1983-0610-First-Know-Thyself-Denver

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Title	1983-0610-First-Know-Thyself-Denver
Recorded date	June 10, 1983
Location	Denver, Colorado
Number of tapes	Two 60 minute tapes
Other recorders audible?	No
Alternate versions exist?
Source	N. Also have DW tapes, 2015
No. of MP3 files	4 files: 31 min, 32 min; 32 min; 24 min. DW version is same
Total time	119 min.
Transcription status
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	Good after first 4 1/2 min. Questions are difficult to hear.
Identifiable voices	Casari
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1983-0610-First-Know-Thyself-Denver
	For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20150623205613

Notes

Not a commercial CD – remove Category << check this

Versions: SN and DW

SN is 31 + 32 + 32 + 24 min. ; DW is 31 +32 +31 + 24 = same.

Who s present: M. Casari.

A seminar was announced but in never took place. Hostile crowd, no tickets were sold. However, the prior week tthere was a seminar the sday after the talk in Boulder.

At Amazon.Com for Direct-Mind Experience there is the following quote from a Denver newspaper article two weeks earlier (need a copy): “Rose says he believes in strong, simple language, discounting the "tons of garbage" written about how man can find himself. -- Rocky Mountain News, Denver, CO, May 28, 1983” http://www.amazon.com/Direct-Mind-Experience-Richard-Rose/dp/1878683012

File 1

File 1 = 31 minutes.

[Note: At start, sound is muddy. Corrected at 4 min, 30 sec with microphone adjustment.]

dw1-00:00

One of the themes of this talk is knowing yourself. The other them is accomplishment. This is on any level. I would like to start with this business of knowing yourself. I have brought this up at many lectures over the country, in universities. People take it for granted that the projection they have of themselves is themselves. I heard it when I was younger; I was studying to be a priest in the Catholic religion, and I got exposed to a lot of literature, and exhortations to do this and that. And one of them said “First know thyself.” And this runs through the theme? vein? of a lot of literature.

I maintain of course that not only do we not know ourselves, but the people in charge of helping us to know ourselves are not competent. For instance, I said one time at the University of Pittsburgh, I said, “People don’t know who they are.” And a fellow interrupted me, he said, “I know who I am.” And rather foolishly I said, “Who are you?” And he said, “I’m the guy sitting in front of you.”

But this fellow who was sitting in front of me was carrying a projection. And people live with this projection all their lives, until somebody, the rebuff is violent enough, the disappointment is violent enough to cause some trauma, and they’re forced to sit and think, “Well, I’m not as much as I thought I was.”

dw1-01:54

And sometimes dealings in romance, a person falls in love and gets rejected. He thought his projection was perfect, he thought he was the perfect rooster, why didn’t the perfect peacock fall in love with him? And he gets rejected a couple times and he realizes that his projection is off, and he reevaluates himself. Well, this is just a crude, elementary example of this.

So we go back to basic psychology. Knowing yourself is basic. If you don’t know yourself you’re liable to succeed in one form of your life’s work but fail in another; and failing in the second might be fatal. I was just reading a piece in the paper, when a man called me on the phone today, and saw where a man had just realized he was worth $9 million dollars, and he took his Ferrari over a cliff and killed himself. That was out in San Francisco. He was organizing a company and was about 40-45 years old. And I thought to myself, “What happened?” Of course, the article said the officers of the corporation had been up for two or three days, they had been drawing up papers for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Which meant that he was running without sleep, that he may have been running on coffee or medical, drug stimulants or something and just couldn’t take it any longer and he fell asleep at the wheel. If this is true, he didn’t know himself, he didn’t particularly know himself. He should have known his capacity. He should have known that a life is worth more than the corporation or the success because naturally without your life you can’t enjoy it or possess it.

dw1-04:00

So we go basically back to psychology and this business of achievement

[discussion about microphones – audio improves here]

dw1-04:26

Basically I’m approaching you with a philosophic and psychological understanding or experience. We depend upon, the trouble is that in our advice we go to people for advice who are supposed to be experts. The aim of psychology is adjustment to conventional customs of the time, not to the discovery of who you are. So that you, if these were successful, you could become a millionaire and not know who you are. Or you might have some other ambition, to become very wise or be a student, a scholar; and unless you knew who you are, you hadn’t begun even on the right step to become a philosopher or a psychologist.

And this disturbed me years ago when I took psychology courses in school. Because in those days, this was back when I was in my 20s, which was 40 years ago, we belabored ourselves with the normal curve and Pavlov’s dogs, and we were trying to guess, predict behavior, so that we could manipulate other people. That’s the only thing I can see that comes out of this behavioral psychology. What good does it do except for the manipulators?

dw1-06:14

For instance, BF Skinner remarked that people were like lions or animals and they would have to be trained. And they were almost irresponsible. In fact, he used the word “masturbation”, that that’s the way you take care of wild animals; that people in the zoo that train animals use this to keep them sedated or peaceful or happy.

dw1-06:43

So this thought went over into the whole funded system of psychology and psychiatry, to keep down riots by placating people, but not understanding. I maintain that you can keep down the riots if you understand. I maintain that you don’t need to worry about friction between peoples if you have the ability to understand yourself, first, and then another step is to step inside the other fellow’s shoes, walk a little way in his shoes, and then you’ll have compassion, friendship perhaps.

