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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk # 189, Dec 28, 1985, runtime 1:25
[J. could have used exclusively binary models and maps with Group, i.e., Red and Yellow Circuits only to explain man's condition --but do you see that if he had, nothing new could have been discovered. Even if E force is purely made up (that even J. doesn't understand it) do you see that it is necessary anyway for any real progress and Understanding. Without it nothing new is possible. ]
[Molecular activity. There is what amounts to a Yellow Circuit limen (threshold). A dog for example has no "medial" state, it is either on or off. Human organism is same except that its molecular activity can produce thinking-of-action as well as action. The possibility of a "medial" state for humans is thinking of possible action. All human activity is an attempt to alter the organisms present biochemical state towards a medial, more balanced condition. Example of use of alcohol as historically considered to be weakness or psychological flaw which is today considered to be an illness of some type. The next more advanced view will be to consider it as a deficiency of alcohol where people "treat" themselves, self medicate with it in attempts to restore their hoped for medial condition. Not a psychological flaw/cause for addition to drugs and alcohol: it is self-medication, prescription. NOW consider depression, self pity, anger etc., all moods singular to the human organism are equivalent to alcohol/drug addition/self-medication. That is, they produce an immediate biochemical rearrangement toward "medial" (note: not more pleasant), more upright, satisfactory, suitable condition. ]
[Remember: everybody is dissatisfied, restless, and it manifests as the continual attempt to alter the present biochemical status quo. ALL human activity is nothing more than this. The seeking of medial stability thru self-prescription. The ultimate alteration is This Thing --it is an unnatural shock. You cannot give up, give in to this ordinary self-prescription when you Understand its unprofitable impact. ]
[All descriptions of "satori", enlightenment, meditation etc. are descriptions of the attempt to stop the desire and need for constant biochemical change. Can't be done, but the reality behind the coming close is enough to make such descriptions rampant and powerful. ]
[More on "never laugh at anyone's hobby" --consider temper as a hobby, self pity, etc. as efficient biochemical alterations for their bearer. You have such hobbies too. You must see that there is no room for criticism ...for what about your hobbies? Everybody has them without exception. Hobbies are the FORCED attempt to permutate biochemically. You have no choice, nor does anybody else.
Transcript
THE SEARCH FOR MEDIAL STABILITY
Document: 189, December 28, 1985
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1985
Have any of you considered that I could have used binary descriptions in the maps I have drawn for you? History is replete with such descriptions, from yin/yang to good/evil. There are good forces and not-so-good forces, strong forces and weak forces, the eternal mind/body problem, and physiology versus psychology. Such binary descriptions have been used for many, many years in would-be religious and mystical activities, and as far as Life was concerned, and the people involved with those activities, those descriptions have been just fine.
Of course though, by now you are all used to my throwing in that crazy third element that doesn't seem to fit anywhere. Life too has periodically raised the spector of a third element primarily in the eastern part of its body. Three gods, or maybe three winds, keep everything moving. The trinary terminology surfaces periodically and then it disappears, and Life has never forced any great Yellow Circuit activity over the third issue introduced. Now most of you were brought up as children to consider a version of trinary influences in the Christian religion, but if you were, you also know that any kind of direct understanding of such in the Yellow Circuit remains extremely limited. The churches' scientific explanations are pretty sketchy at best.
I could have skipped any clear reference to three-ness. I could have said there is a Red Circuit and a Yellow Circuit, and taken most of what falls now into the middle Blue Circuit and dumped it into the general pot with the Red Circuit. I could have done it quite efficiently. I have a pretty glib tongue, and you may even realize by now that I also have to be glib in other areas as well. I could have said humans contain two stories, a higher-end Yellow level and a lower-end Red level; that Life in a human is like a merry-go-round with one of these two forces always predominating, swirling ever higher and higher. I could have gotten fancy and described various mixtures of the two, with a possible intermediate state that most eyes miss, such as C-slash-D -- a sort of little transition thing.
But do you realize that if you do not have that third area, you have no place to go to explore new territory? That you will never be able to understand anything new? Alright, I'll make it worse. What if I made up the whole idea of three Circuits? Of the Three Forces? E doesn't really exist. It means nothing. I don't even know what E is. What if that were true? Do you realize that it doesn't matter so far as you are initially concerned? That you still need that third element to begin to understand anything? Without it, you can't go anywhere. You can dance around and around if you like dancing the minuet, but you're never going to get off the dance floor.
