1981-0215-Psychology-of-Miracles-Akron-from-DME

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Notes

Need to compare with tapes. Feb 15, 1981 is written in the book (hardbound edition) so is presumed correct.

This is from the html.

There are several diagrams. Need to add these.

Dave Weimer cassettes are labeled "1980 Miracles Columbus".

Diagrams

Text

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MIRACLES

Akron, Ohio February 15, 1981

In this talk we are going to run through a lot of things that are unusual, and try to catalogue them if possible, or to let you judge for yourselves what you think is the basis for all these phenomena.

There are many phenomena, and I was fascinated with them from the time I was quite young. I looked into everything available, and this included tune spent in Spiritualism looking for materializations and that sort of thing.

TYPES OF ENERGY

I find that people are inclined to leap ahead into excessive mystery when explaining the material things that occur in life, where a lot of things can be explained by simple biological means.

The secret of miracles is based on the different energy transmutations that are diagrammed in figure 1. As we come out of the earth (at point A.), our first transmutation is food. Transformation of food into flesh occurs with physical exercise, and the food goes into every part of the body. If you are sick, even if you have heart trouble, the doctors will tell you to move, -- you can't heal yourself if you don't oxidize. You have to get out and move the muscles, and keep the blood circulating.

The first horizontal line in figure 1 represents the primitive individual, where food is the only transmutation.

Some of the food goes into a type of flesh called glands. The endocrines are one place where energy can be stored. Of course energy can be stored in fat, but it is much more quickly released from glands than it is from fat and muscle tissue.

Above that second line, above the glands, we have a neural quantum, -- you can develop neural energy as an additional transmutation.

Many of you may be acquainted with the recent discoveries in brain chemistry. There are chemicals, some produced by the pituitary gland, which affect the synaptic action in the brain. In the process of checking this synaptic action the scientists found that there are opposing forces at work in the nervous system. Two of the chemicals which they have discovered are dopamine, the exhilarator, and serotonin, the depressant. The body is balanced in this way.

Now a synapse is the end of a nerve, which feathers out like fingers on a hand. Two nerves are matched with each other, some distance apart, and at the moment of a thought or perception there is a spark which jumps across from one to the other. This goes on through all the nerves in the brain. Perhaps the message from the eye or the sensory nerves in the fingers won't have a spark jump until it reaches the brain.

If you stop and think about this for awhile you will see why this is necessary. Nothing can be piped directly into the mind or the memory banks, so this intermediary process is used. There is a strong supposition that man lives right here in the spark gap, the same as an automobile lives in the gap of a spark plug. To operate properly the spark must be just right, -- not too strong, not too weak.

Now there is a chemical (with about twenty letters in it) that clears the path of every impulse that comes into the brain. This happens at almost the speed of light. Within a split second another message comes through, and its path must be prepared also. If you are studying, for example, and holding your body still in a chair at a desk, the mind continues to think, -- forcing this action. After awhile the system rises to the occasion and starts to produce enough of these clearing chemicals. These chemicals result from transmutation. And when you run out of this force, the body goes to sleep.

Civilization, which depends upon human thought, is based on the development of the proper chemicals here. Perhaps with each generation there is a chance for the development of a greater sensitivity, -- and possibly a greater inclination for overburdening the brain with drugs and so forth.

Figure 1 - Energy Transmutation

From the neural quantum, and only from the neural quantum, is the spiritual quantum developed. This refers to people who are able to heal with their energy, such as Christ and some of the other famous healers (and rules out that class of people who maybe just believe and go to church.) This quantum is developed at the cost of something else, -- of intense concentration in a direction.

In short then, if you stay at the first level you transmute food into flesh, you get fat, and you can become a hog, -- the energy follows (in figure 1) across and back down to the earth. At the second level you can transmute it into the glands. If that is as far as you go, you become a goat and the energy also returns to the earth. Civilization rests on the ability to transmute the energy someplace above the glands.

TYPES OF MAGICIANS AND MAGIC

There are three different classes or types of magicians. One uses illusion. A second dispels delusion, i.e., takes the path of wisdom. A third, whom most of the books call a Magus, is the magician who creates. These forms start with the physical and go upward to the mental forms of magic.

Also I have categorized six types of magic. The first is what we call sleight-of-hand or legerdemain. This is deliberate delusion, playing tricks with a person's optics and so forth.

A second class of magic is practiced with physical energy. It doesn't require neural energy, but can be done with just simple somatic or protoplasmic energy. The Japanese had a way of developing energy they called hara (the Chinese used the word chih), using it in the ability to break bricks with the hands, do superhuman feats, lift enormous loads and so on.

The existence of these abilities are a validation of the different quantum energies I am referring to. I became convinced of the existence of neural quantum energy when I saw several feats where people were able to do enormous tasks with their hands, beyond the normal capacity of the body, -- verging upon the miraculous.

You hear a lot of stories about people lifting heavy loads in an emergency, such as women lifting automobiles when their children have been caught underneath. I have read several accounts of this, and I experienced this enormous energy myself when I was young. A two-ton truck had hit a taxicab and overturned. It was a junk truck full of bathtubs and that sort of thing, -- the truck was on its side, pinning a man and a pregnant woman to the street. Two of us had heard the noise and ran down the street to the scene of the accident.

I shouted to the fellow with me, "We've got to get the truck off them." We took ahold of it, -- and couldn't move it. I kept cursing and shouting, "Come on." Then -- we picked it Up -- we pushed it over, putting it back on its dual wheels. I don't know of any weightlifter who could have picked up that load. And neither I nor the other fellow had ever lifted weights. I could not have done that under ordinary conditions. Afterward we were totally weakened, to the point of collapse from the strain.

From this experience I became convinced that we summoned energy from all parts of our body. That is the only way we could have done it. And I came to the conclusion that the energy comes through the nerves. It doesn't come through the bloodstream, because the bloodstream doesn't have time to get it to all the muscles, say, of the back and arms.

This event took place when I was quite a bit younger. It wasn't until about ten years ago that I came across the evolved scientific chemical analysis of what they call the neural transmitters, these things which clear the path and allow the transmission of the electrical messages through the nerves. But if this can work at lightning speed to clear the synapses, it can also work at lightning speed to transmit energy to any part of the body.

I'm not saying that you have to have neural quantum energy to do these things, but I'm saying that the nerves become transmitters of an enormous energy. What we have is what I call the potential in the nervous system to hold a quantum of energy.

Incidentally, this hara is what the Japanese used in their hand-to-hand combat. You hear stories coming out of places like Formosa about individuals trained to kill people with their hands. I think that they may have unconsciously projected through their nervous system into their hands the power that would have lifted a truck. Now the bad thing is of course that it's all right to use this ability once in a while to help somebody who is injured, but I can't see the idea of downgrading what I consider to be a very sacred energy for the purpose of killing people.

Taking this energy a step further it becomes neural energy. It becomes the intelligence. The ability to maintain a certain level of neural energy will determine the reaction or the grades a person gets when he goes to college.

Going up another step of transmutation from there we come to healers (that's basically what we're here to talk about.) This transmutation comes from neural energy, -- it can't come from anywhere else. And it occurs when energy is projected from the human body, sometimes at a distance and sometimes by laying on of hands. It doesn't comes through the mind of a man so much as it does from the nerves. Of course the mind has to have the intention or direction. This is a bit more complicated than just thinking about something and doing it, -- you may have to think about it for years before you become proficient at healing.

The third category of magic is the miracle of faith. This seems to have very little to do with quantum energy. There is a certain mental attitude that has to occur, but a lot of faith healings happen without any particular body condition of the healer. I assume that most healings take place in a group, so that energy is drawn from a dozen up to several hundred people perhaps.

Some of the mechanics of faith are known, but most things about it are unknown. Also in the faith category is witchcraft. People don't stop to think about this, but witchcraft doesn't work unless the user has faith in it. And they find that to place a spell on a subject effectively, requires having him believe in it.

About twenty or thirty years ago huna healing was quite the rage. They had deciphered the Hawaiian languages and decided that the huna-doctors had developed a unique system of healing that involved faith or belief. Even the huna-doctors believed it, -- so they in turn could be killed by another witchdoctor's reversal of it.

The fourth general category of magic includes the mental forms. This is above the physical and the faith categories, and the mechanics of it are known. The mental tricks or magic have to do with hypnosis, zapping, psychokinesis and so forth, and these are things which have been scientifically tested.

Psychokinesis (psycho - mind; kinetic - moving), the moving of objects with the mind, is manifestly an extrusion of the mind itself. Uri Geller has undergone a lot of testing with scientists in this country and in England, and they claim that he can affect matter in such ways as twisting objects and repairing watches. There is a Russian lady also who can move objects with her mind just by concentration.

