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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk 81, Sept 8, 1983, runtime 1:45
[“Triads." There is a built-in feeling in everyone of losing control and terminal aggravation. Everyone wants to be told what to do about this. All relationships/activity is triadial --involves a third force which should be considered as: Everything Else. The most stable of triads is an individual personal life. A triad will never change without your personal effort to do something different. It takes a kind of bravery to do this; to willfully act differently --outside your normal mechanical range. If you will act differently it is absolutely guaranteed to change the current triad: i.e., everything. The degree of change required is only enough that you know it --can feel it. If your willful change results in a crumbling of the triad --a 50% chance this will occur --in a way not according to your desires, you will nevertheless not be displeased. ]
[You should ask the question: what is going on that all men are born with built-in complaints? Growth always accompanied by discomfort --dissatisfaction. This expanding transfer of energy results in the feeling of being attacked and of being incomplete. No psychological explanation --it is based in the physical energy transfers necessary for the growth of Life. ]
[The feeling of separateness is absolutely required or nobody would accomplish anything. You cannot appeal to anything external to the system for succor. ]
[Spontaneity is an illusion. Ordinary spontaneity must be premeditated. Everybody is constantly spontaneous in that they don't know what they're going to say next. You must feel the reality of "I'm responsible for my consciousness right now, for what it is doing/experiencing". ]
[1:40 comments to Group re: public phase
Transcript
CHANGING YOUR POSITION IN A TRIAD
Document: 81, September 8, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983
I am going to talk as plainly as is profitably possible. No one in the ordinary world knows what they are doing -- no one. Everyone feels lost. Everyone feels as though some great calamity is hiding around the corner and nothing can save them from it.
The desire to worship something is hard wired into everyone's circuitry. This desire has nothing to do with igniting the higher areas of the nervous system. You should be able to See within yourself and others that it is built into the system to feel helpless, to feel as though, "I'm about to be abandoned. Were it not for this one woman or man I've got -- and I can't be too sure about them -- I would be lost. I would probably go back to drugs or drinking and I would just die."
There is built into humanity a need for some great comforter, some external guide: "My life is in terrible shape, I am scared, and I need help, I need comfort." A man engages in imaginary prayer or goes to a priest, a rabbi, or a psychiatrist, and says, "Here I am back in my old position where I feared I would end up. My personal relationships are breaking up, my wife's about to leave me, my job is falling apart. I'm back to situations in life that I thought I had abandoned previously and it's driving me crazy." It is part of an ordinary man's condition to want somebody to say, "There, there, it's alright and I will tell you what to do. Simply look in your holy book to chapter 5, page 76." "Simply look right here in this dream analysis guide where it says, 'thou shalt do so and so.'" That is what everyone ordinarily is looking for. It is part of being alive. It is a part of the role parents play to children. That is one reason why it is a waste of time for someone in This Thing to ever look back. Your parents did not do anything to you, either good or bad; it was just the part they played in the Grid-work of Life. It simply happened. Many people of course still look to their parents, still have that desire to have a parent comfort them, even after their mother and father have been dead for years. Their parents serve as an external standard, an external guide.
You have to See for yourself that there is never anything new, there are no new situations. The players may change, the names may change, you may be in a different city, but there is nothing new. There are physically these situations I have described to you as triads. Everyone feels it; it is that which appears to be the immediate personal relationships in your life and these can be seen literally as triads. You can easily observe any situation as being two forces going on: "There is me and somebody else." There is always at least that or not enough is going on to activate the screen of consciousness' attention. There have to be two forces. Let's say you are out walking, doing nothing in particular, and a drunk stranger in a pickup truck drives by and yells, "Out of the way fatso!" Then there is a triad. You feel alive -- consciousness is being fed -- and if nothing else exciting happens the rest of the day, you may drag the incident out for another two or three hours. You may be lying in bed at one o'clock that night, still not asleep, with nothing else to think about, and suddenly you remember you and that guy in the pickup truck. There are you and that guy -- two forces -- but there is also Third force. Triads go beyond what seems to be the obvious: it's me and the truck driver, it's me and my job, it's me and my mate. You won't go wrong to start there. There is one and two, but there is also a third something which you can Consider as everything else.
