Notes on Jan Cox Talk 3191 by Cfish
/note: Talks above 3000 or so are generally not public simply because the audio is so hard to listen to - you might can get it if you ask, but not to share openly,
Jan Cox Talk 3191 August 25, 2004
Copyright Jan Cox, Jan’s Legacy 2018
Notes by Cfish May 2018
Suggested Title: After the Fact Awareness
Begin: Thinking back to early childhood (ex. six or seven years of age) can you get that feeling of being alive and maybe the carefree feeling of running out the door during the summer just to play? And it’s not necessarily about the details.
The point is there was a time when you did not have the critical/fault finding voice of what is normally called a conscious conscience. Remember one kingdom and two princes, with the first prince, authoritarian and the second prince represents this conscious conscience.
05: 00 Tonight something that you may find even more useful is the description that there may as well be two different consciousnesses and throughout history there has never been a plural for conscious. (ex. Consciousnesses)
The two consciousnesses can appear at the same time. The authoritarian voice/first prince when asked by the host “can I pour you another drink?” usually prevails over the weaker and infrequent voice that may find fault with drinking too much.
10:00 Simply, if you look, the dominant/authoritarian voice is almost always without self criticism. Why did consciousness come up with the idea you have a conscience and that it’s discreet? Why does man have a name for conscience? (ex. a mass murderer has no conscience)
Does conscience hold civilization together? The last few nights we have been looking at the perspective of the brain having two consciousnesses. A authoritarian voice that has no interest in “waking up” and a weaker voice that has the interest.
15:00 Maybe someone noticed the infrequent/weaker voice ten thousand years ago. Ordinary people have a second prince/weaker voice that is almost entirely critical of the first prince/dominant voice. But something the second prince may be able to use is that there is something “not right” with that view.
We were once carefree and had no second voice. The ordinary may blame their parents, religion, or society for instilling guilt. It seems to fit but that is not it. It’s as though another voice started in your head and took away the carefree days.
20:00 The weaker/infrequent voice did not screw up your outer life. It can still bitch but if you are ordinary you will still eat too much. The point: The voice mainly screws up your inner life. Mainly, people like us. The ordinary suffer over it, but not enough to do anything about it.
25:00 Folks like us suffer so much we try to do something about it. Ordinary people, in essence, have the same two voices and live with it. It’s like the old story about Southern Baptists, it doesn’t stop the sinning - it just stops you from enjoying it.
30:00 After a lifetime of observation, there is no adequate description of Awakening/Enlightenment. We have nothing to compare the descriptions of the two states to. So you can’t say if your description or my description is adequate.
I say we have two states. One is the weak/second prince and wants to awaken and the other one/dominant whose power is irrepressible and when it wants to take over, the weaker prince, the more awake consciousness, never gets a knock on the door.
35:00 The weaker prince never gets an advance warning that the conventional/mechanical consciousness is taking over. All there is is “after the fact awareness.” When the dominant/mechanical consciousness wants to take over it never asks for permission.
And maybe in five minutes or five hours the weaker consciousness/ the younger prince in a sense, takes over the kingdom again, momentarily, after the fact. (ex. I was asleep/distracted) The second prince being asleep for the last several hours is a highly useful description. But there is something “not right” about the description. And there is no way to know how substantial the description really is.
40:00 The working model of having two consciousnesses and that there is no such word as consciousnesses - well, doesn’t that make your head tingle? And is that someone’s idea of a sick joke? Life, The Universe,(?) but the universe has no sense of humor.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand what it is I’ve been doing. But there is no way to know. If the description of having two consciousnesses is useful, maybe it pushes you up a notch. Maybe thinking you’ve seen something about what’s going on in your brain.
END 49:53