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Summary by TK

Jan Cox Talk 79, Aug 25, 1983, runtime 1:40

  [Reading of Group papers to :08.]
  [Everything in man's circuitry is a dealing-with-forms, the forms of things. This Thing is an attempt to establish a kind of dual consciousness: to be conscious of an impersonal energy flow thru man and with the instant form of that flow being his "life".    It is an ability to stand back from the particular form that is "I"/your life. Considering is thinking without putting energy into form. Attempting to do any "thing" will have no real effect since it is thru form. The Real Revolutionary must allow some of the energy to bypass form, to get above the Line-of-consciousness; to see without form. ]
  [Nobody is surprised by "Don't". Restriction is expected. J.'s "don'ts" are a clearing the decks of useless baggage. A new "don't": Don't look back! Everybody is wired to look back, it is the basis of suffering. Ordinary consciousness cannot look to the future in any way, because it must use forms (from the past) to project forward, to anticipate events. To refuse to look back renders everything irrelevant--opens Real future. It is a trick (allows secondary discovery) to get you to do something you never would have done otherwise. ]
  [Note that concerns characterized by "what effect does violence on TV have on society?" cannot be considered in reverse (i.e., what effect does society have on TV violence?). It is always rejected as meaningless to unimportant at best. To vice versa "you are what you eat" to "you eat what you are" serves no useful purpose in ordinary life. ]
  [Consider: in the I + Not-I = Everything equation, people either feel that the emphasis is 90% on the "I" or 90% on the "Not-I" part. ]
  [The Real Revolutionary must avoid "sickness" as a hobby. The fascination with illness is wired into the Nervous System. People don't read about cancer to better prepare against same, but to wallow in it. It fuels the old structure, depletes energy for doing This Thing. Ignore health is the only healthy attitude for the Real Revolutionary. ]
  [1:28 Personal comments to Group.]
  [TASK: Make yourself up in an unbecoming way and go out to a shopping mall acting as if that's you for 38 minutes. ]
  [The reality behind above-the-line consciousness is formless; it is energy. There is no depth/complexity to form. The world is populated by "walking around firehoses" with water coming in one end and out the other. 

Transcript

DON'T LOOK BACK                

Document:  79,  August 25, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983                    

       Everything that seems to be the mind of Man, his ordinary consciousness, deals in form rather than energy.  All of humanity sees importance only in the form of things.  It is difficult, to say the very least, to hold a continuous awareness of this fact under ordinary conditions, but it is possible to See something beyond form, beyond the internal voices.  You take these voices as your "thoughts":  What they mumble silently and what they say externally, you take as being you.  The voices say "What is it that makes me think this?  What makes me feel like this?  What makes me behave in this habitual, unprofitable manner?  There is no doubt, it is because of certain things that have happened to me."  It is just the voices speaking.  You must get a glimpse of the fact that energy flows through every human continually, and what seems to be the human drama can be defined as the form that the energy takes.  Energy goes through the circuitry of a man based simply upon how he is wired.  The only "because" is the fact of birth.

     When energy reaches the level of consciousness -- that is the level at which it takes a form.  The form is you.  The sub-forms are everything you apparently think and feel.  It is possible, however, for energy to get to that level and not be confined to forms.  Consider:  Is it possible to think without examples?  The answer worldwide from ordinary humanity is a resounding "Huh?" (which is synonymous with "No", because all you have to do is think about it and you realize that the only way to think is by example).  In the beginning, if you pursue This correctly, you will experience a kind of dual consciousness.  It is a rather vague indefinable sensation that you have suddenly come to your senses, and it comes and goes.  You can be talking to somebody and it is as though you go into a different state (without seeing angels and colored lights) in which you are aware that this thing that you routinely take as being you is speaking in an impassioned manner, making gestures and trying to get another person to agree to something.  It is as if you stand away from a movie screen.  The movie continues to run, and yet you are not locked into it.  It is an attempt to reroute some of the energy that is part of the circulatory system of Life flowing through Man. When the energy hits the Line of consciousness, instead of feeling immediately that you are in the center of all this, you let some amount, no matter how small, bypass its usual stopping point at the Line; you keep it from taking form.

