1991-1006-Augies-Apartment-Raleigh

Return to list of all Recordings     See all Categories    Spreadsheet: Recordings-Source-List

Metadata repository: https://data.direct-mind.org/

Data Template

Title	1991-1006-Augies-Apartment-Raleigh
Recorded date	October 6, 1991
Location	Augie's apartment, Raleigh
Number of tapes	2 x 90
Other recorders audible?	This was also videotaped. Portions are in the Mister Rose video. This may or may not be audio extracted from the video
Alternate versions exist?
Source	SH purchased, white cassette, hand lettered. Also have D. Weimer version
No. of MP3 files	4 x 45 min each
Total time	3 hrs
Transcription status	SH distributed June 5, 2015
Link to distribution copy	http://distribution.direct-mind.org/
Link to PDF	http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
Published in what book?
Published on which website?
Remarks
Audio quality
Identifiable voices	Augie, Mike Fitz, Georg Buehler, Doug White, Shawn, Larry somebody, Kenny, Fred (turned 40 today), Stewart, several others
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1991-1006-Augies-Apartment-Raleigh
	For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20220920201123

Notes

Date is on cassettes. SH version from purchased white cassettes, hand lettering, SH collection. 4 x 45 min. Also have DW version.

See discussion page for notes on Ralph Decker, mentioned on side 3.

This is different from Augie’s apartment 1993

R mentions that there will be a lecture tomorrow. This is 1991-1007-What-Is-Enlightenment-Raleigh [DVD-video]

Present: Augie, Mike Fitz, Georg Buehler, Doug White, Shawn, Larry somebody, Kenny, Fred (turned 40 today), Stewart. Dave Gold comes in, side 2. Art Ticknor speaks a couple times on side 4

Bookmarks/TOC – use headers in Word, create PDF & check the box “create bookmarks using headings”. Must use 1st level header only. Use PDF Editor in Linux to set default open view. Might try this with Libre Office

File 1

dw 00:00

Adventures

It went right over the bank backwards and started to slip sideways. And then the back end went over this high bank. I got out on the running board and jumped off before it took a tree out, about this big around.

Q. Was O. in the truck with you?

R. There wasn’t anybody with me.

AF. About six or eight of us went down ...

R. Had to go down and pull it out. We took the power wagon, put the hook on a tree across the road and winched it.

MF. They came down the road with the power wagon, it’s got the boom sticking up, and they took out the power lines down by the bridge.

R. Shut off the electric to all the farmers down there.

Q. What’s this?

R. Talking about the farm back in West Virginia.

We had a good one, one time. I never could afford anything but a junker. I think I paid $50 for that Oldsmobile. We were going up the 29th Street hill. DM, LL, PO, and somebody else was in the back, forget who it was now. I stopped and got a tank full of gas and then started up the hill. Evidently the hose that ran between the fuel pump and the carburetor caught fire and burnt off. And now it’s pumping and the hose is squirting flame out underneath the back of the car. I didn’t know that anything was wrong except it lost power; there wasn’t anything getting to the motor. And of course I’m going down the hill now; we went over the hump and down the other side.

A. That’s a steep hill, too.

R. Right. And some kid hollered at me; I heard him say “fire!.” So one of the boys looks out the back window of the car and they saw the fire coming out from underneath. And the gas tank’s back there. So there’s a nightclub, they just put in a new asphalt driveway and I turned off into that drive. I wasn’t going real fast, but I thought if it burns up here it will ruin this guy’s pavement, so I steered her back out onto the highway.

dw1-02:41

Well, we’re going down this steep hill now and I’m looking for a place to drive off. The telephone poles are going faster and faster. I’m trying to time it: I’ve got to turn right into the pole to miss the next one. M was a good Catholic: he believed in saying his prayers before he died, so he was looking up through the windshield. He was riding beside me. He doesn’t see the road, doesn’t say anything, he was talking to Jesus up there, or somebody in heaven. L was in the back seat with O and O was saying, “Mr Rose, Mr Rose, Mr Rose,” all the way down. L was a Jew and didn’t have any hope of immortality, so he was the bravest man in the vehicle. He didn’t say anything.

A. You told me later, “Zen is one thing, but when the chips were down, M went back to the Catholics.”

R. [laughs] So I saw a ditch and figured I’d throw it down there and drag it. That’s what happened, surprised it didn’t ignite the gas tank. I just threw a wheel into this deep ditch on the side and dragged the bottom of the car on the ridge. I was still going like heck. Then there was a little road that took off. Somebody with a bulldozer must have started to put an entry into the hillside there, and I steered off. That’s what finally stopped it. So I jumped out. All the doors fell open simultaneously and everybody was out. A tractor trailer stopped; he had a fire extinguisher and helped me squirt out the fire.

dw1-04:43

A. Then about an hour later you came back over to Benwood. We all got into somebody else’s vehicle and went over and stripped that car, took the tires.

R. I got the gas back out of the tank. [laughter] I couldn’t afford to forfeit all that gas. It was expensive in those days. I was going up to Pittsburgh to give a lecture. When I first started lecturing, nobody paid me for the gas even. I never asked for it. But it was getting to where I had two or three places I was lecturing every week and I just couldn’t afford it. Then they’d pitch in four or five bucks for gasoline. I used to carry four spare tires and four gallons of mixed antifreeze in the wintertime. He used to call them “baloney skins”.

A. He had two flats one time, within 15 minutes of one another.

R. Oh, yeah. I was coming into Pittsburgh and then that hill. I pulled over but couldn’t get clear off the highway. There was a bridge and I was running alongside a concrete railing, couldn’t get over it. So I got off as far as I could. I got the car jacked up and every time a tractor trailer would go by it would move the car off the jack like this. I was afraid to get underneath it. They were going about 70 miles an hour.

It was fun in a way. It was a lot of work. But I was doing what I wanted to do for the first time in my life, and nothing else mattered.

dw1-06:32

Q. I heard you took a road trip down to Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.

R. Yes, the Psychology of the Observer picture was taken there, the guy chiseling himself out of the rock. That’s down south of Myrtle Beach. We were just driving and we pulled off, wondered what the place was. They had some big beautiful oak trees and I thought, “Let’s see what else is in there.” There was an aviary with a bunch of birds. They had these statues; there were sculptors in the family, the Huntington’s, a lot of their art was there. It’s well worth seeing. When I go over to Myrtle Beach I always make time for Brookgreen Gardens. But this sculpture was my idea of the spiritual life of man. That’s what we’re doing. Each person spiritually is trying to chop himself out of the hard materialistic life. I thought it was very expressive.

[chit chat]

dw1-08:51

Bob Martin

[The next few paragraphs were rearranged to clarify the story line.]

Bob Martin worked as an engineer mostly, a slide rule man, and he was very deeply interested in all these movements. He belonged to the Rosicrucians and he went out and was initiated into Yogananda’s movement, kriya yoga, which means focusing. He looked into a lot of stuff. There was a guy by the name of Dingle who wrote a book called Across China On Foot. It was all phony. Bob ran into a man who lived next door to Dingle and the man said, “Yes, he lived right here. I knew him real well before he got a group going and moved out of the area.” Bob said, “When did he write Across China On Foot?” He said, “He wrote it there in the house; he’s never been out of the country.” And that’s what I tell you about the stuff you read. It sounds so true and valid but it’s all for entertainment, it’s just a story.

dw1-11:58

Bob was working down west of San Antonio at a big research laboratory run by Tom Slick, , the guy who had the airbase. Slick had done some investigation himself. , He had an endowment from the government, trying to find a yogi who could curtail his breathing. They used to say they could bury these yogis in the ground for 50 days and they had enough breath to survive. The idea was for interplanetary travel. They wanted to see if they could train people to do without oxygen for a certain period of time, to get a guy into suspended animation. And then when he came to, he could function again. That was the big venture. Tom Slick had gone over to Tibet for awhile; he was interested in the Buddhists over there. I never met Tom Slick myself. But Bob Martin was fooling around with him.

Paul Wood

[Some paragraphs have been rearranged.]

And then naturally in San Antonio there were a few other movements, and this Paul Wood was one of them. Bob Martin met him there, but I met him later when Bob was living in Akron and brought him up. I often wonder whether he’s still alive. I couldn’t tell his age. I can’t remember how old I was either. I was married at the time.

He had had a spiritual experience. He had been an aviator when we bombed Japan. But he was a devout Christian and he believed everything he read in the Bible. And he said, “This doesn’t add up. The Bible says that God observes the fall of the sparrow, so where is God when he let me drop these bombs?”

dw1-15:06

After he blew the place up he got to talking to himself, and consequently they considered him dangerous to the other crewmen. They gave him a rest and recreation stint to serve at home, shipped him back to the States. He said this thing troubled him tremendously and he got to praying. He was trying everything to get God’s reaction to what he was doing. He said he was troubled and in mental agony; it just worried the life out of him. He tried a lot of things. He tried to pray. He said he read in the Bible that whenever you’re in need of help you should pray thusly, and what followed was the Lord’s Prayer. So he takes the Lord’s Prayer and starts praying, nothing but the Lord’s Prayer, over and over and over. Of course that drove him nuts.

dw1-16:21

He went to work in a dealership in San Antonio selling automobiles. He’s got this on his mind, and he had some people who came in and gave him a bad time; they got to arguing with him or giving him heck because there was a defect in the car or something. He said he went over to his desk, sat down and prayed for God to kill him. He didn’t want to live. And he passed out. They took him to the hospital and he was out for ten days: ten days as far as our consciousness is concerned. He said that in those ten days he was free, he was travelling. And when he finally woke up he realized that he was immortal; this was his proof of immortality, because he lived, but in another dimension.

dw1-17:13

So he spent the rest of his life going around talking to people if they wanted to listen. Of course he never pushed himself on anybody. Bob Martin got him to come up to Akron. He looked like Crazy Guggenheim, Jackie Gleason’s sidekick who acted the part of a drunk. This guy was taller, maybe 5’10”, along in there. His eyes were hooded, they had white pouches.

dw1-18:47

He had a wife and some children but his wife got rid of him. She shoved him out the door because he wasn’t talking intelligently to her. I don’t know what he did for a living after that. I don’t know if he still worked in the dealership. But he rented himself a little room someplace, and some of the people who knew him would bring him food. A lot of people learned about him. Then he moved from there to Oklahoma and lived out in the country. In the meantime he had picked up a different wife. He had a young woman with him; by young I’d say she was about 25, a very beautiful woman. And I’m telling you, he wasn’t nice to look at. He looked like he’d been soaked up with too much booze. And I think he was, because when he was in the air force he was unhappy and he was drinking to put himself to sleep.

So Wood was in Akron and we were sitting there talking. Bob Martin had invited all the engineers, a whole lot of officials from Firestone who came over to this little meeting. Bob had ten kids so we couldn’t meet in the house. We had to take some chairs and go out into the garage because the kids would just climb over you. Bob never trained them to sit still.

dw1-20:42

These guys were all questioning him about his experience. And he started telling them about the time he had no food in his house. He said, “When you’re working for God you don’t have to worry about food, you don’t have to worry about anything. Whatever you need will come to you.” And I believe this myself. I’m not saying I’m working for God, because I don’t want to presume that I’m doing something for the maximum powers that run the universe. But ever since doing this work I’ve never had any trouble with enough to live on. That’s all that’s necessary, enough to live on. But when Wood came up to Ohio he had a big car. I said, “Geez, did you buy that?” He said, “No, somebody gave it to me.” It was a headache to him, I guess because of the gasoline. And he told me, “I don’t worry about it. I’ll be supplied with what I need to get around.”

But anyhow, he was telling about this time he went without food. He said that in his cupboard he had an onion, a soup bone of some sort and something else. He said people were coming over to talk to him, and he always liked to have soup or something for them to eat. So he gets a big pot of water to make a pot of broth at least. That was all he had. He said he cooks the bone and the onion and whatever other thing he had there, and they all ate it, I guess out of politeness. But the impression was that they were satisfied. I imagine they would be, you know. Who in the heck wants to eat two bowls of that?

dw1-22:37

But he said it wasn’t but a day or two later that one of the ranchers came in with a quarter of beef. He said, “You got a freezer? Can you take this off my hands? I don’t sell it and my freezer will only hold a couple quarters. If you’ve got room you’re welcome to it.” And he said that’s the way his life went, that about the time he was ready to starve, something would show up.

