VOICES: Part 1: Everyone hears voices; some believe they come from god; some believe they are from the dead; some believe they flow from memories stored in their subconscious; some take them to simply be the various mortal voices of dissent, agreement, expertise, and stupidity that issue normally from other men, and some call it them talking to themselves; some even them, "thinking."
People do not respond well to the statement that: "Everyone hears voices". They will deny the assertion in their case, and insist that it is only applicable to those who are mentally deranged - BUT: Everyone hears voices, and only the privileged few who outgrow the childhood habit of passively accepting the automatic resistance their mind continually presents to this-or-that idea ever see the fine details of life in clear focus.
A man is not conscious until he hears voices; before that he is guided solely by the silent messages of instinct; he is not reliable, moral, or trustworthy, and is a constant danger to his neighbors. Unless a man hears voices, he is unsettled both physically, and internally; if you look in his eyes, there is an unfathomable emptiness that is not seen in the eyes of those who are hearing voices.
There is no detectable persona behind the poet's "Windows-of-the-soul" for indeed, such a man has no soul: he has no self - for he hears no voices. The voices that everyone hears is a man's self, (his uniquely-human, strictly-personal, purely-individualistic self, as opposed to simply his physical body); these voices constitute, alpha to omega, what you think of as your, "you" - your private, personal, internal self: a bunch of voices.
And you do not even know where they came from, or what their purpose is in being inside of your head. If you are a run-of-the-mill person you, if asked, subscribe to one of the possibilities noted at the top - which is the overall reaction programmed into collective humanity, but any periodically insightful person periodically flashes on the fact that none of the explanations for man's intangible, internal life explain anything; men understand the strange world of sub atomic matter with much more clarity & certainty than they do the former, (in spite of their study in that area having a five thousand year head start).
Everyone hears voices; everyone knows that they hear voices; through various ruses, everyone denies that they hear voices, and none among the normal civilians have any real interest in the matter, (even those whose academic & intellectual area of study is the mind & brain do not have the interest therein that drives the lives of the secret few, [if they did, their study would be limited entirely to themselves]).
Only a very few children are born with a natural curiosity about the voices they hear which quickly seem to take control of their lives, and whose squabbles create a constant state of internal racket & agitation: it is: ordinary men's ordinary state, and, the mystics' - state-of-dreams. (And now for the details of the savings available to you through this week's Half Price Sale.)
Not only does everyone hear voices, they actually think of it as: "I am hearing voices" - the voices they hear say: "I am hearing voices," and - Bam-O! - the deed is done: from nothing, the voices have created an identity for themselves - YOU.
This is the full landscape in which the life-of-dreams thrives; living mentally hypnotized by the voices saying: "I hear voices." Once this illusion has taken over, your view of life, and of youself, is never again unified, or completely accurate & in focus; you then do partially, live-in-a-dream.
And the dream is that the thing that says: "I am living in a dream" is itself a dream - and you never recognize the fact. An ordinary man says/thinks: "I have thoughts" when the enlightened fact is: "Thoughts have me." There is no mysticism, truth, awakening, liberation, or enlightenment beyond that.
VOICES: Part 2: Everyone hears voices, which causes in men, a feeling of detachment; as though they are in part, a spectator of life; a step removed from the things going on around them. Everyone believes that the voices they hear speak to them specifically, uniquely, and individualistically, and they accept them as the full representation of consciousness.
This is the origin of the distinction men draw between: the world of voices IN-HERE, and the world of events - OUT-THERE. It is the basis of a condition that has poetically been referred to as: "Living in a dream while moving around with your eyes open."
It is necessary that a man hear voices for him to become conscious in the minimally technical sense; it is also a requirement for him becoming civilized. After that, the stage is set for the person to start functioning as the medium by which the voices in-here attempt to work their will on the world out-there.
No creature can conceive of affecting its circumstances unless it feels partially disconnected there from. Not hearing voices, a leopard not only cannot alter the pattern of its wardrobe, but neither can it imagine the building of a shelter in which to retreat from the rain and save its suit from shrinking.
