1975-1119-Lecture-at-Boston-College-from-DME

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Title	1975-1119-Lecture-at-Boston-College-from-DME
Recorded date	November 19, 1975
Location	Boston College, Chestnut Hill, McElroy Hall
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Alternate versions exist?	Note: This is the same as 1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore
Source	Jake and Dave Mettle. Bart's tapes also labeled 1975-1119 Boston College
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Link to PDF	http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
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Remarks	Mentioned in PZS newsletter November, 1975, and in Boston PZS newsletter Nov. 6, 1975
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URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1975-1119-Lecture-at-Boston-College-from-DME
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Revision timestamp	20260111155906

Notes and To-Do

See the many comments on page 1975-1119-Boston-College-date-conflict

Tapes labeled 1975-1119 Boston College are not this talk.

Question as to naming and venue, the misnaming of 1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore

Check the auto-transcript against the book text (this page).

Transcription

Title, etc

Lecture at Boston College November 19, 1975

Lecture

I'm appearing here not just as the writer of a book. The Albigen Papers was written by me after many years of experience and research in philosophic, religious, and psychological systems. At the time of writing it I had no idea of even having a group. I thought it would be a good idea to put something down in case somebody stumbled across it later, and the group appeared while I was writing the book.

Our society is strung over the northeastern part of the country. We have several groups in cities near universities, and a rural ashram. The ashram is in West Virginia and we have centers in Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, and Akron, Ohio and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Where the groups exist people can work more actively. They have weekly meetings for discussion and study of ways and means: how they can help each other to keep their heads on what they are doing, on the path, so to speak.

We have a loose-leaf folder here with photographs of the ashram and that sort of thing that you can look at if you're interested after the talk.

Next I'd like to tell you something about myself. The reason for this is not to bore you with somebody's biography, but that I think that it is very important in dealing with abstract matters to be able to judge the person who is speaking.

We're talking about a subject that can't be discussed,--Zen is something that you can't draw pictures of, with language. At the same time we must communicate some way,--that's what we're here for. It has been said that people who know about Zen don't try to communicate with the general public, but I don't think that there is really a good excuse for not talking.

There is another saying, of course, that those who know don't talk, and those who talk don't know. To me, there would be no knowledge at all if things weren't said. So I think that this expression serves as a clever cover-up for those who don't know. By virtue of keeping silent, of not answering questions, they hide the fact that they're running a racket and really don't know anything about the human mind. Down through the ages someone had to say something, or you wouldn't even know that these people and systems existed.

I have been at this thing all my life, and most of the things that have happened came by accident. I didn't go out with a definite plan to form a group.

And I never have believed in forming a group for the purpose of supporting me,-- the groups that exist do not support me. There are no fees. If you buy a book you pay for printing costs only. If you take a room at the ashram you pay a minimal fee,--so minimal in fact that we get a lot of dharma bums who try to get in, so we screen them a bit.

Yardsticks

I don't believe that the truth has a price on it. When I was quite young I realized that I had a lot of cults and isms to look into, and I made up my mind that I would set up some yardsticks, or I would be spending two hundred years looking through the cults for the truth. Knowing that I had only a limited period of time before my head started to harden up, I figured that I would have to stick pretty close to these yardsticks. You can find some of these scattered in the books that are available, and I have compiled a list of them in The Albigen Papers.

First of all, there is no price on truth. If you're holding meetings you may have to chip in to pay the light bill, or something of that sort, but I don't believe that any man should be supported by any other man. And there are a lot of excuses used for being supported.

Another yardstick is that I don't believe that truth has a geographic region. I don't believe that you have to go halfway around the world to find the truth. I believe that the truth exists within. It may exist in Asia, but going there can be an outward form of laziness which is a substitute for going within. The truth may exist in the Kabbalah, but it takes a long time to learn the symbolism of the Kabbalah and I don't think it's necessary even to get into that.

I believe that certain cults and isms have too much regimentation,--too much rank, ritual, and that sort of thing. Too much secrecy is another one,--this can be avoided. You hear things like, "We can't let you into the inner temple because you haven't learned the secrets. You have to go through so many degrees and get the secret handshake before you're allowed into the inner sanctum." To me this is absurd, and I have all my life rejected these before I even approached any closer.

And in this manner I rejected almost everything I met, especially in my youth. I started out at this quite young; at the age of twelve years I went away to be a priest in the Franciscan order. (They took them that young,--I don't know if they still do or not.) I decided to do this because I thought as a child that God communicated with the priests and the nuns. I thought that if anybody is going to know about this thing then these people should know,--they've been in this all their life.

So I went away, and I lasted about five years or so. And I came to the conclusion that they didn't have any more knowledge of the thing than I did.

From that time until about twenty-one years of age I just floundered around looking into everything I could get my hands on with the limited amount of cash that I had, because that was back during the depression.

One of the things I looked into was Spiritualism. The thought occurred to me that if you want to know what happens to you at death, talk to the dead. Go find a dead man and talk with him. There were a lot of phonies, but I had heard that there were genuine materializations. So I went around the country and sorted through the phonies until I found a genuine materialization and I talked to some spirits.

And like Omar Khayyam I came out that same door wherein I went. The dead didn't know too much more than the living person and sometimes knew less. I'll go into that later tonight if you wish. If you're curious about these phenomena it might save you some steps.

There are such things as entities that will materialize, and there are different ways of getting them to materialize. Incidentally, one of the ways is by getting too much dope in you or by playing games while you're on dope,--you can get all sorts of entities to materialize.

After investigating Spiritualism I went into yoga and psychology. The idea was starting to grow in my mind that I should know something about thought. Like in breaking the atom: I said, "Let's analyze thought. If I can find out what the essence of thought is, perhaps I'll know what the mind is. And if I know what the mind is,--I may know what my essence is."

So again,--the books on psychology didn't have the answer. And they still don't,--there's no book yet on psychology that defines the mind. Instead, they very cleverly avoid the mind. Modem psychology is apt to identify the mind with the body. In other words, "What you see is what you get."

Change of Being

At the age of twenty-one an old saying came back to me from my early theological training, that "the finite mind does not perceive the infinite." And this is what I call a "stopper." When you realize that very possibly you may never perceive the infinite, that you may never find out anything beyond what you see,--the visible physical universe,--it's inclined to stop you. It will seem that the study of its ramifications is infinite and therefore impossible to cover in a lifetime,--impossible to know everything about the physical universe, much less to know what happens to the person's mind at death.

But then it also occurred to me that other people claimed to have breached this obstacle, this wall. And if they had breached it, the only way that they could have done it was by a method of becoming less infinite.

This was the secret. We still say, "Yes, the finite mind will not perceive the infinite," but there is a chance that this finite mind can change, can gather to itself tools, a new vehicle. And I realized that a person has to become,--you do not learn.

Oh, you can learn things,--you can read umpteen books on bardos and purgatories. Swedenborg has quite a shelf full of books on what goes on in heaven and hell. You can read all sorts of things, but in the final analysis, when you're reaching to go beyond the relative bardos or universal-mind concepts, you have to change. You have to become, not learn.

Now I know that this might provoke argument, but it's not something that we can argue about. It's something that came to me by virtue of intuition,--it didn't come logically. Just that my intuition told me that this is what these people did. I had read accounts of yogis and other people who had made enormous strides, and I realized that they must have had to find some method of changing.

So I set about looking for it. In those days all that I had, and all that was available, were books (it wasn't until fifteen years later that I met a Zen teacher). The books on yoga then had pretty much what you're getting today. What we have today is the old stuff warmed over with a little variation,--they throw in a little bit of this or that. Like with our prescription drugs,--add another drop of water, a hydrogen radical or something, change the name, and you can charge a new price.

This is what happens to our cults,--as soon as the people become aware of a certain gimmick there is a slight variation given, a new name, and you get more of the same. For example, we had something similar to TM. It was the Pronunciation of the Holy Name. This is supposed to bring you in touch with a certain intelligence. In yoga it was "OM." Now OM means little more than "I am." But yet by the concentration on this you are brought into a state of quiescence, serenity, and peace with the world. And I languished in that peace for seven years, thinking that any day now there would be a more beautiful theme breaking and I would be in the middle of a revelation. And,--nothing happened.

Work with a Group

I then sort of awoke to certain things and came to some conclusions. One thing was that I had been working alone. Because of having run into so many disappointments in looking into cults and certain isms, I did not believe that there were very many other people looking. There are many more people today by far looking into esoteric things than there were when I was younger.

I realized that the majority of people who went around these groups were forty years old, except for a very few. Most of them had raised their families and then sort of had a feeling that the game wasn't the way they thought it was, and that they would like to look into other things. By this time their families were raised, but they still had a job to hold onto until they retired perhaps, and they could only read about things or get together once a week or a month to talk about things.

I was pretty much disgusted with that too. I wanted action,--I wanted to get into something heavier. And I came to the conclusion that there was no one around who wanted to work at the level where I wanted to. So for those seven years the only teacher that I had was a bunch of books out of the library.

But then I came to another conclusion: that this is too great a task for one man. An individual working alone tends to forget about it. He can get all fired up and do his mantra, say his prayers, or whatever trip he is on. But after awhile he will get interested in something else and he'll forget all about his original aim, although he may come back to it and play with it again later.

But by associating with a group of people, as they do in Alcoholics Anonymous, you remind each other if nothing else. This gives you a reservoir of communal power. I'm talking about quantum energy now, that exists in any group. Christ said, "When any two or more are gathered together in my name, I am in their midst." Whenever two or more people are gathered together for a positive,--let's say, rather than for a negative purpose, there is power in their midst.

This was something that I had been overlooking. I had been disdainful of my fellow man, thinking "there's no use." There still was no one to talk to though,--there was no one to help, so to speak. There was no one to help me. I had met gurus and other people who claimed to know and I found, as I said, that most of them were phonies. That is, they were interested either in money or in some strange form of sex. And that was enough reason to reject them.

But I still believe that you have to help somebody, and that you have to begin wherever you are. You don't have to run to India. You'll run into somebody who is interested and you can give them a pointer here and there that will save them some time.

The Experience

The next step in my life occurred when I was about thirty years of age. For seemingly no reason at all I had an experience. I presume that if it hadn't come then, it wouldn't have come.

Of course, the first thing a person will say when they hear about this is, "Well, this fellow was so darn hungry that he created it." And this can happen,--people build up a great thirst and then create the object. They create their own heaven, so to speak.

