1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore
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| Title | 1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore |
| Recorded date | March 11, 1977 |
| Location | University of Maryland |
| Number of tapes | Probably three 60 minute tapes |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | To resolve: THIS IS THE SAME AS 1975-1119-BOSTON-COLLEGE |
| Source | J |
| No. of MP3 files | 6 |
| Total time | 6 time 31 = about 186 min |
| Transcription status | Next for SH |
| 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? | n/a |
| Published on which website? | n/a |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore |
| For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150103122333 |
Files = 6 x 31 minutes
Notes
From March 1977 PZ Newsletter:
"Mr. Rose lectured at Maryland U. on March 11 to a crowd of approximately 55 people. The response was favorable with about 1/3 of the people staying to talk to him till past midnight before he caught the 1:30 a.m. bus to Pittsburgh."
Rose talks about betweenness in File 5.
Also about transmission in same file.
Somewhere he says, "A year ago at this time I was in Cairo, Egypt."
Sound has too much bass – muffled. Can’t hear with Bose speakers. Maybe try headset.
Notes/Abstract
Sound has too much bass – muffled. Can’t hear with Bose speakers. Maybe try headset. Use Dave Mettle collection
File 1
Doron: ... he’s the author of the Albigen Papers and he’s the teacher of the Pyramid Zen Society. He’s a very fascinating and illumination ??? here’s Richard Rose.
R. Now I have to live up to that.
First I’d like to say a few things about Zen. I don’t know how many of you have done reading on Zen – we could take a poll - how many have? Looks like everybody.
Well, by way of explaining why we are the Pyramid Zen Society – we have nothing to do with pyramids, incidentally. The Pyramid Zen Society was formed before the craze for making little pyramids came out, before Flanagan wrote the book, I guess. But sometimes we get a lot of people that come, thinking that we’re into some sort of formulated Zen that has to do with Pyramids. The reason the name Pyramid was chosen was – in the beginning we didn’t want a name at all, not even the name Zen. Because as soon as you give things a name, there’s a connotation. And yet somehow you have to verbalize your drive, whatever your objective is. This [word] Zen came as close to our drive as possibly could be verbalized in a short term.
01:37
My first lectures at universities were given began at the University of Pittsburgh, and we went in to occupy a room and the people in charge said, “What’s the name of your organization?” And we had none, basically. I had been meeting with people for about thirty years without any organization, and we thought it would be good if it could perpetuate itself that way without too much formality, because the more formal you get the more you get into the evils of organization. You form a new religion or something and the next thing you know you’ve got a financial religion, the organization becomes more important than what you’re doing, and your wwhole work is meaningless.
02:24
But regardless, we found that in order to do things you have to have a name; you can’t come on a campus unless you have a name; so the first Zen study was called that, just the Zen Study Group. We just said if they want something give it to them, so we called it that.
02:43
The system that we use was already in operation, and it didn’t – well, I? wouldn’t say the word Zen was a perfect description of it, but it was the closest. Then when we went into Kent, Ohio, for some reason the boys chose the word Pyramid Zen, when they took it before the board , which had to agree whether they could use the premises.
03:11
Of course the word pyramid is used because it’s symbolic of the efforts of mankind; that almost anything that is done on any human level is pyramidal in form. Anything of any value is supported by a broad base of lesser value, or let’s say a more common type of effort. It takes a broad base of perhaps a million people to form a pyramid of which one person would be a millionaire. It takes a broad base, seemingly, of people of lesser interest, or less scholastic ability, to form a point at which would emerge a PhD.
04:02
And we can see this structure that permeates all human activity, and the same as in the spiritual world. The spiritual laws, incidentally, are very close to financial or economic laws. The same things apply because basically it goes back to human effort, and human effort all winds up to be pyramidal in form.
04:21
The idea, the concept of emancipating all of humanity seems to be very popular, that we’re going to emancipate everybody spiritually, and we’re going to do it possibly by missionizing, or by compromising with all elements of mankind, is sure foolishness. Nature doesn’t have things constructed that way, in the human makeup.
