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HUMANS DO NOT CAUSE OTHER HUMANS TO DO ANYTHING                 

Document:  71, June 30, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983                         

     Let me mention a certain aspect of ordinary life.  I refer to a belief most commonly heard in the specialized areas of sociology, anthropology, etc., but within your own consciousness you have said it or you have heard people refer to it.  It is the belief that there is a division somewhere between "nature" and "Man's establishments -- his institutions. his societies".  It is the assumption that in some way there is a difference between these two things.  I am not attacking this belief because, as with all ordinary observations and beliefs, it is a reflection of something real.  An ordinary observation itself -- which is all that's available at Line-level consciousness -- tells you nothing though.  It is a very good fodder, however, for your own non verbal dictionary in This Thing -- it is a good area for further Neuralization.

     Take this example for instance, that humanity -- including yourself at the ordinary level of consciousness -- is wont to point out instances such as, "There was that nice wooded glen over there with a little lake where you could go swimming.  Then there came Man's intrusion:  he built an asphalt plant up the river and now its polluting and destroying the lake and the whole area".  This seems to be a clear indication that there is a distinct division between "nature" and "Man's establishments".  Now, even though I point out that this ordinary observation tells you nothing and that it is not a profitable observation as far as This Thing is concerned, it is good fodder for you to try to Neuralize:  what does the ordinary level of consciousness believe it is saying?  What is it you think you're agreeing to when you hear newscasters speak about this, or when you read about it or listen to your own internal voices about "Man's intrusion on nature"?  The part that is difficult for many people to consider when they start to look at this is:  what could be the possible, profitable basis for life itself to let this happen?  To cause this to happen?  Why does life make Man feel like, "Alright there is nature -- the pristine, proper way things should go.  And then, there is Man".  What is reflected by this division?

     I am not holding out some answer for this.  I could sit down and get your attention in some way to make you glimpse it in a way that you've never seen, but I'm not inferring that there is one simple answer.  It is for you to try to Neuralize:  what possible purpose could be being served by making humanity believe that, "There is nature and then there is Man's institutions, Man's intrusion upon nature, Man's misuse of nature?"  Let me point out that even if this division had some validity, Line-level consciousness cannot conceive of the fact, even the possibility that nature -- the first part of the division they describe -- is the source of everything.

     Some of you are beginning to get glimpses in this direction and I should give you a small warning.  You start to see in your own way through observing situations that you'd always thought operated in a certain manner (i.e., with humans responsible for what they were doing and with one event causing another) that the fact is nobody is doing anybody any harm, nothing is going wrong and everything is just as it should be.  The reality can be expressed as you may be wont to say, "Everything is just as it appears to be". There are no spirits, no gods as you have been taught, no unconscious motivation going on.  Mary does not have a small Mary inside her making plots and plans and manipulating the environment and other people -- everything is just as it appears to be, because it operates on two levels.  Everyone starts off believing that -- "Everything is just as I perceive it to be".  But notice there is a very distinct but verbally subtle difference between what ordinary humanity perceives to be going on and what somebody with a nervous system activated above Line-level consciousness can see is going on.

     So it is not as simple as some of you may have read in a ninety-five cent Zen paperback.  I have even pulled out in the past the stories of a man going to a monastery and studying, or considering, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", or, "If a tree fell in the forest, with no one there, would it make a noise?" And the man sits there for twenty years and finally, suddenly, one day he goes, "Ha!"  You remember that old story; it's a variation of many of the Zen stories.  The man then asks to see the head of the monastery for the first time in twenty years.  He goes in to the head man and says, "PFFT!" and the head man shakes his head and says "Congratulations".  There is a distinct difference between seeing that everything is just as it is -- and -- Seeing that everything is just as it is.  Just don't get tripped up in believing that This is all a trick.  Remember, that This is not some simple trick.  It is a very, very complex trick and it is almost impossible.

