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Summary by TK

Tape 212, Jun 12, 1986, runtime 1:52

The 3 activities: C, D, E. All/any perception you can be aware of contains all 3 forces. Anything less doesn't exist for you. All Real spiritual heroes had to think in a triaxial manner, they had no choice in this. Ordinary religious authorities are EXPERTS at dividing anything into 2. There is a great attraction for such binary rendering. The E-context cannot held in consciousness. Analogy to backgrounds in older style cartoons (more sophisticated, complex) vs. newer "Flintstones" type (childish, simplistic). This Thing is equivalent to the older high energy, complex background cartoon whereas ordinary consciousness  = Flintstones. Could anyone bear their crude Saturday morning cartoon background life if it became obvious? Equation[C + D =  "infinity symbol"] where E = [ ]. The Few need to be able to pull pieces of the background into the foreground. Life speaks and man only hears 2/3 of what is said. Religious/political mundanities are triaxial struggles for power--not insanity or divine retribution. This power struggle is not like an ordinary power transaction of hot to cold, + to -, it is a focal point of energy conversion resulting in heat gain. This C-D struggle goes on in your own body as in Life's Body, and you can physically be aware of it. C and D are in constant collusion and engaged in a power struggle for heat gain which can only come at the expense of the other. To See this is = to a "king-size solitary glee". Realize that nobody understands any more about reality now than 5000 years ago. There is an internal collusion in the Partnership-where is your consciousness in every given instance/circumstance of that collusion? If it were a truly serious battle between them you would have exploded by now--one or the other would have finally prevailed. But a static balance prevails instead--is this not a dead giveaway? Suffering as "having your brain pinched by ignorance". Everyone wants the complete information but always gets only 2/3 of it. This is equivalent to getting your brain pinched. ]
  [1:46 - TASK: 1. Listen to ordinary talk for: complaining or explaining behavior. Find 5 examples of statements that are neither. Then be sure you have really found same. 2. Group to sing a 5-part Bach Chorale

Transcript

THE THREE PRINCES

Document:  212,  June 12, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986                                   

     I want to say more about the Three Forces, persuasions, possibilities:  C, D, and E.  For anything to occur, for you to fall in love, for you to be angry, for you to daydream about world conditions, to perceive something happening, there must be three parts, like a three legged stool.  If a thing exists it has three necessary functioning parts.  With less than three parts, for all intents and purposes, the thing, the situation, does not exist.  Any less, and you will not see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, or think about it.  You will not be able to perceive it.  A thing must be a triad if you are to be aware of it, not withstanding that ordinary consciousness perceives everything as being a two legged occurrence.  Ordinary consciousness sees in binary terms; it sees two forces at work in disputes or personal relations. 

     If you do indeed activate the nervous system above Line level, you will begin to be conscious in a triaxial manner.  You will have to be; you will have no choice.  All of your so-called spiritual heroes were able to operate in a triaxial manner.  They were not limited to a Yin/Yang, positive/negative, active/passive kind of consciousness, having perceptions of the way Life is, and then some notion of how Life should be. To Understand anything, you must be able to think from three different directions.  You are conscious of any situation having three parts to it.  Any so- called problem, any question, has three legs supporting it, which I've called C, D, and E.  But your ordinary, binary consciousness perceives C Force in any situation as something you find favor with.  Even if your own inner voices say a situation is beyond your personal area of interest, they might still describe what you are seeing as C:  "Here is an objective way in which Life or humanity is moving in a profitable or constructive manner."

     What I refer to as D is that which your voices apparently disapprove of.  "This is not in the best interest of humanity, of decent, civilized society."  Of course, E remains, the eternal problem.  No one with a binary attitude, no one with hard-wired nervous system brains can conceive of an E.

     If you are ordinary, everything is divided into two parts.  It's not ordinarily seen in this manner, but if preachers, ministers, rabbis, would-be gurus receive any recognition at all, what is it they're good at? Being able to divide everything into two.  If you can do that and you have a glib tongue, you've got it.  It's then just a matter of which book you want to wave, and Life can always use another minister.

