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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk 151, Mar 28, 1985, runtime 1:46
[Comments to new tape listeners: cannot listen with the old senses. J's humor. Role of humor in This Thing. Should not make jokes at people, including yourself, at your own expense.]
[The three mortal infra-systems: muscles, mind, respiratory system. The feeding of them as entertainment. Excitation/entertainment is a fueling of one or more of the infra-systems (IS). Everything is entertainment. Religion is entertainment but as it is now, nearly all worn out: "everybody has already heard all the jokes." Even This Thing is entertainment. This Thing as jazz, but J. cannot engage in totally free jazz. Must have some structure (remember, anything too drastic can't be true). Walk a fine line of instability. The entertainment of This Thing fuels all three infra-systems simultaneously.]
[The three IS do not necessarily ordinarily support each others' plans and activity. e.g. night school (mind) not supported by muscles (which worked all day) or mind not supporting a good run for the muscles. If you can get all three IS to cooperate in an activity = great profit.]
[Religious conversion: "born again" syndrome = change in an individual = loosening or erasing of stored memory in one or more of the IS (each has its own memory). Real Change = no hard-wired memory (erasing memory in each IS, in all three). No guilt, no memory. Consciousness without memory. All J's tasks and tricks fit into this assault on the IS to loosen memory, not to mention all the discourse as well.]
[Life continually sets up gods to use as future targets to tear down. Launching assaults on its own sacred structures. One exception: your own Understanding cannot be assaulted (comma)... ]
[Extremes of spectrum: from doom, danger, fear of destruction to the great center swamp of middle age, middleclass boredom and ennui to the “thrill of creation.” The center swamp between the extremes is fascinated with the extremes. Fascinated with murder mysteries and traffic accidents. Seeking entertainment in the certain knowledge of "quicksands everywhere, and I'm going down fast!" of the middle swamp moving into the D extreme. Find examples of C extreme fascination on your own. Connection to "dangerous minorities in our midst" but without them: stagnation. Spurring growth that homogeneous groups could never produce on their own. Everyone has "dangerous minorities"; when they are stamped out you're just a follower, satisfied, sane. Those of This Thing must not stamp them out, but must not listen to them either. Must understand them as necessary for growth.]
[Green Acres allegory; explanation and expansion. We are all Green Acres; all live where all the characters seem insane but understand each other and are in secret league against you. Assault the staid, sane, middle class protagonist. J has been playing Green Acres for years on Thursday nights; assaulting the Group.]
[Kyroot as Life in all its uncertainties and complexities. And Kyroot said... should now read: “And Life said…”]
[In spite of all religions — dance of pessimism and continual woe-is-man-ing, they all profess in the end that good will prevail. 59 minutes and 45 sec. of sermon is "woe, woe, woe" with final 15 seconds being : "but good will prevail!" ]
[Should use St. Quantum's day for more than mere debauchery... Neuralize how.
Transcript
NO MEMORY, NO GUILT
Document: 151, March 28, 1985
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1985
Those who have not been exposed to me and This for any great length of time, often have lingering questions having to do with how they hear what I say. For a long time you can't help but hear This with your old sense. I am not saying, because we cannot do it here, that you should fall into that ordinary would-be religious phenomenon of: "All right, I want you to swear allegiance to the purple gods, admit that you're a new person, agree to follow all the precepts, pay your money and now you're a new person and you're going to hear a new message from the gods." That, like everything that exists, has a purpose for ordinary humanity, but not for those in This. Nevertheless, for a long time it comes and goes and you will still hear what you were wired up to hear.
For example, you may have a problem with humor -- especially those who have been exposed to me just a few times. I'm going to be more specific. I will not speculate on how much humor anyone else might have used in trying to talk about This, but all of you who have heard tapes or heard me live, know that I seem to continually throw in things that elicit laughter. Some of you may not know whether I intended it, or some of you may feel that I made a faux pas, and others think I didn't know what I was doing. So, I'll discuss humor further since it exemplifies the way people are wired.