But we exhort each other to love, all the while we’re anxious to manipulate. Love is one day a week, you know, or something, you put out a good attitude: tell people to have a good day. That’s cheap. How much does it cost to tell somebody to have a god day? But what kind of a person are you behind all this?

So we come to this business of knowing the self, really knowing yourself. And it isn’t that complicated. You don’t have to have a book. I’ve got some books back there that I’ve written; they help, they’ll stimulate some thinking perhaps, but you can do this without a book. You can do this without a teacher, just by sitting and thinking. Honestly sitting and thinking, not just sitting and doping, but sitting and being introspective

dw1-08:20

And when you do this, you begin to observe yourself, you begin to observe your own action. And this action takes a definite course. And the course of this introspective action is described back there in this book the Psychology of the Observer. I maintain that we are not the people that we see in the mirror. Number one, this is one of the things you learn. We learn that we are programmed by genetics; our parents are somewhat responsible for many of the things that we think, many of the directions and choices we make.

So that we come up from a. it’s a very simple set of thinking which – they talk about linear thinking for instance. I maintain that linear thinking goes nowhere; it’s like an endless line. But Hubert Benoit wrote a book called The Supreme Doctrine, and talked of the triangulation of thinking. And this was his explanation for the wisdom in Zen. That what you have is that people observe black and white. Everything we do is relative. First of all you have to understand that you’re a relative creature. Because we have to compare with two eyes, with two ears for sound, two ears to pick it up, one eye doesn’t do so good, etc.

dw1-09:49

Okay, so all of our language, everything we do, we think, we talk, communicate with each other is relative. Every definition requires its opposite, incorporates its opposite. You are this because you are not the opposite. W have black and white, as a simplification. And this is also good and bad, morals, ethics and anti-ethics or whatever you want to call it. [?] And we take a look at this [chart?] black, and all we can see is black. And the other extreme, we say that isn’t white. [?] We see white. But by taking a triangulated view of it, from what Benoit calls the conciliatory point, you look down at a line, you get an overview of a line. And the line is at one end is black only and at the other end is white only, and in-between is an infinite variation of gray.

So that this is what you see, a spectrum now, instead of two opposite things. We get this from what I call the position of the arbiter, the umpire of the mind. The mind is able to take these positions and see – for instance if you conceive something as definitely good, and another person conceives it as bad, or you conceive something as bad – if you observe it from an overview. You get a different spectrum. You get a different n- it might come out that good and evil are the two sides of the same coin. And you begin to get, your whole philosophy of life changes as you go through this.

dw1-11:48

Now you watch this, you watch this operation going on. And this, what I call the umpire, works in everything you do, from whether you want sugar on the food or whether you want, when you go out the door to walk to either the right or the left, it requires a decision, and those decisions are made very rapidly. And these are not necessarily, after you examine these you go, “That’s good, we got a fellow in charge. We’ve got something in charge.” And some religions call it conscience too. The consciousness is the umpire, the arbiter that says, “Hey, don’t do this, don’t do that.”

I find that the, this arbiter or conscience has to do mostly with natural laws, natural things, things that are good for nature. We’ll make decisions to protect our children, very quickly. We’ll make decisions to protect our fellowman on the battlefield and give our life to do it, which isn’t good for the individual. So it doesn’t necessarily take into consideration the good of the individual.

dw1-12:50

So after observing this for awhile, or after delving into it, you develop a thing called intuition. And why? Because the factors in understanding the human mind are more than you can put on a slide rule. There are thousands, millions perhaps of factors in the decision-making of the things that people do. And the understandings, the factors in themselves are tremendous. [?]

Now to get around that, we can’t do it. We look at – I noticed when I started to get into this introspection, I thought, “Oh, boy, first of all I’m going to have to read everything written on it.” You get into philosophy [psychology] , you’re going to have to read everything that’s written on psychology. Then you’re going to pick up on these warring factions in psychology; this school of thought believe this. You know, you’ve got your behaviorists, humanists, Freudians and gestalt psychologists and everything. They’re not all in agreement. So you’ve got to somehow absorb all of this and have a faculty that will give you a reading rapidly. You don’t have 200 years to logically evaluate every book and weigh it against – where did this fellow lie or go overboard in his convictions?

dw1-14:10

So that this is the intuitive factor. The intuitive factor is the instantaneous computation. It doesn’t go about it logically; it develops a sense for quickly deciding: “I like this or I don’t like that, and this is good.” And then you go through a process of correcting your intuition, because it can make mistakes too. But after so much of this you become fairly efficient in, if you correct your intuition enough, you can tell what a person is thinking.