Well, I could see these experts, these were engineers and mathematicians who believed in nothing except what could be explained in logical terms. They’re kind of sneering at him, and Bob Martin said, “Paul, geez, I wish you hadn’t have told that.” You know, “I didn’t want you to appear ridiculous.” And I said, “Bob, shut up, will you? He’s telling them what happened to him. It doesn’t matter whether people believe it or not. I believe it. I don’t believe he’s lying.”

dw1-24:06

A. They were surprised he had a good-looking wife.

R. Yes, well she came in. He got up and went to the house to go to the toilet or something, and his wife comes out with the coffee pot, passing out the coffee. So one of these smart aleck engineers said, “Hey, what’s it like to be married to that guy?” She said, “It’s alright.” And he says, “Well, just how do you tolerate all of his ideas?” And she never missed a drop of the coffee. She went to the next cup she was pouring and said, “He is my lord and master.” And that was it. She hadn’t batted an eye. That’s what she believed.

dw1-24:40

A. What made you sure that he was authentic?

R. Well, I know when I’m around a person. I could tell by the way he was talking. I knew that he had made the trip. One thing about it is, he wasn’t selling anything. The other thing was that he gained knowledge that wasn’t there before. He had the ability to go to almost any time in history and focus in on an incident; he’d flop into another phase of history. He’d do it walking down the street. He was walking with Bob Martin one time and was telling him about the battle of Gettysburg. He was watching it, he was saying where the troops were stationed and that sort of thing. These were things that he seemed to see. Swedenborg had this, incidentally. The Swedenborgian Society formed as a result of his works. You don’t hear much of him around here, but out in L.A. they’ve got a big center, a great big building. They’ve got one on the east coast too, in New Jersey. But I knew that the man was genuine. And that’s the reason when they started ridiculing him I said, “Hey, don’t worry about what people think.”

dw1-26:02

A. Do you think his experience and yours were identical?

R. No. They were identical in that there was no time after death. You can move to almost anyplace you want to focus on, which seemed to be the thing that concerned him most; that he wanted to visit certain places in history. All the history is now. There is no calendar. It’s just a space-time printout you might say.

Q. Do you think any two people’s experience can be identical?

R. Not exactly. They will all be slightly different. But what you listen for is, what did they learn? Just seeing some buildings or seeing a battle, that doesn’t mean anything. What means something is, we’re going to presume that the pictures of the earth may be retained in some memory bank. They used call that the Akashic records. But the thing is, he didn’t need anybody of authority. What he was looking at was like you’d spin some film. But he knew that he was eternal, he knew that he was immortal, from this trip. That he had been there and that’s what would happen when he finally died. And of course there are very few people who put out the effort to try to find that.

A. I’ve often heard you say that when you get to the final point, the capital-T Truth is going to be identical for everyone.

R. Well sure. I just wonder what’s in between. I do believe that a lot of people when they die enter certain bardos, because that’s the only thing they could understand. They couldn’t understand going someplace where there wouldn’t be people, or their relatives. Because that’s their memory.

Q. So when you’re dead you don’t necessarily get complete understanding?

R. The average person doesn’t. Somebody asked Buddha what happened to different people who died. I’m trying to think what he said. He said that people like the Confucians would find Confucius. They’d pick up on what they were familiar with, or search for it. And the Buddhists naturally would still be Buddhists.

dw1-28:46

They tell a joke, it kind of makes the thing seem a bit unprovable by the reports. They say a Protestant died and went to heaven. You’ve heard this have you? [laughter] St. Peter met him and took him for a tour of the grounds. There was a big temple and the guy says, “What’s that over there?” St. Peter says, “That’s the Jews; they don’t think they’re in heaven but they are.” They see these tall steeples and he says, “Oh, that’s the Episcopalians; they’re very happy.” So they’re going from one place to another and the guy says, “What’s on the other side of this big high wall?” St. Peter says, “Don’t talk so loud, that’s the Catholics; they don’t believe anyone else is here.”

dw1-30:03

Q. Did you see any aspects of the Albigen system in what Paul Wood did before his experience?

R. The Albigen system is nothing more than a challenging of definitions. And he didn’t go into that. All Paul Wood would ever do, he would sit and tell you about his experience. But he believed in a magic in connection with it. He believed that what he had to do was to go out and reassure people that they were immortal. His view was that it’s not God’s will that we should be stupid or in ignorance.

We have to struggle to find out. I say we’re animals, basically, and I doubt seriously that a chicken or a rabbit knows anything about immortality. They’re programmed with an impulse to jump and escape when something attacks them. If they thought they were just going to be injured, maybe they’d be slower in jumping. But they do it with a save-your-life attitude. They go as fast as they can to get away from the predator. That doesn’t mean that they have any theological power. But it also doesn’t mean that these animals do not survive death.

dw1-31:35

A. I’ve often thought though that Paul Wood, in his turbulence and his questioning, his perseverance, intensity, focus, that he was a vector, and a lot of the things that are in The Albigen Papers, he unconsciously went through without realizing he was going through them.

R. He went through a tremendous traumatic argument with himself, and prayer. He didn’t argue with God, he was arguing with himself, trying to sift all this material that he exposed himself to.

Q. [Statement about definitions.]

R. Too late for definitions. When you die and you realize you’re conscious, that’s all that matters. There’s a tremendous joy that sweeps over you, to know that you’re still alive.

A. Do you think that Paul Wood knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who he was?

R. I wouldn’t like to say that. Of course, I never questioned him. I just sat there and listened to him, and when I was listening to him I knew he was telling the truth. He didn’t care if people didn’t believe it. He wasn’t going to fool anybody, there was no point. Nobody paid to get in, why would he fool them? But his sincerity was there. And it was kind of hard to take from – you know, this guy doesn’t look like a saint. He looks like some fat man who’s been hit on the head with a 500 pound skillet. He was not a handsome person. But these things are preconceptions. You think that people should have halos; that’s nonsense. You look the same over on the other side as you look here.

dw1-33:46

Q. Did he know you had an experience?

R. Never talked to him about it. He put out some papers; he was trying to communicate with people and bring them into having this experience. But I considered it a bit naive. What he did, he prayed the Lord’s Prayer. He had this trouble in the army, and later when he was working in the car dealership. But he just worked the Lord’s Prayer over and over and over. So I differ with him on this; I don’t believe you have to have a particular, one-only formula. What you have to have is an overwhelming desire. Not just to say, “Well, I’d like to read some books on the subject.” No, no. you live it. You get in there and you live what you think you have to do, to become perfect enough to see through the veil. I mean you have to die. He died. He said he was out for eight or ten days. He mentioned a lot of those places he went in those eight days; I mean he got around. I tried to move around a bit, but I came back. I woke up abruptly.

But he put out these papers and I wanted to see what he was doing. I felt that this was a formula; I considered him to be a valid person and I wanted to know his formula. This was a paper on the Lord’s Prayer. He said what you do is study it a line at a time. Every line in it he says is important. So he writes this paper and he says take the first line, “Our father who art in heaven,” okay, you take that and ask why it’s in there, what does it mean? He said that was what he did. He took it apart, he worked it backwards and forwards. Because if there was wisdom in that, he wanted to shake it out.

dw1-36:16

Well, I read the thing and I got down to, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others who have trespassed against us.” And I wrote him a letter and said, “I don’t sin, so I have nothing to be forgiven for. If anybody sins, the guy who created me sins.” That’s my attitude. So I couldn’t go along with him. I said I couldn’t preach that, I couldn’t advise anybody to do it. Because of the simple fact that the human being is just a poor helpless animal like all the rest of the animals. Somebody’s telling him that he’s committing sins and crimes and that sort of thing. But he’s just doing the best he can out of the hormones and moods and glands that he’s been donated and equipped with. So he does strange things sometimes. And we think he’s going to hell. We get a hell built up for that guy because we don’t like him.

dw1-37:13

That was the thing that he and I differed on. I didn’t intend to advise anybody to do that. I got those papers to look at them and see if I could advise somebody, but I wouldn’t. This is a relative world: we have good and evil, black and white, up and down. No, there is no up and down, there is no black and white, there is no good and evil. There’s nothing bad. Everybody does the best they can. But we’re all in a classroom, and that’s where the calibrations come in. We calibrate ourselves here. When you get across to there, you’re above, you’ve graduated, or they’ve let you out of the nuthouse or whatever happens. You’re not concerned about space and time or the accomplishments of age or anything of that sort. So he was happy. I could see why he was happy, but he was trying to communicate. You search about. Like The Albigen Papers, that’s not a real sweet-talking piece of literature; I’m talking about the bumps on the road.

dw1-38:30

Q. Do you think he would agree with your characterization of becoming?

R. I don’t know. I never got a chance to talk to him. I never talked to him directly. I corresponded with him through the mail for awhile.

No two awakenings are the same. And then you’ve got a lot of stuff that’s partial, where a person gets inspired. Or he becomes a prophet: he’s able to announce things that happen in the future and it works. He’s not necessarily aware of what’s going to happen to him after death. He just has a faculty. He has developed a faculty, or something or somebody has been kind enough to bestow a faculty on him, so that he can see into the future or he can heal people.

dw1-39:28

Q. Have you ever met anyone you thought was as close to what you experience was as Paul Wood?

R. I’ve corresponded with some people who I thought were pretty much the same. I was just trying to think, I’ve never run into anybody. This is what disturbs me, too. I corresponded with some people and I think they made the jump, but they didn’t know what to do after they came back. I remember one lady said that she had this experience, and then when she came back she felt that she should be a healer. By healing people she would be able to contact them, and she could inspire them to try to heal somebody else, using this meditative formula she had.

The whole thing about achievement in anything is that you’ve got to have a mad dog approach. You’ve got to stick your teeth into it and never let go, regardless of consequences. Most people won’t do that. So you get a lot of criticism. I know I get a lot of criticism – because I can say things that people consider unkind. To me, they’re not unkind, they’re just possibilities or probabilities.

dw1-40:54

Moral code

Q. Mr Rose, you said that once you die and get beyond it all, you see that there is no good and evil, right and wrong. But I know you have your own sense of a moral code.

R. Well, yes, I don’t want to rock the boat. I’m not saying that under certain conditions I wouldn’t kill somebody. I don’t know that. I don’t know what’s in the future. But at the same time, I’m not looking forward to that and I’m not studying or planning to. I think I’ve run into a lot of hardship and opposition, but I always give myself a period of time to wait and see if the score is settled by somebody else, and it generally is. If you find somebody who’s rude, he’s rude to a lot of people. So eventually somebody will punch his nose.

Q. What do you think about Magic White and Black by Franz Hartmann?

R. The thing that I agree on with him is his advice. He believes in purity. This is the way. You have to keep your mind pure. If your mind isn’t pure, it’s exceedingly materialistic: you’re down to the earth, you’re down to breeding and eating, raising hell and that sort of thing. There’s nothing that’s going to come of that except a memory of living like an animal. That’s basically what Hartmann’s advice is. I published the book, and I’m probably the only one now who publishes it. When I first published it I couldn’t hardly sell a copy. I thought a lot of people knew about it, but people don’t. People are interested now in sea shells, smart rocks, channeling.

dw1-43:33

See, this is dangerous. It’s not psychically dangerous, but you get to playing games like a kid and then you’re imagining stuff. And if you imagine it too long you’ll hear voices. When you get to hearing too many voices they will carry you away, because you’ll be doing what the voices tell you. And of course an entity moves in.

There are other things in this universe besides the human being and the animals on this planet. There are discarnate entities too. I don’t say they’re devils or angels, they’re just discarnate entities. But they get under your nerves. I maintain that possession is a case where there are exposed nerve sheaths. We were talking about this earlier, with epilepsy and stuff. The bug gets in there and it plays hell with your sanity. So immoral acts are not advised. That doesn’t have to mean that a person who reproduces is not going to go to heaven. Because with this body, what we are doing here, we are produced by someone or some organization …

[break in tape]

[sh1 ends at 45:07]

File 2

sh2-00:00

... like the sand on the beach, by the millions and billions of people, and there’s a purpose; there’s probably a terrestrial purpose for us being here. So you’ve got schemes inside of schemes. You’ve got planetary growth and this sort of thing. We try to puzzle it out. Some of the esoteric thinkers believe that we start as an inactive planet with no life, that becomes an active planet like the earth. Then they burst into a sun, and a new set of planets in billions of years will be floating around us, and we’ll be aflame. Blavatsky said that the ancient Hindus and Buddhists used to think this, that this was an expansion of the universe. That can’t be proven; it just sounds like a possibility.