04:51
They tell a story that in certain monasteries in China that the monks begin the day with the pledge tto never cease their efforts, if it took thousands of years individually, to see that every living soul, every living creature reached enlightenment – that’s a big order. So, of course they didn’t hope this, it was rather facetious, possible, because they really didn’t hope to do that in their lifetime; it was a nice pledge to make in the morning.
05:22
Now we get into this business of, first of all, your comprehension. You have all read something; nearly all of you have read something on Zen. And what is basically the goal of Zen? You could get different impressions by reading D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Or from reading Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen you could get another impression; he has a difference with Watts on technique and that sort of thing.
05:54 Then you can go back and read Garma C.C. Chang and Huang Po and you get still another idea. That possibly the material that the American public is exposed to in the line of Zen possibly doesn’t conform to the spirit of Zen as maybe laid down by Bodhidharma, if we can trust the history.
06:27
My first encounter of Zen was in D.T. Suzuki; I turned away from it at the time. I thought there seemed to be a lot history and a lot of unconnected material; I couldn’t find a system, I couldn’t find an end result that was described properly.
But it wasn’t until I met a man, Alfred Pulyan, , who practiced a system of transmission toward bringing people to a point of enlightenment, that I understood Zen, and why I didn’t get a better reading. I got it just by his reactions with me and his interactions with me and that sort of thing.
07:15
So that – after I met him then some of these other books started to make a little more sense – and some of them seemed to be absurd too.
07:26
Now what is the basic thing in Zen? Is it as Watts seemed to imply that there’s nothing you can do because there’s nowhere to go. And this kind of coincides with a comment about Zen writings – you find that in the writings, and it’s amazing that a man would write it and then continue writing material, offering it to the public – and that is that the man who knows does not speak and the man who speaks doesn’t know.
08:03
The thing is, if nobody spoke and no one wrote, you’d have no sutras, which they consider very valuable. Of course, the point is that if a person – I think in the translation of that may have been that if a guy talks too much, if he’s trying to sell something to the public, then possibly he doesn’t know as much as another man who keeps silent and acts more. I would be more inclined to believe that.
08:27
But there are certain little postulations that really throw people’s minds. And particularly a mind that is given o trying to find an easy way of doing things. If you’re defeated in life, if you’ve been let’s say frustrated and bombed out of your head by booze or dope or something, and somebody comes along and gives you a system by which you can arrive at a maximum enlightenment without any effort – you can lay on your back and go to heaven – that may be very appealing. But in the long run it doesn’t work.
09:12
So we hear in Watts occasionally his talking of arriving at a state of no-mind, that all you have to do is – well, we have another writer who talks of letting go. Now these are all true: the idea of letting go is important – but [it’s in] knowing how to let go, or how to let go [of egos] in the proper order. You don’t just go out and get drunk and stay drunk and say, “I’m not going to rally myself enough to resist.” That would be one form of letting go. Or Gary Gilmore may well have let go; he might have been considered a maximum self-releaser.
09:46
So there’s a lot of confusion. And there are other systems of Zen that seem to be physical. Whereby if you enter an order or a place and you pay a certain fee, which is generally enough to keep things is good fashion, and you indulge in what is called a sesshin – now this is the assembly-line production idea that appeals to both Japanese and Americans: “Let’s get this thing done in fashion. Let’s get it over and get back to our playing.”
10:21
And this is the thing that I run into a lot. That people say, “Hey.” One fellow approached me and said, “Why if you’re anything like Don Juan you can zap me with drugs, and I’ll be there. And then I can go back and continue what I was doing before.” Of course, if you did get really zapped, you wouldn’t want to continue what you were doing before anyhow.
But the American idea of hurrying to get things done aand then getting back to a previous way of life seems to have influenced the Zen system. And I think Zen was influenced when it left India. I think when it left India and entered China there was a change possibly, and because of exposure for six hundred years to a certain type of mind, that was in China but wasn’t in India.
11:10
Then I see a change in it when it went to Japan, and we have more of an assembly-line production; that’s where you hear people shouting mu. They get a whole group of people locked in a room and they keep beating them with boards and shouting mu, and they reach enlightenment. It’s like the ordeal in a Nazi prison camp: after you beat a fellow so much he might decide to become a Nazi. He becomes convinced by virtue of there being no place else to go. And Lord knows how valid are these experiences that we produce under this type of experimentation. Or some of the eminent – and this goes back quite a ways – the keisaku, and some masters denounce it and say it’s unnecessary.
