JAN’S  FRESH REAL NEWS
                          © 2001: Jan Cox
                                            *********************************************
 

September 20, 2001.
 
 
 

Thursday  --   and time, as measured by mortal minds,
moves on as usual, and in that certain location,
a father speaks to a son:

“Throughout the world are stories of resurrection;
from primitive villages to sophisticated cities,
all tribes, cultures, religions and nations have a central story of
a hero who was once dead, and then resurrected himself;
with religions, he is a spiritual hero,
with nations, a political one,
but in any enduring, cohesive group  --  the resurrected hero is there.

Why?  Surely people do not really believe that
a man who was physically dead, literally returned to life
when there is nothing in all of human experience to support such a notion;
so what is actually going on with the resurrection stories?

You might propose that they arise from men’s fear of death,
and represent his hope that it is not as final as it appears,
but there are things present in man’s everyday life,
(such as loss of wealth, or of social standing),
that frighten him more than the loss of his life,
and many other passions, (such as anger and love),
that overwhelm his fear of death, so there is something else:
                                                 what?

Every group, be they labeled spiritual, cultural, or political,
has a mythology of a founder,
a hero who endured the ills common to all men,
and under conditions of defending new ideas he proposed  --  was slain , but after a short passage of time  --  returned to life,
thus becoming living proof of the potency of his ideas,
which now define the particular group centered round his story.
But why are such tales necessary?
What do they provide that each man does not already possess,
in that the stories themselves flow from mortal mouths?

Resurrection is a story played out endlessly by all of life,
for all that lives --  by eating that which does no longer  --
continues the life of the still --
resurrects it within its own flesh,
but no myths are here required,
for this ceaseless cycle of life, death & resurrection
goes on automatically in the lives of all groups from grubs to man.
Your constantly dying cells need no reassuring tales of an afterlife,
nor your gross physique any regarding the departing cells’ replacement.

Life knows that life goes on,
as does the unspeaking part of life within man;
it is the vocal, conscious part of man’s brain that here stumbles,
(and that is a specious, un provable statement,
but expedient for our present purposes, and as always the case:
some statement is necessary to even operate under
verbal conditions, but still, compared to the quiet, seamless working of man’s non conscious operations,
to say that here, his consciousness, “stumbles” is not without merit).
 

The stomach asks for no reassurance that it will tomorrow be fed,
and thus live another day,
as neither does your body in toto when you lie down for sleep at night, beg to be told of its next morning resurrection to a state of wakefulness;
only one part of man is involved in the resurrection stories;
the feature that makes man man: the-monarch-of-physical-reality,
the intangible, second guards who protect the king.
The first guards, those instinctively programmed to instantly respond  --   --  without thinking  --   to threats to the king,
have no need-for, nor any interest-in reassuring stories of resurrection; as with any real samurai, they do their duty unhesitatingly;
unflinchingly do they defend their liege, and indeed,
death in doing so is not feared, but taken as proof of their fidelity.
No, my son, it is only the second guards,
those responsible for noting and remembering threatening experiences outside the programmed responses of the first guards,
and planning for unexpected ones to come,
it is they alone who crave and consume resurrection stories.
                                                   But why?
 

Your muscles are not afraid of death;
their molecules have an inherent awareness of life’s endless cycles,
since they, (and atoms in the non viable realm) are at its base,
and most of the brain’s cells must have the same innate, silent awareness that within life, there can be no  --  non life;
but the minority area of the brain that produces man’s
thought-based consciousness acts for all the world as though
it is totally ignorant of what the rest of his body so obviously knows:
                                        life is alive,
and within life there is nothing that does not live and persist,
be it atoms, molecules  --  even ideas.
 

The cells of your liver need not fear for their future,
for even after your body as a whole is laid in that eventual hole,
they are ‘aware’ --  or at least they are not NOT aware that
they will survive and soon be part of another mobile form,
but the cells that constitute the areas of the brain responsible for
you having thoughts, memories and plans all but  --  cry out
in fear of extinction;
they plead for reassurance;
                                  hence, the resurrection stories.
 
 

But curious comes this affair,
for where do the cells of consciousness have to turn for such
comforting tales but to themselves:
none other in this universe can compose such poetic tonics;
there is nothing in all of reality to tell them that
everything will be all right  --   except themselves,
which, on the face of it, would seem certainly, ‘not-to-do’ –
for if you are already burdened with uncertainly,
how can you then reassure yourself?
How can a thing be frightened and while in such a state,
via its own statements to itself, vanquish the fear?
It all seems most strange --  even doubtful --  and yet it works,
and it works by man’s consciousness creating a mythical history
outside of itself which it then looks to as tangible evidence of its
intangible hopes  ---  that of resurrection.
The neural cells that produce thought within a man will cause him to consciously say that he is sure he will not perish when he dies BECAUSE,
(and here he will figuratively, verbally point to some extrinsic,
physically visible source: a holy book,
the utterances of his group’s founding hero, and say:)
‘Because so & so assured us that it is so’ –
the assurance of resurrection that they --  the man,
the molecules in his brain responsible for him saying it embrace,
must be true, for did not he who uttered, himself return from the dead.