Zapping is a form of hypnosis. While hypnosis generally depends upon mesmeric passes or something that fixes itself on the person's mind or traps his attention, zapping can be done without your knowing it. This is the root-value of most of the cults which come out of India and the East. There are people who train to go into a concentrative mood and remain that way for long periods of time. They will discipline themselves for ten or twenty years to learn how to "zap," -- I think they call this shakti. They are able to actually knock a person off his feet simply by looking at him, and sometimes without looking at him.

You may have heard of Meher Baba, who had this ability. He disciplined himself, even remaining silent up until the time he died. People would come into a room to see him, walk in front of him and collapse on the floor in front of him. Of course that was quite a sales feature. People really believed that this fellow had something, -- that he had the knowledge of the Cosmos or was in tune with a higher Spirit.

But he wasn't necessarily in tune with a higher spirit, -- this was just the product of India. I've always said that since they don't have a great steel production over there they had to find something else to export. And I'm not saying this out of a critical manner, -- I have studied this for a long time, have joined and been initiated into groups. I studied their techniques, and found that it has nothing to do with God.

The fifth category of magic has to do with the magic of entities. We won't discuss this very much here, although you can ask questions about it later if you're interested. You will find hints of this in old writings like The Tempest, where spirits create storms or do the bidding of some person.

The sixth and final category is what I call a supramental form of magic. This category is represented by the arrow pointing upward in figure 1, to spiritual quantum energy, or creation. This is a method of effecting magical happenings, meaning something such as a cure that has no good explanation for the average person, -- a result which occurs without a prescription from a medical doctor.

EXAMPLES OF MAGIC

Now that we have identified the main categories of magic we can talk about some examples in greater detail. There are some other categories as well, -- I don't know exactly how all of these work, but I will identify them as we go along to the best of my ability.

In the Polynesian Islands there is a magic performed that brings the dinner in to the table, -- the people play music that brings the dolphins in. They chant a little mantra to the dolphins, even before they are visible, that the people are having a dinner and all the dolphins are invited. The dolphins don't realize of course, that they are the dinner. (This also is another instance where it seems strange that people would put magical energy into such a purpose.)

When you get to talking about magic, a lot of people will say that this is primitive or that this is pagan superstition and so forth. And to this I say, "Nonsense." These things have been scientifically investigated, and other things as well such as firewalking. People have tested them and they are found to work. The whole field of alchemy is full of these tilings.

Every major religion on the face of the earth believes in magic and believes very strongly. The fundamentalistic Christians can go back to the Old Testament, which is full of instances of it, -- people being taken up alive into heaven, people healing the sick, men emerging from fiery furnaces. Unless we have to redefine the term magic, I say these things are synonymous with it. The same power is there.

We have cases of raising the dead, communicating with the dead, and supernatural help in removing obstacles to progress, as in Heaven sending a legion of angels to help Gideon. Other phenomena observed are walking on water, changing destinies, and stopping blood. Anyone here who is near my age will have heard of the stopping of blood, done with a formula supposedly from the Bible.

Within our own era were the experiments at Duke University, monitored by J.B. Rhine, which resulted in the use and legitimizing of the term ESP. By throwing dice with the right frame of mind you can win. This includes precognition and psychokinesis. They found a measurable increase in the frequency of the dice coming up on a certain number when concentrated on for a long period of time. With practice they could alter the roll of the dice.

I refer to the pursuit of this type of knowledge as Direct Mind Science. This covers generally all of the things I have mentioned so far, and there are many other examples of it in history, -- such as Kapila's Eye. This term comes from ancient Hindu philosophy about the origins of the Indian religions.

There were two men, Shankara and Kapila, the one supposedly the teacher of the other. Kapila was said to have stopped an attacking army -- I don't know how large it was -- but the group was supposedly destroyed by his glance. He gave them the evil eye. Now this may sound farfetched, but of course it happened a few thousand years ago so the recording of it may be twisted a bit.

Right here in Ohio we had the incident of Tecumseh, the Shawnee Indian magician. He was immune (or convinced a lot of people that he was immune) to bullets. He once told some people around him, "I'll stamp my foot and the earth will tremble." So he struck his foot on the ground and there was an earthquake. He had some tremendous power, and even predicted his own death -- knowing that he had to die, and knew the time, and the cause of his death.

So how do these things come about? Somewhere underneath all of this is a common denominator, which I'm trying to indicate in this talk.

Within the miracles of faith are the institution at Lourdes, the healings of Christ, and incidentally the healings of Rasputin. Rasputin was supposed to have been an evil genius. He was what they called a starets in Russia, a travelling holy man. Their ideas of holiness differed a bit from ours, -- he could be quite a lecher when he took a notion to be. Yet he healed people. He was a friend of the last Czar in Russia, between the turn of the century and World War I. They brought Rasputin into the family because the only son of the Czar was a hemophiliac, and Rasputin was able to heal him.

I was fascinated when I read about his life. Rasputin would come into a town and retire into a cellar or cave or whatever they let him stay in. He would remain there a couple of weeks, fast and pray, and abstain from sexual contact, living like a penitent. They said that when he came out of the cellar he would be as pale as a ghost, -- but anyone who got in his road got healed. He would go through town healing people and of course create quite a stir. He could have anything he wanted. He didn't acquire a lot of money in his life, but he had a lot of prestige.

However, there was a negative side of Rasputin. Before leaving town, after healing all the people, he would take all the women out into the woods, -- and they would have a grand orgy. I don't know why he tied this into his life, why it would have been important to him. But it's amazing how well women could keep secrets, -- there wasn't a single man in Russia that ever found out what happened.

Notice that he developed or renewed his quantum energy while he was in the cellar. The power to zap, to transfer energy to someone else, was renewed. As I mentioned, this zapping is among the mental forms of magic.

MENTAL FORMS OF MAGIC

Also among the mental powers we have hypnosis. This business of changing water to alcohol, of which we have a case in the Bible, can be done quite easily with hypnosis. We can't go back and check what happened then, but you can check what happens today. This is quite commonly done. If we had the time today we could hypnotize someone and give them a drink of water, telling them it was alcohol, and they would get drunk. It makes a good show.

A new thing coming up is the effect of the mind upon plants, which in the past has been outside the realm of magic. I think Burbank pointed out years ago that plants responded to human emotions, but I don't think anybody paid any attention to him.

Now these things relate to the conscious mind. But there is another thing, another faculty of the mind, that enters into this magical dimension. I call this Direct Mind. The bigger things are done with direct mind influence, while the smaller things are done with hypnosis, zapping, and the like. Also, there were people alive not long ago, such as Meher Baba and Gurdjieff, who were able to zap skillfully by direct mind. By that I mean that they didn't have to dangle something in front of someone to put him to sleep. This could be done if someone just walked within range of them, and sometimes could be done at great distances.

These examples are not just idle chatter. They are all things that I have seen and done, and also have read about others doing. There is an instance in the Bible about Ananias and Sapphira, who were supposedly killed by Peter with mental power. And Blavatsky writes of being on a portico at a place out in the jungle when a tiger leaped over at the people. A yogi stood up and shouted at the tiger, which dies in mid-air. When it hit the ground it was dead. Again, these are some of those things in magic which a person who prided himself on having a logical mind would find hard to believe. But these things can be done.

A third mental power is creation, represented (figure 1) by the arrow pointing upward. As an example of the use of the mind to create we have something called a tulpa. Alexandra David-Neal, who I consider to be a responsible and intelligent author, outlines in her Magic and Mystery in Tibet a method used by monks to create an image of a person with their will and imagination. These could be seen by other people, -- they weren't as thin as a ghost, but appeared to be very solid. Normally, or abnormally, the monks created women. The only trouble was that after awhile the tulpa would take on a very feminine personality and become hard to live with. Then it took the monk possibly years to get rid of or melt the image.

There are other things that can be created. You may have heard of materializations, which are similar to a tulpa. I was at a materialization session once when a man walked out from behind a curtain and said, "Touch me, and let these people know that I am solid." This was in a room of a house, not a big auditorium. The man who responded was a professional man, a chemist, and he said, "You're as solid as I am, I'm quite sure." But when the thing left, it went right through the floor. Incidentally, I spent years tracking down phony mediums to find a genuine materialization. And most of them are phony.

Telepathy is another form of direct mind creation or projection. You can contact people sometimes at great distances. A lot of people are contacted automatically by urgency, such as when a relative becomes sick, -- the message gets conveyed with something in the communication that is very pressing. And I think telepathy can also be done by practice.

