2577 - Notes on Jan Cox Talk 2577 by Cfish Pressing On
/Jan Cox Talk 2577 - August 13, 2000
Copyright Jan Cox, Jan’s Legacy 2016
Notes by Cfish July 2016
Suggested Title: Pressing On (Thinking Beyond Thought)
Begin: Reads: “If you don’t think beyond your own thoughts you are not using the mind to its full potential.” A factual statement and if ordinary thought did not immediately reject it, it would not be unexpected to hear “how do you do that?”
05:00 How can you know more than you know? How can you be more conscious than you are at any moment - when you are thinking about being more conscious? (You can’t) This is the sticky problem thoughts don’t like to deal with.
Unless you get past the point that your thinking is limited to your thoughts, if you can’t find a way to think beyond thoughts you already have, then all of this, (awakening/enlightenment of the mind, etc) will only be the ephemeral occurrences.
10:00 Believing the mind has the potential “to awaken” may be based on the experience of “waking up,” But few people come to grips with the question “what are you going to use other than thought to think beyond thought?”
15:00 Based on experience, instead of driving yourself crazy to bring on the “extraordinary state of waking up” at will, which I could never do, and have doubts anyone else can do, you relentlessly investigate the experience of waking up.
20:00 You understand the state of awakening happens in the brain and not in the textbooks, and religious books where the descriptions are garbled. But to investigate it you have to think beyond your thoughts, beyond anyone’s thoughts.
If you adopted the model that man is asleep and can awaken, and assuming you have had the experience, then I ask you “what is the experience and what happened?
The point: People do not pursue the nature of what happened.
I would not try to convince anyone of pressing on, but I found continued persistence in ignoring all descriptions (even my own) of waking up/being enlightened, that those descriptions tell me nothing.
25:00 When the abstract starts to make sense to a child’s nascent mind, in a sense their mind has awakened. It is simply, a process six billion people go through where their nascent mind awakens.
This activity, (being asleep and trying to awake, still an apt description) if you press on, you will see a further awakening of the mind. But their is no further awakening with a mind entangled with thought.
Thought is based on duality and it is all in the mind and nowhere else in the body. The duality of the mind is unknown to instinct and to the rest of the creatures on the planet. Consider: There was no word for think until we could think.
30:00 If you can’t think beyond your own thoughts, you cannot think beyond dualities. (black and white, etc.) A person wired to be attracted to hearing a condemnation about dualistic thinking must somehow get free of it.
The condemnations are all local and do not get to the heart of what is going on. That duality/continual preference is the nature of the mind. How do you know what to say without knowing what not to say? (ex. boss asking if you like the job)
35:00 Dualities are just there. Thoughts at their worst are not completely dumb. There is no such thing as stupid life. (discounting several obvious professions) Thoughts, even the dumb ones will not say to the body “Boy, you sure are a burden.”
So, how can thoughts more fully awaken the mind? There is nothing to use to work on the mind except the mind. Mystics, using the mind to awaken the mind, don’t realize the mootness, the impossibility of their attempts to lift themselves by their bootstraps.
40:00 The safest course of action is to take everything you hear as foolishness. But how do you do that? I can’t tell you that anymore than I can tell you how to think beyond thought. You can’t plan it. If you plan to do it, you are already serious.
Just press on with thinking beyond thought and thinking beyond thought will happen. Pressing on in a certain way, you can get beyond what you think. (physical laws still apply) Thinking beyond thought is something that resembles waking up.
45:00 I continue to stumble around with descriptions of all this but a better description may be, there is no plan. The closest thing to a plan is that anything you think should be ignored. No belief in grand masters will aid you.
50:00 So how do you get the experience of “waking up” back when it fades? How can thoughts contribute when thoughts come from the mind? In a sense the second question is the answer. It is a self consuming question.
55:00 How can you think your way out of thought? I considered it from all angles. Physiologically, looking inside your own head, but you can’t look because the thing you are trying to look at is the thing you are looking with.
60:00 How can you be more conscious at any moment? However you think about it, when you catch yourself being asleep, distracted, etc. what no one sees is them thinking
“you can’t do any better than you can at that moment.”
So answer the question, “ How can I be more conscious than I am right now while thinking about being more conscious?”.
And when you see the answer to that - well, at least send me a picture of you falling down……
End 63:20