     You may get a glimpse from above Line-level consciousness and want to use the description, "There is no great secret:  the secret is there is no secret".  But that's been said before, before this generation. There have been many people for thousands of years all around the world -- different cultures, different nationalities, different environments -- that have believed they were involved in This Thing.  And let us say that to some degree they were.  They'd come to the conclusion that the great secret behind all religions, was that there is no secret.  It is not that that conclusion has no validity.  But in the beginning, having no other description, that description may strike you but you should not get trapped in it.  Once above Line level you look around at what appears to be going on and you see it in a different manner, it's like you're loosed from the absolute grid in which you would have normally been tied.  You experience a great moment of freedom where all of Life is going on as its always gone on; it's going on all over the world; everything you see is a reflection, a microcosm of everything going on; and the secret is there is nothing else.  But do not trip there -- that is not the end of it.

     Now back to the feeling humanity has that there are some actions wherein Nature is at work -- such as a mother loving her child -- and then, other apparently non-natural actions such as a mother who has killed her baby or run off and just abandoned it.  The first appears to be obviously nature -- the beautiful sight, the experience of a mother and her child -- but the second appears to be something different.  What caused the second type of behavior?  There is a question that the ordinary mind of humanity cannot ask.  With ordinary humanity it is demons, and back to the matter of good and evil, good people and bad people.  "How did this woman go bad?  We saw her just two weeks ago and she was feeding and bathing her child."  "Well I don't know, but there's demons afoot, inexplicable forces of evil at work in this world."  It is not a matter of good and evil people.  But notice that at the ordinary level of consciousness there is no other explanation.  Other than to say there is no explanation.  There is no way the ordinary level of consciousness can conceive of the fact that there is such as thing as "nature" that they think they're describing ( a woman being a paradigm of motherhood) and over here humanity at work somehow outside of Nature ( a mother who just deserted her whole family) and at the same time be aware that Nature is the source of both types of behavior.  That will simply not compute.  The internal voices picture this second woman:  "She looks ugly, low class and more than likely drinks.  She probably came from a bad environment herself -- that would explain some of it but by God it doesn't justify this kind of unholy action".

     Taking everything I just mentioned as background, I want you to take this in a new direction.  All of humanity believes -- they have no choice, it is not picked up "psychologically" -- that humans cause other humans to do things.  That is the explanation offered at the ordinary level of consciousness to explain why men apparently act outside of "Nature".  People believe that humans cause other humans to do certain things.  "It is self evident.  Something caused this woman to leave her child.  Maybe she ended up married to someone who beat her up all the time.  Or her father was a drunk, and her mother ran off and left her when she was a child.  Something caused her to do this".  But the something is what?

     No longer in this contemporary society do many people really fall back upon the excuse of demons.  So let's assume you are, to a large degree, freed from voices of the past that would tell you, "The devil made her do it".  Your contemporary, sophisticated voices now say, "Other humans caused this -- her own childhood or her present husband.  Not demons.  Humans cause humans to do things."  Who can get any glimpse that that is absolutely not true?  If you can get a glimpse of it just for a second, you are not ordinary.

     Again, look back in yourself.  (I'm not talking about somebody else.)  It is the ordinary level of consciousness of humanity that says, "There is no doubt about it -- humans cause other humans to do things.  You can see it.  Walk into a store, for instance, and see a woman behind the cash register minding her own business.  Then a customer walks up to her and says, 'Did you know that you can buy a box of tissues for half the price at the store down the street?  What kind of people are you, advertising this as a discount store?  This is an absolute ripoff!'  And the woman behind the cash register yells, 'Yeah, well get out of here if you don't like it.  I just work here -- what are you picking on me for?'  There can be no doubt that the customer caused this woman to act a certain way."

     There is nothing else to say to the ordinary level of consciousness.  To Line-level consciousness the customer caused her behavior.  But that is not true.  Humans do not cause other humans to do anything.

     What if we're not talking about two people in a store?  What if we're talking about you just minding your own business and someone tells you something that causes you to do something else?  "I would not be angry right now if I had not found out what Mary said about me.  After all I've done for her!  I am furious!  And just thirty minutes ago I was minding my own business.  Nothing was going on.  I had no plans for the evening -- I was just sitting here looking out the window when suddenly somebody called and told me what Mary said.  Well I've got something to do now.  Boy am I pissed.  And she caused it".  It is not true.  But can you get a glimpse that at Line-level consciousness it is absolutely true.