There are things, as I said, which we don't know the cause of. We don't have enough data on many of them, such as Kapila's eye. Nobody can go back six thousand years and check the data. The use of talismans is also somewhat mysterious, -- it implies ascribing a magical power to a stone, ring or other object. Of the mechanics of this I have no idea. Perhaps it functions on the level of belief, since they are often used within faith systems.

THE MECHANICS OF MAGIC

We don't know haw many of these things work, because our knowledge of the world just scratches the surface. But there are things which we are capable of understanding, when we come to the idea of psychology.

The tie-in is that without psychology none of these things exist. The stage magician is one of the shrewdest psychologists you will ever come up against. He knows how to delude the people because he knows what the mind is not capable of resisting. From the very beginning magic deals with the mind. It is either deluding the mind or opening up the mind to the wisdom that is behind a lot of supposed delusions.

The mechanics of magic seem to be very complex. But by cataloguing the forms and finding common denominators we can hope to greatly simplify them. Many of the magical things are done by very simple people who have no scholastic education. But, for example, in throwing dice, the mechanics of what causes them to roll a certain way must be quite complex, -- and it all has to happen within a short time, say two or three seconds, before the dice come to a stop. So there has to be an intelligence there which is superior to our ability to watch the faces on the dice as they roll and at the precise moment bring them to a stop.

There has to be something there which is beyond that, because these things are done. They can be made to happen. Science is basically a system of prediction. All things in chemistry, physics, and mathematics have to be based upon prediction and proof, meaning duplication of the experiment. Somebody says that he can put hydrogen and oxygen together and produce water. He is asked to prove it and he does it. Then a man comes up and says, "I can concentrate on those dice and bring up a certain average." And he does it. Once he can make predictions like this his work is scientific.

And all these other phenomena, for example healing, may likewise be subject to prediction and demonstration. Incidentally there are certain common denominators and even common limitations to these, such as Christ's inability to heal in a town in which no one believed in him. The people with whom you grew up, and talked with, and played ball with, don't believe that you can do anything except what you did in the home town, -- as a youth.

THE PATH TO MAGIC

Everybody wants to be a magician. I would say that most of the religions on the face of the earth would not have begun and been perpetuated without the use of magic. Nobody wanted to hear polite philosophy alone. They had to have something that healed the sick, or possibly repaired them when they spent too much of their energy in the wrong direction.

Every child wants to find out the mechanics of life, and then to control. And here is where the clashing of personalities occurs, because they run into someone else who also wants to control. Then the competition begins, to be stronger or more clever or whatever.

Generally the first thing a person tries is basic stage magic, -- it seems as if you have to start somewhere. When I was in my teens I looked into Spiritualism, going from one camp to another. Once in college I started working with hypnosis, and for a few months I was really pleased with myself, -- I thought it was a lot of fun leaving them lying in the hallways. But I never had the idea of becoming a stage hypnotist. It wasn't too long before I realized that I was only touching the edge of an enormous body of power, that I could sense that lay back there somewhere. And I came to the conclusion that it was somewhere inside me.

So I would occasionally use hypnosis for parlor entertainment or possibly to help someone, but never on a commercial basis. Some of us also experimented with regression. Some time ago there was the case of Bridey Murphy, who supposedly remembered who she was in a former lifetime in Ireland. This created quite a stir, and shook up all the Catholics in the world with this once-and-for-all "proof of reincarnation, and the destruction of the myth of one life-trip. Or the truth of it, whichever it is.

At the tune, I was meeting regularly with a group of people who were interested in spiritualistic interpretations. We decided to try regression; since I was able I did the hypnosis. We didn't get too far with it, but I did discover this much, -- that you can't prove reincarnation with hypnosis. Because, a person can be hypnotized and put into almost any space and time dimension you want, and then respond and even come up with items of history. Before the meeting I would stop at the library and get someone's name out of a history book. Later we would hypnotize someone and tell them that they were this person. They would then play it out.

To give you an example, I once hypnotized a lady about thirty-two years of age. I stopped at the library in a hurry on the way to the Friday night meeting. I was careful to get the name of a person who had died before our subject was born, so I took the name of a British spy the Germans had executed in World War I.

The spy was a woman named Edith Cavell. I got the name, the date and place of execution, the fact that she was shot, and that she had a boyfriend who was a British Major. (It seems that they mated rather late over there. She wasn't a pretty young girl like Mata Hari, -- she was nearly fifty years of age when she was shot, and her boyfriend was older than she was.)

So at the meeting I hypnotized the girl and told her, "Your name is Edith Cavell, this is the year 1917, and you are standing in front of a German firing squad. Now tell me, why are you standing there? What did you do?" And she got hysterical, of course. At first she said, "I don't know what I did wrong." But after I repeated the question she recounted many of the details of the execution.

This was done in the home of a Presbyterian minister who was originally from Italy. His wife, although also Italian, had grown up in England and had gone to college there. I noticed that all the while I was getting answers from the hypnotized woman, the minister's wife was nodding her head in agreement. To the question, "How are you dressed?" the woman said, "I have my nurse's uniform on." The minister's wife would nod her head, "Yes, that's right."

When it was all over we awakened the girl. And the minister's wife said, "That's an amazing thing. How could she have known? That was exactly what happened, -- the description of the dress even down to the stripes."

And I said, "Howdojyou know?"

She said, "I was raised in England, and at the time Edith Cavell was killed I was a little girl. I read about it in the newspapers." (It was like the hostages in Iran today, -- everyone idolized Edith Cavell.) "Every incident of that execution was branded in my mind as a child. This was an important, heroic figure to me and I never forgot the details all my life."

Now this was a coincidence, because I hadn't discussed beforehand with the group the name which I would use. I had just fished for a random name, only picking someone who had died before our subject was born.

This experience was amazing. I later corresponded with a hypnotist hi New Jersey, and he told me some fantastic things similar to this. You can even go back in hypnosis into what Carl Jung calls the archetypal or racial memory, knowledge which is germane to a certain nationality.

Back to the idea of the upward progression of the magician, we come to the words on the chart, "Selfish Ego." In other words, this is the selfish person who is wanting to be powerful and wanting to show his power, In turn, after you look it over you change to a higher ego, in that you want wisdom rather than power.

To be frank, my conviction was that I was facing my eventual death, and I realized that the body would not survive. Perhaps if I were lucky though, something that I learned would survive. So you don't want to be selfish, except for your pursuit of survival. I wasn't interested anymore in making a big splash as much as I was in becoming something mentally. And I went into mental sciences then which would expand my own sphere.

(Kundalini, which is one of the factors in these sciences, is the basis of a lot of magic. The term refers to the means by which the glandular energy is transmuted upward. There is considerable literature about it. You don't have to use an Indian word for it, but there is no word in the English language which quite suits it.)

So we have the question of egos. You will find in the writings on Zen the message of attaining a tremendous awareness with the dropping of these egos. Of course, they have to be dropped in a certain order. And here we come to a new term, "Outer Energy." This is the self-less ego. It is the ego of the healer, -- but the healer is now making a sacrifice of himself and his own private energy.

Most of the healings which use energy and are found in church settings are brought about by the transfer of energy from the healer to the person healed. Some theologians attribute the use of this method to Christ, and say that had he lived beyond the age of thirty-three he would have died anyway, because he was so burnt from the transfer of his energy.

There was a fellow who went over to Tibet a while ago to study healing. He had been working as an undercover detective for the state of Kentucky, and had to leave the country because his life was in danger. So he went to Tibet and paid them to teach him to heal, -- he took the name of Norbu Chen.

Supposedly they locked him up in a cave and told him to concentrate until he generated the quantum energy necessary to heal. Afterward he came back to Houston, Texas and was healing quite a few people. These were miraculous cures such as removing tumors and other conditions which were nearly fatal, or at least which would have become fatal after a few years. He said he was doing it by direct projection of energy, but that he couldn't project it indefinitely.

It's like a generator producing a high form of electricity, and you can't generate forever. He told the press when he was interviewed that he was only good for a couple of years. No one hears of Norbu Chen now, but he was very popular here fifteen or so years ago.

Now the last term on the chart is "Non-Ego." In this category there is no set technique, so I call it an art of between-ness. There is an art in doing this in which there is no loss of physical energy, so the person is not limited in the amount he can do. This is the ability to hold the mind on a dead standstill in order to effect certain changes.

Now are there any questions you would like to ask before we go further?

Question: You mentioned that Christ may have used hypnosis in changing the water into wine. But what about the guests who drank it having no idea about this change and commenting that this wine was the best?

Rose: Yes, I realize this. We're dealing basically with a book, and I can't prove anything one way or the other by just using a book. A lot of people believe that the Bible is something very valid, -- I used this as an example only. I am pointing out what could be. I wasn't there, and I don't say that this is exactly what happened. What I am saying is that to be scientific these things have to be duplicated.

