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Summary by TK

Jan Cox Talk 88, Nov 3, 1983, runtime 2:00

  [“How do you know who you are?--Part II" Streets of Rome analogy: activating new areas of the circuitry.]
  [Emotion: "octane rating" of energy transfers. The "melody" of the song of life. Three focuses for, or areas for feeding of emotion: two are mechanical: physical stability; psychological stability (identity); third is: work focus. 
  [TASK: 3 one-hour walks to Consider "How do you know who you are?" 
  [See Group Outline #88, titled "New Streets To Travel" for detail.]

  { Editor's note -- We are indeed planning to convert those outlines }

Transcript

NEW STREETS TO TRAVEL

Document:  88,  November 3, 1983
Copyright(c) Jan M. Cox, 1983                          

     Whether or not it strikes you in a blinding flash, you should now come close enough on occasions to smell this:  you cannot tell me what you're going to say next, and yet it happens.  You cannot tell me what you're going to feel next.  You have lived through all your days, just like everyone else, and neither you nor they know what you are going to say next.  You can attempt  to  communicate this to the Yellow Circuit, and it will go into a frenzy and shut down temporarily, or perhaps it can get a glimpse of how interesting the concept would be if it made sense.  But you can't hold onto this idea, although you have had plenty of occasions by now to smell something suspicious.  Obviously everyone is functioning; people are talking about everything from football scores to atomic physics, from computers to human relationships, and yet they do not know what they are going to say next.

     Consider the speed at which things operate internally -- an idea reaches the screen of consciousness and it's over.  Something else has already happened.  To the Yellow Circuitry itself, it appears that nothing has happened until it is on the screen, until the internal voices are talking.  You might say something which might astound someone listening, but if the truth be told, you are as surprised as they are.  This is getting right at the heart of the concept prevalent among contemporary man that there is an "I" inside, an ego, a personality, and then there is a soul that is somehow separate from the rest  of this.

     There is a tremendous chorus composed of the whole population of this planet in which everyone is speaking, singing, cursing, expressing regrets, and threatening their hoped-for revenges.  As long as you are engaged at this level, the truth for ordinary humanity is your truth.  As long as you are engaged at Line-level consciousness, you will believe, as does most of humanity, that these complex physical organisms are individual people.  But you do not have to study psychology or open up someone else's brain to try and find their soul or their spirit.  All you need do is delve into the laboratory right inside your own brain.  Consider the reality behind the fact that neither you nor anyone else knows what they are going to say next.

     I refer you back to the area of the apparent emotions.  I have described humanity being in a sense engaged in what appears to be a continuing soap opera.  Everyone seems doomed to suffer, not only in the physical sense, but also in being sad, fearful and depressed.  I remind you again, nothing is wrong; nothing is broken.  Humanity is not running wild or out of control.  People are not misled.  Humanity is not awaiting a second messiah who will snap his fingers and say, "All right, everyone quit suffering."  There is no such thing as suffering.  There is the .paword "suffering" and there is the reality of it, but the word "suffering" is nothing.

     Life is doing something and it is expressing itself through humanity.  For example, in our lifetime in the western world, areas of liberation have been proclaimed:  the feminist movement, homosexual liberation, the civil rights movement.  If you are observing this in an ordinary way, it may appear that humanity is becoming more civilized and better educated.  It is not that that's untrue, but as long as you stay hypnotized, affixed to the same place in this living grid of energy transfer, you will see these examples as resulting from some kind of individual struggle or confrontation.  Again, it's not that that's untrue.  The apparent people involved with those causes were apparently doing something, but what were they going to say next?  Nobody ever knew because they were not talking, it was Life speaking through them.

     What if you could look upon all of Life as being another person in an exaggerated form?  What appears to be an individual's foibles:  your uncle's drinking problems, for example, are nothing compared to Life itself having a drinking problem.  Of course, "drinking problem" is just words, but it is Life having too many drinks.  Your uncle may appear to have this problem that seems real enough, but multiply that problem by all the people who drink on this planet.  In contrast to that, your uncle's problem is almost nothing.  Or perhaps his problem is like one thought that this big person, Life, had -- one little passing feeling of, "Whew, I've got to cut down."