And I questioned the experience myself. I would be inclined to go along with this explanation but for the fact that the experience was spontaneous,--I didn't know what was happening,--and that the results were so astounding and so much opposite of what I expected.

I had anticipations of reaching some ecstatic beautiful field of flowers or Lord knows what. And because I found something utterly devastating and contrary to all my other preconceptions, I knew it could not be a creation of my desire. Because I didn't desire, as I entered it, I found what seemed like oblivion.

This was twenty-seven years ago. Of course immediately after this happened I thought that it would be nice to talk to some people about it. So that if I ran into somebody who had the same tenacity, the same desire and direction, I could give them a few pointers. Especially on what to avoid, because I think that I made a lot of mistakes in my youth because I didn't have a teacher myself.

Well, I found out first of all that I didn't have the necessary language. You can't just go out and talk to people about it, because they won't understand. I once met a man who had reached Enlightenment through meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I met him about fifteen years ago. This man had no language either. All he could say was, "Meditate on the Lord's Prayer,--just do what I did." And no one ever took his advice, because everybody is too familiar with the Lord's Prayer.

But for this particular man this was his medicine, his focal point or koan. He focused on it so intently that something had to crack.

Now the same thing will not work for everyone. But he went about traveling from town to town trying to tell people. And I listened to his story, the account of his experience. It was one of the most profound and genuine experiences I had ever heard,--he was in this experience for around ten days. He wanted to use up the rest of his life helping people. But he was getting nowhere,--he wasn't helping anybody.

I realized the same thing about myself. Merely having an experience does not give you the ability to convey it or transmit it. So I associated myself with some Zen teachers to study their communication, their method of transmission. You do not communicate it with words,--you don't just sit down and start reading out of some Oriental prayer book or out of some Oriental dogma.

There is a language, a mystical path, associated with Zen that is not clearly described in other groups. Because if it had been mentioned in the Christian religion I would have looked into it. After I came full circle, after I had gone through this experience, then I discovered that some of the things in the Christian faith pointed at this truth. Yet it isn't explained to the people.

One reason for this is that people have a certain level, and you can't talk to them except with what their ears can hear. The majority of the people are vegetating, so the leaders give them the blessings, pacify them as they're dying, and encourage them while they're living. They try to keep them from getting into trouble, from civil disobedience, and try to make their lives as placid as possible. That's basically what our organized religion does today, because the majority of the people don't want anything else. People want to lead the pleasure game,--they're attached to the pleasure trip.

So anyway, after I had this realization I looked back then and saw certain accounts, such as the one of Saint John of the Cross. And I realized that John of the Cross had made the trip. And remembering my earlier training, I was rather irritated that my teachers in the church had not tried to bring this out to those who were sincerely looking. Especially to the theological students. This was in a seminary,--why didn't they bring this out? But they only gave out indoctrination on faith. In other words, "Believe this."

I maintain that you should believe nothing, including what I say as well. You should doubt. To doubt is sacred,--to believe is foolishness. Because believing is an easy way out,--it's a cop-out.

It's easy to just say, "Yes, yes, I believe you, I believe what you're saying,--what do I do? Say three prayers? Chant the mantra?" People want a gimmick,--even ask to be slapped around. They do this in some Zen schools, you know. The student says, "Oh, do anything to me. I don't want to have to perform mental effort."

But tell that person to attack his mind with his mind, and he doesn't know what you're talking about. He wants definitions then, and that sort of thing. He's still trying to find a gimmick. Something tangible that he can play with, rather than just looking inside his own head.

=== The Group/The Book

After communicating with the Zen teachers I met, I still saw no chance of finding people who were interested. That was just a few years ago, in fact. I only found people who were interested in playing games. "Let's play the guru game."

There's a book by DeRopp that's very good, called The Master Game. It tells about some of the esoteric games people play, and the complexes within us that make us want to play these games. It brings you a new perspective, a new awareness of yourself and your motivation, to see that a lot of the reasons for following a spiritual path may just be a game inside yourself.

So,--I sat down and started to write the book, The Albigen Papers. I thought, "Well, I'll write something and leave it lay someplace, and maybe someone will come across it. If somebody finds it he may get something out of it. If not, at least I have done the best I could."

This is what I believe everybody should do,--do the best you can and don't try to build an empire. Just leave some tracks someplace.

Strangely enough, when I started to write the book some people started to collect around the farm. Just local people, young people,--some of them were dropping acid at the time. And they became fascinated because, first of all, some of them had entered another dimension by accident. And they were very much aware that they had entered another dimension. So they weren't agnostic.

Most young people are very quick to pick up that the older people are spoofing themselves. So usually they say, "Oh well, this religion thing is just part of the stuff that they teach kids to keep them in line." But when a person had a death experience as a result of taking acid, he may enter another dimension. Some of you may know what I'm talking about,--if not, talk to somebody who has taken acid and maybe they can tell you what it is. Sometimes you go through the death experience, and you may enter another dimension.

And as soon as you enter that dimension you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is hope. That if there is another dimension, meaning that the mind is able to leave this body behind, to actually be obliviated to the earth and see another dimension,--there is a possibility to live. Because generally up to that time the mind says that maybe you're kidding yourself, maybe there's nothing out there. So eat, drink, and be merry.

A few people who have had this experience have been able to get interested and to start looking. Some of them didn't. Some of them just went deeper into drugs and over the hill.

And strangely enough again, I believe that if it hadn't been for this we wouldn't have much of a spiritual movement among the young people of today. And if you don't have it among the young people you might as well forget about it. Because people who are past forty years of age, if they start on a spiritual path having never done anything before,--if they have just been eating, drinking, and making merry,--I doubt seriously whether they are going to do too much. By this time they've got themselves into too many traps,--they're too busy. And their heads are starting to harden up.

And I felt that these young people were listening. They said, "Let's meet," and the next thing you know they were meeting out at the farm on Saturdays, sitting in meditation, and even helping me to type the book. I started talking, and then got an invitation to talk in the colleges. I went ahead and the rest of it seemed to fall into place. And everything that has happened has only been circumstances which fell into place,--there was never any decided effort to go out and sell this on the highway.

At this point the problem of communication still existed,--how could I communicate? Well, I had to use the medium of words. The book is composed of words. And words are not the best medium for communication. In matters of Zen the best communication is direct. In this business of becoming, you also learn to have a direct mind-to-mind communication if you want to be successful in bypassing years of argument.

The book by itself isn't quite enough. But if you sit for awhile in groups until you develop what we call "rapport," you can develop an ability to go inside another person's head. Almost anyone can do this with enough practice in sitting.

Illusions

Now I'm just going to go through some of my notes to give us subject material for talking. The general theme I would like to bring out is this idea of the number of illusions we are subject to. And if possible, I would like to get to this business of direct communication with you. If by some method I can lead your mind into the realization that things are not what they seem to be, it may give you some impetus to look further.

When I'm through, if you're curious, we'll open it up for questions. I don't want to argue, but I do want to respond to curiosity.

Invariably, when I give a talk in a public meeting, there are a few people who are delegates from some particular cult, who are offended because I do not foster what they believe. And I can't help that. I believe that everybody who is fastened to a certain system or cult is there because that is his level, and that is what is necessary for him. So if they're offended, maybe they are in the wrong place here tonight.

I usually get a bit of an argument from a person trying to get me to assert by virtue of their arguments, that their system is very valid and that their system is going in the same direction. So I always say ahead of time that I will not respond to this type of questioning. I will not respond to loaded questions because it will take us away from the direct communication. It only builds tension and argument, and it will take us away from the possibility of intuitively picking up something here tonight, if you think that there is anything worth picking up.

For instance, we have certain conceptions that this world exists in a certain way. That the seats in this room are blue, that this chalkboard is black,--this kind of thing. And I bring this up because in this final experience which we were talking about,--and you have to be more or less prepared that such a thing is possible,--the entire world disappears, as far as we know it today. And that you're not going to hang onto all your dogma, to the belief that you have to take the wife with you when you go to heaven, or that there is such a thing as heaven until you experience it.

We have these conceptions, and the mind rebels when you get into a system of thinking that says that you can't take the dog and the wife with you,--that they're not going to have the same meaning,--or that you can't take all this body's plumbing with you, because there's not going to be anything to eat there.

And in this rebellion the mind says, "I don't want any parts of anything that doesn't give me my type of immortality. Because this is all I know." But this is not necessarily true,--it is possible that you might know something else as you go along.

We have illusory ideas about ourselves as well. In Zen, and also in the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky system, is this pointed finger that says, "You are a robot,--you are mechanical." And you don't like to hear that either.

I was giving a lecture once at the Theosophical Society in Pittsburgh,--there were quite a few older people there. I mentioned the fact that people were robots, and several old ladies informed me rather quickly that they didn't believe that they were robots and they didn't like to hear it.

But this is a possibility that you have to face. Because even in this life, as you get older and you look back upon your past, you realize that you're not the person you thought you were.

Most of you are pretty young but you can look back to when you were five or six years old. You had a concept of yourself, that you were a certain type of creature. You had certain states of mind that carried you in life. And as you got a year or two older you had to change these states of mind, you had to change your perspective. After awhile, the changing of the perspective changes the individual so much that he forgets who he was when he was five years old. He forgets completely a possibly truer or more pure type of mentality. He adjusts and adjusts until he's just another piece of society.

Another thing happens: we believe that somebody loves us, and we live long enough to discover that the person really loves that which we can give. Now again, everybody wants to believe in love, because we're lonely. Somebody asked me at the talk last night about Zen koans. I was strongly tempted to tell them that the greatest koan I ever had was my wife. And I got that after I went through the experience. My children also were koans.

So these realizations prompt us to reappraise our concepts and definitions. We believe that we are doing something, for instance that we are Joe College, or Joe City or Joe Club, that we're the most popular man in the college or in the club because our thinking is commonly accepted there as being perfect. And one day we get into the wrong environment and find that we're getting clubbed on the head with a blackjack or something and thrown into jail and we say, "How can they treat Joe College this way,--this perfect creature?"

We go further and say that we have security in our faith. We believe that if you just hold onto faith that everything will happen well. But we find before we die that we're very insecure, very alone, and somewhat doubting of all this faith that we have. And I have seen many people in my lifetime who had faith all their lives,--but when they died their last half-hour was spent in screaming.

States of Mind

Any system, religion, or philosophy that does not in its very beginning find for man relief from the confusion of uncertain and changing mind states has no real foundation. In other words, just because some ism appeals to you in a certain state of mind, this doesn't mean that it is valid.