12:03
So basically what is this? What are we leading to? What good does it do you? Of course, that’s another American thing, utilitarianism; nobody wants to hear a thing they can’t cash in. “Will it make me more compatible with my wife or my neighbors? Will it help my business?” And it’s amazing that everything has to be equated with this utility value. “Does it make me more skillful?” People come in and ask whether it’s connected with kung fu or karate, and they’re quite amazed when it doesn’t include swordsmanship, flower arrangement, archery or motorcycle maintenance.
12:41
But basically it’s the deepest form of experience, the aim or direction towards the deepest form of experience that a man can have in his human life. I don’t think you can get any deeper. I’ve never heard of anything deeper than the described experience of enlightenmnt.
13:04
Now how many people really desire this? I often say you can tell by the number of people who respond to lectures and this sort of thing. And even the people who respond and come to lectures on Zen, very few of those – I wonder whether they get what they come for, if they really, really thinking that there isn’t something magical, like [that] there’s a formula that they can get to do something in a few hours or a few weeks and that sort of thing.
13:31
But let’s go back to the main idea or the main objective, is to reach the final state of consciousness, the final state of reality, which I consider absolute. And I think the old Zen teachers would also consider it an absolute experience, meaning that – the reason we use the term absolute is that all other experiences are relative. We have a bicameral brain and everything only exists in comparison; mentally we have to compare with something else in order for something to exist.
14:06
The final experience, mental experience, is, as I say, when the mind is dead, as we know it, that the experience is an absolute experience. And this is the realization of what actually is. The relative world does not exist for you then, as you know it now; although you can come back and live again in a relative experience But momentarilly you live in an absolute experience.
14:37
Real Zen and phony Zen =
Now what is Zen and what is phony Zen? Is real Zen formality? [Does] the wearing or robes, the relative robes and shoes and cushions and this sort of thing give you an absolute experience? Maybe it will keep things in your mind a little bit, serve as a reminder. But there’s a tremendous lot of emphasis put on organization, people who get together and dress a certain way and perhaps have a little tea party that has to be a certain way, and meditate together, as if they couldn’t meditate separately. And this becomes a sort of ritual.
15:29
I’ve often mentioned the – the speed with [at] which a lot of us hurry to a certain point of the earth, thinking that truth is geographical. That only the great spiritual truths emanate from India, Tibet, or the orient. I found out that the majority of people who go in this direction for illumination wind up being attached to institutions very similar to the parental religion that they left behind.
So there’s no need to use the word Zen at all. What we’re talking about is the topmost human experience, mental experience, call it whatever you wish. We have the word enlightenment, and I would like to use the word enlightenment as opposed to some of the other forms, but enlightenment doesn’t seem to mean much, because it’s so commonplace. It’s like the word God. It’s abused. The word God is practically useless as a descriptive word, because it’s – everybody seems to be on a first name basis with the fellow. Consequently we have a lot of liars who are attaining livlihoods under false pretenses by virtue of a pretended relationship with God.
16:59 omit: === Four principles of Zen ===
Bodhidharma laid down – I’m going to give you his definition of what real Zen was, and I think nobody’s said it better; I’ve never seen anything better for it down through the years.
The first one is “A special transmission outside the scriptures”. This is how you’ll identify real Zen. I’ll read them off and then we’ll go back over them. 2. No dependence on words or letters. 3. Direct pointing at the soul of man. 4. Seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Buddhahood or Self. The original was written Buddhahood, but the equivalent in our language is Self or God. By Self I mean capital-s Self. I distinguish between small-s self, which is the person you see sitting here, as opposed to the person you really are.
17:59
And this is attributed, incidentally, those four things, there are many writings on Zen, but this is attributed basically by D.T. Suzuki to Bodhidharma.
18:12
Now the thing is of course, we go back on this: a special transmission outside the scriptures. And this is what I meant a little while ago when I said the abandonment of “the pasture is greener on the other side of the fence”, the abandonment of the parental religion for something exotic and Asian. Thinking that we have to go over and climb a mountain and find somebody in some cave before we can find the truth. And of course the truth is in every human being, not anyplace else. You’ll not find it on the – you’ll not find it in a book or in a magical formula, you find it in yourself.
