1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh
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| Title | 1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh |
| Recorded date | October 17, 1974 |
| Location | Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh |
| Number of tapes | 1 x 90 |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | SH (TAT cassette) and DW |
| No. of MP3 files | 2 = 46 min + 46 min |
| Total time | |
| Transcription status | First pass done, second pass about 8 min only. |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | Pretty good |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh |
| For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150222144759 |
Notes
DW has copy.
SH has blue printed TAT case: 1 x 90 min cassette
Side 2 lecture is to min 27, then there is 20 min of chit-chat after that.
File 1
sh1-00:00
Well, I’d like for this to be more or less of an informal meeting; I think we get more done that way. I don’t talk very loud and I get hoarse quickly, so if you can’t hear me you’re all welcome to come up front. There in the back, can you hear me Mike? Okay. It took a few minutes for the tone to get back there though.
I want to say maybe something about Zen first. Because everyone who comes to these meetings, well, let’s say some come who have never heard of Zen before; they’re interested in kindred subjects. Others have heard of Zen, and there are many books being written about Zen, and each book gives you a different slant, or leads you down a different alley.
Well, to give you an example, we have D.T. Suzuki [who] was the foremost American author on Zen before such notables as Alan Watts came. Suzuki was basically a historian and there’s not much you can get out of his books except the history. I mentioned this over at Duquesne when I was talking over there. 1974-1010-Duquesne-University-Pittsburgh There’s a book he put called The Handbook of Zen. I picked it up and I was rather dismayed by the fact that, for a handbook of something that leads you into the awareness of a state of being which includes everything and nothingness, he would bother to put in a third or a fourth of the book full of pictures, and another third or fourth of the book full of Zen poetry, which is an objective and relative-oriented exercise.
01:57
So that I can better tell you what Zen is not, naturally, because Zen doesn’t have much of a definition, except if you say it aims in a certain direction, it even aims at nothing, you’re wrong: it aims at everything and nothing. And when you say it aims at everything and nothing, you automatically bring in what I call the science of betweenness. Because we cannot conceive of absolute measures with a relative mind. As the old Catholic theologians used to say, quoting Thomas Aquinas I think, “The finite mind can never perceive the infinite.” The catch is of course that the finite mind can become less finite, or more infinite. And this in the path.
02:40
Now over on the board there I took advantage of their chalk [so it’s a classroom] and wrote something of the automatic – I say there’s no place to go but up. And you heard Lee [Gerstenberger] speak of the reverse from untruth. And I’ve got it labeled “search.” But the arrow – it’s an engineering symbol for vector, and we speak of the law of the vector in the Albigen book [Papers] : that you are not necessarily a human with a name of Jack Jones, you are vector that is either going up or down. You have no choice except to go up or down. And once you start up, you have very little comfort in going anyplace but up.
03:21
It’s very difficult once you reach that, where I’ve got “C” labeled? level? to ever go back to “A” level. And it’s very difficult to, I have another set of categories there, and that is along the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky line, in his terminology. Down at this corner here you’d have instinctive man, emotional man, intellectual man, philosophic man. And once you graduate from the instinctive man into the emotional man, you very seldom go back with any great enthusiasm back into the instinctive man. And this is the way it is in any spiritual search. Of course it seems, lots of times along the way, you despair: you think it’s really a hopeless mess, and you’re not getting anyplace. We find that in our group all the time. People say, “I feel like I’m not getting anywhere.” But I always refer them to the other people in the group and I say, “Ask them. You can’t see it yourself.”
04:12
But anyhow, what we have, what we generally pride ourselves in – people who generally consider themselves intellectual – either have an extreme faith or an extreme sense of logic, in which they’re going to demand [that] everything be proven. And basically we know that, even in science, that there’s very little that can be proven if anything. As far as proof is concerned. Again, in the Albigen book we have a law, we call it the law of relativity. The law of relativity has nothing to do with Einstein’s law, it has to do with the fact that all things that have meaning to us are relative in their meaning. That the only meaning or proof that we have is in relation to other things that are unproven. So that the whole structure of everything, even scientific things, such as force fields, which are composed of molecules or electrons – these things are postulated; they’re theoretical. There’s no real proof yet as to what matter is, and this is the attempt of logic to prove everything in material terms.
05:11
So we have a little plus there between that, and that’s this “betweenness” – that you don’t abandon logic and you don’t abandon faith. Faith is fanaticism unless it’s somewhat guided by common sense or tempered by logic. And you have to, at all stages of the game, you have to have faith in yourself. You’ve got to at least postulate yourself. You’ve got to have faith that you’re here and you can do something about it, in finding out who you are. And you go with that combination of the two. In other words, you’re a relative creature and we look, we see everything with two eyes. And our thinking is both subjective and objective, or it i both intuitional and logical.
05:56
So we go up then to the mental class, of subjective and mental objective pursuits. And we find that there’s an extreme there; that some people try to do it all by introspection. They think that they can do everything just by sitting and meditating. And I myself spent eight years at it, so I know where it takes you. And I know a lot of people who have been to TM and are now members of this group, because they realized that they were stagnating. yet this is a higher part of the ladder than the mentally objective where they’re only interested in phenomenal studies and wisdom schools, or mind-expansion schools, where you’re going to study to become a genius by taking a certain course or something of that sort.
But they go from there then, with this combination of again, applying the – not neglecting to be observant of data. We were talking about data here a little while ago, spiritualistic data. It’s good to keep your eyes open and watch for phenomena, because these give you new insight into yourself.
And you take that and you go up to another classification, in which, where you come to in some time in your life, in which you realize that mind is not going to survive death: the mind as we know it. That if you’re going to do anything, you’re going to have to get a little bit beyond the mind as we know it. Whether you want to call it synaptic or DNA molecules or whatever they are, these things are going to disintegrate when you die. So the result is of course to experiment again with an objective type of mind experimentation, which is mind expansion. They call it mind expansion, which is – raja yoga is a good example, and under the heading of raja yoga come a tremendous number of things: kriya yoga and listening to sound currents, and physical reactions inside the body as the result of meditation or something of that sort. Or drugs. Some people some people have “expanded” their head with the use of drugs. They thought they expanded it at least. But that was their experiment.
08:01
We go above that again to the subjective side of that: what I call change of being systems, where you realize that this, the being as it is, is not going anyplace. So you undertake to change your being. And this seems like a foolhardy expedition, because you don’t know what to change to. You realize you have to change to be cognizant of a new dimension, but you don’t know how to change. And you struggle in the dark.
And again, from these two splits off, or you go on up to the schools of Hindu mysticism, Zen mysticism and Christian mysticism. Now I put them all in one bucket, as you see. And we are a Zen group, but I recognize the value of Christian mystics, and I’ve read their lives and their accounts. And their experiences are very similar to Hindu mystics and their consciousness of an absolute state of affairs is similar to the final experience of Zen.