To be civilized is to willfully alter conditions, both internally and without, and for this to occur, you must feel that you are something apart from the conditions, (both internally and without), and to experience this sensation... everyone hears voices.
Voices whose mere presence causes a person to feel partially detached from the rest of life - even isolated, (and this does not even take into account the things THAT they say which reinforce this sense of displacement). Hearing voices gives men the sense of having an individuality, even while inseparably, part OF a herd.
Believing that the voices he hears are directed to him specifically & uniquely makes this, "I'm-a-piece-of-a-larger-puzzle-yet-still-my-own-self-directed-piece" feeling possible. As long as the voices a man hears INSIDE him, can be in some conflict with what is happening OUTSIDE of him, the illusion of individuality is secure - as is also, the feeling of a separation from circumstances.
The voices tell men: "You can change that thing out-there," and in so doing, indirectly tell him: "You are something APART FROM the things out-there," which supports a mental view functionally efficient for herd needs, but disorienting, and annoying to a few head here-&-there who somehow got themselves born with an innate taste for TRUE individuality, (if such an open range actually exists.)
Hearing voices makes man able to alter his environment; hearing the voices makes man feel apart FROM his environment; feeling a disconnection between you and your environment is the living definition of being, "asleep, deluded & trapped."
Hearing voices causes men to turn inward; while their eyeballs look out, their thoughts turn in; while their corneas look at life, their minds look to the voices. To affect the physical conditions outside of them, men must look to the voices inside of them, but a few are put off by the STARING that inevitably takes over, and by the voices' incessant chatter even when there is no practical point to it.
PLUS, a few people somehow discover through non standard experiences that the view of life expressed by the voices is not the only one: a realization that is astounding, and yet, is no less than the few have always suspected. The realization is not "mystical," but, neural; the view is not "occult & other-worldly," but, in-your-face physical.
The voices are here to tell men how things COULD be; the few "wake up" to see how things ARE. Now put it all together & run with it:
The voices are NOT going to tell you how things are - NOR will they tell you how to wake up & escape their influence. You must use the ears of your mind to listen for that which is beyond the voices that everyone hears; that is what you need heed, to proceed.
If you think there are arguments, pro & con regarding the existence of free will, then no matter your education, reputation or I.Q. you haven't got a clue.
VOICES: Part 3: Everyone hears voices, and if you identify them erroneously, and listen to them seriously, you feel constantly harried, vexed & pressured.
The voices continually tell what THEY say you should be doing, as opposed to what you may instinctively be inclined to do; and they press for their picture of life to take preference over the way life IS, particularly regarding other people's behavior & ideas, (which are obviously the result of them listening to bogus voices).
The pressure comes from you feeling that you must make constant decisions in these matters: whether to go ahead and do something you wanted to do, or yield to the voices' prohibition thereof; whether to mentally accept some situation as it is, or obey the voices' urgings to criticize it, and whether or not to heed their prescription which says that all ideas you hear are either legitimate, and to be supported, or else are spurious, and to be denounced.
Everyone feels a pressure to stay alive, but it is not a negative sensation, in that fulfilling all of your survival needs is fun, (eating, fucking, sleeping); people ordinarily healthy do not feel physically harried by being alive, but all ordinary people do feel so - somewhere else.
They feel under pressure in a manner few try to understand, (and not merely in the routinely identified ephemeral examples of being late for work, or fretting over an impending unpleasant task). No, there is a life long, less specific pressure that harries men, and it plainly comes from: Hearing the voices.
The criminally uncivilized do not adequately hear the voices, and they are extremely frightening to those who do in that they appear to live their lives doing whatever strikes their fancy at the moment with no regards for the consequences, or other people's feelings.
They are vilified - and they are objectified, turned into pop culture heroes, both fictionally & in real life. Respectable & civilized, voice-hearers envy the freedom the outlaw's ways represents, yet they do not try to emulate it.
