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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk # 185, Nov 28, 1985, runtime 1:33
[The near impossibility of remembering This Thing in general, and the absolute fact that every thought and feeling is chemically based and physically traceable. The filter of the senses as predicating entrance for all human activity: biochemical alteration. Self confession as example of alteration of biochemical state just as surely as alcohol or drugs. Changing the chemical balance of the organism. Complaining also is a change in the balance of the biochemical status of the body. Smiling likewise --an instant, inevitable connection to biochemical state.]
[Scanning Consciousness --omnidirectional vs. fixed, staring consciousness --is an unnatural upsetting of the biochemical balance. It is not the usual ordinary description of "mystical" or religious experience. A simple electrical/chem. change.]
[The importance of controlling your Yellow Circuit and Blue Circuit chemical balance and activities; of seeing the necessity of this: Be of Good Cheer. Be of Good Plans of Cheerful Conviction. ]
[New term for Consider/Neuralize: "take it outdoors".]
[Could anything/one truly be in charge if it did not have the awareness that such was the case? And is everything negotiable? And is it possible to negotiate with The Partner? So, could The Partner really be in charge? Can you negotiate favorably with the mechanical? Should see the connection of this to: "don't tell yourself what you're going to do". Do not announce/agree with your intentions and resolves especially re: This Thing. This has an unnatural, specific effect on your biochemical balance: To decide to do something but then never admit it --even to yourself. ]
[Example of artificial heart development now beginning to attract controversy re: "quality of life". The extensive counterpoint of C-D-E dance before final emergence of the true worth/use of the new development for Life's growth. The excitement/ pleasure for the inventor as used by all involved by Life in its growth and evolution. ]
[The tendency for duty of the male to overtly transcribe (transfer, bequeath by written or verbal means) generational genetic information to the new generation contrasts with the female duty as more tacit generational transmittal, i.e., more by example, by behavior such as sexual, child care etc. Women as the civilizers of the lower circuit, i.e., men.
Transcript
TAKE IT OUTDOORS
Document: 185, November 28, 1985
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1985
Tonight I would like to bring up something that ordinary consciousness always finds nearly impossible to remember. But before I begin, let me remind you I do not mention this "memory problem" in order to make you feel you are weak. I mention it because you should find it curious how something that strikes you speechless one moment can disappear without a trace seconds later. In fact, you should find it extremely curious. How can Life have arranged you that your most critical insights are the first to vaporize? Answer that one and you will have found the brother-in-law, or at least the cousin of the brother-in-law, of the Secret itself.
Alright. Listen quick: Everything you think, everything you feel, in fact, your very sensation of being an "I" that thinks and feels, is chemically based. Not only is it all chemically based, but it is physically traceable. Since I've touched on this before, I assume you at least have some notion of this. Anything happening outside of your system is invisible to you if it does not come in through your senses. The idea of your having a spirit inside, or a little piece of the gods, simply becomes irrelevant when you realize that even if that "spirit" was there, it would have to hear with your ears and see with your eyes, and smell with your nose. Only what comes through your senses and creates a biochemical change in your hormonal and nervous systems can register in your awareness. Without such physical change, it wouldn't matter if there were gods -- inside or out -- whispering secrets to you. If you were deaf, you'd be out of luck.
Notice, however, that you operate on the opposite principle. Your normal supposition is that, "What I think, what I feel, is far beyond any physical level. I mean, it has to be." And everything down through the course of history that has been related in mythology, literature, religion, and psychology will bear you out. The human psyche simply accepts that there is something very unique in Man that can't be explained physically. All talk about thoughts and feelings being merely chemicals sounds blasphemous, and as for people being just chemical processes..... well, the idea is insulting.
Several other questions are just slight variations on the same melody. For example, neurologists continue their raging debate over the exact difference between the mind and the brain. The "mind" has become today's equivalent of the old "spirit" or "soul", and plays the same function as repository of unexplainable human impulses. Psychologists insist that in order to comprehend feelings you must go beyond hormonal imbalance into the area of environmental influences. "Little Johnny cuts classes because he feels inferior, and he feels inferior because his father beats him and his mother ignores him." What the neurologists and psychologists can't see is that there is no difference between the two sides of these questions. There is no separate environmental and hereditary influence; there is no difference between "mind" and "brain." It is all a biochemical process.