18:58
And this brings us back of course to – another thing that we see before us all the ime – I saw it when I was growing up and paid no attention to it. You’ll see it in a hundred or a thousand different books, to first know thyself. And there’s the formula. Of course maybe they don’t say, “Now, here’s the formula, first know thyself.” Bt strangely enough, once you reach the point where you really know yourself – this is capital-s Self now – you realize that this is the path or door by which you know everything. Now if that’s no clear to you, I ?? think it would be. ?? ??
19:44
But this special transmission outside the scriptures is basically talking about [basically refers to] fundamentalism. It means that you don’t have to depend on a written formula or a written scripture in order to find the truth. You may find [in that] something like the Tower of Babel; you might find confusion by getting into too many words, especially ?? that can be translated and interpreted.
20:09
So this is one path, one thing that happens to a lot pf people in this country young and old, that they come possibly from a Christian, fundamentalistic background, and they become incensed and indignant that it doesn’t answer their questions properly. And they go to Asia and start studying for ten or twenty years studying sutras, the Bhagavad Gita or something else, thinking that they’re ?? magic because the old man has to be stupid to say ?? wouldn’t hold water ?? outside the family.
20:53
No dependence on words or letters. Now this reinforces the first one. Words of letters – this encompasses our whole system of – importance we place on titles and authority, and even systems of – importance we like to put on certain systems or philosophies. It means no philosophies. You’re not going to do too much by arguing with someone else, to show just how brave you are. You’re not going to prove the nature of the universe by argumentation.
21:34
The third is the direct pointing at the soul of man. In other words, it’s a system by which we bypass the inkblots and the evaluations as much as possible, and go directly into yourself. Not to think about yourself, but to go directly into yourself.
Now Ramana Maharshi has a, if you’re acquainted with Ramana Maharshi, he has a good system of explanation of this. And he draws the [an] analogy with a camera, that we are basically like [when] a ray of light that is projected on a screen. And like the man in Plato’s cave, , we think we are the image that is projected on the wall of the cave, when actually we are the projector, or part of the projector. And the real person may be behind the reflection [?] – all we see in the visible universe are reflections or projections.
22:43
And so the more we study these shadows on the wall of the cave the more confused we become. That the only way to find the real essence is to pursue the way back through the source, back through the projector or the camera or whatever is projecting it. And this is the – it isn’t a question of so much verbalizing your trip backwards, or trying to philosophically trying to draw a blueprint of how to go back into yourself, but to just go back into yourself, to just turn inward.
23:20
Now, how do you do that, of course? And the last thing reinforces this somehow: Seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Self. Now seeing into one’s nature – and how do yoiu see into one’s nature? You’ve got to study the projection on the wall of the cave; you’ve got to start with that. And only when you realize that it’s a projection can you then turn and go back
23:46
In other words, we have a nature, we have a human nature – which most of us think we are doing. Most of us think we are doing the things that nature does to us. So that when you get to the point where you can see yourself acted upon, you’re able to turn away from that and start looking inside.
Psychology
Now in this respect we get into something, which is psychology. And I think that through this process that honestly, starting with yourself, evolves – of course I presume that in many instances it’s a wordless psychology, because you just watch yourself committing errors. But it can be a written psychology as well. And I’ve come to look upon true Zen as the ultimate psychology. But current psychology deifies the physical body and pretends that nothing else exists. We have shelves full of books written on a particularly behavioristic psychology in which every action of a man is cataloged. They wire him up with certain meters or biofeedback machines, trying to find by this some pattern or some electricity which [that] will give you his thoughts, or give you some vibration of his soul or something or some proof.
25:26
But it’s like the splitting of the atom. You can split – one time I thought – I majored in chemistry when I went to school, and I thought that I would get into chemistry and prove the existence of reality by proving the true nature of matter. And I’d no more than got out of college but I came to the conclusion that I’d stay out of chemistry; it was a tangential thing that would go on forever. 25:46 start Monday 3:51 pm
And the same thing applies to all of this experimentation that’s going on with thought. Sure we get a lot of new insights. But by the same time we’re getting into the dangerous thing in psychology and sociology, the idea of creating. We’re so capable now that we’re going to create behavior, we’re going to program society, the zombies. We’ll program the zombies, the robots. We’ll find robots capable of programming the robots.