     Consider that the whole of Life is another person, and that our lifetime this person has been going through a great sexual revolution, concerning attitudes towards women, sex and homosexuality.  Although the actions and attitudes of people appear to be what is undergoing a change, it's not people.  It is Life growing and people are all you can see at the ordinary level of consciousness.  You attribute individual thought, planning, and motivation to other people, and conversely, they attribute it to you.  Yet if that were true, then tell me what are you going to say next? 

     Humanity has always had a number of different voices, all of which have had ready audiences.  Consider the doom-sayers.  It is nothing new; it's just people saying that the Russians and the Americans are going to blow each other up or this little problem in Latin America is just going to consume everybody.  As far back as the Yellow Circuit was activated enough to record history, there have been individuals who seemed to have enough authority that their words are remembered.  And their words had a constant tone of, "Oh, my gosh!"  That is not wasted energy.  Consider that it's almost like Life, the exaggerated form of another person, is pondering the alternatives.  This is not much different from you at the ordinary level of consciousness.  For example, you are driving down the highway -- a car whips around you.  Suddenly you picture your children at school.  It's a picture of a big truck hitting a school bus and all these twisted little bodies with blood flowing around them.  In your better moments, you might think, "Whew, where did that come from?  Why am I thinking this?"

     Another possible scenario:  you are on a two-lane highway doing 70 mph, and you notice that a truck just passed you in the opposite lane doing 70.  You wonder, "What if the guy behind the wheel of that truck is drunk?  What if he just looks off or sneezes real hard?"  Then you imagine what a head-on collision would be like with two vehicles crashing into each other at 70 mph.  You wonder, "What would happen to me?"  Life itself has these same wild daydreams and queries, and it comes out in groups of humanity saying that mankind is about to destroy itself.  This is no different from Life just standing around sipping a drink on a bad day.  It could be a split-second daydream on another level and it might take 50 years of hearing about it.  It might continue for what appears to be 100 years of panic, but it could be a split-second of Life standing up at the edge of a tall building on a bad day, having a passing thought of jumping off.  It's just a split-second and yet it comes out in humanity as doomsayers moaning, "My, oh, my, we'll never make it."

     From an ordinary perspective, mass movements appear to be curious phenomena, but that is only because you see them in light of, "something is broken".  Why are all these people just continually prophesying doom?  Or why is this one group of people always attacking this other group?  It seems beyond comprehension.  Not if you can comprehend this nervous system, it's not.  It's not beyond comprehension if you understand that not only do you not know what you're going to say next, you don't even understand the question.

     There seems to be nonstop human conflict, and it happens on a continuous basis.  It appears to be going on between nations, races, and religions, but look into your ordinary life and you'll find it there, too.  Look at yourself and your family, your friends, people you work with, people you pass on the street and you will find that there is apparently some kind of conflict going on.  Abandon any idea of "hostility" or "personal motivation" and simply look at what is going on.  What is conversation?  How do things get done?  Consider what is the basis of the relationship between people living together, mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife.  Just stand back and try to look at it without being engaged with it.  Look at the conversational aspect of a relationship.  It is based on a conflict of some kind, not agreement.  If it were agreement, people would not be talking.  You'd have no soap opera; each day's shows would last just 10 seconds.  (Then I guess they could have 59 1/2 minutes for commercials.)  Again, there would be no stories in popular literature nor in religious literature without conflict.  It's good against evil.  Lovers against their families.  King against king.

     How can a person involved in This Thing use the fact that nothing is broken?  Paradise, as humanity imagines it, is not around the corner.  Peace is not around the corner.  A lack of conflict is not around the corner, unless you consider death a lack of conflict.  But between here and physical death look upon what is going on:  for example, two people become partners and open up a business.  How do things operate?  One guy gets to the office on Monday morning and about a half hour later his partner stumbles in.  The first guy says, "Hey, you told me you're going to get started at nine o'clock.  We agreed.  There is a lot of work to be done and I'm sitting here trying to answer the phone and do twenty different things at once." The conflict has already started.  They may have grown up together; they may see each other socially every afternoon.  And yet their first words to each other that day indicate the underlying conflict.  The other guy says, "Hey, I'm sorry I'm late, but we should hire a secretary.  I told you that already.  We should go ahead and cut our salaries and hire a secretary to answer the phones."

