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SelfDefinition.Org

At Home with the Inner Self

Jim Burns

James J. Burns, III

(1931-2016)

Virtually no one wants to leave home in a real sense and ever has. There's no one who reaches the point totally of saying: "All right. I'm me. I've got my capabilities and abilities, and I'm going to go out and take a crack at it alone." There is an ego conflict in this never wanting to leave home in a deeper sense. A twenty-five or thirty year old can't face the reality that he doesn't want to leave home, but it can never be overcome until it is acknowledged. The ego conflict becomes unbearable. You don't find this mentioned in Jung, Freud, or anywhere. It is the trauma of not wanting to leave home on a subliminal level, at whatever age, and that is what it is all about. If you achieved maturity in a properly supportive environment, you'd want to leave home so badly and sow your own oats, that you couldn't wait to get out.

In puberty the chemistry changes to the extent where you have the on-going new ability to realize that a question exists. You had questions before puberty but did not think a thing about them. The need to know oneself is the thing that frames how success can come to a person in the different age brackets of life. When you're eighteen you are locked into one set of questions, when twenty-six it is another set, when thirty-five another, and forty, fifty, and sixty orther sets. It's a matter of chemistry and like it or not, you have to pay the fiddler.

When you're in your forties or there about, you figure you're going to change the world. Most guys get a new wife, in their mind if nothing else. They get another job, a fresh start. They tell themselves "that if they only knew then what they know now!" This is all generated by chemistry and everybody gets into it. When fifty comes, a different stage starts. You internalize the whole thing and make apologies for every mistake you ever made, even though you may have resolved it at the time. If it wasn't for this process at fifty, we'd never have a readable book. The fifties stage is actually a review for oneself.

After forty or forty-five if you are close enough to a person, they are able to let their hair down a bit and let you know where they are at, and are able to respond to personal questions. You'll find most are into improving their occupation and maintaining their place in the world. That is where their time is spent. After this age, they go through the mid-life crisis and it is a different story.

When a person goes mad, in one way, he looses his imaging process. He no longer has his mind's eye. You don't know what this is until you loose it. A good psychiatrist would say that you burned out and went on automatic. When a normal person gets excessively tired, the imaging ability disappears, to let you know what it is like. This will happen to anybody. You go on automatic. You no longer participate in your own thoughts. Your thoughts are going on but you don't experience them mentally. It is a type of split in consciousness and hell on earth.

Some wives and mothers develop a split that manifests in every word coming out of their mouth breaking down to "Look what you've done to me!" They are usually hypochondriacs. They will never admit it, but think just the opposite of what they say, which is true schizophrenia. They have two mind sets going simultaneously, one conscious, the other unconscious. True schizophrenia has nothing to do with duality in personality. This split in people's consciousness is the commonest reality and is really what schizophrenia is. Psychiatrists and psychologists act like it isn't there and give another, different, definition to schizophrenia.

The problem of current psychology as you meet with in institutions, is that they only deal with certain areas of disfunction such as memory and recall. That's all they are interested in. They aren't interested in describing the underlying process. They have abandoned it. They don't describe general mind sets behind problems. They just say "This is a disfunction." Today's definition of insanity is "Do you pay the bills?" period.

Everytime an analyst can't get anywhere with someone, he does the same thing most people do, he decides it's all your fault. Whenever an analyst labels someone a goldbrick, it just means they don't want to or can't get to the root of the problem and don't want to put up with the person. No matter how they describe it, what in essence they say is that a person is not getting better because he is some sort of goldbricker or malingerer. I think what the case really is, is that they just couldn't cope with them. The analyst doesn't know what to do. What it comes down to is: We can't account for why this guy got this attitude; We don't know what to do with this attitude; and We have beaten our heads against this attitude and gotten nowhere. Where every psychiatrist shuts a person off is that he wants to be important to them, yet he won't allow the person to be important to him. It's one-sided, unnatural, and won't work.

A psychiatrist's sanity is threatened every day but they still keep at it. You cannot imagine what it is like to be in a sea of dispair like a mental hospital. You never see a smile. You never hear a laugh. You never hear two intelligible, sensible words. A psychiatrist is a person with enough intelligence to get through medical school, yet without exception they have no friends. They have no contacts. The only people they see are people who can't find their way to the bathroom. You can't constantly take that type of environment. People live by having peer groups, by being understood and valued. Each person that comes to see him basically wants to destroy everything in sight.

