Jan Cox Talk 0237

An Imperfect Mirror

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Summary by TK

Tape 237, Dec 4, 1986, runtime 1:38

The Partnership: all know the hard reality of this process --a 'flip-flop' kind of binary relationship; one side then the other--desirable me (X1) and an undesirable me (X2). Consider: what if humanity is Life's partner in a partnership arrangement? What if Life uses man as a sounding board, a partial mirror? Consider the same for your own partnership, i.e., a partial, imperfect mirror or sounding board; all of the "I wonder if I can..." talking to oneself. Life's pondering = human actions. The Partnership contains the partners in 'regal collusion', in planned and orchestrated conflict. But then how could it really be collusion? And how could it be otherwise? Where could the partnership process come from? Nothing could operate without a partnership arrangement. The partnership is a way to cut up the Infinite Comment. It is the great deli-slicer slicing up the infinite bologna. Humanity as Life's bologna slicer. To See this is to totally understand history --even what you don't understand about it.]
[Legal term of medieval times: wergille. Means the price of someone's life which must be paid to the victim's community --a hard currency value placed on human life. Consider what is the wergille for bad habits slain by your strength in This thing? Royal house motto for feudal time Franks: "FF" (FuckFairness).]
[Binariness. Yellow Circuit is based on only 2 possibilities: things are either evolutionary or involutionary. These are the only things that will effect interest, comment, controversy. But there is more than two possibilities and this renders the supposed binary completeness invalid.]
[Understanding as equal to long-term memory, and Understanding as equal to the need to know. At Blue Circuit level: need to know = interest. Consider how you can increase your interest in This Thing --your need to know--in a closed system? Can horizontal age have a direct influence on your interest and ability in This Thing? Yes. All enter This Thing at an 'awkward age'. ]
[Does perfection = obsolescence? Perfection = the acceptable, and it is always too little, too late for the Few.]
[1:00 Message to other cities (for erasing): warning against discussion of These Ideas; being 'elder' student/teacher etc. Do not concern yourself with ordinary standards of success re: EVOTECK activities. Sit in circle 3 minutes before meeting. Send postcard once a month to ATL confirming faithful attempt to refrain from programmed script 3 times a day. Send a 3.5" x 5" headshot type photo to ATL with your name on back.

Transcript

THE PARTNERSHIP, THE INFINITE BOLOGNA, AND THE WERGILD

I am assuming that you now have your own understanding of what I mean when I say "the partnership". Of course, before you ran across me all of you should have had feelings that there was some part of you which operated, at times, not in your best interest. And when I began to call it the partnership, all of you (I assume) had no doubt I was pointing to something real. The reality of this partnership can be experienced, as can the particular flip-flopping nature of its operation.

I keep saying "the partnership" rather than "you and the partnership" for a reason. You feel as though, at any given time, you are taking sides in this partnership. You feel that one partner is closer to being "you", and the other one is "god-knows-what". But if we could freeze that situation and move to a different time and place, you would then feel as though you were on the other side. Normally you have no reason to notice this flip-flopping, and I have not given you a reason. You must find your own reason.

Now I want to ask you this: In Life itself, what if Man is the other part of the partnership to Life? I will tell you definitely that Life does have a partnership arrangement. What if Life, in a very particular way, uses Man as a partial mirror -- a sounding board? (You should keep in mind the "partial" qualifier, because in Life, as in you, the partnership does not operate in unison. Or when it does, you don't even notice it. That sometimes occurs when the apparent events surrounding you are of no particular molecular interest. If anything is of interest there is, to some degree, a conflict going on; the partnership never operates in complete concert.)

The partnership does not reflect everything about you. It is a partial mirror. In the same way, humanity does not reflect everything about Life. If any of you can see this, that is one reason Life would have no real interest in Man's religions or scientific truths. Life could not learn anything from those, because they are partial reflections. As in you: Any time the partnership is absolutely convinced of something, you can be sure it is wrong. The partnership is not a perfect mirror. If it were, everybody would know everything, right?

The second part of my rhetorical question concerned the partnership as a sounding board. It's like people talking to themselves: "Will this fly? Will this work? Will somebody accept this feather-laden canard?" In that sense, can you see the so-called upheavals in history when humanity has apparently gone temporarily mad are not to Life as "action", but as "thinking-about-action"? (I have already told you that Life will try anything once. If there is anything you can think of, the only reason you can think of it is that somebody tried it, or you wouldn't know anything about it.)

Life ponders, "What if?" And when it ponders "What if?", suddenly millions of humans go "poof," into some sort of activity -- a war, a protest, a fad. And in its own sweet time, which might be several seconds to Life but decades to humanity, Life decides, "Nah, to hell with it." And then things bounce off in another direction. The human molecules remember it and write books about it, but don't bet that it's anything Life remembers. Can you remember what you were pondering this afternoon at 4:00? Can you remember the last time you were faced with a minor home repair problem, and the different options you considered? And the answer is: "No."

