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Summary by TK
Jan Cox Talk 0227 - Sep 26, 1986 - runtime 1:53
[Change/Excitement/Genes.]
[Perceived individually disagreeable genes have traditionally been taken as "demons". Example of holy man's confession of weakness against which he struggles without real success: absolution of responsibility. Consider the modern technology of "gene splicing" is backwards --true attempt here is to effect gene separation --the separation from one's own disagreeable genes: "the devil made me do it". Relation to conflict with "God is in everything" --a more correct statement would be that everything is in the general flow (god) since there is no out there and each little piece has its own DNA and memory which it constantly exhibits and speaks. After a certain point allegory is useless; after a certain point even the literal truth seems allegorical.]
[Consider how truly difficult it is to do anything new; to do something in an exciting fashion --to change what you are. The attraction of biographies is in the story of apparently real change being accomplished. Red Circuit change is the most obvious; Blue Circuit/Yellow Circuit change is more difficult to see, more subtle. Different energies, different time scales/frames are involved in change in different circuits. The energy sufficient to produce obvious change at the Red Circuit level will produce none at Blue Circuit or Yellow Circuit level, and is of a low-level, temporary excitement. Excitement = Change. Nothing is even of ordinary value unless it produces change. Everyone has a built-in hunger for excitement --but within well defined, narrow limits. This is true for Life as well. There is no true entertainment without excitement --without doing something you ordinarily wouldn't do. Consider how excitable children are: they are in the position where almost everything they do they have never done before. What do you do that is an attempt to change? When were you last really excited --including in This thing? This thing has a particular dynamic which initially excites The Few, but ultimately calms; a calming dynamic which must be disrupted somehow or you will "go out with a whimper". But realize that the possible change for you is very limited because the Partnership is an unfailing release valve. Your chemical balance always seeks stability; disturbance must always be minimized. The Few must excite themselves; must truly constantly attempt to do something different, new. ]
[ACBI (apparently-correct-but-impossible) example from life: "Man's future is null and void if war is not stopped". Also: "The superpowers disagree on the root cause of world tension". Consider again the "royal collusion". Note that every obvious, historically conclusive era of progress was ushered in by a conquest of one people over another. Quantum progress does not include static, docile civilizations. Relation to yourself: is it possible to stay home and prevail/change/be excited? ]
[All of you should be under a self-imposed pressure of some type constantly. A task requires necessary efforts even until it verges on E mode.
Transcript
THE EFFORT NECESSARY FOR CHANGE, OR CAN YOU STAY AT HOME AND PREVAIL?
Document: 227, September 26, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986
In Man's pursuit of change and excitement, he is left continually dissatisfied. He believes he has problems over which he cannot seem to gain control. Historically, he has blamed demons, believing that spirits or devils were making him think or behave improperly. Today, the blame has shifted to what he calls his past psychological traumas. But what if what Man calls demons or psychological problems could be better described as "disagreeable genes"?
Let's say that a minister believes that he has a serious weakness, for example, that he craves alcohol or women or fourteen year old boys. He will stand up before his congregation and openly admit, "Yes, I have this evil spirit in me that makes me do this, but friends and neighbors, I want you to know that I am struggling against it daily," and his flock will applaud. Or at a cocktail party someone says, "Psychologically, I feel the need to drink alcohol. I think it's connected to the fact that my father was overly strict and domineering," or, "I know I'm hostile towards the opposite sex, but there's a reason for it. Let me tell you about it." You've heard of gene-splicing. What man has managed to accomplish is just the opposite -- gene separation. He thinks, "Demons are trying to tempt me, and I must struggle against them," or, "I have psychological bruises as a result of the traumas I suffered as a child." He has separated himself from his own genes.
