You ceased to be part of Life's chemical and electrical energy -- you died and Life forgot you.  You may still be in the closet, rotten meat and all, but as far as Life is concerned, when you die you are forgotten.

     Don't take what I just said and in some way try to incorporate it into your childhood religious dreams of life after death.  This Thing is never concerned with your fears of what might happen after your death. What you must do is make yourself a part of Life's permanent memory.  If you can remember such an objective and you once get a taste of it, you can tell when it is happening.  It simply might strike you one clear hot night in southern Florida that there has become a kind of permanency about you.  It is not that you have become immortal, that the gods have taken you under their wing, but there is the sense that activating yourself above Line-level consciousness is the attempt to imprint yourself on Life's permanent memory.  When you have gotten to the point that Life will not simply forget you the moment it turns its head, you can feel it.

     Now I am going to mention a few things concerning the Forces which I touched on in passing a few weeks ago.  All except the very youngest of you should be able to taste the fact that the older you get horizontally, the more you are beginning to flee from Life's short term memory.  As one ages horizontally one is almost inescapably drawn into a slight variation of one's original forced labor job in the machinery of life.  You slowly but surely begin to work for D force.  The struggle between generations is a part of this. There is a kind of resistance, almost a low level hostility among the youthful toward the older generation, and nobody seems to know why.  Although it is unrecognized, this resistance toward the middle-aged is because they are, almost without exception, now working for Second force.  You can see it in yourself, that below the Line, the older you get, the more conservative you get.  As a teenager you could have been wild and woolly.  You could have been traveling the country in freight trains or been a starving artist in Europe. You could have been footloose and fancy free and pursuing left wing politics and marching in the streets of Paris.  Ten years later you are living in Connecticut, William Buckley is one of your favorite writers, and you are aghast at your teenagers and the kind of music they like.  Your desk has been moved, to say the least, and you are now working in and getting your paycheck from the department of Second force, and you don't know what happened.  Of course, you never knew where your paycheck came from in the first place, so you can't recognize the difference.  It is useful to look within yourself and see that the older the lower circuits get, the more conservative and critical they become.  Under ordinary conditions your job becomes one of fighting for a full-time position on Life's magazine.  An ordinary man would say to himself, "I can see more and more clearly that a man does get wise with age.  I now know that the kind of radical politics I was involved with in my youth will not work, and they do not make the world go around.  Oh, I guess I had my fun when I was a kid, but now I know what's what."  What he doesn't know is that they have moved his desk.  He is now working as all ordinary circuits are wont to do as they age, for Second force.

     Connected to people's desks getting moved is something else for you to consider.  First, you should be aware that in any situation, no matter how simple it may be, you can find two forces in action.  There is that which wants to move, and if it is going to be viable, that which opposes it.  This can first be observed externally, but with a little trickery it is possible to observe the same thing within your own circuitry.  You find yourself thinking, "I think I'll go get a paper and see what's on at the movies, and get out of the house," and immediately there is an internal response of, "Ehhh ---."  You can say that you are too tired, that there aren't any good movies out, that you shouldn't spend the money, or what not.  Whatever the explanation, you can see that there was something that wanted to move and something that did not.  There was resistance.  Then try to consider that, quite literally, everything else in the world is Third force.  And then add this to you considerations:  That which appears to be oneself, that feeling of a stable "I" which one wakes up with in the morning, is but a kind of illusionary stability.  You have this illusionary "I" which your consciousness continually attempts to hold in the midst of the Three Forces, producing the feeling that, "I am existing in the midst of all this.  It is not simply flowing through me, there is an 'I' which exists in the midst of the Three Forces."  It does not matter whether you literally say "I", for ordinary consciousness has no alternative but to operate in this manner.