     All of you should have some feel for how wonderful it would be if everything were divided into two; how easy attempting to do This Thing would be.  All ordinary ideas of growth and expansion, what do they consist of if not some conflict based upon two armed camps?  That, "Wherever you are now is where you don't want to be, and so the answer is in the other place."  It is always based upon some battle twixt good and evil, between right and wrong, between "my potential self and my sad personality."

     There is a great attraction in everyone to hear that everything is divided up into two.  People have always been interested in ideas such as the Yin/Yang, of a masculine and feminine persuasion or higher powers and lower powers, and the battle between the two.  "You are in a less desirable place and you've got to move to a more desirable place."

     What cannot be seen by ordinary consciousness is this third part, which I've been calling E.  To use one example that would seem rather clear cut, how about the symbol of the Yin-Yang?  I could say that you have got to have a circle as the third part of the symbol along with the two parts inside.  But, even then, lateral consciousness is wont to say, "Alright, if one half is C and the other is D or one is Yin and one's Yang, you don't need a circle because they themselves, when put together, they create their own unity. There is no third part."  To which I'll have to reply, go draw me a Yin-Yang on nothing.  I'm not dwelling on the Yin-Yang symbol for some secret reason, I'm just using it to point out that whatever you can conceive of -- good and evil, right and wrong, C and D -- there must be a background for it to exist upon.  This is what ordinary consciousness cannot perceive.

     You can start by trying to perceive E as the background.  Your ordinary consciousness could say, "Yes, I can see two forces.  I'm not tied up in Eastern symbolism or mysticism, but yes, indeed, I can see that the world is divided up into two armed camps and there is a continual conflict.  One day one camp seems to win, the next day the other, etc."  None of that can be drawn, none of that can be depicted, none of that can be written about, thought about, unless there is a background.  No one would know any symbol in the world, be it the Cross, the Star of David or the Yin-Yang unless there was a background to draw it on. Unless there was something upon which to draw it, the light waves could not bounce into your little rods and cones, go into your brain and make molecules move around.  There had to be a background or you would have never seen it.  And this can be a deceptively simple way to attempt to visualize what I mean by E.  E is the ever present background upon which perception is drawn.  If you could hold that simple awareness, it would interfere with the routine of binary consciousness.  If you could just hold the awareness that, "Whatever conflict I can perceive, it can't exist without a background.  None of this exists in a vacuum."

     Now let me relate all this to something quite mundane but, nevertheless, quite apropos -- cartoons.  Everyone, I assume, has seen some of the early classic animated features -- Disney's Fantasia, for example -- produced when it was fiscally possible to employ hundreds of artists at a relatively low cost.  On the other hand, I'll assume everyone has also seen some of the Saturday morning made-for-TV cartoons that, because of the expenses involved, have cheaper, almost static backgrounds.  They spend just a modicum of time making the characters themselves move, but then save all kinds of time and effort with the background.  The background is as crude as possible, very roughly drawn to give some impression of where the characters are.  Whether they are in the mountains, by a river or a downtown urban area, if the characters move, there is very little change in the background.  The characters keep running by the same mountain; one, two, three little humps over and over.  The character can run for ten miles and keep passing the same three mountains.  Or running down the street in a city and passing the same three buildings over and over and over. 

     Alright, hold all that in mind and remember that I started out talking about this elusive E, the third leg that must be present for anything to be perceivable.  Now, taking E as a background, what happens by the time you reach, let us say, that golden age of twenty-one?  By then your background is almost down to the level of crude Saturday morning cartoons.  Or I'll put it to you this way:  at the ordinary level of consciousness, does this description sound far removed from the cartoon lives that everyone leads? Were it not for what appears to be the contact sport -- the interaction between you and some other character, your mate, employer, family -- if it weren't for that modicum of action, how far removed would your life be from a Fred Flintstone cartoon?  The figures just stand there and their chins move a little bit to show that they are talking.  They walk through their house and from room to room, but the background is all the same.

     None of you feel any affinity to that?  If you have some kind of continual awareness of E as being your background, and you try to turn and look at this background upon which you are living out your life, I ask you:  does that not give you a whole new, perhaps frightening, definition of what boring is?  What crude is?

