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Summary by TK

Jan Cox Talk 80, Sept 1, 1983, runtime 1:30

  [Reality of consciousness is physical, chemical. Lateral expansion = flashes of feelings of not being me. Being able to vibrate along w/ everyone else. ]
  [None have any secrets. No longer the same person you were a year ago. The feeling to be able to expand horizontally, to do something you wouldn't have done before. No psychological past or explanations. ]
  [What consciousness is: a background, literally a magnetic field at the high end of the nervous system. Energy flows up from below and when it takes form it is consciousness. ]
  [Criticism of This Thing = becoming the voices. Everyone hears voices. You take the voices to be you. Dual consciousness: "I hear something in me speaking" "talking to myself". The voices come from Life, from being alive. ]
  [Court recorder analogy. What doesn't get recorded in court is effectively nonexistent. Don't let the voices get recorded on the screen of consciousness.  Energy must be stored to be recorded. Energy taking form as daydreams but doesn't become a part of memory. If there is not a reason to remember...you won't. A connection needed. ]
  [The field of consciousness is impartial. No one is responsible for the voices. ]
  [Voices run through you as long as you're alive. Responsible for detaching from the voices. Form of the voices can never be changed. Can expand to the ultimate of being impartial--that is the second stage of vertical advancement. You should have some non-ordinary feel beyond the Yellow Circuit by now. An unnatural control of being able to detach. All tasks lead to this. ]
  [Changing blood chemistry by squeezing at the temples. Clear alcohol fuzz for example. ]
  [It is freedom to step away from the voices. Be consciousness without thinking about it. ]
  [The great human drama: taking in the same type of energy and transferring it over and over the same way. Being asleep. ]
  [Consider: Don't look back. I is not the Yellow Circuit. ]
  [Collective bonfire of all complaints/voices written out. Never to be identified with again.

Transcript

NOT MERGING WITH THE VOICES                

Document:  80,  September 1, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983                          

    Some of you felt understandably confused by my descriptions of expanding one's nervous system, one's consciousness, and my saying that the reality behind people's idea of mystical states lies above the ordinary level of consciousness.  It simply does, physically.  This is not spiritual talk: the reality of it is physical, chemical, and electrical.  The reality is activating and operating the nervous system above the present level of consciousness, above your past, because up there there is no looking back.

     I have also discussed a kind of lateral expansion throughout the circuitry, and the feelings that some of you have had that electrical energy is about to burst through you:  "I feel like my mind is about to go." or, "I get flashes of feeling like I'm not me, and it sure is fun but it scares the hell out of me!" All of this could be described as the first stage of extending your consciousness above the Horizontal Line. It is a feeling that you're in sympathetic vibration with everyone else in the world, with all of Life.  I've suggested things which you initially felt  were impossible for you, but it is getting to a point where you now feel you are almost beyond fear or humiliation.  It's almost a feeling of,  "What else is there?"  But all of you still have one thing, one secret, personal peccadillo, something so deep-rooted that you assume that I would never say, "Everyone go do this."  Somewhere you have the tacit hope that this one thing  won't ever be required.  Of course, I could just say to you individually, "Go do it!"  Let me remind you that none of you have any secrets.  If you were to write down your worst fear, it would not be a secret, and other people wouldn't even consider it fearful.  It's fearful to you only because you find it fearful.

     Try and Consider lateral expansion of the nervous system.  Any of you who are sincerely involved with This Thing have had a taste of this.  In a sense, you are not the same person you were a year ago.  You can go out on the street right now and do things you would have never been able to do.  Your circuitry would have told you, "I just can't do that."  But you can do it.  That is the first stage:  being able to horizontally expand the nervous system beyond these wired-in fears, to the point that you realize you can do almost anything.

     The reason you always felt, "I can't do that" is not something in your psychological past.  There is a literal, physical, chemical, electrical reason why you can't do certain things.  Two men pass each other in the street.  One growls, "Get out of my way!" and the other steps aside, all the while feeling, "I could have done otherwise."  Look at the obvious:  there's got to be a mix of energies.  You cannot have the whole world fight back when someone says, "Step aside."  Neither can you have the whole world step aside.  If you had either, it would be the straight-line phenomenon.  And it would be the end of us all.  There has to be a resilience to Life itself.