We were talking here last night [ [missing tape] ] about the complexities of the human brain. We’re not too much better than an animal. You’ve got some pretty smart animals running around, like horses. They live close to humans and they get to thinking a bit. But regardless, we’re not too smart. Our steps in science are slow and it takes so much time to discover things. For instance these neurotransmitters and prostaglandins: I knew nothing about that when I majored in chemistry in college. I knew nothing about prostaglandins until just the last five or ten years when I ran into the term. And of course we find that these things work together: one neurotransmitter affects another.

So it isn’t just cells and protoplasm. You hear people say, “Isn’t the human body wonderful, with all it’s complexities and efficiency?” They don’t see half of it. Because there’s stuff we can’t see with our microscope that’s motivating these neurotransmitters. When I was in school they were observing electrons by making shadows with them. That’s how they checked out the first electrons. So there are tremendous, complicated mechanisms in these bodies. There’s a purpose behind it. And there’s something, that when you tilt one way, something tilts you back. Or it starts to destroy you; that’s the real hell on earth. Of course when we’re young and we can do a lot, we don’t think enough to keep from being destroyed. That’s the unfortunate part about it.

dw2-03:04

Augie was running a tape here on the guy who had encephalitis, where people would suddenly get paralyzed and do strange things. All they talk about in the thing is chemicals. There were both men and women who had this, they would lose their minds so to speak after awhile. Some of them would regain it when they’d give a little of this dopamine to them. But he casually mentioned certain stuff they were watching with these people in the hospital. They were watching of course their bowel movements, their sexual activity. And it’s almost as if his fingernails are short or his fingernails are long, sex doesn’t matter any more than the short or long fingernails. Because what matters to them, they’re concentrating on the brain; they want to see what the relationship is between these neurotransmitters.

dw2-04:18

But they’re missing the whole point, that the base actions of man determine his mind and the mind affects the brain. In other words, the ability to remember: you can train yourself to remember and you can train yourself to forget.

But what has caused this? How could we evolve from a couple little, you know, a sperm and an egg? How could we evolve all of this gear in a single molecule? That at a certain time there’s a memory in the DNA – when is it activated? What activates it? What kind of machinery have they got in there? Where are these electric wires running from one place to another, to send out these commands? Say there’s a change in the body, an illness or injury, so the rest of the body has to change to accommodate it.

And then the long term thing: what’s going on? I believe that you’ll see a plan, even in international wars. There’s like a robotic creation, and there’s a whole basket full of robots that don’t work and they throw them away. But in the tremendously fine parts – we think there’s nothing but molecules, atoms and possibly living cells, but these neurotransmitters are more complex than any other form of chemistry I’ve ever run into or heard about.

06:25

Q. Is there any kind of phenomena that you have uncovered in all your diggings that you were unable to explain ...?

R. Oh, I’ve got a lot of stuff I can’t explain. There are things that happen when I’m around. I’ll explain probably tomorrow evening some of the things I’ve discovered. But this has been the story of my life. I’ve had stuff happen and it surprised me as much as it did anybody else. But it was there, and I could duplicate it, given certain circumstances. You can’t create the circumstances. But under certain conditions things happen.

07:31

The Experience

Q. Does it seem like your experience was given to you? Maybe something out there said, “Okay, let’s just give this guy what he wants.”

R. No, there was nobody else out there but me.

08:24

Q. I’ve heard you say you had help.

R. I felt that, yes. I felt that I couldn’t have done it without help. But when I crossed over, there was nobody there except me.

Q. Do you think it was the higher Richard Rose ...

R. I don’t know that there is a higher Richard Rose.

Q. The Richard Rose that transcends time might have been helping you, the Richard Rose animal?

R. Well, you’re pretty close. I don’t like to say that. I wasn’t worried much about the body, because I went unconscious before it happened and I didn’t give a thought to the body. And I wasn’t eager to get back, but the time was up, that was all. I don’t know. I do suspect that very possibly there was either an automatic mechanism that sent me back, or that I was allowed to come through because that’s what I was straining for. But I don’t have any proof either way.

But I knew that there was nobody but me. And if you ever go across, there will be nobody but you. Now if you can tie that together, that there will be you instead of me, but there will be only one person. There are different ways they have of describing that, but I didn’t get anybody to sign any papers admitting me in or anything of that sort.

10:27

Q. Do you think you could go back?

R. I’ll be back, sure. I can’t avoid it.

Q. Do you have any desire to repeat the experience?

R. No. Well, at that time it wasn’t to pleasant. I’m trying to think, oh, I had a headache, that was the unpleasant part about it. I had a pain in the center of my head, right here. I thought I was having a stroke. It knocked me out and I thought, “This is death.” I remember thinking before I passed out, “How are they going to get the body back to West Virginia?” Because not too many people there knew me. I was in Seattle, Washington. And that went through my head.

dw2-11:25

But I found myself going out a window. The window was closed and I had gone out through the pane of glass. I looked up and saw the mountains, the Cascades, snow-capped, and I thought, “Oh, boy, now I’m free. Let’s go up there.” That was it. When I got up there, the Cascades weren’t there. I was just on a high place. One thing about it, I was tremendously happy. I knew that I had won, that was all. Not only that, but I had the conviction that I could do anything I wanted to do.

So it occurred to me, “Well, if I’ve got that type of potential, let’s call up the human race.” And I saw the human race. Now I don’t know who or what projected that, but I saw just millions of people coming up the side of that hill. And again, I know that that keys in another possibility, that I’m not alone, that something’s working behind the stage to pull up scenery for me to look at. Of course, that has puzzled me a bit. But I don’t worry about it because that the main thing was, I realized that I was alive, that there was no death.

13:00

A. You said that to see the human race was a very depressing scene.

R. Yes, they weren’t happy people. I looked at their faces. I wrote that up in the Three Books of the Absolute. They just looked like they were stupefied.

13:17

Q. Does your memory of this experience fade, or does it stay with you all the time?

R. Yes, I remember exactly what happened. But I’ve done some thinking about it later, for instance this idea about the human race showing up. I thought that this had to be a picture show. Because I didn’t see anybody I knew except myself. I saw the people coming up and I thought, “Well, I’m in there.” That the Richard Rose I knew, his body must be in there, and I saw my body.

13:54

A. Did you find that to be depressing too?

R. Well, there was something wrong, because my body wasn’t coming up the hill, it was laying in a hotel. But I wanted to see some movies and they showed me some movies. How realistic they were I don’t know. But it was a tremendous gob of people coming up that mountain. I think a lot of this was just an indication to show me that I made it through the barrier. But I believe that you can do things. The spiritualists believe that there are different realms: one of them is called the desire realm; the causal realm may be synonymous with it, where you will things and they appear. And that may be how the whole human race evolved: Adam and Eve, somebody cooked them up and from then on it’s been hell. All sorts of variations.

15:11

Q. So after this experience your emotional fear of death was gone?

R. Yes, well, I don’t have any fear of death. I have a reluctance to die at the present time because I’ve got an 11 year old child. And if it weren’t for the little girl I wouldn’t have the same attitude. But that’s necessary to keep me harmless.

[shortened question]

Q. It seem that if someone has an experience that’s indescribable, or so far away from normal experience that there’s no way for the mind to grasp it, the experience would be sort of like a fossil, a particular impression stamped on one person.

dw2-16:20

R. It has to be translated to your physical body, the picture it will take.

dw2-16:39

[shortened question]

Q. Did you come back with a clear idea of what to do next, or did you kind of piece that together afterwards?

R. It’s very difficult to help people. And I’m not fooling myself with you people sitting here; ninety percent of you will go away with your doubts as to what I’m talking about. And probably the reason for that is when you’re trying to describe things to somebody else you’ve got to pick words, and the first thing you know, the words become material. For instance the mountain: I don’t know where I was but I knew I was on top. I wasn’t only free but I was on top. Now whether that was projected I don’t know. But that was my total consciousness. That wasn’t a dream. Because what happened, to come back here I had to enter oblivion. I came through oblivion. I mean I was pushed. I had seemingly irritated something else. And – what was it in my head at the time?

A. You said, “If this is everythingness, I wonder what nothingness is.”

R. Right. I was getting my questions answered, so I asked a good one. And found out.

dw2-18:40

[shortened question]

Q. Since I’ve been trying and hoping to have an experience, if that happened to me I’d think my reaction would be joy. Whereas it sounds like you were sad and confused. I don’t understand.

R. Oh hell, I wept for ten days. I couldn’t do it. I was back in hell. You don’t laugh when you’re in hell. I wasn’t doping it out either, I was just damn miserable. I mean I realized that I couldn’t live with it. I was going to commit suicide, that’s what was in my head. I was eying up these bridges in Seattle to see if any of them were high enough to kill me. The one right close to where I was staying was floating on cork and I think I would have fallen in before I jumped off that one. It had no superstructure. I thought, “Maybe somebody will fish me out and I’ll have to go through this again.” I thought I was going to get someplace high where I could jump off.

dw2-19:57

I think it was night time, my first memories of being on the street. I don’t know how long that lasted. I don’t have any idea. But I did know that I was weeping, and I wanted somebody to tell me, how do I readjust? I realized I had to readjust to this life. And I thought it was going to have to be a spiritual person. I was born and raised a Catholic so I thought, “I’ll go to the Catholic church,” and sure enough I found one.

I knocked on the door. I don’t know what time it was, 10 or 11 o’clock at night, and they still had the lights on. But some big guy with a paunch like this comes, he’s about 35 years of age. As soon as I looked him I knew what this guy had been doing to get the paunch. He said, “What can I do for you?” And I said, “I’ve got troubles and I’d like to talk to somebody who know something.” I’m trying to look around to see who else is in the room. I said, “Don’t you have any older priests in there?” And he said, “What makes you think an older priest can tell you anything that I can’t?” He was getting real haughty now, bluffing. He doesn’t know anything but he’s got to take a pose. I just thought, “Oh, if I had a gun.” [laughter] I would have killed him.

dw2-21:24

Aftermath

Q. What did you do after you went through those ten days, and finally sort of came to terms with it and decided a direction for the rest of your life?

R. Well, I came back in a rather semi-conscious mood. I got a bus out of Seattle.

A. Had you been planning to leave Seattle anyway, Mr Rose?

R. Yes, I had quit my job. I don’t know if I had given formal notice, but I was planning to leave. I can’t remember that part about it. I left, though. I had to get out. I had a compulsion to get away from Seattle – or make the bridge, one of the two. But I remember, the whole trip back was fantasy. There was a fantasy connected with it, and it seemed like I remembered everything that happened on that trip. I remember some homosexuals on the back seat who some guy in the army was trying to kill. They had made the mistake of grabbing this hillbilly, I don’t know where he was from. These guys grabbed him when he was dozing off, and he wasn’t going to be handled. I remember that, and then the bus driver put the homosexuals off in some little town in the desert.

dw2-22:56

Everything seemed to be like these letters that glow. Everything was very important and there was seemingly a tremendous lesson in them. So we’re coming out of Seattle going over the mountains. It was a short bus that would hold only about 20 people; they didn’t seem to have many people coming east on that route. We were heading for Butte, Montana, I think it was. Just this short little bus, there were only four or five of us there. There was a man sitting behind the bus driver, looked like a gambler; he had that calculating look and didn’t have much to say. A woman was sitting behind him, and I’m across the aisle.

The bus is galloping like this because the road was rough, and the lady stands up, leans over the guy in front of her and vomited down his front. I remember all the details of that trip. But this guy is asleep and he wakes himself up, he’s like a rabbit [mimics sniffing]. So he finally looks down and doesn’t believe it; he thinks he’s still asleep. I couldn’t see why the woman had to do it on him, she was sitting on the aisle. But the bus driver saw what happened. He says, “Lady, you get yourself some cloths or napkins or anything and you clean that man up.” And that floored her; she was tremendously upset because she couldn’t puke on the gambler. [laughter] That would have been the first women’s lib show of contempt for the males.

dw2-25:25

Q. What did you decide on that trip as far as what you were going to do?

R. Coming home? I was going to get close to the cemetery where I’d be buried. Bob Martin at that time was working up in Cleveland. I got ahold of him and stayed over at his house a couple of nights. Bob was just ready to hatch a brood of kids; he already had two of them and he had eight more after that. His wife was fairly young. We didn’t pay too much attention to her because she didn’t read the books; she wouldn’t read much on that. But she surprised me with a remark. I was describing, like I’m telling you, what happened to me. Bob knew what happened; he had done a lot of reading in this line. But he wasn’t commenting too much. I said, “Well, what do you think about this reaction I’ve had to it?” And his wife said – she’s just a kid about 22 or 23 years old – she says, “Dick, I think you lost your ego.” And she hit the nail on the head. This is what happens.