Everyone is involved in this process of gene separation: presidents, popes, rabbis, ministers, your friends, your family, everyone. They blame "my temper" or "my temperament," "the devil made me do it," or even "subconscious desires." Part of the foundation of all the world's great religions is the idea that the founder of the religion, through the grace of the gods, was able to separate himself from some undesirable part of himself. There are also those who proclaim that the gods are in everything. Just as they draw a line between what they perceive as themselves and what they perceive as "out there," they also conceive of a separation between Life and a force outside of this Life, whether they call the force a creator, spirit, or the gods. In an attempt to describe this more metaphysically, they say that little pieces of these gods reside in everything in Life, from people to trees to rocks. They say that reflections of the gods can be seen in everything. However, I am pointing you toward the opposite end of their universe, toward the reality of a four dimensional world. What you should be looking for are the genes, the DNA, of each and every part of life. Take the concept of seeing the gods in everything, and turn it backwards, since, after all, there is no "out there." You should be listening for each little piece of Life. Life has its own DNA, and it attempts to talk. What you are attempting here is to listen to each and every little piece talk to you about its origins, about its memory, and about its destination. Because it IS talking. Ordinary consciousness wants to maintain the notion that a metaphysical, transcendental force exists outside of the system and that its greatness is reflected in the world around us. Religious poets write that the changing of the seasons, the movements of the heavens, the birth of a child are all reflections of "our dearly beloved gods." Those of you with acute, metaphysical eyesight can learn a lesson here, however. The notion is backwards. Each and every little piece of Life has its own memory of its origins.
You have memories that I at times refer to simply as the memory within your nervous system. You can redefine and rediscover history by going back and opening your college records and picking out a new major. You can read a bit of history in something as innocuous and bland as READER'S DIGEST and have a memory of that history. I am referring to the fact that each and every piece of DNA is in each and every little piece of Life. Look in places that you would not ordinarily look. You don't have to be in a synagogue or church to see what I'm talking about. You don't have to be attempting to be poetic or allegorical. Attempting to be allegorical is in fact just a passing phase, like playing with yourself before you become sexually mature. Allegory is fine, but it's limiting.
Some of you at one time thought of allegory as being an end in itself. You'd think, "If I could only be as allegorical as this author I've just read...," especially if the author died four or five hundred years ago. No one ever seems to notice that when you're removed far enough from a time zone, such as several hundred years, almost anything sounds allegorical, because you're too far removed. Under the right conditions, the further you get from something, the more allegorical it sounds. You can come up with your own examples of possibly how a religion or work of art or piece of literature may have started off as something else entirely. Maybe what you think was an allegorical, literary masterpiece was actually some sort of directions about how to repair a gasoline-powered TV set.
I have given you many suggestions, and many of you have undertaken various activities on your own. You've taken up a new hobby or returned to school. If you were a klutz, you undertook learning how to juggle. If you were musically inept, you learned to correctly hum or whistle a complicated tune. Or you consciously planned something, remembered it for two or three days, and then made an attempt to do it. Whatever. Throughout all of these activities, one of the immediate lessons to be learned was how difficult it is to do anything new, to change what you are. People say that they want to change, but their circuits say otherwise, while at the same time pointing out that change has occurred in specific other areas.
The basic appeal of biographies, whether they are favorable or unfavorable toward the person about whom they're written, is that they carry the message that people can indeed change. The story of the subject's life describes how he changed. If there were no change, there would be no biography. The basic plot of the subject's life is that he is doing fairly well, then goes down hill, hits bottom, and then bounces back. Or he starts in the middle, hits the big time, then plunges to the bottom, and then bounces back to the middle. "I was adopted by the Rockefellers, but became a drug addict, lost everything, but now with the help and love of my good family, I'm struggling back to a life of decency."
All biography is the story of change, and that is its appeal to the ordinary person reading it. People believe that here is proof that change really is possible. Walk into any library, find the biography section, pick out any book, and notice, the subject of the book has changed. All the way from St. Francis of Assisi to Hank Aaron. Included is their description of what the subject thought, as well as how he decided to straighten up and pull himself together after hitting bottom. The unanalyzed message is that change is possible, but you should have a nonpessimistic, objective understanding of how difficult real change is.