The power of the voices is too strong in them - so they use it as mental entertainment, even whilst chafing under the pressure. It is not simply that ordinary people secretly want to be thieves & murderers, but their instincts do crave freedom from a pressure that they do not comprehend. (Note: the voices only denounce things men naturally want to do; a man with a properly de-pressured head would need nothing more said about this than that.)
You waste your time to look for external origins of your voices' particular injunctions; they did not come from you growing up catholic, jewish, atheist, republican, poor, orphaned, or anything else; the voices that you and everyone else hears come from life - and from nowhere else.
There is not the tiniest scrap of anything personal about the voices you hear, or concerning what they say - although it certainly seems otherwise - because the voices SAY that there is. It is not possible to make the voices in you realize that the life of the body in which they operate has had nothing whatever to do with what they have to say; if they could understand that - they already would, and would indeed, be telling you all of this instead of you having to hear it here.
From a mortal perspective, the voices have no source, any more than does the wind: the voices are, just there, (just like the wind), and the pressure they exert is, just there, (again like the wind): no one knows where they come from, and no one knows where any particular one goes - when it goes.
The overall purpose of the voices, (exempting as always, their radical contributions to your physical survival), is to create a pressure in you; to harry you; to vex you; to harass you - to civilize you; to turn you into an actor - a poseur - a pretender. Do they do a job, or what?!
The voices accomplish their mission also through making you always feel at least partially at odds with your environment. This is natural with all creatures at the physical, instinctive level, and is patently necessary for survival, but man is irritated by the environment in a way experienced by him alone.
To be alive is to be capable of being irritated by physical conditions, (withdrawing from fire, brambles, dampness), but via the voices, men are irritated by non physical conditions; they are vexed by words - by ideas, expressed by other men who are merely following the directions of the voices they hear.
The voices in you denounce half or more of everything you hear & read which are products of the voices in other people; the voices pressure you to divide all that you hear (which catches their attention), into the true & acceptable, and the fallacious & condemnable, when they are neither - and are both (and this is not even to mention the fact that what you hear has no more substance, nor significance than do the voices themselves.)
The voices in each person pressures them to constantly choose, (actually it is a matter of letting the voices choose for you), between ideas that are valid and those that are not, and to make known your displeasure with the latter: doing so is part of any decent cow's responsibility.
(The voices people hear also direct them to criticize other people's behavior, but this is so easily seen for the transparent envy it be, that no detailed note thereof need be made.)
The initial pressure is to allow the voices in you to have full rein over your mental domain, and total control of your tongue & pen to chastise life, and other people, as they deem proper.
The ultimate manifestation and personal experience of the pressure is in the simple and obvious fact that the voices you hear do not have the same interests as you, at least theirs do not include your primary one. Now you may not be able to say exactly what that primary one is - but, you know down to your marrow in your bones that the voices' agenda does not INCLUDE it.
The few are born with a secondarily-neural wiring desire that is in fact, anathema to the voices; as though the rest of the world is born with, voices-matter, and the few come equipped with, voices-anti-matter.
The voices men hear, run their lives - the lives they live in their head. This is the standard arrangement; it is good enough for popes, presidents, bums, C.E.O.s, your parents, your peers, Nobel prize winners, the question is: Is it good enough for you?
If not: start saying to your self with every breath: "Everybody hears voices. Everybody hears voices. Everybody hears voices - so what else is new?!" A man even half way awake can tolerate no one else in his head but him... if that!
VOICES: Part 4: You not only hear voices in the plural: (comments you & others made in the past; those you plan to make in the future; dialogue from movies, from books, etc). but one, particular-voice which is of prime significance to the few: it is the voice that you think is YOU listening TO the voices.
This arrangement in the brain is the foundation of consciousness; it is also what misdirects those investigating the matter.
There is no consciousness without a subject to BE conscious - namely, a man, you. There is no consciousness without someone to SAY that they are conscious. The supreme test for consciousness, (after an accident, say), is to ask the victim: "Can you hear me? Are you conscious?" and any sort of even semi affirmative reply is unhesitatingly taken as proof thereof.