Dogs fall into the category of two-circuited beings. Now consider for a moment the life of a dog. A dog appears to have two states available to him: he either acts or he does not act. Unlike humans, he never thinks about acting. I am going to introduce a new concept here with regard to the molecular activity of human beings, so listen closely to my description of the difference between a dog's two-element system and a human's three-element system. A dog, as I said, appears to be always either in a state of activity or not-activity. A dog can apparently be in a true medial state, where absolutely nothing is going on. I have read that a dog supposedly sleeps 65% of its life, and all of us with little hairy children know that, by and large, dogs just sleep. And if you ask them, "Wouldn't you like to do something else?", mostly they don't seem very interested. If they're not already doing something, and they're sleeping, they don't seem to have any great desire to be taken somewhere, to be read to, etc.
Now look at the difference between that, and the life of a human being. You have a Yellow Circuit, a third element. You not only have the ability to act, you also have the unique ability to think about acting. No one has ever thought of it in this way before, but your Yellow Circuit activity is set up in such a way that it always does one of two things: it either causes you to act, or it thinks about acting. Now humans also can be in a sort of medial state, but I want you to remember the state I am calling medial in humans is not the same as a true medial state in a dog. A dog can be in a state where absolutely nothing is going on; you cannot. Your Yellow Circuit does not allow it. Even if you are lying down, quite relaxed, or even asleep, the Yellow Circuit keeps right on pumping images in the form of dreams. You can appear to be just as quiet as your dog lying next to you, but you will always be "thinking" and your dog will not. You will always be either acting or thinking of action; your dog will always be either acting or simply not-acting. Your Yellow Circuit, if it does not directly cause activity, will be thinking of possible activity.
But, and here is a big but, all molecular activity in a human being -- all activity -- is an attempt ot reach a sort of medial state for that particular individual. Now I want to emphasize here that what I am calling a medial state for human being does not equate to a state of feeling pleasant. Rather, I refer to a state where the individual feels relatively normal, for him. They feel like they are standing upright, not falling over in some way, not dissatisfied. A human being always falls into the category of either acting or thinking about acting, but when he is acting, all such action is always an attempt to get that system back into a reasonably upright state that feels normal to that particular human being.
Let's start at the crudest level. You're hungry, and being hungry is not a stable condition, so you eat to bring the body back into a sort of medial, stable condition. It's like the organism has tilted and biochemically you want to straighten it out, bring it back up close to what its prior condition was. You are suddenly hungry and you want to cease being hungry, you want to be again not-hungry. Now remember, this state of not-hungry, although medial for you, is not the same as a true medial state of non-activity like your dog's, because if it were, there would be no molecular activity going on at all, other than the little that is necessary to keep your body alive. And you are never in a state where there is no molecular activity going on. If you ever were, you would be dead. Humans are built with this third Yellow Circuit, and it is never truly still.
All human activity is an attempt to alter the molecular activity so as to bring the organism back to its medial state. You are hungry, you eat. You are cold, you get up and adjust the thermostat. You feel the growing sensation of horns and you try to find somebody to lay. All human activity is nothing more or less than an attempt to alter the present biochemical condition of that organism. That's it. You can write it down as a rule, until you understand it, and then you can laugh at it and throw it away.
I have made a condition for those serious about This Activity, that you cannot drink alcohol. That is, you cannot put alcohol into your system every day, day after day. Occasionally, for parties and such, we do drink. But you cannot dump alcohol consistently into your biochemical mechanism and expect much from This. I don't care whether you drink or not, or whether you take recreational drugs, but I will not spend time with you, because then it will not be profitable for either of us. But Consider for a moment how Life looks at the drinking of alcohol. Way back in history Life talked about the dangers of excess alcohol consumption, perhaps simply through that society's looking down at an individual who was continually drunk. At first Life called drunkenness a sin, an evil. Then as time went on, it called it a weakness. Now, if you notice, even medical science has come around to admitting alcoholism is more like an illness than a sin or a weakness. This definition is something new to Life. In fact, the medical profession has come to the conclusion that an alcoholic has a condition that could be almost said to be an alcohol-deficiency -- as though the individual needed alcohol to feel normal. In drug addicts it seems even clearer: once a person is addicted to a drug, he needs that drug to feel normal, and he will continue to put that drug into his system in order to feel normal.
Taking alcoholism again, look at the way Life has, until just very recently, described the condition. An alcoholic, Life said, has a weakness. The person had a traumatic experience in childhood, perhaps, or a whole series of traumatic experiences. Even people who have never heard of psychology or psychoanalysis might say, "I don't know, I seem to be depressed a lot. I don't seem to be able to get along in life, but I have a few drinks and I feel better." Their friends may even say they drink to forget, or to reach a state of oblivion. This makes it sound as though one could correct the alcoholism by making the person relive and relive the traumatic experiences -- as though alcoholism is a mind problem of some kind. It is not. Forget all that. Forget psychology, forget minds, forget special head theorems. If a person is an alcoholic, that person has an alcohol deficiency. Whatever may have happened to them in childhood, including nothing particular, that person was just wired-up in such a way that there seemed to be an unrecognized deficiency somewhere, and then one day they had a drink and found that cured the problem for the most part. Now they could feel normal. The alcohol brought their biochemical condition back into an upright, apparently medial, position.