Enlightenment is a process of giving up your ego. I’m not saying it has to do that, but no matter what it is, when you get a sufficient shock you cancel out all of the things you say you have to have in life. Because your life is over, and that cancels them out. You’re no longer belabored with the ambitions or the need to make a million dollars, or the need to be a hero or something. I was really amazed at her because she hit the nail right on the head.

dw2-27:31

Bob of course was very upset by the whole thing. He was taking a job at Babcock and Wilcox; they were working on the atomic submarine and he was one of the engineers on it. He got me a job, and of course I wasn’t very good company for the people there. I wrote the Three Books of the Absolute there, before I came back to West Virginia. After I wrote them I thought, “Maybe this would sound silly to somebody else.” So I went over to Bob’s house, his kitchen, and read the Three Books to him. I happened to look up at him. I was going to say, “What do you think about it?” and he was weeping. He says, “Dick, I love you. Will you marry me?” [laughs] That was his way of saying, you know, a superlative. But the thing was, he knew what happened to me but he couldn’t take the steps. He had ten kids hanging around his neck, and he had no choice but to stay in his work.

dw2-28:57

Q. Didn’t he go up to you years later and say you were right?

R. Well, I don’t think he ever said that twice. Because we were always competitive. I was always giving him trouble and he was always giving me trouble. I mean it was just on little stuff. He drank a good bit. He had a strange lifestyle.

Q. In the years before your experience you said that you went through a time when everything was beautiful.

R. Yes.

Q. Do you think that that’s a stage that people go through in the path?

R. No. I don’t think so. I had a period of it when I came back. I went through a lot of hell, but when I came back, once more the beauty returned. I think I wrote that somewhere in The Albigen Papers. The children on the street were beautiful, they weren’t just puff balls. For awhile they were like baby dolls, everything was more or less artificial. But then there came a time when everything got beautiful, everybody was wonderful. I tried to write about it but I couldn’t. I wrote some stuff but I tore it up. I thought it was drivel.

Q. How does the world appear to you now?

R. I get a feeling that an insane man is watching it.

Q. What do you mean?

R. Well, I’m free to do all the insane things I want to do. The world as it is, in my estimation, is not too sane. The difference is, I’m living back in with the insane people but I know it. I know that I’m insane.

dw2-31:03

Q. But does it all look very artificial and hollow, or does it look beautiful, or somewhere between those two extremes?

R. Oh, I wrote poetry. I don’t know, there was a bit of a hangover. It didn’t clear up right away. I remember going down the street – I was living in a flea bag hotel up there in Cleveland and I decided to go for a walk. That’s where I ran into the people marching five and six abreast down the street. And I thought, “Oh, my God, there must have been a catastrophe.” They looked like they were all in a state of shock. No one was talking. I thought, “Nobody does that.” There were thousands of them coming. I’m standing there and they’re walking by and they don’t even see me.

dw2-31:57

Finally I stopped one of them, I said, [alarmed voice] “What happened?” They looked at me like I was crazy and didn’t answer. Tromp, tromp, on down the street headed toward the lake. I thought, “I’ve got to get to the next one.” They were about five abreast in little groups. So the next guy, I said, “What happened?” He didn’t answer me. And I said, “Where’s everybody going?” He said, “The ball game.” It was fifty thousand Polacks from Parma going to see the baseball game. And I thought, “This can’t be what I have come back for.” They were all from that area, the flat part, the west side of Cleveland. They weren’t speaking, that was the funny thing, they were so obsessed with that ball game. I thought they had all walked away from death, that somebody had died back there.

Then I went down to Alliance, Ohio and I got a room so I could work in the Babcock and Wilcox plant. And this writing came over me. I just sat down and wrote, day after day. Some of it was poetry, some was prose. The world was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. Couldn’t figure out why, no reason for it.

dw2-33:35

Teaching

Q. Do you still have that sense now?

R. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much of a view of myself, to be honest with you. I surprise myself. I don’t even know what effect I’m having on you people. Of course, I don’t care, because I’m not your enemy. The thing is too, that I look for things that you’re not looking for. And I’m still searching for methods. I know a lot of things that I could do to open people’s minds, and it’s difficult, because people are obsessed.

For instance we have this group. The experience happened in 1947 and this is 1991, so if you subtract you’ll find out how long it has been. I raised a family, I’ve been married twice, but I never stopped working. My first objective was always to communicate with people. I was always hunting, trying to find somebody who was on the brink so I could push them. You can’t get people who never think about it. That’s the reason you write the book, and if somebody reads the book and they understand you a bit, maybe then you can harmonize with them and pull them along a little further.

dw2-35:15

And the efforts for that – I don’t say you get dividends right away. You don’t. I’ve given lectures that went over like a lead balloon. But I’ve met some very good and sincere people. Some of them have struggled. And, well, I shouldn’t talk about it until it’s done, I see light up ahead for some of the people I know. And that’s important to me. But regardless, it’s a vector. I believe if we take away the body and take away the confused mind, what we amount to basically is a vector in another dimension. That’s what’s important. That supersedes all other. Money doesn’t matter, pleasure doesn’t matter. Sex is not an object, it’s just something that will take up your time, and you can wind up getting AIDS maybe, who knows. Nobody is free from the dangers. There’s nothing wrong with dying, but certain types of death I don’t look forward to.

dw2-36:45

A. You used to say people on the spiritual path think enlightenment will be like the feather duster.

R. Yeah, I used to tell him that. I met him when he was about 19 years old, weren’t you?

A. Yes.

R. And I’d tell him, “They don’t want to hear about enlightenment, they don’t want to hear about salvation, they don’t want to hear about anything like that. They’re hoping that when they die there’ll be a whole hoard of angels attack their posteriors with feather dusters to keep them happy, all through eternity.”

A. You said, “Heavenly hilarity, for all eternity.” That enlightenment has to be joy and pleasure in the world and what people call happiness.

R. Well, I had my moments of happiness; I’ve been happy ever since I heard about Dahmer. The only thing, I’m afraid of going into McDonald’s for fear I’ll get a Dahmerburger. I thought I got one the other day. I went in and took the cheap route. They had the big ones for $1.79, and you could buy three little ones for 59 cents apiece, which was less than that. But they weren’t any good.

Q. Did you say Dahmer had a strong vector, though?

R. Now there’s a man you should follow. He’s a man of determination. It takes determination to eat somebody else’s biceps. He was no common character. He tenderized that one guy before he killed him. Must have thought he was tough. I actually like the expression on the guy’s face when I see him there: nothing has happened to him, nothing’s wrong.

39:08

Distress

Q. Sometimes you ask people about suicide and display an interest in that.

R. Well, I was interested in suicide myself when I was in Seattle. I don’t advise anybody to commit suicide. I don’t have any urge to do it. I’m more like these idiots in the wild west, I’d like to go out with a bang. It doesn’t matter how.

A. Take a few judges.

R. Ah, now you’re talking. [laughs]

Q. You were talking about certain aspects of depression, that there’s truth in that.

R. Well I don’t doubt that a bit, not only depression, you’ll go through hell. But I don’t like to harp on that too much. Because nobody wants to go through hell.

A. [laughs]

R. He’s going to laugh his way out of this one. The devils will scatter when he comes with that laugh.

Q. Before your experience in Seattle you described that you were in some kind of turmoil, emotionally out of sorts. Was that a peculiar type of anxiety you were suffering from? Or was it a previously-understood pain you were in at the time?

R. Oh, that was physical. There was no thought with that. I just went into my room and I was sitting in a yoga position up against the head of the bed. I’d sit in that position because it was easy; you won’t fall forward and you’re not going to fall backwards if you’ve got your back up against the wall. So you sit there for a long period of time and read.

Sometimes I’d go out on the farm and do that in the winter. I wouldn’t build a fire, I’d just go in there and get a blanket, wrap up in the blanket and get the book. I was reading Blavatsky out there, I remember that. We didn’t have any electricity in the place, and every evening I’d get an oil lamp, fire it up and read until I got sleepy and then go to sleep. I’ll never forget one time I woke up in the middle of the night and something had me by the nose. I looked up and here it’s a mouse; he’s sitting on my shirt and he’s got his paws up over my nose, channeling the warm air. Of course I didn’t respond in a charitable manner. The next day I took a .22 rifle and shot a lot of holes in the baseboard, trying to get them on the run. The place was full of them.

dw2-42:29

Q. Do you feel like your emotional state prior to the experience was relevant to what happened?

R. I never know what my emotional state is. An emotional person can’t describe his state, I don’t think. In other words, if a person’s depressed and you say, “I’m depressed,” immediately I’m something else. Because I’m conscious of being depressed. If I admit it, something else will move in. Even anger: I’d be angry and somebody would crack a joke and I’d laugh and couldn’t fight.

I don’t know. I realize what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to get a picture. But the different things I say don’t necessarily create a picture of the type of person I was. And I don’t think I should try to say what type of person I was; because nobody will believe you if you talk about yourself. I realize that. If I’d say something that made me look good it would be rejected. The human mind generally rejects it and says, “I can’t believe that.” The best thing is not to enter it; you go get the witnesses and bring them in. That’s the best way.

dw2-44:14

Q. I always try to picture in my mind – was there a certain combination of emotional turmoil and physical pain? – and try to duplicate that.

R. Trying to get the recipe for the ideal piece of cake

Q. Did you have the feeling that this was going to happen?

R. No.

[break in tape]

side dw2 ends at 44:46

File 3

dw3-00:00

I knew I was dying. When that pain hit I knew I was done. But when I came back there wasn’t a bit of pain. That was another thing. I figured I should have come back and the head would still be loused up. But there was no pain. It was engineered, that I believe. That’s the reason I repeat lots of times that I had help. But I never got a good look at whoever or whatever was helping me. And I don’t argue with it. Because whatever it was, I appreciated the help, even though it was painful.

dw3-00:41

A. Do you think the pain was necessary in order to convince you that you were dying so you would let go?

R. Maybe I couldn’t get away unless I lost the physical consciousness. I think you have to die, that’s all. I think a person has to die.

A. In Three Books of the Absolute you talk about a lot of anguish. What was causing the anguish?

R. Ah, um, people like you. [laughter]

Q. Have to laugh.

R. Better than crying. Rephrase that, will you? [laughter]

A. You talk so much about the anguish of the experience ...

R. Yeah, I think if you read Three Books of the Absolute you’ll pick that up. You get a perspective. All your chips are on the table and you’re going to lose and you know it. And that’s the human race. You’ve done your stint here and there’s no way of reclaiming or getting back into the game. You’re going, that’s all. Of course, I knew I was going to die but I didn’t know I was going to wake up. And that causes a lot of trauma. Then of course sooner or later you lose consciousness, so it doesn’t matter.

dw3-02:39

Death

Q. When people are asleep but not dreaming, is that anything close to death?

R. No. Sleep is mostly unconsciousness, unless you’re dreaming.

Q. Where is the personality or the self when you’re not dreaming and you’re not awake.

R. Well, you’re observing something. I call it a roll of film. The mind is unconscious but you’re still observing, the roll of film is still turning. And maybe more clearly than if you were awake.