Incidentally, you can hypnotize a large number of people more easily than you can hypnotize one person. Unfortunately this is what has happened with most people today, -- television.

Question: Of the four types of egos that you mentioned, which operating from? Rose: Well, -- that's a personal question, (laughter)

Question: Are you familiar with the work of the two men, one in the Philippines and the other in South America, who do psychic surgery? And how do they accomplish this?

Rose: Yes, I'm familiar with it, but I don't know how it works. I would have to get pretty close to them and watch them before coming to any conclusions about what they're doing. I place a lot of credence in the reports about the fellow from South America who supposedly operates with an old pen-knife. But I don't want to say about certain instances whether they are true or not, without examining all the details. I saw a film about the fellow from the Philippines. I also heard that some of the tumors they had taken out were analyzed and found to be chicken meat. But that statement could have come from someone who didn't like what they were doing, -- I don't know.

The thing about all these magical phenomena I say is that where there is a lot of smoke there might be a little fire. After we read about things back in history we are inspired to find a parallel around us today. We can't prove things by history alone, -- some of it has to be by demonstration.

I know of cases where after X-rays of their condition people were ready for the operating room. Kathryn Kuhlman from Pittsburgh was involved in a case like this where a woman was about to have a tumor removed. The tumor burst, supposedly, and ran out through the intestine. They publicized it on the radio at the time. I even talked to the doctor who had handled the case. He said, "Well, that will happen sometimes. I won't deny that the tumor burst, but sometimes a tumor will burst like that when it is attached to the intestine in that way." But you do find a number of cases where it is seemed that surgery has been performed.

What I do believe beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that all of these things are possible, -- even if they have never really been carried out. The reason why I believe that these things can happen is there is a formula I ran across, by which you can accomplish nearly anything in relation to the human body. This formula is the last one I mentioned, called between-ness, the holding of the head on dead center. This is the way the bigger things are carried out, -- and I think that the great healers all learned it.

My private opinion, (and I hope I don't offend anybody but we're trying to be as scientific as possible), is that in order to start a spiritual, religious, or political movement in days gone by, you had to be a magician. People such as the ones I mentioned who came out of India, -- the zappers, which are still very effective. They convinced a million people or more in this country that they possessed tremendous power, just by knocking people off their feet.

And they had power, -- the ability to drive entities out of a person who was possessed, for example. This is historical. I've seen these things done in our day. And they can be done on call.

Question: You talk about healing as generating a projecting of our own energy...

Rose: That's one form, but there are other forms.

Question: ... but I have always heard it stressed that it's important to be a passive channel rather than an active one.

Rose: Well yes, -- but I would then ask, "As a channel for what? Where is the energy coming from?" I have heard that same advice quite a bit. But I don't buy it and don't want to confuse or beguile anyone with the term "divine energy."

It's a preposterous farce to presume that we are so important to the creature in charge of the entire universe, that we will have gumboils removed or have our girlfriend make up with us. That the effects of things which we consider by our own religious attitudes to be crimes and sins, and which cause degeneration of tissue, sickness, or whatever, will be removed. And that now all you have to do is to go to the divine source, and somebody will pump the energy down through the top of your head or elsewhere, and you will be renewed so that you can go back out and have some more fun. I just don't buy that at all.

So this is why I would ask the question, "Where is the energy coming from?" These people who have done healings have come from all religions and walks of life, so it isn't limited to a particular religion or deity.

Another form of magic comes under the heading of belief. A large number of these things are done by belief, although I don't say that you must necessarily have belief in order to have things happen. This is a category of magic, but there are other ways it can be done.

MAGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY

Here I want to make a note on the psychology of things. I think that our so-called modern psychology is taking a difficult turn. And I think that this is the reason why people are not properly examining the powers of the mind. Science seems generally to wait until something is discovered and fairly well believed or supported by thousands of people, before accepting it. Hypnosis is an example of this. At one time it was considered to be the work of demons. I think that the people who really opposed it were those who didn't understand it or who couldn't make it work effectively.

Psychology itself, in its pure meaning being the science of the mind, seems to be doomed to an unprovable outcome, -- because it deals with an abstraction, which is thought. And yet the present trend in psychology is that instead of defining thought and the true basis or cause or true powers of thought, we have entered a generation or two of manipulatory psychology, under the name of behaviorism and some others.

There is an attempt to make it a science so that it can be funded, so that it can be forced upon people. You'll have to take it. If you show yourself perhaps to be a little shakey, when some healer could possibly take care of you in a very short period of time, -- instead you may be subject to months and even years of drugs and counter-drugs which leave you a permanent wreck.

This all comes about by conditioning. We are conditioned to believe in authority. We are contitioned to believe that the people who have a shingle out know what they're talking about. The amazing thing about people in authority is they become almost stupefied by too many years in college, studying something as medicine, and when they get out it's like a rubber band is shooting them forward to get that first hundred thousand dollars. They put their patients through an assembly line production, and if they don't know what is wrong with a patient they give him a placebo until they guess correctly. The public on the other hand is supposed to accept these people's authority.

Now this may not be so bad when you get it from a medical doctor. But it is a different story when you have somebody tinkering with your mind, -- who knows nothing for instance about the phenomenon called possession, which they quickly label schizophrenia. Sure there are drugs which will hit you in the head and which will make you harmless, -- and these are what are applied to a person.

I believe that there is a different way of approaching them. But of course, -- if you say these things you are considered to be beyond the pale. There are no miracles according to behavioristie psychology. You follow their prescription and you will not create anything. These drugs momentarily alleviate symptoms, but to heal someone you have to find the cause of the disturbance.

I ran into something when I was reading up on Sufism. This was written in about the year 1200 by al-Ghazali. Every time you look into these old movements you find psychology.

One of the most striking peculiarities about contemporary man is that while he is abundantly scientific ... he finds it extremely difficult to understand that his beliefs are by no means always linked either with his intelligence, his culture, or his values. He is therefore almost unreasonably prone to indoctrination.

In different language, when you want to take a step away from the delusion, from the big game that everyone else is into, you go to a doctor, -- and he gives you a name for it. For instance, I visited a young man in a mental institution when I was up in Rhode Island giving a lecture. I knew him pretty well, so I went in and said to the doctor, "What are you giving him?"

He told me the name of the drug, I think it was Stelazine. And I said, "How do you diagnose his condition?"

He said, "We don't have a diagnosis."

I said, "Then what are you giving him medicine for? A doctor is not supposed to prescribe without a diagnosis."

Well he said, "We have drugs that counter certain thoughts. He has certain thoughts, so we give him a counter-drug. So you don't have to understand the person, you just diagnose one thought, -- we have a drug for every thought."

CLASSIFICATION OF FORMS

Here I would like to present a list of systems, which we can talk about individually later if you like. These are the systems which approach to power, -- healing power or magical power.

BELIEF

PURIFICATION

SURRENDER OF EGOS

INVOCATION

MECHANICAL FORMULAE

KUNDALINI

PRAYER

BETWEEN-NESS

The first is belief. Another one is purification, -- this is an important factor. Third is the surrender of egos. Invocation, -- this is help from entities, if you want to go that trip. Then there are mechanical formulas such as spells, curses, and witchcraft, -- not that you're going to heal anyone with these, but they appear as part of systems like the huna religion. Kundalini, -- this is the outstanding one. Then there is prayer. And then finally, between-ness, -- this is a more scientific term.

These are the general categories of means which are used to produce miracles and mental phenomena.

ABSTRACT STUDY OF THE MIND

I want to start in with something which will give you a general idea on an approach to an abstract philosophy. The first place I encountered this was in a book on Zen by Hubert Benoit (The Supreme Doctrine), and it struck me as really something, (figure 2)

Figure 2

In this business of understanding the mind there has to be an approach to an abstract philosophy. I used to know a fellow in Pittsburgh who had trouble articulating, -- he couldn't talk very well. We'd be talking philosophy and if there was a pause he would motion with his finger on the table and say, "Well there's this (to the left), and there's this (to the right)." Then he'd put his finger to the middle and say, "And then there's this."

Now this sounded like chatter and everybody laughed. But I realized that this fellow knew something. It was just that he had a limited ability to demonstrate it.

But what we have in figure 2 is "this," and "this." Two lower corners of a triangle. One represents black and the other represents white. This is called relative thinking or linear thinking. To this way of thinking everything has to be either black or white. But everything is not black or white, -- in between we find gray. And we arrive at that only by the contemplation of black and white.