     You can also consider how this Yellow Circuit belief in the existence of "I" is absolutely necessary for the mechanical growth of everything.  One place to start looking is how, in the horizontal growth of Life, America is still at the cutting edge.  Food is plentiful, power is cheap, and in terms of technological advancement America is unsurpassed.  Can you see that this goes hand in hand with an absolutely required feeling of an isolated, individual "I" at the center of the Three Forces?  Committees did not invent the light bulb.  The premier of a communist country does not and cannot bring out large numbers of people and point guns at them and say, "All right, I demand that all of you to go forth and invent something great and bring it back next week."  It would not work -- and don't forget that these physical examples of mine are only to point toward something else.  The achievements and advancements of the external horizontal world are apparently tied to individuals, to ordinary people operating at Line-level consciousness.  And for them it is required that they have a continual feeling of an isolated, stable "I" at the center of the Three Forces.  Inventions are not made by committee or mass action.  But all that seems to be "out there" initially manifests itself via ordinary persons operating under the ordinary condition of the illusionary stability of "I" at the center of the Three Forces.

     Now here is something that you may want to address.  Why is it that everyone is driven to want to be seen as being consistent?  It has become an accepted fact among sophisticated, reasonably educated people that a sure sign of a nonthinking, nonprogressive person is a man who is inconsistent.  Yellow Circuit people will fight at least verbal battles if accused of inconsistency.  Someone says, "Here's a book that you wrote twenty years ago, which absolutely contradicts what you stated in your last article."  And people will go into immediate tirades, claiming, "No -- you are misconstruing what I was trying to say."  We are back to why does a dog turn around three times and what are you about to say next?  All of you have a piece of this, of wanting in the lower circuits to defend yourself against accusations of inconsistency, and I ask you to consider why.

     Here's another one:  the continuing unnoticed banding together of temporary groups in defense of something.  Take for example a group of strangers at a bar.  Two of them are having a discussion about the local baseball team and what should be done.  There seems to be a difference of opinion.  One of the two walks off and the other man turns to the crowd and says, "Can you believe that he wants to trade our best player for a couple of rookies?  He must be nuts."  And to varying degrees the four or five people standing around will agree with him.  It is an instantaneous banding together of strangers.  I could pick it apart further and say that half the people had no interest in sports and that the rest didn't rally even know what they were talking about, and yet they agree, even vehemently.  You can call it a simple form of social lubrication -- simply the kind of thing that people do -- and you are correct.  But there is something afoot here which encompasses more than just individual people.  There is an instantaneous, very temporary banding together of people against an opponent.  One says, "Can you believe that he wouldn't agree with me?  Am I right or what?"  They all shake their heads.  Something happened to his listeners internally.  An energy ran through them and they are suddenly all banded together -- like an instant little nation, an instant tribe which is only good for a few seconds and then it all dissolves.  Someone puts his beer down and the energy just goes away.  The people involved may never speak again that night.  I picked out a more obvious example, one in which the actors can be presumed to be primarily Red Circuit people, but I could spin a similar tale with a group of professors at a cocktail party.  The subject matter, the tones of voice, and the degree of rowdiness might change, but the same thing occurs.  There might be a rather civilized discussion over some new economic theory and one person might excuse himself to refill his martini.  The other one turns and says, "Have you ever heard from a man of his credentials a more asinine rehashing of some old theory?  Can you believe it, from a man of his standing?"  And the bystanders go, "Tut, tut."  Don't limit this simply to a social phenomenon.  It is not merely their apparent personalities in action.  It is a banding together, and it goes on continually.  It can go on with just two people.  Two strangers can be standing at an intersection and someone in a passing car throws a beer bottle at their feet.  On of the people turns to the other and goes, "Tut, tut, tut," and the other one goes, "Tut, tut."  An instant temporary tribe of two people was created.  It was them against the bottle thrower.  Do any of you suspect that there might be a connection between this and me asking you to consider why it is that everyone seems forced to want to be seen as a consistent person?

