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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk 163, June 27, 1985, runtime 1:18
[The ordinary energy field as a low pressure area (vortex) in a maelstrom. Surroundings are sucked in. This Thing = calm center = quiet mind. Not oblivious to surrounding tornado, but not sucked into it. The ordinary consciousness is constantly pulled out of this center into the whirling perimeter. In the calm center there is nobody, i.e. impersonal reality.]
[Everyone is wired either to be on the side of C or D. "You" = C, "they" = D if you are engaged. When you are impartial you can see everyone wired to be only C or D; you have the possibility to see E.]
[Question: when you realize that due to fatigue, alcohol etc. you are incapable of making a proper choice or activity, and then forbear to decide, where does the additional judgment faculty come from? Where is it when it's not active?]
[Unseen additional dimensions: an order of magnitude different from mere size difference. What goes on in you (e.g. "I've been drinking too much, I'm going to cut down") goes on in the Body of Life not only at inconceivably greater size, but also in additional unseen dimensions as well. The ordinary consciousness always makes its comparisons to the transcendent on the basis of extrapolation in three dimensions, i.e. size only, whereas you must be able to see into new dimensions as well.]
[Real Acting is the best way to "foresee" yourself. The Constant Act (TCA) produces "the unexpected life". It forces you into an unnatural life which provides the best context to see yourself.]
[You have "done a thorough job" of any phase in This Thing if you can freely leave it. Relates to Kyroots: No place is home until you can leave it behind. Not free to leave unless completely familiar with it.]
[Stage fright is not a "psychological fear"--it is a nexological problem in that the Yellow Circuit attempts to analyze and reduce to mental common denominator what is an actual physical fear.]
[Neuralize the "side-kick" phenomena--i.e. Don Quixote with his Sancho Panza. Reflects the dual mode of the voices, public and private.]
[The purpose of the Group: to form a body for J's circuit.]
[TASK: try to find additional unseen dimensions. Find one and write it down.]
[Warning against negative effects of "neutrasweet"--i.e. like caffeine
Transcript
THE VORTEX
Document: 163, June 27, 1985
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1985
Consider how people ordinarily seem to relate to Life. Picture a vortex -- a whirling, ever-moving vortex with a calm center in the middle -- like a tornado. In a quite real sense, everyone is wired up to be a vortex. The circuits are continually whirling and, as in a tornado, this vortex creates a partial vacuum, a low pressure area inside which sucks anything and everything nearby into the movement going on.
Throughout history, there have been religious and philosophical attempts to explain the phenomenon of becoming entangled in the mundane affairs of Life. At one time, people were said to be captured by "evil spirits"; now they are said to have "psychological problems." You have all had the experience of becoming so engaged with external events that your sense of self or consciousness almost seems to become part of them. For example, you can become so fearful at the thought of impending surgery that all you do is think about the surgery: "I think about blood, I think about needles, I think about dying, no matter what I do. I tried to go to the movies to take my mind off it, but nothing works." This condition is common when ordinary people experience stress.
Consider this phenomenon in relation to my picture of the circuits as a continually whirling vortex. Once the circuits are programmed, they run constantly in the prescribed pattern of your particular vortex, and this vortex creates a low-pressure area inside which seems to be oneself, one's consciousness. All of what seems to be one's attention, thoughts and feelings are continuously being sucked into the movement, caught up in the whirl of whatever the circuits are running. This may not sound as poetic as being possessed by spirits or entangled in the Great Web of Illusion, but I assure you that is a fair description of what is going on.
The process of extracting one's own consciousness from the flying debris of the vortex produces what many religious and philosophical voices through the ages have described as a centered calm, or a calm center. As long as you are alive, you cannot really escape from the whirling dance of vortices -- or "I's" -- but you can produce, internally, a constant, calm center.
This is not something that can be created on any permanent basis through the mechanical methods Life has produced. Chanting, taking drugs, or attempting to watch one's thoughts until the mind stops will have no lasting effect. But there does come a time when those attempting to do This Thing must learn to separate themselves from the whirling waste flying around in the vortex of the circuitry.
Just because you learn to create a calm center, does not mean you are suddenly free of the whirlwind. You do not become oblivious to your own or other people's voices of suffering and upset. You are not blind to the fact that the forces which help Life grow must also cut down and destroy. If, for whatever reason, you chose to step outside your own calm center, you would know instantly and without question that the tornado was still around. It will always be there, pulling and sucking, no matter how you are wired up.
The circuitry in everyone -- from the most lethargic to the most hyperactive person -- is wired up to run at an appropriate, constant tempo. The vacuum this creates pulls everything that moves close to it, including what seems to be a person's individual consciousness, out to the perimeter of the tornado. This leads to the feeling everyone has that Life is a blisteringly fast merry-go-round where they are simultaneously pulled, pushed and dragged. People, things and ideas go flying off before you can grab them; you can't make repairs or even paint the thing because it's moving so fast that paint flies off. You can't stop -- you don't even know how it got started -- but you're glued to it by the very momentum.
