Audio = Stream the audio from the bars below in two parts.

Audio Download = DOWNLOAD Jan Cox Talk 0234 from Cassette

AKS/News Items = none

Summary = See Below

Diagrams = #75, #101 in body of Transcript below

Transcript = See Below

Summary by TK
Tape 234, Nov 13, 1986, runtime 1:55

  [What are you trying to accomplish here? Why are you here?Fellowship, knowledge, etc.? Relation to the comfort of religion. If you were forced to give a proper truthful reply, you would have to confess ignorance. None have a "grand plan" a grand design for accomplishing goals in their life. But how can anyone then be disappointed with anything? Yet everyone constantly feels disappointed with their life as a continuing series of problems and unexpected disappointments. If you have no "grand plan" you must feel disappointed--no recourse. With a grand plan, nothing can disappoint. ]
  [There are no 'little' cosmic truths. The only cosmic truth is an undisturbed infinite statement. The Yellow Circuit as your contemporary "father" of the pervasive myths of patricide: the patricide of the Yellow Circuit being noun-ed to death; breaking up the infinite statement of Life. "There is a great deal to be said about saying very little!". AMV12 as a reflection of the infinite statement which is continually truncated at the horizontal line of consciousness in the nervous system. Truncation = no possible cosmic truth. ]
  [Frontiers. The moving frontier such as the American 'wild west', beyond which dangerous disorder reigns. But frontier always moving, expanding to include more civilization. Relation to expanding civilized areas in you; the upward movement of the conscious line in man's nervous system. "Poverty follows peace" Moses, Mohammed and Jesus were troublemakers, agitators, in peaceful situations; they understood very well that peace produces poverty. Everybody should be doing something irrelevant to shake up their system constantly. If you want something extraordinary to happen in your life, you've got to do something extraordinary; be extraordinary. For some, just holding on is extraordinary. Poverty is slow death by starvation. Look how comfortable, how stable, This Thing has become, how much more peaceful you feel now. Poverty. Things are always relatively peaceful --all thru history. War is the only cure for such, the vivifying process for Life. In a real sense, Moses et al., led people to do useless activity on a grand scale --chase in circles to serve Life's purposes. If any activity has even a vestige of This thing and is not" povertied to death" --at the very most it runs afoul of the temporal government; the world of Caesar; the IRS, for its closest approach to full on enriching warfare. The greater the horizontal civilization, the greater the difficulty to instigate warfare; to feed Life. The necessity is always present to feed This thing, to nourish the weakening blood: warfare. You are greatly mistaken to believe war is detrimental; that cessation of hostilities or peace on earth would benefit Life. ]
  [If ordinary success proved to be a proper measure of a life well spent, very few have helped Life. Statistically, very few can be rich and famous. When the Fabled River surfaces for a time in mundane affairs, it is wasted if people peacefully starve to death in its flow. The smell of revolution must be in the air.

Transcript

POVERTY FOLLOWS PEACE

Document:  234,  November 13, 1986
Copyright (c) Jan M. Cox, 1986

     Let me ask you to consider the question of, "What are you doing here?"  Do you believe This will produce some form of enlightenment?  Or is this some form of low-level religion to produce comfort and fellowship?  Is this to make you peaceful?  Why in the world do we continue to meet like this?

     The purpose for the existence of any other group of people is at least stated; at least they have an obvious claim as to what they are doing.  But what can you claim that we are doing?  If I insisted that each of you tell me why you are here you would all say something like, "I would like to activate higher circuits; I would like to See with a capital 'S.'  I want to be conscious outside the ordinary limits of humanity."  And in all your responses you would use ideas that you got from me -- that is, from an external source.

     What if I further insisted that each of you give me an answer that I would be satisfied with.  That is, I would have to hear that your response involved a certain truthfulness arising from an almost direct reaction from your circuitry.  Then the closest answer to the truth you could give would be, "I don't know."  Is that not a weird commentary on all this strange business?  You don't know why you continue your involvement in This.  What can you make of that?