John Dunninger one time was once asked how he began to be a mind reader. And he said, “I started by guessing.” In other words, you just get some people you know, and you say, “You’re thinking of this.” Like JB Rhine down at Duke University, they rolled the dice so many times with the attention on a certain number and that number came up. It made it a scientific operation, meaning that statistics showed that the effort, the effect of the mind helped to move the dice

dw1-15:15

Okay, then the same thing when you get back to reading minds. You take little ESP games, and if you become highly proficient at picking up – you’re 51% right on your guessing – you’re starting on the path to mind reading. You become a fractional mind-reader so to speak. But anyhow, I’m trying to point out the importance of the intuitive factor. [interesting connection between intuition and telekinesis] which a lot of people don’t think about at all.

As I said, most people think that whatever they project – the big crime is in saying, “Well, I am this, with the help of a little makeup or with a nice suit of clothes, they’ll believe that I’m the rooster or I‘m the peacock,” whatever it is. And these errors have to be overcome.

dw1-16:10

Now let’s take this and project it a ways. What goes when you are taking this conciliatory point. You’re taking a relative world and viewing it from a superior position, meaning that you’re observing it. And this in turn, you suddenly become aware of what you’re doing: you realize that this relative creature you’re watching, this body and the body actions, are not you. They are a spectrum. They are a spectrum that begins at birth as an infant and ends later on as a decrepit old person. And that’s the total [relative] you.

dw1-16:54

And then you realize that you in turn are studying a process. And I came up with this realization that the view is never the viewer. That which you see is not you. Whenever you’re able to study and possibly change this person that you’re watching or working with, [it] means that the real consciousness is anterior. Now you can take a system of psychology and run it back, and say, “Well, I’m watching myself watching myself watching myself.” No, no. It only goes back so far; it goes back three steps. It definitely goes back three steps. And once, what happens is, in the analyzation [analysis] of the self you watch your actions. The next thing you watch is like gestaltic patterns. When I studied psychology years ago the word gestalt meant mental patterns. Today it means something else. But originally it was that we think in terms of patterns.

Not in, like I touch something hot and I move. I think and I react to somebody’s words, and it’s a one-on-one thing. [? one-time thing? ] This isn’t true. When you’re driving a car, you drive according to a pattern of thinking. You visualize ahead of time or through experience what will happen if a dog runs off [out in] the street or a car swerves in front of you, and something else, if you tramp on the brakes and the brakes fail. If you visualize this correctly you’ll be ready for it. And you won’t wait until you hit the car to have the reaction. You will do all the things that are necessary. you’ll twist the wheel, and it will all happen in one to two seconds. You’ll tramp on the brake and twist the wheel and you’ll do exactly the right thing, if you’ve visualizzed it ahead of time, because you’ve set up a pattern of thinking.

dw1-18:55

So what happens in this next stage is you stand behind yourself and watch these patterns of thinking taking place. You realize now that you’re no longer an individual with deliberate, very purposeful direction. That until you find out that these processes of thinking, states of mind. [sentence] I find very few psychology books that mention states of mind. What causes fights? What is the main cause of two people fighting? If you go into a beer joint or some place. In the book I tried to spell it out by Mr. A, Mr. B and Mr. C. But their genetic background, their religious background, their nationality and so on may spark something, because each one of these has a state of mind.

Every family has a unique state of mind. When a child goes to school, in the first grade at school, it always enters into shock and we wonder why, because we can’t remember when we were a child. Because in the household from which it came there was a decided state of mind. The parents talked, the children heard it, meaning, “We don’t do this,” or “W do this, but don’t tell other people.” Or, “We hate these people; this type of people are no good.” And it’s much deeper than that. It’s a whole reactionary, emotional reactionary system. It’s the tolerance that they have for the child. [?] In one family the child may be able to get away with anything. In the other family he’s beat half to death if he looks crooked. So the whole state of mind is wrapped around this. It’s a certain expectation from living in that family; you adjust yourself to it, and then at five or six they send you out into people with other states of mind. And there’s a tremendous shock that occurs.

dw1-20:59

But naturally the child is programmed to forget pain rather easily and trauma, so it adjusts. But these things, later, there are still fragments of the family state of mind, the racial state of mind, meaning the nationality. It doesn’t have to be race, just nationality. Each nationality, if they live together in a place, a certain country or a certain part of the town, there will be a state of mind develop there. And when they mingle, they go out and go to college, the kid goes to college nd he meets other people. He thinks, “Oh, boy. They don’t understand the way I’m talking.” And again there’s a bit of adjustment.

Now what happens, there’s nothing wise happen, they just adjust. They’re still confused; they’re trading one state of mind for a piece of somebody else’s state of mind, trying to put on a bigger and a bigger act. And the dealings with most people every place you go is, develop a personality that’s not offensive to anybody. It’s really a pretzel, you make a pretzel out of yourself to do it. That isn’t, that shouldn’t be necessary. But regardless, it probably is necessary, because everybody is not going to be aware of the fact that they’re moved by states of mind.

dw1-22:23

So we watch, this is just one element, one process that the mind goes through. We look at the world through stained glass windows sometimes. And when we realize that, we realize that we shaded things through, well, when the body was in a certain hormonal stage which it isn’t in later, we got a different state of mind. And that state of mind will click [snaps fingers] sometimes within 24 hours. The person will be in a different mood and they don’t know what caused it.