     You can observe conflict as a pushing and pulling:  without this no relationship would be alive at Line level.  It appears to individual men that something should be done about this problem -- my marriage, my children, my job.  And at the same time it appears that men seek out ways to establish "no conflict" situations.  Similarly, built into each nervous system is the need to believe that everything is broken.  Each nervous system is also in charge of some viewpoint of criticism.  It's already in everyone's system.  It's not your fault; it's not some weakness or flaw.  Vibrating within each nervous system is the notion that conflict has got to be dealt with, stamped out and analyzed.

     It's neither right nor wrong; "conflict" is simply a word.  It might as well be a synonym for Life, and "lack of conflict" would be a synonym for death.  If you can see beyond the word, past the engagement with the idea that things are broken and should be fixed, everything can be seen as energy.  There is no such thing as energy running pure in any one direction -- if there were, you could not see it.  It would simply be invisible.  For anything to be alive, there must be apparent conflict; energy must meet resistance.  There must be a convergence of forces, of energies going in different directions.  It is different kinds of energies, neither right nor wrong.  That is, unless you are living at Line level, where it's all very personal, and where you are the universe.  If you can get past the word "conflict", past the ordinary level of consciousness, there is simply energy moving.  And for energy to be seen, for it to create life, it takes on some fisible aspect.  The Yellow Circuit in Man now has the word conflict.  And ordinary Man can say, "I know what conflict is.  Yes, sir, been working on it trying to rid my life of it."

     Consider that humanity forms a living Grid, as a refinement of my map of the Magnus Machina.  It is a refinement in a slightly different direction.  The picturization of the Grid is such that if we had all of humanity on a large plane, there would be a moving dynamic grid network.  What seems to be each individual person resides at a juncture point within this expansive grid.  In the same way that no piece of moving machinery can have a perfect fit, this living grid requires a certain amount of tolerance.  You cannot have two gears fitted perfectly, or they would not move.  They would be frozen.  The grid lives and breathes and there is the appearance of a certain kind of "give" in it.  This kind of tolerance helps reinforce Man's sensation that he is free.  The positions in this living grid are structured in such a way that if you are content to remain in your fixed position, no matter what your dreams may be, you  will never change the manner  in which your nervous system is activated.  Your level of awareness will never change. This thing that seems to be "I", the voices that seem to speak for you and the feelings that seem to flow through are of such a limited nature that, once you begin to see it, you can literally feel trapped in a certain position.

     You may plan to start getting up at 5:00 am, jog four miles, quit consuming white sugar, quit smoking, and call your mother every week.  But actually doing all those things you planned is another matter.  Even if you do lose weight and stop smoking, there is a way to begin to feel for yourself that you didn't produce those changes on your own.  It is not some freedom that you have exercised.  You can always go back and say, "All right, what am I going to change next?"  Then see if a voice says, "Hey, that's the same old question about what are you going to say next."  But that voice doesn't have much of a sense of humor anyway, does it?  I could be more truthful:  an internal voice has no sense of humor and no sense of irony.

     There is a feeling that people cannot ordinarily describe because it is not necessary to describe it.  It's a feeling of comfort -- a sensation of safety while staying where you are in the grid.  Anything that's alien is frightening.  You are tied to a point in the grid system and any attempt to struggle against how you are tied is experienced as a distinct form of fear.  Any attempt to dislocate one's self from that place of safety by going into unfamiliar environments, doing things you wouldn't usually do, produces a kind of fear.  Even if you are locked into the grid system in such a way that you seem to be a person who has great nightmarish fears -- at least you're familiar with those.  They are yours.  They seem to be you.  To try and move from that position produces a distinct sensation of alienation and fear.  This fear is not "psychological".  There is a reality behind apparent psychological explanations which make the explanations themselves appear as absolute gibberish.

     I want to give you Part Two of:  "How do you know who you are?"  If I asked an ordinary person (and of course, from the Line of ordinary consciousness down you are an ordinary person), "How do you know who you are?"  The question would seem irrelevant.  It's insane; it's meaningless.  "How do I know who I am?  Well, I am me.  I know who I am!"  But how does this thing that calls itself "me" actually feel that it is something individual, constant?  Within the wiring system of a person there are limited points of energy transfer -- certain positions where the Circuits transfer information.  There is both an electrical and a chemical aspect to this fixed pattern of transfer points between circuits.  If I drew out a pattern showing where information is being transferred in your circuitry, it would show parts of the circuitry that have been activated, set in motion, and are affixed.  If I could slice it out, stain it, and flash it up on a screen, I could produce any one of you.  And there would be the pattern; there would be your limits.