Please note how nearly impossible it is to hold any awareness of this fact. Assuming I could trick you into seeing that consciousness is completely biochemical, you still could not go about your everyday business at Line level and hold that realization. Teetering on the verge of a great thought, if you suddenly remember that it has a biochemical basis, you will lose that thought. You may have moments when you remember that whatever you are feeling is only hormones pumping through your system. The next moment, however, you will again be caught up in the same feeling and forget your great realization. You cannot be the process and simultaneously get outside the process to look at it. The human system is not wired up to do both. In fact, the ordinary human system is wired up only to be the process.
Only for a few people is it possible, through certain methods, to come to a personal realization that all thought, feeling, and behavior, as well as the "person" doing the thinking, feeling, and behaving, is a biochemical process that can be physically charted. But if you could attain this realization, then all of your questions would be answered, and everything you ever dreamed about higher states of consciousness would be yours.
Life has always been telling Man about this biochemical basis for his existence, but only now are we reaching the point where people are susceptible to hearing it. I am going to give you examples of some of the ways Life has been talking about this, and I'm going to describe them in ordinary terms. These will be simplistic descriptions that sound as though they have nothing to do with mundane chemical reactions, but the reality is strictly biochemical. And I am going to talk primarily about thoughts and feelings, but remember that these descriptions include behavior as well.
The first example I will call "self-confession." By self-confession, I mean the act of people talking about themselves. Generally, all speech is a form of self-confession, but let's take the situation of people apparently glorifying themselves. Perhaps a man starts telling magnificent war stories about all the places he's been and all the things he's done. Maybe he's never been more than 50 miles away from home and never done anything more exciting than drive a bread truck, but hand him a drink, get him to relax, and he'll find all kinds of interesting things to tell you about himself. Such self-confession can be explained psychologically: "People have such weak egos that they need to continually bolster them by magnifying their self-image. They lack self-confidence, and bragging themselves up is one way they can feel reasonably good about themselves." That sounds sane psychologically, and the explanation is not totally untrue, because everything is true to some degree. For you Here, however, that degree needs to be tuned up by several thousand percent, or your time here will be wasted.
A slightly clearer example would be the act of taking alcohol or other drugs into the system. Everyone must agree that such obvious physical additives immediately change the biochemical processes of the person involved. The heart speeds up or slows down, the breathing changes, the perceptions change, even one's feelings and behavior can change quite drastically. All from a pill, a smoke, a drink, a liquid pumped into your blood through a needle. What is not so obvious is how difficult it is to move from a perception that drugs cause physical change, to a perception that something so apparently "nonphysical" as self-confession causes physical change, to a realization that one's "self" is a physical process in which all these changes can be made.
Self-confession, alcohol and drugs exist because Life needs humans to undergo certain chemical changes. Each organism exists in a fairly steady state and hence things in general tend to stay as they are. But if no one ever changed, Life would become stagnant because no energy would be transformed and nothing would take place between people. Things need to be moved around. New energy combinations need to be formed. And so Life has found many ways to alter your chemistry, change your blood, and vary the level of your hormonal output in order to alter you and your relationships with everything else.
Complaining is another good example of the way Life shifts the balance. Complaining is not just some foolish hobby the whole world seems to have picked up. Complaining is real. It serves a quite useful function for Life, and for people. For some people, in fact, complaining is their main method of varying the stability of their lives. It provides entertainment, it gives them something to do. It alters their normal production of hormones and brain chemicals. It revs them up, it keeps them going, it shakes them up and juggles their internal processes.
Facial expressions also change the biochemical balance, particularly through hormones, and particularly in the Blue Circuit. One of the greatest tricks to ignite the higher areas of the nervous system is simply to smile for an extended period of time. The immediate pleasure you get from smiling goes beyond the sensual pleasure of exercising your facial muscles. Smiling directly affects the internal chemical balance of your system.
If you've ever done that -- smiled for a whole day without taking a break -- you know what I'm talking about. The effect facial expression has on consciousness is not a psychological or spiritual effect. Even the medical profession has begun to notice the relationship of facial expression to physical manifestations of stress, such as high blood pressure and heart attacks. For instance, those wired up to smile a lot seem to suffer fewer stress-related diseases. I don't need to pull out psychological explanations for this: even the most uneducated man on the street will agree with me this sounds right. And for you, psychology no longer explains much anyway.