Because of all the inner frustration in mental hospitals, the psychiatrists are so overloaded with all the projections of the patients on them that they live in fear. If I were to frame it in Freudian terms, it would be the Oedipal Complex. They do everything in their power to form a chemical lobotomy on the patients, which prevents the patients from a genuine experience of themselves, in the hope that some dissolution of this frustrated energy will occur to allow them to walk safely on the grounds.

As long as a person is on drugs, he cannot do introspection at all. Psychotherapy with a person on drugs does absolutely no good, absolutely none. Drugs separate the inner and outer selves. The only drug that doesn't have this effect is lithium.

Psychiatrists have no idea how drugs work. When they say they have some idea of how it works on the brain, they're only talking about the output from the patient that is taking the drug. They're not talking about the actual chemistry and mechanics of the brain. If you have a chemical that is able to affect the brain, you are getting close to something the brain is able to do by itself by design. If it was not, you wouldn't be able to have the effect.

This dimension is truly being run, in my view, from a stable position of superior knowledge that we can't generally have insight into. We are generally and mostly not here in this dimension, but we are familiar with it and we accept it as being here. My honest thought is that the real programmer is on the other side. The DNA is left here only as a vehicle. I have to think that actually we never get here fully. If you are to consider that our body may have decended from an ape, to be here in perfect spirit you would have to have a perfected form to contain it. So I honestly feel we don't completely get here. Some of us gets here, more or less at various times, but we truly don't reside here because the job isn't done.

Before psychiatrists came along, people went to ministers. Ministers probably had the same success rate as psychiatrists but for much less money. I have minister friends who endlessly bemoan this fact. Something that really throws a wrench into it all for me is that every psychiatrist I've known and gotten to the point of talking about it, has said that they wouldn't have become a psychiatrist if they knew what they were getting into. When I ask them why, they say "I can't do anything else!" Several have said this to me.

In my twenties, I began questioning what was worth doing if I could do it. I learned that certain things drew me out. I was drawn to mechanical things, I was drawn to music. I was drawn to a few pieces of poetry. After awhile I began to understand these movements in others, where I could see similar movements. Then, I burned out and moved into the dark world. It was an entirely different world and I've lived in it, more or less, ever since. In the past few years things have changed somewhat and I've had an opportunity to compare the two.

Most people in mental hospitals are not burned out as I was. Their conscious mind still functions. Some are in an endless conversation with what I don't know. They are always talking to themselves. Occasionally the scan of their comprehension will include you when you're there, but only peripherally, and only to a minimum. Their delusion is totally irrational and usually relates to nothing that has any sense to it at all. There's about ten percent of the population in mental hospitals I've seen that are roughly in that state. It takes great knowledge, wide reading and practical experience to get any response out of them at all about anything. They don't want to relate to people at all. You have to be able to second guess at what is going on in their mind. You have to be an authority figure to them to be able to get any response at all. If you seem an ordianary person like themselves, they won't pay any attention to you. The ordinary inmate of a mental institution has complete disdain for everybody on earth with good reason.

When a person gets mentally sick, it has nothing to do with anything that would commonly come to the mind of a healthy person who is trying to understand. A healthy person trying to understand doesn't have a chance because the sick mind generates a reality that the healthy mind has no access to, has no experience of, has no notion of. It's a filthy state.

When you are mentally healthy your mind is on what you are doing and what is in front of you. When you are sick, no matter what you are doing, you aren't thinking about it. You are not conscious of the state you are in. You're in a state and can't get out of it. Usually you don't know you are getting sick. Your inner mind knows but you don't. After years of sickness, you realize that the world is hostile to you, but you don't care. You realize you don't have any interest in anything, but you don't care.

Until recently I was pistol whipped. What I mean by this is that there was nothing left in me with which to complain about what had happened to me. I used to scream and rave about what my situation was, but it was all hollow. It was like screaming about being in chains, with no capacity to get rid of the chains. I don't know how to describe it except I used to call it "screaming against the restraint." I was broken, there wasn't a whimper left in me and all the hooting was an empty barrel rolling down the hill. It was just noise, there wasn't anything in it for me. I could not stop doing it, but I didn't get anything out of it. Because of something that happened, this all changed in an instant. It didn't take five seconds.