Let me state again: You cannot engage in any form of hostility and do This Thing. And I am certainly not encouraging any sort of sham love commune with you attempting to act toward one another on the basis of: "Oh how I love you. It's so wonderful that you are here." Or, "It's us against the world." But, if you are going to do This, you cannot participate in the routine hostilities and tensions, the routine transfers of energy, that hold the rest of society together. That cannot be the basis (or even the mid-section) of a group working together in which each person has an extraordinary Aim. Hostility cannot go unchecked. And let me reiterate something else I've mentioned: you cannot be cynical or sarcastic. And that is not just toward others doing This. You are on very dangerous ground if under any conditions, drunk, sober or otherwise, you made any racial or religious joke or remark. It would mean the end of your participation in This. That is not because of simple, moral reasons, nor because I am here to defend any religion, race or nationality. Any time you entertain voices of cynicism or sarcasm you are playing out your routine role of critic.
To get back to where I started: People may still believe they are having a particular problem with humor and hostility, especially since they think they hear me engage in it. Some people wonder, although they may not have detailed it verbally, "Does he know what he's doing? Is he making jokes at someone else's expense?" Often I add the postscript: "Look, I'm not laughing at any group of people.", but you still wonder. Sometimes I use a historical figure to illustrate something and it strikes people's wiring in a particular way. I'll repeat again -- and you should hear the truth of this because it is not an explanation -- once you begin to really Hear, you will see that I do not laugh at anyone. I do not laugh at anyone, and I am saying "I" on that basis that you wouldn't either. You will reach the point that you clearly See that YOU literally EQUALS EVERYONE ELSE. I do not laugh at people because what I'm making jokes about are not people. In a sense, I do not even see people: I see the complex, ofttimes stumbling, process of the great Life experiment itself.
But, about humor: It is quite possible that anyone, especially those minimally exposed to me, would believe that I am making jokes at someone else's expense. But, if you move beyond your own hardwired senses and begin to really Hear, you will know that there is no hostility in what I say. There is no one to laugh at. Those around me for any length of time know that any conversations we have together usually end up in a continual series of laughs. Because to encourage serious conversation is to take your own hardwired self seriously. And that's no fun at all. But again, there is no one to laugh at.
And another thing: You should never make jokes at your own expense. If you are a Buddhist, that does not give you license to make Buddhist jokes. It's no excuse to say, " Since I'm a Buddhist my joking about Buddhism isn't anti-Buddhist. Not like a joke from someone who is not a Buddhist making fun of my religion. Surely I can do it to myself." No you can't. It is just as dangerous as making a joke at the expense of someone else's race or culture. You are part of Life, and it's still hostility.
Sometimes I use a group of people, or an archetypical position of power (such as the Pope) in what may appear to be the butt of a joke. Suppose I use a bricklayer from a particular geographical location like Alabama to illustrate a Red Circuited person. It has nothing to do with geography or making fun of anyone. I'm talking about the mining and manufacturing, the Red Circuit level IN YOU. It is alive in you and you've got to hear it when I direct messages to it, or when other parts of you are talking about what's going on down there. It's got nothing to do with geographical locations or particular people. We're talking about everyone's nervous system, and in a particular example such as talking about bricklayers, I am using it synonymously with the lower end of YOUR nervous system, those parts that are older, less sophisticated, less liberal. And that's all there is to it.
You've got no right to make a joke at your own expense. It is just forbidden. It will not help you at all, and you should surely begin to See that. You've got to be able to See what you are, what Life is, and even begin to be able to joke verbally without using it as an excuse for hostility towards yourself, others, or Life. To make some joke to yourself -- about how dumb you are, or how clumsy you are -- before you See enough is, at the very least, a waste of time. At the very most, you can remember that I told you that you cannot engage in hostility and Do This.
I want to draw your attention back to the three mortal infrasystems of the muscles, respiratory system and the mind. I'll give you a crude sketch, I may go into at another time, having to do with fueling these three systems. A sketch equaling fun, equaling entertainment. Suppose you're at the beach, at a park, watching TV (or looking at your own screen of consciousness if you know how to control it), and you see people engaged in a multitude of activities to entertain themselves, to have fun. Do all these attempts have anything in common? I don't just mean that volleyball and croquet are both called sports. What they have in common, that goes unrecognized, is that all forms of entertainment, of trying to amuse oneself, are based on fueling either one or more of the three infrasystems depending upon the individual's wiring. I'm trying to resist even giving any examples, but you can look easily enough at any entertainment and one or two examples should strike you immediately; examples of people pleasurably feeding the muscles, or of people stimulating the mind.