     It would be as though we laid out a map of the city of Rome with all the streets and alley ways.  There would be certain streets within a certain area that would constitute your neural neighborhood.  Any one person would have travelled only along certain streets since reaching the age of adulthood.  The electrical and chemical activation of the circuitry is limited within each person.  It is constant, and it is repetitive.  The limitations produce the ordinary sensation that, "I am a stable something."  You don't have to listen to theory; just look right inside your own nervous system.  You can feel it.  This thing you call you, under ordinary conditions, cannot get outside that pattern, outside those streets.  What appears to be change in ordinary people occurs only within the limited repetitive system.  There is no difference between a drunk and a teetotaler.  If I pointed out the streets of Rome which are the only routes that Fred ever travels, it would be the pattern which represents where the energy flows that makes Fred a drunk.  It appears that a change has occurred when the energy has always gone in one direction and now apparently he has reversed it.  Instead of going from east to west on Rue de Boulevard, now he is going from west to east.  It appears to be change, but the change is within that limited repetitive system.  Fred is not travelling new streets in Rome.  Of course, you remember we're not talking about wandering around in the environs of the Eternal City.  We're talking about the areas in the brain where Fred goes.  It is limited, repetitive, and constant.  Anything that conflicts with the pattern, say a passing extraordinary experience of something unexpected, is frightening.  It is not frightening on the basis that you can go back and stand away from it, and objectively look at what happened and say, "That experience in itself was frightening."  It was the pure unexpectedness of it that was frightening.

     You do experience little occurrences of things that are not part of your limited system.  It is as though you are back in Rome and without knowing it you step in an alleyway that you have never been in before. It seems as though you always stay in a certain kind of neighborhood and you are familiar with a certain kind of people.  And then suddenly it's as though somebody purple with a rhinoceros mask jumped out and scared you.  Then they disappeared and you found out it was a carnival, or those purple people from Antarctica were in town for a convention and one just happened to step into that alley.  You say, "Oh, I see. Well, there's nothing to it, I'm not frightened now.  I don't know, it was just so unexpected."  Right.  This happens and it is almost eradicated from your memory as soon as it happens because it is not a part of where you live in Rome.  It is not a part of this stable, constant, repetitive structure wherein you seem to be consciously moving.  To attempt to expand that pattern is unnatural and frightening.  It takes a bit of horizontal time even if one has serious intent and attraction to This Thing.  You must attempt to feel that you can experience the sensation of being almost locked into a certain position in the Grid.  Forget calling it an "I", a personality, or a demon.  You don't have to call it anything.  There is this thing that seems to be able to identify itself as being itself.  It thinks, "I know who I am because I constantly think the same thing.  I know who I am because I feel a limited repertoire of emotions.  I know who I am because I can identify everything that is not me."  It's not a psychological flaw in the sense that the rest of humanity now would label it; it is not a weakness on your individual part.  When the system gets outside of its own limited pattern, it reacts fearfully.

     Let's say I told you to go out and do something foreign to your system, such as pretend to be a blind person and beg on the street.  If you did it, you would discover the fear is almost immediately followed by a kind of relief.  For the first time in your life, you understand that you can act like anybody and nobody will notice.  Nobody would care; nobody can see.  But all too soon you find yourself back home, back in the place of comfort, the place of safety, that place where every one belongs.  When you do that which you are not wired up to do, you are stretching at the fabric of not only the triads that exist within you but all the close triads where the lines of the Grid converge most often.  You are stretching the strongest invisible live wires.  There are those big fat ones between you and your sexual partner, and between you and your family.  Then the slightly smaller ones between you and your business acquaintances, your friends.  You are tearing at the fabric, the very makeup of the grid to attempt to expand this limited repetitive pattern within the wiring system.  You are leaving safety.  The whole organism reacts, not just within one circuit somewhere.  It reacts with fear because it does not know what is going on.

