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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk 124, Sep 6, 1984, runtime 2:10
[The feeling of discouragement. The need to periodically inject new energy into the Group: Evoteck. Horizontal age (new rule: never dwell upon/talk about your age) as draft to D employment. The loss of long term dream energy that comes with This Thing: the subsidence of mechanical energy flows seems/feels like you are losing your interest in Life. Must not get entangled in this. Ignore it. ]
[Complex directions are necessary for the simple whereas simple directions are given to the complex. Directions for the Few: simplistic and vague indications only are essential to avoid shipwreck and misdirection.]
[When ordinary religion begins to stop growing internally there is increasing emphasis on external activity: building new church etc. This Thing and the Group must continue to grow or else it will die. Must make energy to help "storm the gates of 3 dimensional consciousness". Cannot become comfortable and insulated: commune syndrome. ]
[Remember that no one's individual views in life are right. Life entertains every nightmare, plan and dream thru man as do you in your own daydreams, ambiguities and contradictions.]
[There is no magic --it is science, mathematics. Science is a more appropriate vehicle/map for This Thing today. Particle physics: macro vs. micro physics. Human consciousness as the interface between the ends of this spectrum. Life has a Yellow Circuit and man is involved in helping Life to gain an expanded awareness of itself. The "known universe" to man is the birth of Life's Yellow Circuit. The paradox of observer interfering / participating in the process under observation. Life doesn't have to pay for its mistakes as you do. Life survives its mistakes while man is the experiencing agent of all its dreams and nightmares. Consciousness as Life's instrument for self exploration. Life experiments and man experiences it as reality. The Assured, the Interested and the Skeptical. The skeptic is at the lowest place in Life's Yellow Circuit. ]
[The assured is at the highest: the Few. Knowledge is the interruption of the seamless flow of everything. Memory can apparently resurrect the past; allows an extended, removed, echo-like transfer of energy: increased efficiency of energy transformation.]
[Envelope of Observation. Example of critics analyzing and criticizing previous critics and artists. Each E of D is ever more complex, including the previous E of D. ]
[A useful trick: Take willful responsibility even for events obviously out of your control--but without telling anyone. Take internal responsibility. ]
[The more complex is the system, the closer it can come to comprehending itself and almost even recreate itself; create an even more complex system than itself. This is possible for The Few. They undertake the re-creation of themselves at another, higher, DNA level.
Transcript
ENVELOPES OF OBSERVATION AND TAKING WILLFUL RESPONSIBILITY
Document: 124, September 6, 1984
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1984
In any group coming together for any purpose over a period of time, feelings of periodic discouragement run in waves through it. The feelings aren't anyone's fault, and the fact that they occur gives food for Neuralization. Someone may wonder, "What am I doing wrong?" or feel as though everything he does leads to a dead end. It's only a short step from there to entertaining voices of, "What have I gotten myself into? What's the purpose of all of this?" This feeling goes hand in hand with the renewed impetus that periodically has to be shot in to re-energize such a group. Otherwise, the energies of any group begin to run in a "devolutional" manner.
Let me point out on a personal level at least two aspects of this deliberate process of recharging the energy of a group of people who come together for a particular purpose. It falls within the framework of a variable waltz; a dance between the proprietary inclinations that I sometimes refer to as the Forces. A change takes place in the dance of the Three Forces, which affects the energy of a group. To describe it somewhat differently, the Three Forces go from being unsettled to stable, to stagnant, and back again. (The starting point is arbitrary since there is no beginning or end.) And it's a four dimensional process, while this description is necessarily linear.
Nothing can go in a straight line, even in four dimensions, and that includes any creative movement by an individual or a group. The illusion of the existence of straight line phenomena is ingrained in the beliefs of humanity; but it's an imperfect, incomplete statement and understanding of the way things work. At the ordinary level everyone has to operate that way. "Yes, if I lose weight and have some hair transplants done, my sex life will directly improve." It doesn't work, but it makes no difference. There is a purpose to humanity believing it.
I'll give you a couple of specific examples that will affect all of you. One of the specifics involves ordinary, horizontal age. Life has named certain age related phenomena. One is referring to men around forty as having the "middle age crazies," while women have their own version of this. Don't look for any psychological explanations for the behaviors; there is a physical reality to it. But a person involved with This can't ever speak of or entertain the voices which speak of his age. It should be maintained as your own absolute rule that you never allow the voices to become audible telling you about you age.