‘The-proof-is-the-proof’ --  so say the cells that speak,
and since they alone do so --  who is to counter?
Why should anyone counter?
Of what benefit would it be to an ordinary man & his mind-molecules
to dissuade them from this belief?   None.
 

Even though the first unit of silent, instinctively responding guards are ultimately responsible for the king’s physical survival,
in times of extreme stress the second, vocal unit may try to verbally rally the first, exercising that sensation of freedom,
and the ability to mentally plan and foresee, unique to them,
in simple terms:
ordinary men who feel sad will ‘tell’ themselves to:  ‘Cheer up’ --
a most complex affair (on its face):
the situation is like in a grandfather clock that is winding down,
and causing the sound of the hands’ movements to lag,
having the sluggish tick tocks exhort the pendulum to: ‘Pick up the pace! Tighten up your act!  Pull yourself together!
Look on the brighter, faster side,’ and such.
Do you recognize the  inherent, inescapable tomglotzery?

…And yet, with ordinary men, it is not total tomglotzery,
for rather than quickly sinking in the swamp of
self-perpetuating dreams of self-referential-impossibilities,
men’s minds latch to the external myths that their predecessors
have already put in place,
and instead of trying to fool themselves into a state of reassurance by telling themselves that things are not as they know they are,
(which is plainly ridiculous),
they put such words in the mouth of their founding hero,
(or a deity, which is an exaggeration of the hero.)
Thus do men appear to accept reassurance about matters which
bother them mentally, from sources that are not themselves,
but which their own minds previously created,
and now feign to have forgotten doing.
 

A man actively trying to understand what is going on --
and who has made some headway –
has no where to turn for reassurance;
he recognizes the legitimacy of what has above been limned;
he has a personal familiarity with the desperation with which
his mind & thoughts live, (compared to the rest of his being),
and he begins to suspect the reason for their near frantic disquiet.
Ordinary men, in their mind, dread physical death,
but in their mind, their mind is disturbed even more by the prospect of their mental demise, that is:
men’s minds are deeply bothered by trying to think about
their own non existence;
not the death of the body, (which is clearly beyond its ability to conceive),
but the extinction -- the non existence of
the very thing that is attempting to think about its non existence.
 

Thoughts, my boy, the thoughts that life feeds to everyone through the species wide, collective neural network,
it is the thoughts who tremble & near disintegrate
when they try to handle the idea of their own non existence.
It is man’s thoughts alone which need and keep alive,
the resurrection stories, and I will tell you, (best as words allow),
why, (or at least lay a hint).
That which doubts its own existence,
most fears its extinction.
Strange, you might say: curious, you might conclude,
but glance around you briefly at others,
then look more deeply within you  --   at your own consciousness,
and it is easy to see that what I describe, tracks things as they are.
 

But note what I earlier said:
a person privately struggling to come to an understanding of life that is not normally served on mankind’s routine menu
has no place to seek reassurance about anything, save himself,
and, ‘himself’ (as he finds it to natively be) is itself riddled-with, partially-composed-of, uncertainties, questions & doubts,
which would seem to preclude any success in this direction,
for from any ‘rational perspective’
(as defined by the collective thought of mankind itself),
it is impossible for one who does-not-know
to somehow teach himself that which he does not know --  but  --   AH! -
there lurks a loose thread in this otherwise tight weave;
in some people, for some reason, there are free floating,
unaligned neurons in the brain which somehow get around this
impossible situation of a blind man teaching himself to see,
for did not this possibility indeed exist --
how could I be describing it to you,
and you realizing what I am talking about.

Hormones and other guards silently protect your earthly kingdom,my lad, while neurons cry out about potential threats;
it all works nicely with the majority,but the few feel out of step, as though something is not quite right,
and the silent answer to the question behind this feeling,
I have today mentioned  --  somewhere amidst the above words.
 

 Freeing your ability to actually --  Think --
from the natural dependence your consciousness wants to have
on collective man’s automatic thinking,
                                              is the true resurrection;
                      a coming to life of that which was previously inert.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Regarding a certain matter, the king asked a courtier:
“What do you think about it?” and he replied:
“The same as you, Your Majesty” to which the king responded:
“But you do not know what I think about it”
“It does not matter Sire: whatever you think  --  I think also.”
and the jester, experienced well in the ways of the court, mused:
“Being as there is no alternative  --  why not say what he did?!
Why not pretend that you do engage in willful and individual  mental action
in spite of the apparent evidence?
If you accidentally trip, why not say: ‘I meant to do that’?!

                                              It costs no more  --  it indeed:
                                                            costs no more.”
 
 
 
 

               The magnificent resurrection of efficiency.
 
 

The death of useless concerns  --   the birth of fresh air.
 
 

                                                          J