I’ll never forget, I was in the hospital one time and this guy in the next bed to me was dying of cancer. They were all older people; I was only about 40 years old at the time. Three people in the ward were all terminal, they didn’t have too far to go. And they got to talking about death. I said to them, “Your life is like a roll of film. Your life has already been lived, it’s on the roll, you’ll play it out. And when you get to the end of that roll of film there’s no extension.” This guy was dying of cancer, he could hardly talk. He listened to me and he didn’t say anything much, until it dawned on him what I was talking about. He took his arm and pointed at me, and he said, [whispering] “I need another roll.” I hope he got it.

dw3-04:53

Q. Do you feel that reincarnation is true, or false?

R. I don’t know. And I don’t know if we have a choice in that. I do think sometimes that after death you move around according to your capacity. I think that there’s a governing force, too, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It’s like when a baby is born: I think a baby awakens from another dimension. Maybe it would love to explore something besides mama, and after a few months or years he gets irritated because he can’t explore. But I think the same thing may occur when you go to another dimension. There will be possible restrictions placed on what you can adapt to. It’s an adaptation deal. And I think it’s just automatic that you might run into that. I don’t know for sure. I didn’t have any restrictions placed on me. At the same time, I got dropped off the cliff.

dw3-06:09

Intuition

There are things you can come to a conclusion by and think they’re proved, through philosophy and experience. But they may be disproven later. Your philosophical command may be incomplete or inadequate. Then there are things you experience, mental experience you have, when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re right. And these things have happened to me. I had things happen to me that were uncanny, and yet I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were happening, or would happen. And since I’ve had that, more than one of them, I’m inclined to believe that a pattern in any dimension might be very much the same.

dw3-07:15

I’ll give you one or two of the examples we were talking about earlier. When I went away to the seminary my mother took me up to the parish house; I was just a kid, 12 years old, just out of grade school. I hope I’m not offending too many Catholics; I don’t see anybody shaking. But this priest came out and my mother is talking to him, and he’s telling her what kind of clothes I have to take with me and so on. I’d say he was about 45-50 years old. I kept staring at him and I wasn’t paying too much attention to what he said. I saw him dead. He was a dead man right in front of me.

So we came out and I said to my mother, I said, “Father Philips is going to die.” And she said, “Shut up.” You know, blasphemy. So I didn’t say any more. But he died within a week. He was gone. I’ve had that happen repeatedly over the years. And it’s that kind of conviction that makes me believe that you’ll know when you’re right, if you can get tuned up to that. You don’t want to predict things just because you don’t like the person or because you love them, but you see things and can judge a situation. It’s not physical; this is another dimension, when a person’s at the point of death. And you see the thing ahead of time.

dw3-09:00

I was in the contracting business with a guy, he was about 60 years old at the time. He never kept any money; he was living in a trailer court over in Bridgeport, Ohio, he and his wife. They had grown children and two of the girls had married and moved to Florida, and she sent for them. So in this 40 ft. house trailer there was him and his wife, the two daughters and two little toddlers. I used to drop in on them once in a while because I knew he was sick.

So I went over there and I walked in. He was lying with his eyes shut on a couch about that high. The daughter was getting ready to go to the Eagles to play Bingo. She was hoping to win Bingo because they didn’t have any money, they didn’t have a cent. They were in bad shape. It was a rough situation. He was lying down and she got down on one knee to where she could hug him, and she put her arm around his shoulder. She said, “Daddy, we’re going over to the Eagles to play Bingo.”

dw3-10:25

I saw his hand come up like this on the other side of her, and he touched her like this, real slow. And I thought, “Uh oh, he’s going.” I went over and knelt down beside him and got his hand. This man talked to me through his hand. What was conveyed was that he was dying at the time and he was wanting to let me know that it was alright, that there was nothing wrong with death. Now to translate that, it sounds crazy. I had nothing to go by but his hand. So when she stood up I said, “Don’t go.” She said, “Why not?” I said, “He’s dying.” She said, “He goes into these comas all the time.” I said, “Maybe so, but he told me he’s dying.” She said, “He didn’t speak to you.” I said, “Yes he did. I had his hand.”

She said, “We don’t have any money.” I said, “Get him to the hospital.” They had these two little kids there. I said, “These kids shouldn’t have to witness this, because when he dies he’ll vomit up his lungs.” He had lung cancer. I had never seen a man die of lung cancer but that’s what I told her. She said, “We have no way to get him there.” And I said, “Do you want him in the hospital?” And she said, “Oh, yes.” So I just called the volunteer fire department in Bridgeport, Ohio. I said, “We need an ambulance over here right away.” They came over and loaded him into the ambulance. I went home and felt like a fool. I thought, “If that man lives I’m the biggest jackass in the valley.” To her at least. He died that night. It shook everybody up, but least I got him away from the kids.

dw3-12:19 [this paragraph is moved up from below]

We were discussing synchronicity earlier. You hear a lot of talk about Karl Jung, the philosopher or psychologist or whatever he was. He brought up that point of synchronicity. I never paid too much attention to it. They were talking about coincidences, and how can you scientize coincidences? But what I’m getting at is that these things happen. And when they do there’s no hesitation. I would have felt bad if I was wrong, but I had no doubt that it would happen. This isn’t just one or two incidents, this is all through my life. I’ve been around people and I can smell death. Sometimes it’s flowers; I’ll go past a house in the winter time and smell the flowers, and I’ll take down the address. And in about a week somebody in the house has died.

dw3-12:54

Ralph Decker

I knew a guy in Benwood – did you ever meet Ralph Decker? This man was about 45 years of age, and he later shot himself. His wife died. The whole family died. I’m trying to think which ones went first. But he had gotten injured in an accident, he wasn’t critical or anything like that. But he had a son who was 21 years of age, and the son was epileptic. He would sit up all night and talk to the truck drivers over the CB radio, and he just got fatter and fatter and fatter until finally one day it got his heart. That was what was pending at the time I think. Twice I was at his house and somebody died shortly afterwards.

[sentences in the next paragraph are reordered]

But Ralph got so he could smell the flowers. His mother had died about a year before, and one night he called me and I went out. He said, “See if you can notice anything.” I said, “Yes, I can smell the flowers in your dining room.” He said, “Can you pinpoint it?” I walked around again and I said, “It’s under your mother’s picture; but she’s already dead.” And he said, “That’s exactly where I smelled it.” He was checking me out to see if I picked it up. I said, “Well, she’s giving you a message, possibly, God knows what it is. But it’s her way of telling you possibly that she’s happy, that she’s still alive on the other side. Or – you’ve got trouble up ahead. One of the two.” It wasn’t only a week or two later that his son died with a heart attack, 21 years of age. He just got too big. But Ralph wanted to die too; he tried to die two or three times.

Then after the epileptic boy’s funeral he called me again and I went over. This boy appeared to his brother, physically, showed up at his door and came into the house. And the brother, Alan his name was, came past this spook or ghost or whatever you want to call it and went off the second floor banister to get away from him, frightened of it. So I told him, “Ralph, get ahold of your boys and tell them they should be happy.” The boy couldn’t communicate because he was retarded a little bit mentally. “He’s happy now that he can communicate, and he thought of you. He’s not going to hurt you.”

dw3-17:00

A. Is he the one who used to come to the refrigerator in the middle of the night?

R. Yes, the boy, the epileptic. Ralph called me on the phone and said, “If you’ve got time, come around 11 o’clock,” and I knew something was up and went over. And in his kitchen there was a table. I’m trying to figure, there was a door coming in from the outside and there was a refrigerator that stood right here, with the table in the center. I was sitting with my back to the door. And all of a sudden somebody walks through the room, right through us, through the table. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Now what I felt under my feet was not something going down but something lifting up. I thought maybe it’s somebody in the basement poking the floor with a pole, but I checked that out and it wasn’t.

dw3-17:58

He goes over, right to the refrigerator. There was a little wire basket on top holding about eight glasses, and when you’d go to open the door the glasses would shake. And those glasses shook violently. But the door didn’t open, because it was latched, I think. Whatever was manifesting didn’t have enough strength to pull the door open, but it did shake the glasses. And Ralph said, “This is the exact thing he did every hour at night.” The boy didn’t sleep; that’s the reason I think he died. He’d come out and he’d make a sandwich, walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, then he’d slam it and the glasses would shake. He would take his sandwich into his room and get onto this CB radio and he’d be talking to truckers all night long. This man was about 15 years younger than me. About six months after that he shot himself. He got lonesome. He just didn’t want to live any more.

So the idea of being able to pick up this type of thing, I don’t argue with it. But it’s phenomena. It doesn’t help philosophically, spiritually or anything else. To me, I realize that I’m able to touch things that other people don’t touch. And this guy, because he was interested in his family, he was able to hear it also, to react to it.

dw3-20:00

Nostalgia

Q. Do you ever get nostalgic?

R. Um, I’ll have to think about that. I always thought that nostalgia, real nostalgia, is the language of the soul

Q. Augie has said there’s got to be a pull and a push at the same time. That irritations push you, while some kind of nostalgia pulls you along.

R. There’s another word I use, similar to nostalgia. [melancholy ] We live in pictures of the past sometimes. I gave a lecture on that subject.

A. The Lecture on Moods.

R. Right. There’s the nostalgic mood that keys in. I call it the language of the soul because you feel it intensely and yet there’s no logic for it.

A. You said in that lecture that it’s not the cabin and grandma we’re nostalgic about, but our initial fall from truth into relativity, somewhere back.

R. Right.

A. We know we were perfect somewhere along the line, innocent. That there’s something beautiful or wonderful out there.

R. It’s out there but you’ve got to go through yourself to get it.

dw3-23:18

Celibacy

The most beautiful, the most binding memories I have are memories of celibacy, of years I spent when I was celibate. The world was a beautiful place.

Q. How long were you celibate?

R. Well, different periods. I was celibate from when I was 21 to when I was 30. My experience happened when I was 30 and I got married when I was 33. Then I separated from my wife. I lived with her 10 years. She had a habit of cursing me, and I warned her, but she didn’t see anything wrong with it. So I told her, “I’m convinced that you’re showing me your dislike.” She called me some fancy names.

Q. It wasn’t bodhisattva I take it.

R. No. She got about half loaded on wine one time and I had some company. And she said, “He thinks he’s the Buddha; I’m the Buddha.” And some guy said to her, “Can I rub your belly and make a wish?” That shut her up. That was George Blazer. [see page George-Blazer ].

A. I was there.

R. She was wishing you said it. [laughter] So I lived with her another 10 years, different part of the house. And that was beautiful. You got to go through hell to appreciate heaven. Now see, this is difficult to follow. She was basically a good woman. But there are certain things I don’t tolerate, that’s all. Sex doesn’t mean anything to me. What means something to me is the beauty of the motherhood – that’s very important – and the dedication of a woman to her child. Sure, you can get attached to the flesh. But after awhile you get the feeling that you’re no better than two dogs on the street. What counts is the sacrifice for the other party. And the man sacrifices himself so that the woman won’t be starving while she’s trying to raise children. And that’s beautiful also.

dw3-25:53

But it’s not beautiful when somebody starts calling you names and telling you how much they hate you. Because hate is poison. I became convinced that she was serious and I said, “Okay, you’re free. I just freed you.” But she was a good woman. She hung around for another 10 years and every once in awhile, every year or, so she’d say, “When are you going to do your duty?” And I’d say, “I have no duties; no duties on this planet at all.” Finally she went out to Arizona and got herself a divorce. We had a mutual no-fault divorce. She could have taken half my property but she didn’t take anything. She took a suitcase, that’s all. But everything ended up for the best: she got somebody who could tolerate her drinking and her lifestyle, and I got peace of mind.

But those were the most beautiful days of my life: when I was a child and any period of time I was celibate. Sex shatters you. It scatters your intellect too. You find it harder to think of ten things. A person who’s celibate can think of ten things at once. A person who’s married is lucky to think of one thing in ten days. It’s a more difficult way of living.

dw3-27:36

Answers

Q. What do you know by being enlightened that you didn’t know before? What answers did it give you about yourself or about reality?

dw3-28:01

R. Well, first of all, anything mentioned in this dimension can’t be given, because of the simple fact that this is all illusion. When you step accross, this is like you’ve been to a picture show, and it’s rather petty. And the liberation is just ecstasy. Once you’re clear away from it, it’s ecstasy. The other thing is that somehow I felt – I didn’t see anything – but I felt that I was one with God. There was a force that was so powerful, so beautiful, and I was one with it. And I didn’t say, “I want to see this guy,” because there would have been two of us then. I just knew it, that’s all.