Say you quit running for a month and you go back to it and you can't run like you could before. Or you get bruised and look down to find that the bruise is still there two months later while the last good bruise you remember healed overnight. The voices will start telling you about age. It happens nonverbally as well. Say you're out playing tennis and you miss a shot. You turn to some younger people in the next court; you give a look like "whew," or pat your stomach. What you're doing is saying, "I'm getting older and that explains it." A person involved with This can't listen to the voices discussing age. That one thing will wear you down.
It all fits together, once you See it. You're more tired; your sex drive isn't as strong; you seem as though, "Well it's too late. I'm forty. I'm not worth a million dollars now. There's no chance. All the dreams up to now, all my hopes...but now that I've hit forty, I'll just coast on into the grave." That's the way it's supposed to be. But you should See that this kind of talk or thinking is absolute, unconditional profanity. You might as well be taking knives and cutting any connections to This that you already have. It's a form of suicide. Everyone is getting physically older, and it won't stop, there's nothing more to say about it. But when you reach forty you still have about half of your life to go. And if you lay down and die now, you're no good to me, to This or to yourself. You're going to eventually die. So what?
You can't listen to these voices; it's more than just a waste of time -- it will kill you. You have to be a pawn of Mr. Employer D to entertain such voices. All that's happening is your bones are beginning to creak or your metabolism slowing down. Forget it. Ordinary consciousness will look at an older man who's still up on stage singing and dancing, and say "Isn't it a miracle?" But you can't attribute it to him or his lifestyle. Simply put, it's genes. He had no choice.
On another level, you can interfere with the aging process a little bit. But looking for some magic to stop it is like spending thirty years learning to walk on water when you could catch a ferry for a dime. It all depends on where you want to put your effort. Even if it were possible, I wouldn't tell you how to do it. What do you want to do, look twenty up until the day you die and then just drop?
The other aspect that I wanted to mention is that of discouragement. The more you can See of all of This, the less long term dream energy you have. It might seem negative in a particular way; "I have days when I'm just delighted; I can't imagine having lived without This. But at other times I feel like I'm in some new form of depression; like, 'What's the sense of getting up? I might just lay here in bed the rest of my life.'"
First, we can look at short term and long term dream energy on the mechanical level, changing as a person grows older. Before the Yellow Circuit becomes active, you have only short term dreams: "Gimme, gimme, gimme." Then you get a little older and the dreams involve baseball cards, comic books, and dolls. Then around puberty, the change shifts into gear; you start running on long term dream energy. You begin to have dreams about, "What I will be when I grow up." Or in past years women used to dream about, "Who I will marry, where we'll be in the community; and what a fine family we'll have." After a certain length of time, you reach the other end of the spectrum; you're an elderly baby again and you return to short term dreams like, "Can I get up and make it to the bathroom without breaking my hip?" This is a part of what I was referring to about the middle age crazies and menopause, when you begin to shift back to short term dream energy. You start going downhill.
There's a difference between the ordinary aging process and the process occurring with those involved with This. If you hadn't become involved with This, you'd be driven by dreams like: "Maybe I still can get rich," or, "Sure I don't write much anymore, but I still have that novel up here in my head." But This Thing starts to drain long term dream energy; the energy gets rechanneled. The voices might say, "I'm losing interest in Life; and This can't be a good thing. Am I in some way being harmed by This?" Look at it in a more positive way: A physical phenomenon is literally taking place. You're losing (and it can happen very quickly) a large part of your long term dream energy; and you seem to be rather devoid of long term plans anymore. You have to remember, you haven't been seduced or brainwashed into This. Your genetic programming has dictated your role in This and you had no choice as to whether you ended up here or not. If it wasn't This, it would have been the closest thing you could find. Just accept it and then lay it aside.
You may have feelings that, "I'm reaching a point in This where everything in Life seems to be a waste of time. You mean I went through all of this, and all it showed me is that Life is just a waste of time?" No, all of Life isn't just a mechanical waste of time. You're a complete idiot if you listen to those voices. You should know that without any words. If the voices express those feelings, so what? Just take a deep breath and it'll pass. Of course, you can prolong its whisperings to you by entertaining it, and by going ahead and being depressed. You can suffer on your own time if you want to.