     If you could pluck yourself and the other central character out of your own cartoon leaving nothing but the background, and examine it with the idea that, "This in some way is indicative of my life," then what, by any objective standard, would it tell you?  "If I just looked at my background, could it be drawn any cruder? I seem to travel thousands of miles in my mind everyday, and yet, it's the same three mountains, the same three buildings over and over, no matter how far or fast I run."  Does that not strike any note of familiarity with anyone?

     We are all converting energy within the growing, expanding body of Life.  Can you see the need and the possibility of being able to take that which apparently is the background and convert it into your own foreground?  If E is the background upon which C and D exists, can you see the possibility of converting E into C and D?  Can you feel the need to convert your awareness and perception of your own background into an understanding of this apparent C/D conflict? 

     If I gave any credence to the idea that we do eat our experiences, that an ordinary man is continually being changed by what he experiences, (which he is not) you are still left with the fact that there has to be a background upon which the experience exists.  Ordinary Man will say, "There are complete experiences I have undergone, things that have happened to me, that have changed me dramatically."  But they did not happen without a background.  What you have in ordinary existence is a crude Saturday morning cartoon mill where the background is almost nonexistent.  You can move around this planet, from Podunk, Missouri to Paris, France to Bombay, India, but if you have the Sight you can look around and see the background is those same three buildings.  It's the same three little humps that are suppose to represent mountains. The background has not changed.  You are not living a complex colorful story, such as -- to make a comparison again -- Walt Disney's Fantasia, where there was real art work, real effort and time and money spent just on the background.  When you can take this apparently irrelevant and, at first blush, visually repetitious, crude background and drag it into what apparently is the main characters and their conflict, you can begin to move.  When you can take a piece of E and bring it into the foreground, all the so-called mystical states become irrelevant.  When you can do that, the idea of being converted into something else becomes irrelevant. 

     Let me go back and say a little more about the possibility of an ongoing royal collusion between the C and D Forces.  If you'll recall, my premise was that Man's world was divided into two principalities run by princes C and D who, on the surface, were in continual conflict with one another, always involved in either overt warfare or preparations for war.  Then I suggested to you the possibility that C and D, these princes, were in collusion.  They had learned that the most beneficial way to keep humanity growing, to make people struggle to invent things, to work, to save, to toil, to live a more productive life, is to keep some kind of pressure on them.  And rather than each prince, having to be a tyrant to his own people, the two princes formed a royal collusion based upon keeping their subjects in a constant uproar over the "threat from over there."  But there is no threat.  It's all a sham.  The two princes are in collusion.  They're even good friends, and they get together in secret and plan conflicts, unbeknown to their subjects.  That was my suggestion to you, while reminding you that it has nothing to do, whatsoever, with politics or religion as you know it.  But now, let me go back and use everyday, horizontal affairs in Life and see if I can't take your attention a little further afield.

     Throughout history, Life has continually talked about such matters as apparent religious and political conflict.  These conflicts seem to have played a most significant part in human history and seem to still be of real importance.  At the ordinary level, many of you still read the papers and worry about such things as apparent religious or political conflicts going on in the world.  It seems to be most questionable, if not despicable, that there are still people on this planet killing one another over religion.  You worry that, "We're going to blow up the whole planet," over some political conflict.  And, as always, there are voices within Life's body that cry out along with you, "Wait a minute, this is insane.  We've got to put a stop to this."

     Yet there is no such thing as a struggle over politics.  There is no such thing as a conflict over religious ideas.  It is a struggle within the body of Life itself for power, and by power I don't mean one country dominating another.  That's nothing.  Or one religion finally running all the infidels out of its territory; that means nothing.  That's not power.  Power is a transfer of energy.  It is a transfer of heat.  It is parts of Life's body attempting, and ofttimes succeeding, in moving the locale of a certain kind of heat.  A certain kind of energy conversion moves from one part of Life's body to another, under the name "conflict."  It comes out historically as a detailing of the success of one society over another, of the success of one religion trampling another one.  But you don't know how far you are from the mark when your own nervous system responds to these conflicts in some meaningful way; you are responding to something meant for children.  You are responding at the lowest common denominator within the cells of Life's body itself.  It is not a matter of political or religious conflict, it is a matter of heat being moved about.  It is a matter of power. 