One of the few things that I would assure you about Life is that that is not necessarily so. But notice, in the beginning, how progress seems to be a matter of attempted repairs or knocking problems off the merry-go-round one after another. Only later do you begin to suspect that progress is not a linear process.
There is not some psychological "you" which came about through a series of events and can be unraveled like a mystery. You are a moving tornado. Your physical body is the perimeter of a literal, whirling vortex wherein the circuits fly around and around, over, under and through, in an ever-moving pattern that is you. You are transferring energy, moving information just as you were wired up to do. And inside, what seems to be your "self" is sucked into the movement, too.
Hence, the feeling everyone occasionally has of, "I have to get away from all this. I need a vacation. If I could just lie on the beach and not have to deal with any more problems or think about my job, that would rejuvenate me." This is an unrecognized desire to physically escape from the tornado. Hence, Life's little placebos: drugs, alcohol, attempts at meditation and prayer. These provide only momentary relief.
It is possible to experience a very calm place within, outside the reach of the ordinary circuitry. I do not use "calm" in the usual sense, as synonymous with "complacent," but this calm place is beyond the mechanical pull of the vortex. In an ordinary person, such a place does not exist; it only comes about through the production of a new circuit. This is because everything you were born with -- all of your Life-produced wiring -- is part of Life's circuit merry-go-round. That is where you came from; it is your ordinary you, created to move energy at the level where humanity's consciousness was when you were born. At Line level, there is no escaping the vortex. You can certainly bodily remove yourself to a mountain somewhere, become a hermit, or take a vacation and go lie on the beach. But that is no real escape. Once you begin to Understand this for yourself, you can walk past all those sweating bodies lying in the sun and, even though they are motionless, you hear a soft, constant Whirr----. You can hear the roar of the tornado.
Nothing in ordinary Life -- nothing you have experienced, no available information -- prepares you to be able to separate yourself from the hypnotic vacuum pulling everything into the vortex. The natural state of consciousness is to be part of that movement. If you could take a regular person -- your ordinary self -- and pull it apart to separate the "fake shell of personality" from the "real self" -- if you could crack apart the vortex and uncover the center, do you know what you would find? The center would be calm and quiet enough, but no one would be there. That's why I sometimes joke that if you have made any effort in This Thing, then it's too late to go crazy. Going crazy in the ordinary sense would be to accidentally pull apart this shell, get inside this vortex, and discover there is no you inside.
To produce a calm center, a "you" separate from the tornado, is to produce a constantly calm place that moves as the tornado moves. No matter where the tornado goes, at the center there exists a spot where nothing is happening. You can be conscious in that center and look ten feet away to a scene that's like Dante revisited. Hell might be just outside your window. But there in that calm center no matter where the tornado moves, nothing is happening. I suppose if this description fell into the wrong hands, you might have people saying, "Nothing is happening? Well, that doesn't sound like much of a sales pitch for whatever this is." Do I look like a salesman?
Let me shift things a little here. I am often asked about the idea of "evil." People feel, "No matter what you say about the Creative and the Destructive forces and how they are interdependent, there are surely things going on in Life that are inherently evil." I want to give you another way to Consider evil. Everyone is wired up to be on one side or the other of any disagreement. Look at your own experiences, and you will notice right away that, in a given situation, absolutely everybody feels as though they are on the side of C Force -- the side of goodness, decency, propriety, and what is right. Of course, they also recognize that they have opponents, but those people are seen as being on the side of D Force. If you are operating at the ordinary level of consciousness, you always feel that you are right, and there is always somebody else who is wrong. The reality behind this is that there are always two apparent sides; everyone is wired up to fall to one side or the other, and the sides are called "C" or "D," depending on which direction you are facing.
It takes time to absorb this. You can observe it more easily in other people, in situations which have no mechanical pull on you. Look upon Life, read the newspaper, watch what goes on in confrontations where two people or two groups of people are taking sides, and you will see quite clearly that both of them believe they are on the side of C, and both of them think their opponent is serving D. Everyone is mechanically pulled to one side, and everyone is wired up to think the side they are pulled toward is C.
Once you begin to See the reality of the situation, you can no longer answer the question, "Which side are you on?" in a simple, binary fashion. You can no longer simply take the side you were born to take; you can no longer assume, "I believe this because it is right." If someone with any degree of Understanding could be said to take sides, they would attempt to be on Life's side.
Let me ask you a question. Everyone has had this experience, either through fatigue or illness or consuming drugs or alcohol: Perhaps you are in a store trying to buy something. You've read up on the item and compared prices and examined several brands. But this particular day, it suddenly strikes you, "Hey, I am in no condition to figure this out. My thinking processes are shot and I shouldn't be doing this because I can't trust any decision I make right now." You know that the reasonable thing to do is thank the sales person and go home. Later on you realize that if you had made a decision then, it would not have been a choice made with your best faculties. So, here is the question: What is it in you that looked upon your thinking processes and judged them unfit to make a decision? Who in your head decided that your head wasn't functioning?