     Now I'll point out that ordinary humanity, that is, the many, feel the complete lack of any grand plan or design in their lives.  And they find life to be simply a series of unexpected problems and disappointments. This is not in any way a commentary on the sad nature of life.  And I ask you people, do you have anything resembling a grand plan of any kind?  Ignore any internal rumblings you might have of trying to qualify your answer, such as, "People on a spiritual quest don't have any cheap plans.  I'm not trying to buy a new corvette, I'm trying to expand my consciousness.  I've got no interest in being caught up in all these so-called plans of trying to be rich and famous."

     If we used ordinary success as a gauge for a life well spent, if we assumed that the pursuit of fame and fortune was the only real game to be played, how many of you can face up to the fact that simple statistics portend very few winners?  This unsettling statistical information is readily available -- Life is broadcasting the fact of the matter in a big way.  And the fact of the matter is that the chances of you or anyone else becoming rich and famous are just about nil.  You can look around you and feel it.  It's not necessary to look it up in an abstract published by the census bureau.  I'm talking about success with a capital "S."  The chances of you becoming a famous musician, dancer, author, or artist are almost infinitesimal.  The number of successful people in any field of endeavor that you could name will fit in your closet.  You may say, "In some way I've gone beyond such mundane motivations as the pursuit of fame and fortune.  I'll probably live the rest of my life driving old cars and shopping at K-mart -- but I'm still glad that I didn't go ahead and waste my life getting rich."  And my response to that is:  Big deal.  You can be mechanically pleased that you got over it, or displeased, and I ask you, what's the difference?

     I'm not trying to give you the blues.  You simply need to face up to the cold, hard, statistical fact that the chances of you becoming rich are just about zero.  And yet, everyone on the planet starts out with the notion that in some way they are going to conquer Life.  It's not some kind of delusion; it is not some kind of personal peccadillo that conflicts with the urge to live a better life.  This notion that is in everyone is part of the missing ingredient that makes Life grow.

     Ordinary men do not have to recognize this statistical fact.  They survive their appointed years very well regardless.  They can own a cadillac, become fat, at least eat well.  There is nothing broken in Life.  You can't buttonhole one of your old college buddies and say, "Hey, I remember when you used to talk about writing the Great American Novel.  You were going to take the world by the tail.  But now look at you.  You own a bakery in Des Moines.  You've got five kids and a double mortgage.  Shame on you."  You can't say, "Shame on you," to someone.  Their feeling, if you pushed them into looking at it, would be, "Well, that's life.  We all had our dreams."  They did not become successful in the way they dreamt of it at one time, but they were fed in the way that was necessary to survive.

     What is your grand plan?  We're back to my question of why you continue to come here.  You don't know.  What kind of grand plan is that?  And yet people involved in This Thing surmise that they are indeed exceptional.  You are in the minority, though not necessarily in the way you might presently believe. Thus I continue to refer to you as the Few.

     The Few have got to have plans.  How can you be exempt from the lot of the other 99% of humanity if you haven't any plans?  Without a grand design, all you apparently have is a continuing series of unexpected problems and disappointments.  I don't mean this in some everyday, mundane sense.  I mean that the problems and disappointments become the pillars that support your life.

     Those of you with Yellow Circuit aspirations might say to yourself, "If I've got no real plans then I won't be disappointed."  It seems that if you were a ship making for no port you wouldn't find ill wind.  Or, you wouldn't find yourself in the wrong part of town if you weren't going anywhere.  And yet, are you not continually disappointed?  The answer is, "Yes, yes, daddy, we are.  We feel disappointed sometimes for no particular reason -- we just wake up and feel disappointed.  We are out jogging and just turn a corner and feel disappointed."

     Additionally, as I pointed out, you are beset by a continuing series of what seems to be unexpected problems.  I don't mean exotic problems or horrendous catastrophes like your mate leaving you or your house burning down.  Your car breaks down over and over.  You hurt yourself repeatedly.  You continue to misuse and break things.

     So I ask you again, since I said that nobody has a grand plan, how can this be?  At Line level it is neither reasonable nor rational.  If I converted this situation into a mathematical equation it would not compute on this level.  But on the level of particle mathematics it certainly computes because everything does.