But who or what is it in you that says, Yes to the question: "Are you conscious?" Ordinary men will say: "It is ME who says it," but what proof do we have of that? Who can back it up? Who else will vouch for YOUR being conscious?
That one particular-voice in ordinary men would say in their head: "I MUST be conscious, or else I would not even understand the question asked of me about my being conscious, much less be able to truthfully respond thereto. Plus - I act, speak, and apparently think about like everyone else does - and they are conscious - so I must be also."
Sounds impressive, but still: What proof - even evidence - do you have to support this claim? There is no question that SOMETHING is going on in your brain that is behind your assertion of being conscious, but is what it SAYS it is, an accurate telling of the matter?
For most people the question is irrelevant & uninteresting, (which is to say): if such a question is presented, that one particular voice that the brain produces in men which constitutes the basis of consciousness - will say that it is.
Consider: why does your brain - the supreme example of intelligence in the entire universe - show no direct interest in itself? Do not get misled again so soon by the fact that it displays much indirect interest; the brain has led man to construct a multitude of off-balance, entertaining mental distractions & vaporous fire walls to keep itself FROM a direct looking at itself.
A scientific take on the situation would be that it is not possible for the brain to study itself, (any more than could a microscope study itself), therefore it must be done circuitously, (the reasoning/explanation of why Psychology went from a study-of-the-mind, to that of behavior), and while such a view is valid, and the brain actually "studying itself directly," an impossibility, it is only MOSTLY impossible: impossible for 59 out of every 60 seconds.
And what is this momentary, eye-blink window of opportunity? It would be your continual struggle to constantly shift around inside and see over the shoulders of the voice that says on your behalf: "Yes, I am conscious."
If to this adventure you-are-born, you can avail yourself of that one second exemption from being misled by relentlessly trying to cut your eyes to the side SO QUICKLY that you actually get a glimpse of the voice that says: "I am conscious" as it immediately leaves the scene, once you are looking at it.
One of the oldest, most used & revered tools to aid in a man's awakening-from-the-dream is, "self-remembering; mindfulness; the awareness-of-awareness" - none of which are possible, (save again, for that one second potential exception).
Pursuit of such a method can indeed be fascinating, and feel useful, but few of its practitioners ever come to recognize the point of it all. The point of trying to "self remember" is to finally realize that you have no self TO remember beside the self that is trying to DO the remembering. You cannot be "eternally mindful" - you only have one mind, and you and the mind are the same thing.
Men who commonly show interest in this matter are wont to describe their goal thus: "I want to raise my level of consciousness" - what grievous mischief hides in the open in this statement? The subject, (I), and the object, (consciousness), are the same thing.
This is not what the laws of physics allow, (not to mention, those of grammar). The idea is far beyond being merely: "Technically impossible; an affront to all reason, and an untenable insult to the entire history of man's intellectual progress". NO! it is much worse than that - it is ridiculous; silly on its face, and yet - what face is there to FACE this face?
What is there that will confront this simple & obvious fact? Who, or - what is there in your brain that is quick enough; alert enough, and anxious enough to take on the near impossible task of realizing that the voice that says: "You are conscious; you have a mind; you have thoughts" is the sole same thing AS, "your" consciousness, mind, and thoughts.
VOICES: Part 5: "EITHER SHUT THAT THING OFF, OR OPEN IT UP AND SEE WHAT'S MAKING IT PLAY!" The voices are man's ultimate caregiver, and prison guard. It is the voices, (of consciousness), that enable men to recognize and deal with problems to which just their instincts would be blind, and non compos mentis.
The voices are your supreme caretaker & overseer, but they also act as a strict restraining device, and as long as they keep you mentally looking at anything but them, you will be normal, never satisfied, and will never realize what is really going on.
The voices are everyone's friend, (as always, for comparisons, we only speak here of ordinary people, not anomalies), the voices are also the friend of the few who live their inner life attempting to cut through the natural fog & din, but the voices also prove to be something besides a friend to these solitary adventurers, and it soon accomplishes little to think of it in terms of them being your enemy - for that is not so - which should be obvious, in that life is in no wise suicidal, or psychotic.