     I want you to Consider that there is no psychological explanation for why things operate the way they do.  There is a real explanation:  you are part of Life; part of a living organism, and its energy flows through you to take form in what seems to be human behavior, human speech, human consciousness.  I am going to describe more specifically what consciousness is and the way in which it ordinarily operates.

     Consciousness is a background.  It is literally a magnetic field.  At the ordinary level, there is no such thing as pure consciousness.  You cannot be ordinarily conscious without being conscious of something. Consciousness is not separate from what's imprinted on it.  Where the imprinting takes place -- where incoming energy/information is grounded out in this magnetic field -- is where you feel conscious, where you feel "I", at the higher end of the nervous system.  Energy enters the system, and when it takes form it is printed -- stored -- on the field of consciousness.

     Let's go back to my description of voices.  I said that everyone hears voices;  unless you are insane -- unless you have deviated too far from that certain uncertain pitch everyone takes to be themselves -- you hear voices.  The same thing continually happens to everyone.  You hear a voice -- the sound of energy running through the system -- and you take it personally.  Everyone hears voices, and at Line level everyone believes the voices are them, just as you merge with the screen of consciousness and take its imprint as being you.

     I have described in many ways the kind of dual consciousness that a person can almost feel taking place.  For example, you might be driving in your car, minding your own business, when suddenly in your peripheral vision you see someone go zooming by and almost hit you.  You turn around and a voice in you jumps on that person:  "I should have known!  A woman driver!"

     The voice is there, but it has nothing to do with you if you are sincerely attempting to ignite higher areas of your nervous system.  It is certainly there, but there is nothing to be gained from trying to argue with that voice.  It did not come from the prejudice of your parents; it did not come from the hostile nature you have developed since your wife left you.  The voice came from Life, from Life running in you.  It came from being alive.  That is the way things operate at Line level:  something happens, you turn around, a voice speaks, and you take it personally.

     Here is another way to Consider how consciousness can and must be used.  Picture the read-out screen on a computer.  Dual consciousness operates in this way:  information is entered into the computer; words are typed in on the keyboard, but then you have to take another step in order to burn this information into memory.  What you have to do is catch it before it's burned in.  You almost can't help what appears on the screen.  If you are alive, the voices will run.  Little bits and pieces of information, meaningless phrases and opinions, will flit across the screen.  It's simply energy running through your system.  But you don't have to merge with it;  you don't have to let it burn itself into Line-level consciousness.  It's like images flying out of a movie projector:  you know they're there, you see them coming, but at the last second you move the screen.

     Energy continually runs through your system until it finds a home:  until it is given form.  And it's form is "I".  That's where the energy stops:  "I" think, "I" feel,  "Oh, no, a woman driver" -- it's all energy taking form.

     And things continually happen which never become part of consciousness' permanent record.  When they reach the field of consciousness, they are not strong enough to become part of stored memory. Everyday you go out jogging down the same streets and you always pass a sign that says, "Burnttree Circle".  Everyday you see that.  But one day someone asks, "What's the first street sign you pass by?" and you realize, "I don't know.  I see it every day and I don't know."

     You have no need to know.  If you had a need to know, if it had some connection to that which is already burned into your memory, you would have known it from the first day.  You might look up and see "Burnttree Circle", run a few more steps and suddenly remember, "That girl I met in a bar two weeks ago said she lived on Burnttree Circle."  Then, if someone later asked you about the street name, you would know it.

     You constantly see things -- that is, they do reach the screen of consciousness -- but do not have a strong enough connection in your wiring to become part of permanent memory.  The only things you do have an interest in, under ordinary conditions, are those which connect with something that is already a part of your memory.  But what I want you to notice is how you can see something -- "Burnttree Circle"-- and two seconds later, if it was not strong enough to impress itself on the field of consciousness, it is gone.

     It's all related to my descriptions of the voices.  No one is responsible for the voice in them that says, "I should have known it was a woman driver!"  You're not responsible for it being there, you're not responsible for what it says.  And you can't live by that voice.  When it comes up, you cannot merge with it so that it becomes part of the record.  And you only have a split second -- the speed of light -- to stop it. These voices have been in you for years.  They are in everybody.  You are not responsible for that voice or what it says, but when you merge with it, it becomes true: it becomes form.  You have solidified one of the pathways through which energy takes form as you.