     I periodically receive questions concerning "Cosmic Truth."  There are no big cosmic truths.  There aren't even any little cosmic truths.  By "little" I mean anything that you can comprehend.  The reality behind the notion of "cosmic truth" would be the undisturbed Infinite Comment.  At Line level, humanity believes that there is a cosmic truth or a handful of cosmic truths.  Beyond the only decent answer that you could give to my earlier query of why you continue to come here, many of you would believe that you have a desire for some kind of enlightenment -- that is, that you wish to become privy to the cosmic truths.  There are no such things.  The closest verbal description of "cosmic truth" is the undisturbed Infinite Comment.

     Now let me suggest to you that for the Few, there is the distinct danger that the Yellow Circuit can noun itself to death.  I further suggest that throughout the history of man there have been mythological and religious tales of patricide:  All those stories of princes slaying their fathers, or of men being adopted by the gods and then they turn around and try to kill their benefactors.  To place it in a more contemporary context, how about the so-called psychological theories of sons being in direct competition with their fathers -- subconsciously desiring to kill their fathers.  What if the Yellow Circuit can be viewed as your contemporary father and these stories represent man turning around and attempting to kill his father.  That is, man attempting to take the undisturbed Infinite Comment and noun it to death -- to kill it by a continual attack on it?  And the attack is cutting it up so a sentence can be extracted out of it. The attack is placing periods on the Infinite Comment that apparently provide a stopping place, a sense of finality.

     With ordinary man, this must happen, or else we would not have progress:  lights, TV, hot chocolate, underwear, etc.  But for you people, the Few, the danger is that you can become a walking compendium of aphorisms -- short little sentence packets of information that you believe will eventually add up to the one big cosmic truth.  If we picture the Infinite Comment as a room, you can walk in and out, but if you take anything with you when you leave you are attacking your father.  You are party to a brutalizing attack on the race of genes, the father and grandfather of us all.

     Now let me turn your attention to the substance in the blood that I have mentioned:  AMv12.  Over a period of years, even before I put a name on it, I pointed out that one description of what this activity is about is to be able to create and maintain a certain enrichment of the blood.  This enriched blood can physically feed areas of the brain that are not currently being fed.  Can any of you see that the substance AMv12 in the blood could be seen on a mortal level as a direct reflection of the Infinite Comment?  And I refer you to my map of the nervous system, with the blood going up to the Line and no further.  That is where you cut up the Infinite Comment -- you stab at your father with periods and stopping places and the flow just stops.

     If you are following this, what I have just told you precludes any notions of "cosmic truth" because all you can get when you attack your father is a piece of scalp or flesh.  If you cut up the Infinite Comment into little sentences and sentiments that's what you get.

     I have hinted around this before, but now let me tell you directly that there is a great deal to be said about saying very little.  Now in our day, as long as you are out there working and dealing with Life, you have got to talk to some degree.  But you do not have to take it seriously -- it does not have to come from an apparent center of what you are.  There is a difference between the circuits just running your tongue and you having control over it.

     How about frontiers?  I'm going to use as an example the westward expansion of the settlement of America.  There seemed to be at all times during that era a moving frontier.  And it was distinguished, from the viewpoint of the people at that time, as a line of sorts beyond which civilization and order broke down. One went from settled parts that had a certain decorum and order into areas where the feeling was, "Hey, out here I'm on my own -- it's wild; anything can happen."

     You need to see that it was a movable frontier.  At one point in the settlement of the country the Wild West began just outside Jamestown.  At a later date it was outside of Richmond; later still, the frontier was on the eastern edge of the great plains.  It was a cyclical, continuous process of the frontier moving, in this example, westward across the continent.  Civilization would catch up, and the frontier would move again.

     Does any of this sound familiar?  In various ways, many of you are already going through that.  There is a movable frontier in you -- that which at one time was uncivilized in you has been settled and civilized.  But the frontier continues to move.  In the past, before you got involved with This Activity, you might have used religious terms to describe these uncivilized regions in you:  your material, baser self, etc.  You might say, "At some time in my past I had desires to do things that scared me.  I was afraid that I might get drunk enough sometime to actually do them."  And it's as though civilization caught up with you.  But the frontier must move on.  Can anyone see a further connection between this process of moving frontiers and Man's level of consciousness continuing to move up?  Not just in humanity, but in you who have a Real Aim.