     That is the reality behind all of the strange dreams throughout history regarding enlightenment and being awake.  Energy must be diverted to bypass the ordinary wiring, and there is no simple, direct way to do it.  It cannot be done through manipulating the diet.  You should already be disavowed of any notion that by simply giving up alcohol or meat the gods will somehow be very pleased and send you secret messages.  It does not work.  (It is important to set up conditions wherein you are not working at cross purposes by feeding circuits food unnecessary to the pursuit of This -- such as my suggested abstinence from meat and frequent alcohol).  There is no way to directly go into the headwaters of this energy flow and try to affect it by ceasing to do certain things.  For you to be functionally alive, the energy must, in a very real sense, go through every atom in your physical being, through every part:  the Red, Blue, and Yellow Circuits.

     This Thing is the attempt to grow little stray molecules here and there that can run through all of the Circuitry and not end up in a form.  Energy that rises above the ordinary Level of consciousness takes no form because there is no present form -- there is no present structure there.  That energy can get there is reflected in the libraries of mystical and spiritual tomes of the world.  In a sense it is accidental and the people that this happens to have nothing to say of any significance.  When they come back they must describe it based upon the forms already extant in routine consciousness.  A christian must describe what happened to him in christian terms, a jew in jewish terms, a buddhist in buddhist terms.  There is no boon, without a certain kind of preparation, to any of this energy getting to where there is not form and then back.  The person can only say that something extremely interesting and delightful happened.  But what was it?  It is absolutely useless unless you want to consider that perhaps they were then able to make a living as a guru or a writer of famous books.

     There is another way to Consider form.  Ordinary consciousness cannot in some way freely scan the future.  Forecasters from the areas of economics, psychology or sociology cannot conceive of what possibly might be the future of humanity.  They simply take the forms as they already exist in their circuitry, in themselves, and come up with variations on the way things seem to be going now.  All they can do is take the present form and turn it slightly.  You do not have to look into the dark basements of the ivory towers of economic structure; all you have to do is look into you and see the dreams that are going on in that twilight world.  There is no such thing, under ordinary conditions, as someone dreaming what they might actually do if they had a million dollars a day coming in.  All they can do is take the present form and enlarge upon it.

     Is it not strange how people say "I hurt 'my' knee," as though there is something internal that is separate from their knee?  Everyone, including yourself, is driven (for very necessary reasons) to deal with the world from the basis that the "I" that speaks for you is something real inside you.  You also assume that there is a similar thing inside others, that there is a Fred in every Fred and a Mary in every Mary. That they are complex creatures who have personal histories and problems, dreams and heartbreaks.  You feel that it is all a very complex, burdensome business.

     In the beginning, however, you are safe to consider that it is all backwards.  Consider that there is a flow of energy which might as well be blood; it is the circulatory system of Life itself at this level.  You and everyone else are taking in this blood and transforming it in a certain way.  You take it in and put it right back out, and everything is thus connected.  But actually it is a matter of energy.  The difference is in being able to see without form; to realize that you are not dealing on the ordinary level with anything real in yourself; you are not dealing with people.  (Once you begin to See it, of course, you are not limited to this or any description).

     I am going to approach this from another angle:  everyone is open to "don't".  Someone's standing on the street corner eating a sandwich when another guy walks up and says, in an authoritative manner, "Don't eat food at the bus stop!"  Even if the first person was not waiting for someone to say "don't", he would not be really surprised.  Within certain limits, it is built-in reaction to go, "Oh well, I'm sorry," and try to put the food in a pocket or something.  The second person walks off and your sandwich eater doesn't find anything untoward about being called down at the bus stop.  He almost feels better, in a certain sense:  "That was good for me.  I don't know...  I shouldn't do it."  He has put his food away and he feels like he is somebody.  I am trying to get you to clear out a certain area wherein energy can get above the line of forms.  Consider the fact that everyone expects there to be rules; rules that are always given as "don'ts". You won't find any major religion that has commandments in some positive form.  It's always, "tch, tch, tch #1:  Thou shalt not.  The rule to being good is DON'T!"  None of them say what to do.  See if you can realize that it has been that way all your life.  And don't blame it on your parents; you should be beyond that.  It is built into everyone and it's more even than a ready acceptance.  It is almost like panting dogs running around looking for, "What shouldn't I be doing... Somebody tell me."  It strikes a different place in consciousness to tell someone to DO so and so than to tell them "don't".  Which one do people remember?  "Don't ever do this and that," is real significant and important compared to "alright now, do so and so."