I call this a method of triangulation of thinking. It's similar to the method which might be used by a surveyor who wants to measure the height of a mountain, the perpendicular distance from its top down through its base. The line can't be measured directly because it is inside the mountain, and it would be too difficult to drag a surveyor's chain up to the top.

The measurement is done at a distance from the mountain, using a transit. You point the transit to the mountain top and measure out a certain distance from the apparatus toward the mountain, then determine the angle by measuring a triangle with one unknown side. The distance toward the base of the moutain is measurable -- so you calculate the unknown side of the triangle -- the height of the mountain.

The idea of an abstract philosophy is very much similar to this. By using it we can rise above the linear type of thinking. This saves years and years of contemplation on that line. An example of doing this is the concept of space-time. (Figure 2b.) The concept was brought about by triangulation. What we see is only that which our senses and our human mind allow us to see. But what exists in the final analysis is neither space nor time as such. Really there is space-time. There is no understanding of any dimension in space without an understanding on our part of time.

Now going over into our thinking, we have two faculties or tools so to speak. One of these is logic, but there are other things we perceive without logic at all, -- we sense them. Some of the greatest creations, and probably most of the inventions, would not have occurred without the faculty of intuition.

I remember years ago working at a Babcock & Wilcox subsidiary plant near Alliance, Ohio on the atomic submarine. We had a man there who was gifted with an unusual intuition besides his knowledge of physics. He discovered and devised ways of piping liquid molten metal through a motor, at a time when most everyone else had given up. He applied his intuition, not his logic. We had said that logically there was no way to pipe it through because it would burn up the motor.

Now you have to combine the two faculties. (Figure 2c.) An untrained intuition, in a person who just gets hunches, can get erratic and misleading. But a person who tempers his intuition with logic can arrive at wisdom. And the entire pattern is one of being, for the first time.

When you're approaching a problem there is a formula which can be used, which has to do with the exercise of a magical betweenness to produce, or rather to witness, a total reality. First there is thought (and of course we're obsessed with thought and try to hang onto our thoughts to a great extent.) But you take the mind first in thought, and then have the mind in no-thought, and you have an absolute realization. (Figure 2d.)

Here I keep having to refer to such things as Zen. Inci-centally, I consider the Zen technique, developed thousands of years ago, to be a much higher type of psychology than what we have in the Western world today. This is because they used what I call direct mind. They didn't try to photograph thought or try to catalogue certain types of behavior. They went directly to the mind itself.

The students of Zen in order to have a total realization had to rid the mind of thought. You'll find this in all the books written on the subject. This is the only way it could come about. Now this seems paradoxical, to think with the mind free of thought. It sounds a little frightening in fact. But all through these books you'll read that this fellow was looking for "no-mind." There is another term for it, if you can comprehend it. "Losing yourself in God." But if a person is offended by the word God, we can just say that you do not think, -- you have the mind without thought.

In the old Kabbalistic writings the formula was, "The imagination plus the will plus the fiat. And then forget." In the beginning the creation was dreamed up, this was the imagination. Then the will was spoken in the fiat, "Let there be." And then drop the whole matter. This is the formula for the creation of the world, or anything you wish to create.

So you put a thought in your mind and hold it there. Then forget it. Or, -- you bring yourself to the point of anxiety by Zen techniques, into where the mind actually goes blank from the tension. And when this happens you experience something superior to the knowledge you get by step-by-step processes, weighing one word against another.

The reason for using these diagrams is that this is about the only way to explain the mechanism by which this works, other than say quoting a sacred writing. It applies to this other method of healing also. You can pick up a lot of this information in some of the literature that is available. Each one of these books I mention contains a fragment of this information, which the author develops. Our group tries to make some of these available.

THE MIND AND CREATION

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book which he calls The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. He said that his wife was dying of cancer, and he decided that he might be able to heal her if he could destroy the present paradigm and substitute for it a paradigm of health, or of immortality perhaps.

The term paradigm refers to a fact which relates to language and our beliefs. If you work say in a machine shop, there is a language that develops which only the machinists know, composed of short terms and abbreviations. It's the same with chemical labs and engineering labs. Doctors use it in the practice of medicine, -- they call a hemostat a "stat," and so on. A new language develops, and this is called a paradigm. But it's a paradigm within a paradigm, because the whole human language is a paradigm.

The paradigm is a language, one that has been concocted just for expedience, -- just to get by. For example, in primitive times, in Anglo-Saxon times or even before that, the word "good" as a quality was meant simply in terms of pro and con. But later the concept of good took on a meaning of its own.

By this same process we developed a language which believes in such concepts as sickness. Mary Baker Eddy for instance goes along with this same thought, -- Christian Scientists maintain that we create sickness, and that we have to change the paradigm by faith. So in dealing with a person who is sick, as defined by a certain paradigm, Chilton Pearce's concept of the way to cure the patient, (his wife in this case), was the substitution of this paradigm for another one.

I do not entirely agree. And I don't know what his thoughts are about it now. His wife died later, incidentally.

But this is the magical triangulation again. (Figure 2e.) You first have the thought of a paradigm, then you have no thought of a paradigm (or thought of no-paradigm.) You say, "Baloney, -- I don't accept it. I don't think about it." Of course what happens is that you create a super-paradigm. This is the way it is created, -- you might call it a system of magic. Or it might be just something that happens as a result of things which don't function according to the laws of chemistry and physics as we know them.

Figure 2f. is the one which has to do with say the lifting of a truck in an emergency. You start with the thought of action, "This truck has to be lifted." Then, -- you don't convince yourself that your back is going to break if you lift it. You cancel that thought completely out. And the result is, -- herculean physical phenomena. It is somewhere between action and nonaction that you have the capacity for total action. This is creation on the physical plane. I point out that here again we have the factor between-ness, which I earlier associated with the term non-ego, and the effortless method of healing.

Besides using this to alter physical circumstances, this method is also used very effectively in the mental and personal realms. It is spoken of very plainly in the prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: Give us the serenity to tolerate the things we can tolerate, the strength to change the things we should change, and the wisdom to know the difference. There is a magical formula in that prayer. People change as a result of it.

Why? Because a person surrenders his ego to a higher will. We don't have to name it, -- we're not smart enough necessarily to be able to identify that which is superior to us. It's like saying, "Yes, I believe this, -- I would like for it to happen. But I'm not going to try to make it happen, unless it's supposed to happen, -- then I will it to happen. Otherwise I'll forget about it." And the result is creation, -- if it's supposed to happen. You don't create anything that isn't supposed to be created.

JACOB'S LADDER -- THE PATH TO REALIZATION

This thing I call Jacob's Ladder (Figure 3 ) is from my book The Psychology of the Observer. This shows what I call Absolute Realization. You can take it however you wish, -- as a concept, or an established fact, or as nonsense. It is an example of three of the kinds of pyramids that I have been describing.

The first one has to do with the relative physical consciousness. It has again the line (AB) at the bottom. Our relative world is a line running always between opposites, -- negative and positive, black and white, good and bad. We are in a constant struggle to define things within that line. And of course this becomes ultimately impossible, because the line can be indefinite in some instances.

In the observation and study of that line we find what Benoit calls the compensatory point. This point is at neither extreme, but is somewhere in between. Somewhere in between there is a governing force, -- this is what I call the Umpire in human consciousness. In devout Christian circles the Conscience, -- perhaps. But it is an inner decision-making apparatus.

Figure 3 - Jacob's Ladder

Because we are always faced with the negative and the positive -- what to do and what not to do -- we get down to monumental decisions. Whether to kill or not to kill, to love or not to love. Whether to climb uphill or slide downhill. These decisions are made by the Umpire. The mistake that nearly everyone makes is in thinking that this Umpire is our infallible guide. But if you observe yourself in a meditative manner over a period of years, or even over a couple of months, you will discover that the Umpire is faulty.

It makes decisions occasionally that cause the person to get sick or sometimes even killed. Or, for example, allowing a person to fall in love with someone who has a bad disease. The Umpire collaborated in the decision, -- it said, "Yes, go ahead. That's true love."

When we first encounter the fact that our individual judgement is faulty or can be faulty, we remember that perhaps we have abandoned some intuition we should have listened to. This brings us again to another relative line (CD). Because we are still in a relative dimension we can only think along relative lines. So we have then a correspondence or a contemplation between higher intuitions. This doesn't refer necessarily to hallucinations or simple intuitions, -- it is a higher intuition which maybe inspires us to join a church, or follow some moral path of life that the Umpire didn't necessarily take care of.

We are always then, when we get to that level, at war between Saturday and Sunday. The Umpire is good enough until Saturday, but Sunday the higher intuition -- the Sunday of the mind so to speak -- takes over and says, "You may not have been doing the right things the last seven days." Because what you have been doing may be leading you into psychic trouble.