Many of you are not the same person you were when we met. When you get past being ordinary to a certain degree, you can describe yourself as having changed, except that things are not that different. I could state some absolute, new requirement. I could say that everyone must stop doing such and such, or that everyone must immediately begin to do such and such. Let's say that you go along with it. Would there be any excitement to it? If I said that everyone has to drop ten pounds in ten days and from then on one pound every ten days, would it be exciting? What happens at your ordinary level of consciousness? You should be able to see it. Your own DNA has a memory of mankind attempting change. Let's say you attempt some kind of change. You buy a new car, get a haircut, or buy new clothes. It's exciting for a moment, an hour, a day. Buying a new car passes for apparent change, but how long does the excitement last, and when the excitement is over, what happened to the change? It's as though the change doesn't exist. As I've pointed out before, in certain parts of Life's body, attempting to change one's body is a popular pastime, that is, for areas wherein the Yellow Circuit is the focal point. You do not find people in undeveloped countries or ghetto parts of Life's body jogging or working out in health spas. Exercising results in a change that can be seen, and that is one reason for its popularity. You can see it, whereas thinking a new thought or attempting to gain new information cannot be seen. You can attempt to tell a few people about non-Red Circuit change, but it is not the same thing as walking into your class reunion having lost thirty pounds. Or let's say that you return to one of your old haunts after being away for some months. If you'd lost thirty pounds, your buddies would immediately recognize the change, whereas if you bring with you a book that you believe had a profound effect on you, does anybody notice?
Also, does it not seem easier to effect change in the lower circuits? Is it not easier to effect change in the Red Circuits than in the areas of so-called human emotions or so-called human thought processes? Let's say I gave you a choice of doing one of three things. The first is that you must stop getting the blues. The second is that you have to improve your reasoning abilities. The third is that you have to work out at a gym and put two inches of muscle on your arms and an inch on your thighs. And you must do one of these three by a certain date. Even those of you who hate exercise would choose the third one. All you'd have to do is stagger into the gym three times a week and stand there with a barbell for forty-five minutes doing lifts, whereas the other two choices require something else.
Is it not easier to effect change in older circuits than newer ones? There are different difficulties in attempting to change the Red Circuit than in attempting to change the Blue and Yellow. Each takes a different kind of energy. Different time periods are involved. This varies from person to person, but you should be able to hear and feel in your own genes the validity of this. To have a specific, observable effect in the Red Circuits (for example, the effect of gaining new muscle or losing weight) a particular time frame is required. This time frame, if it could be measured sequentially or even three-dimensionally numerically, is not the same as what's necessary to change the Blue Circuits. The cubic area of effort and time involved in changing the Red Circuits will have no effect on the Blue or Yellow Circuits. The Blue and Yellow have no comparable, observable change.
The attempt to change oneself in a specific way over a certain length of time, with a certain kind of attention given, and with a certain kind of intensity, has a life span. That life span is a lot shorter than your life span. To work on changing only one of the three circuits, however, will get you almost nowhere. But notice that everything in ordinary life, from religions to self-help groups to therapy to ordinary community wisdom, says otherwise, and at that level of consciousness, attempting to change one area has validity.
Throughout the ages, throughout the different areas of Life's body, people have devoted and continue to devote the core of their attention to trying to change themselves in one area, whether it be under a religious guise or a psychological guise. Attempting to change the Red Circuit also includes what I call the "ambrosia syndrome," which can be described as the idea that you don't have to jog ten miles a day or do yoga or lift weights or lose weight; you have only to eat the right kind of natural, health food in order to have the direct effect on your psyche, your soul, your spirit of making you a better person. People believe that that will change them in a way that is significant. As I've pointed out to you before, you are not what you eat; what you eat is you. You do not become what you eat; what you eat becomes you. What you eat won't change you; it is of almost no consequence. With ordinary people, it has no consequence other than the fact that it seems to them to have real consequence, other than the fact that it's the subject of heated discussions; other than the fact that experts have statistics showing that if you refrain from eating certain kinds of food, you will become healthier. But if you are a part of This, what you eat is of almost no consequence.