Satori
Now again, there’s a mistaken thing that permeates all the Zen writing, and that is the word satori. The word satori I don’t use. Now Lee mentioned the gamut that I had gone through. He did not mention my experiences in Zen. Because I don’t care to refer to lineage too much. The teacher I had – and I didn’t receive enlightenment from a Zen teacher. I looked up Zen teachers for the purpose of learning transmission. , Because – nowhere in Christian mysticism or in Hindu mysticism do you find any method of transmitting, or helping another person achieve enlightenment. It’s only in the Zen system. Now there may be others – I’m not saying that that’s all – but this all I could find when I was around 30-33 years of age. So I found Zen to be a wonderful language, by which you could communicate to other people meanings without words, so to speak.
10:15
Again, the word satori, as described in various books like Kapleau , is a wow experience: a sudden, sharp, brief illumination. And non-traumatic: you turn around and eat your ice cream cone and go on home and say, “Wasn’t that something.” This is not enlightenment. All the events of enlightenment are accompanied by a tremendous – well, you pass through the valley of death. This is the reason it’s real. You die and then return. And it’s brought about by different means, and it generally comes unpredictably. Although it does follow a life of intense direction, or tension. You have to have your head on the goal, on the truth or definition, if you want to call it that.
11:11
There’s no sense in saying we’re pursuing the truth. We say that loosely; what we’re pursuing is the conquest of ignorance, or the definition of ourselves: who we are. And ironically or paradoxically or whatever it is, after you find out who you are you find out what everything is. They are simultaneous. And the old adage, the formulas, are always in front of you, and people read them and don’t pay any attention to them. And that is, “First know thyself.” And that doesn’t mean just say what your name is – that’s what people think when you’re talking “I know myself. I’m so-and-so’s child.” This means know yourself. And when you know yourself you will know everything.
11:50
So we have, consequently a, we speak of levels of exaltation, and they start pretty much the same in that category. They’re down, they’re basic. Man starts off with exaltations and he cannot help but feel that any spiritual breakthrough has to come with a similar type of exaltation. And what are the earlier exaltations that human beings experience? Why, it’s a child smelling a flower perhaps in a meadow, or looking at a sunrise. Or – there are tremendously heavy things that a person can experience sometimes when he least expects it, if his mind is open.
I was coming up here tonight and a leaf blew down in front of a car, and just the way it kind of circled and passed down in front of that windshield caused a nostalgic memory of eternality, if you can understand what I’m trying to get across to you. That momentarily this leaf was a part of eternity; it cut an eternal pattern that reminded me of the whole eternal pattern of all the world.
13:04
So that this a child might experience as well, and know nothing about Zen. A child experiences, or a young person experiences a titillation, and a love, or sexual titillation, and this is an exaltation. And in this – one thing about all these exaltations is there’s a measure of selflessness; that you’re drawn away from yourself to see the beauty of a pattern, in which you feel yourself part of a pattern, and a very significant part of a pattern.
And we go up through these – as I say, the first step, the first man, man number one, that Gurdjieff speaks about – I’m now referring to the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system, if you’re not acquainted with it you can ask me questions about it later. Gurdjieff speaks of the instinctive man, which is the man who just, he’s the man with the hoe; he’s the fellow who vegetates and dies, and who has no further objective in life except to have fun. And to eat, drink and be merry, and that sort of thing.
When this man gets tired of his eating, drinking and being merry, he may look into an emotional aspect of life and be drawn – fall in love with a girl or the girl may fall in love with a boy, or something of that sort. Or they may fall in love with a figure, another figure. It may be in a religious pursuit that they fall in love with a figure of Christ. And by an intense devotion to a personality they reach what I call the exaltation of salvationism. And this is the bridge, this is the betweenness – between instinctive and emotional man. And he lingers in that. I’ve known people who spent their whole lives in the salvationistic way; they are convinced they have been saved, and they hang right with that all their life. And they can see no further, until they get tired of it. We have to weary of our game? gain?
14:56
And the next level of course is they are drawn toward the intellectual. They realize that their emotions could play games with them, they can be confused, they can create things with their imagination, they can create gods or create demons. So they take a second look at it nd they start studying. And they experience what I call the wow experience, and in this category also comes the satori experience. It’s a brief thing. And it occurs also when you’re studying mathematics. When you start a mathematics course, say algebra, and you labor with it and it makes sense to you, and then all at once a light breaks. [what kind of light, in the case of satori?] And when that light breaks, there’s a conquest, a feeling of conquest, in the knowledge that now you’ll be able to manage the whole book. The whole thing starts to have meaning to you.
15:40
Well this is the mastery – the intellectual pursuits are nothing more than tinkering with symbols, whether those symbols be chemical compounds or letters or numbers or historical dates or whatever. Intellectual pursuits are the gymnastics, mental gymnastics of tinkering with symbols until a certain wisdom light pops.
And again, this becomes a vanity after awhile and we recognize it as a vanity. We say, well, we’ve been fattening up our head with our intellectual conceit – and we start looking elsewhere again. And we enter into philosophic pursuits. And as a result of the philosophic pursuits we make another exaltation. And this is called samadhi. Now as I said before, I’m reluctant to use Hindu terms, oriental terms, because I think the truth is not indigenous to any region; it’s right inside everybody here.
16:42
But unfortunately we have, we borrow some words from other languages because we don’t have them in our language: there’s not a clear-cut distinction. I’m trying to give you distinctions between exaltations. And the only person who I’ve ever encountered is this man here [holds up book] I don’t know how many of you are acquainted with him – I’ll quote a little bit of him later – Ramana Maharshi. It’s a little book put out by – that’s the reason I don’t laugh at any country on the earth, or any religion on the earth as having enlightened men, because beyond a doubt this man was enlightened.
17:13
And he categorizes the, better than anyone else I ever encountered, the different levels of spiritual exaltation, and when you hear it you’ll understand the difference between a state of cosmic consciousness perhaps and a state of enlightenment, total enlightenment.
But regardless, the mind is still in a relative condition when it’s appraising a philosophic aspect, because philosophy is a scientific pursuit, it’s the juggling of, still the juggling of words and gestalts. Instead of words, now you’re fooling with gestaltic books, or books of gestalts, so to speak. Tossing one against the other, trying to come up with something.
And this is what is referred to as kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. It’s a big word, for a word, I’d like to call it samadhi, but unfortunately he labels both experiences as samadhi. The second one, which is the final experience, is sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. And I have the difference between the two. Because – I presume, the people who are interested in actually what Zen is all about – and unfortunately there are too few authors in the country who do not begin their books, when they write about Zen, they begin their books by telling you they know nothing of Zen. Watts was one. Or they play little games with you and say, “Well, the enlightened don’t speak.” Well, you might as well realize then that this man is telling you he’s not enlightened, because he has this as his excuse. But this is all nonsense. Everyone speaks. Buddha left a formula, and the only way he could have left it was by speaking. So there are little clichés that [have] somehow condoned people to be mysterious and pass over without explaining themselves. [sentence]
19:04
[Referring again to chart.] But the category of sleep, in comparison to the idea of sleep – and he categorizes it as number one: In sleep the mind is alive. In kevala samadhi the mind is alive. In sahaja samadhi the mind is dead. This is a clear distinction.