     Everyone here has voices. This does not mean everybody is no good.  Everybody is no good and everybody is not no good.  Everybody, at the ordinary level, is irrelevant.  And the voices are irrelevant because they are the ordinary level.  The voices are the predetermined manner in which energy -- which is your life -- flows through the nervous system to reach the Line and take form as "I", your sensation of "I". On a less describable level, it comes out as "I-am-having-thoughts."  But it's the same thing.  It's energy taking form and the form it takes is you.

     You all have voices that rise up and attack other people, other countries, other drivers.  You have voices that want to attack me.  You are not responsible for these voices being there.  But you are responsible for not taking them personally.  You can and must stop these voices from becoming part of the record.  They can run almost up to the screen.  The projector is on and in mid-air -- at the speed of light -- you see it coming.  You can see the picture before it hits;  you know what it is, you have, after all, seen it all before.  And before it hits the screen you can disassociate yourself from it.  Distance yourself.  Turn your attention away; move the screen:  Don't let that image be burned into memory.  It is the same thing as running past "Burnttree Circle".  You see it, and let it go.  It does not become part of the permanent record of consciousness.

     At the ordinary level, you can always come up with excuses for your voices; consciousness can always find an explanation:  how there were unusual circumstances in this case --  "Well, I was very upset."  "I ran into an old friend and I had half a bottle of champagne before I said that!"  If you accept such excuses in yourself, you have forgotten about the Third Force.  Because that is what circumstances are, and they explain nothing.  There will always be circumstances.  But so what?  It doesn't matter whether your mother died yesterday, whether you're drunk, whether you just wrecked your car.  If you let any hostile voice from the past speak for you, it is unforgivable.  End of subject.  It can't be explained away.

     You must See the voices for what they are and stop merging with them.  It's not a matter of suffering over them or what they say.  If you do that, you're back to believing in them.  It is a matter of Seeing it for yourself.  Imagine meeting your favorite spiritual hero -- who, for purposes of my example, lives above the Line.  Someone who is more conscious.  Can you imagine his meeting you and one of his voices turning on you because of your race or the size of your nose or how you're dressed?  Can you imagine any excuse whatsoever for such a person letting that voice become his spokesman?  Can you conceive of someone who is alive above the ordinary level of consciousness allowing such a voice to be them?

     As long as you don't merge with the voice, you did not do it;  it is not you, not part of your permanent record.  It was potential.  It was information typed onto the computer screen by Life.  Ordinarily you would have no choice but to store it.  Ordinarily, that voice would be you.  But you should now have a choice. You are the court reporter and in the back of the room you hear someone yell, "Kill the judge!"  You hear it -- the same way you see "Burnttree Circle" when you run past -- but you don't record it.  It remains meaningless, impersonal noise.  It's the sound of a car backfiring on the street, it's the sound of your lungs pumping, your heart beating.

     You can hear the voices and not let them become a part of the record in you.  That is your choice in This.  And after a point, it's no longer a choice.  It's a duty, a responsibility.  If this were not so, your only possibility would be to find a system of comfort, a savior to hug your lower circuits and non-verbally go, "There, there...."  And that is no possibility at all.

     The lower circuits don't talk, at least in words.  Energy running through the lower circuits does not take form in words, but in action.  That's why I have pointed out that if you truly love someone, you don't have to say, "I love you."  Just hug them.  That is lower circuit talking;  that is lower circuit transfer of energy. The need, which all of you feel, the dream of finding a savior, a system of comfort, is real.  It's built into the lower circuits.  It's in your past, so it's real, but it won't do anything for you.  It may make you feel better temporarily, but it won't ignite the higher nervous system.  It won't produce growth.

     These voices in you are nothing but energy.  And it's going to run through you as long as you are alive. The pattern of its flow, how it takes form, is predetermined.  It's the structure of your system.  And it's absolutely predictable.  Every time someone almost hits your car, the same voices will speak.  If this does not strike you immediately, if you don't already have some familiarity with this predictable repertoire, you've wasted your time here.  Everything your voices have to say, you have already heard.