     There are people who have some knowledge of this, those that are hard-wired to be diplomats, advisers, etc.  Throughout the ages, there have always been people who were close to the seats of power, who have had a general knowledge, without understanding it, that, "This apparent conflict between my prince and the other prince is, in reality, a sham."  The princes have never told the advisers that it was all a sham, but they could not operate as go-betweens, as ministers, unless they had the knowledge that, "Hey, when my prince is attacking the religion of these other people, that's all show.  This whole thing is about power.  It has nothing to do with who is going to take over the other country.  Is C going to take over D?  Are we going to be defeated?  No way."  They know it without any understanding; it is just a fact.  They may, along with the prince himself, put on a good show and call the other prince and his people lots of insulting names, but they know that, "My prince is the biggest tyrant in the world.  He doesn't give a damn for democracy, for making the world safe.  What he wants to be in control."  Remember I told you this has nothing to do with politics or religion.  We are talking about you.

     Within Life's body, and within your own body, you can find the struggle between my two princes, who, I suggest to you, are not in direct opposition as much as in a secret collusion.  But this collusion does not change the fact that for Life and for you to stay alive, both princes are seeking power at the expense of the other.  They do not seek annihilation of the other party, even if they were foolish enough to believe that it was possible, because it is not.  C is not going to overtake D or vice versa.

     This map bypasses all lateral, so-called understanding.  If you are tied up in lateral mindedness, the map is just insanity.  Nevertheless, I suggest to you the great possibility that both princes are in continual direct collusion and yet they are both seeking power and the only power immediately available is at the expense of the other one. 

     For lateral consciousness it seems that, "Well, that's insane.  You can't have it both ways.  You can't have them seeking power at each other's expense and being in collusion at the same time."  And yet when you see it, you may experience a kind of solitary glee.  But it's also another piece of the understanding that, at the ordinary level, no one can correctly perceive anything.  Because at the ordinary level, it's all got to make sense, and at the ordinary level, the only thing that makes sense is that which is lateral.  The only thing that makes sense is a background with only three mountains repeating themselves, linearly over and over and over.  "That," says Line-level consciousness, "makes sense.  That I can follow.  On the basis of that, we will finally explain everything."  The background upon which everyone lives is at the ordinary Saturday morning cartoon level.  If something doesn't make sense, they can't do anything with it.

     One thing people are kept from realizing, because it is still part of the same game, is that no one understands anymore today than they did five thousand years ago.  (That's not literally true.  But it is true enough that, unless you are exceptional already, you can't find the flaw in it).  You don't need a degree in history to understand this.  All you need is a way to read your own DNA.  The information is in your nervous system, it's in your genes.  The information that, "Taken at Line-level consciousness, I understand what all of humanity has always understood.  That is as much as I understood five years ago, two years ago, last week."  At Line-level consciousness you and everybody else, for all intents and purposes, do not understand any more today than people did five thousand years ago.  And nobody realizes it.  Nothing is wrong, yet nobody realizes it.

     It is only a short turn from there to Life having people believe, "Wait a minute, now I see why no one can understand what's going on.  What is lacking is some kind of drastic knowledge that's not readily available.  It is information outside my system.  It is information from some external source because it is certainly not in me now."  If you begin to see in a trilateral manner, you understand that there is a struggle within Life's body, but it is a correct struggle.  It's not a struggle between good and evil, it's a struggle between the most efficient way to convert energy for new growth and ways that are less efficient, ways that have been outmoded, ways that have been proven less than efficient today.  That is what makes different types of people in Life's body.  That is a part of the basis of the division into races and nationalities.  This is a part of the reason for a group being up today, and then down tomorrow.  It has been going on throughout history, yet no one can see it.