Number two: In sleep the mind is sunk in oblivion; you’re unconscious. In kevala samadhi it is sunk in light. In sahaja samadhi it is resolved into the Self.
Now we go back into kevala samadhi: it is sunk in light. You read these accounts – the book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke – you read the accounts of St. John of the Cross, of many of the mystics who had this experience. Richard Bucke described his experience, he describes going out on his veranda or something, and the whole town lit up with a rose-colored light. This is one of the phenomena that generally occur with it. Certain LSD experiences are very similar to this, where you’ll be overpowered by an immense technicolor fireworks. But this was accompanied by a feeling of bliss, an intense peace with the world. These are almost quotations from the book: a feeling that he was “a part of.” Now [if] you remember what I said, that all exaltations – this is one of the identification marks – is that you feel as though you’re a very important of this overall scheme of things, when, what you discover.
20:47
Now, in sahaja samadhi there’s no light, because you’re beyond the relative dimensions. Whenever you hear a man in a spiritual experience talk about seeing a light, or [experiencing] bliss, rest assured he has not reached his final experience, because he’s describing with relative terms.
Now we go on back to kevala samadhi, number three: He likens it, this is Maharshi, he likens it to a bucket tied to a rope and left lying in the water in the bottom of a well. Now that’s the mind. He likens the mind to a bucket that’s, you know, it’s sunk in light and it’s lying there inert, so to speak, in bliss. He likens sahaja samadhi to a river discharged into the ocean and its identity lost. The river that went into the ocean is no longer discernible, but it’s there.
Number four: The mind in kevala samadhi can be drawn out by the other end of the rope. In other words, he comes back and writes a book about it. He can come back and be conscious of it [?] again. In sahaja samadhi, the river cannot be redirected from the ocean. All that remains after a sahaja samadhi experience is the memory of the experience, and the fact that the body is still living. But you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re part of the ocean.
22:19
Now, taking this, going back to these charts again, you can, if you take the time, you can go back and you can categorize – I don’t like to become specific – but you can categorize any of the religious, or pseudo-religious, or philosophical movements, isms or whatever you call them – you can very quickly categorize them by their objectivity. That you’ll find that most of the movements that abound today are on the mental-objective level., labeled C-A there. That they’re trying to use a physical gimmick in fact: some physical manipulation to bring about a change of mind or a change of being.
And this permeates clear up to the mind-expansion systems. Drugs are a physical gimmick, in order to try to change something. Now the main point here remains though, that unless you are aware, already aware of this, it has no meaning to you. In other words, if you are on a particular level, that you’ve just found peace of mind by some prayerful attitude or some contemplative attitude, then this what I’m saying to you will have very little meaning. It only will have meaning to people who are hungry, or irritated, by a deficit of returns on their energy expended.
23:55
I want to give you a brief rundown on myself of course. Why I’m doing what I’m doing. [aside to somebody: That’s alright, I don’t particularly want a ??] I started out of course pretty much on this faith category. Instead of logic I started my career out as a believer. In fact I studied to be a priest. And I took everything for granted, because it came, directives came from people who I loved, and I trusted them, and it took me a little while to shake it off. But from there I reverted to the logical thing. I went in for such things as Spiritualism, as I mentioned to Randy here a little while ago. I thought, “Well, if I want to find out what happens to you after death, I’ll just go talk to somebody who has died, that’s all.” It never occurred that you’d have to make the trip yourself; I always thought I’d get it by second-hand information. So I looked into everything I could in the line of scientific line [sentence] – this included psychology.
I find of course that the psychology then – that was 30 years ago – isn’t too much better than the psychology today – today’s psychology, I mean, isn’t any better. [fix sentence] It’s still extremely objective; it is a pretensive science on a subjective matter. In other words, you can’t be absolutely or totally scientific or objective about a subjective matter. Or – well, the way they get around it is just by denying that there is any subjective matter there; they just say there’s nothing there but a body.
25:40
But this doesn’t answer all the problems, as I’ve explained before, because the simple fact that – let’s presume there is nothing here but a body – did we, men, create these bodies? Did we create, did we form the place where we stand and where we breathe, and that sort of thing? We’d like to think, through our psycho-sociological vanity that we’re going to breed a race of people who will create ne people [a] new environment, heaven on earth and all this talk, without any knowledge at all of the factors involved in human essence. They just ignore human essence. They just ignore that there’s such a thing as a force field for instance behind an electron. And if there is such a thing as a force field this force field could very well be the result of an intellectually-directed force.
26:41
Or as they say in the thaumaturgical law, with [that] the will plus the imagination plus the fiat equals creation; that something did will and project all this illusion that we see all around us. But regardless, whether it’s an illusion or whether it’s the only reality we’ll ever know, the factors are not known by the scientists. We have no knowledge of whether we came from a divine light and we’re going to wind up in a black hole in the universe, or where this is merely a thought iin the mind of another entity. So until those factors are known, it’s absolute vanity to think that a group of people who are human are going to prescribe the brainwashing for humans to come, as though they would know that that fits into the plan of this creation.
27:32
So consequently, I think it’s intelligent to look a little further if you’re curious about you’re destiny or your origin. and I found, as I said before, about logic, I found it to be a vanity. I gave up for awhile the study of psychology, and that’s how I came yto be a chemist: I majored in chemistry when I went to college and I thought, “Oh, boy, I’m going o find what matter is by looking at matter.” And I was in school about two hears and I came to the conclusion that this is not going anyplace, except into complexity. Complexity breeds complexity, and out of that will come complex confusion. So I earned a few dollars as a chemist but I never took it seriously.
28:18
I immediately launched into other steps: yoga. I got ino yoga mainly because it appealed to my intuition. And most of the things that exist today – the country is running flush with all sorts of cults and eastern gimmicks – and we had them in those days too. They were just a little bit rarer and a little bit more expensive, and they were mostly followed by people over forty years of age, instead of people under forty.
But after a tremendous amount of this digestion of material, I came to the conclusion – I was around 21 years of age – that man would never learn anything. This idea of learning at all is vanity. You will never learn anything. There’s only one path, there’s only one method, and that is becoming. The finite mind, the finite being, will not perceive the infinite. The finite being can become the infinite.
Now that’s a statement, that’s an unproven statement. Of course, I don’t prove too much. I think that you have to make the trip yourself. And I maintain of course that you don’t believe me. I don’t think that you get any place by believing. That’s what I started off with, believing somebody. I think that you have to search, you have to question every step of the way.