     But anyone who heard me say this would call it insanity or allegory.  Can you perceive at all how the belief that, "people cause people to do things" helps hold everything together?  If I could suddenly make all of humanity realize that humans do not cause other humans to do anything, do you realize that everything would fall apart?  There would be, in a sense, no input occurring; there would be no causes. You wouldn't be able to tell what to do next.  Even on the ordinary level, you would have no perception of there being any reality -- that anything could cause anything.  You might walk into a store, pick up a pack of gum, hand someone money and somebody else would jump out of some bushes with a whip, make you stand on a chair and jump through a hoop of fire.  There would be no predictable relationship between things; and moreover, the place where your circuitry culminates into the feeling of a sense of an individual "I" would be gone.

     Of course you realize that I cannot make all of humanity see that people don't cause people to do things.  And if I could do it, I wouldn't.  This inescapable feeling humanity has -- I will tell you for the time being -- is genetic.  It is not induced from life after your birth; it is a built-in feeling that "humans cause humans to do things".  If it were taken away, you would have no perception of being anybody.

     I repeat that it does not matter whether your own internal voices use the language of psychology or of religion -- there remains the continual, inescapable feeling at the ordinary level that something outside of a man causes him to behave as he does.  If people don't believe that spirits and demons cause humans to behave the way they do, what is left?  What's left is that you will directly attribute your attitudes to other people's actions in your ordinary, horizontal past.  "My family, my experiences have caused me to be like this and now things that happen to me contemporaneously, things that people do, cause me to act the way I act".  Can you suspect what a jolt it is to really begin to see that there is something else going on, that humans do not cause humans to do anything? 

     I want to continue a bit now on the Three Forces.  Ordinary people must have a continuing involvement with, "I shall not forget who I am.  I shall not forget my background, what I've been through."  It is necessary to have these voices to maintain a kind of stability that is a requirement to be a passably sane person.  "I shall never forget the way my country fought, my friends who gave their lives."  "I shall never forget that my father was killed by a drunk driver who got only a $500 fine."  Or, "I will never forget that I am Catholic."  On the ordinary level, all of that is important.  It is the basis for me referring to life as a soap opera.  It is not funny in some crude sense and it is not cynicism because everyone is a part of it at the ordinary level of consciousness.

     If you will notice, humanity historically and contemporarily says, "We will not forget the last war.  We will not forget the bombs, the death, the destruction."  That is all quite necessary.  It gives people a feeling of stability.  It gives the feeling of some continuity to life.  And it is not humans who have conjured up these notions.

     I have pointed out that you cannot listen to internal voices that say, "I will never forget."  Whenever you listen to such voices and allow those voices to become you, you are not involved in This Thing.  It is not a matter of denying that the voices exist or in some way forgetting them.  It is being able to transcend that level of consciousness -- which is in everyone, no matter who they are -- that is grounded upon memory. Ordinary consciousness is based upon ordinary life memory.  I have pointed out that when memory is obliterated, such as through an accident or surgery, personality is also lost.  And so what seems to be "I" is grounded upon, is synonymous with the existence of mechanical memories such as, "I shall not forget how my family was killed."  If you separate what seems to be "I" and these mechanical memories, which you can't, you'd have a loss of apparent personality.

     It is not a matter of justifying these voices that talk to you about, "My buddies and I won't let the public forget what horrible things we went through in the war."  Nor is it a matter of going back and in some way trying to unravel that or deny it by saying, "I'm not going to listen to that."  The noise of the voices is going on -- you must become conscious above their level.  Part of the trickery of all This is in me trying to point out things that you would have never considered in order for you to see these voices from a vantage point above them.

