Jan Cox Talk 0316 ( Paradigm 7 )

Pentagonal Consciousness

February 15, 1988
AKS/News Items = none
Summary = See Below
Excursion / Task = See Below
Diagrams = See Below
Transcript = See Below
Keywords = new people , intro , introduction , Circuits, time zones , act or think of acting

Summary

Jan Cox Talk #316 * Feb 15, 1988 * – 1:03
Notes by TK

Talk appropriate for new people.

Ordinary passion for pursuits in the City (hobbies such as books, stamps etc.) when they are made into a commercial enterprise, inevitably take on a business attitude —i.e., lose the original exciting flavor. The subject becomes just ‘stuff’, merchandise. This can be used by the Real Revolutionist; he can take himself as a business; not take himself seriously, personally. When ‘you’ becomes just business, just merchandise, the ‘fiery’ lower circuit blood fuels the ‘ice water’ of the upper circuit blood –the ‘mind’.

The circuits must be balanced; heated areas of blood must be used to heat colder areas (Yellow Circuit). Time zone analogy for simultaneously existing contrary realities applied to the differing realities of Red Circuit vs. Yellow Circuit (non-verbal vs. verbal). People live in one or the other of these realities (Red Circuit or Yellow Circuit) in an alternating fashion and there is an unrecognized associated conflict/irritation always existing between them which fuels human progress.

Hamlet’s question is reduced to: “to act or think of acting, that is the question”, with guilt associated with erroneous choices (‘should have done…’). Recruits have the full potential to become more conscious, more balanced in the circuits –coupled to lateral expansion into 4-d consciousness: the continuing awareness of the seamless backdrop of time as a non-stop panorama. Beyond this is “pentagonal” consciousness, 5-d, fifth-level consciousness, which contains 4-d consciousness; this is the above-the-line seamless awareness–non-episodic consciousness.

Remember, you can’t believe what you don’t like. This is true on another level as well: If Life doesn’t like you, it won’t believe in your existence, won’t take notice of you. Connection to Real Revolutionist dislike for his ordinary self.

1:03 Epilogue: At this point tape is stopped to demo Numbers and give ‘favors’ (rules requirements of Group conduct.

Excursion

First excursion for new people: energy reversal with someone who you can‘t get along with. You interrupt habitual dance with another by acting as them.

Transcript

PENTAGONAL CONSCIOUSNESS: A SEAMLESS VIEW OF THE CYCLORAMA

There is a particular phenomenon in Life I want to point toward, and some of you may be familiar with it. Let us take, for our example, a book enthusiast. He dreams for years about opening his own bookstore, all he wants is to save just enough money or get a small business loan to open a little store — a place where he could pay the rent and make just enough money to live, and be surrounded by his beloved books. That’s his dream. Let’s further assume that somehow our book aficionado actually does open his little shop, and it survives. What some of you have seen in Life, but given little or no thought to, is that if our friend continues in the book business, his love for books will eventually disappear.

You know all the jokes about the cobbler’s kids not having shoes. Regardless of the profession, it won’t be practised at home. In any crowd, the guy driving the biggest clunker of a car is a mechanic. It’s a fact. If you love music and finally open your dreamed-of record store, when you close it five years later you would not have added one album to your collection. And here is why: If you start a business doing something you are passionately interested in, in a short period of time under all ordinary conditions, your passion becomes “stuff”. Those things for which you had a passion become goods, merchandise. Your passion becomes a business attitude, and no one can avoid this no matter how grand their initial passions.

Life encourages certain professions to adopt a business attitude. People often say that, “Although a doctor should give his patients the best medical care, he should not get personally involved. After all, the person may die. If the doctor were ‘personally involved’, he’d be a wreck.” What is being said is that the professional should give the best service, by his own and his community’s standards, and then forget it.

What I want to point out to you is there is an unspecified, unspoken attitude required to make any real change; and the attitude can be said to be, “Hey, it’s all business.” All of you start out with something you dearly love — yourself. You dream of changing yourself, altering your behavior, knowing more, feeling differently. Back at City level you are certain that to effect such change you must be personally involved. Once again, need I point out to what an extreme degree This Thing deviates from what you imagine. You need to look upon and treat “you” as merchandise.

Some people believe that to change requires passion, that you’ve got to get very upset along the way. Others say that you need to almost be slain by the idea of loving thy neighbor. There is no doubt that there must be a fire in the belly, but for you to ever Do This, you must have human emotions under your control. You cannot be hostile, or a critic of Life; you cannot suffer, even if apparently for others. The fire of negative emotions leads nowhere. You can’t do that which is self-consuming. Rather, you must learn to use the fire of the lower circuits to fuel the ice blood in your head. I use the word “ice” because there is no such thing as Yellow Circuit or intellectual passions. In the City they talk of the passions of the mind, or of somebody passionately wanting to discover something, but the idea of an intellectual passion is a misnomer. That is not where passion comes from. The temperature of the blood varies in different areas of the circuitry, and doing This requires balancing the circuits in a way not ordinarily required by Life. A clear cut attitude is required: you look at yourself and see that all your dreams, complaints, beliefs, and opinions are all “stuff”, just merchandise. Your old self, your city consciousness, is just “goods.” You can’t take what you are doing to yourself through This Activity personally: “It’s simply business, my good man.”