     You can attempt to fake an emotion that is apparently foreign to you.  Let's take, for example, "personal outrage".  For the purpose of this example, let's say that your ordinary mechanical position in the grid system would have been that of an outstanding wimp.  And yet you can't help but notice in certain other people an unbridled ability to be outraged in public.  While standing in line at an airport they can say, "This plane is always late.  What is going on here?  This is outrageous!"  And what appears to be your pattern stands there in that same line and is almost ashamed or humiliated for the other person because "They are too dumb to realize what they are doing."  Would any of you find it interesting that you can start to imitate an emotion that is foreign to you and suddenly you are into it, suddenly you are doing it?  It just takes a few seconds.  Just start any place you can:  raise your voice and start to bang on the counter in a restaurant, "Hey, what do you mean you quit serving breakfast at 11:30?  What am I supposed to do, eat breakfast when you want me to?  I stopped here!  I wanted to eat!  You have a sign outside that says BREAKFAST SPECIAL $1.99.  It doesn't say a thing about stopping at 11:30!  What kind of place is this?"

     Do any of you find it interesting that as soon as you start to imitate the very people you can't stand, you begin to experience the emotion through imitating it?  "Emotions" is just a word.  There are apparent emotions that are foreign to all of you; there are simply streets in Rome through which you have never walked.  For example, your system may look at a public display of anger as something foreign.  There is a reality to that.  Your nervous system is not activated at that spot.  There are no connections in that area containing information; no energies are being transferred.  Nothing in your system that life has produced can  ordinarily generate this so-called foreign emotion.  There are no circumstances wherein you would have ever said, "What do you mean you quit serving at 11:30!  The sign outside doesn't say anything about that!"  There is no condition whatsoever that would have ever made you do that.

     Now let me give you a stronger hint at the reality of what is going on.  Throughout the level of consciousness on the Grid, throughout literature, emotions have a particular importance.  They have a great strength.  They are identifiable, useable and potentially dangerous.  And in some way they are common to all of humanity.  But what can the Few make of the fact that you can begin to imitate something that you have never done, and suddenly you are in a place you have never been?  What can you make of that?  I am going to hint and sketch:  you can start directing energy into an area of Rome where you have never been.  You've heard about it, you have seen pictures of it, but you have personally never been there.  You can divert the energy from your normal patterns to a certain place and it will activate that place as though you have been there all your life.  It is no longer a matter of doing an imitation of somebody publicly outraged -- you are there and you can feel it.  But don't stop there.  A person should find this extremely interesting, not just .paon some pragmatic level of, "That's good to know I can do that; I feel better."

     There is a little wider aspect that I am going to try to get you to look at.  It is so subtle that I have to watch that the sketch does not get too specific.  The word emotion is just a word, but it is referring to a specific energy.  Once the Primal Flow is split in man, this energy has a specific place in which it is primarily processed.  Neuralize the Three Circuits as I have drawn them, each with a different color.

     At the ordinary  level of consciousness it is not possible to conceive of emotions as being what they are in actuality.  That is what I am trying to get some of you to look at in a certain way by asking you this again.  Do you not find it interesting that you can start off imitating a so-called emotion that would have never been a part of your feeling repertoire, and the energy itself, which is always running through you, goes into a different place in your circuitry, and the fake-emotion becomes reality?  It is no longer an imitation. You activate it and you then experience exactly what it is that other people seem to do naturally.  All you have to do is run the energy there, and there is no longer a question of trying to understand people who seem to be hostile and ill-tempered.  If you want to understand it, activate it.  Once you do it, there is no longer anything else to say.  You understand it because you have now been on that street.

     The emotions are like the basic octane to the fuel of human life, compared to what would seem to be the activities of the Red and Yellow circuits.  If we could speak of the Circuits in isolation, which of the Circuits would seem to be making things move?  It is easy to get tripped up as you try to answer because the first answer you are going to hear from your internal voices is from the primary source of fuel of these same voices.  (So, as always, you have to disregard that which your apparent self can come up with in response to a serious question.  All you can do is say to it, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I knew that already.") Continuing along, if the Circuits could be separated, which one seems to be fueling the kind of conflict that keeps things alive?  We are talking about your particular level of consciousness right now, since it would alter slightly given a different time and place.  Right now is it the Red Circuit?  It would be easy enough for some of you to say, "Well, it's got to be the Yellow Circuit.  Just look around at what humanity has done to the environment.  Look at the place science holds in the ordinary life of humanity.  That is obviously coming from the Yellow Circuit, right?"

