KEY TO SYMBOLISM:
the city: man's ordinary mind.
the plains (open plains): area of the brain outside the city.
the mayor, the warlord: the principal spokesman & manifestation of a man's ordinary mind.
the king: the non ordinary part of man's mind   --   the people: the rest.
the collective, the herd: ordinary humanity mentally (non pejorative)
the rebel, the certain man: a person struggling for freedom from the collective city mind (aka: mystic).
the father & son: man's on going internal conversation: the brain's cortex both speaking and hearing itself speak,
                              with the father representing a mind's rebel.
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The father patted the tv set and said to the son:
“Remember my boy --  if the program sucks, at least be sure the reception is good”
and the lad assumed the old man was using tv as a metaphor for something else,
(and that he had purposefully omitted mentioning the alternative
of simply not watching it).
 

Regarding Roamers & Stay-At-Homers:
to the certain man, it is as though the old part of his mind is always out of town;
self stabilized consciousness is always there when you need it
(it is alleged that on one planet, as punishment for some damn thing or the other,
all the inhabitants were made aware of where their thoughts come from).
 

Another History Of The Progress Of Man:
he first swapped rocks for words;
then switched words for metaphors,
and is now engaged in trying to trade in metaphors for scientific specificity;
the parallel of the few is in their struggle to circle back to where they started,
but somehow end up ahead of where they were originally,
by never being content to let one thing represent another, including
their mental sense of their self  --  for their self.
 

It takes a blind man and his deaf brother,
standing by a highway with traffic frozen in gridlock
to mistake its reality for the sights and sounds of the Daytona 500,
and one man asked life’s representative for local conditions:
“Can we at least agree on one thing!” to which it replied:
“Certainly --  as long as it is my one thing.”
The certain man is never out-of-sorts
as long as he is mentally, out-of-doors
(never forgetting that ancient school for getting-to-the-bottom-of-things
known as: You-Should-Get-Out-More-Often).
 

The mind of the simple, not knowing what to call itself, calls itself, god;
the mind of the more sophisticated, also not knowing what to call itself,
calls itself, thought;
the mind of the realized knows not to call itself anything.
In some solar systems, planets do not exist unless & until someone gives one a name
(and all the mental debris floating about said: “We don’t get it.”)
 

There was once a group of people who kept getting a rebel drunk in the hope that while in an inebriated condition he might slip up and tell them TheSecret,
but being of ordinary consciousness  they did not take into account the fact that
in such a condition he couldn’t tell them  --
even if he used the appropriate words  --  it still wouldn’t work.
....By the by: even if this is just a concocted story,
and there never was such a group and rebel,
plenty of individuals attempt the same thing with themselves,
as if their getting stoned or drunk will produce a seer in the head
who will reveal all.
Question: to the certain man: what is the difference between a drug, a strict spiritual discipline and imagination?
Response: no one but the certain man wants to hear the answer to that one.
 
 
 

If you cannot tell  and need to ask someone else whether you are awake or not --
--  is that not your answer right there.
 
 
 

Father: “My boy, at one time,
waking up to the plain reality of what is really going on in life
was a simple, straightforward affair.”
Son: “When was that?”
Father: “Before Adam offered his first excuse and explanation.”
And a gentleman from Oslo asks:
"Does it strike anyone strange that while thoughts can drive you crazy,
you cannot go crazy unless you think? .........is it just weird to me?......
......have I been in the cold too long?”
The way it is played among the herd:
thinking is the only game that never stops, and can never be satisfactorily scored.
 
 

Those who believe they can be told TheSecret were the original Cargo Cult.
 
 

The collective mind of man is like a large balloon character in a parade  --
so large in fact that it is the parade,
and this gigantic balloon is filled  --   totally filled with  --   nothing  --   that’s right: absolutely nothing;
and yet --   the damn thing --  rises up!
lifts off the ground!  --  and by god, flies  --
soars and sails, kept aloft by nothing more than the spectators watching it.
 
 

After reading about the realization for many years one man mused:
“My mind has surely been boggled  --  but apparently not enough.”
 
 

One day the center of the universe sent out a message to all the far flung areas asking: “Are things okay out your way?”
and from those areas where things were, received no response
(sounds like something that might go on in the certain man’s mind, huh?!)
 
 

Health Watch:
Without friction: the mind won’t work,
                             the eyes won’t glaze,
                             and the head won’t spin  --  so, watch it!.....wait, that should have read: without fiction........sorry about the confusion        ---           (“What confusion!”)
 
 
 

When it comes to the collective consciousness of the city:
it is every one’s responsibility to help prop up everyone else.
 
 

Even if what everyone else is talking about strikes you as a waste of time,
if you comment to yourself about how it is so
then they have sloshed some of the slop on to you
(in the mental city, the distance from the sidewalk to the gutter is an imaginary one --  or:
in the land of corn, corn  --  nothing but corn,
there is no corn blight  --  or:
if you even visit Stupidville  --  you instantly become a resident
[this is why no one knows where the certain man lives]).
And one guy said: “Some times I get dizzier than at other times,”
and being asked: “When?” replied:
“Whenever I’m not here.”
 
 

While stopped at a service station in the middle of the desert to have a
water hose replaced, a man was told by the mechanic that out behind the building, laying on a sofa, was an honest-to-god mystic,
so he walked around back there and found, as promised,
a man stretched out and he leaned over him and said:
“Hi, my name’s Jim  --  I’m from Detroit and I really wanted to meet you;
the mechanic says you are a true mystic --
I used to read about that sort of thing and think about it a lot,
and always wondered what kind of man it would be who could actually uncover
the secret of everything?”  and the man raised up and said:
“Hi, my name’s Jim  --  I’m from Detroit and I really wanted to meet you.”
 
 

Probably the most difficult part about trying to think-your-way-into
a more expansive and elegant state of consciousness is that you can’t.
 
 

When a curse falls on a land --  it falls on all the land,
and when a blessing falls on a land the cows will say: “Where’d the curse go!?”
Men invented Geography to keep themselves from looking some where else.
 
 

A son asked the father:
“Do those who finally reach the realized state ever get bored with it?” and he replied:
      “No one ever stays there long enough for that to happen”
         (and the lad surmised that several words had been left out of his reply).
 
 

Unless a man understands the nature of thought he will believe that
man is under the control of an extra-personal force  --  which is not to say is untrue,
but he will take it to be super-natural  --  rather than the quite ordinary thing it is.
 
 

If you still care what others think  --  you still do not know how to think.
 
 

A passing slave ship sailed close enough to shore for the captain to call out to a man there: “Care to hop aboard?” to which the man replied:
“That won’t be necessary  --  I’m already in a normal state of consciousness.”