There is a great diversity in mind experience in people, and you cannot walk two roads at once. Everybody comes to their state of knowing by the experiences that they have had. While they are largely similar there are also vast differences. So you have to know someone for a long time in order to explain their behavior in terms that are meaningful to you, if only to yourself and not to them. When he does such and such, I perceive it as such and such. On this side you'll never have the opportunity to take it any further. You can't get inside the other person and know whether it is a decent match. The odds are that it might not be, because you did not grow up in the same moment to moment experience that they did.

A particular reaction to our present society is cults. In my view cultists are a type of person who has become utterly disgusted with the ordinary of life. They give up entirely on the ordinary mainstream of life and find someone who can produce serenity in their mind. They've suffered so much upset that they throw over the ordinary ways of everything they've known in life.

What they are seeking is an auto-hypnotic state. They don't know a thing about seeking, but they have seen the people in cults in what I'd call a "stuperous" state. They sense and inutit what that state is and they want it. It is a weird thing. The cause of it is in someone's previous homelife. Pain made them go into a cult. Boredom doesn't have anything to do with it. It's pain to the point of panic from disillusionment. They never had a happy experience and it is better to leave them alone than to put them back in that same situation.

The cultist has to be impressionable. A street smart person doesn't end up in a cult. They still have to be looking for "big daddy" without thinking of it as big daddy. They have a knot in their stomach and can't stand the view of life their family has generated and fostered on them. That view makes life look like hell-fire and brimstone, which it is when they are in that state. Somebody comes along then and says, "All you have to do is shave your head, wear a robe, stand on the corner and say Um-a-Um-a-Um-a-Um-abba and I'll take care of you forever." The thing that amazes me is that there are any kids that aren't in a cult.

You wouldn't believe what conversation with a cultist is like – circles of logic every ten seconds. That's the only way that state can be maintained. They have to keep repeating the "mantra" and the mantra is one day long. They've got enough gibberish stuffed into themselves to keep themselves away from themselves for one twenty-four hour period, and they go at it one day at a time. Repetition is the root of the capability to be able to maintain the state. A fanatic cannot hear you and what you have to say if they tried. The circle of logic they've worked out and dwell in keeps them from the pain in their consciousness. It is auto-hypnotic and they are programmed to think certain thoughts that evade all emotion. They are very carefully worked out programs of thought. There's still a fire underneath, so they have to keep at it.

Hubbard and Scientology are dangerous. Hubbard discovered it is possible to, what I call "get on a plateau." It's a method of getting away from the problem and escaping into something else. Scientology is about nothing but controlling the electrical potential reaction from your hands on the "E-meter." When there is no reaction to things, you are supposed to be "clear." What you are is completely disconnected from things, hypnotized. It's dangerous. If you want to see a zombie, see a "clear" Scientologist. They've completely separated their comprehension from their driving process. Intellect has to be connected with feeling through comprehension or you create a monster.

Two thousand years ago, people did not understand hypnotism, but they used it. They did not have sharp, clear concepts about hardly anything. They were just beginning to learn tools, crafts, trades. The only people with sharp, clear mind about anything were the carpenters, the potters, the stone masons, the builders. They're the only people who had to be able to reproduce things exactly. The cammon horde was doing nothing but following sheep around and tilling the earth and didn't have to have sharp concepts. You bring into this someone who has a native capacity for thinking, which I consider to be genetic, like Christ, who in my view was basically a hypnotist, and they could produce a big effect.

Somebody in those times could be taken and put into a trance and they'd never know there was a trance. I put people into a trance by talking, but I tell them about it. I put them into a trance in the area of reality where resolution takes place. There are a million frames of mind available. I'm referring to the one in which resolution takes place. It is hypnotic, but it works.

Anybody at that time could come into a mob of people and start talking "reality" and the reaction would be like the first time someone heard a symphony. They either hated it or loved it. Generally, they hated it because it was so new and foreign. I'm referring to someone who comes along with a particular brand of mumbo jumbo. What happens, I claim, is that all human beings from birth have a definite need of a spiritual experience, but a spiritual experience is relative. Anyone who can come in front of them and say "I am a messiah" turns them on and gives them a feeding in a part of their psyche that they have been languishing with since they were born. They come away illuminated and they don't even know what happened. They could never repeat the experience themselves. That's how I see the type of thing that went on. It was feeding a hunger.