I said that I would discuss two aspects of this shift in energy. But maybe I'll point out a "two and a half" aspect. The ordinary mechanical system is hard wired to feel a need to be patted on the back; for someone to say, "Good show, you're doing well." You might say a Blue Circuit thermodynamics needs to take place. Needing approval is as necessary a part of being alive at the ordinary level as eating -- an energy transfer needs to take place. That's just a given; it's neither right nor wrong. But it wouldn't be profitable to set This up as a constant pep rally. Ordinarily, a guru and his followers all get together and rejoice in some way. He shows up and everybody applauds and he applauds them. He tells everybody, "Hug one another, and let's hear it for all of us. Let's hear it for the gods. We're all getting better." All of you have had voices wishing for more encouragement from me, that I should sit up all night drinking coffee with you and discuss things such as the nature of the Universe. It's not something to be laughed at, but it's not profitable. And there is no pristine opposite -- only a very thin line. It's mechanically necessary and proper for humans to have this need for emotional thermodynamics, this transfer of energy, this patting on the back and passing along of energy. It doesn't even have to be a sincere effort. It could be no more than you passing a strange dog and patting it and when it stopped and smelled you, it wagged its tail. Something has happened between you and the dog, and the dog doesn't seem to notice if you're sincere or not. The dog doesn't worry, "Did he mean that or was he just patronizing me?" That sort of energy transfer is necessary in Life. But you should suspect that we'd be way off in a ditch somewhere if This had operated as a pep rally. It just can't be done.
Your voices may say my apparent nonchalance at times might not be appropriate, but take note of this: You can give simple directions to the complex; but you have to give complex directions to the simple. Say you're walking down the street and a man pulls over in a car and asks you directions. His face and voice tell you that the man is illiterate, almost incoherent. In order to help him you would have to give him very complex directions; and repeat them over and over. But the more complex you become, the more simple should be the directions. When some of you present me with problems or observations and ask me for directions, I might just wave my arm and say, "Well, it's out in that direction, press on." Some of you still entertain voices that I have secret meetings and we talk about the real secrets or something like that. But those who Understand something can almost question nonverbally. They can put it in a way where the question doesn't even matter much verbally. And about all I have to say is, "Over that way." And that's it. The more complex you are, the simpler can be the directions.
On a horizontal level, this does not necessarily hold true. In fact, sometimes it would be detrimental to get too simplistic. More complex directions are needed horizontally, as things become more complex. On quite ordinary levels, more complex thinking is now required of those with predominantly Yellow Circuit wiring. But if you leave the horizontal world, and attempt to confront This through specific, complex directions, you end up with a religion or a cult, and nobody is going anywhere.
Recall back to when you were first exposed to This Thing. Almost everyone attracted to This has some variation of the "secret book syndrome," of believing, "Alright, I know what I want. I have specific questions and all I want is an answer." A response to those "great eternal questions" would require very detailed directions, and the responses would have turned into stable, then stagnant entities. So, the simpler the better, except it takes a long time. You have to get pretty complex yourself, at a new level, to Understand that the best directions are the most simple. "How do I get to so and so?" "Just go."
All of you should have some awareness that everything is either growing or declining. There is a reality behind ordinary religions and groups of people having to constantly grow externally. When real internal evolution is no longer taking place, there is an unrecognized awareness that "Inside we're not going anywhere, and what is required is that outside we apparently have to be going somewhere." In some fashion, everybody who joins up with a church or a guru realizes this and what happens: "We're going to buy us such and such land, build a church, bring in twenty thousand new members. Let's go out and get them."
A kind of growth is needed in This, but not simply in raw numbers, or in an external fashion. A need for growth surfaces periodically; for whatever reason, a point is reached where everyone involved has to take over part of the necessary energy transfer. And altering yourself internally is the only way you can help transfer some of the necessary heat and energy. You have to participate. You have to grow. There is no resting spot. It isn't a question of, "Will you?" or, "How much?" you just must. And if you don't, it is you personally who are going to be the worse for it.
The day will come when the gates of three dimensional thinking have to be stormed. Messengers are already peeking through the gates; science, psychology and ordinary human mentality see bits and pieces of it. But the gates finally have to be stormed. And someone who fully understands what is necessary has to lead the charge, because unless someone fully Understands what is needed, no matter how sincere, he could not find the proper direction in which to run. They would put their heads down as a battering ram and run; and all they'd do is give themselves a concussion.