Now I guarantee you these diagrams are not just marks on a paper. If you sit down and face yourself in some sort of meditative manner, this is exactly what you'll find. You are always going to be stuck with two polar points. If a person talks about the Absolute, then somebody else immediately says, "Well, what is there with the Absolute? What created the Absolute?" It seems as if it's impossible for a human mind to conceive that there aren't two things. He is so used to dealing with this confusion of opposites.

In a meditational process a person observes that this is happening, just like we are observing it here. He starts to watch the workings of the Umpire and the higher intuition. He watches his mind doing somersaults. He watches himself going through cycles of foolishness and wisdom, cycles of breakdown and repair. Because he can't yet, even with the higher intuition, completely control his life and stop the waves.

And this man at point (E), becomes a very real creature. This is where a man is no longer living a somatic life. He is watching his own mind, -- which seems to be an impossibility when you first think about it, the mind watching the mind. But if you remember, I mentioned that the aim of the Zen student is to reach a point of no-mind, and that he has to do that with the conscious mind. Now if this were impossible or idiotic, somewhere along the line of a few thousand years they would have thrown it out. But it must have worked for a few people.

This fellow (at E) has risen to the point where he is concerned not so much with the body as he is with consciousness and the workings of his mind. He becomes obsessed with this, -- this is the center from which he works. But he again discovers that there is another relative line. He is watching the mind, but he is also aware of awareness. He is aware that there is something behind the mind, -- something that is seemingly almost indestructible. So he doesn't look with intuition anymore, he looks simply with the direct mind at awareness itself.

Now from this contemplation, the dashing back and forth across this upper line (EF), man arrives at an Absolute realization. He arrives at a point in which his head is on dead-center. There's no place left for it to go.

What happens when the head is on dead-center? Almost anything. My reason for putting it in the book was not so much for healing as for realization. It is more important to realize who you are and what you are than it is to heal someone.

So the first profit that comes from having your head on dead-center is an Absolute realization of yourself. And then of course, if the experience doesn't kill you, you might be able to do something on a mundane level.

Question: You said that when you were young you realized that with hypnosis you were only touching into a body of wisdom or power. What type of wisdom is most important to have?

Rose: Definition. I think that people presume that they are. And this presumption isn't adequate. As a child you exist in a certain life form in which everybody is protecting you, flattering you and patting you on the head, making you believe that you're wonderful. You come to presume that you are something, -- that which you are projected to be by your parents, friends, and so on.

When you go to school with that mood, a kid punches your nose. And this goes on all through life. If you talk to someone who is 60 years of age, they will tell you these stages. When you are 25, you look at the kid who is 15 and say that he's green behind the ears, -- he's not mature. This means that all these people do not have a just judgement of themselves. You can get to be 50 or 60 years of age and say, "This could go on right up to the last momentl I could be fooling myself about who I think I am."

This process is what I realize is the basis of true psychology. True psychology is knowing who you are. It isn't the knowledge of what drug to take to bring you down when you're high, or to lift you up when you're low. It's basically a permanent understanding of yourself. And when you have that permanent understanding, possibly there's a little dividend, -- you might know what you're here for.

Question: How do you think Edgar Cayce functioned? Where was he coming from?

Rose: I don't really know, -- I sort of bypassed Cayce there. But he is one of the miraculous phenomena. I visited the Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach in 1954 or '55 and talked with Hugh Lynn Cayce. The place was almost inactive at the time, -- there was grass growing out of the roof-gutters. But I've heard that they have some new buildings there now.

I was amazed, of course, at some of the things he was doing. In TheAlbigen Papers I mentioned that what we need is an Edgar Cayce, not his readings. I think they're now trying to heal with his readings. As to where he got his information, I'm inclined to believe that in view of the fact that we can understand an item called space-tune, Edgar Cayce was cutting in on things that had already happened. Discoveries that had happened in space-tune but not in mortal time or sun-time.

I think he was able to go into a certain state of mind -- taking a little liberty possibly a state of no-mind -- where he reached that absolute pinnacle. But regardless, he allowed this information to come into his mind. In this respect he was a very unique person, a very miraculous type of magician, a very humble man. I don't think that there was any baloney about him at all. But the unfortunate part is that humanity can't duplicate him. What we should be trying to do is to duplicate him.

Question: Why do use the term magical instead of spiritual?

Rose: I avoid using the word spiritual in my lectures because basically the origin of even spiritual aspirations is the magical desire in every human being. And my second reason is that the word spiritual has a sort of, let's say, narcissistic association. It covers a multitude of rackets. I wouldn't want to wade through some of these spiritual movements with hip boots on, for fear of contamination.

Question: But there's only one Source.

Rose: We don't know that. This is something you have to prove. I use the phrase occasionally "surrender yourself to God," but not in a scientific sense. You'll notice that when I'm talking here I carefully avoid saying anything that I can't demonstrate. God is something that you can't prove by logic. In my estimation the only way to find God is by becoming, not by learning. Learning is the barrier between you and God.

Question: What are your books about? Do they cover a method of this meditative process?

Rose: Yes. My first book was written as a result of an experience I had. For quite a few years I didn't even conceive of trying to verbalize it, -- because it was an absolute type of experience, and how do you say that with words without confusing somebody and building another cult or code or set of words? So I dodged the issue for quite a few years. Then I just made notes, and finally compiled the notes and laid out a system.

Some of the analogies I use are quite simple. I say that you go about spiritual work or mind work in the same way you go about building a shed. If you want to build a shed you pick up a hammer and nails, and learn to drive the nails. You go down to the library if you wish and get books on carpentry. Of course when you get into what I call a higher form of mind work you've got the books, but you've got to wear hip boots because they are about ninety-nine percent phoney.

These things are all based on primitive belief. The human being from the time of primitive man had to believe, -- belief sustained him. Belief sustains people today. A lecture like this shakes people, -- it comes through to their mind that maybe they're not what they think they are. Or that maybe they are irrevocably lost unless they get ahold of themselves. When I'm lecturing I can see it on their faces. My own daughter said, "Dad, let me go. I've got games to play, -- I don't want to read your book." So if you're frightened, don't read the book.

Question: Have you had a chance to examine the contemporary healer Olga Worral? How do you feel that she operates?

Rose: I don't know too much about her. I talked to her once on the phone, when we were getting speakers for a symposium down at the farm, but we didn't have her price. Her husband, Ambrose Worral, I think was a very reliable healer, and I think that Olga herself has also healed people.

As I said, there are three ways generally used to heal. The first two of them use projection of energy from the healer, and if she did this she would have been worn out years ago. She's an old lady, and her husband did this up until the time he died, -- he was quite an old fellow.

When I was talking to her on the phone I explained the system to her and she said it was exactly what she had discovered. But she said the healing wasn't done in that manner -- they have meetings and church services -- it was done primarily with the suggestion of healing, and allowing the will of God to work on it if that was to be. So I'm inclined to believe that she was of the third category. It's a formula, incidentally, that people can use without actually having to go clear through to an Absolute realization. They are following it pretty much through blind faith, or by trial and error, -- something happens to work so they repeat it.

Question: Are you able to do this? Rose: At times it has happened. Question: Would you do it now?

Rose: No. Because whenever you're ever doing anything of this sort there is something that you have to wait for. Some of the people here have been down to my place and we have had demonstrations of it. For instance, there are times when I can see sickness inside a human body. But I can't do it all the time. I don't profess to be a healer, or go out on the marketplace and say that I have something to sell. But occasionally if I sit down with somebody I can see illness, -- and this has been confirmed by X-ray.

Here today what we have is a different structure, basically a lecture. If I did happen to see something though, I might tell you later on. Right now we don't have a healing type of group set up. I think that there are people around who have been healed, but for one thing I don't like to take claim for it. When you get to bragging or talking about what you do you don't have the same effectiveness. So I prefer to do just the things that come in front of me. I don't go out to look for it or give demonstrations.

A lot of this stuff came to me through hypnotic demonstrations, such as that case of regression, because with hypnosis you can tap people's minds. I know enough about it, and I can see how things happen with myself and with people around me, to know that they can happen. Let me put it this way: I think everybody has a function on earth, -- my main function is talking. My main transmission is reserved for knowledge transmission rather than for energy transmission. I decided that I would try to do that which was my best function.

One time we had a chautauqua here in this same church, several years ago. There were a couple of ladies here who had come down from Cleveland. One of them later wrote me a letter and said, "Mr. Rose, I think you are cheapening yourself to a certain degree by doing this when you could be teaching something else." The chautauqua was composed of things like astrology, Kirlian photography, and so on, and there wasn't much about mind science at all.