     Now I'll jump from American history to the general feudal era in European history.  Regardless of what the history books say, the little kings and would-be rulers at that time were not rich.  They were constantly strapped for money.  The only times when they had money was in wartime.  The only way that they could really get down and rock and roll like the gods meant for them to do was by going to war.  So almost every year the king would gather his vassals and his knights and say, "We've got to fight somebody."  And he'd come up with some story or reason.  They had .pato almost continually wage campaigns against somebody.  They had to pillage and plunder.

     There was a little gem of wisdom among these small time kings and lords:  Poverty follows peace.  Peace was not desirable; when it was peaceful the leaders were just as poor as everybody else.  Can you see any possible reason I might bring this up?

     Back to my other example of the frontier of the wild west.  If you went past this frontier, you were in uncivilized, disorganized territory, while on the eastern side of the frontier it was organized, stable -- it was peaceful.  Why did they continually push at the frontier?  Ignore any immediate Line level responses you might have, such as, "Well, there was this influx of immigrants and they needed more land to settle."  Poverty follows peace.

     Let me remind you that I'm not speaking of American history and the definition of poverty in these descriptions is not limited to some commercial or institutional sense.  Let's return to my original question of, "Why do you continue to come here?"  And I mentioned several possibilities such as the desire for fellowship, comfort and peace.  Many of you certainly might feel that peace is a desirable goal.  You very likely feel that in some way you have already become more peaceful having been involved with This.  If I were to present This publicly as a system or method that would make it possible for one to be at peace with Life and with oneself, would not large numbers of people say, "Yeah, where do I sign up?"  And you surely realize that there are many systems and groups apparently offering just that.  Peace would seem to be a worthwhile goal, except for this:  Those kings of old were correct when they said, "Poverty follows peace."

     Taking another angle, consider what all the prominent historical religious leaders had in common.  From a certain viewpoint, they were all trouble makers.  Regardless of what the history books may say, the various times that these guys showed up were, by and large, peaceful times.  (As an aside, I could say that it is always rather peaceful.)  But these famous historical religious figures were born in relatively peaceful surroundings and they rattled the cages of the prevailing powers of their particular time and place.  They apparently persuaded large numbers of their contemporaries to get involved in warfare.  In a certain, peculiar sense, they took large numbers of relatively stable, sane, peaceful people and made them undertake, dare I say it, a useless endeavor -- an irrelevant warfare.  I suggest to you that in their own way those famous religious figures also understood the fact that poverty follows peace.

     Why do I periodically tell you that you should be continually doing something that is apparently useless or irrelevant to you personally?  Such as jumping out of bed in the morning, hitting the floor and doing fifty push ups nonstop.  It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it is useless to you; as long as there is no need for you to do it.

     How about the way ordinary men are driven to attack religion?  Someone walks into a huge old cathedral, and they see the little old priests and dwindling congregations and they smell the candles and incense.  And they might say, "Although it is a rather interesting display of ritual, there is nothing worthwhile going on here.  It lacks vitality -- it's just a shell."  Poverty follows peace.  It's been said by someone that if one of those great religious teachers came back from the dead and tried to get back into the church that apparently he originally founded, he would get the bum's rush.  That is, assuming he would try to get in.  I'm telling you that he would do the same thing he did before.  He'd rattle somebody's cage. He'd make trouble.

     Every time that you feel, by any measure, that there has been some movement of the frontier in you -- such as a feeling that you are now more civilized, or more conscious, I say:  So what?  There's always a frontier just past where you are right now.  Suppose that you have pushed across the Ohio valley and now the frontier is somewhere in Kansas.  And out that far you have dragged your chandeliers.  You have shipped out your library of great books with their leather bindings, you've got your silverware.  You've moved into a decent house with nice aluminum siding and your little realm is now civilized.  But you've got to remember that right down the road a few miles is Dodge City.  It's rough and rowdy there; people are dipping snuff, spitting on the floor and drinking out of bottles.  But there you sit with your snifter of brandy, patting yourself on the back.  "Isn't nice just to sit here and relax.  I've certainly earned it."  Everyone at Line level believes, "I've earned this."  But as you should know by now, you didn't earn it.  You don't even know how you got here.  There you sit, but off in the distance you can hear the rowdies on the frontier whooping it up.  Who in this situation would tolerate somebody jumping up and saying, "Hey, things are too peaceful.  Let's pack up and move to Dodge City where the real fun is."?  And you sit there and think, "You've got to be kidding.  I'm now 25, 35, 45 years old.  I've paid my dues."  Of course, you understand that I'm not talking about Dodge City and Kansas.