26:22
But the thing is, when you look within yourself – well, I can only give you my opinion, of what I found, I tried looking within myself – I find that there’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing basically wrong to change. I don’t see any point in trying to change things. Trying to change things is a rationalization for [not making, or a substitute for] effort on yourself. Of course people – there’s an argument that goes forth that says you’ve got to change the world before you can take the time out to do any spiritual work. And my immediate answer to that is, “Who is doing the changing?”
27:02
The thing that pursued me all my life, the thing that caused me to look into these things as deeply as I did, was the fact that I knew that I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know even who I was. I watched myself doing things which maybe a week later, a day later, or an hour later I didn’t approve of. I watched myself making mistakes that caused trouble. Now this is looking into your nature. You look into you’re nature and you see these things happening and you say, “What’s going on? Who is running my mechanism?” And with an intense desire to study this, if you’ve got an intense psychological desire, that’s basically a self-analysis, that’s all you really need.
27:41
But my first step was into religion, of course. I was born and raised a Catholic, and I thought, “Well, the thing to do is go to church, and these people are authorities, they’ll tell me what the score is.” And to this day I’ve never found a minister [who could]. We were talking about one tonight over at the house. Where a man in Columbus, Ohio who had been a minister, he’s ninety-six years of age, and he candidly admitted he didn’t know where he was going when he died. Where? he says it’s just a matter of, you know, keep your chin up, be prepared, that’s all. And have faith, without hope.
28:19
And so what are we leaning on? What are these udders by which we feed ourselves, our complacency? Are the evils of the world based upon a faulty representation, a distribution of food supply, or are the evils of the world based upon am improper vision of what the world is? Are we going to argue with the engineer who designed this thing? Individually think that we’re going to vote, and by voting decide infallibly for the betterment of the world? Or are we going to look into ourselves and see how we should act in reaction to a pattern that existed before we were born? So of course that’s open to [your] desire; whatever you desire, that’s what you do.
29:10
But I became somewhat disgruntled with my adventure into the priesthood. And the only thing I got exhortations to have faith there. I have come to one other conclusion about something that’s very sacred ?? in Zen, and that is the right and the duty to doubt, not to have faith. That you have to know what you’re having faith in, before you have faith. I think that you have to have faith in yourself. I think that you have to have some sort of conceit that you’re capable of doing this trip, that you’re going to survive it, that it isn’t a problem that cannot be solved.
29:56
A lot of people say, “Oh, well that’s too big for me – trying to find out where I came from. Whoever figures it out?” No one evidently does if we’re all like the minister, the ninety-six year old man who was still waiting to find out. So it’s just looked upon as too great a task, and eat, drink and be merry. But after you’ve looked into yourself for awhile you find out that you can’t be merry. That your merriment is a state of mind, that’s all, imposed on you almost like a bait to keep you – it’s like the ...
[break in tape]
[side 1 ends at 30:31]
File 2
File 2 length is 30:51
REPEATED TEXT: ... that you’re going to survive it. ETC ...
That your merriment is a state of mind, that’s all, imposed on you almost like a bait to keep you – it’s like the corn that you feed to a hog. If you take the bait, then you’ll serve some functional purpose in the biological aquarium of life. You’ll function, and die by virtue that you’re fattened up by your own vanity, so to speak.
01:07
So I looked around – I too took the path [figuratively] to Asia, to India, and checked into a lot of isms and joined a few, was initiated into several. And came away with as much disillusion as I had in my parental religion. I came to the conclusion of course that some of them were even worse. The big thing there was I was trading my devotion for somebody else’s financial success, in many places, and some of them are just, I found a lot of them were just more or less social institutions. Some of them there wasn’t so much money involved, but the people seemed to believe, definitely believe in what they were talking about, but it had just got to a social religion that had bogged down, and it was just a nice place to go.
02:09
I found – it was very similar to going to a church in this country. I went into the Vedanta temple on the west coast and I thought it was a very beautiful experience. But I didn’t learn anything there; I just had a very soothing experience from being there.