Back to my original question: Can you see that the attempt to effect apparent change on the different circuits would involve different kinds of energy, different intensities of effort, and different time frames? Let's say someone, either through reading or joining some kind of group, decides, "I am going to change. I am no longer going to eat refined sugar, white bread, meat, or dairy products. I am no longer going to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or take drugs." Regardless of what he calls the outcome, he will feel a shift in his system. For a few days, when he'd awaken in the morning, he'd think, "Can I get up today and not smoke a cigarette? Can I stand not having sugar in my coffee?" He would experience a kind of excitement. His partnership may be saying to him, "I feel a change in me. I must be getting more in touch with higher spiritual powers," and he will experience a temporary kind of jolt, a difference. However, if he has changed a habit in the Red Circuits, the excitement is very short-lived.
Humanity is wired up in such a way that thousands of people can undertake attempted change of the Red Circuit variety, feel a kind of short-lived excitement, and never notice how brief that excitement is. The Yellow Circuit doesn't notice it. If it's pointed out to them or they're asked about it, they'll say that they still, ten years later, are so delighted that they gave up white sugar. But in the intervening nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, they've forgotten about it. The habit has become NOT to eat white sugar. The excitement is gone. Let's say that our character runs across an old friend he hasn't seen for years. They sit, drinking some herbal tea, and talk. His friend says to him, "I remember the good ol' days when we were trying to become more in touch with the great, spiritual community of man. You gave up sugar at that time. I remember that you loved to put lots of it in your coffee." He replies, "Yeah, I remember we were hanging out in Denver. I remember that day I gave up sugar, and to tell you the truth, I haven't tasted sugar since then." His friend asks, "Are you glad you did it?" He replies, "Yeah, I'm glad," but that's the first time in ten years that he's thought about it. Memory is capable of pulling out little packets of survival memories, little packets of energy, such as, "Yeah, I'm glad I did it. I feel so much better. I wouldn't go back to eating sugar." But in truth the excitement is gone.
If you can see the reality behind my words here, you will understand that excitement is synonymous with change. If you can to some degree see at a right angle to ordinary reality, they are synonymous. Don't let the simplicity of it throw you. People don't understand this, and you'll see the difficulty of remembering it once you see it. There is nothing in life, even at the ordinary level, that is of any value to anybody unless it creates excitement. This is true even in areas of religion, areas that people generally believe are outside of the more crude, material realms. Ministers on television or out preaching in tents have thousands of people amen-ing their messages. And the message is excitement. What is the message of politicians, even those who seem to be a cut above the ordinary? They are exciting their followers within certain, confined limits. Built into the body of Life, just as is built into you, is hunger for excitement. However, the excitement is confined. It cannot be too exciting or the amen corner will become the nay say corner. If the politician, the religious leader, the entertainer becomes too exciting, that is, too intriguing, entertaining, or informative, the situation becomes frightening.
Understand that what I am telling you about excitement and change is not a sermon or something that I'm trying to convince you of. They are processes of Life that you have to see for yourself. I am describing the process of excitement from several, different angles while giving you the caveat not to feel pessimistic. To Line-level consciousness, this all sounds like a downer, but it's not. You must see that your own partnership, as well as everyone else's, talks as though real excitement and change are just a heartbeat away, and they're not. Notice that our environment here changes relatively little over time. Locations and interior designs change, but not drastically. Note that I do not drop a pencil, bend over to pick it up, and then straighten up wearing a disguise. There's a fairly constant tenor, rhythm, and intensity to my voice. I don't scream at you. Collectively, I can see the general confines of your excitement tolerance. Part of your questions to me are about how you can speed up this process you're undertaking here. You think, "Don't tell me to run twice as far everyday; tell me something real." Of course the one real thing is that you have got to be able to change. You have to be able to overcome your ordinary extremes and then produce your own new ones -- you have to be exciting. Some of you think that too much here is predictable and that I should produce greater excitement. But then you ask your partnership what you would have me do. Come out wearing a turban that I set on fire? Wear a tutu and dance? Noodle on a piano while I talk? I'm not just being funny. You have to understand change and how it is produced, and you have to see that change equals excitement.