     I am going to give you a strong suggestion, now that I have pointed this out.  There is no mechanical magic in it and it is not meant as a mechanical restriction.  I am going to give you three words, the best words I can tell you, but not strange words.  I am telling you that this is as good as any invisible tattoo you could put somewhere.  It is:  Don't Look Back.  

     Those words amount almost to a holy directive.  The wiring in your system and Life itself is, in a sense, diametrically opposed to that.  Where does the sensation of "I" come from?  If it gets questioned at all, the sensation of "I am still here" is always back down the road.  You can always tell who you are by looking back; by looking in what you call daydreams.  If we could suddenly stop and freeze reality, stop the flow and bring your internal voices out for everyone to hear, a linguist could find some of it that apparently was not in any particular tense.  Once you get good you will see that the voices always look back, even when they are apparently looking forward.  They must look back because it is the only thing they have to go on. They can talk about looking forward, but they must look back to have any form upon which to draw.  In a similar manner, you cannot respond to events except in the past.  Everything that brings about a particular situation is changing faster than the speed of light.  

When you look at the Xross, it appears to be a fair representation of reality.  There does appear to be one's past and future and there does seem to be some dividing line that is one's awareness of being here, now.  In a sense it is true, but once you begin to See it, it is not true, because this system is tied into every other system and it is all continually moving.  Each triad is a piece of another triad.  When one thing moves, everything is affected.

     There is a way to willfully look off and stay right in front of what seems to exist right now.  You must literally force it.  "I" identifies itself by its reaction to Not-I.  And you can be conscious before it reacts.  You can look just before what is happening.  In a sense it absolutely destroys everything.  It makes everything unconditionally irrelevant.  One way to try and slip up on this is "Don't look back!", no matter what the voices say.  No matter what the reaction seems to be.  I've given you a good rule, and there are no exceptions to it.  It is a trick tied right to the Future/Now.  If you can refuse to look back I am afraid that you are going to come close to catching a glimpse also that it makes everything irrelevant.  You can't live your ordinary existence and not look back.  It renders everything irrelevant...until you think about it.

     When I say something is a trick there is no negative connotation to it.  A task appears to have an immediate point to it.  But there is a possible secondary discovery and that is what makes it a trick.  A task is useful for someone attempting to do This Thing only if it is going to bring about something else.  This secondary discovery, of course, requires your participation; it requires that you be open to have a new experience.  Part of the trick is to make you do something that you would not have done.  It produces conditions that place you outside your normal position in the grid system.  You can start off feeling as though the task is of great benefit, but sometime later, you may come up with an observation which your system would have never made, and it is tied directly to the task.  That "something else" reveals itself and you then have the need and the growing ability to see something that you would never have seen.  That is why I call it a trick.  You may think you know the purpose of the task.  But the trick is going out and giving it your best shot and along the way strange things begin to reveal themselves; things you'd never have thought about.

     Yet another side to the built-in limits of form:  Consider the contemporary cultural question:  "What effect does the portrayal of violence on television have on our society?"  Nobody can ask the reverse:  "What effect does society have upon the portrayal of violence on t.v.?"  Or how about the one that's been around in its verbal form for some time:  "We are what we eat."  Who would have ever been able to turn that around?  "We eat what we are."  (If that sounds like mere word play, tsk, tsk, tsk.  I must remind you how to attempt to Consider this.  "Oh, look how foolish everything is.  Everything is upside down and backwards."  It is not.  Once you See it you realize that it is not upside down and backwards.)  There is nothing inherent in the wiring system of any ordinary human to ever make them take such serious questions and turn them backwards.  Everything at the ordinary Level of consciousness is in some way connected to prevailing opinion.

     You hear a statement such as "The portrayal of violence on television is having a detrimental effect upon society."  Your nervous system may not be wired in such a way that you take up the banner of that viewpoint, but it will strike you as being of relative importance -- something with some validity to it.  It is an area in which you can perceive that one thing has a direct effect on something else.  But where does that t.v. violence come from?  Are there a bunch of undercover agents for evil spirits sitting there writing out these things to have a detrimental effect upon society?  Can you conceive just for a second the possibility that these people who are writing are fairly ordinary people?  Whatever flows through them, whatever motivates them to write this violence is in some way a reflection of society.  And your system goes, "well, yeah..." and that's it.  The system can see it for a second, but then has no further interest, because you can't do anything with it.  In the original statement you could isolate a cause, directly affecting something else and .paattack it.  But when you turn it around the other way, what can you do with it?  Nothing.