The reality of the situation is right in front of you. There is a direct link between facial expression and the chemical state of an individual human organism, and Life uses this link to continuously manipulate the chemical stability of the organism for its own greater purposes. But you can willfully change your own system for your own purposes, once you realize how powerful this link is. If you deliberately smile when Life wants you to frown, you will physically feel your pattern changing inside, breaking from depressive or angry connections, and freeing the system to connect with new energies.
Why do you suppose people drink? A so-called "problem drinker" -- someone who feels he needs to drink in order to feel good; you don't think he's lying, do you? He says he feels better when he drinks, and you watch him, and he does seem to feel better. He acts better. He quits growling and he lightens up on people, he goes up to women he would never dream of approaching while sober, and you can see the change is real. He may never notice that he has gone from one state of bondage to another, and for him it doesn't matter anyway. All he knows, all he is wired up to know, is that his system requires alcohol to feel good. His urge is Life's urge, and for him that compulsion is just as real as the need for sex or for food.
Maybe you begin to see what I mean. All ordinary explanations for alcohol or drug abuse become irrelevant under the light of my funny biochemistry. People aren't using such substances abusively: people are used by Life.
Look at prayer, or any other form of talking treatment, such as psychoanalysis. Simply talking about personal problems with a friend can bring about a pleasurable chemical change. Even silence, or the refusal to talk, will bring about change. Some people, when faced with a so-called stressful situation, seem to need to babble continuously. Others in the same situation withdraw and remain quiet. Both responses alter the internal chemical processes of that person. While you think this thing called "I" is struggling with decisions and trying to figure out solutions to problems, Life is playing you like a flute, and you never see your player.
Most of the examples I have used so far appear to relate mostly to the Yellow and Blue Circuits. We could also extend our view to the area of the Red Circuit. How about exercise, sex, hugging a friend, or stroking your pet? When you put your cheek against someone you "love", do you not feel a direct physical reaction, in you? You can be thinking, "This person means more than anything to me," but what is going on is biochemical energy; moving, and changing, and recombining, and moving some more. And between two people in a relationship, that process can be very intense, and seem very pleasurable. Why else would you feel driven to find someone you can "relate" to?
I want to refer you back to a description that I used before I came up with the terms "Consider" or "Neuralize". My description was that ordinary consciousness seems to be unidirectional. Apparently, consciousness can only focus on one thing at a time, like a flashlight. For most people, this is not a problem. They would simply define this unidirectionality of consciousness as the ability to concentrate. But I suggested to you that you can See more. You can broaden the scope of your consciousness by deliberately not staring -- by keeping your eyes physically in constant motion and allowing your eyes and attention to sweep your surroundings like a lighthouse beam. Even without moving your eyes, standing in front of a person and seeming to give him your full attention, you can scan your surroundings at the same time you hear every word he says. I called this, as opposed to a "unidirectional" flow, an "omnidirectional" flow. You do not allow your attention to stare. And I told you to try it first by physically moving your eyes, and then when you got good enough, you could keep your eyes quiet and still sweep your attention.
You should find this little experiment more than just interesting. The human biochemical system has been constructed to take in only a limited portion of its environment at any one time. Thus, you "stare." By speeding up this process, like putting the frames of a motion picture through a projector, you alter your internal chemical construction, you break up the pattern of your normal system, and you speed up and broaden the flow of your consciousness.
When you first try this omnidirectional scan, it can feel tiring and even dangerous, because you are unnaturally upsetting your entire internal chemical balance. You might find the effect very spectacular: the only problem is you can't remember to do it very often and it seems to take a tremendous effort. You can't scan for more than a few seconds at a time. And the reason is that this use of consciousness interferes with the chemical processes that are your ordinary you. It's as if you took all of the chemical substance and electrical activity that is you, put it in a test tube, and shook it vigorously. You were never meant to be shaken that way.
Now, the reason I brought this back up is because I want you to take another look at what you think This Thing is. It's easy to talk about "enlightenment" and "consciousness" when they still lie out in the fuzzy area of mysticism or psychology. But did you ever suspect that consciousness is a physical process, and that you are a living physical process, and that your own "enlightenment" would only result from your physically interfering with the chemical arrangement that is you?