29:38
Of course I do believe, but this is also paradoxical. That you have to work with other people. I found that I tried to work alone, and all the time I thought I was working alone, I was reading somebody else’s book. I’d pick up a book of esoteric philosophy or religion or something, and I thought I was doing it all alone. I wasn’t. I had a teacher; it was a book. So what’s the difference whether you take a book, and struggle with a book you can’t talk to, when you can go talk to somebody who’s alive. So that consequently, the mere fact that you associate with people, even though they have no “value” or knowledge, but re interested in the same thing you’re interested in – even if it’s alcoholism – you can form a group of Alcoholics Anonymous and help each other. Or you can form a group of ignoramuses anonymous and become philosophers. But taking it from that viewpoint – there’s hope. But taking it individually there’s no hope.
30:33
But I went through – let’s put it this way, I went through quite a bit, as he mentioned. I joined groups. I never stayed with them, I never pledged myself to them, but I stayed with them long enough to learn their gimmick, their trick, whatever it was. And I came back of course with certain ideas or convictions. I discovered I think for myself certain laws. And at the time I had no audience. I wanted to help somebody, I wanted to do something – and of course saying “help somebody” is a ... 31:31 [break in tape]
SPLICE GOES HERE ... to remove from it, all this huckstering. And when this is done, well then there’s no danger of somebody trying to take over the thing either, because there’s a million dollars involved in it or something of that sort.
But the, to sort through all these things becomes a monumental task. We were just talking about one little item here before the lecture started about spiritualistic phenomena, and the years that I had spent digging into materializations, until we found a genuine materialization, only to find that the genuine materialization are unreliable. And again, I’ll go into that if anybody’s interested, but I don’t want to belabor you too much with it.
So consequently, at the time, here a few years back, I had come to the conclusion that the young people in the country were being awakened a little bit. They were being momentarily awakened by drugs – but destroyed by the same. Following the awakening they were destroyed. So I have sort of a half-hearted objective to catch a few of them before they went over the cliff. Because they had had an experience, it was up there on the top of the rung; it was a mind-changing, mind-expansion experience in which they realized, many people realized – by experiencing the death – for instance in LSD or some of these drub experiences you will go through the experience of death; you will actually die. And when you die you enter another dimension, and this is an exaltation of sorts. This for the first time shakes a person loose from his pragmatic convictions, or his materialistic convictions. He realizes that it’s possible that there ias another dimension; the grave is not necessarily the end of the road.
With this momentary awakening I thought, “Well, I’ll try to contact. And I wrote a letter and put it in an underground newspaper over in Haight-Ashbury several years back. Well the result was a tremendous debacle. Some people visited me and they were flotsam and jetsam, and Lord knows what type of hangups they had, but they were, I sure got the overflow of something. And I gave up again. I thought, “I can’t work with these people.”
But strangely enough, out of this – incidentally, out of it, part of my property is leased to the Hare Krishna people. Because they came in and wanted a place, and I had a farm I wasn’t using and I let them have it. They’re still there, incidentally, and prospering it seems. But that was some profit, total profit from this letter was that I became pestered with hare Krishnites. But a few people did trickle in here and there. They heard about it, they heard I was interested in something a little heavier. But it was always disheartening. You’d see them go back, they’d take a little vacation from the drugs or the pills, and the vacation would generally be filled up with drinking beer, and then they’d go back to the pills again.
So I thought, “I’ll write a book and when I kick the bucket somebody can read the book, and maybe I’ll at least contribute that much.” Because I find, I think at least the majority of the people, I don’t know whether this Maharshi is still living or not, I don’t know too much about him. But this [book was published in] 1972, and it was printed by someone else, it was printed in India so I don’t really know whether he’s living or not. The picture is a picture of an old man, so he could be or could not be, he could possibly be dead.
The strange thing happened, I went out on this farm and I started typing the book. And some local people came around; some local boys, from the local colleges, and offered to help me type and in the process of helping me type they saw what the subject matter was and they got interested. And a meditation group formed, just without any invitation. They came out and sat in circles, and some of them had Rose with acid. They came out and would drop pills to see what the effect would be. So that too was disheartening.
But nevertheless, before the book was printed a group started to form. And I gave a lecture here in Pittsburgh at the Theosophical Society, not in any school. The first lecture I gave in Pittsburgh was there. And a group immediately formed at the Theosophical Society, and this was a couple years ago. Well, the group of course was a group of older people who were mostly socially inclined, and they had some hangups, some kinks they wanted ironed out, and [when] they seemed to get the kinks ironed out, they were very happy with, it developed pretty much into a confrontation group.
But from there of course, almost by accident a group formed at the University of Pittsburgh, and from then on it’s been spontaneous. As Lee said, we have no financial structure. For instance, a boy from Pittsburgh is now in Cleveland at his own expense setting up a group. A boy from Kent State came to the Theosophical lecture, heard that I was giving it, and went back and practically at his own expense set up a group in Kent. And from Kent, one of the Kent boys went down to Columbus, Ohio State University, and that’s how they got started. People took two or three hundred dollars of their own money and went down and enrolled in the campus or put the circulars out, the posters up, that sort of thing and got it going.
37:00
So that brings us pretty well up to question time. I’d prefer from now on, I don’t like to talk too much, because there’s a, the heart of this is the communication with individuals. I’d prefer if you have an angle or a question, or something that you’d like to have explained, if I can explain it, why, I’d like to devote the rest of the time to that.
37:25
Q. Could you elaborate a little more on enlightenment? You said something about ?? through the valley of death ?? ??
R. Well, in order, the only way, in the first place, you cannot while you’re living know what death is. And you have to die in order to experience it. This is one of the identification marks on enlightenment, that you’ll actually go through the death experience. And you hear this spoken of in some Zen writings, that when you go into a true Zen experience the hills are no longer hills and the valleys are no longer valleys. Actually, what they’re saying is, you’re going into an absolute condition, you’re no longer a relative creature, you go into a, the relative creature dies, the mind dies. Absolutely; there is no mind left. Now to substantiate this is impossible, to prove to you – we’re speaking with two minds, yours and mine, and to tell with mind-talk that the minds cease to exist is incomprehensible. But this is the inevitable direction. That’s where you go.
And because of this, you know when it happens, exactly what happens to you after death. You don’t know – you are. See, the memory of this state of being is what you return with.
Q. Then there are no enlightened living?
R. Oh yes, yes, there are. Because there are people who go through the experience and return. The most outstanding case – that’s the reason I have on the blackboard there, I’ve got Christian mysticism and Hindu mysticism and Zen. They come from different parts of – there may be others – the condition of enlightenment is not peculiar to any group of people or any religion. If you dug far enough you would find it in almost every place in the world. But they are very rare, as Bucke says, one in a million. But the most outstanding case I encountered was a man who had reached enlightenment by meditating on the Lord’s Prayer. And he was in this state, an absolute state, for around ten days – which is an extremely long time to be dead. That is, he was dead to this world. He was in the hospital.
40:00
There’s a case in the Reader’s Digest – did you read that? Someone sent it down from Pittsburgh. Do you know which book that’s in, any of you boys from Pittsburgh? In the Reader’s Digest, just a recent issue. October? Yes. The name of the article in the Digest was “I died at 10:20,” or something like that. This is an account of a man who’s driving down the street and he has a heart attack. His wife is driving the, I think he was driving. Wasn’t he driving the car? His wife had difficulty getting him out the car and into an ambulance.