I’ve had people stay in the house and, mostly this happens more with women than than men; I think the cycles of change are different. But I’ve had quarrels going on between two or three women and I’d say, “What happened?” I remember one time one of the girls said, “I just forgot to look at the calendar. Or I would have known what happened. [would happen]”

dw1-23:25

So these things, this person who says that, is now what I call a process observer. These are the processes, that we think we’re doing things, we think that we’re in charge of something. And we may be; we may be running a big business. But then one day you find out that you’re not doing anything. The bottom falls out for some unexpected reason.

And once you become aware of that, then you’re at the point of another triangulation between somatic judgment or the umpire, the man in charge of the body apparatus, the somatic-humanity part too. [?] On the other end of that spectrum there’s a new triangle forms which is intuition. And then from that, the conciliatory point is a process observer.

So you’re watching these different actions. And you’ve got to do this if you want to know yourself. You can’t just read books about it. You’ve got to know where to look, but then you’ve got to go through this process of looking.

Now we’re going to have a seminar here tomorrow, and what we’re going to do tomorrow, I’m going to put some questions to you to see – so that you will see too – so that you will see how much thinking you have done to date. There’s no big follow-up to that, except the rest of your life you’ll be able, you’ll be on the lookout for this neglect of proper observation of what’s going on in your head.

dw1-25:06

Ninety percent of our troubles start in our own head, not in the enemy’s, not in the other person. So that what happens is, that this, there’s a third step that’s taken, and this is the last step, and this is when the process observer, when you pretty much exhausted that, you automatically become – you’ve cleared out all the cobwebs and you don’t know where else to look. And you still don’t particularly know yourself totally, you just know what to expect under certain conditions. There’s a strange combination. Now you become aware, after you do this for, it might take a couple of years, you become aware not so much of any composite being, except for an observer on one side and an awareness on the other. The investigation of the life inside the human being, thinking objectively, practically seems to boil down to nothing but awareness.

Here’s a person now or a point of consciousness that’s watching all the games it’s played inside this person’s structure. And that’s all he has outside of awareness. I don’t want to get into this too deeply, you can if you wish. Or in an hour or so after I’ve run through this stuff, if you want to ask questions I’ll be glad to explain it in greater depth; it really isn’t pertinent now.

But the correlation, the concentration upon the two points of awareness and the process observer, a person observing the processes of life, brings you to a state of realization. Now from this overview, once this state of realization came, I was able to look back and see what had happened. You can’t see it from where you are. you have to do it. If you have never been into any of this, you can’t see it. What I’m saying you may not understand. It may seem reasonable to you, or intuitively, but you have to apply your head to it or possibly read something on it, there was this little book back there that will spell this out, and if you forget what I’ve said you can read it until, every time you forget it and you’ll understand it again.

dw1-27:42

But the view is not the viewer. And you continue in this, but what happens is that you suddenly get an overview of exactly who you are and what your purpose is, and all this mechanism below seems to be some definite fog that’s put between you so that you’ll be a good fertilizer. Our purpose here as I can see it, in the final analysis, on the natural level, we are nothing but fertilizer.

But we have something beyond the natural level. And this is the overview. You have to have that overview from a spiritual level. By spiritual I mean an essence level. The world spiritual is bad; people have all sorts of association with hypocrisy and holiness. And that isn’t what is meant, the common word of holiness. I mean that you’re aware of your essence. And you’re aware of what your purpose is. So that you can spell out this, and you see, when anything’s happening you can immediately say, “Oh, yes, I should have looked at the calendar,” or “I know that this has happened as a result of one of these processes that set in.”

dw1-29:04

The other thing is the formula. There’s a formula for this. And the formula applies to everything we do in life, or want to do. First of all, you can’t have everything, simultaneously. You have to take a choice. And I think that some of the older people that were back in the country, where I come from, a little town, the mothers when they had a child born, they had a little routine they went through, because they were curious whether the kid was going to amount to anything. Or what he wanted to do with his life. So they put some objects in front of the baby, so many days or hours after. It went back to some little formula. And one of them was a book, the other one was a silver dollar and another one was a bottle, a whiskey bottle. They claimed that whatever that child picked was what it did with its life. If it grabbed for the bottle it became a hedonist. If it went after the silver dollar, maybe you’d think that the brightness of it would attract the baby. But anyhow, the reason I mention this is that it shows that people are aware that there’s a destiny to a man.

[break in tape]

File 2

File 2 = 30:36 min.

dw2-00:00

... there’s a desire, even in that baby, there’s a desire in that child to do what his destiny is.

This is the catch. And if you have a desire, you are pretty close to destiny. I don’t think that your desire are that much at right angles. Consequently, you have to make a decision, then you have to make a commitment. And these are a very simple formula. I mentioned, the night before last, I was talking over in Boulder, and I said it doesn’t matter what you want. If you want to be a millionaire you have to make a commitment.