     Consciousness above Line level is not based upon any past memory.  Yet you do not go into some form of extraordinary amnesia.  If you need to you can still recall, for instance, a street where you used to live or a company where you used to work.  You can remember all of that but it is not based upon ordinary horizontal memory.  To be conscious above the Line has nothing to do with whatever ordinary events have happened to you.  That's why if you have a hunger for This Thing and end up here, it is irrelevant who you are and what happened to you.  All the terrible things that happened to you and all the wonderful things -- if you could think of any -- are absolutely irrelevant because they are memory below the Line, memory that supports the ordinary level.  If the voice in you that says, "I don't care where This Thing leads me, there are some things I'll never forget", is strong enough, you're right -- you will not forget and as justice prevails, nothing will ever happen in you.  But if something happens with you in This, the very things "you'll never forget" will become irrelevant.  Because all of This is a new start; it is in a sense a virgin birth because this consciousness has nothing to do with what life fed you.  Nothing.

     Now I want you to consider this.  Neuralizing is one way to approach that which seems to be the problem of decision making.  Without it, decisions are simply made:  they just happen.  You can be confronted by an apparent dilemma -- the epitome of the rock and a hard place -- and you feel like, "There is no way out; this is the end of the world.  I don't know what to do."  And all we've got to do is confront you five hours later or five days later and ask:  "What did you do about that problem?"  And you say, "What prob...Oh, oh that?"  Something always happens.  The worst that can happen -- or the best for some people -- is you'll die, in which case you were right, "This decision will kill me."  But who can consider the possibility that having no choice, and being in the position of "any old choice will do", are the same thing?

     In the beginning, having no choice is what you start to get a taste of.  It is not an instant form of "enlightenment":  it creeps up on you.  You begin to notice in your relationship with a friend, or in your job or in you interactions with your family, some continuing aspect of "you" that continually reacts in a certain unprofitable way.  You begin to have the feeling that, "I have no choice.  I have got to stop this.  I've got to make some change in my relationship with this person.  I don't exactly see how to do it right now and it looks like it will create even more problems but its almost as though I can smell it coming.  I've got no choice, I've got to do something."

     A person can get to the point where what he does never offers an alternative.  Let me point out that if you can see it in a particular way, that would be a form of absolute freedom.  That, "I've got no choice over what I do."  A person could come up to you and make every effort to insult you.  But you would have no choice -- you wouldn't listen to it.  You couldn't get angry anymore.

     That is a certain kind of freedom.  But see if you can stretch your eyesight to see that that is also just the other side of the other side of "anything that I do would not matter."  They are the same thing.  People can be confronted with "Here is a change I would like to make", and that, of course brings about its own immediate resistance.  There is no such thing as change which does not produce that which appears to be suffering.  It is always first force, the reforming force -- the apparent initiator of change -- taking the status quo and transforming it.  First force in the ordinary world is not a total creative force.  It is not the inventor of a brand new idea, or a brand new animal.  All the forces can do is take that which is already in existence, that which is known -- the status quo -- and rearrange it.  And this causes suffering.  It causes discomfort.  Any statement of desiring change simultaneously produces its own resistance.

     Having no choice is quite different from the way things ordinarily work.  For example, you feel, "I can't stand this job.  It's driving me crazy.  I can't take one more day of it.  But I can't find another job and I can't afford to just quit this one.  My rent is due next week.  I cannot confront this situation; either way it'll kill me."  But then a week later you've forgotten about it.  Something happened.  Let's just say that a decision was forced.  Something always happens if it doesn't kill you.  But that is not a choice.  And that is not what I mean by having no choice because under ordinary conditions people are continually confronted with mechanical situations in which they have "no choice".

     If you went up to the person in my example and asked him the next time you saw him, "Hey, I noticed you're not complaining about your job anymore, did you find a new one?"  He might say, "Nah.  I'm still at the old job and it hasn't changed or anything -- still it is driving me crazy -- but I just finally said to myself I'm too tied up right now to quit.  My wife is pregnant again and she can't work.  I've got the rent coming due.  I don't know where to get another job.  I just had to tell myself for the time being to forget it...jut do the best I can."  That is apparently a human making a decision.  But can you begin to see in more lucid moments that that is the ordinary working of the machinery of life, that that is not somebody making a decision?