And this is the reason I was so happy. I wasn’t happy because I hitchhiked my way into a higher stratosphere. But it was a realization that I had made it. There was a temptation there, too. I don’t know, maybe that was put into my head by some other force. And that was, “Let’s test it. Let’s see how much I can create.” That was when I said I want to see the human race, and there they came. Of course, as I said, I often think it was a setup; that I needed an accommodation. It was an accommodation, not a reality.

dw3-29:30

Q. Did you become one with God, or remember that you had always been one with God?

R. Well, my memory prior to getting off that bed and going out the window was not being one with God. I didn’t even know what God was, and I saw no shape or form that I could draw you any pictures of. But I knew that I was one with the totality. I sensed that I could do anything I wanted to do – and of course, what do you want to do? After awhile you don’t want to do anything. At least I didn’t. But I was testing it, so to speak. I think it was a foolish question to ask and I got a foolish answer: the whole imitated population coming up over the hill.

dw3-30:19 – sh3-30:50

Q. Is that what you mean by an accommodation?

R. Something accommodated me, yes, it responded. See, there was no voice there. I don’t want to get into too much of this stuff, because there’s rules of creation, that if you talk about them you mess them up. I think it better that you see them but we don’t talk. Because I can’t prove anything, number one. You get into a situation where, we can’t get a picture of this, so let’s get a picture of the guy with the camera. Let’s get around some other way, come in from another angle and get a picture.

In other words, there’s a formula for creation and one thing you don’t want to do is brag about it. That destroys it. But the proof is always in the pudding, and you never do it for yourself. It’s always for somebody who needs help, somebody you feel sorry for, or just wish to be happier. That’s alright.

But the truth of the matter is that I didn’t have any what I’d call basic material thoughts. I was observing stuff but I didn’t have any argument with whatever was running the show. And there’s a possibility that some of it was projected: a silly man asks a silly question and gets a silly answer. Something is cooked up and thrown out in front of him to look at.

dw3-32:28

Q. My understanding is that in your twenties, in all your diggings and readings you hadn’t read anything about enlightenment or satori, that these were unknown concepts.

R. Well, I heard the words. Bob Martin was always talking about [with a flourish] nirvikalpa samadhi. I’d say, “Christ, why don’t you say it in English? What’s that mean? You don’t know what it means. Why use a six-mile word?” But I learned a vocabulary from him. Later I’d be reading and I’d know what he was talking about.

dw3-33:12

Q. You talk about aspects of the experience possibly being a projection, but there was an essence to it where there was no doubt. Is there any doubt in your mind whether it all could have been a projection?

R. Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. If I had doubts about it, it would mean I didn’t make the trip. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. When you fall through space and find yourself in a solid place, that place is valid. You can’t argue with that. That’s as valid as it’s going to get.

dw3-33:59

[A question is asked which Rose doesn’t hear, then the following is repeated.]

Q. You’re pretty much doing it all alone.

R. Well, no, I can’t do too much. I can advise. I can give a talk and maybe get some people interested. But the wrong thing to do is try to coerce, or be an orator and sweep people off their feet. This is nonsense. The thing is, the reason I hang around is that there’s a door open. And some of you people, if you ever want to go through the door, you fight your way up to it. I’m not going to bother you. I’m not going to coerce. I’m not going to raise hell. I may say, “Hey, you’re spelling this wrong.” But you’ll see the way I react.

dw3-34:54

There are people in this group now who have an ability to go the whole trip. But number one, they should fight. The symptom of success to me was when you people start fighting instead of talking about it. To stop listening and start doing. Stop depending, and read your books to get the data. What we’re doing, by books and literature, you feed data into your computer. Because this is nebulous, this thing of enlightenment and so on.

dw3-35:35

In fact, I don’t think a person should really go for enlightenment except for individual proof of survival. Enlightenment can mean a whole lot of different things. But the main thing is for you to get past ignorance. In other words, you’re working hard, you’re studying hard, you guys are all doing things with a lot of energy – ask yourself why. Get the answer. You’ll find out as soon as you try to get that answer you’ll change your lifestyle, if you’re honest with yourself.

Augie’s one guy who doesn’t have to have the answer. He thinks I’ll give it to him when I die, that I’m going to take him with me. [laughs]

A. You keep telling me that but I don’t believe you.

R. I know that’s the reason you hang on.

A. You’ll change your mind at the last minute.

R. I know you believe that too.

A. You wouldn’t do that to me.

dw3-36:50

Q. Augie’s worst fear is probably that you won’t warn him when you’re about to die.

R. I want him to hang around so I can hold him up as an example of how not to live. [laughs]

dw3-37:06

Q. You have a poem in Carillon about saying goodbye, that you were going to leave, but vaguely. It always seemed like strange poem.

A. “I will take leave of thee.”

Q. Yes, it seem strange and I never quite understood. Were you talking about your death?

R. Oh, yeah, that’s what I was referring to.

Q. That’s strange, “but vaguely.”

R. Well that’s what life is. Life is vagueness. It’s all vague. That’s the reason I say that when you hit this, you’re not going to worry about proof. This life is tremendously vague. We don’t know what we’re doing from one day to another. We don’t know what is really true, what we can go on. Everything’s a postulate. We set up a postulate and then try to prove the postulate the way we want it to be proven. Heaven has to be a happy place. Heaven has to be a place where there’s causal creation. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, for some people. That part’s not important. The whole idea is, they may put you to work as soon as you land there, just like here. As soon as you land here you get put to work. We’re like people incubating something out for some other-dimensional entity.

dw3-38:54

The Arts

Q. Did you write poetry when you were young, as well as later in life?

R. I learned verse, how to write with meter, when I was twelve years old in the seminary. The priests got me used to writing with meter. I think one of the poems in the book was written when I was fifteen.

dw3-39:14

[shortened question]

Q. You talk a lot about self-analysis, thinking in words, thinking in ideas. Did you ever feel that poetry or other art forms, like sculpture, were ways of cultivating and exploring moods? Did you ever feel like this was a path?

R. I don’t know. It’s a vanity sometimes. And there’s nothing wrong with vanity unless it poisons your head. It may throw you off if you get too vain. The reason I don’t associate music or any of the arts with spirituality is that the art colonies are all full of degenerates. And that’s evidence enough that I don’t intend to go to any art gallery to find spirituality.

dw3-40:27

Q. I see a lot of ego when I’m in touch with people who do artwork: self-expression at the cost of everything else. But some seem to be sincerely seeking and they work that way.

R. I’ve run into people whose painting showed they had beautiful thoughts. But they’re damn rare. I was up in New York, working up there close to the Catskills as a waiter, and I ran into a guy who was a good artist, a very wonderful man. He was straight too, incidentally. He was Jewish, I think. Ben Gaiolas [sp?] his name was.

Q. Straight you mean heterosexual?

R. Yeah, sexually. He was married, yeah. He was a good guy. I don’t know, he took a liking to me. He wanted to paint my portrait. I didn’t have time and he didn’t have his paints; he was up there on vacation. But I saw that he was just one hell of a good guy. He married this woman and she’s got something bad wrong with her. She’d have crazy spells, wake up everybody in the hotel. And he was very patient with her. I asked him, “Your wife and you are so much different. How did you ever get together?” He said, “When I was a starving artist she kept me.” He was loyal. And when he got to selling some paintings she had flipped her lid. I figured she got paresis or something like that, because it was in her brain and getting worse. She killed herself. I corresponded with him when I came back from there, and I got a letter from him. He said, “Well, she went into the bathtub and cut her wrists, and I found her dead.”

But he was a damn good man. There was no foolishness in him. I saw some of his paintings and there was a beauty and a dignity to them. A lot times I see these painting and I think somebody ate a firecracker and it went off in their head. They’re tainted, after the firecracker hit them. God knows what they’re trying to say. I can’t pick it up.

dw3-43:16

I ran into an artist down in Atlantic City; they had an art show on the boardwalk every year. I wasn’t down there every year, but I met this guy from Maryland, his name is Jerry Dadds. We’ve got a member who’s a graphic artist; I don’t know if you met him when he was down at the farm, but some of you guys know Lee Warfield. He worked for Jerry Dadds for awhile. Jerry Dadds is a real artist. We’ve got calendars by him that are unique: he cuts out blocks of wood and stamps them. I’ve seen my wife do that. She studied art at RISD, and she would whittle out a block and make it look like a rabbit. He made sheep one year; every calendar page had a different type of sheep in it. He puts them out every year and we put them up in the building on the hill, because we figure they’ll be valuable as antiques. One of a kind. But he’s a really good fellow, very human.

[break in tape]

File dw3 ends at 44:44 – sh3 ends at 45:20

File 4

The Arts-cont.

sh4-00:00

dw4-00:00

They’ve got to put that on in order to sell their wares. But I’m saying there are exceptions; there are good people.

Q. You made reference to a series of paintings in Washington DC.

R. That’s Thomas Cole, four big paintings, as big as across that mantel. The four stages of man.

Q. What were the stages?

R. The baby and – I can’t remember them all exactly.

Q. A baby, then a young man, middle aged, and an old man – in a boat, travelling.

R. A little baby is laying in the bottom of the boat and there’s an angel standing at the helm, piloting. And the sky is light, it’s beautiful. The second one is a virile man out there challenging the waves, showing his strength. He thinks he’s on top, he’s got everything under control. He’s still a young man. There was an angel that came with the baby, but on the second one the angel is on the bank, watching. You were with me weren’t you, when we saw that?

A. Yes.

R. The third one is the guy fighting the waves, fighting for his life. The angel has taken off, he’s small figure up in the corner. There are storm clouds and the rudder is off the boat. Then the fourth one is the old man, praying, down on his knees. And the angel is coming back. He’s getting ready to pick up the old man, when he gets rid of his luggage.

dw4-02:41

Power

Q. You said earlier that people in this group are talking about the work but they’re not doing the work right now?

R. Yeah, that’s right.

Q. What could we be doing that we’re not?

R. Well you could be celibate. That’s the first thing. And after that you have to apply action. Celibacy is beauty; you clear up yourself to where you can live with yourself. And then you start taking the energy that you salvage and you go after the books, you go after the philosopher or the meditation. Meditation shouldn’t be sitting there looking at your third eye or something like that; it should be arguing with yourself, analyzing within your own mind. And writing things down, because as you analyze you’re going to forget. So you keep track of your battle scheme, things that you found. You think that this postulation may be true: “Okay, from that postulation we’ll work out a plan to take a step out of ignorance.” You’ll know what I’m talking if you get active, because it’s your whole life.

dw4-03:57

Q. The action is mostly reading and meditating and ... ?

R. Well, I don’t believe in sitting down for the purpose of meditating. I believe in productive thinking. That’s meditation. To find out what your obstacle is, whatever it is. If you’re tongue-tied, learn to be un-tongue-tied. And if you’ve got a faculty, learn to develop that faculty to greater use, greater capacity.

For reading, I’m not saying to read my books. I’m no judge of my books, because I wrote down what I was inspired to write, what I could remember and that’s it. But I used to get Blavatsky’s books, I remember. And when I was out there on the farm I’d wrap up in a blanket and I’d read Blavatsky. There was no path, there was nothing really significant, but those books were just piled with data: people down through the ages who had started spiritual groups, like a history of them. Then she compares them, and you get a tremendous amount of information. I marveled at how the woman ever was able to write that out with a pen. They didn’t even have ballpoint pens then, just a pen point. She has to write it carefully so that some printer can copy it and put the thing together, 700-800 pages and it’s just a load of wisdom.

dw4-05:44

Of course she claims she’s an amanuensis. She never said she thought all this up. She claimed she was either psychically inspired to write it, or she got access to and help from some people in India who would translate their historic spiritual works. For instance Patanjali, he was a pure yogi. By that I mean he wasn’t running a racket. He was interested in people’s being. Then there was the guy before him, who wrote just one page, the guy who could stop an army.

Q. Kapila.

R. Right, Kapila. And I don’t doubt this. These things can be done. The yogis could stop animals, kill tigers that would attack them; they’d shout at them and the tiger would drop dead at their feet. That sounds like fiction but Blavatsky mentions it. But I know that certain things like that can happen, if you’ve got the right attitude, let’s put it that way. Kapila could stop an army. He had tremendous feats that he could do. He didn’t do too much writing but there was a lot of stuff written about him.

dw4-08:00

Now in Tibet they had a thing where they lift these immense blocks of stone with horns. Did you see the dramatization in the paper? The monks blew these horns that reach from here to that wall. They’re building a monastery and the only way they can do it is to go up the face of the cliff, because it must be 50 miles around to get a road to come up there with those blocks. So they tied a rope around them and had a bunch of monks chanting their mantras and blowing those big horns, and the rock floats up. They photographed this procedure not too long ago. I had never run into this before except in Blavatsky. She talked about the power of vril. That’s been recognized down through centuries as the ability to manipulate stone, and there were certain people who had it. If you’re ever in Florida, there’s this place Coral Castle. He had stones cut five feet square ...