You should feel absolute rejoicing in beginning to See things on your own. It is indescribable to See that Life is developing its own Yellow Circuit; that Man is right there in the Yellow Circuit of Life. And you should be able to rejoice that you can See your voices for what they are, and gain pleasure from the fact that no person's view, at the ordinary level, is correct regardless of credentials or subject matter. No matter what anybody in the world says, you begin to See it and know it, for yourself, for what it is: that no person's view of Life is .pacorrect. That is enough to make you internally take off your clothes and jump up and down and dance.
The external and internal voices crying doom and destruction aren't reflections or proof that humanity is going downhill, for I can assure you it is not. It is simply that Life, thru Man, is entertaining every possible daydream, nightmare and fear possible. You kill whole villages internally, and then you turn right around and wish that you could really be in touch with the gods; you're sure that if they'd finally take notice of you, you'd be one of their favorite people. You've done it all and you don't even notice it going on. The same conflict is apparent in Life as well. To my fictitious reasonably insane man, the evidence available, externally, that Life is evolving and not dying should be obvious.
I'm going to mention a few more things of a different nature, using a little more scientific terminology. There is no inherent magic in what I am referring to as science, I'm just taking the term and the apparent reality of it as it exists in the ordinary world and using it as a man. There is a continual expansion, a nonlinear progression, and Life now speaks through science as the cutting edge rather than religion. And in the sense I'm using, it is much more than ordinary humanity perceives in the concepts of either religion or science. But, I have to use maps that communicate at a very basic level, that sound as though they're making sense; so I'm now using science, for the time being. I can take general scientific ideas floating around and try to get you to see certain things; redefine and add missing words, letters and numbers in equations that the ordinary Yellow Circuit cannot get to add up to one hundred percent. It's now more appropriate for me to use science as a springboard, rather than religion or anything else.
You can See how new is this use of science, because the collections of people that humanity would consider mystical or somehow involved with This are still dealing with religion. It isn't that they're wrong; it's that science as a map is still in the beginning stages of development. The religious maps and ideas are being rehashed. Attempts are being made to bring them up to date with "new age" interpretations. But you can see a blossoming in a new direction. Do you think it's coincidental that I can make scientific experiments and theorizing fit perfectly into what I'm talking about? I can use this blossoming to show you that the storming of the gates is already beginning to occur in Life. The information isn't emerging through the same areas which were used in the past, namely religion or even psychology. The ideas are now appearing through science. That is in part why I use it. But remember, it isn't anything permanent and this isn't the ultimate map.
I'm going to mention some ideas that are being developed through controlled experimentation in particle physics. In these experiments, the difference between the observer and the observed is becoming murky. Although scientists don't quite see it this way yet, the same idea is also showing it's face at the other end of the scientific spectrum: in astronomy. Astronomers are beginning to express the appearance of a "time gap" between the observed and the observer/astronomer so that you can't clearly differentiate them: "I, the astronomer, am actually looking at this star or this galaxy, but I'm not. Because of the time element involved, (Light moves at a rate of a billion miles per hour, hence, star or quasars may actually already be dead), what I'm looking at, I'm not looking at. This star or quasar doesn't exist at this place and time unless I look at it. So there's no clear distinction between me and this quasar."
You can look at this on a different level: the difference between Man's internal world and the external environment; between large and small systems, or micro and macro physics. This division into two systems sounds correct to an ordinary hard wired system. You could say, "It sounds like a scientific version of the equation I + Not I = Everything." There appears to be a separateness to the very small systems, and, seemingly at the other end of the spectrum, the gigantic systems; and assuming this separation in human consciousness can be called the interface between the two. But you should have a distinct suspicion of anything that sounds so correct to the hard wiring. There should be a suspicion that it's too cut and dried to be so pat that human consciousness is the interface. After all, human consciousness is also the very thing that divided it in the first place. Do I have to remind everyone that we're not talking about science at all?
According to scientific theories, these two systems, the small system and the large system or even the study of them, would never overlap. They can't find a place where the very large turns into the very small, either gradually or abruptly. But they do overlap. You just can't See it with 3-D consciousness. And where do they overlap? In OAI consciousness. This has yet to be fully realized in Man. The overlapping can't be found in a microscope, and it can't be found in a telescope; the overlapping isn't yet indigenous to Man's consciousness, as a whole. But it is there, right where a new circuit is growing.