02:21
So I got into raja yoga. , I experimented with all these different mental processes. I had started into my search when I was twelve years of age. I was about twelve when they sent me away to be a priest, and I got out when I was about seventeen. And then I spent some time studying psychology; I thought you could pierce, by studying the mind itself, you could know what the soul was, if there was one; the connection between the thought and the brain, an [if] a person could find the contact point between the thought and the brain a person you could find what the human vitality was, what his essence was.
02:57
Well, I didn’t find it out quick enough then; I abandoned it [this] and went into checking out Spiritualism. I thought, “Let’s talk to the dead.” I heard that there were materializations that [where] you could talk to [them, the dead] and they surely would know where they’re at, if they’re spirits of the dead, and so we’ll go down and have a – I hunted all over the United States, incidentally, to find a genuine medium; most of them are phony.
03:17
And we did find one who could produce some entities. I didn’t make any sense out of anything that they said; they mostly repeated what you – if you gave them a question you got a like answer. But there were about – two carloads of us went to this place [White Lilly Chapel in Delaware, Ohio] from Steubenville, Ohio, and a lot of us put questions to these spirits that came out, such as, “Where are you?” and, “What’s it like?” and, “Is Jesus there?” And the answer was, “Well, we’ve heard about him.” And I thought, “That’s about like it in this country.” One of them said, “We have seen his light.” I get the impression that there is a certain mimicry.
04:00
If you want to get into the study of these materializations, there are quite a few books written on it. And this is a common them that runs through investigation of materializations, that there’s no, there have been a lot of materialized spirits but there has been no theology resulting from it. There has been no great revelation that said, “Here is exactly what will happen to you when you die; and here’s where your cousin is,” even when the person standing in front of you is a duplicate of your grandfather or your father, brother or something of that sort. We’ve seen this happen.
04:38
But brother Joe was smarter when he was living than when he was dead. And that takes you back to the Bible where it says, “The dead know nothing.” If these are the dead they know nothing, because they are just echoes to what you ask them. And I’ve done a lot of reading on this, besides this personal adventure, reading other people’s accounts.
05:00
So I didn’t stay long in that pursuit. I got away from checking out the phantoms and got into yoga, and I thought, “Well, that seemed to appeal to,” – everything I got into seemed to appeal to, when I got into it I’d think, “Boy, this is it This is the real answer. I’ll get this.” And two or three years later, and four or five thousand hairs later – I was getting balder all the time and – nothing was happening.
05:28
And I’d think, “Boy, maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you’re not supposed to know. Maybe nobody knows.” And then you go back and you read these books and it sounds very convincing. Your intuition says, “That man wouldn’t have written that way, why would he publish a book if he didn’t have something? Where there’s a lot of smoke there must be some fire.” So back on the head with the yoga exercises, and meditation, and several more years go by, and you feel like going out and getting drunk and forgetting about the whole thing. I never had the stomach for booze so I never could get drunk enough to get away from it completely.
06:06
But I would surely get disappointed with the progress that I was making. And I thought, “Well, who am I, to reach this?” We had a businessman in our group in Steubenville, and we were talking about this pursuit of truth. His name was John, and he said, “Rose, who in the hell is John, who is so important that he should live forever?” He said, “This is a fallacy in itself. You look around and there are two or three billion people like me on the face of the earth, and what the hell are we so important that we should put up this demand to live forever, or look for it even?” That the unlikelihood is greater than the likelihood that we’d be significant enough to survive death.
06:54
So it gets very discouraging. You find a lot of reasons for playing, so to speak. And I tried to find some reason, I’ll be honest with you. I’d get away from it entirely, and I’d have dreams of going and getting married and raising some kids, and trying to get wrapped up in the game of life. But every time I did, something would pop up and get my attention again and I’d find myself back [standing] on my head, doing the yoga exercises.
07:26
So – something did happen when I was about thirty years of age, quite unexpectedly. And I think certain things happen along the way too, to such an extent that I could not go back and play games. I hadn’t reached in that interim period any great illumination, but I got to the point where I couldn’t talk foolishly, I couldn’t live foolishly. In other words, I couldn’t go into a dance hall. I used to say that if you really want to see what goes oon in a dance hall, go where you can’t hear the music and watch their motions. And it would seem utterly grotesque that people would have to wiggle around, after working hard all day, go down there at night and wiggle around for just a little social contact. There must be a briefer, quicker way of making social contact without losing all that energy.