     It is going on in you.  You get up and there is a struggle for power.  One prince says, "We are going to get up and go out and run.  I've got dreams of me two months from now when I have lost forty pounds." And then you've got another prince that will say otherwise.  It is a struggle for power, a struggle for supremacy.  The Yellow Circuit excels in dividing all ideas, all feelings, all emotions, all apparent desires and motivations into two camps.  Things are arranged to fuel this continual battle for supremacy.  It seems that there are two aspects inside of you and they are in a running battle.

     Yet I suggest to you, again, the possibility of a collusion.  It can seem that, "Within this battle this morning, I'm prince C.  I wanted to get up and do right.  I know I should go run, I just know it.  And I didn't do it.  But the battle is not over yet.  I lost this morning.  Prince D overcame me, laziness overcame me, but I'll get him tomorrow." 

     This possible collusion is not just between some enigmatic forces I am calling C and D.  There is a collusion within you and everyone takes it personally.  What else do you call suffering in Life?  Why do people need psychiatrists?  Why do people need marriage counselors?  Why did you originally need This? It appears to be a battle raging, but, if it were a true battle, everyone would be exploded.  You would all be novas, but you are not.  You are still here and you still feel as though, "I am the background, the battle ground, for some kind of war going on."  But it's not truly a war, I suggest to you.  These forces seem to be using you as a battle ground; some days you win, some days you seem to lose.  There is a collusion going on.  If it were true war, something would happen.  There would have been, at a cellular level at least, a Hiroshima in you.  One side would have bombed the other.  You would have exploded by now.  You would be a desert.  One of the forces, after all these years, would have won out, would finally have you under its thumb; you and everyone would be on their last leg.  But this never happens.

     People believe the battle can reach a conclusion within them.  People drive around with bumper stickers that say, "Life's a bitch and then you die."  But you drive past them and blow your horn and they have got a beer and they smile and wave.  Even those that seem to take religion the most seriously, waving holy books and saying, "Most of the world is going to a pit of fire.  The gods are going to kill you and torment you," you talk to them and you find they enjoy the battle.  It's what makes them go.

     The point I'm trying to make you see is that if indeed it were a true struggle -- the way it feels, between god and non-god -- if it were a serious battle, something would have changed by now.  Don't you agree?

     Let me appeal to your lateral reasoning, if nothing else.  If this battle is, as ordinary consciousness wants to perceive, between some great good force and some equally great evil force, then after all these thousands of years, don't you think something would have happened by now, that the battle would seem to be a little closer to a conclusion?  That one side or the other would have taken over?  And yet, it seems to be stagnant.  Just turn your gaze back, if not to horizontal recorded history, then to your own DNA -- you will see that the status of the struggle seems to be about the same.  If you can Look, you will see that the general status between good and evil, between sanity and insanity, the exercise of power between the princes of the C and D kingdoms over the long haul, the balance of power, seems almost static.  Doesn't that tell you anything?  Namely, that if "God" is as great as the two dimensional mind conceives him, then after all these thousands of years, wouldn't you think that he would have made some inroads, that the forces of evil would be in serious retreat by now, or at least worried?  No sign of it.  Doesn't that make you curious?  We can ask even at the lateral level:  If there were a God and a Lucifer and they were fighting over our "souls," as your forefathers believed, then what is going on when the status of the conflict seems to be in continual stasis?  Would that question not give even a reasonably lateral minded person some pause to think, "Perhaps I am in the midst of a charade.  Perhaps I am a part of an unseen collusion.  God and Lucifer aren't mad at each other.  They aren't actually in a life or death fight.  They get together periodically to plot what's going to happen.  It's only we humans who believe that a do or die, serious struggle is going on."