Many of you feel as though you're entertaining your own running battle at times trying to decide if I'm speaking allegorically or literally. So let me tell you something specifically: Life has a Yellow Circuit. And in Life's nervous system, the Yellow Circuit is where Man resides (remember, the words aren't correct...the map is imperfect). The existence of Life's Yellow Circuit is a physical fact, and a very distinct part of Humanity's purpose, without being aware of it, is helping to give Life a consciousness of itself. Though not a perfect parallel, this isn't far removed from what you're attempting to do to yourself.
What about the old phrase, "Know yourself." It sounds right to your hard wiring, but it's dead. It's already been chewed up and has no nourishment. But if you're complex enough to hear it, I could point out that a part of This is a knowledge of oneself. You should See that an ordinary person can't know himself; they simply are not designed or driven to do it. But even if they were, "to know yourself" is almost nothing. You have to build something new on top of that. If knowing yourself was all there was to it, there would be some ultimate and continuing validity to those passing feelings of discouragement I've described. You could not move. But it is possible to build something on top of "knowing yourself."
You could take this even further, jump into macro systems, and look upon the observable, the known, universe as being created by the activation of Life's Yellow Circuit. At some point in history, the Yellow Circuit became activated in Man, just as it became activated in each person. I have a new term the scientific community hasn't come up with: "The Yellow Circuit Big Bang." Because in an instant -- whether an instant be an instant or whether it took ten billion years in a different time frame -- suddenly from nothing came everything. Life's own Yellow Circuit -- the observable, known universe -- was activated.
To get back to quantum physics, and the study of the micro-realms of reality, it got to the point that the physicists could no longer say, with any certainty, what they were looking at. They could no longer make valid predictions or accurately time events which they were observing. They found the instrumentation required to see the micro-processes, itself, interfered with the flow of what was going on. For example a scientist might describe the following: "It is almost as though the subatomic particles were so small, you had to come up with some great magnifying glass, and you had to stick this magnifying glass into this swirling mass of particles. But by doing so, you were interfering with their activity. So what we're seeing isn't actually what was going on before we looked at it." That is as good as an explanation as the physicists have (and remember, we're not even talking about science anyway). In a sense, this observation took the scientist from being an observer into a position of being a participant, whether willingly or not. He had to attempt to take into account that the observer is participating in what he observes.
Now can anyone see its relation to this: When Humanity was at the religious stage, the general feeling was, "I'm an observer to this." What else could you be, when the scenario was the gods looking down from outside the system saying, "I'm fed up with you," and flooding the place, or setting cities on fire? "I'm an unwitting player, an observer. I attempt to pray, to give sacrifices, to do something, and it's all rather meaningless." Man was in a position of being an observer to the forces which were driving everything. Then a kind of sub-stage arose. It might be called the psychological age, where the prevalent feeling was that the forces aren't just external, they're also internal. But Man still acted on the basis of being an observer; something else caused both the internal and external events. The feeling was still: "I'm an observer to it. I'm not responsible, my parents did it, something in my past did it." The forces still appear external. Even if they reside in "my heart," or, "my head," they still fell separate from "me." That is 3-D thinking.
The gates, or the limits of this 3-D thought will be assaulted by going outside of the science lab, by moving beyond the observer into a gradual, growing feeling that, "I'm an actual participant in this." It is already surfacing in bits and pieces, as in the recent interest in ecology. I've given numerous examples of how you can't observe something without being a participant. I've talked about how fish live in water, but can't see the water, how a fish is not separate from his environment. They're seeing it in science. But no one is really aware of the implications. Humanity says there is an increasing awareness and manipulation of what seems to be environmental systems, but it is as if they are standing outside of a closed system talking about something they are not participating in.