But his account when he came back, when I read it, I realized that this man had had a partial enlightenment. He had not been – well, he gave no history of his philosophic searchings, maybe he had some, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But the experience that he had, if you want to get the particular issue and read it, you’ll get a good account of a man who got enlightenment, a glimpse of it at least, of what it’s like.
41:00
But this man who I spoke of concerning the Lord’s Prayer, his name was Paul Wood. And he did this out of desperation. He was not particularly a religious man, he was a Christian – I didn’t mean that to sound that Christians aren’t religious. But he was just a person who attended church, in other words; he was not a devotee. But he was an aviator in the second world war. And he had bombed in Japan and killed a lot of people. And he became, well, he went crazy over it, so to speak. He became depressed. He found that it didn’t go along with his childhood teachings, that God was watching over the earth and observed the fall of the sparrow – and here he is allowing these bombs to fall on people. Allowing people to massacre each other by the millions. His complaint was, ‘Where is this God at? How can this happen?”
So they put him out of the Army, because he turned out to be dangerous, I guess, and they sent him home. Well, he got home and of course the problem wasn’t solved. He killed a bunch of people and he wanted to know why. While he was busy with the problem, the wife divorced him. He said she had to get someone who could make a living for her. So he lost his family and he lost his property and his business, whatever he was doing before he went into the Air Force. And he said he needed help, spiritual help from some place, and he went to the Bible.
And he looked in the Bible for advice and he saw where Christ was saying, “If you would look for,” you know, “help from heaven, why, pray thusly.” And then what followed was the Lord’s Prayer. So he took the Lord’s Pray and – he read it and it didn’t mean too much to him, because he had heard it a thousand times. But he focused his attention on it; he studied it, meditated on it day and night. And it – like any set of symbols it started to have new meaning to him, seemingly.
But it didn’t do anything for him. The more he meditated on it, the more trouble he had, the more deeply involved he became in hassles with people. He took a job as a salesman in a car dealership in Dallas, Texas. And he said that things kept piling up and he kept praying. And finally he gave up, and he asked, he wanted to kill himself, wanted to commit suicide, but [said he] didn’t have the courage. So he asked God to kill him. He said he put his head down on the desk – he said he had a customer come in and the customer was giving him a bad time – he just out his head down on the desk and prayed for God to kill him.
43:25
And he passed out, whether from blood pressure or whatever happened. Seemingly there were no aftereffects though, of a stroke or anything. But he just passed out. They hauled him away to the hospital. Well, during this stay in the hospital and during this unconsciousness, he experienced everything that ever was or will be. And in detail. He could tell you in detail, you know, a tremendous panoramic thing that led up to the final non-relative experience.
So that it was a, to me, a very authentic case. But the man did not know how to convey this. He did not – all he could tell you was say the Lord’s Prayer. This was only the answer for him. This was only a mechanism that worked for him. For another person it’s Zen. For another person it’s some Hindu ritual. Or for another person it just might be living a sincere life, being honest with yourself, and fighting it out.
44:24
Q. Um, I wondered if you could define what you mean by the mind. Because if the mind dies, how can you have any recall?
R. Well, yes. The thing is, though, that this is paradoxical. But I just – if I could read this – this is a question and answer thing in this little book. This is not my answer, incidentally, byut it will give you a little idea. He says:
Who am I? The gross body which is composed of the seven humours, I am not. The five cognitive sense organs, viz., the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell which apprehend their respective objects, sound, touch, color, taste and odor, I am not. The five conative sense organs, the organs of speech, locomotion, grasping, excretion and procreation, which have as their respective functions speaking, moving, grasping, excreting and reproducing ot having pleasure, I am not. The five vital airs, prajna, etc., which perform respectively the five functions of inbreathing, etc., I am not, Even the mind which thinks, I am not. The nescience too, which is endowed only with residual impressions of objects, in which there are no objects and no functionings, I am not.
IF I am none of these, who am I? After negating all of the above mentioned, as “not this, not this,” that awareness which alone remains – that I am.
In other words, what you go back to in meditation, if you examine yourself, you realize that you’re not your toes and you’re not your nose. But you are that which is aware, not that which perceives. You are that which is aware. You are aware of your awareness of things. And that is you.
Now this is limited. Even that is limited. Because you’re only capable of being aware of that which is thrust in front of you. You’re only aware of two parents, but there are many, many other people, many other beings ...
[break in tape] File 1 ends at 46:38
File 2
sh2-00:00
.. see? So in order to find, to be aware of more, you have to move in another fashion. And to be aware of everything, you have to move in an extremely different fashion.
Q. Yes, but why does one have to be aware of other things?
R. You don’t. This is just – you do it, though, in the search. Buddha said, Buddha laid down this thing of first, you must learn to think of one thing. Then you must learn to think of everything; that’s the man who pursues the science for years, trying to sort the problem out. Then you must learn to think of nothing. And that’s what the Zen Buddhists refer to as no-mind. To research Hi – doing some research on an apocryphal quote attributed to the Buddha: “First, you must learn to think of one thing; then you must learn to think of everything; then you must learn to think of nothing.” Have you heard of this? Thank you.
But this is paradoxical: there is always an awareness. But I can say this, that if anyone here has taken LSD, they’ll know what it is to remember but yet not to have their mind. It’s not with their mind that they remember, if they’ve had a deep experience with LSD. But here’s a situation where a whole new world of meaning, and a whole new world of experience pops up – without any memory. It doesn’t come necessarily from the memory. It’s actually entering into another dimension with your awareness. It always goes back, though, it’s always that which is and that which is not. In other words, you can never remember an enlightenment experience totally. You can remember it, the experience, but you can never remember it totally, because if you, to remember it totally would be to enter it. So you look as though through a glass darkly when you return. And as far as verbalizing it, it’s even more difficult
01:45
Q. I think, I think it’s bad to actually try to remember it. Because then it’s a throwing ?? ??. of your eyes.
R. Well, yeah, well, the thing is, this is one thing that I – we talk. And talking is bad. I know this, but how am I going to communicate with you unless I use words that are, what do you call it, ambiguous? But we have somehow to struggle to find some method of communicating that which cannot be defined. This is the whole difficulty in speaking of Zen.
02:27
What was your question?
Q. Can you tell me, I’m wondering if this awareness, consciousness ?? consciousness ?? awareness ?? the difference being that the consciousness is aware of itself as it is, knows what it isn’t? Do you know what I’m saying? Is like, my negative definition of myself. Is that the sum total of ?? Just saying that I’m not this. You can say that awareness ?? ?? quality of the orange ?? quality of itself, regardless of ??