I could point out, parenthetically, that all past "spiritual heroes" dealt in the same coin I am dealing you. They, too, devised methods of chemically altering the physical constituents of their students. The further back you go the less they understood how the process worked, but nevertheless, they were doing the same thing. Only after the fact have their teachings become codified, mysterious, metaphysical. They created their methods for certain people in a particular time and place, and the further back in time those methods were created, the more mysterious they seem now. But the reverberations continue. Words spoken long ago and watered down through several languages still have a certain real, biochemical effect. And more than that, people expect written words to be true. How can a teaching be handed down through generations, in writing no less, and not be what it says it is? One of the proofs that ordinary people use to verify divine authorship is the effect the words have on the reader. And sure enough, they all pack more of an emotional wallop than what you read on the back of your morning cereal box.
Words on a written page, cold paper, cold ink, scatter light off the page onto the retina and into the optic nerve and are transformed into electrical signals. The firing pattern and the chemical balance of the neurons of the brain are altered. The "I" reading some holy book may feel as through it has been astounded. There has been an emotional change, resulting from the reading of this material. It may seem like a spiritual agency, or at the very least, something more than mundane chemistry, but chemistry it still is.
It is critical that you discover the necessity of controlling the chemical balance of your own Yellow and Blue Circuits. You cannot be involved with This Thing and continually allow yourself wild mood swings or unproductive, repetitive head chatter. I suggest that two primary methods for stabilizing the Blue and Yellow Circuits are: 1) be of good cheer and 2) create and implement good plans with cheerful conviction. Deliberately take control of your own biochemistry by invoking a Blue Circuit orientation that allows no suffering, and at the same time, find ongoing, interesting hobbies and activities to occupy your time and attention.
Everyone has certain activities they enjoy, something they are already involved with or something they always wanted to be involved with. It doesn't matter what it is, or how silly you think you might look. You don't need an audience. If it pleases you, do it. If you always wanted to sing, lock yourself in a room with a piano and your two snapping fingers, and go at it. Study singing, learn singing, play with singing. Put 100% of your energy into enjoying and getting better at singing. But do it. Make it your personal, deliberate avocation. The occupation will do more than please you: it will help stabilize your entire biochemical system. You are a process: you must, if you wish to become extraordinary, forcefully direct the flow and quality of that process toward your own ends. If you do not, you will remain exactly as Life created you and serve no purpose other than that.
I want to give you another description for what I just called "omnidirectional consciousness." I have called it by many names, such as Considering or Neuralizing. I've also called it "remembering something without thinking about it," or, "letting it float." None of these descriptions is quite right, because this process has never been described before. Such states do not exist naturally. So here is a new way to think of it: whatever it is, "take it outdoors." If you are trying to understand something that disturbs you or puzzles you, "take it outdoors." Take it out of the doors that the Yellow and some of the higher parts of the Blue Circuit have compartmentalized it into. There is a door between what you find acceptable and what you find unacceptable, between what seems true and what seems untrue, between the possible and the impossible. Break down the old connections. Take it outdoors into the fresh air, into the light, and see if you don't find something new to chuckle about.
Here's a question for you: Is everything negotiable? Is it possible to negotiate with The Partner? Let me tack another question onto that one right quick, and see if it doesn't clarify something: Can you See the connection between my funny biochemistry and my comment that if you really want to change something, you can't tell yourself what you are going to do?
If you are a biochemical process, what exactly happens when you set out to do something different? The normal thing, of course, is to make an announcement of your intended action, both to yourself and to anyone you can get to listen. You make a big production out of it. No big deal -- everyone does it. But you in this have to look further. You have to ask, "Why do people feel the need to talk about their intended action, if they're going to do it anyway? Because they have weak egos? Because they're afraid they won't act if they don't paint themselves into a corner by letting everyone expect them to act? Why? What really is going on?"
How about this? Maybe what's really going on is the talk is the action. Maybe you just think talk is talk and action is something else. But if everything is biochemical, then talk is as much a "thing" as action is. Have you ever noticed, for example, that when you really take some kind of action, immediate action, you do it first and talk later?