If you've had time to analyze communication, you notice that you may hear one thing but come away with a different impression. Commmication is a total thing. The least dependable and accurate part of it is the spoken word. You have to be there and accept how little you really know about the person before you. It takes time. In total communication, you are very slow on words and very long on the feelings people generate in you. If you can develop the ability to be aware of what is in someone else's mind, it will enhance the ability to be aware of what is in your own mind.

After the bridge between the inner and outer self has been destroyed, so that consciously you do not experience the inner being much if at all, then the experience of love must go through the back door. Most of the love in the world today that we experience is indirect. It is mostly because that love is so strong that it'll burn the inner circuits, if the bridge between the inner and outer you is not strong enough. If the bridge is absent, washed out, you cannot experience the thing from below into the consciousness.

The result is that the most return of the expression of love comes to the surface after a long period of time. I have friends that I've known all my life who have a great deal of feeling for me. I say feeling and not love because it cannot generate into the remembered feeling of the teenage years when love was a very real and tangible thing and most often unanswered to. The result is that most love is now simply the ability to accept someone's need to be as nutty as you are.

People want to love more than they want to be loved. The more you pay attention to a person, the more you are siphoning off love. The worse frustration on this earth is not not being loved, but not being allowed to love. People won't let you near then. Everyone is trying so desparately to keep their own boat afloat, that when someone else injects their presence, they reject it because they need the time and presence of themselves so badly. You have to be sneaky. Considering the spans of time that we know of, if you can imagine someone as short of a time as a thousand years ago, which is no time at all, there wasn't time for someone to even begin to consider inner and outer selves, because of the difficulty of just surviving. We've definitely come a long way. When you think in terms of thousands of years, have a belly-ache now, and have to get up and go to work anyways, and can't answer to the inner pain... the result is that the mind shuts off. Then you get into what I call "automatic" with a vague sense of the inner self that is the most common condition of the vast number of people today.

For various reasons we have built cities, but we do not have the vaguest sense of the psychological problems that are involved in them. We build our houses so closely together that we cannot escape the expressive envelope of every house on the street. You become accustomed to it.

If you walk by a house, a person, or a bus goes by, no matter how internally involved you are in your own thoughts, you are constantly presented with the question "Why is that not right?" When you walk by a house and the porch is in disarray, the grass isn't cut and the like, your innate sensitivity for beauty and order is violated. Consider the state of the cities and consider that every aspect of turmoil, of frustration, is expressed nonverbally in the state of consciousness of the mass of the people. They do not know what they are doing or why, yet your sensitivity is constantly there and you are constantly required to answer to it.

You may start a day feeling pretty well and things are going good, but in the course of the day run into a few people who subtly upset you, and you wish you hadn't had the experience you had with them. It might have been mild negative experiences, strong ones, or anything in between. Our goal here is to be at a state of familiarity with self so consistently, that the instant you meet someone and something doesn't go right, or something does go right, that you know why that response is there, what it's all about, and what it means to you.

You can run into a bus driver that will upset the heck out of you. What do you do when this happens all the time, that there are a lot of such people in the world? What do you do when you've had so much bad experience with people that your don't any longer ever want to see what is out there? You are so sick of looking at these people that you could just go to some fantasy land and live there forever. Basically, that's all that mental illness is, bad experience. All graduations of it come from having to deal with people who just didn't have what you needed. There's things you have to have from others, and if you can't get them you are in trouble. You end up being rejected, negative, abandoned, and any one of the series of descriptions used.

We desire to be free of hatred. One of the most energy consuming and damning things on earth is hatred. But if you don't answer to it face to face, you'll never escape it. If we ever get to the point where we have living mastered well enough to do it with internal harmony, then we will have the time in every day, with the company of one another, to come to the release of the tensions in one another. It is our deepest drive. We not only desire to release our own tensions, WE ARE ALL ONE, and are of necessity required to release the tension in those around us. I was out looking for someone to pay attention to me, and I found the way to do it was to pay attention to them. That's where the relief is.

The false self is the difference between what you want to do and what you are allowed to do. I remember when all I had to do to get rid of my friends was to let my real feelings show on my face, and they were like the cockroaches going for the corners. That was the first real relief I ever had after three or four years of struggle. It then dawned on me that every son of a gun that had ever gone down the road, that ever saw this thing for what it was, went straight through where I just went through.