R. Well of course, the thing is, what you’re doing, you’re saying “self”. f course when I use the word self I always immediately say small-s or large-S. Because the small-s is the relative self and the large-S is the absolute Self. Now what I started to tell you also was the fact that we shouldn’t talk about enlightenment. We shouldn’t even discuss it. Because it’s not definable. But the reason I discuss it is that mainly, and the main reason I’m here tonight is that there are too many phonies running around talking about enlightenment.
04:00
And unless somebody comes out and says, “Here are the facts,” or, “Here is a reasonable explanation of this thing,” as opposed to just accepting everybody as an authority, that claims to be an authority.
But for me to tell you to pursue enlightenment would be to ill-advise you. No one should pursue enlightenment. What you should pursue is the retreat from ignorance. And you inevitably have to go in the direction, in the total then. [?]
Q. So are you saying then, awhile ago I think you said something like there’s no truth.
R. Well, this is true. This is right. There is no truth.
Q. Then how do you pursue ...
R. That’s what I just got done saying: you can’t pursue the truth. You cannot pursue the truth. We say this loosely, that we’re pursuing the truth, but you cannot pursue the truth. You don’t know what the truth is.
Q. It’s a fact that ...
R. So this was the fallacy of nearly all philosophy, that there was no truth to pursue, that they postulated and then tried to substantiate postulations with a mass of evidence. That was not proof; it was just a mass of evidence.
05:09
Q. So that, for myself, I’ve been in India for twelve? years, and in Israel also. There are bodies of scripture ?? available. And also the same? truth in there. I ...
R. You’re speaking of what I call small-t or relative truths, though. These are not proven; neither are the fundamentalistic truths in the Bible proven. They might make nice reading but they’re not proven.
Q. Likewise your truth is not proven.
R. Right, absolutely.
Q. So then we have to discern.
R. You have to dig for yourself. Dig for yourself, right. Trust no one. Trust no one. This is your eternal welfare we’re talking about. Not something I would possibly be selling you, or somebody else would possibly be selling you, that’s what I’m telling you. Be careful.
Q. But Jesus says, “You can trust the Son of God.”
R. Who is Jesus?
Q. Well, whoever they said in the Bible ...
R. Well, now you’re qualifying it.
Q. ??
06:07
R. If you would like to trust a historical character, I would much rather trust ...
Q. Well, no, this is my statement? [?] So all of these scriptures that were written in different times by different people, I guess that the same things are said, for ?? happens to you or not. You? know? this? to be ??
R. Well, what do they all say?
Q. They are strains of truth, which are obvious to me.
R. You mean there are strains of similarity. Have you read Frazer’s Golden Bough? , All gods developed from the corn god. The ancient religions of India basically came from the corn god. They’re all traceable back to the corn god. The religions of mankind are traceable back to primitive gods that made the corn grow, or stopped the lightening from hitting them or something of that sort. So you can’t, what you’re speaking of basically is ...
Q. This is what you’re saying ...
R. ... what you’re speaking of is fundamentalism, though.
Q. Personally, I’ve never heard of a corn god.
R. Well read Frazer’s Golden Bough. I can’t help it because [if] you don’t read. But if you do read, it’s no value, unless you can prove the writer. For instance, if you wish to spend twenty years of your time in fundamentalistic pursuits, that’s your business.
Q. How do you mean fundamentalistic?
R. Well, you don’t know what fundamentalism means, as opposed to the school of eminence? That’s what that diagram is about. Fundamentalism is blind faith in written words. And these are the two Christian schools, and they permeate every religion. There’s scripture ...
07:38
Q. Well, I’ve read the Vedas, but also ?? the Bible, and before, I read all the ancient Hebrew scriptures also. They all, they’re written at different times; they didn’t all get together and make them up. But the same point is there, that factual providence? in truth is made by the proper combination of faith and evidence. In other words of, a person, in the basics, as you yourself said, the basics of this is desire.
R. Yes.
Q. We wouldn’t be happy if ?? ?? But the desire ... the proper combination of faith and life ?? is evidence [?] See in other words ... ?? ?? So it is a ...
08:23
R. Believe me, whatever level you’re on, be happy. I’m not trying to change your mind. You remain with whatever you believe. That’s alright. It doesn’t bother me. If you believe the Vedas, then believe them. But if you’re questioning – you’re not questioning me for my sincerity, you’re just arguing. I’m not interested in argument.
Q. I’m not trying to get into a debate, I just ...
R. We can’t take time here tonight with the Vedas and the scriptures and everything else ad infinitum. There has to be a very simple point. And I believe that whatever you believe, you sound like you’ve got a conviction. By all means, don’t let me disturb it.
Q. Well, my question is: What is truth?
R. [laughs]
Q. What is truth? What is that self-identity?
R. [to someone else] What is your question?
09:11
Q. [same guy as before] So you’re saying there’s no truth?
R. I didn’t say there’s no truth. [in that sense] I answered your question before, when I said that it’s impossible to define the truth. It’s wrong to define the truth. Why should I answer your question? You’re not asking a question of me, of some particular branch of what I believe or practice; you’re just trying to put me on the spot with a foolish question.
Q. I’m asking a very intelligent question, and you didn’t answer it.
R. Well, I gave it to you. Now I gave it to you twice. Now let me go on to somebody else.
Q. You didn’t saying about truth.
R. You want it defined with a word? You’re telling me to define it with the word truth.
Q. You spoke f the absolute realm, right? You mentioned the absolute realm, I remember it.
Cergol [?] Hey, I want to hear somebody else’s truth.
R. Yes, yes, please. Listen, one thing we want to follow here in these talks. I’m very interested in spending any amount of time with a sincere person. This is not your podium. If you want to come up here and talk, you set yourself a night. I don’t know what you’re driving at. But I have honestly answered your question, and told you what can be answered, and there’s no great matter about it. Now I would like to go on to somebody else, if you don’t want to occupy the whole evening. Back here, this man:
10:23
Q. I was ?? an analogy. ?? analogy find it helpful [long question ] with the proper balance of faith and evidence [same phrase, different guy] ?? in your mind, you can perhaps in some small way approximate some factual statement, that you might be able to call true under certain circumstances. But the thing we find in science today more and more, that all our observations about different things you find in the process of observation, when you disturb the experiment – supposing you take off a small piece of the whole fragment and examine it around the edges, you’re not really getting any good information. And the point is, that if the truth, if you realize it, your own mind will always be too small. That the truth is always something greater than yourself. ?? And that rather than trying to drink the whole ocean, or sort of, take it all in yourself, you ?? you never contain it all. It’s a question of ... ??
11:39
R. Well, this is similar to the atman and the brahman concept of Brahmanism, the brahman concept, I shouldn’t say Brahmanism, but the concept of the atman and the brahman. And this is true; this is a valid analogy. But there’s no proof of it.
What was your question? Did you have your hand up?
11:58
Q. ?? ?? Does that mean we create the absolute truth?
R. Uh, when I say that man is finite, or that you must attain the infinite, this again is a statement that is not provable. this is merely a statement for you to examine, for you to study; because it would be absolutely foolish for me to tell you, to describe the infinite.