You may or may not be aware of this, but we are strongly subject to states of mind. If you take dope, you will have a state of mind that is entirely different from the one previous. The same if you get drunk or if you are passionate. And the way you'll know this is that when your passions are surfeited you will see that your state of mind changes abruptly because of chemical change, the burning-up of the endocrines in the blood stream or whatever happens.

You will notice in that instant that there are two states of mind in your head, in a very short period of time, that are contradictory. One says "go" and the other says "stop." One says, "This creature (the sex partner) is perfect," and the other says, "Get away." A complete change in convictions,--and yet we like to think that we have a constant and continuous state of mind.

We must first know the self and find transcendence from confusion. It is not enough to read philosophy and Zen,--we must find ourselves. We must find out who is talking, who is reading and studying, who is looking for survival. And we've got to find some safety from vacillating convictions.

We were talking about this business of sanity. Everyone likes to think that he is right, especially as concerning sanity. But we find psychiatrists running into another psychiatrist's couch, plopping themselves down and saying, "Oh my God get your pencil and take this down before I forget it,--I think I'm losing my mind."

And he doubts. He is supposed to be an expert on sanity, but he doubts his own sanity.

In our religious faith, if you take instances of people who believe that God will heal themselves or their children, when it comes a time that the children are in trouble, in danger of dying, we say, "Well,--I could go along with my concept of Christian Science, or just plain belief, whatever it is, but I can't play that game with my child. I have to give my child the benefit of the doctor." And immediately our state of mind changes. Our convictions change.

Awareness

We get into another thing: what is experience? When we get into spiritual matters we are talking about experiencing something. Are all instances of experience nerve sensation? Modern psychology seems to imply that the body is what is picking this up. If so, what about death experiences, when seemingly all the nerves are inactive? Or the feeling of peace? Are these merely forms of surrender or neural activity? Or is there not an awareness of the whole happening, whether the experience is neural or not?

In other words, do we have a faculty of awareness that is not neural or somatic? Are only the nerves aware of the nerves? Or is there something behind the whole neural system that is aware? Is there an experience that experiences,--an endless experience,--watching ourselves experiencing? Is there a final observer, which you might call an essence?

Another thing is knowledge. I thought when I was young that I would arrive at knowledge by studying psychology and that sort of thing. Everyone has a conception of what is meant by the word, but really, what is knowledge? What type of experience is knowing?

For instance, what do you experience in a musical note? Or a mood? What is the experience of "green-ness"? Are we thrilled by the color green because we depend upon vegetation for our survival, or is there something special about the color itself? Does it just bring back some primitive memory of survival in green areas? Or does green have an esoteric meaning? Does it awaken archetypal memories, or does it awaken something beyond the DNA memory,--something in our very essence or being?

It is now said that the color green is therapeutic,--why would this be? Some time ago, incidentally, a Hindu came over to this country and was using colors to heal people. The authorities thought that he was a real quack so they threw him in jail. This was an old man. But now the hospitals are painting some of their rooms green. They report that certain colors will make people peaceful, while other colors make them turbulent.

Is the reaction to the color green possibly a memory from another dimension? We are talking here basically about experience. We experience a certain color and then we have a certain mood. I can remember a mood reaction I had when I was a kid,--there were certain jelly beans I didn't want to eat because of their color.

Green is supposed to be a color which is developed from light of a given quality or wavelength striking the retina and inspiring a response from specialized nerve-rods. But how do we account for the green that is seen on an LSD trip when the eyes may be closed? The argument is brought up that you are just reawakening an old memory. But the geometric patterns seen in such a trip would rule out this as a possibility because these patterns never seem to have been witnessed before,--they can be entirely new. Or there is a possibility that the dimension you step into may have come about by virtue of going through some color picture.

We can explain it away partially by saying that the vision comes from inside the head. And if we say this, it gives a whole new meaning to experience. It means that colors and experiences come from within rather than from without. So we are not just reactors to an external world, or to a physical world alone.

This indicates that something in our essence responds to a sensory picture,--but how much of all our experiences are limited here by our sensory inadequacy? Science has proven that we have a limited capacity for picking up color. We don't see as well or hear as well as some of the animals. It's very possible that there are wavelengths that we don't pick up at all. So with this inadequate seeing and hearing ability, what is the effect upon us and our world-picture?

We conceive certain ideas about the world, such as by looking out in the sky we say that evidently space goes on forever. And then we read that Einstein or some other mathematician has come up with the concept of the space-time continuum, or the concept that space is curved,--if you went out in a straight line you would end up by coming in behind yourself, or something like this. That space is not out there infinitely, but rather the whole universe may be contained.

The space-time concept indicates the possibility that space does not exist independently of time, nor time of space. That which exists is space-time. And if this is true or even possible then our whole concept of passing days and years may be erratic.

Our whole concept of experience may be inadequate. Now maybe you'll say that I don't have all the scientific facts on these arguments. But I'm just throwing this out, because I do know that we only see partially,--we only witness and experience partially. And the reason I know this is because my experience went beyond this. When it went beyond I could look back and see that there was no such thing as time.

And yet that was yesterday,--twenty-seven years ago,--so there was time. And this takes us into the paradox of the language in talking about these matters. People will say, "Well, either there is time or there isn't,--that either was twenty-seven years ago or it was right now." Well,--I say it is both. Because we're using a relative language to describe a non-relative experience we have to include seeming opposites to try to give a more complete picture.

This analysis of our illusory ideas about the physical world can be extended to our psychological self-analysis. As you get older you may find yourself continually discovering that you're not whom you thought you were. For example, people try to project a certain image,--they try their darnedest to project something that will get them by in their social relationships. They fall in love with somebody and think, "Why, this person can't reject me because I'm projecting a certain image and they have to pick it up." They may not come right out and say this, but everyone acts this way.

But they encounter someone who isn't interested, and who tells them off: "Here's what's wrong with you,--you're a fathead." So there's a letdown.

This psychological letdown happens because we haven't had the proper view of ourself. This is called losing an ego. As we go through this, as soon as one ego is eliminated,--we go back and build a better one. A little bit better this time, a little more cunning, if we're just ordinary people. But if we are philosophically inclined we may drop it. We say, "What's the use of building up this false front? Let's just try to be honest and act naturally, and see if we can't get by that way. But this reaction is not common.

You can't just go in to an authority for help either. We have a new type of priestcraft coming up in our midst, the hierarchy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology.

We can't go in to these people and say, "What is the mind? What is thought?" As I said, I find no books on psychology that define the subjective matter. None of them define either the mind or thought,--they bypass it. They describe the mind as "the total being," whatever that is. And that's about the way it is said in the books,--"the total being, the total experience, whatever that is."

But yet we have to read something. We have to start somewhere on this self-analysis, this business of peeling off.

Now why do we want to peel-off or divest ourselves of egos? Because basically we're after the truth, including the truth about ourselves. And after we find the truth about ourselves we may be able to find out the truth about other people as well.

This is what most people seem to be doing today,--finding lots of inequities in other people. It's a great picnic, finding inequities in politicians, leaders, authors, and so forth and saying, "Boy, here's one devil worse than me. Let's hang him and take the attention off me."

Instead of finding the truth in themselves, people criticize others for lying to the public. And all the time we are lying to ourselves about who we are, not collectively but individually.

Looking Inside

So this is not just a head game. This whole system of spiritual realization depends upon us finding out who we are.

And now you say "Why? Isn't there some other way? Can't I find some chemical, some formula, and let it go at that?" This is what everybody is looking for,--a gimmick. That all you have to do is follow a certain diet, do certain exercises, be good according to certain human principles, and you will go right straight to the good place,--you'll be complete.

We find that when you do start looking into yourself that instead of a greater criticism of your fellow man you may have more compassion for him. You would think that a person who finds himself might say, "I'm better than the rest of these people now." But this isn't true. As you go along you have a greater compassion immediately because you realize that very few people have any degree of control.

This is the amazing thing, incidentally. People think that they are pulling strings, but the majority of people are just responding, just reacting. And everyone is trying to be a manipulator. About half of the people whom I have talked to who went into college to study psychology did it because their heads were mixed-up. The other half wanted to become manipulators.

In other words, factories and institutions will hire professional people who are able to write up tests or whatever in order to sort out which people they want to hire. The type that will be amenable and placid, are sorted out to be used in the factories.

So psychology is being used. And the sad part about it is that the people who are doing it know nothing about this thing we are talking about tonight. All they know is, as with Pavlov's dogs, that if you hold the bone in a certain way people will sit up and beg, people will respond. But this is not knowledge of the Self.

Now as we go through this process of peeling away this error we get into the first step of genuine self-realization. But we do not postulate and say, "Here is a system by which you can annihilate your ego." Because your ego may be the only thing you have,--why should you want to annihilate it? This process is just something that happens when you start searching. You gradually shed certain egos. And after you shed them you're glad you got rid of them. You're glad that you don't have to live with that nonsense. But it is not a matter of going out deliberately trying to annihilate your ego, trying to be forcefully humble, to make yourself a community blob that is inoffensive to the rest of the mob.

Reversal

One of the reasons why I came out of the woodwork and started to talk was that I found many little cults or isms that pretended to take people into spiritual enlightenment, but that gave no sensible method. Most of them prescribed a certain form of action such as a mantra, a prayer, or a physical exercise,--a physical attack.

But in the particular system that we employ in our group we use the phrase "a reverse vector." There is no way to approach truth, because to approach truth would mean to aim in a certain direction which is unproven. That you must know truth before you can aim at it,--you must know what you're aiming at and also know who is aiming.

Now this may seem like a tremendous task, to aim away from everything that is untrue. This might sound unnecessarily stern. But it is not impossible that we can aim away from untruth.

Of course the question comes up, "What is untrue? If we don't know what 'true' is, how can we know what 'untrue' is?" But we do know that which is ridiculous, or absurd, and we can go back to common sense.

And I cannot in this instance prescribe for you or label what is absurd. What is absurd for you may not be absurd for me, or for the fellow next to you. You have no alternative except to determine what is absurd for you and to get away from it.

A little while ago I said that we should set up certain yardsticks. To me it is absurd to think that money can buy truth. And I immediately turn my back on that type of practice.