When it gets down to what seems to be one's personal, individual life, you have the most stable of triads; a stable triad that contains what appears to be one's own "I". It is that which appears to be one's own personality, that which contains one's sexual, friendship, and vocational attractions. Unless someone does something extraordinary like ignite the nervous system at a higher level than it is now functioning, this stable triad is not going to move. It is only the ordinary who dream otherwise. Consider a triad based upon your sexual attractions: there is you and this other man or woman. It may be somebody different once a year, or the same person for the last ten years, but there is you, the other person and there is this unsuspected, unaccountable Third force. At the ordinary level of consciousness, the values placed on these three are not going to change to any degree worth talking about. If you are attracted to a drunken sorehead, that is what you will always be attracted to. And only an ordinary person believes otherwise. "I'll get a new hairdo, I'll move to another city and find a new boyfriend." "Every job I get ends up in conflict; well, I'll change jobs." "All my marriages have failed. I'm still looking for the right person." You have got to See for yourself that all of this is doomed. You must drag yourself away. You must get beyond the stage of believing, "Alright, there's something in my psychological background that makes me argue with my boss and become attracted to men who mistreat me." That is child's play. That means nothing.
There is something physically afoot here. It is the transfer of energy; it is the necessity of having triads that everything is built upon. A triad will not change. Nothing is mechanically going to make it change. You were born into this life, you are now a piece of this fabric and you are here to serve a purpose. Life does not go back. It cannot, and I assure you, it will not. Life will not go back and change the entire fabric because one of the threads somewhere yells out, "Hey, give me a break, ease up on me!"
You cannot go back and change a cell. Can you imagine an ankle cell saying, "I'm a cell down here in the ankle and I'm too close to the feet and feet smell. Feet are a different thing than ankles and I don't even want to associate with them. I want to move to another neighborhood." Once it is established, a toe cell is going to play out a toe. In the triad where you are .paordinarily playing out what seems to be "I", you are taking in certain kinds of energy, transforming it, and then passing it on.
Neuralize triads, starting with what seem to be the most immediate triads; what seems to be one's personal life. There is nothing that will ever change in a triad unless one part of it makes a willful effort. There is only one way to create change, no matter how your "I" wants to specify change: "Well, I want him to change. I want her to change. I want those people at work to change. I want my family to change." You are still talking about one leg of the triad. There is only one way to change a triad; there is only one way to change reality. You have to change you -- personally. This sounds simple, but remember Real change does not include thinking about change, whining about change, or dreaming that the other person in the triad will change. I repeat, you are in a sad situation if you do not already have your own specific suspicion that "things" do not change.
The only way you can change a triad is for you to do something differently. You have to change what amounts to your own position in the triad. If you willfully force yourself to act differently, then I can give you an absolute guarantee -- absolute, no conditions -- it will change everything in that triad. It is not a matter of if, it is not even a matter of whether you do it right. This is an absolute do or die method.
For anyone who asks, "How can I change the situation I'm in?" All you have to do is change one part of the triad. And there is only one part you can change. You can't change the others; you've spent all your life trying to do that. You have spent your life pleading with other people, threatening or cajoling them. You have done whatever the voices in you told you was appropriate to do: beg, whine, cry, moan, get upset, be haughty. But you have had all your life to find out -- that does not change anybody. So we can eliminate one leg of the triad. And as for Third force, you don't even know what it is, so how are you going to change it?
When you change what you are in a relationship, it is a do or die method because it affects everything else. There is only one thing that can be done -- change what you are in the triad -- and the only change required is just enough for you to feel the change. That is all that is required; in other words, the bare minimum. You only have to change enough so that you feel the change. When you do that, there is a 50-50 chance that the triad will arrange itself in a more agreeable way to you. But there is also a 50 percent chance that the whole triad will crumble, almost immediately. That is a fact. But I will give you one more guarantee. If the situation seems to crumble and you did it, you will not be displeased. If there seem to be voices and feelings in you that say you cannot tolerate a certain situation, and you make enough change in your part of the triad so that you feel the change, if it does crumble, I guarantee you will not be displeased. Suppose your sexual relationship suddenly is over -- you are aware that "it's gone", the triad is gone -- if you did it, you will not be displeased. This is true even if your original intent was to rectify the situation: "I want to hold on to it, but I just want to clean it up a bit." By acting upon what I have said, which is the only thing possible, it may crumble right before your eyes. But you will not be displeased. On the contrary, look at the rest of ordinary life. There is the continual feeling that everything is crumbling: "I am dying from this and it can't be fixed." It cannot be fixed because it is not broken. The triad is established and everything is just right. By attempting to ignite the higher end of the nervous system, what you are about to do is break up triads. Those involved in This Thing are in a sense attempting to break every mechanical relationship they ever had. Do not take this into the realm of imagination; this does not mean that you should never again speak to your family; it does not mean you can't get along in Life. But you must begin to See how the kind of triads you are involved in operate, for you will find yourself in the same position wherever you go until you learn to manipulate your own triads.