When people undertake to make any change in themselves, it is predicated on the fait accompli that their present condition in that area is not serving their best interest, and that its discernible manifestation is indeed an enemy: (alcohol, anger, depressing daydreams, a gluttonous appetite). And those few who hunger for that extraordinary goal which is not so describable, also must begin with some picture of an opposition to their desire, and once you get past the kindergarten stage of thinking it is from a supernatural curse placed on man, or the circumstances of your life, you are left with but one choice - the voices.
What clearly seems to stand in the way of any change in your consciousness is consciousness itself; it is the relentless running of the useless & redundant voices in your head which put you into a semi hypnotized state, and distract your attention to your detriment.
You have not even begun this adventure for real until you have personally & privately come to the conclusion that the only thing you have to actually struggle with in the entire universe is: the voices naturally occurring in your own head. BUT - if you never get past that necessary point-of-departure you will ultimately be no better off than when you started.
The voices of consciousness, (and specially that certain-voice among them that you think of as "you" thinking-about-this-matter, in those odd moments when you do think of this matter), are the only real help available to you, (another person's words & ideas about the matter offer illusionary assistance and simple entertainment); only the voices in you can lead you to that astounding destination, (even though from one view, it is they who keep you from it).
The reason your voices seem of so little help is because of their own nature - which is to look at life - not themselves. They do engage in a form of harmless play wherein they will ponder the contents of the thoughts for which they are a medium; examining certain conversations & images that repeatedly pass through them for hidden significance & explanations for the person's psychological discomfort. This kind of self reflection is in fact taken as a sign of superior intelligence, but it serves no purpose other than to fortify the voices.
To maintain their functional position in collective man the voices keep people looking at anything but the voices themselves; fixing men's attention on the content of what they say & picture, but never directly on the voices themselves, in the attempt to determine their source & nature.
As long as they keep you rummaging through their contents, making you believe that if you find the source of why you have angry daydreams about car salesmen, priests, or your mother, such will be highly enlightening & liberating, whereas, vis a vis the goal of the few - it accomplishes nothing; it reveals nothing, and indeed, chasing such concerns keeps your attention far from where it could profitably be.
What the voices of consciousness say in your head is of absolutely no significance to your awakening from that detested, dream-like state in which the rest of the world peacefully lives. What you hear in your head has no relevance whatsoever to your state of individual consciousness & dissatisfaction; it is not WHAT the voices are saying - but the voices themselves.
You will never catch-on to what is going-on as long as your attention remains fixed on what the voices are saying rather than on the voices themselves, and what makes this such a tricky maneuver is that the voices have ears - and in hearing themselves speak, the sensation is created of there being two seperate entities in you: you, and the voices you think you hear - which is ridiculous, there is clearly only ONE of you, and the voices ARE you.
And right there it is - the secret is out! That is precisely why things are arranged so that most people never give any thought to thought itself: they will talk about the things they think ABOUT - but never about thinking - their voices won't let them - their voices never even mention the subject.
It is not an evil plot, or conspiracy against man, it is simply how it is - yet not so simply realized. If the voices are all you have for consciousness, and they don't want you looking at them, then who can look at them? Who else is there in your head to look at them?
...If the voices are all you have for consciousness, and they don't want you looking at them, then who can look at them? Who else is there in your head to look at them? That is THE question, of which a thorough investigation will reveal everything you and the rest of humanity has Always wanted-to-know. There is no "answer," and you will not find "the source" of the voices, but that will not keep you from waking up - only not looking will.
Dedicate yourself to looking AT the voices, (that is), attempting the near impossible: trying to force the voices to look at themselves, and, "force" is the proper word. All you have is enough energy for an eye-blink-effort - once a minute, to pull it off. But - Sweet Mavis Staples! What the culmination of all those eye-blinks eventually reveals!!! It is so simple & obvious as to be totally astounding. (How can a human ask for more fun than this?!) (jan cox - jancox.com)