The point people fail to realize is that if you are true to yourself, you're alone, and you will do anything to avoid the experience of being abandoned. That's the whole circle of life. Whole societies demonstrate one side of the issue. The Japanese have no tolerance of independence. They stultify all of the things that go together to make up self-determination, strength of character, strength of will, strength of energy and force, locus of self in the propulsion forward to find answers to your wants. They stultify all of them. Their society is still feudally oriented. They are successful at what they do because they operate as one mind. They have a national consciousness. They do not have private consciousnesses. It is like a beehive.

Every person who ever accomplished anything, and it is always one individual that accomplishes anything – masses of people don't make breakthroughs – would have far rather have been dead if he could have gotten away with it. It isn't worth it in any respect. It takes a crucifixion to generate an inner experience. How does this reflect on the notion that God is a loving being and all that clap-trap? I can only conclude that sane people think that way because for them life must be a pleasant experience. But what about the people for who it isn't?

People get to the point where they're so separated from themselves that they want to destroy the whole darn world, which is the thrust of everything that leads to warfare. The whole direction of the nuclear problem is the desire for self-destruction. If you can step away from it all and see it for what it is, why would anyone play with something like nuclear bombs, knowing that most people are crazy? If some son of a gun gets a bad fried egg in the morning, the whole thing might go up. You wouldn't do this in a rational state, but this is the state we are in. We have a world full of people wandering around in a fog.

I wouldn't try to convince anyone, but it is my opinion that we have many lives. Something came up in my mind the other day, and I said to myself "Well, maybe she was right." I was remembering a woman at an A.R.E. meeting a long time ago who had looked at me with eyes like saucers and said, "You devil! You devil!" She claimed she saw that I had been a slave trader in a previous existence, and that's why I'm having such a hard time of it this time around. If you start believing such stuff, though, you're so far in trouble you'll never get out. Mostly it is believed by people with no practical ego.

When you start looking at yourself, you are looking at blind feelings. You have been dealing with blind feelings for years because these feelings weren't allowed in the environment you are in, and this is the problem. The point is not to go with your feelings, but to understand what is behind them. The last guy that "went with his feelings" is doing life for murder. People are like boiling kettles all the time, but become so accustomed to it that they regard it as normal. This is the "shadow side" of a person in Jungian terminology. It is what is trying to get these feelings to the surface.

I don't see Jung's "shadow side" as being something normal. I don't think there is anything intrinsically negative in the human psyche, but because we don't know has to answer to it, it gets frustrated. Only in the presence of it becoming bottled up does it become negative. I might add that that is after years of it.

The first thing that comes up upon a negative reaction of the psyche is that the person says "That can't be me!" I always knew it was me. Somedays some friend I would meet in the morning would ask, "How's it going?" I'd tell him, "I just came from the house and shaved the devil!" I would have just finished looking at a guy in the mirror, red-faced and with eyes bulging from being in a rage, and I knew it was me.

If there is one single, starting, repeating, endlessly to be learned about function in my description of the reality of the mind, it is that everything you do circles around your chief hang-up. You are always talking about it in interrelationships with other people.

One of the first things you have to learn to study is how your body responds when you meet somebody. Your body is never wrong. You might want to run away. If you do like them, you want to stay. That is the key. If you meet someone and get a stomach ache, that's the bodily response to get to the root of. Sometimes you repress it and get the reaction the next day.

When you have someone who has been affected by something all their life, but has never been able to get enough distance between themselves and the negative experience to identify what it did to their mind-set and outlook, then the whole situation manifests in a bodily response. Also, everything you don't come to terms with, is still there, and occupyinging a portion of your conscious energy in circles. In the bodily response, our technique here is to meet the bodily response to a thought, feeling, situation, or trauma. Bring it to the surface as clearly as possible. Hold it in consciousness as long as possible and you can stand it. Permit it to generate a new view of what's causing the problem. That's the root of the whole technique. The more effective you are in dealing with feelings, the sharper your comprehension becomes. The better you are in dealing with your inner homework, the better you are at everything.

The key to success in this whole process is that you never have the same emotion twice. What you're trying to do in this process is to get the patterns that you've identified as being repetitive and a blind end, to go further, to move on, to change and to blossom into a new insight.