08:18
And I could see so many things that people did which just didn’t appeal to me; I couldn’t conform to it. I couldn’t get interested in who’s on first base. I couldn’t get interested in politics. I could care less; I saw the whole structure as a structure of fools, people thinking they’re going to change a system.
08:41
Consequently these are little milestones that you’ll get on, and you’ll think you’re not moving. But you find that you can’t go back and play the games again. You just don’t have the stomach for it; you just, it doesn’t appeal to you. The glamour is gone.
09:01
heading
This brings us now to a – I’d like to give you something of a definition of this maximum experience. Incidentally, in most of the books on Zen that you’ll read, you’ll hear the word satori. And I take issue with this word, because of the described experiences that come in the books on Zen with the word satori. Satori is defined in almost all the books I have read as a very brief “wow” experience. And enlightenment is not a very brief wow experience. So there’s something missing. And one time, when I looked upon all these words, when I was younger, I couldn’t see the difference – until this happened to me. But sometimes I thought, “What happened to me? Why do these people talk about another experience?” And I saw that there were definite layers, definite steps that you went through.
10:14
We hear of – there are a lot of words: samadhi, some call it nirvana, enlightenment, salvation (“I’ve been saved.”), eureka, satori, cosmic consciousness, kevala samadhi. And I thought, “Boy, that’s really confusion; it all means the same thing.” But it doesn’t. If you talk to people who have been saved, you get an entirely different vision of what their experience was from say a man who’s gone, accomplished the cosmic consciousness experience. And you can get these – there are books written on this. I don’t know how many of you are acquainted with Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness; he has a whole treatise full of them. There’s another man, Johnson, who writes of them too. I forget the name of it, but he has a compendium of case histories, you might call them, of people who have reached psychic breakthroughs.
11:29
And there’s a similarity that runs through them. But they aren’t all the same; they fall into certain categories. Now the way you can tell the reception or the attainment of an absolute experience is the fact that there are no relative connotations. There’s no way to describe it in a relative manner. Whereas those that are described in a relative manner are not an absolute experience. So you go back and take these experiences in which they [either] reached a visitation, you know, of a person, or a personality.
12:07
I don’t know how many of you are acquainted with Gurdjieff, but he laid down a number system for man’s gradations, one, two, three and four, going up to seven; but the first four categories were the instinctive man, the emotional man, the intellectual man and the philosophic man. And I find that this is a good categorization of people. Because we find in their pyramidal structure that the majority of people making up the base of the pyramid are instinctive people.
12:40
And they’ll tell you quite frankly that they’re living for their instinctive purposes, they’re living to eat, drink and b merry; and they’re living for physical things like power, a better house, a better car, a better sexual mate and that sort of thing.
These are instinctive people. And when they evolve, if they transcend that, they go through what people like Huxley [Bucke?] would call an exaltation.
13:10
And their exaltation has the name of salvationism. And they lose that by dropping an ego; the ego, in their, their physical ego, of the need for pampering the body; they see that it’s no longer necessary. So they fasten themselves to something else – they have to, to break loose from themselves, and that something else maybe Jesus or the guru. And this is a bona fide way of breaking away from yourself – to fasten yourself and make something else more important. Sometimes it may be love in a marriage, where you remove a person from their, and they’ll find salvation in that.
13:48
But regardless, there is a feeling of a breakthrough, and a contact with where do they [?] projected [for] themselves.. [whatever they projected]
Then again, if they live long enough they find that they were hung up. Because now they’re in the emotional department, regardless of who they love, they’re attached to whatever they love And they may linger in this for a long time. It may be the religion they were born in. And after awhile they start to analyze this thing, and their intuition prods them and they get to thinking, “Well, maybe this isn’t the last thing on earth,” and they’ll start tto get into something perhaps more mathematical. Or maybe they will get into magic, thaumaturgy, numerology, astrology or something – they’ll try to make it a tangible search, and belabor themselves [with that] – the cabala is another one, incidentally It’s symbolic, the evaluation of symbols.