I want to verbalize the difference between the Yellow Circuit’s thoughts of reality and the lower circuit’s nonverbal reality. I’ll use a very anachronistic example: We’re back in time 1,000 years, before people had a full understanding about the nature of the solar system. In our example, let us say that the people inexplicably had telephones. Picture further, that it’s noon in Bali and a man is phoning someone in North Carolina where the time is six p.m. The man in Bali describes what a glorious, hot, sunny day it is, and the guy in North Carolina thinks, “This guy’s nuts. It’s getting dark outside.” There is no way that the two of them could agree on the time of day; they have opposing views and neither is wrong. They didn’t understand the curvature of the earth, and that the earth rotates on an axis etc. — they had limited information. If you had a more complex view, if you could see in a more complex manner, you would see that things apparently in opposition exist simultaneously.

You believe one thing and someone else believes another. Neither of you is right, and neither of you is wrong. If you get a little more subtle and use this internally, you know that one minute you can “love” someone and five minutes later, not. One minute life seems tolerable, the next it sucks. Ordinary people think that some of their thoughts are improper and need to be overcome — but for that to be true, some of what you believe would be valid, and some would not be valid. But this is not a matter of degree; it is all true, it all exists coevally.

Back to where this started: Humanity deals with two kinds of reality, and it is never seen. One is the Yellow Circuit’s reality, that which people talk about, and the other is the nonverbalized reality of the lower circuitry. Stubbing your toe in the dark is a nonverbal reality. After, the Yellow Circuit chimes in with, “Dammit. Who left a brick in the middle of the floor? Didn’t I tell her not to leave things all over the floor!”

One of the great bases of conflict, never recognized in Life, is when someone is dealing almost exclusively, at a given time, with one of these realities as if it were the only one. It is true that there are people who live at the extreme ends of the spectrum almost all the time: at one end is the computer fanatic tied to a terminal 24 hours a day, and at the other is the illiterate guy who digs ditches and can do nothing else. These people live almost exclusively in their end of the spectrum, but what I’m talking about is the conflict that arises between people when an ordinary person, not one of these two extremes, finds himself dealing in just one of those realities as if it were the only one.

Another aspect of how the verbal and nonverbal realities produce problems and questions in Life is that they are in a state of unrecognized conflict. They are acting simultaneously internally, yet no one can see it. Hence, people are dismayed when they read headlines that say, “Protesting Pacifists Attack Police,” or, “Minister at Boy’s Camp Admits Pederasty.” It is the conflict between the two realities, and it can’t be seen. They rub one another, just as they are supposed to, stimulating Life’s growth. If they didn’t rub one another, man would not have been compelled to invent electricity, lights, heat, anything. If they didn’t rub each other, then no one would have ever thought, in the midst of a freezing night, surrounded by smelly humans, and five or six dogs, “Let’s invent something that’ll heat us up so we only have to sleep with three dogs and no smelly humans.” Progress occurs because of this division, because man can imagine a reality different from that which he is confronted with.

The rubbing is serving a necessary purpose. But you must see that in you, personally, this running parallel dynamic exists, splitting up two realities — and they do not necessarily coincide. Of course, that’s not a problem in the city; it must be that way or else no one would do anything. If there isn’t a running conflict between what people imagine to be reality and what they are confronted with, no one would get out of bed in the morning, let alone, have reason to go to work. Another way to look at it is: without the conflict between acting and thinking of acting, you could no longer be conscious. If the conflict between thoughts of reality and the nonverbal reality suddenly ceased, you’d disappear into a black hole, uttering your final words: “Finally, everything’s settled down.”

To do This, you must become aware of the fact that that is the way you are structured; everyone is wired up to operate on the basis of this unrecognized conflict. You also must see that there are proper times to act, and proper times to think of acting — but the two are running simultaneously at all times. Sometimes they are close, and other times they are so far removed from one another that you feel, “Things just aren’t right. I’ve got all these problems…”

Much of what people call “guilt” or “self-destructive tendencies” is thinking about acting when you should have acted, or acting when you should have thought about it, when there was no need to act. Just pick any personal example, one that has been hovering around your brain like a pigeon around a sidewalk artist. Pick something in your life that really disturbs you, something you did to your mother that you feel is just terrible. Whatever it was that you did, if you had just thought about it instead, would you feel badly about it? Or, if you had wanted to do something and never did it — if you had done it, wouldn’t that have cured the feeling of, “I wish it had been otherwise.”