I don't know how she picked up that I had something else I was trying to do with my life. But I find out that more people are interested in astrology than in changing their nature or changing their state of being. If I were talking about astrology I could get fifty dollars a piece out of you. (laughter)

Question: There is a phenomenon that has been documented about seventy-five times, reported on a science program lately, termed spontaneous combustion of the human body. How do you fit this in?

Rose: I really don't know. I've heard those accounts of people being totally incinerated in a room, where even the foot would be burned but the shoe wouldn't. Possibly the rug would be scorched a little. There was a man burnt up inside a cab of a truck out West. He was driving a gasoline truck, I think. Nothing but the man burnt, with a little bit of scorching on the roof. The only conclusion the so-called scientists could come to was that he was a heavy boozer, he had a high content of alcohol, lit a cigarette, the cigarette lit the alcohol and away he went.

As I said, we are only standing on the edge of this enormous body of knowledge. And the reason it's so hard to get into it is that we're dealing with a contrary paradigm that says, "It can't happen." There are many books, validated books, written on these extraordinary phenomena. There's a Fortean Society (Charles Fort) that studies nothing but these occurrences that don't correspond to science, -- flying horses, fish falling from the sky in some remote dry area, and levitation.

I have seen levitation. It happened among the same group that did the regression. They were all responsible people, professional people, there was no money involved, no charge made for attending. And they got into levitating tables. I had my hand on the table when it rose from the floor, -- a big heavy oak table. And some strange things occurred to the table, -- it became like water, like it was floating under your hand. Whether that's some kind of illusion or not I don't know, but right before the thing left the floor it became almost like a living creature. You could ask it questions and it would kick one leg down violently on the floor according to a code, twice for "no," and so on, and rather accurately give you information. They (the tables) have been seen going all the way up to the ceiling where nothing would be left but fingertips on the bottom of the legs.

What do the physicists say about all this? "It's manipulation," they say. They've got a pat answer. For healings the medical men use the explanation "coincidence." The serious investigators are outnumbered tremendously. However, we are getting into a new era in psychiatry and psychology. Such as with Ornstein's book (The Psychology of Consciousness) on the two types of thinking which take place in the two hemispheres of the brain. It's a very good book, if you can get a copy of it.

There are many unusual phenomena that occur. (Some of which are reported in .Fate magazine, which I've subscribed to for over twenty years.) For instance the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship of the sea. The reason I think that these do occur is that we are in a much more fluid universe than we think it is. My conclusion of course about the universe is that it is in the human mind. So there is a tremendous leeway for creation.

Question: Isn't the spiritual dimension a whole world of unexplored area? I was thinking that magic doesn't ask for a scientific explanation.

Rose: Well, I think that magic does ask for explanation. Maybe this would be the difference, -- the word spiritual has usually the connotation of faith and belief whereas magic, such as in the formulas for invocation, seems almost like chemistry. Two drops of A plus two drops of B result in X.

I would say that magic attempts to be very scientific. It's another language entirely, incidentally, but it seems to work. I use the word magic because it is the basis and the root. We can see where these other things such as religion and spirituality work in, somewhere in between, -- but down at the bottom it's the magical child, the child that's interested in magic, that first gets interested in these things.

At the other end, when you get into an Absolute situation where there is no possible way to manipulate things except under the will of something else, it is still magical. It is tremendously magical when it happens.

Question: Do you believe in angels and demons?

Rose: I do not disbelieve in them. This is another egotism of humanity, -- that we're the only fish in the sea, and what you can't see isn't there. I don't buy that. I think science has to deal with that which can't be seen. If it didn't you'd never have any information on viruses. You'd never be able to cure diseases, because we can't see viruses.

Some of these things can be seen and even photographed. Now I don't say whether they're angels or demons. I'm talking about William Crookes and his Titania. And Katie King, -- there were pictures taken of her at a materialization. If you can find a genuine materialization, I think that you can take pictures with infra-red cameras.

I have sure seen enough of them to know that they are separate intelligences and that they have form. I think that a lot of these things we consider to be demons are deceased people. Some of them I think were never people, because of their limited knowledge and the way that they acted. But there's no reason why the fauna and flora we see on this planet can't be represented by an equally mysterious type of fauna and flora in another dimension.

Question: If a person ever gets to a point where there's something higher -- a higher principle -- controlling him, does this remove his free will?

Rose: I don't think so. What ends is the belief, the illusion, that he can do as he pleases. But simultaneously with the arrival of that realization comes the knowledge that what he wishes isn't important. It's like with alchemy. You start out trying to make gold out of lead. Then you study, study, study every science on the face of the earth. Then you discover the truth about yourself, and the gold is no longer needed. The purpose of the study of magic in nearly every case is abandoned on down the road. The purpose at the start is always selfish, -- it was with me at least. I don't know how many unselfish people there are, but when I was young I had very selfish purposes. I wanted to be big.

Question: Do you believe that good and evil are real beings, fighting for supremacy?

Rose: No. There is no such thing as good and evil. Question: Would you say positive and negative then?

Rose: In our relative thinking, yes. But you transcend that rather rapidly when you start to study the Umpire. You see that it is a human evaluation. For example, it's good not to attack your fellowman, because he may shorten your life span. But death in itself may not be evil, it may be liberation.

There's a book by Koestler (Darkness at Noon) which tells of his experiences in jail in Spain during the revolution. He told of the soldiers every day taking out ten prisoners to shoot them, -- because they didn't want to feed them, I think. A fifteen year-old boy had been picked up with these revolutionaries. They were taking the boy out to shoot him, and he realized suddenly that his life was over. Koestler describes the priest as being somewhat greasy and drunken, -- maybe he had to be drunk to do his job. The boy shouted for his mother and the priest said, "Don't complain so much, you're being liberated. This is your freedom." He was being liberated from the relative dimension and the beliefs which run with it. So maybe the priest knew something.

Question: In the face of all the self-annihilation around us, what is the relevance or significance of this philosophical type of thinking?

Rose: Do you mean, -- do we think we have an answer to this seeming madness?

Question: I was hoping that somewhere in all of this, the people who are into it might think that over time it may make a qualitative difference in the way we live.

Rose: Richard Bucke wrote a book (Cosmic Consciousness) in which he did a survey of the people who had reached cosmic consciousness. His statistic is that one in a million will experience it. Now I give talks on cosmic consciousness, and my book is on cosmic consciousness. So out of the two hundred million people in the United States, I should have at most two hundred listeners. But I know that there have been five thousand copies of the book purchased, so perhaps there are far more people interested than we think.

Now a lot of people come at me very bluntly when I'm lecturing and say, "What are you doing for humanity?"

And my answer is, "Nothing." I have no time for humanity, -- I have time for only a small segment of humanity. I'm trying to specialize. I believe that it is going to take all of my strength and the rest of my life to contact those people whom I think I should contact in my lifetime. And that is all I can do.

As far as the workings of humanity -- the wars, the strife, this wave of suicides we're having in the country -- behind it all there is a chief engineer who has everything under control. The machinery is going according to blueprint, although from where we stand things don't look so hot.

The thing is, -- don't get into where the violence is, to where the explosions are. Don't associate with trying to change the world. I started lecturing back in 1968, and I ran into thousands of young people at different universities. They couldn't wipe their noses, and they were out to change the world. And by now very many of them are already dead, and the world is still going on its own mad course. So we have seen which way it will go.

I think that the best thing a person can do is take time out to find out who is "being had." Because the evidence is that we're "being had."

Question: Would you tell me something about your books? Are they instructional?

Rose: Yes. We have some flyers that give a pretty good description in two pages. If you have a specific question about direction I'll try to answer you, but to give you a synopsis of the book is difficult because of the subject material. It gets into how to engage in an abstract study, how to approach an abstract question, such as life, death, thought, identity, who you are.

But it can be done. The book demonstrates that it can be done. And this is the formula followed by Huang Po, or Buddha, or whoever arrives. We don't know much about Christ's early years, but he probably followed it as well.

Question: About that incident of lifting the truck, and the fact that weightlifters may go through years of training to get to that point, or maybe never arrive, -- I was wondering exactly what is the relation of effort to accomplishing things? Is the effort in overcoming the paradigm that says you can't do it?

Rose: I think there is a limit to what you can lift, and you can't go beyond that. If a locomotive had been lying on top of that young woman I don't think we would have been able to pick it up. But I think that there is a tremendous plus factor that is not accountable to medical science.

Question: I wonder why there seems to be such a struggle to know oneself?

