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

September 24, 2001.
 
 
 
 

The father looked up from his dictionary and said to the son:
“Gawd! What a great word I just found: ‘complicated:
difficult to analyze, explain or understand’ --  what a great word!”
Now having the boy’s full attention,
he repeated, apparently much savoring the word,
and commenced to expound.

                                           “Complicated!

The more complicated is your life, the more civilized you are;
the more complicated is your life, the more normal you are;
the more complicated is your life, the more you must try to believe that your life has a purpose;
and the more complicated it becomes, the easier it is to maintain ephemeral sensations of it having such:
(to pay off your debts; get the latest cell phone, computer game,
kitchen gadget, automobile;
save enough for breast/hair im/trans plants).
History is full of people denouncing stuff & entanglements,
swearing that possessions & personal relationships
serve merely to needlessly complicate a man’s life,
but as is always the case, and hardly ever realized,
an idea put on trial by a prosecutor will always be found guilty,
but will never give up its useful information,
which is my way of saying anew that
if you go after an idea with a pre set, critical attitude,
you will never discover anything new,
and most assuredly, never solve this case.

Once a man has decided not to grow his own food,
and mind his own business
he has no choice but to make his life increasingly complicated
to remain sane.
We would not be sitting here in this structure, with these books,
and the indoor lighting necessary to read them
had not men before us made their lives more complicated.
Anything a man has that he cannot eat, fuck, or otherwise crawl into,
exists entirely due to humans making their lives more complicated.
But, more complicated than, 'What?'  --  you may ask:
‘More complicated than they need to be?’ –
but then you must uncritically ask:
‘Do men really need their lives to be as they are now?’ –
and if you understand anything by now, you understand that there is no meaningful response to this man-made question
other than the unprejudiced recognition that life is as it is –
until it decides to be otherwise,
and such changes are effected most noticeably in the life of man
through the lives of men.
Put simply: ask any ordinary man if he prefers his sophisticated,
urbane life --  with all its vexations,
over that of a penniless jungle dweller
living a simpler, but scarcely sustenance existence,
and you know his answer beforehand.

But we have not even yet entered the feature of this word, ‘complicated’
that is of any interest to us, huh, boy?!

As a man becomes less captive of the relentless pressure of merely staying alive (finding or producing food each & every day),
an improved situation that is the work of his consciousness,
his consciousness then has free time on its hands --
and what to do with it?  Day dream; imagine having & doing things that are not simply necessary for survival.
Without putting it into so many words, consciousness then directs: ‘Complicate your life to keep me from driving myself crazy from boredom’ --   and men comply; men are supposed to comply,
and they do it by deciding that they want certain things
that they do not need,
and to varying degrees, apply themselves to acquiring such.
They pursue this both in the realm of material possessions,
and human relationships.
                And all the while: consciousness keeps a’churnin’ and a'sanin'.
 

Still (if you can believe such a thing) a few people’s consciousness,
(even after it has set up this arrangement)
does not find it satisfactory;
what it does to keep itself sane & distracted
(the very same things that everyone else does)
has the opposite affect on them:
it makes their consciousness even crazier.

They may have the same gadgets and relationships as others,
but it is not these that are at fault or lacking;
                   it is their consciousness being rolled by them.
 
 

The necessities of life complicate no one’s life;
it is only the after-market add-ons,
and they do not of themselves, give any trouble,
it is your consciousness’ constant thinking about these things
that have no intrinsic value to your actual existence that causes
the few their anomalous distress.

When the purpose of your daily life is not to simply stay alive,
then consciousness looks for another,
and men make their lives more complicated to the very unrecognized end of creating the sensation of a new, another purpose:
‘I no longer must worry about saving myself from starvation,
so I will save the world. That will be the purpose of my life’.
Even though they do not directly think & speak of the matter,
it is present in everything that men do which is not essential to survival;
their consciousness pushes them into endless activities
& daydreams of activities that offer a series of ephemeral sensations of their lives having some purpose,
and they must take the activities & dreams to be serious;
to routine human consciousness:
if you do not have something in your life that is serious,
then your life has no meaning --  no purpose,
you might as well be an illiterate,  brutish savage,
living alone in a jungle, far removed from decent people.
Such is what strikes ordinary men’s consciousness as the
only alternatives:
either constantly try to better yourself by the acquisition of
additional wealth & possessions,
and through expanded human relationships,
or be a lonely, uncaring, bum,
but where they see it being a matter of either:  a banquet or hunger,
a man with a certain special non-physical hunger eventually sizes up the scene as being driven by the ostensible invitation you received
TO come dine.
The consciousness you were born with came with a
built in invitation, to be later in life delivered to your attention
which urges you  to complicate your life so as to provide a sensation
that your life is challenging, meaningful, and by god,
has a serious purpose.

My lad, it can do less than merely, ‘serve-no-end’ to say to an ordinary person that human life has no purpose that anyone knows of
other than those proposed by consciousness,
which does not know either, but which needs to try to know:
needs to pretend to know, so that it can maintain its stability
during the long periods when it is not now needed by most men
to day-by-day, physically survive.
If fact, my boy, if you will note: I have never even said to you
whether human life does or does not have any meaning, or purpose,         and I do know,
but note that I have not said, nor will I ever;
for this you must realize for yourself,
and when you do, you will understand why I never did.

Take easy, precise note that your life can be complicated in
two distinct precincts:  in the physical environment
which you make for yourself with non essential stuff,
and entanglements with other human beings which serve no purpose other than as another source of complaints,
and in the inner environment of your consciousness,
which life births you with, but much of which is not only irrelevant to direct survival, but not even of any individual interest to you:
the daydreams inherent to, consciousness-in-its-spare-time
serve only the needs of consciousness, and may or may not furnish you any personal pleasure (of course many humans are of a temperament [okay, all humans] to enjoy being pissed & critical;
it helps consciousness stay at, fighting-ready,
but for a few it is nothing but annoying, noisy shadow boxing,
going on night & day in a hall closet).
 

To ever achieve the grand realization
you have to finally begin to strip, in your attention,
the meaningful inside your consciousness --  which is simple –
from that which is not,
which is fatally distracting to what you want to see --
and always complicated,
and I assume that you have by now ascertained that when I say, ‘complicated’ I mean TOO complicated,
for the great realization is simple,
and anything in your thinking about it that is complicated at all,
is too complicated; needlessly complicated,
and will keep you uselessly distracted, looking here & there,
and never seeing that which is simple and right before you.

Hoist a glass, my son: here is to  --  A complicated life --
both without & within;

without which the ordinary would not be sane,
and with which, the few are driven near bonkers.

                                               L’chayim.”

                                                       J