     Throughout the day, you're continually bombarded by impressions, by energy.  And you can't take it all in.  It can't all reach the screen or you'd be overloaded.  Your screen would burn up.  Consciousness would shut itself off.  So under ordinary conditions, all you do is think the same things you've always thought.  Energy continues to run down the same dead-end streets over and over.  Your system is wired to receive only certain kinds of energy;  it's wired to process those energies in the same predictable way. And at the ordinary level, there's no possibility of seeing, doing, being anything new.

     All you have to do is try it.  Try to think something new.  The Yellow Circuit will say, "I can think anything I want to," "I can change my mind anytime," "I can do whatever I want."   But you can't.  The best you can do is go down the other side of a one-way street so that what used to be 'yes' becomes 'no':  "Yes, once I was a Republican, but now I'm a Democrat."  "Once I was an alcoholic, but now I"m anti-alcohol."  But nothing has really changed.

     The energy flow in you -- how it takes form as you at Line level -- is already established.  Changing that process is not what This Thing is about.  This is about transcending the Line level you;  diverting energy from the process and using that energy to push yourself above the Line, and to expand your system below the Line into areas that were previously unavailable to you.  That's when you find that you can do almost anything.  But you have to reach that point of Horizontal expansion in order to have a basis for true Vertical expansion.

     If there were such a thing as pure consciousness at or below Line level, it would literally be a blank screen.  Ordinary consciousness is a background, and the only way that you seem to be conscious is for something to be imprinted on it.  It cannot be blank and under ordinary conditions never is, even during sleep.  Energy continually flows through the nervous system and finds form in what seems to be Yellow Circuit activity.

     Recently I have described energy in terms of electrical charge;  energy becoming form in the electrical sense.  Consider that there can also be change in a chemical sense.  The blood continually circulates through the body.  There is a way to affect the blood flow when it reaches a certain point in the brain.  You can squeeze it.  You can chemically affect it, once you know how.  I'm not going to tell you much about this, but with some of you it is already happening.  I'll give you one example:  You can pour alcohol into your system to the point that you should be falling-down drunk, but as the blood reaches a certain place you can squeeze it, almost as though you were pressing the alcohol out.  (This is not to say that everyone should drink, by the way.)  I am saying that physically, literally, you can affect the chemistry of the blood in a way that no one imagines.  You can squeeze it just as it makes the top loop.  Of course, if you can do that, you can also look into the Future/Now, because you have to operate at a different speed  in order to do it.  You can't be right behind it.  You have to put yourself in the crack before it happens;  you have to do it before it is done to you.

     Since I mentioned alcohol:  some of you may  have no desire whatsoever to drink, even socially.  It just never occurs to you;  you don't like the taste, whatever.  And if that's the case with you, stick with it.  A little alcohol is all it takes for some people to take some of these hostile voices personally.

     All of you have had at least a glimpse of what I am describing as stopping the voices before they reach the screen.  You have seen it happen; you stood right beside something and it did not burn itself into consciousness.   For a split second, you heard voices hollering, but you turned away.  It was simply noise at the back of the courtroom.  You found out that it all goes on, but, "I can not-be-it":  conversely, if "I-am-it", nothing is going on.  "I am me, back where I always was -- merged with mechanical, automatic energy that takes form as me.  All my energy is being used up at and below Line level."  That is being engaged, that is being an idiot, that is being ordinary.  And it becomes an unforgivable sin, because you cannot stay there and do This Thing.

     Whenever there is a hostile voice in you, you have two possibilities:  either you listen to it or don't listen to it.  You've had all your life to listen to it, and you should see by now that it says nothing of profit to you.  Your voices will never teach you anything new.

     The possibility of expansion lies not only in the unused part of the nervous system above the Line of ordinary consciousness, but also at and below the Line.  And with this lateral expansion comes the understanding that the voices -- "I like," "I hate," "I'm afraid," -- are irrelevant.  You find out you can step aside from all that;  you find what freedom truly is.  You walk down the street and go, "I'm singing in the rain," and not care who sees you, because at the moments you can do this, no one can see you.