Human evolution is a process of aiding Life. That which seems to be human consciousness is a part of and assists Life in planning where to go next. I happened to read something in which a biologist was rambling on about Nature, as he called it, and Nature's natural selection process. And he pointed out that Nature "Knows where to land next." In other words, he was, with the Yellow Circuit, supporting the idea of evolution, natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc. But he noted that, "Although each step seems to progress to the next correct step, the intelligence of Nature in general is rather limited and dumb. It doesn't really look into the future." Do you follow what he was attempting to say? "Nature just goes from here to the next step, with no farsightedness. At various points, one line of progression was abandoned and Nature went in another direction. It is short sighted in its selection process. It continued to make little short steps that were proper, but it had no long range view." At his level, no problem. I'm not here to tell him otherwise. But let me point out that that isn't true. Life's far sightedness is through Man, but Man himself cannot see it.
Life is continuing to look ahead, and it's looking ahead through Man's fears and daydreams. Life makes false steps and false starts that it doesn't have to pay for in a large way; because it does it through Man's having daydreams and nightmares. These dreams and nightmares are what saves Life from having to actually go through something obviously detrimental to its health. One prime example of Life using Man in this way is the controversy over the peaceful uses of atomic energy. For several decades it seemed like, "Boy this is the ultimate. It's Atomic energy! Safe and continually renewable." And then without any great explosion or disaster, the widespread sentiment turns to: "Hey this is dangerous." Now remember neither view is right, and you should rejoice in that. But it's a prime example of Life being able to look into the future through Man's fears and daydreams. Life didn't have to blow up an atomic energy plant somewhere in order to see what happens, to see how bad it hurt itself, to see if it was worse than a little indigestion. Can you begin to sense that Life can do something in another way and pay less of a price for it? Part of the price is what ordinary people think of as their own personal psychological traumas, fears, nightmares, and depressions. But it's Life being able to sort of See the future, and to conjure up possibilities without actually paying for it in the most severe manner.
Here's another way to look at it: Human consciousness, or Man, is Life's own instrument for scientific investigation of itself. Life has studied itself at other levels in the past. I would suggest that at the Red Circuit Level, Life learned something about itself through dinosaurs, and many animals now extinct. That is why they're extinct: They got used up. They served a very good purpose, but they got used up.
But when Life reached the level it is now operating on, it had to use a different instrument to study itself. It couldn't use the trees and plants or animals be they extinct or currently alive. Life already had that. It required a new instrument to scientifically study itself at the Yellow Circuit level and Man is this instrument.
All of Humanity is literally in the Yellow Circuit of Life. Some of you might find that interesting and maybe even encouraging. I can temporarily map three locations in the Yellow Circuit of Life: The area of the skeptic, the area of the interested and the area of the assured. Now examples of the first two abound throughout history; they permeate the nervous system of you and Life. But the third area, the assured, is represented only by the Few interested in This Activity. Everything else is a progression. You might find it coincidental that the map is tripartite. But you could say that these levels do exist in Life's Yellow Circuit, and if they exist there, they also exist somewhere else. Guess where?
The "interested" are like the way station, and include so-called religious or mystical groups. They can smell the future. At a low level, Life is talking through these people. But the interest manifests as an attempted reinterpretation of the past. The skeptic is even lower than this in Life's Yellow Circuit. As a skeptic, you're at the absolute low end, at the weakest possible area of the Yellow Circuit. Skeptics can be seen as the deniers of progress. To be interested is an improvement. But to be interested is not to be assured. There's quite a difference between being interested and actually knowing something. And you can only know it when you See something from a certain place in Life's circuitry. It can't be debated. You can't even talk about it. And although it is not necessarily of ultimate importance, Life will not forget that instance, because you helped it move.
Let me try one or two more uses of scientific maps. (Remembering again that we aren't talking about or limited to science.) We're going to jump back and forth between physics and somewhere else, without my telling you which one we're discussing. Any OAI observation produces an interruption in the quadraxial flow. It is seaming, dividing reality. Remember my crude picture of sticking this huge magnifying glass down into this swirling mass of subatomic particles. You had to, but as soon as you did, the glass interfered with the particles themselves. That example also describes what an observation is. That which you seem to be conscious of, is nothing more than an interruption of the flow. It can't be otherwise. That's all ordinary knowledge is -- an interruption. The naming of something is the interruption of it. "Pardon me here Adam, (or is it Atom?) would you stop here a second?" And Adam says, "Yes." Then, "What's your name? You don't have one? Well, here, I have one for you." You have to interrupt it, you have to stop the flow in your consciousness to name it. All you need to do is be alive; consciousness takes care of the rest. You continually attempt to interrupt the flow. Were that not the case, ordinary knowledge, in its very basic and necessary form, would not be alive, and humanity could never have progressed. Try to remember this, because you can take this much further: I'm all in favor of knowledge as a hobby. But remember that which seems to be knowledge is derived from interrupting the flow. That's all it is.