On most any other day, you would have walked in, said, "I want to buy one of these," made the proper calculations about price and features, and walked out with the item. If I stopped you in the middle of the purchase and asked, "Who are you?" and you had any ability to See what had been going on, you would have to admit that during the past few minutes you were the thinking process of comparing items, prices and features. So if, on a regular day when you feel fine, you are your thinking processes, then what is still working when your thinking processes are too far gone to work properly? Who judges? Who sees?
Normally, you and the vortex of the circuits are all pulled together into one moving mass. But what happens when you suddenly move outside the vortex and see your thinking processes are not functioning? Usually, the process does not observe itself, but moves on without self-analyzation. So what is this thing that sometimes rises up and looks at and judges the process? How does it come into being? And if there is something beyond the thinking process, where does that something go during all the times when it is not observing the process? Why isn't it always in operation?
Have you ever noticed that sometimes Life seems to rear up and look at itself in the same way I have just been describing? For example, recently there have been all kinds of public voices condemning the excessive use of alcohol and particularly drunk driving. It is almost as though Life suddenly stepped back, looked at its own processes, and condemned itself for drinking too much.
Use this example to Neuralize that there is more than just an allegorical connection between your body and the Body of Life. The first thing that may strike you is the size difference between you and Life. If it takes waking up with a hangover twelve days in a row and starting to shake a little to get you to notice you've been drinking too much, what would it take to get Life to notice? Would a billion people have to wake up with hangovers? What tremendous number of humans would have to be killed in alcohol-related accidents for Life to finally condemn drunk driving?
The magnitude of the size difference between Life and Man is almost unthinkable, but even the Consideration of size will carry you only so far. To Neuralize this you must also take into account unseen additional dimensions. It's not simply a matter of you having a headache this big and Life having a headache THIS BIG. You could carry that type of comparison to the extreme: Say that two percent of humanity is worried about nuclear destruction of the planet. If two percent of humanity is the size of a dime lying on the sidewalk, how big would two percent of the known Universe -- Life's body -- be? That might be the size of the Milky Way. So if Life was concerned about nuclear destruction to the same extent humanity is, think how much this would be bothering Life! A whole Milky Way full of worry. Only it's not that simple. Life not only has larger dimensions of length, breadth, and width; Life has dimensions your ordinary consciousness cannot perceive. And taking this as far as it will go in all possible three-dimensional directions will not give you any idea of the true difference between Man and Life.
Even carried to the extreme, size comparisons take only three aspects into account. Instead of picturing expansion in size, you have to become able to look at right angles and Consider unseen dimensions. This is a whole other ball game than size. Life has dimensions going off at what would amount to right angles, though once you See this, you realize you are not really looking at right angles. What you See cannot be described; if there was a description, then people could see this way.
Whatever temporary description I may give, the angles are there, and you can become aware of them. People throughout history have been aware of them, or This Thing would not exist. One reason This Thing has remained so illusive is that Man can conceive of only three dimensions. Even when he tries to expand something, he pictures the expansion in only three directions.
Humanity has always expressed the idea of Man being a reflection of Life in three dimensional terms. The old religious ideas of heaven being in the sky and the gods being omnipotent and omnipresent are examples of Man taking a three dimensional picture and expanding it three dimensionally. Descriptions of the gods have ordinarily been no more than descriptions of human life enlarged in three directions: "I'm smart, but if there were gods, they'd know everything. I get mad at people, but they never would." This is no criticism of religious descriptions; at the ordinary level, all descriptions are dimensionally limited. If you have trouble believing this, sit down and try to write a new definition of "god." Call upon your past experiences, poetic and mystical feelings, philosophical ideas you have studied. All these add up to is a three dimensionally expanded picture of human life. This is why Man has never been satisfied with any description of the gods. And those who become involved in This Thing are even more dissatisfied than ordinary people.
Humanity is a real reflection of what is going on in the Body of Life; this is not an allegory. But Considering the connection between you and Life in three dimensional terms is never going to satisfy you. After a certain point, you must learn to deal with unseen dimensions.
Now I am going to discuss two types of questions which often arise after people are initially exposed to This Thing. Often, once people hear these ideas and make their first efforts, they ask a question which goes something like this: "Why do I not seem able to do for myself what I can do after I heard you say do it?" The simple answer is that, initially, people do not know what to do. This is not a personal foible or weakness in you; nobody in the world knows what to do because the information is not readily available. The ideas of This Thing are not needed, generally, in Life. If you did not have an extraordinary need, you would never have heard these ideas, or seen the possibilities of This Thing, or tried to Do anything. If you had known what to do, you would have done it, right? How simple and unmystical an answer can I give? That's the answer.
Sometimes people ask specific questions about their progress in This Thing, or about the levels or stages one goes through: "Is it possible to leave one stage of development without having completely understood it and go on to another? I thought I had gotten over being hostile toward my mother; the tension between us had definitely diminished, but then she called me yesterday and I fell into the same old pattern." Or, "I'm not sure I should go on to anything else, until I fully understand why I feel frightened all the time." There is also a simple answer to this kind of question: You have done a thorough job of something if you have freely left it; that is a thorough job.