So I narrow it down to the groups who don't charge and I search among them. And I find one that says, "You have put the guru up in the middle of your forehead and concentrate on him." Well, that may be meaningful, or that may be absurd in relation to another discipline that may seem to be sensible. So we decide to at least tentatively put the thing that is seemingly more absurd in the background, and to concentrate our attention on what seems to be more sensible.

Now this is the total formula that you follow. And before you get into too much of this business of a reverse vector you have to develop an intuition, or you will not know how to decide that which is absurd. Some things we reject accurately because they are absurd, but sometimes we reject things only because they don't include things which we want to do. In other words, we are good at refusing to accept any philosophy that doesn't approve of all our vices or of all the directions that we would like to take.

Basically we have to develop our intuition and our reason. Now I didn't say "logic,"--logic is often a form of vanity. Intellectual thinking can be a vanity trip. But we have only two things with which to evaluate this problem. Two eyes, so to speak,--we're relative creatures. One of these is our intuition and the other one is our logic, or rather, our reasoning powers.

And we must try as we go along to develop these a little better, so that we will not be kidding ourselves or doing wishful thinking. Now there are ways of developing your intuition. One of them, of course, is by checking it. For instance by using ESP cards,--trying to pick up things directly with your mind and then watching to see if you're getting a greater degree of accuracy.

There are certain mental exercises, such as using mathematics, that can be used. We give an "intensive" of largely mental math exercises, prepared for the purpose of exercising logic, to try to get you to try to think in an orderly manner, rather than in a random, desire manner.

There is a certain lifestyle, a certain way of living that develops your intuition. And the more you have your intuition developed the better able you will be to cut time shorter and to bypass a lot of useless movements and useless books. To go right to the heart of the thing.

If you do pick up a book and read it you will have to know if the author was on the level or if he was just writing a book to sell it. If you don't have an intuition developed it is not going to do you any good to sort, because you may make the wrong decision,--from lack of discrimination.

The next thing to concentrate on of course is, basically, work. You have to get into the place where the material is, with people who know something. You have to join some sort of human relationship, to work with some group if possible, so that you will be reminded to go back when you slip and forget. Reminded to keep digging, keep meditating, or keep some sort of action going that will keep your head on the problem.

Because this process is basically the sharpening-up of a computer. Giving the computer two important faculties, developing these faculties, and then keeping a problem in that computer incessantly. Keep feeding that problem into the computer until the computer solves it.

This process is equated in some Zen schools by the use of a koan. Now I don't like to put the entire value of Zen into the koan, to say that all you have to do is to get a koan,--this seems to be the feeling that is received by some Western students of Zen.

I believe that the koan is pretty much a system of finding sense by the intense application of non-sense. There are not enough symbols existing to adequately describe the truth,--and the more symbols you use the more confused you may become. Whereas, in the Zen technique you take just one set of symbols, one word or so, and you use this as a koan. By concentrating upon it, although it seems to have no meaning, you'll arrive at sense. That's the idea.

Well, this may be. But I would recommend that you take a word or an idea that may have some meaning, and concentrate on it until you know more about it. Of course, you can use then an English koan to a much better advantage. Such as the words, "Who am I?" or "What am I'?" or "What am I doing?" This type of koan is much more effective. And there are variations of it as you go along such as, "What is intuition?" In other words, "What is this thing and how does it help me?"

Now this outline is about as much as can be given out as the generally advised path. The detailed path for the person who is interested in finding self-realization,--that is, total self-realization,--is almost an individual case. You can't just write a general blueprint and say, "Here it is,--follow this." Because you're going to run into many instances of roadblocks that are not in the books. Each personality is different and each set of egos is rooted differently.

Here again the group is of value. Whether there is a teacher or not, some people may be able to help you recognize an ego that you may not be aware of. And it is not always a group confrontation,--the cure for a lot of this is an individual one-to-one thing.

And the business of transmission is generally a one-to-one thing. Transmission is the finding of the ability for direct contact of mind with mind, to communicate energy from one head to another, for the purpose of expediting some mental realization.

Q&A

Samadhi

And now we will turn this into a more informal talk. I think we will get further by getting into your personal inquiries.

Question: After your experience, what is your present state in relation to your previous state, and what is your present perception?

Rose: Well, again I wonder how it's best to describe what you're asking me. One thing is that I don't take the physical world to be as significant as I used to. When you are in an experience you are out of this dimension. And when you come back you have to be in this dimension,--you can't do it halfway. Nevertheless you always carry with you the memories that this dimension is not real. The other is more real, now.

Paradoxically, while you're here this dimension is real,--it's all you've got. Once again you have to accept it as being totally real,--and yet you have the memory that it is not totally real. That it is not the only dimension.

Question: What do you mean when you talk about dropping certain egos?

Rose: This isn't just idle talk about dropping some little fault or habit. There are tremendous things that are built into us,--they come with the package when we are born. And children have them, although not to the same degree that older people do. For instance, we have a power ego. We like to be impressive with people. But after awhile we may philosophically sort of drop it and say, "Well, I'm not that important." This is an example of an ego and it can be a real hindrance

But there is another ego, and that is the survival ego .... that we don't want to give up this life. If somebody throws a hatchet at us we duck,--we can't just stand there and take it, because we don't have the conviction yet where we're going. So we hang onto this ego.

Then there is the spiritual survival ego, in which we think that we're important enough to live forever. When you are young you look into the mirror and say, "I don't know about the rest of those suckers out there, but I am really a special creature." This is an ego. "Those other people out there are just vegetables, but I am going to find immortality." Well,--before you find it you will give that up. You give up the ego of physical survival and you give up all hope of spiritual attainment.

But you can't give them up for long, because those are the things that keep body and mind together. That's the reason that this experience is a very brief experience. You die,--you actually die,--and you can't stay dead for a long time. And when you come back you've got to get back into the game again.

Question: I was wondering about faith. Don't you have to have faith in your own path?

Rose: You have to have a certain kind of faith. I always say, "Doubt everything except your ability to doubt." You have to have faith in your ability to accomplish, your ability to sort.

There is nothing proven. We know nothing for sure,--we don't even know that we exist. But we more or less have to postulate or accept as a fact that we exist and that we can do something, at least tentatively, until we prove that we can do something. Or,--prove that something can happen to us.

Question: Would you relate something about your experience to us?

Rose: Yes, if you're curious I can tell you. It occurred in Seattle, Washington,--I was thirty years of age at the time and I had been fed-up several times with what I was doing. I had been into yoga and other things, and several times between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty I had given it up and wished I could go out, get drunk, and forget about it. In fact, I had gone to Seattle to get married and I was going to chuck the whole thing. I said, "If I get married, I'll throw it out,--forget about it."

But while I was there I picked up a job, and again I gravitated down toward the library. I'm back down there reading books on yoga, and doing my yoga exercises,--trying to marry the two, the mundane world and this mental drive that I had. I think that this was the catalytic factor that caused the experience,--trying to bring these two together. I could be wrong.

I had a room in an apartment hotel of sorts, and I would come home every day, sit up on the bed with my feet tucked up under me, meditate and think. So this particular day I sat there,--and I started to get a pain in the top of my head, right in the center of the top. The pain got worse,--in fact it got so bad that I started weeping.

Tears started to come out of my eyes. I couldn't stand it, and I thought, "Oh boy, three thousand miles from home and I've got to blow my stack. That's what is happening." I thought that I would have a stroke or possibly go crazy. Because I didn't think that it would just stop on its own.

But I was aware at the peak of this pain of going out the hotel window. I was aware of actually seeing people who were on the street at the time, except that I was above them. This was in daylight, incidentally, it wasn't at night. My window looked out toward the Cascade Range of snowcapped mountains. And I watched this just as if I were in an airplane, passing underneath me.

And then there was sort of a time flipover, in which I was no longer over the Cascade Range,--now I could see all of humanity. I knew that all I had to do was look wherever I wanted, and I could see any man who ever lived or would live. There was no such thing as time. These people were all living now,--all I had to do was to check them out, if I wished.

So I looked and I saw myself. I could see myself struggling down there,--Richard Rose,--I could see his whole life pattern. I'm still in a sort of astral projection form, I'm still much attached to the body, to these people, and I feel a tremendous amount of grief. A tremendous amount of sadness for this seemingly senseless struggle.

Because when this happens you've got in the back of your head the question of why people have to struggle, and if there is a Creator who could just say, "You're all smart,--all I have to do is to make you smart,--why should I make you stupid?" So why is all this travail going on?

Then I realized that I was both humanity and my individual self, and that I was everything. And in an instant I realized that humanity didn't exist and that I didn't exist. But that I did exist in nothingness and everythingness, infinitely. And how long this lasted I had no way of checking, because I was alone and when I came back it was rather traumatic. And I stayed that way for several days, because it is as difficult to come back as it is to go into it.

This experience is almost synonymous with the one that Paul Wood had, the fellow we were talking about earlier,--in relation to the Lord's Prayer formula.

Spiritual Experiences

So never get the idea that a spiritual experience of this sort is pleasant or blissful. Now that doesn't mean that all spiritual experiences are not blissful. People often think that all spiritual experiences are the same,--this isn't true.

Ramana Maharshi was a teacher whom Paul Brunton supposedly discovered in India some years ago. And his book The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi was the first one that I saw that describes the differences in what are called spiritual exaltations.

He describes the differences between what we call cosmic consciousness (Kevala Nirvikalpa Samadhi) and enlightenment (Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi.) He describes them very accurately in plain and simple terms.

He said that Kevala Samadhi is a situation in which the mind is like a bucket attached to the end of a rope and lying in the bottom of a well. The mind is dropped down in meditation but at any time it can pull itself back out. It is no great travail to go down into the bottom of the well, rest awhile, and it's no great travail to come back up. This is the cosmic consciousness experience.

Whereas Sahaja Samadhi, the enlightenment experience, is equivalent to a river flowing into the ocean. And once it flows there we don't recognize the river, it disappears. Its identity is lost, its individuality is lost, and it never returns. This is the basic difference.

Now there are other "exaltations," and this is where the confusion comes in,--the confusion is in Zen as well. Every word that describes spiritual experience is not synonymous with the others that describe spiritual experiences. We have words like nirvana, moksha, samadhi, and satori, which are not all the same, if you go by the descriptions of the experience in the different accounts.

Satori is an experience anterior to, prior to cosmic consciousness, not beyond it or superior to it. Because it is described as a relative experience. Cosmic consciousness is a relative experience,--enlightenment is an absolute experience.