     Poverty follows peace, and poverty is slow death.  Look how peaceful some of you feel compared to what you were.  You walk down the city streets and look on your fellow men running madly about and you feel a certain stability compared to before.  You feel as though, "I know a secret.  I know parts of many secrets.  I'm much more peaceful -- my ulcers have quit bleeding.  I no longer have to drink alcohol or take Valium."  Poverty.

     This Activity continues to reach a place where it gets rather peaceful.  I could say this at any time, because when there is a minimal number of people seriously involved with This, it is always true for somebody at any given moment.  Someone has had their silver shipped out, they've finally got some good books and some decent recordings of Mozart.  And they would drink to my health and to This Activity, whatever it is.  "I feel so much better; I'm not nearly as agitated as I used to be."

     I repeat:  Poverty is slow death.  If it's peaceful, you're only one step away from poverty.  You'll starve, the kingdom will starve.  There is only one solution, only one way to make life livable again.  You have to go to war.

     Is there a difference between me telling you to learn to do fifty push ups and the story of the Israelites of yore following a questionably stable man for years through the desert to find a so-called Promised Land?  That was the story:  "We're leaving Egypt (which, I remind you, was not all that bad; it was rather peaceful at the time) and we're going to the promised land."  And the truth is they were going nowhere -- they walked around in circles and ate dust for years and years.  Now there's obviously a difference between thousands of people on a meaningless journey in the desert for years and you doing fifty push ups for no reason at all.  There is a difference in numbers, but so what?  What I want you to see is, if you think that there is a qualitative difference, then I'm not sure you have the right apparatus to be Here.

     This kind of Activity can be seen as a bloodletting, blood producing River that comes above ground at various times and places.  If this river becomes peaceful, poverty soon follows, and it disappears.  I'm sure you can think of many examples, in both historical and contemporary times, of groups of people apparently involved with would-be mystical, transcendental efforts of some kind.  I'm not talking now about instances when this River arose and had any kind of real force to it.  I am referring to the many instances when this blood, this River appeared almost as ground water -- where the AMv12 existed for perhaps a second -- and sparked an affair that lasted five, ten, or twenty years.  Even on such a crude level, if the activity, whatever it might be, is not going to die out through poverty then there has to be warfare of some kind. And the closest such examples get to the enriching, profitable activity of real warfare is they seem to run afoul of the IRS.  They start a commune and ignore zoning codes.  Or in the past they ran head-on into the prevailing religions of their time and place.  Nowadays it is hard, if not impossible, to get in trouble with the apparent world of the gods on this planet.  Somebody can jump up and say, "Hey, there is no god, and if there was a god his name would be Larry and he would wear a bow tie!"  Don't hold your breath waiting for the pope, televangelist or rabbi to say, "Hey, you can't do that!"  You should realize that these days you can say almost anything.

     So the more common possibility now is that such groups run directly into what was once called the world of Caesar.  That is, they run afoul of the temporal governments.  The IRS sells all of their belongings, or it is discovered that the head of the movement has been married three times and never bothered to get a divorce and the authorities throw him in jail.  And that's the end of their efforts.

     If you ignore any of your partnership's ideas of morality and propriety, you might still correctly suspect that such scenarios are less than optimally profitable.  Life does it many, many times, but it's not the way in which Life really uses This Activity.  But even at such a crude level, there must be some form of warfare or the group will die of poverty.  Such a group might make the news ONE time for thirty seconds -- you see a thirty second news clip about a bunch of people right outside of Oklahoma City who believe god is a man called Larry and he wears a bow tie.  You're watching the television and they show all these people sitting around with bow ties.  And that's the last you ever hear of them.  Twenty years later you happen to think of them and you wonder, "What ever happened to those guys with the bow ties?"  Nothing happened to those guys.  That's the point.  They povertied to death.