Perhaps you begin to See where this is going. Maybe the impetus of your intention, your need, to act, only requires a certain quantity of responsive biochemical alteration to satisfy it. What if you use up all your "need" by the "action" of talking? Now you might think that sounds wrong, because you still think talking is different from action. And it is, to you. But to Life, both talking and action are physical processes, and maybe it doesn't matter very often which one you do, as long as you do one of them. In fact, if you notice, people talk a lot more than they act, which is just right, for Life. We can't have people doing everything they say they'll do, after all. Life would grow so fast, and so straight, it might fall right off the edge of the cliff and break its neck.
I could explain this process of getting ready to act even more specifically. Perhaps you read something, and it excites you: you want to go out and try it, too. A chemical alteration is made in your nervous system, specifically in the Yellow and higher parts of the Blue Circuits. But you've never done that thing before, and it's as if the Yellow Circuit must prime a certain firing pattern, by repetition, before any real action can be taken. So you repeat it, over and over, by thinking about it and talking about it. But remember what I just said: you can use up the chemical material of your response by talking and thinking, and never get around to actually acting. So if you want to be sure there's enough left to really do something, you'll have to find some way to lock up the firing pin so it can't keep wearing out the substance you need for your action. It is possible to do it. It is unnatural, but it is possible. What you have to do is stop that firing pattern from being primed before it starts. It is possible to hear The Partner talk about something, and to not respond. Do not admit that you agree to the proposed action, even though you do. Don't admit it to anyone else, and don't admit it to your Partner. You can only negotiate with something that's really in charge. So -- who's in charge?
Now no one is naturally constructed to avoid telling themselves what they are doing, and that's why it sounds so insane. Life needs to constantly proclaim its intentions, and humans give these intentions voice, thinking they are their own intentions. When you interfere with this natural process, you are interfering with yourself, with your own circuitry. That's why I suggest it. For those of you interested in This, such interference produces a powerful alteration of your chemical balance. It makes all kinds of things possible. If it were a natural thing, it would have no potency for the Few. Not only would it have no potency, it wouldn't be any fun.
I have a couple more interesting things to bring up before I stop. If you look at the news, or at history, you can observe a certain activity that will give you a glimpse of Life's behavior on a grand scale. Let's say a great technological advancement is made in medicine and it is proclaimed to be a spectacular boon to mankind. Then immediately other parts of humanity find ways to criticize this advancement, and for a while it seems there is a kind of seesawing going on in relation to this new thing. Life may go through quite a lengthy dance of C to D to E to C and so on before it makes a final judgment on the usefulness of this advancement. In fact, everything that survives for any length of time will go through periods where it is praised, and then denounced, and then forgotten, and then revived again. You can observe this in the field of literature and art as well. Sometimes this wavering goes on for many years: that is the nature of what seems to be progress.
Now the author of a new discovery or work of art, when asked, will likely express a kind of pleasure in what he has done, despite all problems, and all criticism. You can learn something from this. The pleasure was not necessarily just the pleasure of personal achievement. The pleasure was of being directly in the midst of Life's own flow of discovery, its pattern of movement. The individual through whom Life spoke its new invention partakes of the excitement of first discovery. Just like you, however, Life needs to talk to itself about its new plan of action. And of course, Life being larger, it takes longer to argue things out. Anything that ultimately survives must go through several cycles of support, opposition, and irrelevancy. Of course, Life ultimately outgrows the usefulness of everything that can be verbally identified, which should give you pause to shudder in case you're expecting immortality in your present condition.
All Life is a physical reality. All energy is matter. All parts of you, from a belch to your most sophisticated brain activities to your highest aspirations, hopes and dreams, consist entirely of biochemical elements flowing in repetitive patterns around and around and around, and those patterns as a whole create the entity you identify as "you." Life moves those elements around for its own purposes by also creating in you various "needs" and "urges," which you "satisfy" with the narrow limits of your personal pattern by finding ways to alter the biochemistry of that pattern. You are hungry, so you eat. You feel tired, so you sleep. You feel lonely and horny, so you search for a sexual mate. Depression rears its ugly head so you find someone to complain to, or you drive to the nearest shopping mall and buy something you always wanted. And the pattern alters slightly, for a few moments, or a few hours, or a few days. And then the effect wears off and you do it all again. And Life grows on.