     But what is carrying along the song of Life?  You can change the words, you can change the rhythm, but the Blue Circuit is the melody of it.  Why does it seem so appropriate at times to refer to ordinary life as a great soap opera?  What is human literature?  What are the t.v. soap operas?  Do you turn on a soap opera and see several characters sitting at a university discussing some of the latest theories in the birth of the universe?  Do you see evidence that the writers who put words in the actor's mouths are up-to-date on the latest theories in astrophysics and astrochemistry?  Is there any demand whatsoever for that?  Is there even one person who would turn that on and watch it?  You might think there is, but the kind of person who might be watching it would already be at the university doing the research.  It's not right or wrong, but there is nobody to watch a Yellow Circuit soap opera.  Now if you go into the apparent domain of the Red Circuitry, you can certainly raise splendid crowds for a sporting event.  But a football game does not produce the same sort of attraction as Blue Circuit exposition.  What are soap operas, classical literature, and so-called religious writings of humanity?  What is their melody?  What makes them live?  What is going on within the kind of energy that humanity refers to as emotions?  Why do they seem so dangerous?

     People are apparently speaking at times in public forums about how we must counteract the old ideas and theories of some other cult, race or religion with our own proper ideas.  And you can be captured by that at the Yellow Circuit level, thinking that there's an area where something of living importance is going on.  But the basic octane is coming through and processed by the Blue Circuit.  What is it that humanity always discusses?  Apparently one group of people has always talked about the need to straighten out that group of people over there.  People don't go to war with wrong ideas; a man doesn't hit his wife in the nose based upon an erroneous idea:  that is not what is going on.  Why is it that Blue Circuit energy is considered to be of such great importance, to be of such potential danger?  There is a reason for it:  the octane rating.

     There is another temporary map with three distinct observable levels of flows.  Some of you sly sorts might try to fit this into the map of the Circuitry, into the map of the Three Forces, into anything that strikes you.  (I remind you not to put a period on it or you've blown it.)  This temporary map involves three flows of energy.  The lowest level of flow is generally referred to out in ordinary life as the drive for self-preservation.  I'll just leave it at that.  The middle level is the apparent drive of the individual "I" for stability and permanence.  The first two levels are all that is normally available; they are fixed and mechanically driven.  The third and highest level is the desire to do This Thing.  The first two are fed by Life -- they're inescapable.  There's no direct way to alter the amount of fuel you're getting to survive physically, and there is no way under ordinary conditions that you can personally affect the amount of fuel that goes to supporting the stability and comfort of your own "I".  It just happens; it is fed.  The fuel comes in through life and it is predetermined and fixed.  The third level is not fed by life:  you have got to feed it yourself.

     Right now I'm the one feeding it.  I may speak to you and something may come up which sparks you down a new alleyway; suddenly you can see something because of what I said.  Yet ultimately a person must feed it themselves.  It's got to come from somewhere other than ordinary life, because it cannot be mechanically fed.  After pursuing This correctly for awhile you may begin to feel neither an attraction nor a repulsion to routine Life, and I understand that.  You may feel that you've been cut loose or you have lost some excess baggage, excess fat.  You may find that you don't worry in the same ways that you used to.  And then you may find yourself in what appears to be a place where you might say, "Here I sit, and I'm not particularly upset, but neither do I feel like getting up and dancing down the street nude."  You cannot stop there.  You have got to feed it yourself.  You have got to create the kind of food for this highest level of flows.

     Regardless of your apparent state, you cannot let the Yellow Circuit just wave in the breeze, being attracted by association and running back and forth down the same streets.  Go out and run down some brand new streets.  Of course, even should you never run in the same direction down the same streets twice, anyone who is seriously attempting to wrestle with the question of, "What am I going to say next?"  will find out that internally you can still run the same track everyday.  A car can pass you  and blow its horn, and your pattern might be to turn and wonder, "Are they blowing their horn at me?  I hope not.  Is there a hole in my jogging clothes?"  For somebody else, the horn blows and their immediate reaction is, "Hey, the same to you, whoever you are!"  You automatically head for your habitual internal streets, and that is what I mean by the Yellow Circuit waving in the breeze.