There is a book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke which gives several accounts: Christ, St. Paul, Buddha, St. John of the Cross, Pascal, Mohammed. They all have a common denominator in that the person experienced ecstasy, witnessed color, light, beauty, and found peace within his heart. This is a relative experience.

The enlightenment experience is the experience of nothingness and everythingness,--and it is said this way because neither of them is the experience. It is paradoxical or untrue to call it just nothingness, because it's not oblivion. But it is the knowledge, or rather the being, or entry into nothingness and everythingness. And that is the total experience.

Now we go back and we hear a person talking about salvation. He says, "I have reached the paramount experience. I'm saved." And I realized a long time ago that the person describing this experience did not have the same thing as cosmic consciousness.

Or you pick up a book on Zen and you read about satori, which is the "wow" experience. A fellow says, I went to such-and-such ashram, I stayed there so many months or years, and one day,--Wow, I knew it! And I had a beer with the head master and we went away laughing together,--we got it." This is not enlightenment. Because if this man had enlightenment they would have carried him out on a stretcher,--it's that drastic. You don't die and then laugh and say "Wow!" Death is more final than that.

Progressive Stages

Gurdjieff talks about man numbers one, two, three and four. Man number one is instinctive, number two is emotional, number three is intellectual, and man number four is philosophic. These are the steps that we take in the natural evolution of a person, regardless of whether the person is spiritual or not.

When we start off we just function instinctively,--we eat, we reproduce, we hunt a place to hide when it's raining,--that sort of thing. And if we can get more of the same, we get more of the same. More eating, more reproducing, more pleasure, more luxury, leisure, security.

But a time comes when a person feels that this is inadequate, that he has a greater meaning than say, just being an animal. And he then attaches himself to a personal figure,--this is one of the symptoms. This personal figure may be Jesus Christ, it may be a guru, it may be some spiritual teacher who is dead. But it's always a personal figure, a male god,--that is, a man-god or a human god type.

And by intense concentration on this he forgets himself, he loses himself in this other person. And he reaches a rapture or an exaltation, as the psychologists call it. And this has distinguishable characteristics: he loses himself, he is less instinctive, he can forget his vices, he can be free of them in fact, by focusing upon this other being.

But again, sometimes a person gets disgusted with this type of experience. After so many years go by he may say, "Hey,--that was my emotion. I projected perhaps, onto another person. Does that person really exist, outside of a book?"

So he goes about applying his intellect to this. Maybe he gets into translating the Bible to find out if this fellow did exist. Then he gets into the Kabbalah and starts into the shaking of the head with numerological symbols, or into mathematics, which is pretty much the same as the Kabbalah; math may be the substitution of symbols for concepts.

After this is done for so long the mind awakens to the meaning for mathematics,--like a light bulb turning on. There is a realization of exactly what is meant by "x plus y equals z." And you say, "Wow! Now I know." The whole algebraic system,--the whole thing,--pops. Now if you have had this experience you will know what satori is like,--but instead of algebraic symbols you'll have artificial symbols of philosophy or some esoteric system. And this experience in turn is followed by a transition.

These transitions or elations are let's say the sharps or flats between the high points of the instinctive, emotional, and intellectual man. You go through an exaltation to take a rest, and you relax or stay awhile in each one of these.

And the next step, of course, is when you realize that your intellect is a vanity. You know that you can work these math problems fast, you're good at remembering these things, you can play chess and beat so many other people, because you've got a good mathematical head. But then you realize that this is all a vanity trip and that you don't know anything yet. That it didn't bring you the real realization about what your thoughts are and what your interior self is.

I say that there are three things that have to be answered: Whom you were before you were born, whom you are after death, and what your relation is to the Ultimate.

And any movement that does not answer all three of them doesn't answer any of them. You'll notice in some of the movements that they will tell you what is going to happen to you, but they never say where you came from. Some of them will say that you just spontaneously arrived here. Some will tell you where you came from, but they have no knowledge of your relation to the Ultimate,--provable, that is. They may give you a concept structure, but they don't give you something that is really substantial and answers to common sense.

So we get back to the idea of saying, "Hey, this intellect thing isn't going to take me anyplace. I've got to get into a general appraisal of all the data that I can pick up." This is philosophy,--going out and bringing all sorts of systems of thinking together and trying to find something just maybe by luck, by throwing a whole lot of garbage into the computer, a mass of erudite writings.

And as a result of this, strangely enough, we even lose the philosophic ego,--if we're able to do this. This is where cosmic consciousness (Kevala Samadhi) comes in,--this is where we experience ecstasy. But ecstasy is not enlightenment,--it is or may be one of the landmarks toward enlightenment.

Question: Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Rose: No,--I have only heard about it. This is what we're beset with today,--I prefer not to get into Zen writings at all. I don't know what the book is about. It's possible that his concentration of motorcycle maintenance may have been his koan, if he focused his head on it.

Question: You said that enlightenment was dying?

Rose: Yes.

Question: It doesn't seem that this would be a very pleasant experience.

Rose: I didn't say that it would be.

Question: One wonders why people would look for it.

Rose: Yes. Maybe I shouldn't tell you,--maybe I should let you think that it's nice. Again, you're at a disadvantage when you hear this. The only advantage of telling you this, is that when it happens you won't jump out the window. You'll say, "I expected that it might be rough." That's all.

Question: Can't you see it as a rebirth instead of dying? You can't see things freshly if you don't let go of your previous conceptions.

Rose: Why do you have to see things freshly?

Question: Seeing things for what they are without....(trails off)

Rose: Hanging onto the fence, do you mean? Well, you have to let go of what you think things are. Now as far as the idea that there's no birth unless there is dying,--it's possible that "you" may not experience birth. That the only reason why people do experience birth is that they never realized that they could stay dead. They maybe feel compelled to play the game, to go back on the stage,--this is one of the concepts.

The Buddhistic concept of reincarnation was claimed by some to be a misinterpretation,--that Buddha was supposed to have meant reoccurrence. That the same life reoccurred. He said, "When you light the candle again, is it the same flame, or is it another flame?" Some people think that it's another candle,--no. It's the same candle, you just witness the same drama over and over and over.

Question: Would you say that you witnessed Nirvana at the time of your experience? If so, what about your worldly attachment then? You mentioned that you were about to get married.

Rose: Well, I didn't marry then. The only thing that I did was to get out of town and go back to where it was a little safer. You know, closer to the cemetery in case something happened. But I had no more ideas about getting married for awhile. I did get married the next year to somebody entirely different.

The idea about Nirvana now,--I presume that what is written about Buddha's experience was written not by Buddha but by somebody else, the same as with the experiences of Christ. But I understand that his "Nirvanam" was identical with the word enlightenment (Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi.) If you take the word Nirvana in that sense it's not synonymous with satori.

Question: Were you able to function after having this experience?

Rose: For about a week very poorly. Very poorly. You're pretty helpless for quite awhile. And of course the main thing is that there's no reason to function, and the difficulty is in getting yourself to either function or commit suicide. This seems to be the alternative. That either one is equally valid, and it seems like quite a burden to go through the motions.

I came back a little closer to home, to Cleveland for awhile. I didn't go all the way back to West Virginia. And what I experienced then was that I began to see people more as robots,--they were almost transparent. They weren't actually solid, and they stayed that way for quite awhile.

Not only that but I could see their motivations,--their motivations seemed to be very transparent. And everything became so absurd.

I would get shocked. I remember I came out of the hotel in Cleveland and the sidewalks were full of people,--marching. They had no thoughts, their faces were almost blank. And I thought, "Oh boy, some terrible thing has happened. They're all in a state of shock." And I went up to them,--they didn't seem to be saying much,--and I said, "What happened?"

And one of them said, "What do you mean, 'What happened?'" I said, "Where are you going?" And he said, "To the ball game." They were going down to the stadium. All I picked up was that these people had no great purpose in life. They were just going as zombies, speechless. If they were talking, if they were even saying anything, it wasn't apparent to me.

So this was the transition. Trying to get back into this thing of saying, "Oh yes, I'm in rapport with your little head game." This is basically what social rapport is. We have to get out there and try to feel this fellow's personality, so to speak, and get along with it.

Symptoms & Modern Psychology

Question: So one might say you were quite mad?

Rose: You might say that, yes. Oh,--according to definitions, I would have hated for a modern psychologist to have gotten a hold of me.

We have a friend right now, from Brown University, who was just committed to Butler. He's going through a spiritual experience,--there's absolutely nothing wrong with him. But he was starting to weep and to break down, and that's where he ended up. I went down and talked to him and I could stop him, I stopped him two or three times. But I couldn't stay there day and night. The thing is, he should go through the experience and get it over with. But the psychiatrist was pumping him full of dope. So it was unfortunate that he had to stagger into there.

Question: There is a fear there with me. Occasionally I feel as if I am on the verge of breaking into that, and I pull back.

Rose: Right. That's the reason why I felt that I should talk about it. Because some of you people may at some time or another go into an experience of this sort.

I said to the boy when I first went in, "What were the symptoms?" And he said, "I thought I was dying." And I said, "Good,--this is one of the signs, there's nothing wrong with you. Because if you were dying the doctors would have found it with stethoscope, blood pressure gauge, and so forth. So it's manifest that you're not dying, or you would be dead by this time." That this is a psychic experience, not a physical death.

Question: What about a person going through this who might find himself committed?

Rose: There's no answer. You just hope that these buzzards don't do too much to you, that's all.

A.T.: Well, that's the purpose of having a group. People who can isolate you.

Rose: That's right. That's what I tried to do with this fellow. I went down and talked with the therapist,--and I found the therapist giving me the once-over.

I said, "Hey,--don't pump this guy full of dope. He's got to go through this either now or later. If you think that he's going to hurt somebody, put him in a room where he can't. But I guarantee you he'll not hurt anybody."

There is a tendency for sociologists to think that they are going to be the future planners for the robot enterprise. That the government will somehow fund them and put them in charge of the behavioral patterns in the country, so that people won't cause any ripples. When you start rioting in the streets you'll be herded into someplace, given a shot in the posterior, and come out loving humanity. This kind of idea.

And that's what this doctor told me at the hospital two nights ago. He said, "We have a drug for almost every thought." That if they find that your thoughts travel in a certain direction, "We have a drug that will turn you around."

"This guy shows paranoid inclinations, so give him so many milligrams of such-and-such a drug. Well, what do you know? Now he doesn't act like a paranoid, he acts like a schizophrenic. So we give him a counter-shot for that and he'll be back to work, back to paying taxes, and the government will give that money to fund me and my institution."