Some of you have been disconcerted by my saying that everything is show biz, including This. This Thing is entertainment, because everything is entertainment. Religion, too, is entertainment, but its at a dead end because everyone has heard all the jokes before. A new generation comes along and they have new ministers, rabbis, popes and swamis....but it's the same old jokes. It's no longer good, nourishing entertainment. The new generation responds in a slightly more refreshed manner because they haven't heard the jokes as many times as their fathers, but even so, religion has reached such a level that it's part of the Line-level consciousness of everyone. It's down in the genes. So, everyone's born having heard all the jokes and knowing all the punch lines. A new minister may arrive on the scene with an up-to-date show, contemporary music and all the fanfare, but he's still waving the old religious text and it's all the same old jokes. The same jokes everyone used who walked that stage before him, in that religion and in all others. There are only so many verses in the manual, and they've used them over and over. Everyone's heard the jokes, by now almost genetically, and it's wearing thin.
All is entertainment, including This. Are you going to tell me you're not entertained by This? I play a music for you in the sense of what jazz musicians do. Some jazz is conservative using the same songs over again, but embellishing on them in new ways. The musician tries to improvise a bit, put new interpretations on it, restate it in his own way. Then there's free jazz. The guy comes out, picks up a horn and plays something he's never played, always trying to stay ahead of himself, ahead of his muscles, attempting to play anything different from what he was about to play. And to the majority of people it sounds like noise.
I can't engage in totally free jazz here. I can't totally bring tomorrow down to today's level of consciousness, because it would have so little relationship that it would not trigger any associative responses in you, the hearers. It would be gibberish, just noise, and would appear totally irrational. That would obviously be unprofitable. And so when I speak it is a song that must go back and forth -- sometimes sounding as if I'm saying something that readily bears on everyday life and what you know, and then I shift and take you to an unknown right angle that leads you somewhere totally new. Of course, often the process ends in a laugh and I seem to end the musical measure there. When you're good, you can do this to yourself. You have to See, in a particular way, that everything that goes on in human life is entertainment. And This is no exception. Contrarily, if it were not entertainment, you would never even hear it; you would never have heard anyone who has ever tried to speak of This.
But try and remember what I started out with, that entertainment is the direct fueling of the three mortal infrasystems -- the muscles, mind, and respiratory system. I want to bring your attention to the possibility of feeding more than one of the infrasystems at the same time. Can you at least speculate that when This Thing operates just right in you, it entertains all three systems at once?
On a more apparently personal basis, can you see that the three infrasystems do not ordinarily and directly support each other's plans. Take the muscles and the mind for example, while remembering that even though I isolate one apparent example, nothing is that clean cut. Let's say the mind decided, "I must go back to school. The only way I'll get out of this dead end job is to go back to graduate school. So I'll have to go at night. I'll race home from work, try to get a quick shower -- or maybe I'll go directly from work -- and go down there three nights a week etc." This plan, let us say, is from the mind. Can you see that the other infrasystems are not going to directly support it? After all, the guy's forty years old, he's been working all day. His muscles are not going to joyously take him home after a hard day, loosen his tie, throw some water in his face, drive across town and sit in some night class for four hours three nights a week.
By the same token, the mind is not going to directly support the muscles' plan of going out to run 10 miles. Ordinarily any of the three infrasystems are not going to support the other's plans. Need I point out that there is great practical use in this map. Like many other maps I've drawn, any many things I've encouraged you to try on your own, this map is a good illustration of how to take this very process beyond the ordinary. When you can move at a right angle to what you normally would have done, it is an opportunity for all three infrasystems to be fueled. When you can drag in all three systems, even in some small way, into what you're attempting to do, the noise, the automatic reactions, and even very strong resistance disappears.
To Neuralize -- to remember something without thinking about it -- correctly is to disrupt the rat-race your head goes through, and that is the only way to use your head when dealing with This. Don't let the Yellow Circuit run it through the same old department and come back with the same old information. Find out for yourself that there is an absolute reality to This that you never suspected, never heard of, and never would have found. A reality that you can See. Almost everyone wants to bypass this and tell me or themselves, "Wait a minute. I hear a lot of this. It's great! How can I do it?" In a certain sense, you have got to be able to See something on your own before you can really deal with Doing it.
Let me mention something about so-called mystical states and their relationship to the three infrasystems. In those states, in so-called conversions, someone seems to undergo a deep change and claims: "I've been reborn. I am absolutely not the same person I was before I found this religion." These kinds of states are worthy of you consideration. It seems undeniable that the person has undergone a change. So, what is going on when this happens? It is that the person has been loosed from the full-hold of the memories stored in those three infrasystems.