     Above the ordinary level of consciousness you can reach the point where you are not confronted with this apparently circular feeding of one force off the other, the "I can't stand this, I've got to make a change. But on the other hand I can't -- it would produce more problems..."  Above the level of ordinary consciousness is the only place that someone in This can correctly make a decision.  Part of the trickery though, is that the situation which seemed to be the problem to be decided about, ceases to be a problem. It just simply is.  It is only above Line level that someone can make a real decision, but it's on the basis that there is no longer any choice.

     Can you conceive of the possibility that having no choice is the same thing as it not mattering what you do?  I mean that it does not matter what you do. If it is possible to make a decision and know what you're doing, can you see that being in the position of having no freedom to act other than a certain way, is the same thing as being able to see that it does not matter at all, literally, what you do?  It's the same thing as having no decision.  Any possibility is the same thing above Line-level consciousness.  It's being able to see that there is only one possibility:  "There is only one thing I can do.  I have no other choice."  And its the same as:  "I can have any choice I can come up with and its all the same thing."

     Now I want to point out some things about hostility.  You cannot be a conduit in This Thing for the ordinary forces of hostility.  You have got to see for yourself the kind of necessary tension -- that can quite correctly be called hostility -- that holds everything together.  It passes between everyone out there in the world -- even people smiling at each other and saying, "Hello, I am delighted to see you."  That is a very thin veneer of civility.  The same people may, three beers and twenty minutes later, end up outside fist fighting and rolling in the dirt.  It is simply a matter of a kind of tension that you have got to see.

     At this place and time it is an accepted truth in society that you cannot go around holding in anger or hostility because it will produce psychological and/or physical harm.  Since that is now an accepted truth out in the ordinary world, then it is, of course, true.  But on the contrary -- which should not be anything new as far as opposites go in words -- it is the exact opposite for someone attempting to ignite the higher areas of the nervous system.  You cannot ignite the higher areas and have any form of anger or criticism toward any aspect of life -- no matter what it is.  To pursue This Thing you have got to be able to see the necessity of this.  It is not going to kill you and it is not going to cause harm to swallow the fire of anger or hold in hostility.  On the contrary, it produces a quite positive result if your Aim is to become more conscious.  It produces a kind of strength to swallow this fire that is burning in everyone.  But as long as you continue to pass it along -- it is going to be passed to you -- you are serving your ordinary purpose, you're pleasing the mechanical gods, you're doing exactly as you should.  People write books with titles like: "Better Marriage Through Fighting" that are based on, "It's good to fight even in a marriage.  You're human, you have some hostility -- don't hold it in.  Communicate.  If you keep holding it in then some day your whole marriage will suddenly explode."  But if your Aim is to become more conscious there is no damage to be done by holding hostility in.  I know how it feels; it is literally unnatural, regardless of the fact that all religions have some version of "Love they neighbor and turn the other cheek."  All of you have heard that, no matter what religion you came from.  But you should try to have some kind of objective ability to peer into your past and realize it didn't work.  The ministers, the rabbis, the religious leaders can't do it; nobody can do it.  It's not meant to be done at the level of ordinary Life.  It is tomorrow talking about the way it would be if Man were more conscious.  It is where humanity is headed.  It is the direction life is going and how it will reflect in humanity tomorrow.  It hasn't happened yet, and it's not going to happen in your lifetime.

     You have got to be able to swallow hostility even though it feels like you can't do it.  It produces a kind of strength.  You begin to understand what is going on in life and how everyone is helpless at Line level.  A stranger, or your spouse or anybody hands you hostility and you let it run through you and right back out, either back to the person or to somebody else:  "You don't know what happened to me today, the way my boss treated me.  That's the reason I was picking on you just now."  You can't do that and ignite the higher areas of the nervous system.