The further you're removed from the interruption, the knowledge, the observation that you've made, the cooler it gets. It becomes more remote, more vague as you move not only from the point where the interruption was made, but also in time. The observation becomes less distinct and more remote insofar as having any direct significance. This is where the "memory aspect" of the Yellow Circuit takes over a very important function. In a very real sense, the past does exist. You can remember it. You can remember and get mad over an insult that occurred twenty years ago. You can recall an incident when you were seventeen, you almost ran off a bridge while drunk. Inexplicably, within a couple of seconds of thinking about it, you can feel physically frightened. Memory can apparently resurrect the past. It is a way in which Life works through Man to recycle energies that were previously used. But one thing it can't do is put the "healthy blush of Life" back on it. It can almost bring a corpse back to life, but the corpse never looks as healthy as it did before it bought the farm. Yet this memory is serving a very specific purpose, and is necessary. Even if the observation is now so far removed that it can't be repeated, memory can continue to transfer energy in a manner that is still useful. And that which is apparently dead or beyond bringing back to its original health can be revived, resurrected and fitted into new observations. With memory, we have a continuity that time can't interrupt. Something that happened a thousand years ago can still be used.
Architectural ideas of how to keep structures upright is a good example. Although steel skeleton buildings seem far removed from the Gothic flying buttress architecture, a progression has occurred. Interruptions occurred in the flow of the progression where human consciousness at some point decided or theorized, "We can do this." But there is a continuity. That's part of the purpose of memory.
If you were my kind of smart aleck and followed any of that, you could properly ask, "Well, that's all well and good as far as architecture and stuff; but how is it involved with what seems to be emotions? I don't mind Humanity and me remembering the progression of Western art, but why do I have to keep worrying about the way my first wife left me? How come I can't forget that? It's like memory is this energy, this continuing wave. Why can't the wave bring stuff that's objective and unobjectionable?" It's a good question and I'm not going to answer it.
Consider one more aspect along these lines. I've started developing my own kind of "funny physics." I took some of the scientific maps now seeping into human consciousness, and twisted them to serve my own purposes. So along with my funny physics, I've had to come up with some terms of my own. One is the "envelope of observation." (By the way, note that these observations are interrupting the flow.) Let's set up an example. Say a social scientist is observing something; he's observing it, analyzing it and then even comments on it. And, let's say you're observing what he's doing. He's in a laboratory in the biology department of some university and he's standing there studying the behavior of white mice. You're watching him from a room with a one way mirror; you see this man analyzing something and making comments on it, and you look over his shoulder and even read these comments. You're observing him observing, analyzing and commenting: OAI. And, simultaneously you're observing that which he thinks he's observing and analyzing. You understand, it's now a two stage complex. You're observing, analyzing and commenting on him observing, analyzing and commenting on that which you originally thought he was observing, analyzing and commenting on. Then, let us say you write down your observations of what he's done, your reactions, a critique of it. Then someone reads your critique. The envelopes get more and more complex. Now they're analyzing and then commenting on your observations which are analyzing and commenting on his original observations, etc.
In Life, there is no arbitrary beginning as there appears to be in my example. Each of those steps is releasing energy. It isn't folly. Nothing wasted is going on. Take the arts: A guy wrote a fictional novel twenty years. Now people are getting Ph.D degrees based on criticizing what the guy made up. The critics then branched out and you have people who are pro and con author X. And now you find people who no longer criticize the original work, but are criticizing the critics. This whole picture could appear to be a castle made out of smoke, from one viewpoint, meaningless. "You take a dumb book about some stupid stuff and that's bad enough. I tried to read it and I wouldn't have given a dollar for that book. And then vocal, adamant schools of thought developed around what he meant in this book; the interpretation of it. And now subclasses of critics are attacking the critics. Good grief, give me a break. Life is insane." It isn't insane, it's increasingly complex envelopes of observation, and energy is released each time a new envelope or a new observation is made of a previous observation.