14:51
And if they pursue this long enough they’ll be a breakthrough. For instance, I heard a yogi say one time that wisdom was the result of the juggling of any set of symbols. That is you could persistently juggle any set of symbols you’ll find wisdom. That’s like in mathematics; I’ve had this experience with algebra, when I first went to school, [?] and I was taking advanced algebra, and I couldn’t see the sense of the whole thing; it just seemed useless to concern myself with why “a + b = c” when I could dump the – I figured well if we’ve got a problem, why can’t we just say “1 + 2 = 3” instead, and the superimpositions of values for those things?
15:32
After belaboring myself with this – because I had to, to get through school – all of a sudden the thing popped like a light bulb one day, and the whole thing became manifest to me, the whole thing became easy. From then on, algebra was very easy. Because if you apply yourself long enough, you’ll get a one-ness with whatever subject, if the symbols form an orderly pattern.
15:58
So this is what happens, basically. The evolvement from the emotional level puts us into an exaltation. But after awhile you find out that this is a vanity. Than basically – and here is the basic clue, between this form of spiritual endeavor and most [other?] forms of spiritual endeavor. Is most forms – I understand, a spiritual endeavor, and I’m talking about the religion of my childhood as well – are increments, [incremental?] accumulation of holiness, accumulation of merits. So many hours off in purgatory, or so many kilowatts added to your halo.
16:49
And everything is closer, becoming more saintly, becoming closer to the illumination of your chakras and yogic things, getting them spinning, according to Anthroposophy or Rosicrucian concepts of the chakras. The big thing is you’re supposed to get the chakras spinning, and that will attract the master in astral form and you’ll be on your way. These are objective things to go after.
17:17
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Footnotes
Url: http://direct-mind.org/index.php5?title=1977-0311-University-Maryland-Baltimore
Patrick Flanagan, Pyramid Power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Flanagan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kapleau Audiobook here: http://selfdefinition.org/zen/ The Practice of Zen. Zen Teachings of Huang Po, by John Blofeld. PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/zen/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/Pulyan.htm http://the-wanderling.com/pulyan.html Eliminate this – distracting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin Convicted murderer executed in 1977 who had demanded the death penalty. In interviews he said he believed in predestination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gilmore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesshin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) Hitting the back with a stick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keisaku http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) See chart on page: http://www.albigen.com/uarelove/sahaja.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave See 1977-511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus for more on Plato’s cave.. Los Angeles, 1946-1947? See Peace To The Wander, p. 11-12. http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Yoga Rose: Yoga: Hatha, Shabd, and Raja. PDF: http://www.searchwithin.org/download/yoga.pdf Rose is apparently differentiating from so-called automatic writings or channeled teachings, of which he also had a generally negative view, such as the Seth material. 1978-0412-Kent-State-University: “They can’t be established as being anything but fiction.” Also see 1977-0426-Intro-to-Albigen-System-Cleveland. Rose always advised not to trust voices. Rose did extensive investigation in later years, such as in the mid-1950s with Steubenville Psychic Research, a group of about 40 people. See p. 70, Peace To The Wanderer. Ecclesiastes 9:5. In the original Rose attributes the quote to Christ, corrected here. Mid 1950s, see footnote above. 1947. In the original Rose says “31 or 32 years of age”, corrected here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori Sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Maurice_Bucke PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/ Probably Raynor C. Johnson, The Imprisoned Splendour; alternatively, Watcher On The Hills: A Study of Some Mystical Experiences of Ordinary People.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynor_Johnson See http://www.woodlandway.org/PDF/Leslie_Price_PP8.pdf Also see http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/resources/links_etc/linksetc.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff See Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, ch. 4. PDF: http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/ “Philosophic” is Rose’s take. Gurdjieff called man number four “balanced”, meaning that the psychic centers work together, he is a product of school work, someone who has developed a permanent center of gravity and other characteristics. Further explanation by Rose on the different spiritual steps of man appears in “Pathfinder”, 1986, TAT Journal, Issue 14: http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal-14.html#1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley Huxley wrote on spiritual breakthroughs, but no real reference to “exaltation” is found in Huxley’s books. http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/ However, Bucke makes use of the term in Cosmic Consciousness. Rudolph Steiner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucianism
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