How about a third aspect. Can any of you see that the partnership could be seen as an aspect of the two princes' royal collusion? I have mentioned the royal collusion before, but it couldn't fit in with what I was just talking about, right? If there is always some sort of internal conflict going on, that couldn't be a sign of a collusion, right? If you say "right", you and your partnership have a real short memory. Can anybody see that in each individual, without their knowledge of course, the partnership could be a reflection of a royal collusion between two princes?

You lay there at night and it seems so reasonable to be planning what is going to happen tomorrow. But it is the partnership doing it. You'll go to the board meeting to give your presentation and they'll love it. But maybe they won't like it. Maybe you'll bumble it. Ooh, what if there's a big wreck on the freeway and you're late? What if you don't get there at all? You could lose the deal, or even lose your job...

It's all very reasonable to the partnership, but you can look at it another way if you see it correctly. If you could deal with life in a single stroke -- if you had a blade the likes of which would make Excalibur look dull -- you would simply decide what to do and you would do it. You would do it on the basis of your own best interest. And as a rule, what you intended to do, you could do. You would get there on time.

The internal debate is the partnership at work. Ordinary people, and Life itself, would not operate without it. If you ask, "How could it possibly be a collusion?", to you I say, how could it be otherwise? Where did the partnership come from? You are back in the arms of everyday religion if you believe that the "other" part of you -- the part which has no apparent inclination to drop its bad habits -- is in some way foreign to you or comes from outside this universe. You might as well be saying "the devil made me do it."

I suggest to you that there is a collusion going on. Forget about conspiracy theories. Those are for people who can't See. The reality behind ordinary conspiracy theories is, I suggest, a royal collusion. But remember, it's the two guys in charge. How can you call that conspiratorial? The two adjoining kingdoms take up everything. (I heard someone in the Partnership Corner moan again. Somebody rattling their worry beads. Or, sir, was that your brains you were rattling? I know I heard a noise.)

Another question. Could any of you see the possibility that the partnership is a way to cut up the Infinite Comment? That is, if the Infinite Comment were not going to be the absolute endless bologna, the partnership would need to be a big deli slicer. Or there you would be. You'd be in ordinary consciousness, and the bologna would be going by, and you would keep waiting to have a bite. Discuss it. Dress it up. Move it. Argue over it. Dye it. Chop it up. And there you stand at age 15, 20, 35, 40, as the bologna goes by and there is nowhere to get your hands on it. (Of course, to carry this a bit further, in the real binary world you would not notice any of this because without a partnership you would never be hungry.)

The infinite bologna has to be cut up. You have to be able to deal with things if you are part of the ordinary. And all of us are part of the ordinary. You have to drive and clean your clothes. To that degree you have to cut up the Infinite Comment and you have to deal with everyone else cutting it up. You have to cut it up at the right time, when other people cut it up, and you have to hear how they cut it up. "Yes or no, pass the biscuits, I don't care, how are your folks, hello and goodbye." You do all of that because you must wear clothes in public. But beyond that, who would take it seriously?

You have to see that the partnership is the way of cutting up the Infinite Comment into agreeable, digestible, usable pieces. And can you see that Man, if Man is the other part of Life's own partnership, is Life's way to cut up its own Infinite Comment into usable pieces? If any of you get a glimpse of that, then you'll understand all of history. Ordinary people say, "Why does humanity continue to run this race of folly? Why cannot humanity learn from its mistakes?" And there is the answer -- bologna. Instead of blaming all the many fits and starts which Life may seem to take on the folly of humanity, you could consider that part of humanity's purpose is to cut up the Infinite Comment in usable pieces. Then, what seems to be the inexplicable behaviors of individuals and masses of people becomes explicable. How could it have been otherwise? Life cut off a slice, then decided it didn't want it. Life made itself a sandwich and never came back to eat it. It should be understandable. You have done it all your life.

New subject. Since we're talking about history, does anyone recall, from your study of the late middle ages, the term "wergild"? (I didn't make this one up by the way.) At that time it was a semi-legal habit, which was the beginning of law, and it was the price placed on someone's life. It was based on, and proved, a person's social position and worth. If man A killed man B, then under certain conditions, rather than being tried and killed himself, he simply had to pay the wergild to the victim's estate or family. Of course if man B was simply a serf, much less a surfer, his life might only be worth two or three pence. We would assume a duke would be worth perhaps thousands of shillings. So it was a way of referring to a man's social position and worth, and in the more expensive cases was a deterrent to murder. Now why in the world would I bring this up, other than our mutual innate love of arcane history? (Well, I forgot. I just always wanted to say the word "wergild.")

I would bet that if that sort of thing happened in the external world (as some of you smart-alecks have already surmised) there must be some way it could be used by me to point to something internal. What happens when apparently you have really undergone certain changes? When, after a certain point, you have no doubt that you are not molecularly exactly the same person internally? When you find that you now have apparently some control over certain emotional responses or habits? Of course it is relative, because you're only aware of it after it happens, but you now have certain powers over something in you. But what price was paid to kill that? What was the wergild on what seemed to be some weakness you had?