To take it further, you recall I pointed out that each department -- the Red, Blue and Yellow -- has its own storage system, its own distinct memory. I have pointed out some of the ways people react within the different systems when confronted by certain situations of great fear or a death in the family. The systems react according to the memory stored within each. They are, of course, interrelated like everything else, but there is a distinct place in the mind, muscles and respiratory system where each files away its own memories. Consider the example of a religious conversion: the leader paces, hollers to the audience that the gods will get them and concludes with an appeal to, " straighten up, walk on down to the alter, send in your name, put your hand on the TV or at least say to yourself, 'I've missed the marked, lived incorrectly. I know I'm wrong and the gods need to forgive me' -- and you'll be a new person." Hundred, thousands of people will tell you (and they're not wrong), "Something happened to me. I stood there, admitted I was wrong, asked for forgiveness and now I feel wonderful!" Their faces break into a smile and they want to hug everyone. The storage systems of the infrasystems have been altered. Remember: No memory, no guilt.
I keep pointing out that what passes for change in the ordinary world is not really change from any viewpoint that would do the Few any good. You can't go out and follow some self-help method, improve your posture or your health. It just won't do. At times I refer to Real Change, with a capital R and C. Real Change is in no memory. The memory of the three infrasystems is genetic; it didn't come from the environment (because your environment is nothing more or less than the genetics of everyone else). The way you act, the way you respond to things, is from the memory stored in the three infrasystems and the memories they store and the way they store them is genetically determined. It doesn't matter whether your mother beat you, your father ridiculed you, or your "environment" had some other influence on you. Your response, the memories which determined your response, is genetically determined. Can you See that anything that passes for change is when one or more of those three infrasystems releases some or all of its memory? No memory, no guilt. No memory, no fear. Any time that happens to someone, it feels like something extraordinary has occurred. And if it happens in more than one of the infrasystems, it feels like something really extraordinary has happened. Life knows what it's doing. None of you ever really wondered what was going on in traditional religions where there were all kinds of assaults on the human senses and systems: the music, architecture, playing bass drums, people shouting, hugging. It's all an assault -- an attempted entertainment of as many of the infrasystems as Life can manage in that one situation.
The unactivated area above the Line, in the Future/Now, absolutely exists. When you have flashes above the Line -- however you may describe it -- you feel that you are conscious in a way that almost bears no resemblance to anything you've ever experienced. You are still sane, and still standing, but otherwise it bears no resemblance. Do you realize that the new circuits you've ignited have no hardwired memory?
Life has had men repeating some variation of, "The truth shall set you free" throughout history. And, on a good day, it'll just about grab anybody. It just strikes your nervous system that there is great validity to that, that it holds a key secret. But can you conceive that consciousness without hardwired memory is the Truth? The truth is a new consciousness with no memory, and that consciousness doesn't come from the hardwired circuits that are crying out, "Where is truth? How can I find it?"
What passes in ordinary life as some great conversion, a rebirth, is simply an alteration of the hold the hardwired memories have on the hardwired circuits. Glaring examples pop up throughout history, and the change is not always just linear; it happens all over the planet in varying degrees, in religions and in other ways. There is a mechanical loosening of the hold of memory on one of the infrasystems and it's experienced as being everything from the unusual to the extraordinary. You are right in suspecting that much of what I say and suggest for you to do fits right into that. The closer I get to playing free jazz for you, the greater the potential for you to See something new, with a newly activated part of your circuitry. Provided I don't stray so far that you hear nothing but noise, I attempt to assault your infrasystems in such a way that energy which runs through your circuits is loosed to run to places it has never been before.
About religions in particular, it's reaching a critical point where the audiences -- and the audience is the whole mass of humanity -- already know the punch lines. Religions are no longer entertaining. This is not an abrupt process; the food value has been wearing down for a long time. Some people know the punch lines before they've even heard them, because they're within the genetic webbing of humanity. A religious leader starts quoting from his religion's manual, and before he's finished, you know how it will end. And you don't even know why. You thought maybe you caught something from his posture, or he gave verbal and nonverbal hints, but you know the end before he finishes. You whistle right along; you're already familiar with the music. Life is very big and while it's forming new melodies, the old ones still play until they're worn down.