     There are a few other things I want to cover.  One is that someone was asking about the Primal Flow, wondering what it might or might not be.  Remember that the name I gave you for it is only temporary, and the description is just a working description for now.  I am pointing you in a direction so that you can see that there is something else going on.  I have described such a flow for you to see an unseen something flowing through you now, as it always has.  But I will give you a slight variation of my description.  You might consider that the Primal Flow is like a kind of necessary large uncivilized ocean of non-personal energy.  In a sense, what you are trying to do here in attempting to activate yourself above the level of ordinary consciousness is to try to produce a kind of refined new energy.

     I continually get questions regarding the sexes and how they might complement each other, and I will repeat for all of you that, in a sense, once you have the ability you can learn more from the people you are attracted to, especially if you are living with someone who is actively involved in This Thing, than anywhere else.  That is why you should be happy for them, even if somewhere in your lower circuitry there is a piece of you which is as negative toward their machine as it can be.  Such an involvement doesn't require that you live with the person for the rest of your life, but for the time being they become an absolutely astounding book.  It is not a matter of attempting to acquire their traits because This Thing is not about acquiring any recognizable traits -- it is rather to become conscious outside all traits.  But there is definitely something you can learn from considering the apparent traits of the person you are attracted to.  You should become aware that to be attracted is to be aware of one force, one side of the coin (even though it doesn't make any rational sense to you that the complaints you have about your mate are simply the other side of the same coin).  The very things that you are complaining about are part of the attraction.  It's all the same thing.

     Further clarification concerning the Three Forces is also in order.  There has been some questioning about how the Three Forces might vary from individual to individual, from culture to culture, from men to women, and so forth.  The reality and purpose of each force does not vary in any individual, or from one group to the next.  If you can identify anything as First force, all you have to do is move slightly, and as far as you can see, it has now become Second or even Third force.  If it were possible to freeze reality into instantaneous moments, which of course it is not, then it would be the manifestation of the forces through different individuals which appears to have different flavors.  But then you are left with trying to interpret the appearance of the particular flow that you thought you saw, and any way that you interpreted it, you would be wrong.  But then if you were able to turn on yourself and observe your own observation of such a force, and could ask the unspoken internal question, "Why do I seem to listen to the kind of opinions which run through me?"  Then you might learn something.  Any time you make an observation and name what you observed you are incorrect, but you will find that you can learn even from that which is incorrect.

     Here's another one.  Someone was thinking about one of the things I said recently, and they opined that it would seem to them that consciously the choices for humanity would be unlimited.  I would like to respond to that for all of you.  With an ordinary person there is no question of them having unlimited possibilities.  They do not.  Once you begin to see, once you begin to be able to ask yourself the question, "What am I about to say next?" you will understand that below the Line you are as ordinary as the rest of humanity.  You will then know that below Line-level consciousness one cannot even conceive of a wide range of alternatives.  If that is not clear enough, try to recall what it was that you expected to gain from This Thing when you first heard of it.  If I asked, you would come up with answers such as, "Well, I believed that I would become so and so and that such and such would happen, and I would stop doing so and so and stop worrying about this and that."  But all you have to do is look down your own nervous system to see that it still believes the same type of things it did before you started This.  Or, if I could produce a magic genie and give everybody one wish, what would it be?  Unless you were extraordinary your wish would amount to nothing.  And yet the ordinary circuitry which keeps everything moving and produces horizontal advancement believes that the world is its oyster.  It believes that it can dream of faraway places, sing romantic songs, picture exotic women, and imagine being fabulously wealthy.  And yet your wish to the magic genie, unless you were truly extraordinary would be something on the order of, "All my life I wanted a good electric train and all my parents could afford was an old wind up.  If I had a million dollars a day, I'd have electric trains in every room in the house!"  But then what would you do?  "Well, I don't know, I guess I'd get more electric trains."  Can you remember that we are not just talking about electric trains?  The ordinary mind cannot conceive of unlimited possibilities.  It would not know what to truly do with a wish.  The ordinary mind can only deal with that which it is accustomed to dealing.  The apparent "I," the apparent self from the Line down, has a specific job to do of manifesting a certain type of energy based upon its wiring, and it cannot be changed.  For this system, the question of unlimited possibilities is moot.  If it was given that one wish it would blow it and it wouldn't even realize what had happened, except for the feeling that something was wrong as it sat in a home lined from floor to ceiling with electric trains.