You read some of these books. Napoleon Hill, Think and grow Rich. He was an esoteric philosopher and his advice is very accurate. He says some things in there that you put your whole being into it. Not half. Don’t think that you can be drunk and fooling around with this or that and make that million. You’re going to be tripping over it. Several books have been written, that I think have a tremendous lot of import along that line.

dw4-01:17

But this thing, if you decide for instance, there’s a desire to know our essence. I think this is the most important thing, to know who you are. And this little phrase which I skipped over so, hundreds of times I’d hear people say, “Know yourself.” “Everything else would be added unto you.” [source?] This is the great thing in life to discover, in my estimation. No matter how much money you get, you’re going to have to part with it sooner or later. But that which you are, that which you become, you don’t have to part with.

And I’m speaking not from proof but from personal experience. Again, I’m open o questions on that. But once you make that [pledge?] honestly to yourself and carry it out for a period of time, you will arrive. Hardship and many things might be thrown at you, but if you keep plowing through, you’ll arrive at whatever you put your head to, and being a commitment and a priority. That doesn’t say you have to quit anything. You don’t have to quit eating meat or drinking beer or making money. But whenever that interferes with the project that you have – of course if it [the project] is making money then everything else is secondary.

dw2-02:39

Consequently, it’s a formula that involves a magic in human behavior, and it’s a very simple thing. You take yourself out of it too. You have to take yourself out of it. You can’t glory in the fact that I made my first ten thousand or twenty thousand. You take what comes and continue working, and you won’t have too many headaches and too many regrets.

And the same thing when you’re dealing with definition, which again is what we’re talking about, basically. From the very be=ginning we’re talking about definition: Who are you? Who is doing this? Who is performing? And sometimes I know, everybody here has seen a time when they stepped away from themselves and looked and said, “Hey what a jackass you were.” Or are.

And I know, myself I was talking here [Boulder?, check talk] the other day about, I went one time, I was going to marry a woman for her money. That was my way of getting rich, when I was a young fellow. Well, I went to considerable bother, and I made a jackass out of myself. I found that she loved some other woman more than she loved me. And here I was projecting all that I was going to do with this person who had absolutely no chance of any compatibility.

So this is a tremendous gain when this happens to you; you never do it again. Because you know you can’t kid yourself. The first person you lie to is yourself. If you lie to yourself and swallow it, God help you. Because you’ll start talking to yourself before not many years go by. Because you can’t lie to another person without lying to yourself. And of course I always have a qualification there: don’t plead guilty. That might be a lie, but you’re not required to stick your head in the guillotine.

dw2-04:45

When I talk about being honest with yourself: be true to your friends, be true to the people you’re living with, your family, your children. And above all, be loyal to your friends. In this book I’ve written, which is a pseudo-spiritual type of book, because it touches on these subjects. I say that there’s no religion greater than friendship. And this I believe sincerely, because I know, I’m convinced, that 99% of all people who pretend to have religion, or who teach, preach, or become mighty gurus from the other side of the planet, are phonies, hucksters, and they’re interested only in money and selling words.

And if they had it, if they had the real thing – you can’t sell it. You can’t begin to sell it. And that’s one of the reasons that we try to keep these lectures – in other words, I had somebody call me on the phone, they may be sitting here now, who said they were interested only in the business aspect to psychology. Where I said, “Well, I don’t believe that this type of thing – there’s a formula that I go by – and I don’t believe that you can run a racket without lying to yourself. And you become tangled in this.

dw2-06:12

I think that beyond what I call pro-rated expenses: you pay five dollars for a talk, and [for] the lights and the place you’re sitting in has to have some money. Perhaps I have to have some gasoline to get here. But no rackets, no profit. And I can prove this at any time. [laughs] I do not make money. And I don’t want it; that’s not my objective. But I believe you can use it for that if you wish. [?] But I think that the thing is that once you get into the money, you can no longer be trusted. Because you become businesslike. And a business man, one of the first things he has to learn is how to fire his best friend. Or how to eliminate his best friend, and overwhelm him and take his partnership over or something. And this is understood as perfectly ethical in the business world; it’s just part of the checker game, the chess game, the game of business.

So I think you have to be able to trust people because we’re dealing now, not in money, which you might be able to recoup, but you’re dealing in a subjective value, which is your life, or your essence, or your wisdom. And it’s so easy to tell people what they want to hear, and they’ll pay you. And when you give them a formula, for instance I draw an analogy to this: you take these various movements that float in here, into this country – I’ve watch them – I never see one of them that had the moral background. I shouldn’t say that, because some of them do have some advice, but I mean a real – for instance, I believe that there has to be a certain moral stance – what we call moral, but it isn’t that so much as what I call putting the whole being into what you’re doing.