People frequently look at this normal attrition with concern, thinking the new melodies are perversions of the old: "Humanity is turning its back on former structures of goodness, taking what was once a charitable activity or worthwhile idea and perverting it. The gods gave us the truth and in fifty years or 5,000 years, look what we've done to it. Shame on us." To believe that, you are looking through the binocular vision of ordinary consciousness.
Life is actually alive, but it is not conscious in the way that humanity believes the gods would be, that it would know absolutely everything it's doing. It doesn't. Of course, its stupidity to us would be deep wisdom. But Life does stumble. It tries things, all sorts of things. At the same time that some people are in church, or out doing charitable work, or contributing money to feed the hungry, others are out robbing old people, knocking them down and taking their last dime. It's all happening within the body of Life. So what seems to be humanity's callousness toward loving and religious ideas, toward "truth", is Life continually instigating assaults within its own body. Life is assaulting its own "holy structures", its own temples. It raises up a solid organization like a church or religion, and then knocks it down from another part of its body. You just have to See it. Life sets them up, from one viewpoint, only for one reason -- so it will have something to shoot at. Of course, humans caught in the old melodies feel that humans caught in the new melodies are ignoring the goodness and wisdom the gods had sent down. But Life is just trying out new music. Humans don't do anything; they are caught in the music. Life sets up new melodies, new leaders, new institutions, new truths, and then shoots them. It does it everywhere, all the time, but it seems particularly odious and unfathomable to ordinary consciousness when it happens in the spiritual and religious realm. People think, "How could this happen?" It's just Life instigating something in one part of town, and then setting up an insurrection in another. It plots an assault on what it has already set up.
There is only one exception to this process: your own Understanding. That cannot be assaulted. There is nobody to assault it. (Remember, there is a comma after "your own Understanding," -- it can and must move.) Once you begin to experience this for yourself, you will know what I'm speaking of. You feel, "Something is moving in one of my systems in a miraculous, magical way." What is that something? It's the entertainment. It's you building your own exception to the process. Sometimes it seems vague, sometimes you want to write down exactly what I say as if it feels like an updated version of one of the ten commandments. Then six months later you can barely keep from writing me and mentioning that I appeared to be totally refuting what I had said six months earlier. Your own Understanding is the only exception to Life setting up gods only to knock them down, but it moves and grows as you See more of all the apparent contradictions.
Consider a spectrum in which all of ordinary Life exists: at one end is the ever present danger of destruction, and at the other is what would appear to be the anticipatory thrill of discovery. Put crudely, I am hinting at what would be perhaps a D end and a C end of this particular spectrum. In the center is a swamp of the middle-aged, middle class, slowly dying bored. Has anyone seriously wondered about the criminal life? How is it, for instance, that the average bank robbery in the United States yields only $1200 or less, and that's provided they get out the door without being shot or arrested. And yet, people continually rob banks. Do you think that quick money is the purpose driving ordinary people into a life of crime? I suggest to you that it's not quite that simple. Psychologists are puzzled by examples of people who grew up in routine surroundings, yet by the time they could walk they were grabbing purses. They say, "They put him away and as soon as he's out he does the same thing. As soon as he could afford a gun, he tried to hold up the 32nd Precinct. There's something loose in this guy. Any halfway reasonable person would see that that's not profitable." Or the guy that stole $50,000, spent it all, and was caught two weeks later. The psychologist figures if you divide twenty years doing time by 50,000 the guy didn't do well at all. And people wonder, "What's loose in this guy?" I suggest to you again that Life's purpose encompasses both ends of the spectrum, not only the constructive end but also the destructive one.
The ever-present danger of destruction. It's not simply in the criminal field, it's everywhere. It's felt as, among other things, fear. You stop at a store, look inside, and you don't like the way "those people are standing around." The ever-present danger of destruction. People say, "You've got to watch yourself at all times, watch where you're going, because things could just fall apart, savages could take over." This is not something new to civilization. Fear and destruction have always been present; it's part of Life.
On the other end of our spectrum is that which seems to be of a more constructive nature: people fed by a kind of warmth, the excitement of discovery through the arts and intellectual pursuits. This end seems to be of a more progressive nature. These people do not stab each other over which school of art a particular painting belongs to. You don't hear a physicist say, "I find your latest mathematical model so offensive that I'd like to roll up my sleeves and whip you silly, Professor." No, compared to those fighting over a twenty five cent throw of the dice, in these people there seems to be a humaneness, a warm enjoyment of whatever they're engaged in.