If we look at these envelopes of observation as physical envelopes, (which wasn't my intent, but it can be done) it would be like starting out with one envelope with a simple note in it. "Come home quick." Then you put this envelope in side of another, and then another; each envelope is based upon previous observations and comments. The envelopes grow more complex; the energy passed is more and more complex. You can look at the person spending his whole life criticizing the critics. It seems that his criticism is completely removed from the basis of the book itself. But it isn't foolishness, it isn't going downhill; it's the passing of more and more complex energy.
I'll end up with something apparently less scientific; just some stray food that you might chew on. How about an idea that's been around since Man has been talking and writing; people wanting to be "the servant of the gods." This idea has run all the way through organized religion and into its mystical wings. Can you perceive it as being an unrecognized wish to find an acknowledged position of servitude to a verbally identifiable force? People wish to attain this position rather than being a helpless player in Life's drama, as I was speaking of earlier.
On apparently another subject: To varying degrees, all of you still suffer with feelings of not having done what you should have. Sometimes these feelings are related to This. Now I've reminded you, you have to quit suffering, regardless of whether you think you understand your suffering, or whether your voices tell you that it's due to unconscious motivations. Simply stop it. If something is making you suffer, stop it!
Let me give you another way to approach this. This approach is just as valid, though it sounds different, and it can be used quite specifically. It is, take willful responsibility for things which aren't your willful doing. Say you find yourself back replaying the hard wired program that you've always played; you seem to be back in the same old place; you seem to have hurt yourself again. Something in you says, "This unconscious programmed, conditioned behavior is unprofitable, and I keep doing it." A way to approach this situation is to take full responsibility for it. Don't tell anybody, don't ever talk about it, just take willful responsibility for it; while knowing (and I say "Knowing" in the loosest possible sense) that it wasn't your willful doing. You know you aren't responsible. You didn't "willfully do that." Don't debate that. Only ordinary Man would fall for that. The Few take responsibility and that's the end of it!
I'm not going to tell you much more in words. But you almost have to learn to talk to yourself to find your own ways. You have to talk to yourself without really telling yourself; you willfully prevent the mechanical voice from reaching the screen of consciousness. Simply take responsibility, while knowing that you aren't responsible. But beyond that, forget it, and that which you don't understand will come to light.
This isn't just a crude trick, it's a fair reflection of what you'll eventually be able to do. You'll find out that there's nothing to suffer over. "Sometimes things happen which are no longer necessary to me and I still do them. I get caught in the rain." The voices may say it's because you're overweight and can't move fast enough. Or the voices say, "Well, you're an idiot, you're trying to get back at your mother because she always told you not to get your clothes wet." No. Instead it's, "It rains and sometimes I find myself in the rain." That's the end of it. Take full responsibility, willful responsibility for even those things that you know you aren't willfully responsible for, period. That's it. Forget anything that doesn't fit into that sentence.
This exercise will produce a pressure point through which new energy can be transferred, but it takes strength. People ordinarily believe that the kind of life they'd been living is full of pressure: "I feel guilty over what I do, I feel like I'm not serving the gods properly. I feel like my parents have mistreated me, and that my life and life in general is going downhill." But you should be able to feel, by now, that that's nothing. The pressures are real enough when you're there, but that's not pressure, other than the pressure of being alive.
You must create an unnatural pressure. You observe, "I can't seem to stop, I periodically do this thing, this bad habit I have, and then I want to explain it." So silently, privately, without telling anyone, just take willful responsibility for it. You're storming a particular gate. In fact you're storming a gate that doesn't really exist yet. But why wait until the last minute?
On a final note, I've pointed out that a mechanical system can't understand more than what's in its programming: that a radio can't understand how it got put together. But that isn't the final statement of reality. If it was, This Thing couldn't exist. The more complex a system becomes, the closer it gets to being able to comprehend, if not recreate itself. Now if that was pushed, if the system became more and more complex, it might be able to create a system which is more complex than itself. It's already a possibility that computers will repair themselves, to heal themselves, to find out what has gone amiss within the hardware or the software, to be able to pinpoint whether it's a physiological or psychological problem, if you will. It's being theorized that computers will combine information in ways which weren't intended in the original program. They can come up with something original. That is one step closer to reaching a stage of complexity where a system could comprehend itself, to recreate itself or create a system that's more complex than itself. The human system will come closer to this complexity as it comes closer to storming the gates of 3-D thinking.