     Consciousness cannot be opened up as long as you listen to the old voices, because they live in one place.  My fictitious, reasonably insane man would ponder, "These are the kinds of voices I've been hearing now for twenty-five, thirty, forty years...what's new?  What can I do with this old information?  How does this help me?"  You cannot look back.  There is nothing in these already-established patterns that is of any validity, other than as something to jump off from or turn inside out for your own benefit and pleasure.  The voices can be used on the basis of, "Oh, there you are again!"  A voice says, "You shouldn't hang around with people like that."  You can say, "Hey, I'm glad you reminded me."  and put on your coat and go hang around with those people.  "Boy, we would never act as dumb as that guy!"  Then you and the voice start doing an imitation of that guy.  Then, of course, the voice goes away.  There is no voice, and you experience a kind of freedom that can't be described:  "I can do this and the voice is just gone."  There is no feeling of shame, guilt, or suffering; no worry about, "What will people think of me?" There is no looking back.  You are dancing right on the edge of the Future/Now:  "I am doing that which my system was never equipped to do!"  You're right.  You have no ordinary business whatsoever doing that.  Tsk tsk tsk.  Except once you do that, there is no external standard, nobody to go "Tsk tsk tsk," because everybody is too busy doing their own "Tsks tsk tsk" to worry about you.

     There is a physical reality to what I am describing.  This is consciousness.  The upper end of the nervous system is a magnetic field.  Were it not for its established neurological paths, you would be conscious, but not as "you".  You wouldn't know it, you wouldn't be conscious of being conscious. Ordinary consciousness is a background, a possibility.  You must find this out inside yourself; it is not just some interesting theory.  Something is constantly going on:  "Did I hear him say something behind my back?"  and your system, being a living magnetic field, picks it up.  But much of what is going on does not get imprinted.  So the voices -- the energy finding form in you as words, daydreams, feelings -- flow on, and you can keep them from becoming "part of the record."  You keep consciousness from merging with that word, that daydream, that feeling.  Once it merges, you are done for.  You are looking at the past and whatever it is, you have already been there.  It leads nowhere.  It leads to your ordinary, continuing position in Life's short-term memory.  Life will never see you any more than you see "Burnttree Circle", if you are constantly merged with the ordinary level.

     When you keep consciousness from merging with the voices, there is a different feel to everything. You are closer to being able to keep the automatic mechanical energy from taking form.  You're closer to not being "you".   It is as if suddenly all the shutters in your head have been opened and fresh air blows through.  You can almost just be conscious, without thinking about anything.  It is being able to think without examples, it is being conscious without being conscious of.  Once you get a taste of that, ordinary consciousness tastes awfully dull.  It's heavy.  It's sour.  It's always on the verge of being terminal -- running down a dead-end street over and over.  You discover that ordinarily you are there, but absolutely nothing is going on, unless you catch yourself.  And when you do catch it, you'll see that it was all quite serious to the voices.  Maybe you can't sleep and you're sitting up smoking a cigarette at one-thirty in the morning, thinking about that woman or man.  It's a weighty problem; it's important.  Suddenly it strikes you:  "I sit here every night of my life, even the nights I'm not literally sitting here.  It's the same old thing, and it's going nowhere.  It is not a curse from the gods.  It's not something my parents did to me.  I have done this every day and night of my life.  This is being ordinarily conscious."  The background of consciousness and the energy flowing through it are one.  It's the way it's supposed to be.  The type of person you appear to be -- what you could call your role in life -- is the kind of energy transformation station you are. There is no appropriate word for this, but it is a sad, sad thing to ever get so much as a glimpse of this and then slip back to merging with all your ordinary voices.  Because then you are stuck with human consciousness:  the great human drama; with taking in the same kinds of energy, transforming it in the same way over and over, and taking it personally.  That is the way everyone is supposed to be, but for the Few there is another possibility.  If you stay involved with This Thing, you will find it harder and harder to go back there.  But in the beginning, all you can do is catch a glimpse -- a personal taste -- of what is going on -- then it's got you again.

     I want to leave you with one more thing to Neuralize.  "I" is not the Yellow Circuit.  Remember that regardless of what the Yellow Circuit tells you.  "I" is not the Yellow Circuit.