We are talking about the difference between form and energy. We are talking about everyone taking life personally; about you taking what seems to be yourself personally; taking triads -- all situations -- personally. Yet anyone involved in the attempt to ignite the higher regions of the nervous system cannot attack Life for being arranged this way; it is not open to attack. You cannot go out in Life and say, "Listen, you people would not take your families personally, don't take your sexual attractions personally." That is insanity. Triads are necessary. Out in Life it is necessary to take things personally. This is true throughout the whole fabric -- the Grid -- of Life. Only a few people can get free from it; that is what This Thing is about. The Few cannot take Life personally.
Instead of criticizing Life, all of you should be asking yourselves questions such as, "What is it that is going on, that all of humanity seems to be born dissatisfied?" It is not some form of "psychological" damage done to people by other people. You have to remember, there have never been "other people". The answer to the question, "Was it caused by birth or by experience?" must be that it is all birth. Because your parents' experience was based upon birth. There is nowhere to look for the cause of dissatisfaction. Nothing is being done to you; nothing has been done to anyone. Instead, one attempting to do This Thing should look within and Consider, "What is going on in me and everyone else? Because there is this raging complaint within me. I cannot still it. I cannot satisfy it. It just seems to go on and on."
Notice that you can be sitting around doing nothing in particular -- sort of taking time out -- and you will shift right into that gear: "I shouldn't be sitting here like this, I should be doing something to make me lose weight. I should be doing something right now that will make me rich." You and everyone else were born with a raging -- or at least a continually dissatisfied -- pacing, clawing, growling beast within. It is in everybody. And you did not get it from anywhere in Life; it did not come from the way your parents treated you. It was not done to you; you were born with it.
So what is going on? How can it be? Has Life produced within itself something that will turn on itself? Are we to assume that we are living inside the body of a Life which is perhaps no better off than we are? And that all these discomforts we experience are its discomforts? I won't leave you with that. The answer is no. So the question is, "What's going on?".
It is energy. It is the transfer of energy necessary for Life's growth. Whenever something is growing, there is a kind of discomfort. Cells die; muscle tissue is broken down; blood is pushed from one place to another; calcium is moved about as bones expand. There is a sense in which pain is required to do anything in terms of growth. Look at the natural process you went through growing up physically, or at what happens now when you try to take up ballet, weight lifting, or some other new sport that works muscles you haven't worked. There is a pain in it. Things are broken down; energy is moved from one place to another. That is what you are serving -- Life's growth. Only the ordinary take it personally.
Triads go beyond just what appears to be you and somebody else and Third force involved in a particular situation. For example, what is it within Man that seems to continually attack him? What is it within you that complains you are too dumb, you look awful and you have unacceptable sexual daydreams? The more sophisticated humanity becomes, the more personal -- or so it seems -- this internal feeling of being attacked becomes. But this is not some psychological problem you personally have. It may appear so because it can now talk. (By the way, if it could not talk, you would not be suffering in the way in which you are.) There is a triad extant in the feeling that, "There is something in me worthy of listening to these voices that attack myself."
This is impossible to Hear at the ordinary level of consciousness. But can any of you Neuralize it -- just remember what I have said without allowing the ordinary circuitry to think about it? Neuralize the question, "What is going on that I and everyone else is born with a self-condemning voice that seems to have specific complaints?" How is it that everyone is allowed to grow up with that? If we are indeed in the midst of a living thing and we're playing a vital part, what is going on that we continually suffer? How is it that "I" want to do certain things, and at the same time internal voices seem to condemn that behavior? How can this be?
Do you suspect that when I ask, "How can this be?" I am asking you much more than how it can be? I am not simply asking you to come up with an answer. But for you to Understand the question will give you a glimpse of something beyond the continual, present sensation you have that everything is happening to you personally and something should be done about it. Unless you begin to Understand the question -- unless you do something out of the ordinary -- forget it, because nothing is going to be done about it. Under ordinary conditions nothing will change because nothing is supposed to change.
Back to the question: how is it that the whole world's population is in situations that they continually bitch and complain about? How can it be that everyone is apparently made to suffer? Out in the ordinary world, it is only in mental hospitals that you will find people who feel everything is fine. "You mean you like your marriage?" "Yeah, it's alright." "Oh, come on." "Well, we do have some problems." What purpose is being served by that exchange? It is transferring energy. It is, relatively speaking, a stable triad of what seems to be you and another person -- that is, First and Second force -- in operation. And when you involved Third force, a wider scale comes into play. You need to begin to See this for yourself.