When you put the whole being into what you’re doing, you can’t become a dissipating person. You put that whole being in. Nothing else has a priority. You’re not going to say, “I can’t go tonight, I can’t abide by my decision, because I made an appointment to play tennis.” Or, “I meet with the fellows and we play poker and drink some beers.” That’s alright, but if that becomes the priority or takes the place of what you’re doing, then that’s not your whole being. Something else is more important. If it takes priority over it, at any time.

dw2-09:06

I’ve had people come to me and tell me, one fellow told me he was going to college and having trouble with his lessons, and he’s also in a dramatic class, and he’s also going for a master rating in chess. And he said that the days we get together were either when they had the chess tournaments or when the drama class acts [meets] or when I’m [he’s] needed in the classroom. I said, “Well, keep your commitment regardless and see what happens.” I think we met on Wednesday nights. And he came back the next week and said, “You know what happened? They changed the date.” So he could show up on Wednesday. It doesn’t always work out that you’re crucified just for making a commitment.

dw2-09:52

But the thing is that after awhile, I think there’s a, with me at least there was a period of rough going. Because I, you have to give up sometimes even certain relationships, friendships, business. Maybe you think you’re going to make a lot of money. I know we used to meet in an old town [Steubenville] about 30 miles up the river; I’d drive every Friday after work. I worked as a contractor and every Friday I’d go up to meet. just to

The purpose of the meetings incidentally is just to keep it on your mind. This is one of the best things in regard to the church, the business of religion. Is that people get together once a week, and if nothing else, they remember. If they didn’t get together once a week they would forget, completely; they’d just become animals, they’d just go out there and vegetate. But at least once a week they come back and say, “Boy, I can see this last week I forgot all about this stuff.”

dw2-10:49

Consequently, I found that every time we had this Friday night meeting I had hundreds of things, I had opportunities. Here’s a contract to sign, they can’t sign it except on a Friday night, and I’d forget about it. That was a commitment I made and I kept it. And I never lost anything. And not only that, but there were so many opportunities that would be thrown at me in this manner, that I had more business than I ever had before. And I wondered what sort of – it’s what I call “milk from thorns”, you run into. This is a new type of process. You’re setting up a new type of process. If you watch it, that you’ll get obstacles, those very obstacles can be used to accelerate your growth into understanding of yourself.

dw2-11:41

Let me stop at this point and ask you if you have any questions on this matter. Then I have some questions I want to read to you, to get your reaction. They will be a prelude to what will be done tomorrow. Do you have any questions, or anything you want me to expand on?

Q. inaudible

R. Yeah. I wrote, there’s a book back there called The Albigen Papers, the first one I wrote. It was published in 1970-he can’t hear me, put your hand up and I’ll know what you mean. I wrote this book from a ladder, from working as a contractor. I didn’t have time, I was raising a family and I didn’t have time to write anything except when I got home in the evenings. These things would all come into my head, the way these things set into place. And one of the things I noticed, was when I first started out, I started out with a helper, one helper. I started out by myself, but when I got so that I could hire one person to help me.

Now I found out, and all this had to be was an inexperienced boy 17 or 18 years of age to hand me tools, help me hold ladders, this sort of thing. And I noticed that the bidding on a job – you bid man-days – and to do a certain contracting job might take 100 man-days. Meaning that if I worked it by myself it would have taken me 100 days. When I hired this young fellow to help me who had no great skill it wouldn’t go down to 50 days for two people, it would go down to something like 48 days. It worked invariably; that this person wasn’t doing a lot of work, but he was expediting what I was doing so much that it cut it down to 96 man-days for the job instead on 100.

dw2-13:48

So then when I took this further and hired 3 men, 4, 5, 10 men, the efficiency rate or the rate wasn’t proportional; it was out of proportion. So that with 4 men working you didn’t do it in 25 days, you did it in 20 days or 18 days. And one of the factors is there’s a sort of communal energy formed; people start to moving in a certain rhythm. One guy does his work efficiently, the other guy envies him, does it a little better. One guy works faster and the other fellow says, “Hey, how’s he doing that? I’ll have to see.”

But you can apply this in anything. This is what I call the Contractor’s Law. You don’t make much money working by yourself. It’s only with a multiple of manpower that you make money. And this is how it’s broken down. [?] Consequently, I applied this to the spiritual department. If you want to do anything for the human race, if you want to call it that, I maintain that you can only help people who are on an understanding level close to your own.

dw2-15:07

And so what happens if you set out to do something? Why does an evangelist go out and insist on preaching to a bunch people? If he has discovered God, why doesn’t he sit quietly with God? Why does he go out? Of course, there’s something in the human being, I don’t think there’s any real good reason for it except that he knows he that only exists in relation to other people. If you were to die tomorrow and your after-death life considered [consisted?] of an immensely beautiful, happy place but no one was there, I” think that from our memory viewpoint we would be very miserable.

I think there’s a, and you carry this out farther, this idea of, I think if you help intelligently you don’t try to help everybody. You only try to talk to people with ears. You don’t try to argue and convince or harangue an argument or anything of that sort. And you talk to where, people who hear it will move. They can move from there.

So what happens is that, when you go out by yourself talking – you can’t stay all your life – I come to Denver, I can’t stay all my life here. But yet I take steps so that other people will read or get interested. I leave a few books behind, or there are people who I leave behind that will maybe get together and hold little meetings and discuss philosophy.

dw2-17:01

And incidentally, the field of philosophy is a tremendous, good thing to take into consideration to stimulate your thinking. And in this business of observing yourself, you can’t just sit and think about yourself. This is the hardest thing to do on earth, to deliberately sit down and think about yourself.