     The hostility is out there.  It's like rain.  It's just weather; its smog.  There is no need to transform hostility unless you're ordinary.  But it is absolutely unnatural to swallow it and hold it.  It is not an immediate matter of success, yet it is not a lifetime proposition either.  It is not impossible.  But when you're at the ordinary level of consciousness its like being in a sinking ship where everyone's drowning and what you do is try to paddle water; you grab onto somebody else and they're grabbing on to you and everybody's in the same position.  That is the position you're in when you let hostility -- which is there -- come in.  You're sinking with everyone else.  You've got to swallow hostility, although it tries to get back up and your internal voices give you every reason, every possible justification to become hostile.  And as far as the ordinary level of consciousness is concerned, the voices are right and what I'm saying is wrong. 

     To hold in hostility is a form of strength, but it's a strength that's unnatural.  It's not a strength of showing off, of pointing out to somebody, "Hey, do you realize you just tried to make me mad and I didn't get mad?"  If you did that, you'd be back at Line-level consciousness to say the least.  It is a strength that only you know.  It's an absolute, unnatural and unholy strength which is unnecessary unless your Aim is to become more conscious.

     You have got to swallow hostility and there can be no exception to it.  It does not matter what the voices say:  "She insulted my religion, my race, my friends."  "Nobody can talk about my mother that way."  You don't see that you're at the ordinary level as long as you are transforming that kind of energy, letting it flow through you and back out.

     Now see if you can place any of this together.  On several occasions I have pointed out that all news is bad news because it is from the past.  If in some way news could start out and be considered good or just sort of impartial, and it was rushed to newspaper, printed up, put in a special edition and rushed to the streets -- by the time you got it, it would still be bad news because it would be dead.

     Anything that is news is bad news because it is the past.  It is second force resisting change.  Now let me refine this.  Even if there was such a thing as good news -- for instance, the president saying, "I'm sickened over the knowledge that in our civilized country there are people going to bed hungry.  I am going to stop it.  I'm not going to appoint a committee to study it for five years.  There is nothing to study -- people are hungry and the answer is they need to be fed.  I'm going to stop this hunger within one month." Now let's just say that's good news because we'd all be in favor of seeing that people weren't going hungry.  And lets say that it would be related to first force.  What does this good news also bring with it? What's the bad news?  Do I have to say your taxes are going to go through the ceiling.  You can nod, "I'm all in favor of this.  I'm not one of the people going hungry, in fact I'm overweight.  But I feel bad about others going hungry.  I'm glad the president's doing this."  The next stage is, you are going to have to pay for it.  So we have, before it was stabilized, isolated and killed by identification, what could be called first force -- a force for change -- a transforming, a reforming of the situation as it is.  But you cannot change a situation without severely altering the existing one.  The more you want change, the more the status quo has got to be broken up.

     The refinement I was pointing to here is that what could be temporarily viewed as being apparently First force, a force for constructive change, brings with it Second force, the resistance to tearing up the status quo.  There can be no such thing as apparently good news without bad news.  There can be no such thing as First force without the breaking up of Second force.  Now, least anyone think that I was actually talking about politics and taxes, how about: "I'm going to change jobs", or "I've lived with this other person too long.  I've got to make a change:  something's got to be done."  You cannot have First force without Second force. You cannot have a transformation of anything unless you've got something to transform. There can't be a restructuring of a situation unless there's a situation to start with.

     Why is it that Second force seems to have such a high profile, such high visibility?  Looked at from the ordinary viewpoint, there seems to be in life almost a preponderance of Second force.  It appears that there is an imbalance somewhere because every place you look its Second force -- nothing but bad news. What is history?  It is a collection of bad news.  When the history you read about today was contemporary, people would shake their heads and say, "Once the enemy gets here, civilization will be done for."  Its almost as though the only thing people can see is Second force.

     A part of what I am trying to get you to Neuralize in this way is that all news seems to be bad news.  Even that which could be described as good news is carried piggyback on bad news.  And as soon as you realize the bad news, that which appeared to be good news no longer appears so good.  When a man hears the president's speech about abolishing hunger he says to his wife, "Mabel come here and listen to this.  We've elected a good man finally.  The president's going to do something about the hungry people in our country."  Then right at the end of the speech, the president mumbles, "And the best I can figure, everyone's taxes are going to double.  Thank you and good night."  And you go, "What?  What did he say?"  Not only you, but the entire nation goes, "What!"  Where goes the "I'm all in favor of First force?"  I assume you realize, and remember this is not any form of cynicism, that during the rest of the night our citizen and Mabel are not going to have any further discussion about, "How good it is that we're feeding the poor."  Hardly.  They would be spending the rest of the night talking about impeaching the president. There is just no such thing, apparently, as good news at the ordinary level of consciousness.