At Line level, you and your partnership would say that your problems are psychologically based, as opposed to religiously based. Because of the time and place in which you grew up, because of the age of your genetic patterns, you think, "I have psychological problems that I need to overcome," rather than, "The evil spirit tempts me and I sin." As an aside, note how much easier this would be if I said simply, "What I'm talking about is a continuation from where Freud left off concerning human motivations and behavior; we do have free will, and we can become better people." Not only would that be easy, but it would make a great deal more sense to you. You could describe problems in easy psychological terms: You fear women, you hate men, your mother mistreated you, you'd like to kill your father, you believe the government is plotting against individual freedom, you have homosexual daydreams. I could pick out one of you and say, "I want you to take off your clothes and run around the room screaming at the top of your voice." If that person did as I instructed, he would feel afterward as though he had made a true psychological breakthrough. He would be in an apparently altered state of consciousness. He might say, "I've just bypassed years of analysis," or, "The pent up hostility and sexual fear I've always felt are gone!" and his eyes would look like those of someone who for the first time just did a free fall from an airplane. His whole system would be in a state of mild shock. Whether you describe it as a psychological release or a moment of religious epiphany or a state of satori, what is at the heart of this experience is excitement.
When you're entertained, when you think you're being informed about something new, you're being excited. What's occurring is an energy transfer, and what you are perceiving and receiving are new amounts of energy. You are not entertained by anybody from Gatemouth Brown to Horowitz unless you're excited. No matter what the apparent message, whether it be in the form of poetry, guest lecture, church service, or rock concert, you will remember nothing if it did not excite you. You will have nothing to say about it in any positive way unless you were excited.
What would it take right now for you to be excited? Using the lower, cruder circuits as an example, you would have to leap up and do something you ordinarily wouldn't do. Why are children so excitable? Because they haven't yet done many, many things. Once they do them, that's the end of them. But for a handful of years, there are enough new things they're doing that they stay excited. Now I ask you, how difficult is it to do things differently? You think, "For the next ten minutes I'm going to stand differently," or, "I'll go and get a mohawk haircut, and that will last a couple of months," or, better yet, "I'll pluck out my eyebrows and paint them on with green shoe polish." If you go home and do that, you will experience a sense of excitement. If you shave off your eyebrows and look in the mirror, you're going to get excited, and that will probably last through the next morning when you realize, "I've got to go to work at IBM, and I've quickly got to find a pair of eyebrows somewhere."
These examples of mine aside, I ask you, what do you do that is exciting? What do you do that is attempted change? You say that you attempt to change. You say that you try to do the things I describe, that you try to Neuralize, that you attempt to cease being a critic of everything you hear, smell, touch, and imagine. But I tell you that if what you're doing is not exciting, you're not doing anything. If I told you right now to do something in the next five seconds that excites you, what would you do? I'm truly not trying to make you feel badly, but when was the last time you felt excited? Are you as excited about This as you were the first time you saw or heard me? If I were to jump out of the bushes one night and ask you, "How are things going?" you might say, "I'm struggling. I still have my bad days when I revert back to being me, but I continue to make effort. I can feel the challenge." But are you excited? How often are you excited? You think, "Well, I don't know. I know that this has helped me in a lot of ways. I'm not as afraid as I used to be, and I'm not as worried about what other people think anymore."
Let me point out again that many historical religious figures, the subjects of age-old stories, had they lived as described, led lives filled with excitement. You could describe them in many ways, but bored would not be one of them. There is a dynamic at work in this kind of activity that we're undertaking. While you may believe that This is unique in that it's exempt from certain ordinary parts of Life's body, it is and it isn't. When it rains, we all still get wet. The dynamic I'm referring to is the fact that without analyzing it, people here believe that they have been cured of their problems, whether they believed they were psychologically or demon based. They say they feel better, they worry less, they suffer less. They say they feel more centered, more focused, calmer, more generally not fearful. But I ask you again, is that excitement? Is that real change? If you are truly prepared to go out of this life with a whimper, something is wrong. Of course nothing would be wrong at Line level in that all you've done is fallen into the mainstream of the "I believe I have changed" syndrome.