Every habit pattern that you've identified as being repetitive and static is a hammer beating at your consciousness, trying to get you to move forward. The more common the habit is, the more easily it can be opened up, as contradictory as that may seem. If you want to decide where to start your effort, pick the most repetitive habit you have, that you know is off key. That's were the most energy is and where the energy is at is the key to where the problem is.

When you open it up, you won't believe the flood of insight that it will bring. Your other brain channels and synapses have all been worked way forward in consciousness, but held back at that point. If it's not something that is deep, anything that is deep that is related to it is immediately accessible. The minute you knock that wall down and move one inch forward, you're in a new universe. You have all the energies and drives immediately at hand to open and expand the world that you brought yourself into.

You can't start anywhere else other than where your real problem is. What happens is that you can't deal with anything else regardless. Every emphasis that is going on in your mind on the subliminal and subconscious level is related to it. You think you're doing something else, but you're not. If you're not on the right track, you can't get the right answer.

The unconscious is suppressed conscious capability. The ability was there if it had been answered to, to have been aware of it in the conscious mind. The unconscious is the large body of unanswered opportunities to answer questions. The need was there. The question was generated, but it wasn't answered to.

I separate between that dimension and the true subconscious, which can only generally be reached through the meditative process. The subconscious is the generator, in my experience. I had to answer to the unconscious to the point where it would give me five minutes off, and then get into the subconscious to determine what direction it wanted to go in. I would answer to that, and when that was done, I would automatically find myself in the superconscious, which was the point of my thrust in the first place.

I've been on the superconscious side of things many times in this life, and if it wasn't for that fact, if I hadn't had the perspective of timeless things, I simply couldn't have done it and maintained the ability to stay on the street. It's as simple as that. The habit pattern in my life has been to answer first to the sore stomach. If I try not to and go to work, I become completely incapacitated. I can't even think. It's simply because due to some odd circumstances I had the opportunity to go within earlier on. When your system develops the ability to get some satisfaction in the inner arena, it becomes master. You can't control it. It won't listen to the street necessities. It won't pay attention to them.

I don't wait ten seconds before I let everyone I meet know that I've been in a mental institution. I don't waste ten seconds before I clear the air, and then it is gone. The reason is because of something that has happened several times. People have said to me "I thought you were the most insightful person I ever met, until I heard you were in a mental institution." The heck with that.

Practice at free association is the only practice I know of, if you are lucky enough to be able to submit to the pressure of it, for what comes when something forces the valve open of a kundalini experience. In my experience, the kundalini starts in the chest, although at the time I didn't know the word "kundalini." It has nothing to do with sex. Your conscious mind is incapable of letting anything unknown into it. By allowing free association, you get accustomed to shock.

Fantasizing is caused by the inner urge to go beyond what your conscious mind is accustomed to or allowed, your fantasies are constantly trying to awaken you to the feeling of being motivated, if it is about being a concert pianist or whatever. Most people reach a point where they say "This is all B.S." and shut it dawn and destroy what good it does them.

The ultimate basis for sexuality, and even sexual fantasy if it were possible to get behind it – which it isn't for virtually anyone – is the drive for all comprehension. My view of sex is that a bed is for sleeping. In the mental realm, sexuality does not exist. It ceases to exist. People have been looking for an answer in sex for the last million years and no one has found one yet. On the other hand, to me celibacy means staying away from women, which seems about as wrong as you can get. Nearly all the sex urge is not genital at all if you experience the depth beyond the superficial. Real libido is beyond the false libido of sex.

When you get into the area of sex, if you have real feeling for the person, an accurate identification of their good points and their bad points, a genuine desire to be with them that is separate from the specific area of lust... In normal sex, a similar phenomenon is going on as in anger. Real sex is quite a different thing. If you can come to the point of realizing that the only freedom comes from mutual need, if that becomes the basis of all your sexual experience, for one thing you come to the point of having sex darn near never. This is because you'll only do it when it is good, when you learn what good is, and the time is right. I have fought with the concept of sublimation of energy since the first day I heard of it. I do not think it is possible. You advance the whole front. You don't take something out of here and put it over there.