Question: So does your philosophy work together with psychology?

Rose: Yes. I think that Zen is the greatest psychoanalytic system in the world,--it goes directly inside. But what modern psychology and psychiatry are doing is dealing with symptoms, and a conjured up set of symptoms at that. It used to be ink blots...

Question: Well, that's a tangible thing. That's what they're trying to work with.

Rose: Right, that's my criticism. They should enter the mind directly. If you want to be a psychologist you should learn to enter a person's mind and know what he's thinking. And you'll know why he is thinking it. Walk one mile in his moccasins and you won't have any trouble diagnosing his case.

First of all, I don't believe that all these things which are called insanity are insanity; and I think that a lot of the writers are coming into this broader scope. I believe that insanity should be defined as breakdown of brain tissue or something else in the body, that would cause erratic reactions or behavior.

Now there is something else. A person can become possessed,--and don't think that this is fiction. These are real cases. You can become possessed, and modern psychology refuses to accept it. They may use the word schizophrenia for possession. And consequently any cure or therapy is going to be in the wrong direction.

Instead of getting rid of this double occupant they go about telling this fellow that he is messed-up. Attacking him for it, or maybe giving him a drug that knocks him out so completely that this other thing doesn't manifest. They used to have a cure in Bedlam a century or so ago,--they beat the hell out of the patients. Harass the body enough and things will leave; not even a devil would stay inside them. Turn the water hose on them ,--this was also done.

Freud and Followers

Question: What do you think of Sigmund Freud?

Rose: Well, I don't criticize Freud entirely. The only thing I criticize him for was that he was more intent upon packaging. The more I read about Freud the more I realized that what he was doing was running around Europe trying to set up a whole string of chain-store institutes or places for therapy.

And he was surrounding himself with a group of less able men than himself. People who were glad to latch onto the bandwagon if it showed signs of making money.

But as for his basic concepts, I think that each one of these people has discovered something that is worth listening to. The sexual concept of Freud's had not come up before, and it was good to look at things from that viewpoint for a change,--that some of our problems could be caused by sex.

Sometimes most of our motivation is sex. If you want to analyze yourself and your motivations today you will come around to sex: Why do you want a job? Why do you want an education? Male or female now. The guy wants an education, he goes to college, for what? A better job? Because if he doesn't get a better job he is not going to be able to reproduce in the same fashion,--he may have to settle for quite a bit less. Consequently he is going out to get a job by which he can support the best woman he can find.

The girl goes to college, sometimes, to find one of these able-bodied people who can support her. I'm not saying that this is always the case but nevertheless, we are basically motivated by sex in a lot of our directions. I don't say that we are motivated by sex in our spiritual directions or philosophic directions, but in the mundane directions the motivations are mostly sexual.

Then we get to the will to power. Nietzsche was pretty much going along these lines, and the idea of the will to power in some of the psychologists who followed him went more or less in the same direction.

And then Victor Frankl came up with the idea of the will to meaning. I was really amazed when I first saw his book. I thought, "Here is a psychiatrist for a change who is on the path." That basically this is what everybody wants to know who they are.

Some of them get tired, that's all. The majority are mostly sunk into something like, "Oh, the factors are too great, the studies are too much for me to encompass in a lifetime. I'm going to let the preacher do it; I'll take his word for it. I'm just too tired to go through all this study, this thinking, or whatever it is that has to be done."

But everybody wants to know who they are. Everybody realizes that the game is fixed and that they should find out what the puzzle is. But they don't do it.

Frankl discovered this,--I thought, when I read the first few pages of his book. But after I got into the book I found out that what he was talking about was, "Assume a meaning; if you don't have one, pretend you have one. Go grab a meaning,--survive." In other words, let your wife die in the concentration camp, but hang onto that manuscript until you get out. That was his meaning for living.

Question: This sounds like Meister Eckhardt,--he wrote a poem about being both God and a creature. Is it possible to be in a place where you can see the Absolute and yet still hang onto this world?

Rose: I'm stuck here for awhile,--don't have much choice. Maybe I do.

Question: What about the other side of the coin, seeing the Absolute?

Rose: I'm still a little unsure about what you are driving at, but let me try to anticipate it, or feel what you're saying:

The question that, possibly the person who has seen the Absolute would be concerned or give a damn about whether Freud was packaging his stuff, or would be concerned with the behavior of people, whether they got along or didn't, or whether they understood or didn't.

Again, I definitely, sincerely do not worry too much about what goes on. But if I am talking to people who are about to embark on a spiritual path,--then I say, "Hey, there are certain things in this rat race that you want to watch out for."

If you are going to read books on psychology, try to learn how to sort with your intuition, to be able to tell what these people are up to. Did they make a tremendous discovery that can help you, that you can hang onto as you go down your spiritual path? Or are they playing some head game just to package and sell books or some therapy system? This is what is important.

And all of this in my estimation is important. In other words, this is. What you see here in these various stage acts, this act of mankind on the stage, is part of the Absolute. So there is no dichotomy.

The Relative Dimension

Question: Why are we caught up in this relative world? Is there any value to it?

Rose: This is the catch. When I was about twenty-one years of age I tried to write a poem about this. The theme was, "Why am I on this path?" This too is implanted. It had to be. I am not an individual who says suddenly, "I'm going to get rid of these hangups and barnacles and be a free individual." I had to be almost programmed to look for the truth.

Now what does this mean? In esoteric or spiritual writings you hear words like, "We have lost our way from the father." That each particle wants to go back to the Father. This is what I meant when I said that everybody is looking for the truth.

I don't like to say it in such a religious sounding way that would have a listener think, "Well, this is just a belief, this is the foundation that you have." But this is the feeling that you get when you go back there,--that you went back to the Father. That you had lost your way, so to speak, because your consciousness had become fascinated.

I was talking earlier today about one of my grandchildren, a baby. The baby isn't totally in this dimension, at this age. It will only come into this dimension for a time. And I realized that what you have to do to keep a baby in this dimension is to keep its attention. You neglect that baby and it will die. This applies to some animals also. It is said that if you let a monkey lay and don't give him something that is like a mother or a friend, he will close in on himself and die. He just retreats into the other dimension.

So what do we do with our babies? We make crazy noises at them, we talk baby talk to them, and try to attract that baby's attention. We sing songs to it and keep dangling toys in front of it. Finally the baby starts watching what is in front of it and becomes enchanted by it. The next thing you know he is exploring the whole room, and pretty soon he is hooked.

Question: What are your views on reincarnation?

Rose: First of all, if I knew for sure that you were going to reincarnate I wouldn't tell you. Because I believe that it becomes a form of procrastination.

There may be cases where people have realized that they have lived before, or that they have been on the stage before, something of this sort. But this idea of reincarnation can be used for several purposes. It can be used by the powers of that particular area to tell the person, "Don't feel bad because I'm stealing all your money,--the next time around you will be in charge and you will be stealing my money." Or, "The reason that you are here is that you stole my money last time." This is one rationalization connected with the theory of reincarnation.

And the other rationalization is of course, "You've got all the time in the world. This cosmos turns slowly,--and in time you'll get there."

Question: You talked about the different levels of our being. Are these like stages of development?

Rose: Yes. It seems pretty hard to make a jump, although there seem to be people who have possibly been born with a certain faculty that other people were not born with,--they seem to jump a bit faster.

The saying is that these people seem to be "old souls" when they are born. So we do see such cases where people move rather rapidly, in comparison to others for whom it took years or possibly a lifetime to break through. Sometimes it happens after a long life of spiritual work, and you will notice it happening to them on their deathbeds.

Question: Do you see these states of being as able to coexist at the same time and be constant?

Rose: They do. For example, if you reach the Salvationist experience you never completely lose it. And you don't have to lose it as you go along. You don't deny it, even if you find that it isn't the final experience.

In other words, when a person has a Salvationist experience, that to him is the maximum experience and everybody else is crazy. Only when they transcend the instinctive level can they still be an instinctive person, recognizing the values of instinctive living, the energy that comes from instinctive living, and be now, on an emotional level. And then,--still be an intellectual person, recognizing that it is a vanity while becoming a philosophic person, and still go on from there.

Part of the system that I advise in The Albigen Papers is that we make milk from thorns. These very things which are negative can be turned, the energy taken from them, and this energy used in progression,--in finding goals faster.

Question: When you reach the point where the physical world and time become unreal in a way, when practical life loses its value and doesn't matter,--it can become pretty difficult.

Rose: I know. I know that. The only thing I can say is to try to keep yourself chemically balanced, that's all. You can handle it, if you don't become unbalanced chemically.

God, Buddhism, Christianity

Question: Do you believe that there is a God?

Rose: I don't believe that the God that people talk about exists.

Question: Where does Jesus Christ fit in? Was he somebody who attained enlightenment?

Rose: Well, I don't really know that. I believe that there were people who lived on Earth who had a great potential. And I think that sometimes their writings are misread. And I don't pretend to know what they knew.

Buddha wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing,--but we find say three gospels written almost identically at a time when printing was expensive. And I'm somewhat dubious about this idea of wasting the time in the writing of three almost identical gospels.

And yet, this book gives us the formula. As I said, you will find formulas in sacred writings. In my particular case I got disgusted with the whole Christian movement for awhile, and ignored the formulas therein,--and then came back and rediscovered them. For instance "the way, the truth, and the life," is a good biblical formula for any seeker.

The paths to the truth are three-fold in both Buddhism and Christianity. The formula is the way, the truth, and the life. You don't just work on one thing,--you have to work on three levels at once. In Buddhism it's the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Both formulas are pretty much synonymous,- dharma means way, and the sangha is the brotherhood.

You have to become the truth, you must apply the discipline, and you must be associated with a brotherhood,--that's the life in the Christian context. The truth, of course, is the central thing. Christ said, "I am the truth." He also said, "I am the way and the life."

This implies that he too became. He had to become, he didn't learn. He may have studied with somebody, such as the Essenes, but basically his admonition was to become. He didn't say, "I learned the truth," he said, "I am the truth." This was the distinction.

Now exactly whether he did say this or not, whether or not somebody just wrote it down, I don't know. That "somebody" might have said, "Well, we liked that fellow, he was in our club, let's make him a Messiah." This argument had been presented. And I don't like to rule on it.

I say to find out for yourself, basically. Or to try to find somebody who is living and has gone through some experience, and talk to them. It may do you more good than trying to live according to the code of someone whom somebody else has written about.