Periodically I throw out the phrase that everything is show biz. That's not a cynical criticism of or attack on anybody. I am referring to the fact that an energy exchange is occurring. Even if you are reading this ten years from now, there is still an energy exchange occurring. Somebody is apparently on stage (me), and somebody is in the audience (you). In everyday life, these two roles switch back and forth continually. Let's say you're standing in line at the supermarket, and the person next to you glances at the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and says to you, "Can you believe they write this kind of stuff?" It's as though it were his turn on stage, and then when you reply, it's your turn on stage. Sometimes the exchange is so minuscule that you don't even notice it, but every time you speak, you're on stage, and the person listening is the audience. Then when it's their turn on stage, you run out and sit in the audience. What is going on seems to be significant to you. You differentiate between someone talking to you about spiritual matters and someone telling you how to get rich in real estate. You think, "I go to these seminars on real estate every time the speaker comes to town. I buy all his books. I feel like I benefit from what he tells me. But that's different from the metaphysical meetings I go to. The speaker there talks about matters of real consequence, not like money and real estate. There's a big difference." Are you sure? Line-level consciousness tells you there's a difference, but if you're being excited by them, there's no difference.
Even those who are apparently in areas far removed from mundane life, such as religious leaders, would have no profitable energy exchanges with their audiences if they were not exciting them. Look at the show biz ministers on television. They pace the stage, yell, pound, wave their bible, and it is a show. They are producing excitement in the audience. Look at the difficulty in keeping public television financed. These shows would not be commercially successfully for the simple reason that they are not exciting. If you say that you're doing something different and you're not excited by it, then you are mistaken about it being different.
But let's say that you consider what you could actually go and do that would be exciting. You think, "I'll go to the blood drive, and when they come over to draw my blood, I'll leap up and tear off my clothes and run around the Red Cross Building. I'm sure that would be exciting. I would not go home and watch television for the rest of the night. I would be excited." But then notice what the partnership says. "That's overdoing it a bit. I'd be arrested, which means I'd be taken to jail, and then I'd have a police record. I can't do that sort of thing." The distance between where you begin and where something becomes too exciting is not very far. The partnership will say, "I can't do that. I'll have to think of something else." So you try to think of variations. You think, "Okay, I'll still go to the Red Cross, but I'll rip off only my shirt." The partnership responds, "Don't do that. I've got no hair on my chest, I'm too thin, and I've got no muscles." You women can think up a similar example. Then you think, "Okay, I'll only rip off my shoes and socks," and the partnership replies, "Nooo, I don't think so. Bad idea." You narrow it down further and further until you find it impossible to do anything.
To the partnership, anything you do that's different is too much. The partnership says everything is fine just as it is. It tells you, "You're not under indictment; your mother isn't ashamed of you; your wife (husband) isn't threatening to leave you; your neighbors aren't laughing at you; your boss isn't on the verge of firing you. Everything is fine. And you think, "Good grief, you're right. What if I had gotten arrested for indecent exposure? There goes my job, there goes my wife, they'd throw me out of the Kiwanis Club. Boy, was that a close call!" The partnership says, "That's absolute proof that you shouldn't do anything. Stay home and watch television. Excitement can get out of hand." What about the absolute, chemical basis for staying as you are? You personally maintain a chemical balance that for all intents and purposes is not to be disturbed. There are people with the propensity to be disturbed a little bit. But it is very confined. They are disturbed in ways that have no overall effect on the general health of Life. You ask me, "How can I move at a faster rate of speed? How can I take the minutes I get and turn them into hours? What can I do to ignite parts of my nervous system that are not now in operation? Tell me what I can do to experience the chemical, physical reality of all past and present areas of metaphysics." It's simple. Excite yourself. But you have to do something truly different.