It is good to learn to clarify your appetites. Don't eat until you know exactly what you want to eat. Don't eat fast. Don't eat in noisy environments. Get as much bodily participation or response out of everything you do as you can possibly get, starting with food, because it is the most common. You will begin to realize the difference of habit with real appetite. Almost nobody eats when they are hungry. They eat because it is there, or it's time. People eat to numb themselves out, to prevent consciousness. In blunting the basic experience of real appetite, you destroy the capacity to be razor sharp in identifying any of the urges that arise from your blind or shadow side. If you follow this simple practice, you'll see what value is in it.

People talk of being physically drained, but there is no such thing as being physically drained. To feel drained is something different than feeling physically tired. You have to take a very close look at the distinction. If you feel drained, it's because you are not doing what your soul wants. If you're not doing what your soul wants, you're going to feel drained from doing nothing to everything. Until you know exactly what turns your spark of interest on, until you know exactly what it is and are engaged in it, you are going to be drained at the end of every day. It doesn't matter how many authorities disagree with this, it is still a fact. If you find something that is fulfilling, don't wander away from it.

When you are doing what your soul wants to do, you'll have so much energy you won't know what to do with it. If it is in the mental realm, you have to balance it by doing something physical to bring the body chemistry back into equilibrium. You will start head tripping if you don't. You have to do something physical to bring yourself back down. Locations have something to do with this also. There's such a thing as not being able to be your true self in certain locations or places associated with negative experiences. In dreams you go to the locations or settings where you can be your true self.

Your inner side is always trying to bring these things to your attention. Paranoia is another method, and is not delusion but your inner mind trying to get you to pay attention to something, and it won't stop until you bite the bullet. Hearing voices is another example. Voices are a person's own self, and if you could demonstrate that, it would be the end of voices. I know. I've been down that road. The belief in entities comes from the same source as the desire for the perfectly fulfilled person to come and guide you.^*

* When asked about this statement and if invisible entities affect us also, JB said "Well, I don't want to scare anyone to death..." – Compiler

I'm a mechanic, and for two and a half years haven't been able to tell what is wrong with my car. For two and a half years, every dime out of pocket, every dime of psychic energy, and I'm sick. I'm trying to demonstrate something here about when something keeps hammering at a person. Someone said to me about it, "You know better. It's not the car that's got you upset, it's the symbol."

The minute I realized that, my inner side saw an opportunity to have a field day with me, and make me feel like an idiot because I couldn't solve the problem. My inner side is always looking for an opportunity to make me feel like an idiot. Why? I have never had a job. I have never had a family. I don't have a house. I don't have any ego. I constantly have to live with this side that can't stop railing at me. The reason this is important is that everyone has three, a least, people to live with. You, a child, and the less-than-ego.

Comprehension is a compulsion and the mind needs to know just as the body needs to have certain things. The only thing that releases you from inner stress are explanations that hold water. Comprehension is a functional thing that is affected by all the things around it. You are under barrage from countless inputs, and you're continually filtering them to determine the best and simplest route to your own satisfactions, including mental satisfactions. You NEED to see pretty flowers. You need to see the country. You need to see the city, which amazes me.

The average person learns constantly, but they only learn successfully if they don't notice it. If you notice it consciously, you have to go through ego death. The ego doesn't have one bit of sense, it can't give up. You can't check out no matter what the problems. Whenever you come upon something you need to know, you go through an ego death, because the ego can never admit it needs to know anything. If you learn to become clever and effective at ego death, you can really streamline the process. You still have to go through it everytime, you cannot circumvent it.

Consciousness is at the crossroads of desire and fulfillment, and is allowed to work as long as it gets the job done. If it doesn't, the whole house of cards comes down. When your consciousness doesn't get what it needs, it disintegrates. Ego is intrinsically involved in this, so the ego dies also. If you can't get what you need out of your environment, you're done, consciousness quits.

Ego is a very phony, slippery, and difficult thing to get hold of. Everything is "I did," and the truth is that you don't do anything. You are a victim of your circumstances, but at a certain point your need for identity takes over and you say, "I did, I thought. I this and I that." In my opinion we are at the crossroads of becoming. We have nothing to do with how things got here or where they are going. If you really examine the thing, you are just sitting in a theatre while this is taking place. You are where it happened and that's about all you have to do with it. The truth is that in the larger sense there is no choice. We are continually making choices based on determining all the chances in different areas. But if you had the ability to be conscious of all the factors, there would not be any choice. Choice in the small sense and choice in the large sense are very tricky areas.

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