I hear also, I’ve got a little book back there on meditation. The only way that you can meditate easily is to meditate on trauma. Don’t meditate on how good the beer tasted; that’s no good. Don’t meditate on pleasure, in other words, because you’ll get into morbid reverie.

But to think of trauma: sit down and think of, just like when I found out that I had made a bad guess, I go back and think, “What the heck is wrong with my head? I thought I was smarter than that, that I wouldn’t get tripped up.” This is a trauma. And then you go back further. Where did this trauma start? And you go back to very small childhood [when you were a very small child]. And when you do, you clear the road. Once you realize what caused your present foolishness you clear the road, and the likelihood of foolishness in the future is less.

dw2-18:24

So this all involves, the Contractor’s Law involves what Christ talked about, I think his word for it was “the life”. You live the life. The life that he led was immediately, with twelve apostles and around seventy other brothers. These were the people who were necessary to put his voice across.

Buddha spoke of the sangha. And they all had this, three forms of, three words in their thinking, in their advice. Christ used the way, the truth and the life. Now we get back to this thing truth. This is ignored a tremendous lot. Everybody thinks that it’s inconsequential. Especially in the field of abstract sciences, philosophy or psychology. In other words, there’s a whole group of people who think they’re going to remake society. This isn’t the truth. The truth may be quite the opposite. The truth may be that this is already engineered.

And we think we’re going to do something about it. We’re going to educate the public, we’re going to train Pavlov’s dogs for it. But the catch is, who is going to do the training? What robot? How dependable is this robot’s mind, to train other robots?

dw2-19:56

Consequently, we talk about the truth. And they say, “We’ll create a new one.” I just had this told me by a sociology professor: “We’ll create a new truth. If everybody believes it then that’s the truth.” This is not truth. The truth is recognized by very few people. Richard Bucke spoke in his book Cosmic Consciousness that the number of people who reach cosmic consciousness is one in a million. We are trying to run the world from the normal curve of 51%. If 51% of the people in this country vote for a certain man, or vote for a certain issue, they are sane and we are insane. Politics and psychology take the same yardstick. If 51% of the people are killers, murderers, that is sanity, according to the basic tenants of behavioristic psychology.

So that now, we’re incorporating into our human pattern things that 20 years ago we wouldn’t have considered normal or sane. Because we’re voting it in. This is not going to change the facts or create a new truth. The truth will remain the same. And the overall truth is that we’re not running the show. None of us are that smart. This gives us a very chesty feeling to think that we can vote a whole thinking process into being. We’re never going to do it.

dw2-21:32

The first thing is to hope. You’ll never know what the – I call it the engineer. There’s an engineering here that is manifest. I just read a piece in the paper, they came to the conclusion that the trees are talking to each other. Scientific evidence, that when the insects attack a tree, the tree gives off an odor, the next tree immediately prepares an anti-poison to put a stop to the bugs eating them. They start to put off a protective mucous or something that make it hard for the bugs to eat their leaves. Now this was evidently carried out under pretty careful, it’s not just a theory, it was carried out under pretty careful investigation.

This isn’t the only thing; you see it all up and down the line. I refer in the book to the pterodactyl. The pterodactyl is a prehistoric flying lizard, or snake, I don’t know where the evolution came from. But here are wings, and the people with the concept of evolution say that these wings occur, or these fins occur as the result of the environment. This couldn’t be. Why would the wings be necessary? To escape from a predator. It takes a million years for a form to evolve something like a wing, maybe ten million. They don’t evolve. We’ve got clams that are very similar to trilobites that they are digging out that are two or three hundred thousand yars old. They are still clams. They couldn’t get away, they couldn’t grow feet.

dw2-23:15

So here’s a pterodactyl that flies like a bird, looks like a bird but it has no feathers, and it’s the forerunner of most everything that flew. And the only answer I have is that if this creature depended on those wings to escape from a predator it had to be done instantaneously. It couldn’t grow [just] a little wing and escape; it would be eaten. It couldn’t grow a foot-long wing and then a two foot-long wing and then learn to run like hell. No, it would have still been eaten. If it’s depending on those wings growing for it to survive as a specie, for it to survive as a specie once it was created, formed, engineered, it had to be engineered with that equipment. Same as the wings on an airplane.

dw2-24:11

So you get the, there’s a fellow name of DeRopp did some investigation the sex life of insects. The insects have peculiar mechanisms to keep them from inter-mating, and these are the equivalent of e? l? locks. the male has a key that only fits the lock of a certain, of its own specie. And when you look into a lot of this stuff you realize that this concept of things, that we are evolving into, I think we are evolving and changing, but at the same time, whole dominant species are eliminated such as the pterodactyl, the dinosaurs and so on. We evidently didn’t need them, or the purpose ahead didn’t need them, let’s put it that way.

dw2-25:00

But to make a log story short, I believe that we should never exercise our ego too foolishly. One of the biggest detriments in the understanding of yourself is, what stands between you and yourself is an ego. And this ego, there are many steps, as I described a few of them, but you get into in this business of observing yourself and looking for methods, what I call the Ways and Means Committee. You have to set up a Ways and Means Committee for every step.