All addicts treat themselves with their particular substance in order to make themselves feel relatively normal and upright and stable. As far as they are concerned, they have found their own particular personal prescription. Of course, all prescriptions have side effects to one degree or another, and some are worse than others. Most people would not choose to need to treat themselves with heroin if they didn't absolutely have to.
But notice, this is a new way for Life to consider the problem. And notice also, if an individual human suddenly finds himself in the position where Life, through him, no longer needs him to need alcohol or drugs, he suddenly finds the wherewithal to make the necessary attempt to withdraw from that addiction. Then he may become addicted to telling others how bad it is to be addicted to alcohol or drugs.
Do not look for psychological explanations for addictions. One person may have had an apparently unpleasant childhood, but even so, that doesn't explain why he became an alcoholic and his brother, who was treated just as badly, did not. His brother was not born with an alcohol deficiency. Remember, if there is ever an argument between heredity and environment, heredity always wins. There is no environment, only heredity. An alcoholic finds alcohol to be a reasonably successful prescription for his hereditary state of not quite feeling right. The effect of the self-prescription is not displeasing. On the contrary, it works fairly well.
Now let me expand what I have been saying. All activity a human being undertakes is an attempt to rearrange the molecular activity of that organism, to change the biochemical state of that organism, to bring it continually back into a medial state. Remember that you are conscious of nothing until that activity is turned into molecular activity in your particular system. You would not hear me talking, you would not see the light waves bouncing off the walls -- if you cut off the molecular activity fed by the senses you would not be conscious. You would at least not be human. I have said you need to remember that constantly, although for most people, in the ordinary state, that is impossible. All activity is an attempt to rearrange the molecular activity going on in the senses, in the Circuits.
Now go beyond alcohol and beyond what people normally think of as drugs. Go past food, warmth, sex. What about depression, anger, self-pity? All of the so-called human emotions are also an attempt to alter the biochemical condition of that particular human organism. All moods, anything unique to humans acts on the organism exactly like an alcohol prescription, in that it alters the molecular activity of the organism. People who have a bad temper indulge in anger the same way an alcoholic indulges in alcohol, except that instead of taking a drink, they turn around and yell at whoever is convenient, or go home and beat their wife or their dog. It has the same effect. It seems to alter that particular bio-organism when it feels tilted, and brings it back into a more medial state. Every human is wired differently and needs different prescriptions for its illness. You all have a particular illness and a particular useful prescription, or you wouldn't be human. You certainly wouldn't be here, investigating This. You may have a terrible temper, you may find yourself fighting periodic bouts of suicidal depression, you may cry for hours over anything you find to cry about or nothing at all. You don't do these things because you have a psychological problem, you do them because you are wired-up in such a way that this is your particular deficiency, and when you indulge in alcohol, drugs, anger, or crying, you feel -- like it or not -- more normal, more like yourself. Look into your system, and you will see it. If your prescription for your deficiency is anger, and you begin to tilt away from your medial state, you will feel absolutely compelled to get angry. You will not feel right until you have yelled somebody down, or beaten your fist through a wall, or started a fight. You need to get angry just as much as you need to eat when you are hungry, just as much as an alcoholic needs a drink when he needs one. You need your "fix" and nothing else but that prescription will work for your deficiency at the moment.
You know human "emotions" have a certain effect on the organism. Just try faking an emotion. Try cursing at something, anything, and you can feel right at the edge of becoming angry. You know all such activity has a specific effect. It changes the biochemistry especially in the Blue Circuit, in the limbic system above the spinal stem. Every human activity, from drinking to sex, to so-called sexual deviations, to apparently unseemly fits of temper, to suicidal depression -- all such activity is nothing but an attempt, for that organism, to bring itself back upright into what feels like a normal, medial state. It's all physical, not psychological. It's all hereditary, not environment. Even medicine now recognizes such states as depression to be a physical condition. Now, if you go to a doctor and say you feel terrible, you are always depressed, he may very well give you a choice: call you credit card company and extend your credit so you can pay him to let you sit on a couch and talk about your childhood for ten years, or have him prescribe a little pill for you that will make you feel better tomorrow.