You start off and you feel as though there are weaknesses you should overcome, if not eradicate. If you could just get over being jealous or hostile you'd surely be a better person. Then you realize, after the fact, that the weakness no longer seems to be a problem. The truth is, you cannot say you overcame the weakness at 4:00 p.m. on November 26. It's after the fact when you realize it. You no longer have the desire to do it; it's as though it just went away. So, relatively speaking, it seems that you have developed some strength. But also relatively speaking, it seems that something has been killed. Was there a wergild involved? "Life couldn't be arranged that way. That's unfair. You mean there was a price for my change?"

That's when you can tell you've made not just one step in This, you've made two steps. Some people take many years to make one step. The second step is, you realize there was a price. You didn't have any choice; you paid it. You first realize that the biceps on your right arm has expanded. Then, if you continue long enough, you happen to look in the mirror in a strange way and your left biceps resembles a straw. This is all an exaggeration, right? "This could not be; that's not fair." I guess from one viewpoint I shouldn't bring up such matters, because then some of you trinary smart-alecks could get the notion that if there is some validity to all this, perhaps it should be taken into account before you take any further action. Except that's not possible. But at least we killed a few minutes.

Someone recently asked me the following: "When you say the world is not going downhill, but uphill, isn't this based on a binary map?"

Without a doubt. Unless I am taking you into those convoluted areas wherein one's ordinary head begins to hurt, you should not forget that there is a binary basis and limitation to all verbiage. (And unless, again, you can tell me what you're going to say next, in which case we'd be beyond the limitations of the binary world.)

Along those lines, you will recall I have sometimes said, "Based upon the two possibilities of involution or evolution, there is no involution." Or, "Based upon the two possibilities of heredity or environment, there is no environment." Those are not absolute statements of fact, as I keep telling you, because they only take under consideration two possibilities. Nonetheless, given only those choices in 3-D Life, there is no environment. But that is not the reality of it; that is not the final statement. But also, it's better than anything else you've ever had, if you could just remember that.

Someone else asked, "Could it be that the difference between long term and short term memory has to do with the degree of involvement of the Blue Circuit?"

I have recently rhetorically asked you about the possibility that long term memory equals understanding, which equals the need to know. Let's up the stakes, since someone has asked about it. Let's be more specific about the Blue Circuit, and rather than call it a "thing", consider its interests. The only things you are passionate about are those in which you have an interest, either positive or negative. Could you see the possibility that the need to know equals interest?

Connected with that, how about the questions you ask me about how to move faster in This? Let me speak for all the real good smart-alecks -- the fictitious reasonably insane smart-alecks -- by pointing out, if this is indeed apparently a closed system, how can you increase your interest? It sounds good when I tell you that you have to increase your need to know; to make yourself need more. And people write it down and take it seriously. They ask me how they can work harder. (Assuming one can "work harder" at This. But let's don't go into that.) You can certainly increase your hunger at the Red Circuit level. Just exercise more and you'll have to take in more food. But could you make yourself hungrier on the Blue level? Increase your interest hunger? Yeah, but you may have to kill somebody. And then you have to take into consideration the wergild. Nah, worry about that later. Just shoot him. It's what you're going to do anyway if you do anything. We'll worry about paying it off later, right? Right, right, right.

Let me respond to two more questions asked recently. First, "Would one's age have anything to do with the developmental process or stage which one finds oneself in, in This?"

Does age have a direct influence on activity in This? Hate to tell you, but yeah, it do. Your sex has something to do with it; your height, your weight... I'm not trying to evade the question, because age has a direct effect. No doubt. I also can say that everyone comes into This at an awkward age. They do. When you came across me some of you were 20, 30, 40 or whatever. But in every case you were at an awkward age. It was not the best time in the world. (Other than the fact that it was the only time in the world.) Things will apparently get better with age, even here. I can't promise you'll have the same degree of horizontal success that Jack Daniels does by aging in barrels, but to some degree you'll get a little more mellow. (You probably won't turn that kind of amber color, unless you get some new form of hepatitis.)

And secondly, "Are perfection and obsolescence equivalent?"

That's a good one. Let's say that "perfection" means "totally acceptable", right? Then, if that is true, perfection is always too late. Obsolete. Always. No exception, no way out. And that is why just enough is never enough for the Few. That is why no matter who you shoot, no matter who you kill, it's never enough. "I felt sure if I could just overcome my temper, great understanding would be mine. Never mind all that wergild stuff, I'll worry about that when I get there." And sure enough, one day you turn around and your temper is no longer a problem. But just enough is never enough for the Few.

Someone in the Partnership Corner just held up their watch, and they said that time had run out. Of course, knowing the kind of people in the Partnership Corner, I don't for a minute believe that's...