     What about the story of one past commentator for This Thing who came out and announced, "I have observed this:  All of life is suffering."  Then he said, "But..." and waited to see who went "Huh?"  Most of the audience started talking among themselves, "Yeah, yeah!  That man, he's right on target.  There's no fooling him; life is suffering."  But after the man stepped aside a few kept listening to hear what came after the "But..." 

     Recently someone noted to me that resistance seemed to be the major force in them.  They asked me if a person was born with one of the Three Forces dominating in them.  Everyone, were they to try and observe the Three Forces, would at first be struck with, "Hey, I'm almost entirely Second force.  I just seem to be a walking personification of it."  And it is not true.  Nobody is a conduit for any single force.  You would be dead; you could not be alive were that the case.  But everyone has some notion when it is presented to them that, "Yeah, I do feel like I'm almost entirely Second force."  Notice I keep using the example of Second force -- does anyone feel like they're Third force?  Does anyone feel like "Well, I'm First force, no doubt about it.  That's me."  Does no one find that curious?  If I said:  "Don't all of you feel as though one of the forces predominates within you?"  Then if I said, "Alright everyone write down which force predominates in you," do you realize there would only be one answer?  Does anyone find that curious? 

     As with oneself, it also appears at the ordinary level of consciousness that Second force predominates worldwide, that there seems to be a much higher percentage of suffering than pleasure.  But I am telling you it is not true.  You cannot have the forces out of balance.  The fact that there seems to be a preponderance of suffering or second force is, however, something very worthwhile and eventually necessary for you to Neuralize.  Remember, Neuralize -- not think about.  You can't think about -- listen to -- the voices at Line-level consciousness telling you, "Well sure we all suffer.  Man was meant to suffer. I've got so many faults anyway; my temper is so bad no wonder I suffer."  These voices are nothing.  But you might, non-verbally, find them curious.  And you might also Neuralize that that which seems to be suffering is always in some way tied to the other forces; they're all circling one another continually.  Even that which apparently you can see as suffering is simply a reaction to First force somewhere trying to bring about change.  Second force does not just hover around and decide to pick out one country, land there and holler, "Suffer you suckers!" and make everyone suffer for awhile.  It is not that.  The very places you see Second force really working and crying out, are alive:  if they are not suffering, they are dead.  They cry out because they are resisting change; they cry out because there is change to resist.  So everytime you think you're seeing suffering, you're only seeing a part of something.  Remember that and then you're left with, "Why can I only see suffering or bad news?"  The only reason that you can see it is there is something attempting change.

     I want to mention something that I've mentioned before, because many of you experience a brief sensation of this:  It is the feeling of, "I'm almost coming apart.  I feel like I'm losing the sense of who I am. I'm standing here in an ordinary every day situation and its almost as though I have ceased to exist.  I see myself standing here, hear myself talking to people, but I feel like I'm going to explode."  There is nothing beneficial in that kind of feeling.  It is a kind of loosening of where you are fixed in the Grid of life, but you can't blame it all on your involvement in This Thing.  You could be simply fatigued or not eating right or not getting proper exercise.  Regardless of the reason, when these moments hit you -- if they do -- stop whatever is going on.  Take a break.  Go out and run; go swim; stand on your head; go eat in a greasy spoon.  If you belong in This Thing you will not go crazy.  Justice prevails.  I know what I am doing; nothing occurs too drastically.  But there is that kind of feeling when you're loosening yourself from your ordinary position and that loosening does require a kind of preparation.  That is why I've told you that if there was a magic such that I could suddenly snap my fingers and cause you to be conscious above Line level, I would not do it.  Sometimes it happens accidentally (and temporarily) to people in ordinary life and it accomplishes nothing as far as This Thing is concerned.