     This struggle makes everything grow, it keeps us all healthy.  It is a struggle of power.  But I am suggesting to you that there is a collusion within yourself as well.  If not, why has not your "worser" part taken over?  You should be able to see, if you look into your own genetic history, that no matter how long you live, things don't change very much.  You have read books that supposedly told you how to do better, how to more efficiently attack your bad habits.  You have attended clinics.  You have undergone analysis. You have listened to diverse gurus and spiritual teachers, but the truth is simply this:  as far back as you can remember the status of this conflict that seems to be going on in you has changed very, very little. Ordinary consciousness wants to blame it on the "environment," but you were born with this partnership. You were born with two principalities.  It is almost a blinding experience, just for a second, to realize, with no pessimism, that, "This conflict, the nature of it, the balance of power is the same as it was when I was fourteen, thirteen, twelve.  Sometimes C is victorious for a while and wins a little territory.  Sometimes D seems to win."  But through the hall of years something should strike you as funny; "I don't get a whole lot better and I don't get a whole lot worse."  Then you could look out upon the complete genetic history of humanity, and whether you couch it in spiritual, political, economic or nationalistic terms, you notice the same thing.  Looking at Life as a struggle between two principalities, things do not drastically change. There seems to be equalization of power.  There seem to be skirmishes and temporary victories, but they don't mean anything.

     Furthermore, nobody is allowed to be curious about it.  It is not a simple collusion between (as your forefathers would have it) God and Satan, between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  Because, to begin with, we are still leaving out one third; we are leaving out another prince that has an equal amount of power, E.  But even if you reduce it to the basis of two principalities, people are not allowed even to find it curious that this struggle is not what everybody believes it is.  It is prince C or prince D whipping their armies into a frenzy, their soldiers rushing up, screaming, hollering, some of them knowing they are going to die.  Yet princes C and D had discussed it all two months ago.  Maybe they even have a "guesstimate" as to, "How much is it going to be worth?  How long should we let it go on before we pull back?  How many people should we lose before it becomes unprofitable?"  But to the people involved, it is do or die.  At the binary level, nobody is ever aware of the fact that it seems to be that way in him all the time and in others. It seems that, "This is serious business indeed."  But if it is so serious, why does neither side win?  How is it that things always bounce back with an unrecognized elasticity?  How is it that the situation always goes back to a balance.  Nobody seems to notice.  Two months, two years, two minutes ago, this C army was prepared to kill the armies of prince D, both out there and in you.  And suddenly two minutes later, you can't remember what it was about.  It seems, in a man's retelling, in his imagination of what has happened and what's going to happen, that the battle is serious.  It seems that the internal conflicts are serious and could have absolutely life and death consequences.  But for this fact:  they don't.

     The conflicts seem very serious.  Everybody talks about them.  Movies, books, classical literature, what are they about?  "The hero, the forces of good are going to win and rout the forces of evil.  Goodness has got to win."  But nobody notices that, in reality, goodness doesn't ever win.  I ask you once more, have things really changed much since Abraham's time, Adam's time?  Are things getting any shakier?  Are evil forces taking over?

     Life seems to be a do or die proposition.  Many people, when they are first exposed to This, find some of the things I have talked about, at first blush, to be harsh and uncaring.  I don't seem to worry enough about people's problems.  And indeed, they are right, but no one understands what problems are. Everything serves its purpose.  Looked at another way, what seems to be suffering is having your brain pinched by ignorance.  It's as if Life were a pie divided into three parts, but all you can see is two-thirds of it.  As far as you can tell by all ordinary means, that two-thirds is everything.  That is the principality of C and D.  That's everything you have been taught was right and wrong, everything that you perceive to be true and false.  But it creates, in an unrecognized manner, a brain pinch.  You are trying to perceive something that would be like a pie divided into three and, no matter what you do, you can only see two slices of it, and it makes you hurt.  It's like having a little brain pain.  But it comes out as, "I'm misunderstood, I want to do right and the gods won't allow me to see all the mystical things."  It's little brain aches.

     Everyone is wired up to believe that there is a raging conflict, within me and without.  But you do not ever notice that the conflict not only is never ending, but there is no great shift of power.  And it is almost impossible to entertain the notion that there could be a collusion between two forces.  And, further, this collusion could not exist without a third background on which to operate.  Princes C and D can't meet at each other's palace.  If someone saw prince C slipping into D's palace, the whole game would be over. They have to meet over at E's place.  And, of course, the only way that works is for all the people in the two kingdoms, to believe that as far as they know there are only two kingdoms on this planet.  Prince C and D could not meet were it not for E having a palace.  They could not meet in safety and carry on this alleged collusion if the people in C and D knew about it.  Nobody would put up with that, would they?