All activity in humans is an attempt to alter the biochemistry of the organism so as to bring it continually back towards a more medial state. Everyone is dissatisfied, and everyone continually takes steps to find satisfaction. That's why people drink, seek entertainment, eat, have sex, or commit suicide. It's why some work too hard and others seem to avoid every unnecessary effort -- everybody's dissatisfied. And all human dissatisfaction is Life attempting to alter the biochemical activity of that human, to move it along, to force exchange of energy between people, to force it within a single person. That's it. That's the whole reason for dissatisfaction. Were it not for that, you could truly be in a medial condition like a dog is. If your were not too hot, not too cold, not hungry, not horny -- you would just lie down and go to sleep and that would be that. But dogs, remember, do not fall within the area of Life that is still growing. Humans do. Dogs do not need to be dissatisfied unless their physical organism requires food, rest, or sex. Humans need a lot more dissatisfaction than that or they would never do much, never attempt much, never grow from generation to generation. And if humans don't grow from generation to generation, neither does Life.
All human activity is a prescription, a sort of medicine, for that person at that time. It is not imagination. There is no such thing as imagination, there is just incomplete understanding. If the organism seems to need a change in its prescription, it is because it no longer finds the original prescription profitable. Nor is anything a weakness. Your partner may tell you it's a weakness, or you may tell your partner, "it's you making me do it," but I am taking you beyond all such misconceptions. Some prescriptions, some medicines, interfere directly with what we are doing here, and I cannot allow you to indulge in them. Some people may find the few prohibitions too hard for their organism, but that does not change the fact that I must make them in order for This to work. The ultimate treatment, the ultimate medicine, is This Thing, because once you have found that, you can, in a sense, do anything. This is the ultimate biochemical alteration -- it is so ultimate that it is unnatural. It is ultimate because it will biochemically strike all of your problems, other than death, if you still feel death is a problem. All other problems will become child's play. And this ultimate alteration is not imagination either -- it is a directly perceivable physical shock to the system. You can feel it. It is an absolute shock, and it is not a one-time miracle, it will continue to go on the more you pursue This.
The only thing that becomes totally unacceptable here is for you to give up. Then you are no use to Life here, or to yourself, or to me. If you find yourself wrestling with a particular dissatisfaction and you find your ordinary prescription for it is unprofitable here, go find a different prescription. If you feel continually depressed, go get a doctor to give you a pill that makes you feel better so that you do not have to dig your own tearful grave. Let modern medicine prescribe a medical antidote to your need to consume alcohol or drugs, if you have that need. Do whatever you can to make it possible for you to pursue This, until you can find the ultimate biochemical alteration.
There have always been branches of religion and mysticism which have attempted to quiet the organism. It has been called Zen, Satori, various forms of meditation. Can you see now, after ingesting the things I have just said, that these activities are an unknowing attempt to cease the desire for biomolecular change? Well, it's a striking phenomenon to even get close to This; that's why the stories still survive.
A while back I pointed out that you should never laugh at another person's hobby. Suppose you are reading the newspaper and come across an article about the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Cigar Band Wrapper Collectors. Perhaps it's a long article, describing how two thousand people showed up from all over the world -- doctors, lawyers, and so on, and how one cigar wrapper sold for $75,000. And if that is not your particular hobby, you could easily laugh. You can't believe anyone could take such a silly thing seriously. But how about other hobbies? How about the hobby of getting mad? How about the hobby of people who are always in a hurry, or people who seem always curt and short with other people? Don't you understand that those things are hobbies? Whatever a particular organism finds that will end its dissatisfaction, alter its biochemistry, and tip it back up to a more medial, comfortable position -- that is its hobby. And now you should be getting glimpses down the road as to why there is no room here to laugh at another person's hobby. You think cigar wrappers are funny? How about your own hobbies? Some of them may be even funnier than cigar wrappers. I always liked the old joke about the drunk who sees some guy who has been hired to dress up in a purple chicken suit and pass out coupons, and the drunk watches him for a while, and then finally walks up to him, laughs a little, and says, "Don't you feel dumb dressed up in a chicken suit like that?" And the guy says, "Me feel dumb? You're the one talking to a purple chicken!" You may not have a hobby that you carry around in little protective cases, or go to world meetings to satisfy your needs. But whatever it is, I assure you you've got something, and if you put yourself in the position of criticizing or laughing at another person's hobby, you will place yourself in a very unprofitable confluence, with regard to doing This. One person likes to dress up like a chicken, another person continually feels, "life is out to get me and nobody loves me," and still another feels compelled to drink all the time. If you laugh at another's attempt to normalize himself then the joke is on you, because Life is making those people do those things, just as it is making you do what you do for a hobby. No one has a choice, unless it is the small choice to take a pill rather than punch holes in your liver with alcohol, or unless, for you, it is the choice to supercede all hobbies with the ultimate hobby and the ultimate biochemical change.