Q. He was in love with some woman?

R. He was in love with her and she married somebody else or something. So he just decided he wasn’t going to fool with the human race anymore; he went down there and occupied himself with getting those stones. Nobody could figure out how he did it. He made the gates out of this stone. Did you go there with me?

Art. Yes.

R. He had a wall built out of it, and nobody knows how he cut it or moved it. People around the area knew he didn’t have any derricks. These are enormous stones. I think people tried to find out but he never talked about it. I would have liked to talk to him just to find out how much power he had, what gimmick he used. Of course he’s been dead for quite a while.

But what I’m getting at, there’s a tremendous lot that the human mind is able to do, and there are people who isolate themselves and go do it. Maybe it took all that man’s mental strength in his entire life to get those stones, and that was one project. And he did it to leave word behind that it was possible to do, that’s all. But he didn’t say how.

dw4-10:58

There’s a whole lot about this type of activity, that if you want to do things, don’t speak about it. Like you guys will ask me questions, how do I do this? And I don’t want to tell you. It’s not because I’m playing games with you, it’s because that destroys the formula. You cannot have theatrics. If you have a theatrical attitude you can’t do any of this stuff. In The Direct-Mind Experience, I wrote of betweenness, and betweenness is the formula. And that’s how most of this stuff is done. I don’t know how deeply I got into it, but of course I didn’t want to make statements that I’d have to prove by arithmetic and the laws of physics.

dw4-12:05

Q. Back to studying and reading, why is the pursuit of knowledge considered a path, as compared to the yogis in India who just sit and meditate? Are these all valid paths?

R. None of the yogis who sit and meditate ever came up with an answer. The secret of power is the use of it. I mean, the secret behind wanting it has to be the use of it. I figure that if a guy’s sitting in one position to gather enough power, and he uses it to do something, then I’d say yes, that’s a path. But not just to sit. I used to sit that way to keep from falling over, I’m honest about it. I breathed, sure. There are times when I forget to breathe, so I catch up with it by breathing more frequently. That’s nothing psychic or spiritual.

If you’re doing certain things, when you are moving into an esoteric lifestyle, you’ll sometimes quit breathing. And you can’t quit breathing. Swedenborg made the remark that everybody he knew who attained any enlightenment of this sort were people who quit breathing, who could go for two or three minutes without breathing and didn’t notice it. Anybody read Swedenborg? He wrote a hell of a lot of stuff.

dw4-14:16

Q. What I’m getting at is this constant pursuit of knowledge. All this knowledge seems relative, and as you were saying, this world is vagueness.

R. I don’t tell you to pursue knowledge. I tell you to do things that will provoke your mind to think. Not just to learn more abc’s and algebra or whatever. That’s not knowledge. But this is a relative mind; we have find an absolute answer with a relative mind. And knowing this, to go about it, the only thing you can do with your mind is to remind it.

For instance, if you come and say, “Tell me how to heal people,” I couldn’t, wouldn’t tell you. You take the story of Norbu Chen. , He went over to Tibet and they taught him how to heal. They locked him in a cave, a barred cave that he couldn’t get out of. They locked the door and told him that when he was able to heal people they’d let him out. He evidently got out when he was able to heal people. He came back and lived in Texas a long time. People came from all over the country to get healed, and he healed them.

dw4-15:52

But he told somebody when they interviewed him, “I won’t last very long; this power will fade within two to four years,” something like that. And I have heard mentioned that that’s the reason Christ was crucified, that his power failed him. He was a young man when he started. Two or three years later he had built up some anger among the Pharisees and the political Jews who wanted him dead, the Jews who were dealing with the Romans. Some of the other Jews who followed Christ were thinking that he was going to be the guy who would overthrow the Romans, so the Romans naturally didn’t object when the other people wanted to kill him. But there’s speculation that if Christ hadn’t died at 33 he would have been helpless anyhow. He would have died naturally because he had burnt himself out, like these Tibetans lifting too many rocks a thousand feet in the air. It takes a piece out of you.

dw4-17:01

Q. So what we’re doing by stimulating the mind is just putting tension on ourself?

R. Yes. Because you don’t want to think about it. You go to sleep. You’ve got 101 things to do: you’ll become a painter, a writer, you’ll have all kinds of ideas. There are guys in the group who do this; they write and write and write, and the first thing you know it’s all drivel. And then they back off and try something else. But they don’t want to stop and act in silence. You have to generate that power in silence.

dw4-17:32 – sh4-17:43

For example, what I’m doing by talking, I’m running out of gas. If I were silent, didn’t have to talk, I could show you how to heal people. I can do it anyhow, but I mean I couldn’t do it after I talked too long. Your energy can only be channeled in one direction, and your direction has to be that of acquisition. You have to find your power. And that means it’s an all-out battle. It’s not just something you can do on Mondays and Fridays, or for an hour. I hear people saying, “Well, I get up every morning and sit and meditate for awhile, and before I go to bed maybe I meditate a few minutes.” That’s nonsense. What I want to know is what they’re thinking about when they’re meditating. Meditation without activity is a waste of time, daydreaming. You might get into hell knows what.

dw4-18:41

Action

Q. You talked earlier about finding your ability and that each person has certain abilities. Is that what you mean by finding your power?

R. Well, I’m trying to find an analogy I can give you. And it’s hard to do because it requires action without thinking: action with pre-thinking, knowing that you’re liable to do it from a previous time. But when you act, you do it without thinking, without fear of failure or hope of gain. But that has to follow a lifetime style of egoless-ness. You have to be egoless. But you have to be dynamic, you have to drive.

dw4-19:44

It takes the same strength as would be spent in raising 20 kids. You have to focus. If you’ve got 20 kids you’re going to focus whether you want to or not. That’s what I mean. And it’s important to be able to build that up. There’s a power that functions in the formula.

Now, I don’t talk to you too much. I give talks, but I don’t single anybody out, and I don’t say you’re not doing it right, you’re not doing enough, or you’re not doing this or that. Because of the simple fact that I don’t know how much you’re tied. Now you’re in college, so I’m not saying, “Hey, go join a monastery and don’t graduate.” No, that’s your leverage, that education is your muscle. This doesn’t mean you have to let go of it. You can be a physicist or a chemist or anything else, but your priority has to be the other. And you have to prove that to yourself. Not to me. You prove that to yourself. That’s the way I feel. I worked as a chemist, I worked as a metallurgist, a bunch of different things. And I could grasp it. But all the time I was stirring something up. Always.

dw4-21:22

[shortened question]

Q. I have to decide whether to take another degree or get a job. Being in school I have more free time, and I could have this as my priority. But I also have to eat.

dw4-21:56

R. You’ve got to work, that’s all. It doesn’t matter what you work at. I don’t say to drop it. Hey, I never graduated from college. I was head chemist in Baltimore in one of the plants down there. I had a couple years of chemistry. But I mopped it up; I was eager to put two and two together and learn how to test stuff. And it paid off when I wanted the job. I worked there a little while and then decided I didn’t want to be a chemist. I worked on the development of streptomycin. They developed it in Denver, Colorado at the National Jewish Hospital. I had the whole process practically to myself, reducing this from streptomyces griseus, which was a mold that they grew. Then they centrifuged it.

They did experiments with TB, and with streptomycin they put a stop to it. They closed all the tubercular sanitariums in the country. When I was a boy every state had a TB sanitarium. There are none now. One doctor came through locally. He just went in and everybody who had one lung that was completely useless, he operated, cut the lobe off that was rotten, sewed them up, kept them going on streptomycin and sent them home. Where before, they put them there until they died They didn’t have any cure for it.

dw4-23:43

Q. There are so few jobs that give you the freedom when you need to take off

R. Everything is miserable. When I was working out there, there was always something miserable. Don’t expect things to be too smooth. You’ve got to get a few knots on your head.

Q. Mr Rose, you said earlier that after living a certain lifestyle you come to a point of acting without thinking. Is that what you mean by becoming?

R. I don’t mean acting without thinking; I think you should plan your life ...

Q. No, no, I know you mean that.

dw4-24:51

R. I know what you’re talking about. You’re talking about betweenness.

Q. Yes.

R. But I don’t want you to try betweenness. I’m giving these things to you because I’m not going to be around here all the time, and someday you’ll remember it. You can read The Direct-Mind Experience, and one day it will occur to you that you can do this, and you’ll open the book and say, “Yeah, he knew how to do it. So I’ll do what he said.”

dw4-25:16

Q. I know you’ve advocated against faith ...

R. Yes, it’s auto-hypnosis.

Q. ... and yet in a sense, that style of action based on conviction ...

R. That, I believe in.

Q. ...is a form of faith

R. That’s the paradox of things. I’ve always believed in that. And you better have it. You better fight for what you believe in. Of course you’d better be right. [laughter] I believe you should act on what you believe. You may be in error as far as what other people think, but go through the mistake until it flies up in your face. Then make the correction and believe in it. You have to believe in your correction. It may later be proven not as good as it could have been, but that’s the way you grow. You can’t grow by saying, “Oh, I’m going with the flow.” I always say you wind up in the sewer; that’s where everything flows.

dw4-27:07

When you’re struggling with philosophy you’ll take a certain stand because you like it, or maybe because you think people will like you if you take that stand. And then later on you’ll find out it was baloney. So you adapt, and you say, “I’m going to reset this whole program and I’ll drop the garbage. That gives me more energy and more impetus to carry out the improvement.” And this is what we have: we get improvements in our philosophy; it changes from time to time. Of course, one thing that doesn’t change, we’re after the right answer, meaning the truth. As they say, the truth will make you free, and it will. Of course it can also get you killed. But if you’re free enough before you get killed it doesn’t matter.

You get revelations. When you sit and think, you’ll get real revelations. And those add strength to you as you go. But this whole thing of celibacy is the maximum challenge. When you attain real celibacy, then you’ll have real strength. Of course, that develops an ego too. Then be careful. About the time you get the ego developed, that’s when you fall off the throne.

dw4-29:09

Q. In the past few years, do you think you’ve had more realizations, built on your work?

R. If I answered you I would sound egotistical. So I won’t answer you.

[silence]

dw4-30:55

[shortened question]

Q. You mentioned that a person who lives the life will someday read what you wrote about betweenness: is that the power?

R. That’s one of them. What happens when you get control of yourself, you will feel powerful. If you’re not in control of yourself you will always feel inferior. You’ll be remonstrating. This is not a fiction, it’s not a built-up ego you’re accumulating. This is real power. There’s a power that can be transmitted from one person to another. Somewhere I mentioned the thing about the monkeys: the baby monkeys don’t thrive unless the mother holds them. And if the mother monkey gets killed, maybe some human will hold them and they’ll be just as happy. It’s the realization that you’re safe.

dw4-32:20

As of now you know basically nothing. We know a lot about what the chemistry is in the leaves of those trees, and we know about the neurochemistry in the human body. But we don’t have it pieced together yet. We don’t know where it came from. And there’s the significance of a tremendous, brilliant engineer who has put this thing together. I don’t believe in flesh just being dropped into a pond, the ketone enzyme, and it accidentally finds another ketone enzyme and forms the first human cell. The chances are a billion to one. The chances are that the first ketone enzyme after that billion-in-one chance might get eaten before it reproduces, and that’s the end of the cycle. So if you’ve got even a thousand ketone enzymes that happened by chance, the chance is that they’re going to die.

So there’s something planed against all of those possibilities: that these things have to evolve, that there has to be a metamorphosis from the fish to the land animal, wherever it supposedly started. Then the land animal has to adapt, and it grows different types of limbs. And the next thing you know it’s homo sapiens, from the scum where the earth met the water. So this is really not a good argumentative statement.

dw4-34:10

What I’m saying is, you don’t have to analyze everything. That isn’t part of the power. The power is, number one, when you go so long without weakening yourself, you’ll know that you’ve got power. And this has nothing to do with lifting weights; that gives you no power whatsoever. But you get a power that’s not associated with kinesiology. It’s basically that you know you have a capacity. You also know that you can lose it after you find it. So you take the right-hand road and you go from there. You look for ways and means of discovering the unspeakable. Philosophy in this line is almost unspeakable. You have to have an intuition all the time, and you run it through the computer, an intuitive computer. And you’ll know.