And then there's the middle. A kind of cement, very widespread. It is the center swamp of middle age, and you know, you can middle-aged at twenty. Most people are. But when you're forty, it's really middle-age, and you begin to feel the hot breath of the swamp gases calling you home. You realize, "I am standing in quicksand, going down -- and everywhere I look is quicksand. Everywhere I look is destruction sitting on "hold", right next to the "ready" button." This is the center swamp between two extremes: the middle-aged, middle class, dying the slow death of boredom.
Along these lines, consider the following questions. You have a famous physicist, and his one hobby is that he reads murder mysteries. What is the fascination? Or, you're driving on the highway and you see an accident up ahead. Lights are flashing, broken glass covers the road, a car is hanging off the end of an embankment, and you think you can almost make out an arm dangling out the car window. You're inching along because every other car is also inching along. Everybody tries to look. It is Man's fascination with destruction. Try not to look. Literally, try it. It takes an incomparable effort to not look -- like trying to bench press 700 pounds or run 52 miles nonstop. One system can say, "I'm not going to look. After all, it won't serve any purpose." And as you're driving by it's as if the whole gravity of the universe drags you, eyes riveted, to the scene. I mean it -- just try not to look.
What I'm pointing toward is that within the great central swamp of the middle-aged, middle class, dying the slow death of boredom, there is a built-in fascination with the entertainment available in the destructive end of the spectrum. It's available in gory stories, crime stories, or in imagining, "I won't go into that store because I don't like the way those people are just standing around." It's a thrill, a small vacation. It's entertainment. There is a similar situation at the creative end of the spectrum, but it's so much rarer. Humanity still rests within the Red level predominantly, hence, people are drawn primarily to the ever-present danger end of the spectrum. I'll leave it to you to find examples within yourself.
Here's one you might find profitable to Consider. It has nothing to do with politics, or sociology, but I'm going to use music you can relate to. It's a prime example, and always has been, of what Life is doing. Throughout history, Life has the majority speaking of others as "dangerous minorities." With just a few exceptions, the majority looks at the minority and thinks, "In some way they are not a part of us. They're dangerous." Can you see that these "dangerous minorities" who seem to be constant troublemakers, who appear from almost nowhere or are growing within, who cause the collapse of great empires -- help to spread energy that would never be spread in a more homogeneous group? If you carry homogeneity far enough, in anything, you have absolute stagnation.
Everyone who has any potential has dangerous minorities within, as opposed to those living in the center swamp of the middle-aged, middle class, slowly dying bored. They have no rebel factions, no potential for the new. One of the jobs of religions, including psychology, is the attempt by one segment of Life's body to stamp out dangerous minorities. It is their job to imbue one with community spirit, love of country and religion -- to get to the point where you feel no danger of minorities within. Note that I have never suggested you stamp out your internal minorities. They need to be seen. Even if you could rid yourself of them, I would never encourage it, because then you would be a follower. You'd tell me how you carry my picture around, and that wild things used to go inside of you before you met me. If you are attracted to This, if you have any potential, you have plenty of dangerous minorities. This Thing is dangerous, it is in the minority, and if you had no rebel factions you never would have been attracted to it. You cannot destroy your potential -- you must See what those dangerous minorities are, and then cease to entertain them. You must cease to entertain them, because they do not speak for you.
Once you See that, they no longer even attack you. Up to a point, the more you feel the influence of the two extreme ends of the spectrum, the more potential you have. I have on occasion recommended to several of you who were very oriented in the Yellow Circuit that you undertake a Red Circuited activity. In life there is no purpose to that, but those involved in This need to know that level as well.
One final note for this evening about religion. Has anyone ever noticed how, in spite of religion's continuing pessimistic dance and how awful people and things are ... they always say that "everything will be all right in the end"? That "goodness will ultimately prevail"? And ordinary consciousness heaves a sigh of relief. End of sermon. People walk away and feel that something has been resolved. They can't remember both things at once; they can't remember both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. First they say everything's rotting and we're at the pit of fiery destruction. Then they say that goodness will prevail. Consciousness can't deal with both simultaneously. It's like two different worlds; but it's not. It's Life telling the truth again. It stumbles, yet it knows that goodness will prevail in the end.
Of course, it helps to know what goodness is
and it helps to know where the end is.