     How exactly should the blood be stirred up in this time and place?  How should the warfare be instigated?  It is not so simple as it appears.  You can put on a nose and glasses and stick your tongue out at the prevailing powers, but what good will that do?  You are all sophisticated enough to know that won't get you anywhere.  I'm going to point out something, but let me caution you beforehand that we're dealing with two-thirds of reality here.  As man becomes more sophisticated and civilized it becomes harder to stage war.  It becomes harder and harder to insult some group, to stir some group of people up.  Listen to early morning radio talk shows and you'll hear people, under the guise of being preachers and political commentators, saying things that not so long ago they would have been arrested for.  They would have been committed to an institution.  But nowadays one can say almost anything.  It is getting harder to stage warfare of a kind that will feed Life and enrich the blood that is behind an activity such as This Thing.

     Some of you inside your partnership might interpret this question on the basis of either quality or quantity.  And of course, the right quality, from a sequential line of thought and reaction, would be to attack the status quo -- to attack society as it is.  But I just got through pointing out to you that it is becoming harder and harder to be new wave.  What can you do that is that offensive any more?  Or it might seem to be a matter of just getting enough people together and producing results by sheer force of numbers.  Are you sure?  There are plenty of people already proclaiming some very strange notions (from a normal majority viewpoint) and some of them have hundreds, thousands of followers.  You never hear about them -- they don't even make the news.

     How is one to feed oneself?  How is one to feed This?  I'll twist my example of the Israelites out in the desert:  they've been marching for years and years, and they don't have any food.  The leader whips them into doing twenty years of nonstop push ups.  And as the story goes, food comes down from on high and keeps them from starving.  That is, food comes from the same source that got them all agitated to start with.  Up until now everyone has taken such stories literally.  But let's jump real quick from the allegorical to the reality of it.  It's not a matter of physical, material food.  It's a matter of how do you continue to feed the very thing that agitated you to begin with?  How do you continue to feed that which you cannot even describe?  I ask you why you continue to come here and you don't even know.  How can you feed This enough to stop things from becoming peaceful?  How can you prevent the frontier from stopping and civilization from setting in?

     Although I am not singing the beauties of war by any means, if you think that war has not served a purpose on this planet you are mistaken.  And yet there is no lack of old ideas that heaven, or at least progress in human affairs, would be the cessation of all hostilities.  Line level historical commentators have pointed out that there have been civilizations that seemed to be strong, full of vigor, and then over a period of time their inventiveness deteriorated, their muscle tone disappeared.  For example, the great Roman Empire:  as far as the history books go, it was a period of the greatest peace known up until that time.  There was a certain amount of justice and common law throughout the land.  There was art, literature, music, architecture -- all the things that make a society great.  Then the people apparently got soft.  And what happened?  All these crude guys on motorcycles with names ending in "goth" came roaring in and ran over the mighty Roman Empire.  They raped and pillaged and basically tore the whole place down.  Five hundred years of civilization was knocked over and burned down in a short time.  And let's picture a group of these Goths standing around the campfire, picking their teeth with some famous art object.  On the ground nearby a dying Roman says, "How could you people come here and overnight tear down five hundred years of civilization?"  And one of the goths says, "What, huh? (belch)."  The mighty Romans grew fat and lazy -- poverty followed peace -- and yet people still have the unexamined feeling that vigor and progress in human affairs is somehow dependent on doing away with all feelings of tension and aggression.

     This Activity cannot be fed by people getting just the necessary food to enable them to survive their seventy-odd years.  When this fabled River bubbles up in Life, it cannot be sustained with mechanical food.  It can't be fed by you just accepting what I say, or just by you showing up each week.  That is becoming peaceful, and anytime it is peaceful it is much too peaceful.  It can become so peaceful that you are in danger of starving to death.  You'll just wither away, as in actual physical starvation.  There are no great pains; you can smile and lay down peacefully and that's the end of it.

     If that happens, I will be responsible.  But I won't let that happen.  This fabled River is wasted if the people starve to death.  It takes a special kind of nose to smell, not Fall, but revolution in the air.  Man the barricades.