Back to my map of the activated and unactivated parts of the nervous system. For the sake of discussion we’ll say that half the area is activated, and the other half unactivated. The unused portion is everything you reject, deny, criticize, or have no interest in. What you think and feel is all based on the contrast to that which you reject. A lateral expansion, an activation of the unused lateral parts of your nervous system, would give a whole new definition to “blowing your mind.” Anyone interested in This must attempt to be as active, and as activated as possible, in all the circuits. A lateral expansion would be astounding to you (and now I’m referring only to an expansion of those unactivated areas at Line level, not the areas above the Line). It would cure your boredom, and at your level, it would be the solution to all problems. In particular, I’m talking about a lateral expansion in the upper circuits, expanding what you think and feel. If you belong here, then you’re already close enough to being as Red-Circuited healthy as you can be — get there, and forget it.

I could refer to what This is about as the possibility of pentagonal consciousness, fifth order consciousness. It would be a consciousness of the three dimensions, plus having a continual, nonstop, seamless awareness of time. If ordinary consciousness could see itself, it would say, “I have no continuing awareness that what was true to me five minutes ago no longer is. I have said that you’ll never catch me doing such and such…but I know there’s every possibility in the world that I’ll do it.” You don’t have to be that magnanimous with yourself — you know, once seen from a particular vantage point, that if you say you’ll never do it, then you will. With a continuing awareness of time, you know that you’ve always done things you said you never would. But ordinary consciousness cannot see that; everything it perceives is splintered. Literature, the movies, television — all of it is a reflection of the very way consciousness works. It’s segmented. But from a 4-D view, you could see Life as a nonstop, seamless panorama, and all your Line level questions would be gone. A continual awareness of time answers everything — all the Line level questions you have about why man is the way he is, why things happen as they do, etc. The hints float around the City: “Time cures everything.” I can make it better: Time kills everything. Time answers everything, if you can See it.

Have any of you seen or heard of a cyclorama? It’s a 360 degree painting, taking up an entire room. Everywhere you look, everywhere, is painted. There are no frames, and it’s not cut up. If time became like a cyclorama to you, and you could look at it without ever blinking and without ever staring — you would understand all your Line level questions and the answers. But ordinary consciousness is splintered: you blink, you stare, you look off. The cycloramic picture is cut and framed. Someone says, “I heard you just lost your job.” You drop your head and stare, “Yeah.” The ever-running movie is cut into frames and you’re looking at them one at a time, forgetting the seamless continuum. A continual nonstop awareness of time as the background to everything — what you take to be good, or bad, or up or down — would drastically alter your consciousness beyond description. And you would certainly no longer be a critic of Life, because you’d understand how Life operates in the city. That would satisfy most of you. But, that’s not the end of it. What This is really about is developing a fifth level consciousness — in activating the area above the Line. This fifth order consciousness is a full fourth-order awareness plus an awareness of its container. Everyone is familiar with the Yin/Yang symbol dividing things into two principals: male and female, cold and warm, up and down. What no one sees is that which holds both parts together. That is E, the wind that is never seen, the continual seamless background upon which everything operates. It is the pool from which all change is derived.

Time does not stop, it does not blink, it does not cut Life up into episodes, either agreeable or disagreeable. Human consciousness is episodic. If it were not, how could you think? It’s like TV — the movie’s running and it breaks for a commercial. That’s TV blinking. It comes back and picks up the story — as with all things in Life, it’s a reflection of human consciousness. But what if you didn’t have to blink? What if there were no editing? If I could suddenly make an ordinary man 4-D conscious, he might describe it as, “Everything is running together.” It would be like reality is melting, everything is running into everything else. There would be no beginnings and endings. Ordinary consciousness could be described as that which keeps things from bumping into each other. It divides things into manageable episodes. This sounds so simplistic, you might think you understand it completely. But do you realize that you could never be mad at anyone if you had a continual awareness of time? You can only be angry in ordinary, episodic consciousness: “I came home and there wasn’t anything for dinner. I’m working two jobs and he hasn’t worked in six months. So here’s the episode, I have only 15 minutes before I have to leave for my second job, and there’s no food, not even a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So, here’s the episode: I said….” You’re in the midst of a cycloramic painting and you just happen to turn one place (he didn’t make you a peanut butter sandwich) and then you blink and turn another way (So I said…) then you stare, etc.

It is physically possible to have a continuing awareness of time; it’s just unnatural. What happened to you wasn’t episodes. It was Life. Life happened to you, and Life does not stop. It doesn’t come along and kill your father, or break your leg, and go, “Phew,” and take a rest. But that is how consciousness perceives Life — as a whole bunch of fits and starts. Time does not blink or stare; it doesn’t do something to you and then take a break. Life is open 24 hours a day.

Let me quickly repeat something I mentioned recently (push your envelope of validity as far as you can and try and hear this): If you don’t like something, you can’t believe it. Even if it was “proven to be true,” if you don’t like it, you won’t believe it; you can’t believe it.