12:23
Q. You keep saying that nothing is provable. So then why do you ?? I mean, can you only prove it to yourself?
R. Well, it’s just like he said, back there, you can have, you can grow, with a small amount of observable material. And that’s what retreating from untruth is. That basically you never, the process of this retreat does not – “to prove” is an asinine posture, or to say that you can prove. Because you can’t prove. All you can do is give references, that’s all.
Q. ?? [no break] R. But what you do is you retreat from things that are manifestly ridiculous. In other words, we no longer worship fire, for instance, or we no longer worship the corn. We no longer worship the sun, because we consider this ridiculous. But we are still worshiping things. There are still people on the earth who are worshiping things which we consider ridiculous. So we move away from that too. And we examine this whole world of phenomena, religion, philosophy and everything, and move away from it. We don’t necessarily disprove it. It’s impossible to disprove it. You just have to retreat from the manifestly absurd to the possible. The possible eventually becomes manifestly absurd, and you retreat to something else that’s more possible.
13:38
As your work goes on, your range of vision improves, and you can see more possibility. And this in turn narrows down to that which is less and less ridiculous, let’s put it that way, or less absurd. And? then? it comes down to a point. That’s the reason we employ the symbol of the pyramid: that all wisdom is pyramidal in form, because of this. It’s a retreat back from a mass of evidence, a mass of observational data.
14:06
Q. So it sounds like it’s a void.
R. A what?
Q. It’s all a void?
R. Well, I don’t know how you would draw that, use that word in that ... hm?
Q. Buddha mentions the void ??
R. Well again, these are things, this is one of the big drawbacks of Zen in Asia, is, I find it in a tremendous lot of writings on Zen, that a lot of the little Chinese children, twelve years of age, are running around prattling about no-mind. They don’t experience it; they couldn’t begin to experience it at twelve years of age, but they’re talking it up. And there’s no point in talking about the void until we know what the void is. There’s no point in talking about death until we know what death is.
14:46
Q. If? the absolute truth is void, and this is nothing, why is everybody doing this? right now?
R. Well, because you have no alternative. You have no alternative. You’re here. See, you’re just giving me a postulation. You didn’t quit living. So if you’re going to live, it’s inescapable; you’re living, so you’re doing something.
Q. So we? should? just? enjoy now.
R. No, that doesn’t mean just enjoy now. Because what is enjoying? What is enjoying? Who enjoys? Who enjoys. Do you enjoy or does something enjoy you? Do you catch the girl, or does marriage catch both of you? Meaning reproduction.
15:30
Q. So then what’s pretty much being the enjoyer that’s suffering from ?
R. There could be, but that doesn’t say there must be.
Q. It’s? better? than? saying we’re? zero?
R. [laughs] Are there any other questions? Yes ...
15:43
Q. Well if you talk about, well everything and nothing ...
[break in tape]
R. ... indicating that they may borrow from each other.
Q. ?? ?? each in its own way ??
R. Or that they’re reflecting each other, that they borrow from each other. The Krishna religion is 6,000 years old. The Buddhistic religion was about 500 years older than Christ. So consequently, the early Christian liturgy and ritual was all borrowed from what the Christians call paganism. So that we don’t know how much of the rest of it was borrowed.
16:28
Q. [passing the hat?]
R. See, the whole thing in this, let me say this, that I’m not asking anybody to accept this. And if it doesn’t sound agreeable to you, the only thing you can do is turn me off, just turn your hearing off. Because I believe that whatever level you’re on – supposing I’m nuts, then those people who are here that are nuts will maybe be turned on by me. On the same token, whatever level I’m on, you cannot pick up what I’m saying unless there’s some degree of rapport. We can’t pick it up by opposition or argument, or by saying, “Here’s a contradiction; let’s look at the contradiction.” No. This is as I explained to him, it’s very difficult to use words to describe subjective material or subjective experiences. And the only way you’re going to pick anything up from it is by a type of questioning that will lead you closer, not to fence. We can’t fence and get anything. So consequently I prefer that people who do, if they have questions, if they’re interested in expanding on what I have said, or [in] explaining what I’ve said, this is alright. But not to just – what good is it going to do to argue?
17:52
Q. It? says? right? here? ?? doubt, regardless of ?? doubt is still my? goal? If I have a doubt, based on my ?? ?? considerations ??
R. It’s like I tell you, that’s your province; that’s your ??. But I don’t want you making speeches. [laughs] That’s all. We don’t have time. If you’re not interested, if you think this is phony or false, that’s your prerogative. But I don’t have time to argue with you. That’s the whole thing. So if any else has any questions ...
18:34
Q. What do you do?
R. In our group meetings, you mean? Well, the group meetings are basically different levels of commitment, or participation. The first is just people who come to the meeting and sit and ask questions, to find out what we’re doing. This costs absolutely nothing. You see of course that they pass a can during the meeting to pay for posters and paper, group expenses. But you can come indefinitely and just ask questions, with no compulsion.
The first measure of participation is generally to obtain the book and start examining it, studying it, and entering into what we call confrontation, that is, agreeable confrontation; you have to agree to it. We don’t confront anyone who doesn’t want to be confronted. Now this is basically to straighten the head out.
This is basically, there’s no point, in my book, of getting into a philosophy if you’re going to accept the philosophy because of a mental hangup. It’s like if a man likes women he becomes a Mormon, so he can marry ten wives or something. This is what I call a utilitarian acceptance of philosophy or religion. We have to get our head on straight so we don’t accept a particular philosophy just because we like it or it satisfies some urge inside us.
20:04
So that the first stages in the group are basically head-straightening stages; they’re just inquiry, of why you think what you think, why you act as you act, and how you respond to yourself. Do you please yourself, or are there times when you’re angry at yourself? And if there are times when you’re disappointed or angry with yourself, why? Because this shows that there’s something in your computer that’s dissatisfied with the productions of the computer.
20:30
So then of course there are different levels beyond that. There’s no point in going into them too much. We have a rapport session, which is the step beyond that. There’s also an ashram down, as I said, I have a farm in West Virginia. And quite a few of the people come down and spend an intensive period in the summer. There’s a two or three month period that runs from, genefally the intensive part runs from July 4th to Labor Day.
So then there are individual monitorings of me, by me, with people who I think are getting to a point where they can be gently shoved into an experience. And this is brought about by means of me knowing what they’re thinking, and knowing where they’re at.
21:17
So this is as well as I can explain to you the general plan of action for the group. And of course, each person who, as I said, I believe there are certain laws employed. And these laws are found in different religions down through the ages. And it’s the law of cooperation, that you have to help in order to be helped. That doesn’t mean that you have to finance a church, but you should try to help somebody else along the road. You should try to get to a point where you can advise or guide a little. the efforts at first are kind of simple, maybe you’re just handing out, you’re tacking up posters on a university bulletin board. Maybe they’re monitoring a group, or some simple thing of that sort. It goes down to heavy participation in the intensive down at the farm.