If you ask the partnership, "What can I do? What am I prepared to do? What can I do that's legal? What can I do without dying from it?" -- notice that the number of things you can think of that would be acceptable in a legal-moral sense are hardly worth doing. They would have almost no effect. So the only real possibilities you'll come up with at Line level are those that go too far. But note that the partnership keeps pointing out that you can't do those and narrows it back to, "Well, I'm going to have to think about this some more." From all of this verbal pointing that I'm doing here, you should be developing your own understanding of just how difficult, if not nearly impossible, it is to do anything exciting, to do anything different.
Many people today in positions of so-called authority, as well as large groups of the general population, are asserting that unless Mankind does away with weapons and war, the question of Man's future is null and void. All you have to do is be ordinary and listen to that, and a part of you will say, "Yes!" They say that if Mankind does not proceed with disarmament, we're done for, and it's not true. Consciousness at Line level, cannot see a triaxial situation. It cannot see that quantum measurements of so-called progress go hand in hand with warfare. What do you make of that?
Someone on television the other day commented that the great super powers of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. should work toward a better state of harmony with each other, which would allow for greater cultural, social, and scientific exchanges between the two. He added, "All this might be possible, although Russia and the U.S. disagree as to the root cause of international tension." What is not obvious to ordinary consciousness is that there is no disagreement between the U.S. and Russia. They both understand that "I have a foe that is the cause." They are in absolute agreement.
Do you recall my hint of a royal collusion? The subject of ending international tension is played out in the press and at the U.N. There are continual meetings between ambassadors for the two countries in order to iron out their disagreements. In actuality, there is no disagreement. There is never any disagreement between the forces. It is only the binary mind that says C and D forces oppose each other. It says that if C and D were personified as countries or peoples, they are in disagreement. But the forces interact perfectly well with each other. Saying they disagree is just as funny as your religious forefathers believing there was some sort of antagonism between their gods and their non-gods. It's almost as funny as individual people believing there is some kind of tension and conflict between "in here" and "out there."
Consider the history of Mankind in the horizontal world of apparent sequential events. Historians, commentators, observers continually describe history as being a kind of quantum progress. They can describe various parts of history that seem to be specific periods of time when great progress was made. I'm not referring to small events like the invention of the cotton gin or vermouth, but rather the periods that seem to be wide-reaching times of progress. Whole groups of people seem to have become civilized and stabilized; the Yellow Circuit began to flourish in a particular way, and great works of art were produced. History is replete with examples of this. What I want you to see is that every one of those periods was tied directly to and based upon one group of people conquering another group. The Romans. The Chinese. The Saxons and Anglos. The United States. Go back and pick up an undergraduate, one-volume history of the world in 600 pages or turn on public television. Whether they're talking about the arts or sciences, they will say that "such and such" was going on when King so and so and his army invaded and conquered this other group of people; and from that flourished a new period of prosperity and progress. But notice, everybody who stayed home and minded their own business was stillborn. They were stifled. They were forgotten. If they are still around now, they're called "third world." All you had to do was stay home, not stick your nose in anybody else's business, not conquer, not get conquered, and you did not make the quantum history books.
Look at America. The forefathers of our part of the world were originally part of the so-called establishment of British/Anglo civilization, which at that time was one of the great rulers of the world and the fount of the industrial revolution. But as far as there existing a group of people in the British Isles, one cannot even remember what they were called. They disappeared. Remember, we are not actually talking about history. Jump from the founding of the U.S. to where we are. Since we have no American Indians here tonight, we could say that we are strangers; we are the invaders. But then look around at places that were not warlike, that did not go around conquering other people. What happened to them? You never hear of them, or if you do, what you hear is boring. You hear that the centerpiece of their cultural museum, for the whole country, is a plaster duck, or that the highlight of their literary endeavors is one well known epic poem that begins, "There was a young girl named Tucker..." This is worth pursuing on your own.