Question: I take it that you don't believe in God.

Rose: That's not correct. Don't get me wrong,--I believe that the enlightenment experience is the same as the God experience. But I like to qualify this because the term God is generally used with certain implications.

Question: God is thought of as being a mind, a perfect divine mind.

Rose: Well, yes,--but there is a concept that reaches beyond that. There is an intermediary state that you enter after death, and that is mind, the mind dimension. Mary Baker Eddy discovered that this existed, possibly by studying some Eastern philosophy, and she calls it Universal Mind.

In other words, in your individual mind you have your own private thoughts, but nevertheless your mind functions at its best when it is in contact with the mind dimension. Some sects in India call this the Buddhic mind. Paul Brunton calls it the Overself, of which we are all a part,--like the Brahman, so to speak.

The basic concept of the Atman and the Brahman would be closest, if you're talking about the God concept. The Atman being the individual ray that emanates from the central light that is the Brahman. The ray of light, that plays upon the void, seems to be an individual and identifies itself with a certain name. But it is really attached at the other end to the Brahman, the Absolute.

So this is an entirely different concept of God than the guy with the big whiskers that sits up there and says, "Hey, you're getting out of line down there. You broke a rule."

Question: Are you saying that God is Universal Mind?

Rose: No. I don't say that God is even Universal Mind. I think that the Absolute is a stage beyond mind. The mind is a dimension.

And you discover that the mind is a dimension by losing the mundane mind. The individual mind, the mundane mind, gives way and you realize,--that you don't have an individual mind,--that it is mostly just contact with mind-stuff, so to speak.

Other Systems

Question: Is this material included in your book?

Rose: There are other books that give this out about as plainly as it can be given. When I wrote The Albigen Papers I tried to avoid repeating as much as possible, but I listed certain books which I consider to be helpful or accurate. And the group tries to make these books available, if they're hard to find.

Ramaha Maharshi's book gives very accurate descriptions, although this one is not listed in my book. I do mention Conquest of Illusion by J.J. Van der Leeuw,--you can get this one through us or through Theosophical bookstores, if not in the general bookstores. Paul Brunton's books are very good, such as The Wisdom of the Overself and Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga.

Question: What is your opinion of Krishnamurti?

Rose: Well, I really can't say definitely. Incidentally, this book by Van der Leeuw was dedicated to Krishnamurti. I have never met Krishnamurti, never heard him talk, but I have watched his life over the years,--he's a bit older than I.

It's very possible that Krishnamurti is an enlightened man. Although I wonder sometimes at some of the material in his books and lectures. I have read some of these, and wondered why he gets into such things as remaking society, or making society a better place to live. I have no desire to play with the factors, the numberless factors, that go into making society any different. I have seen men like Stalin and Hitler try, and if those fellows couldn't do it there's no sense in my trying, there's no sense in Krishnamurti trying. In other words, this world is like a Juggernaut that is rolling along, and there's no sense in throwing yourself under the wheels.

But Krishnamurti has a life history of a man who wanted to find the truth. You know his history, of course. He was Annie Besant's disciple, so to speak, and they tried to make a messiah out of him. The Theosophists or Blavatsky or somebody had predicted that a reincarnation of Christ was due, one of the Masters was going to reappear, and they had Krishnamurti groomed to be this new messiah. They had this all built up, and they were going to put him on the scene at the right time.

But Krishnamurti rebelled and spilled the can of beans. He said he didn't intend to do anything of the sort. In other words, he wanted to find the truth himself. He could lecture, but he was not going to sell any merchandise.

Then he disappeared from the scene and nothing much heard about him for ten or fifteen years. And it was in that period of time I think, that he was going through the trauma that was necessary to bring his mind into realization.

When he emerged his lectures had a different tone. Before, they were mostly devotional little things like At the Feet of the Master. But now he was coming out and saying, "I see a new world" (when he was looking out the window of a train.) And, "You should see a new world."

Question: If this was a spiritual experience that you had, why did it include marriage as a consequence?

Rose: I didn't get married as a consequence of that experience. I got married as a consequence of a body, which I inherited from my parents, that had a prostate gland in it.

Question: Well isn't sexuality an attachment? How did you resolve the idea of marriage after your experience?

Rose: I worded my answer to you in a decided manner. I have never been attached, even before the experience. The idea of getting married was not because of sexual attachment. The idea was just help.

It's like with anything else,--it may be a lot of fun to eat food, but you can eat without having the fun. And I'm not saying that you should deny the fun if it's there. The idea is that you should not quit eating just to relinquish the ego for eating, let's say, or giving up the desire for food to such an extent that you would starve to death.

There is a difference. You should realize that there is such a thing as detachment. You can go through a garden and admire the flowers, but you don't have to pull them up by the roots. This is the mark. You don't have to cram everything into yourself physically and say, "That is mine,--I want that." But also you do not have to say, "I'm going to castrate myself." If you castrate yourself you might lose some of the energy that is needed to arrive at something, or to raise your kundalini.

Question: My understanding is that any sensual pleasure feeds an addiction, and may keep you from spirituality.

Rose: Sure, absolutely. I had no addiction for anything and never did have.

Question: Well how can you indulge in a sensual pleasure...!?

Rose: Hey,--you're putting a color on it that isn't there. How do you know that I indulge in a sensual pleasure? How do know I don't just indulge in a physical act? Why do you use these terms when you don't know how I indulge?

And I'm not going to tell you any more because you might start writing books about me. (laughter)

Question: What percentage of people ever attain the enlightenment experience?

Rose: Bucke says one in a million.

Question: I was also wondering where people like Einstein and others fit in.

Rose: Well,--I don't know. Some of these people may have individual lives, but generally if you become too prominent a public figure, with too much attention placed on you, it's not too good. To have the obligations of a politician, a scientist, or something of that sort, and become occupied with such is detrimental to spiritual ideas and work.

One of the greatest detriments to spiritual work sometimes can be to have an ability as a scientist, working in a research lab or something, and to be using your head all day. When you go home after work and try to meditate you will be wanting to go out and chop wood or play golf to get some exercise. Your work pretty much takes all the quantum energy that has been accumulated.

The same in any business. If you get into a business and it takes up all your energy, you are not going to be able to do the proper thinking and inward looking, so to speak. So it is difficult to find a niche in life in which you can live and get philosophic things done.

So I don't know about these people. I used to think when I was younger that every smart man knew about the ultimate search. A person like Einstein, "certainly must be enlightened." But as I gathered from the conversations of Einstein shortly his death, he didn't believe that there was anything that happened after death. His concept was just oblivion.

Question: He said that if he had to do it over again he would be a cobbler.

Rose: He started out as something like that didn't he? A clerk or something?

Transmission

Question: Weren't there a lot of enlightened Zen masters in China? Isn't transmission used in all the Zen schools?

Rose: Huang Po, I think it was, answered the same question "No." Somebody asked that out of the several monasteries in China, each of which had two or three thousand students of Zen, "You mean there's no large number of those students becoming enlightened?"

And he said, "There is no Zen without transmission, and there isn't a single man in China who can transmit." Imagine,--of all these thousands of people. So it is not something that you encounter very often.

But if you see it, if you're near it, you will know what is happening. It is done through direct rapport. Transmission is direct mind to mind.

There is a part of our system which I haven't mentioned too much tonight, and even if you attend the weekly group meetings it might be rather vague to you. When you first get into it you might think it looks somewhat like an encounter group. We believe in approaching the truth by a sort of challenging of each other's thoughts: "Why do you think along a certain way? Are you being honest with yourself in this or that?" This sort of thing.

But then we have another thing which we call rapport sessions, in which we are trying to develop the intuition, and to sort of get the head in a position where transmission can be effected; where direct mind-to-mind can be experienced. To where you can sit and look at another man and say, "You're thinking this .... "and be right. This comes about slowly but surely, and this is where your head is ready for transmission.

Question: So the transmission occurs only between the teacher and another person?

Rose: It can occur between any two people, the only difference is that you can only transmit what you have. So that one person may transmit say some great love secret, and another person may transmit an experience similar to satori or cosmic consciousness. But you can only transmit what is already in the experiential computer, so to speak.

Question: Do you experience this awareness of yourself now, or is it something that the person loses when he comes back?

Rose: Well, it dims and brightens, that's about the best way I can tell you. There are times when you are very much aware of your body. For instance, they say that the whole world is an illusion so pay no attention. But it's not an illusion when a truck hits you or breaks your leg. It's still an illusion, but it's very real. The illusion becomes a very real illusion.

So the person with the broken leg, whether he is enlightened or not, is going to be very much aware of the physical world, the play-act.

On the other hand, there will be times when his mind or awareness will drift back to the other experience. He will not go back into it completely,--you can't, without going through the death experience again,--but he will go back to the point where he remembers it very vividly.

Question: And this is between-ness?

Rose: No, no,--that's not between-ness. Between-ness is a methodicity. This is another one of the laws that I was referring to. There is a certain way that you are able to hold your head just on perfect balance, not being to the left or to the right. This is something different.

What I'm talking about now is that when you come back, you are never completely in the world and you're never completely in an enlightenment experience. When you are completely in either one, then you're in it, that's all.

But at times you'll be aware of this other experience, and at unpredictable moments too, incidentally.

Question: Are you saying that transmission is very important in attaining the peak experience?

Rose: Well, I would say that it is a validation that a person who pursues a solitary path doesn't have. I think that it will give you a zest to go all the way through and experience it for yourself.

Question: So your group is oriented to creating this?

Rose: Preparing. So that they will be able to use what I call a direct mind communication.

Question: Have you run into any ways in which the "groupness" of your group interferes?

Rose: You get group states of mind, sure. You're always battling a group state of mind.

States of mind are the big thing. This occupies one whole chapter in The Albigen Papers,--including the ability to pick up states of mind. Because as long as you are in a state of mind you will not have direct mind communication. It's like with an animal in heat,--you're not going to be aware, except of the object of your heat. This is an extreme example, but there are other states of mind that can strongly affect you. I know that when I was a kid I used to go into a picture show and come out like a Horatio Alger character,--I wanted to change the world. That was because I got into a state of mind.

But the true state of mind is neither this nor even the state of mind that rejects it. It is very difficult to keep and hold a true state of mind. We continually flop from one state of mind to another. But to hold a true state of mind is,--to have the experience, which is basically a true state of no-mind.

Question: Do you feel like your life had ended with the experience and now you're just trying to pass it on?