I don’t say it has to interfere with your life; although I think sometimes education can be a real ego trip. I never took a career seriously, because I knew I couldn’t work in a plant and do the work I’m doing. You’re tied in, you can’t move. I came to the conclusion that I had the farm back there, and that was the point where I could come. So I got the books, dragged them back there, got myself a little library. And what those books did was stimulate an activity in the mind. You can’t sit down and say, “I’m going to think about eternity.” Try it, it ain’t going to work. But you can get books on subjects that are remotely related. And the first thing, you’ll be drifting in the right direction, expanding your real philosophic knowledge. The formula is very simple: you take the first step. And if down inside yourself you feel that this is right, you do it. And if you don’t, you don’t pay attention, that’s alright. So you do what you wish.

[37 seconds of silence]

Purity

dw4-37:21

I think that our children in this country, and probably in most countries, in the future will have very little spiritual chance at all. I don’t consider religion spiritual. Religion is the dance of the wishful people, but nothing real. But this comes from purity of mind, and purity of mind comes from purity of body. You can’t have a corrupt routine and do any thinking because you don’t generate intuition. Intuition is only generated in this manner. What you’re doing, you’re dealing with invisibles and intangibles, and the logical mind can’t handle it. It’s only an intuitional mind that will be able to handle those intangibles. Even then sometimes it requires checking other books or other opinions, and carefully weighing stuff out before you make it part of your lifestyle.

dw4-38:18

But today, my little girl goes to school and they hand her an educational pamphlet on sex education, and in this pamphlet are pictures of the male organs. And they are given to the little boys as well, pictures of female organs. So you’re not going to have any celibacy in this country or in any country. We’re going to become a bunch of dogs all over the face of the earth. There were wise men years ago who advised celibacy and the religions endorsed it. Today the religions are crumbling because you’ve got homosexual preachers and degenerates of any capacity you want to think of. They’re in the clergy as well as anyplace else. So they’re not going to protect the children.

dw4-39:12

This is one of the quotes that I take from the Bible, that you’ve got to become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. And that means pure, that’s what that means. I have a daughter who’s been raised as perfectly as I can raise her, and my wife has been 100% in cooperation with it. There is nothing of vulgarity that exists in our house. There’s no vulgar talk or insinuations that would cause her little imagination to start spinning. But hell, you send her over to school and they’re telling her this is something you’ve got to learn. The next thing, they’ll be practicing it. And the race will go to hell, that’s all.

dw4-40:04

Q. Why do you think things are going downhill like that?

R. I think there has always been a battle between the human eaters and the human developers. There have been entities that wanted just to consume the human race. In other words, you’re like potted plants, except that you’ve got wheels, you’ve got feet. But I think we’re raised for certain things. There’s evidence to me that there are entities that feed off human energy, and the human energy comes to them in the form of sex energy. If you read some of these accounts, that’s basically where the temptation occurs. Temptation is a mental message put into an entity, a human body that’s got kind of a stupid brain in it that can’t pick up direct from entities; but it jockeys him into a position where he will lose semen. So the entities are prodding for that purpose. I presume they want the commodity. What they do with it, God knows. Maybe we’re their food supply, I don’t know.

dw4-41:16

Q. In Life After Life, Raymond Moody talks about the experience that people have after death. Have you read the book?

R. Yes, I read it.

Q. Those experiences seem like you get a feeling of peace and safety. Are these just certain people who have these type of experiences? I remember a guy who you and Augie ran into in Benwood, and his experience was of nothing.

R Sure, because his whole life was spent drinking and whoring around. If he wasn’t drunk he was with a woman. And to him that was great. To me, he was being cultivated to fertilize the garden for some blasted reason.

Q. So you think most of the masses are headed toward his direction?

R. The masses are headed for a crude, animal existence.

Q. Which may very well end up in annihilation at death?

R. I don’t know. I hope not. I mean, I hope I don’t live to see it, that’s all. And I hope my daughter survives it, if possible. I don’t know what causes these things. But when the Congress of the United States passes laws saying that you can’t be rude to a homosexual, you can’t refuse him a job, you can’t refuse the risk of AIDS, then we are doomed. And you go to prison if you hate them. I mean, you don’t have to say you hate them, you have to show that you don’t want them around, and then that might be considered hate. Now I don’t hate them. And I feel as it’s mentioned in the Bible, that it goes back 6 or 7 generations, and don’t blame anybody in particular. I don’t believe in that. But at the same time, just because somebody wants to get reelected to Congress, why should the whole human race have to expose themselves to something? They’re fighting over that now, they want the doctors and nurses to be tested for AIDS. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but the heat is building and there’s opposition to it.

Congress is basically in favor of educating kids that there’s nothing wrong with it. This is not the way to educate them. There is something wrong with it. They should teach them to avoid it – not to hate the kids, but to avoid it. I think that if some of these sky pilots, these ministers who scream and shout and that sort of thing to get people excited, would mention some moral advice to their parishes, they would be doing something of value for their people. But I don’t hear much of that. I think it’s just a big hypnotic thing.

[End of audio tape. Should be continued on the video tape if it can be located.]

[side dw4 ends at 44:44. side sh4 ends at 44:44]

Footnotes

 Url: http://www.direct-mind.org/index.php?title=1991-1006-Augies-Apartment-Raleigh 

For more information send email to editors@direct-mind.org

 Brief excerpts of this talk appear in the video “Mister Rose”. http://tatfoundation.org/videos.htm
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookgreen_Gardens 
 Photo here: http://tatfoundation.org/psych.htm 
 Edwin J. Dingle (1881-1972), English journalist, founder of Institute of Mentalphysics in California. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Dingle
 Southwest Research Institute. Martin started there Dec. 1953. Peace to the Wanderer, p. 55. 
 Tom Slick Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Slick 
 Slick is most famous for having investigated the Yeti. 
 William Nolen reported that Slick’s Mind Science Foundation tested Norbu Chen in the early 1970s. http://selfdefinition.org/norbu-chen/nolen/william-nolen-norbu-chen-chapter-10.htm
 Rose wrote Martin on April 12, 1959 saying that Rose would have moved to San Antonio to work with Tom Slick, but he felt that Slick’s work was aimless. In the same letter Rose wrote: “If you see Tom Slick, tell him that if he wants to do something worthwhile and also make a million, to form an expedition to rescue the Tibetan libraries of esoteric books from the Communists.” Peace to the Wander, p. 80-83.
 Martin met Wood in San Antonio in 1959. Peace to the Wanderer, p. 91. 
 Rose and Wood were both born in 1917. They met in Akron in 1963 so both were 46. Wood died in 1965. http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-obituary.htm
 See 'Mystical Christian' Presents Beliefs: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm
 Rose was under the impression that Wood had participated in the atomic bombing of Japan, but Wood does not appear on the crew lists. The US was engaged in conventional bombing towards the end of the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan 
 http://selfdefinition.org/christian/guggenheim-gleason.htm 
 The account of Mary Wood, the second wife, suggests that Wood had already separated from his first wife by the time he had the experience.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records 
 Rose may be quoting some other Buddhist teacher. Confucius lived 551–479 BC. Buddha is believed to have lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC. 
 Rose never mentions Wood’s space travels in the context of a silver flying saucer as later told by Mary Wood http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm 
 Martin said considerable time was spent on “forgive us our trespasses,” where Wood surveyed his entire life to understand the nature of his trespasses and their causes. p. 92
 Rose remembers meeting Wood only once (see 1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute) but Martin says Rose met Wood on two occasions. Peace to the Wanderer, p. 96.
 Rose is forgetful here of Alfred Pulyan, who Rose said was an effective teacher.
 http://tatfoundation.org/magic.htm 
 See Mark Jaqua, “Conservation Therapy”, August, 1986. Pdf: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
 See videotape: 1991-1007-What-Is-Enlightenment-Raleigh
 Rose was living close to his job at the Seattle Tennis Club on the west side of Lake  Washington. The Cascades are east of Seattle. He would be viewing Mt. Baker if the window faced east, or Mt. Rainier if south.
 “The peoples of the earth did I see, all that had lived or will live, and their thoughts were upon their faces.”  http://www.richardrose.org/ThreeBooks.pdf 
 Desire realm is Buddhism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_realm 
 Causal realm is Theosophy: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/et/et-03.htm
 The year was 1947 so probably the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, which opened in 1940. .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Washington_Floating_Bridge
 See postcard from Rose to Martin: “Am in trouble. Will arrive Cleveland 8:00 P.M. the 19th. Meet me at Greyhound station.” Dated Seattle, May 15, 1947. Peace to the Wanderer. p. 19.
 After the experience in Seattle, Rose  worked for some months as a layout inspector at Cleveland Pneumatic Tool Company, then briefly as a waiter in Medina, Ohio, and then joined Martin at B&W in Alliance, Ohio (renting a room in Hartville). He returned to West Virginia in the fall of 1948. See Peace to the Wanderer, p. 23-28.
 Rose describes his writing of the poem in Chapter 8 of The Albigen Papers.
 Chapter 8: “I was losing contact with the motionless condition imposed on me ... Motion was once more enchanting. A rose was once more a rose. I came home from work each day and propped myself up in front of a typewriter. I thought that I had a message of joy and beauty for the world.”
 Rose wrote the poetry in Carillon before his experience. Peace to the Wanderer, p. 10.
 Rose says 1992 in the original.
 From 1981-1114-How-to-Run-a-Psychological-Group: “A person about to commit suicide is in exactly the same boat as a man right before an experience of enlightenment. He has written everything off. He has come to the conclusion that his name is shit, the world’s name is shit, the future’s name is shit and the past is pretense and shit. So he says, ‘Hey, check out.’ He’s a wise man. Now, if in that trauma he is handled correctly, he may have a spiritual experience.” Also see the first few minutes of 1983-0323-Is-the-Game-of-Life-Fixed-Synod-Hall-Oakland-PA.
 Bardo at the moment of death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo 
 Son was also named Ralph (died at 21). 1951-1972 http://www.ancientfaces.com/person/ralph-decker/30318103  
 See 1978-1023-Nostalgia-and-Dreams-Case-Western.
 There are two different versions: 1979-Moods-Ohio-State, in Direct-Mind Experience, ch. 3, and audio available from Rose Publications. http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/richardrose8 
 Martin met Rose in the spring of 1943 when Rose was 26. Peace to the Wander, p. 1.
 See “Jerry Dadds: The Artist and The Messenger”: http://youtu.be/XBW5_TD8Nc8 
 1989 Calendar: http://www.nikisawyer.com/sheep/sheep_image_5423.htm 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapila 
 For example: “Here is the body of the tiger to testify that the animal was not killed with a weapon of any kind, but simply by the word of Gulab-Lal-Sing.” From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6687/6687-h/6687-h.htm   .
 Wikipedia: “60,000 sons of Sagara ... assaulted him. Kapila turned his assailants to ashes.”
 Search web on Dr. Jarl, German, 1940s, Tibetan levitation.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle 
 (1887-1951) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Leedskalnin 
 Rose says in 1977-0405-Zen-Columbus that breathing exercises could have been used as training to help the yogi return to life after an enlightenment experience.
 Swedenborg practiced breath control to achieve concentration. “Some Historical Implications of Swedenborg's Spiritual Psychology.” http://www.shs.psr.edu/studia/index.asp?article_id=116 
 See Fate Magazine, August, 1974. http://selfdefinition.org/norbu-chen/  
 See 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU for discussion of Norbu Chen.
 Actually only a few years; Norbu Chen died in 1977 according to his assistant JoAnn Parks.
 In the Fate Magazine article, Norbu Chen said he would only be good for three years. 
 In this paragraph there are two references to Christ that Rose attributes to Norbu Chen, but the statements do not appear in the Fate Magazine article. In “Points of Reference” and “Psychology of Miracles”, both in Direct-Mind Experience, Rose said that he heard these speculations but he does not attribute them to Norbu Chen. They may have come from a different source such as Rose’s acquaintance Slim Cunningham. For Cunningham see 1984-0428-Peace-of-Mind-in-Spite-of-Success-Akron.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptomyces_griseus 
 From 1983-0610-Denver-Colorado: “I have learned a tremendous lot since I was 50 years of age. My experience occurred at 30. My experience only gave  me an answer, it didn’t tell me how I could communicate with other people. It didn’t tell me the mechanisms of the people’s minds and that sort of thing. So you can always learn a tremendous lot.”

End