     Perhaps at times when you are sitting there listening to me, it seems as though I can get inside of you, and it seems as though you feel more in focus.  You may feel as though internally you have taken that mechanical tiger and put him aside, and now you feel alert.  Now a whole tribe of nude dancers dressed up in rhinoceros suits could run through the room and in some way you'd have a different kind of attitude toward it.  You'd watch it; maybe you could try to be objective by not responding to it in an automatic way. But you can't depend on me forever.  You cannot wander around out of focus.  Along these lines, if any of you have anything that proves to be a real interest out there in life, it is in no way in conflict with This Thing.  If you like music, computers, painting, I am telling you to feed that.  Pursue it with no conditions.  If there are things that you can do that do not require an audience, do them.  Not everyone, by any means, has that kind of particular interest in any given area of the external world.  I know that, but if that is the case, you cannot suffer over it.  Try this:  look at it as temporary objective boredom.  I can assure you that there were plenty of times when famous religious heroes went out and sat under a tree and wished, "How long before television will be invented?"  If they were real, more than once they laid in bed in boxer shorts, twisting their beards up into little balls.  This was not some kind of depression.  You can look at it as a more enlightened form of boredom.  Consider that you're in good company:  you are now bored on a higher level than ordinary people are capable of.  What humanity calls boredom is a negative thing and they are forced to do it, it's part of their limited repertoire.  At least you're not upset.  If you have to twist your beard into little balls or lay around the house in your underwear and play the ukulele, it will not be that way forever, so do not drown in it.

     I was recently asked a question about love.  What humanity refers to as love is the imagined pure first force.  But there is no such thing; there is no pure force of any kind that has taken form.  You would have to go back to the Primal Flow.  Humanity refers to love as being all constructive, with no destructiveness in it.  There is no such thing.  It does not happen in your life or any ordinary person's life.  That to which you are attracted in love, you can want to strangle in a split second.  The dream which Life itself continues to talk about for tomorrow, which comes out in humanity as the idea of love, is the imagined reality of the existence of a pure first force.  It is this ideal of love which carries within it no contradiction, no self-conflict, no destruction, no desire to preserve the status quo.  From the kinds of maps I have been sketching for you, that would be a fair description of pure first force, if such a thing existed.  Among other descriptions, this could be part of the reality behind what humanity refers to and believes they refer to when they speak of love.  But it is not that there is a reality to a pure first force.

     I am going to say something else real quick.  It is nothing strange or out of the ordinary, but ninety-nine percent of the male population pursuing This feel a frightened concern over their sexual daydreams or sexual nightmares.  At this point, they are of no concern whatsoever.  They are almost impertinent; you suffer needlessly.

     One of the great lingering shocks is that NOTHING IS BROKEN.  Yet to ordinary consciousness it appears that things are broken.  If you are attempting to do This Thing, you cannot be critical of anything in Life; not for some vague theoretical, spiritual or philosophical reason, but because by criticizing, you are continuing to handle and to transfer the kind of energy that is necessary to keep you right where you are in this grid system.  When you criticize, you are physically reinforcing where you are.  You might as well be playing with dynamite:  you are supporting the status quo.  When you do that you're an idiot, no matter what the Yellow Circuit may be talking about.  You could not be serving ordinary life better if you took two bricks and slammed them against your head and thought, "You want to see somebody act unconscious, just barely getting by?  Watch this!"

     It is no different when you criticize yourself:  "I have these terrible sexual daydreams."  You do?  When did you plan to have them?  Where did they come from?  Where did you adopt them?  If you were ordinary, you could say, "Well, I keep having homosexual daydreams and I can remember that a guy tried to pick me up in a park when I was six years old."  That could be true, but it explains nothing.  There is no explanation for where you got these daydreams, because there is no "you" having them.  We are back to my question:  Can you tell me what you're going to say next?  I went through all that to say that what appears to be self-directed criticism is playing right into the hands of you know who, but notice that it is also routinely proper.

     We are back to another great question:  Don't you find it interesting and objectively curious that there are desires that just seem to spring upon you and as soon as they spring, they are wearing an overcoat of guilt?  They spring and they have a Siamese twin,  "No, no -- not that."  Nobody finds that interesting at all?  Nobody remembers that nothing is alive unless there is apparent conflict?  Sexual daydreams is a good one.  Who wants to give up suffering?  "Oh, I do."  Are you sure?  Are you sure that suffering is not exotic and stimulating?  "All my life, I have been saving enough money to go to Paris."  What if you finally got there and thought, "This is all there is to Paris?"  How about the old story of getting rid of seven demons?  You go off on a picnic and when you come home there are seven times seven new demons in your living room.  Well, what if you got rid of the seven times seven demons and there were no more demons.  There you sit all alone.  "Boy, it sure is a big old house.  I didn't know it was so lonely.  I used to have demons I could wrassle with, and things to worry about..."