Since we are not interested in the romantic conquests of the Anglos and Saxons or our forefathers' invasion of Indian lands, I ask you to turn all of this inside of you, as though there were an inside to you, and ask yourself this: Is it possible to stay home and prevail? Then ask yourself, does this have any relationship to what I was talking about earlier? What is more boring than staying home? Do you think you would have heard of Nero, Alexander, William of Orange, or Fred of Apricot if they had stayed home? Would we even be here in the U.S. if the Anglos and Saxons had looked across the channel and said, "Aw jeez, let's leave 'em be," or, "It must be eight or ten miles across there. We're going to have to go into debt building our boats. There's nothing wrong with where we are"? Let's say a few wide eyed people three or four hundred years ago made a few trips in boats and then returned to Holland, Spain, England, Germany and said, "Hey, if you get into one of those boats, and you don't drown or get scurvy or starve to death, after months and months, you get to another place, and there are hardly any people there." What if your forefathers or foremothers had replied, "Well, I'll admit that does sound exciting, but I think I'll stay home"? We would all now probably be fighting for the one position of caretaker looking after the plaster duck.
Can you stay home and prevail? Can you stay home and do anything truly different? Remember, every time there was a quantum measurement of so-called progress in horizontal history, the activity involved one group of people invading another. What is the relevance of that to you? Some of you fail to hear what I'm saying. Nobody gets a title in the history book's table of contents that reads, "Here is nation X, traced back to X B.C.; they stayed there, and then they seemed to flourish." Go and try to find such a description. If it flourished, it was tied directly to the idea that, for example, "There existed a group of people that hunted and then tried to do a little farming, and then suddenly there was a period wherein, for some inexplicable reason, a group of them ran twenty miles south and invaded this other area. They fought for four or five years, took over, and then very shortly, they began to paint, write songs, compose poems," and so forth. They have to conquer or be conquered or nothing happens.
What is the pertinence of this to you? Can you stay all the little "you's" that you are now? Can you remain this little country? It's easy to stay home and mind your own business. You and your partnership have the same tastes. You like country music or you like opera. You belong to one of the era's acceptable religions. You're peaceful. But if you do mind your own business, you'll never be heard from again. If you started reading about yourself and they didn't use your real name, it would put you to sleep. You would not make history. You would not even make your own history.
For there to be a quantum movement of so-called progress, there has to be some kind of change involved, and that change cannot be as small as brothers-in-law fighting. There has to be a discernible difference such as race, religion, political persuasion, locale, etc. They intermingle, and they are no longer the homogeneous group they were to start with. They are now the original group AND the new group. It is only in this way that real change occurs and that progress is made. One group must move into an area that is foreign to them. They have to move in and conquer. You think, "Well, I'd prefer to stay home. There's no sense in getting too wild at this stage of my life. A person could get hurt. Something terrible could happen."
As I mentioned recently, you should be continually producing your own self-imposed pressure, your own kind of new extreme. It could be anything, and you shouldn't wait for me to give you something to do. You can get close to what is apparently E. It should be a near-irrelevant task. You should be continually attempting to either gain or lose weight, to run a half-mile further every month than you did the previous month. You should be attempting something like literally memorizing all the parts to Hamlet, not in some vague, undisciplined way, but similarly to the way you would undertake change in the Red Circuit. A certain amount of minimum effort would be required each day if you were to meet the deadline. You could borrow a piano or guitar and commit yourself to learning all the scales forwards and backwards in one month. Or you could learn how to play a particular song from beginning to end. Or as soon as you get out of bed in the morning, drop to the floor and try to do forty push-ups nonstop. That's something that you can do. Then when you can do forty, increase the number or change to a different activity. You are missing a real opportunity, if not the real excitement that I've been talking about, if you do not attempt these kinds of things.
You should be continually involved in a secret, self imposed, pressurized task. The process of doing it will not produce a new state of consciousness per se, and it will not turn you into an enlightened being of some kind, but if you're not doing at least that, you're not doing anything. You should be at the point where you can hear what I'm saying. What you undertake should be secretive. You shouldn't be talking about it to anyone. It's nobody's business. It can be an apparently irrelevant activity, but it must require effort.