Rose: It has to do with the ascending and descending arrows in the diagram. The force that goes down is just as powerful if not more powerful than the one that goes up. You have to take care of what I call the upward vector, which is what a man becomes. He becomes a vector or a direction of energy.

The great vector in life is back toward the earth. Nearly everybody is fighting tooth and nail to go back into the earth, and at the same time trying to keep from going back into the earth. So between these two efforts there's not much left for going up into the creative realm.

Nature drags us down. We're like the grain in the field, -- you reach a certain age and the grain comes to a head, the leaves immediately get dry, and your purpose is arrived at. You realize what you are, -- you're a cornstalk that is produced and dies, that's all.

Question: Do you think that yoga is good preparation for forming this vector?

Rose: Yoga is one of the magical systems, yes. Raja yoga is very good. Of course there are different schools. And there are a lot of pretensive raja yoga schools that use techniques of visualization that I don't approve of. I don't believe that you should imagine things. If you want to put something into your head, put something in that's real. Are you familiar with what they call darshan, -- producing a certain image up between the eyes, deifying the guru and that sort of thing? I think that these are detrimental.

But there are meditative forms which are useful. And you can't do just one thing, one little ritual, -- you have to use combinations.

I was into yoga for years, from the time I was twenty-one through twenty-eight years of age. And nothing was happening. I became almost angry, -- I thought it was absurd. I travelled all over the country looking at these various movements, and I began to think that if they're not out for sex they're out for money, -- there's no real truth to them. Then I realized that there was a grain of truth in each one of these movements. The intuitions of men will not follow a completely phoney path for long. This is the difficult thing, to find the grain of truth. But you pick out the grain and throw the garbage away, -- this is the point.

For instance, if you simply sit in a certain posture the mind becomes at peace, and you can develop a certain ability. Now, -- what is happening inside the head? This neuro-transmitter system that I was talking about begins running evenly. The graph of the energy is not bouncing up and down. Consequently there's no trauma or restlessness connected with it, after you train yourself to do it.

While you're in that position you can do a tremendous lot of thinking. You can take in a lot of information in regard to the original direction. This is the time to ruminate, to chew over. Wisdom is inside ourselves. We've got billions of factors in those billions of cells. So all we have to do is to keep pushing this material through the computer.

The memory bank of the computer contains everything you have ever read or heard. So to get the answer from that, you continually attack the computer with one or two words: "Why? What? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Let's come up with an answer. Let's get away from all this fiction." This is the message you have for yourself. "Come on, we've been into this fiction before. We've discounted that once and for all. We've found out that it's absurd."

For instance, -- you don't pay a man for spirituality. This is one of the yardsticks. I don't believe that there should be any rackets run, because it's too important an undertaking. It's the highest relationship between one human being and another.

Consequently it's serious business, but people don't treat it that way.

Question: Have you investigated many of these New Age movements?

Rose: I think that there's a big mistake that people are making these days, in relation to this. (You ought to know how it's put forth, because everything isn't valid.) The big movement that is sweeping the spiritual and mental worlds today is something that is a cross between Fritz Perls and old-time religion meetings. Fritz Perls hugged everybody, and so did the old-time religions. Except Fritz Perls got into it sexually, -- that was his "method" of curing people.

The emphasis is on trying to make people feel good, rather than looking for honest answers. Consequently there's a big direction taken today: "Don't criticize anybody." But you've got to realize that your future and your lifetime are too valuable for this. You've only got so many years in a lifetime. If you start off when you're five years of age, you've got only seventy years to solve a problem which as an intelligent human being you must solve. You have to find out who is suffering. So we don't have time for people who are going to thrust themselves on us because they too might have a good point.

So under the basis of the pretense of not criticizing this or not criticizing that, -- you won't be getting anything done. Or you will accept the mediocre when something real might be around the corner, or might be equally available. I think that there's a tremendous complacency today, and I think it's born out of the fear of violence. The pseudospiritual movement today is oriented toward man instead of toward wisdom. It's nice to be oriented toward man, but not his body, not to the economy, and soon.

Question: Why don't you use the terms "soul," and "enlightenment?"

Rose: There are certain words which are pretentious. If I use the word God, then I am immediately subject to another Question: "How do you know?" So I avoid these words because one man's God is another man's Devil.

To me the term enlightenment refers to an Absolute realization, or the total realization that you can come to. Now about the word soul, -- I don't use it to mean something of a gossamer quality that floats around like a ghost. I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have something more real. The inner person or capital "S" Self is more real. The universe that we enter at death with that Self is far more real than this. What we have right now is a big long line of thinking, -- bouncing around on this thing of relativity. Whereas in a direct-mind experience of the Absolute, you only experience oneness, not multiplicity, not shades-of.

So I do believe in a soul, but I prefer to let people find it through their mind. The perfect psychology will find the soul. This is my reason for showing you these diagrams. The perfect psychology will take you to God. And I'm not making a pitch, -- I don't believe in making religious pitches. I believe in working from a fact basis.

Question: I still don't understand why you don't use the word God.

Rose: Well, I don't deny that there is a superior engineering. But when you use the word God you might be defining it according to somebody's pet theory. Everybody uses the word, but people can define it in very different ways. And some of them can seem to be pretty strange.

We could take a poll of the people in the room today to try to get their ideas on God. Of course we would be getting only vocal answers and not their true meanings, -- we don't know what people really mean. But if we could ask people their definitions of God and get their meanings, and compare them with our own, we would find nearly all of them different.

Some of the people would be thinking of a very personal creature who actually has a telescope and is watching every sparrow that falls, and somehow being able -- because someone said he was able -- to watch all the sparrows. Now I think that all the sparrows are watched, but it's by virtue of the creating of machinery which takes care of everything. The Hindus saw the machinery and called it karma. Certain laws were put into effect and it all works like a big piece of machinery. Of course we say, "God is watching this." Well... the blueprint which the engineer made may be working.

And then there is another line of science which says, "Hey, -- maybe we can sneak in something while he isn't watching. Maybe some of these things aren't being scrutinized very carefully." This is the school of magic. A lot of people think that they can, despite the plan, get hi there and pull some tricks. But this doesn't really work. It's strictly ego.

Question: What does your kind of psychology say about insanity?

Rose: I don't believe in insanity. I believe insanity to exist in a physical breakdown of the brain only. If somebody splits you with an ax, you're not going to think as clearly, -- you may be a schizophrenic. I'm sure that a lot of you have had the experience of going directly into the mind of a person. If you have ever been with a person who is mentally sick and you pick up what they are thinking, you'll know that they are just as aware as you are. But then: communication method is crippled.

Question: Why is that?

Rose: I don't know. Most of them were born that way, but sometimes it is caused by physical breakdown. I do not believe in mental insanity. We've got a few psychologists and psychiatrists who say the same thing, but they don't elaborate on it properly. Szasz is one, -- he thinks a lot of it is pretension.

I just say that people who can't help themselves can't help themselves. It's not insanity, it's just that the doors and the windows aren't open, -- they are inside of a closed structure. And it's only by direct mind that you can understand them. This is the reason why I maintain that until the psychologists and psychiatrists develop some kind of direct-mind intuitional approach, they're wasting their tune and the sick person's time. You've got to walk a mile in their moccasins to know them. The scientific doctor or psychiatrist tries to be objective. He tries to observe and catalogue exterior symptoms alone.

Question: Is there a tie-in between the spark gap you mentioned and the concept of the triangulation of things? Is the stretch between the negative and the positive like a spark gap?

Rose: No. The spark gap is just more or less a biological structure.

When we talk about the human mind we always wonder where the memory is. Some people say that the memory is in the DNA molecule, in the genes. Maybe so, but where is thought? What is happening? Where does thought occur? We are all thinking right now, -- what is going on electrically? And I maintain that all of that living (and thinking is living) which continues until you go to sleep, occurs right there in the synapse.

Question: After all your studies, what's your feeling of how Jesus Christ got his miracle and healing powers? Can you rely on the historical accounts?

Rose: The stories are useful as a point to refer to. The stories, as in the stories of other men such as Kapila who lived before him, show one of a holy man. By holy I mean that he went through the necessary disciplines in order to achieve his power. I have no answers on whether or not he was God. I don't know.

Incidentally, he said to his Apostles, "What I do you also can do." I think that this is synonymous with saying, "What I am you also are." I am quite convinced that each man is a finger of the sun. The celestial Sun, an Absolute Reality. The Atman and the Brahman, -- each person. That's the reason you find God by looking inside, not by looking in a book. Looking in the book is inspiration. Really finding yourself is finding where that Being touches you. And then when you find it, -- you find that it is you. I'm not saying that it is a part of you, I say that it is you.

Well, I want to thank all of you. It's been wonderful, -- I hope to see you again.

END

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