22:13
But we know – we have something. I’m quite sure you’ll find that out. And it can’t be twisted out of me by argument. It can’t be done that way. I’d like to. If I could just say, “Yes, I can argue it out with you philosophically, and you’ll see.” Of course, this is foolishness, to think that you can – if it could, why it would be written a hundred years ago or five hundred years ago. If Buddha could have presented it by argument, it would have been presented, believe me. The majority of people who experience, like Paul Wood, never wrote anything. Because it’s almost foolish to write.
So I know that when I start talking, I’m going through an arduous task, of indulging in ambiguous words, with relative meaning and all that sort of thing. But we still struggle, because somewhere people have the intuition: to say, “I feel that there’s something in this group.” And the people who have joined this group in the past, the first people who joined in Pitt, are still with it, and that’s been three years ago. There are only a couple people who have dropped out. So they’ve had plenty of time to look into the authenticity of it, or to study the logical aspects of it, or the intuitive judgments of it.
23:29
And this is the thing to do: come to the group and talk to the people in the group. They’re very friendly and we’re not a snobbish cult or anything of that sort. We recognize every human being as a searcher and a sufferer, including ourselves.
Are there any other questions? Yes.
24:01
Q. Would you say that desire is the main barrier to achieving truth?
R. No. Desire is one of the main tools, it’s one of the implements. In The Albigen Papers I mentioned this, that we are created with certain implants; our computer has certain little gizmos in it, or transistors, or whatever you want to call them. These implants are desire and curiosity. They’re almost the same. But these are implanted in us to keep us living, so that we’ll function as organic beings. And the mystic, or the philosopher, goes through a process of what I call getting “milk from thorns.” You turn these to a spiritual advantage by pointing your curiosity or your desire, not in the direction of sex or pleasure or power, but in the direction of inquiry, so that you become more and more curious – about that which is. And so consequently your vector is turned then. That’s what we call turning the vector. And then it becomes very much instrumental in your finding the truth.
25:19
Q. You have ?? ?? paranoia ?? Do you think that’s an implant too?
R. Well paranoia is another word for fear that’s all ...
Q. ??
R. ... sure, absolutely, fear is an implant, it’s a protective implant. If the animal didn’t have fear, it would not avoid traumatic incidents as it walked back in and get killed; whenever it’s injured it develops a fear of that place and caution, and it survives. And we have to as organisms have fear. Well, of course the, in some respects it becomes a sickly fear and it’s labeled paranoia, because it seems as though we make a business of being afraid and not being adventurous. The being afraid somehow inhibits the adventurous spirit of going out and foraging for food and, like the rat in the maze eventually just wilts, folds up and quits eating. That’s paranoia, in the human, we just retreat back into ourselves and quit functioning. So it’s just an overabundance of fear.
26:23
But fear in itself is healthy. We shoulds be afraid, because if more people were afraid, they wouldn’t be destroyed before they’re able to undertake a spiritual path. There are certain factors that are destroyed in most young people, and by the time – that’s the reason I say that most people past 40 years of age cannot – unless they have spent many years before that, digging for the truth, it’s foolish for them to start. Because they’re generally destroyed. Their sensory mechanisms are destroyed, their intuition is destroyed. In other words, in simple terms, they’re jaded. And jaded people are not sensitive, and people who are not sensitive cannot discern.
[silence]
Well, it’s 9:30, I’ll still, if anybody cares to discuss anything, I’ll be around for a few minutes. It’s been nice talking to you all.
27:30
[Lecture ends here. On the tape there follows 20 minutes of conversation away from the microphone with a lot of cross talk.]
Footnotes
Url: http://www.direct-mind.org/index.php?title=1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh For access, send an email to editors@direct-mind.org Suzuki of course was Japanese but lived in the US, had an American wife, and published books in English in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki Alfred Pulyan: “I met Suzuki twice. I am very suspicious here because they turned out such a big volume of words & theories. Zen Masters do not do that!” http://selfdefinition.org/pulyan/letters/1961-0323-pulyan.htm 1974-1010-Duquesne-University-Pittsburgh. Try: http://www.searchwithin.org/img/jacobs_ladder.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_yoga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriya_Yoga See Rose: Yoga: Hatha, Shabd, and Raja: PDF: http://www.searchwithin.org/download/yoga.pdf A review of Rose’s correspondence with Pulyan indicates it was more complicated than Rose indicates: http://selfdefinition.org/pulyan/letters/ Also see Alan Fitzpatrick’s 4-page essay, “Richard Rose and the Assimilation of his Enlightenment Experience. At that time Rose was unaware of Ramana Maharshi’s ability to transmit, as he did for example with Sri Muruganar. See his “Sri Ramana Experience”: http://albigen.com/uarelove/muruganar_realization.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kapleau Three Pillars of Zen. Pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/zen/ See Richard Rose, Direct-Mind Experience, Ch 2, “Lecture on Moods, Columbus, 1979.” Man number one becomes man number two. Man number two moves in the direction of man number three. It would be helpful to have a compilation of Rose’s students’ personal stories of their own “satori” if they had such an experience. Man number three moves in the direction of man number four. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samadhi An interesting illustration of Rose’s intuition and experience. As compared with today where everyone “spiritual” is taught and tries to learn Ramana Maharshi, Rose, who had never heard of him, recognized his enlightenment immediately upon reading this book. See Richard M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/ The chart Rose refers to is reproduced here: http://www.albigen.com/uarelove/sahaja.htm Rose erroneously says here that the experience occurred in Canada. Bucke lived in Canada but the experience occurred in London, England. Sri Chinmoy, in “Samadhi: The Height of Divine Consciousness”, associates nirvikalpa samadhi with bliss: http://www.srichinmoy.org/spirituality/concentration_meditation_contemplation/samadhi http://selfdefinition.org/rose/articles/1967-richard-rose-letter-to-san-francisco-oracle-about-ashram.htm Ramana Maharshi died in 1950. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi There are several references for this: Alan Watts, Hubert Benoit. Here’s a fuller quote from Garma Chang, Practice of Zen, Discourses of Master Po Shan, “... the mountain was not a mountain and that the water was not water... etc.”. http://selfdefinition.org/zen/garma-chang/practice-of-zen/ch-2b3-discourses-of-master-po-shan.htm “Story of Paul Wood.” http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm “One in many millions.” http://selfdefinition.org/christian/bucke-chart-p43-one-in-a-million.htm “I Died at 10:52 AM”, by Victor D. Solow http://tatfoundation.org/forum2003-12.htm#5 During WWII the Air Force was still a branch of the US Army. Matthew 6:9-13. Luke 11:1–4. That became the core of the ministry in the years that followed.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough Several versions available on the web. E.g., Project Gutenberg, Volume 1, 400 page pdf. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41082/41082-pdf.pdf The Albigen Papers. July 1972. So 2 years, 4 months. The Albigen Papers, Seventh Paper, Discernment The Albigen Papers, Eighth Paper, Maximum Reversal Technique.