Rose: I think that this is the only excuse I've got. (laughter) I have often wondered. A lot of people say, "Well, what are you hanging around here for?" And I don't know why I'm hanging around here.

Question: Is it possible to achieve transmission in a group?

Rose: We have many times experienced more than one person in a group having a certain rapport. But I don't think that the transmission is attainable by more than a one-to-one. I have never heard of any cases of the experience being picked up by more than two people at once.

Because basically it calls for me, if I'm the one who is acting, to lock your head with mine. Now I'm not much capable of locking my head with multiple heads. In other words, you fasten yourself to the other person's mind, and move them with your head while you are so fastened.

Question: You say that your system has to do with preparing someone for this experience,--what is this preparation about?

Rose: Outside of what I have already told you, there are two things that are practiced. One is the arrival at a knowledge of let's say the mundane self, or personality,--the elimination of the discrepancies in the personality, false beliefs, and that sort of thing.

The second is the practice that aims at direct mind communication. There's nothing complicated about this,--we call it a confrontation. It's like an encounter, where people actually try to be honest. And then there's the rapport.

Now in a rapport exercise, of course, only certain people will have rapport with each other easily. Sometimes you can select groups of four or five people to experiment, and if they find out that they can have rapport you isolate these from the main body. And then the remainder will try to find four or five who can have rapport, and so on.

So other than these things there is not too much that you can set down. From there on it's an individual thing,--there is a lot of feeling as you go, so to speak. You will watch and then somebody will come to you and say, "Hey, I don't feel like I'm making any progress," and then you try to look into it.

I have heard this repeatedly. I remember a case of one fellow who had been in the group for a year. Right before he had come to our place he had tried to kill himself,--it was a combination of disease, drugs, and depression. He had saved up his money to go up and be amazed by one Janov,--you know, Primal Scream. He wanted to scream with Janov, and was saving up his dough for this. So the boys in the group tried to discourage him from going,--a month at a time: "Stick around and see if you don't quiet down while you're here."

He complained after about a year that he didn't feel that he was making progress. So I just said to him, "O.K., well,--ask some of the others." They were sitting around and they started telling him, "When you came here, here's what you were, here's what you were doing,--and now look."

He had to be reminded of it. Because nobody feels like there has been any change. Right now everybody feels as if they have been this way all their life, but they haven't. You are not the same person you were a week ago perhaps.

So in answer to your question, there are individual steps. And every person is different because everyone encounters different traumas and everyone reacts differently to those traumas.

Pleasure-seeking

Questions: Is pleasure-seeking harmful?

Rose: Your comprehension of it will change gradually from year to year,--to where you will later laugh at your present idea of pleasure.

I was pointing out a little analogy in regard to personality changes. The man who puts the cup of booze to his lips is not the same man who sets it down. You immediately develop another personality, and you're critical of the personality of a half-hour ago. You say, "That wasn't me, that was a fool. I'm the smart guy now." But after this person gets good and drunk and then comes out of it he says, "That was a fool. Now I've got to start to find my sanity again."

Question: If your experience can't be described in relative terms, what is the value of your description in the back of the book?

Rose: I think that people pick it up.

Question: I get feelings, but it's nothing at all in the words.

Rose: Well, I warned you of that in the book,--I said not to go by the words.

I could have left the poem out of the book, but I wanted to make sure that it got printed, so that if something had happened to me, it would have been available. I'll tell you something,--I use this. When someone approaches an experience I'll read this to them and they will know its meaning. The meaning of it comes through to them.

Question: How did this ("The Three Books of the Absolute") come to you,--did you have to sit down and think about it?

Rose: No, no. It was all written within an hour.

I didn't know any other way to communicate it. First of all, when I came back, I tried to talk to people about it and...

Question: How long did the experience last?

Rose: It seemed to me only three or four hours, I guess. I don't think that it was longer than that. Of course, I was unconscious as far as time was concerned. I was pretty far from home and I wasn't able to...it was a draining experience.

Question: Why would that be?

Rose: Well, it's hell,--it's hell going in and it's hell coming out. It is hell to die unexpectedly, and you think you are dying.

And of course when you come back then, you realize that you're perfectly healthy. And then you realize that you have to leave reality. And you have a choice now, either to sweat it out in the experience you had before, or to commit suicide.

And you think, "Well, this is what I wanted." I started out at this thing pretty seriously when I was about twenty-one years of age. I tell you, the reason why I do what I'm doing is that when I was in my twenties, about your age, I ran into so many phonies. So many guys who had something to sell or something to gain.

Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was sex. There were a lot of guys who were trying to trap young people sexually by saying, "Hey,--I've got the answer, listen to me."

And I would get infuriated. I would get to the point where I was ready to kill people to eliminate some of this. This is man's definition, his search for God,--and here are these creeps trying to...

Question: Prostitute it?

Rose: Right. So I pledged that if I ever found anything I would make it available,--without charge, if I were able. And of course, there is a limit to what you can do for people without charge. But I believe that with the people who are ready to experience this that it doesn't take too much. I believe a lot in destiny. For instance, there are people around here tonight,--I don't believe that this is an accident. Certain people were supposed to come here.

This area has a population of a million or half a million,--and how many people gravitate here on a certain evening? Of the people who gravitate here, how many stay because they want to look a little deeper? So I believe that if people have a desire, they will gravitate to some place where, if they're sincere and honest with themselves, they will be able to progress.

The thing is that first of all you think that this requires a terrible sacrifice,--but it doesn't. Life doesn't mean a thing anyway, if you don't know,--you're going to live like a goat and just vegetate, reproduce, and die,--that has no meaning. It is just undefined action.

But I made up my mind that I didn't care if I went crazy, if I lost my life in the process, made myself sick, or whatever happened. It was more important for me to find the truth,--if I found the truth,--or to kick the bucket trying, than to live without my being defined. And it was because I ran into all this flack that I decided that I would try to make available what I found.

Well, as soon as I had the experience I came back and ran into an old friend of mine,--we had been on the "path" together,--and he was rather overjoyed. I read "The Three Books of the Absolute" to him and he started weeping. But very few people who read it had that same reaction. Occasionally he and I would get a little group of people together. But these people were too busy making a nickel for Kroger's. They had games in life that they had to play and they couldn't get out of the house, except for once in a great while.

And I would get sort of despondent and say, "Well, maybe this is just my ego. Maybe I'm not supposed to be preaching this stuff. Maybe their time hasn't come, or my time hasn't come."

And I actually quit,--from the time I was 32 until I was 50. I got married, I raised a family, until my youngest kid was old enough to take care of himself.

Then the Theosophical Society sent word down from Pittsburgh,--they wanted to know if I would speak on Zen. So I went up and talked. Then a couple of the fellows here tonight, who were going to the University of Pittsburgh at the time, came to one of my talks and invited me to speak at the University.

The next thing you know a group formed. The book at that time was in an 8½ by 11 form which was stapled and bound with carpet tape. That's how I put it together the first time. I had printed a hundred copies, because I thought that this would be the most people I would run into.

The thing just seemed to grow by gravity or something. I ran into a lot of young people and amazingly they seemed to pick up what I was saying. Each step of the way I was amazed. So,--I had a 300 acre piece of ground in West Virginia and I said, "Well, we'll use that for an ashram." And some of these guys are still there. I found out that everything will happen, if you don't try to make it happen.

Women and Men

Question: Do you know of any women who have experienced enlightenment?

Rose: Yes.

Question: What is the ratio of women to men who have experienced it,--is it 50/50?

Rose: Well, I would say that in the written accounts there are more men than women by far.

Question: Why is that,--do you have an explanation?

Rose: Yes,--I can tell you why. You've got to prepare yourself that women are not equal to men.

Question: Oh,--I have to prepare myself for that?

Rose: Most people refuse to accept it.

Question: In what way,--are we inferior?

Rose: I didn't say that women are inferior. They're not equal,--they're not the same. The woman can pick it up much more quickly than the man. But their action is not consistent.

Question: Why is that?

Rose: Because women are programmed by nature to forget.

Question: Hormonally?

Rose: We are basically animals that are programmed in a certain way. Men are roosters and goats; women are hens and nanny-goats.

Question: Their processes are different?

Rose: Right. We criticize a woman if say her husband gets ground up and she doesn't weep. But she's got three children. Her computer is such that if she's got three children, two of them can be killed and she will survive to take care of the third one. A man might not. I have known men who dropped dead when they lost a child,--because they are programmed differently.

But women are programmed to forget, in order to keep going, to carry the species. If women are honest with themselves they will know much more about themselves. But this idea that they can do anything a man can do is just as foolish as saying that a man can get pregnant.

Question: Are you able to heal?

Rose: It has happened, although I don't try to heal. Somebody that I knew would have a headache and I would get the urge to take their headache away, and it worked.

Question: Why did you experience an LSD trip at the age of fifty, when you had experienced enlightenment at thirty?

Rose: I thought that it might be possible that the chemical would create the death experience, and that the enlightenment experience would be renewed. It did create the death experience, which is necessary to go through enlightenment, but it didn't produce the enlightenment. Just the physical part was there, but not the awareness.

Question: Do you know what you will experience when you die?

Rose: Yes.

Question: Do you know what will happen to your state of being,--will your consciousness continue?

Rose: Yes. If it did not, I wouldn't talk to you. If oblivion were what is waiting for you I would keep my mouth shut. It would be better for your peace of mind. It's better to have peace of mind if you're going no place. If I had discovered that oblivion was the answer, I wouldn't talk.

Question: There would be nothing to talk about.

Rose: Right. It would just make people turbulent for nothing. Getting back to this earlier question,--I want to explain something to you so that you don't misinterpret it. The female is able to pick this up very quickly, much more quickly than the man. It's like an intuition. A girl or a woman can come and hear me talk and they will know. They will know me.

Question: But the man will have to work at it?

Rose: Right. He may doubt,--he is supposed to. He may say, "I've got to analyze this a bit,--let's put the slide-rule to it." And this is proper.

The intuitional ability of a woman is part of her computer in that she has to make very quick decisions in protecting the young. They had to develop this sense. It's genetic. They had to be able to sense, better than the male is able. The survival of the race depended upon it.

But also, this unfortunate ability to forget makes them subject to more states of mind. I'm talking about a twenty-eight day cycle, that the man doesn't go through. He may go through a yearly cycle, a solar cycle.

end

End of lecture. Rest of tape is conversation.

Lots of good stuff. Try to recover it.