     Something came up a few nights ago.  Some people were sitting around listening to loud music, and I pointed out that a dog who knows the sound of certain things like his name and "do you want to go out" and "do you want to eat" can be lying right in front of the loudspeakers and apparently not hear the music.  But you can call his name and he will respond.  One of the people sitting there commented that if creatures hear in a certain way for their survival, then the future/now entails ignoring Life's TV broadcast in favor of the voice no one else can hear or listen for.  Later someone mused, "Does that which is unnameable today have a name tomorrow and is This Thing unnameable because it is always beyond the nameable?"  I think I'll just leave it at that.

     Someone else wanted me to comment on how space and types of space affect people.  There is a great deal to be learned from this type of observation, how people place themselves in a given space, how close people will get to each other physically, how it varies from culture to culture, and from person to person.  You place yourself certain distances from specific people and you don't know why.  You simply get closer to some people than others.  You'll find that you stand closer to people in a crowd under certain conditions and you don't know why.  The weather may have an effect.  There may be more men than women standing at a bus stop and you'll come up and stand a few feet away from the fat lady with the umbrella.  If you could make these kind of observations, and had the right kind of objective memory, then you could know things that you have no business knowing.  You could see things that you have never done, and know what you would have done.  And there is nothing particularly mystical about it.  You can be aware that, "I was walking up to the bus stop, there was a crowd there, and I got to a certain spot and something changed, and I simply stopped."  You might ask yourself the nonverbal question, "At what point when I was walking to the bus stop did I decide that I was going to get approximately three and a half feet from that fat lady and then stop, and look off like I didn't know anybody?  When did I decide that?"  And when you develop the right kind of objective memory you can have memories of things you have never done.  You can be aware of the fact that if, for instance, the crowd had been composed of all men, you would have stood either nearer or farther away.  You wouldn't have stopped where you did, and it has nothing to do with your background and the way your uncle mistreated you when you were a child, or that the fat lady reminds you of someone.  You can simply be aware that, if things had been slightly different, you would not have stopped and stood where you did.

     Now back to what I started talking about.  Back to the swamp.  Many of you are beginning to glimpse that that which in the beginning seems so vague and elusive is possible and at hand.  What This Thing is about is the reality behind all your dreams of the vague and unattainable.  It is the reality behind what Swami X is supposed to represent.  When you get good at This the vague and unattainable becomes everyday, it becomes the norm, and then you have to go somewhere else internally, that is part of the reason why, when This Thing is operating at its best, the descriptions often seem contradictory and confusing, as opposed to the good old pseudo-system approach in which everything is spelled out:  "Listen, all you have to do is learn to self remember or remember the names of the gods, or just come here and give money and kiss the Swami's feet, and he will drag you by his coat tails through the gates of heaven."  All of that seems quite "un-vague" and specific, but can you see that This Thing is directing you to a specific area above the Line of consciousness by means of all my convoluted descriptions?  There is wiring, there is the switchboard, and almost non-connected to that is absolute consciousness.  A mere glimpse of absolute consciousness has spawned all the mystical stories and tales which thousands repeat. There is reality behind those astounding descriptions, but the reality is not vague and far away, it does not lie up there somewhere in the heavens, but it is in the area above the Line and it is at hand.  I don't guess anyone feels like they are trapped anymore, but I guess that once a year I should point out the obvious:  that you are not trapped here.  Anyone can stop This and quit.  But after This I don't know why in the world you would.  Well, maybe you'll inherit a million dollars a day.  A million dollars a year?  You could have electric trains everywhere you looked.