     It is the ordinary condition to see isolated effects.  Everyone's wiring system deals only in form; it sees one thing going from here to there.  That is necessary, you must remember, to keep everything moving. We must be surrounded by people who absolutely believe that "this causes that, there is a direct connection between this and that."  If it were not for these people nothing would be going on.  They are passing the necessary kinds of energy, but they cannot see that a fish and the water are not two different things.  It is only after you are able to extract yourself from the water that you can take yourself above the water level and see where you were and where everyone is.  

     Suppose I divide humanity into two groups of people.  (Remember, this is trickery; none of this exists.  We are back to the old joke that there are only two types of people in the world, those who divide humanity into types of people and those who don't.  All such divisions are arbitrary and illusionary). Consider the equation, I + Not-I = Everything.  There are two general classes of energy transformers. Those who feel (even though they've never heard of the equation) that "I" equals about 90%.  Then there are those that feel as though the Not-I equals 90%.  The wiring potential of every person falls in one of those two classes.  It seems to manifest itself, as ordinary people would say, in a certain psychological statistical form.  There is a living reality to the feeling down in some nervous systems that the Not-I in the equation is overwhelming, and then others to whom "I" is of paramount importance and everything else out there is almost of no significance.

     Now listen real fast and simple, and try not to let it get down in the ordinary system.  You should absolutely avoid sickness.  The world is full of people who are sick; I am putting it in a crude form, but there are many people for whom being sick is a hobby.  (This has nothing to do with the fact that if I broke my ankle tonight, I would go pay a doctor to see it rather than attempt to do it myself in my spare time with a hockey stick and chewing gum.)  The Few must avoid and abandon chronic health "problems" -- your bad back or bum knee.  Don't even read an article or listen to t.v. when they say, "astounding new findings and theories concerning the growth of lung cancer."  You want to read that?  Why?  To prepare yourself? That is not a reason.  There is no way in the ordinary world to disprove it, but you've got to smell that "being prepared" is not what is going on.  Although it sounds like just plain good sense to be prepared, it is not.

     Let me give you a real physical piece of why.  For a person to do This there is a certain kind of potential wiring that has to be already extant before you ever find This.  The idea of in some way preparing yourself is almost of no significance (look at how you ended up here).  If you belong here and continue in This, you have no right to suffer.  That doesn't mean that you will never have a cold again or stub your toe or get stung by a bee.  But remember, there is a difference between pain and suffering.  The point is that for someone doing This, it will finally simply happen that there is, at the primal level, a certain reality to illness and death that has nothing to do with your attempt to live above the Line.  What you will finally do is virtually abandon all illness and doctors.  It is no longer a game.  The more you can activate your system above the Line, the less likelihood that you will be involved with some lingering illness leading to death.  I am not going to explain this and I can't prove it to you.  Being sick cannot be a hobby for you involved in This.  As long as you're driven to think about health, you're in danger of being sick.  There is nothing to plan for; the only thing worthwhile for the Few is to attempt to do This Thing.  If you do, you are still going to die, but between here and there, you have no business being sick.  You should just keep going until the energy is gone -- you'll be standing there whistling a tune and fall like a sack of bricks.  There is an absolute reality to this:  I am not just being funny.  You are either alive or dead.  You can either stand on your leg or you can't, and maybe it should be looked at.  You should not think about it because there is nothing to think about.  It is not a hobby for the Few.

     The reality behind people being in some way super-conscious, being able to operate on some different level, can be quite directly and correctly described.  Ordinary consciousness deals solely at the level of form -- that is what being human is.  That is what being ordinary is.  On the higher level, there is literally no form to what seems to be the infrastructure between people.  There is no form to the so-called institutions. There is no form to the apparent animosity between nations.  There is no form to anything.  But that is the only way that ordinary consciousness can operate and it serves a purpose.  To be freed from it is astounding:  everything is balanced, including the tension that holds it all together.

     At the ordinary level it is all a very personal matter:  humanity imagines there is a great depth and complexity to it.  And there is none.  There is no great complex struggle going on between the forms of people.  It is just the world populated by walking fire hoses, water coming in one end and going out another.  And that's it.  The world is full of weighty things unless you don't look back and you are prepared to be astonished.  Prepared to find a hobby beyond suffering and being stupid and being serious.  You can't be worried about what tomorrow will bring when you can't worry about what will bring tomorrow.  You can't worry about where you will be in the future when you can't worry about where the future will be in you.