It has to do with your position in the Grid -- the fabric of Life. You and the other apparent person -- two forces -- are situated in a particular position and are serving the purpose of transferring a certain type of energy. This is all built into the system and nothing is going to change it. A slight shake of the fabric is not going to change it. The architect is not going to redesign the system. Everything is operating as it should be and Life's not going to come back around and risk upsetting everything just to please you.
All triads are arranged in such a way that the participants feel, "How can things be arranged this way?" They are arranged correctly. It is right for you and everyone else to constantly cry out that things (including you) must be changed. Even before you Understand this, the proof of its rightness is to look around you. Is it the norm to cry out for change? Yes? Well, there is your answer. It is serving a physical purpose in Life.
The whole world says they are dissatisfied. How can you call that wrong? That is the Yellow circuit talking. It is words, passing along the energy -- that "I'm incomplete and you're incomplete" -- for growth. And it comes out in complaints: "Why don't you treat me better?" "Why can't I ever do anything right?" The words, the apparent operation of what seems to be "I" in the Yellow circuit, are of almost no significance. What is of significance is that they pass along energy in a particular way.
There is a physical basis for the transfer of energy that is holding triads together. You cannot interfere with one part of it and not affect the rest. That is not psychological theory. That is a law of physics. "You mean the other person will do what I want?" No. The situation will change and you will be freed from it. If any situation is driving you crazy, all you have to do is literally change the way you behave toward it. Change just enough so that you know you have changed. Don't look for anything mystical in this, just do something. Put forth an effort, just enough so that you feel it. The nervous system is like an open conduit, with energy flowing in and energy flowing out. Put on an absolute willful act so that you know, "this is not me", and you have changed where you are plugged into the triad. The other person will look at you and that will be the end of it. They won't know what happened, but you will See it. And even if the entire situation seems to fly apart, you'll have to go in the closet and grin.
You cannot do This as long as you take the form of things -- the voices within you and everyone else -- as being the correct explanation of what's going on. Because the expressed dissatisfaction in the voices -- yours and everyone else's -- is part of the proper operation of things. If I could go in and answer your voices and arrange a relationship to suit them, that would be the end of that particular relationship. You have a 50-50 chance if you do it yourself willfully, but if someone else changed the triad, that would be the end of it. And you would never know why. Of course, the Yellow circuit would have an explanation: "I just got fed up with it."
It is part of being ordinary to want outside comfort and guidance. It is part of being ordinary to dream that the gods will come down and change the whole planet in order to solve one of your apparent personal problems. But that would affect everything. To solve the complaints you have would destroy human life.
It is an illusion to believe you are separate from anything, much less Life. There is no equation of "I + Not-I = Everything." Yet this feeling of separateness that all of humanity has is necessary. Without it, nothing would get done, nothing would move in the body of Life. People would not attempt to get the better of one another; one person would never try to sell his car for more than he paid for it. A business would not manufacture products and market them for profit. Men and women would not try to pick each other up sexually. No one would discuss baseball or relationships or business ventures, were it not for this feeling of separateness, because nothing would be happening. There has to be more than one force, there must be something you are apparently working against, for a transfer of energy to take place.
Remember that this description is just one place to start. Consider that you cannot be separate. There is no way out. You are in the midst of something alive and you are part of it. There is nothing foreign. Remember this when you wonder how other people can be so unreasonable. Consider it when you hear voices within criticizing your own behavior. You are not going to get rid of dissatisfaction. That would be possible only if something were broken. Then we could all get together and fix it and send the bill to the gods. But nothing is broken. You are supposed to be doing exactly what you are doing, including complaining about it.
People often speculate that it would be wonderful if everyone could be more spontaneous. Do you see that the only thing an ordinary person can come up with to do is that which they can come up with to do -- which is what they should have done? Do you suspect that true spontaneity would not be "spontaneous" in the way that people normally use the word? Only a willful act would be spontaneous in any real sense, and the consequences of such a willful act would be very far reaching. That is why this course of action is not readily available. Everyone can't go around acting like that. It would lead to an unacceptable instability; things would fall apart.
But all of you must learn to willfully act. You are going to have to willfully feed energy into This Thing. And the first step is to find out that you can literally feed energy into yourself in a way that is not available inside of these static, already-established triads where you ordinarily serve your purpose as a Fred or a Mary. I will grant you it is almost impossible, but you can change. You cannot change the other person in a triad. Third force cannot change; it is not equipped to change. But with a certain kind of effort, having a Real Aim, you can do it. And then you simply do it. It requires bravery of a kind you never imagined.