And it’s a great temptation to exalt yourself. And right before you have your final experience, the biggest ego you have to face is your own immortality. I remember, we were speaking in Steubenville one time, I was trying to get a fellow to, his wife was sitting in a little group with us, and he was a tremendously congenial fellow, and he was generally sipping a martini when we were talking.[ So maybe the meetings were at the Kapitka’s, not the D’Alibertti’s.] He said, “That’s alright but that’s not for me.” He said, “You’re talking about life after death and immortality, but John Kapitka is just not that dammed important to live forever.” And this is what you have to face, one of these days. And if you aren’t run over by a Mack truck, you will face it. If you die slowly, the thing that will surge through your consciousness is, “I’m not that important. Why should I, this wreck of a body, what’s left of it, what is important about the inhabitant of this body that’s that important?” And actually you drop that ego, and strangely enough, in the process of dropping that ego is when the lights come on.

dw2-27:02

But anyhow, I talked a lot. Maybe someone has a question.

Q. Excuse me, did you not ??

R. Yes. Have you heard of Gurdjieff?

Q. No.

R. There’s a fellow by the name of Gurdjieff, a lot of you may not have heard of him. I consider him the top psychologist of the western world. Still. He had an astute understanding of the human mind and the different types of people. His was a psychological-spiritual philosophy as well. And these people fit into this. Because we’re all spiritual people. As I said, as physical beings we’re nothing but fertilizer. Unless we have some objective beyond that, then it doesn’t matter what we do. If there’s no inkling of hope for anything beyond the last day, why, you may just as well do what you think is fun. Do what you please.

But Gurdjieff divided men basically into four classes, and above these, man number five, six and seven were people beyond ordinary men. And the first bracket was the instinctive man, the second was the emotional man. He called it living in his emotional center. The third would be the intellectual man, and the fourth was the philosophical man. The fifth was the enlightened man. [coughs. Boy, I hope this doesn’t continue.] But anyhow, we have a transition between these, which Gurdjieff didn’t talk about too much. But you picked it up by reading his literature, you picked up the inference.

When does an instinctive man become an emotional man? That’s a step above. Do you know? Can you see it? What is an instinctive man? he’s a guy who loves to drink, he loves sex, he loves to fight, he loves power, playing, that’s it. The world is a playhouse, everything is material, there’s nothing but material, and that’s all that counts.

dw2-29:20

And his concept of life is, “When I can’t have sex, let me be dead.” But my concept os sex is, “When I depend on sex, shoot me.” Because it’s a trap, that’s all. But anyhow, the instinctive man falls in love. I’m saying man but this could be a woman as well, an instinctive person you might say. But the instinctive person falls in love, and in so doing he touches into his emotional center, he respects somebody more than he respects himself. He goes out, or she goes out. In other words, she gets pregnant. He starts working selflessly for his children, he has forgotten about all these other games. I don’t say they always do, but this is the graduation, if he graduates.

Now, there’s another form of this emotional release or growth. And that is the salvationistic experience. Where a man falls in love with Jesus, or Buddha, or someone that he respects, and follows that person who he can’t see. But regardless, what it ...

[break in tape]

dw2 ends at 30:35

File 3

File 3 = dw version length = 30:36

[continuing on salvation experience]

dw3-00:00

It’s no great contact with heaven. He loses the worshiping of himself and his body. This is the key to this struggle. And from this comes a marvelous release. And now they say, “I’m saved.” This is the first step in spiritual growth. But why do people leave churches? It’s because these convictions come and go. The computer is saying maybe you’ve snowed yourself. Maybe six months after getting married you realize that you’re no longer worshipping this person; that you’re working because you have to.

My father in law was a Pentecostal minister, they used to call them holy-rollers. He was like the man in Tobacco Road or God’s Little Acre, or one of those little books. He would go out, if he got his hands on too much money, he would go out and get drunk, or he’d get one of the girls from the church and take them out to the irrigation ditch. And he was married and had a family. And he would go back and repent, confess his sins and start all over again. He was a sincere person but he just wobbled.

After you become disgruntled, you realize that you’re emotional and consequently unstable, you don’t have proof. …

I maintain that this idea of the pursuit of truth, should be started off with a scientific procedure with the same strictness with which you would examine the element oxygen or hydrogen in a quantitative or qualitative analysis in or chemistry. It’s that strict. It isn’t fiction. And you can test. There’s a system. Although it’s different from the science of chemistry.

In chemistry you can reach for a certain test. In the process of finding the truth there is only one path to go because truth is not anyplace where you can put your finger on it. You don’t know what the truth is. You’ve got millions of books perhaps to study but don’t know which one to start with. You don’t know what the word truth means. You talk about looking for god; you don’t know what the word God means. In West Virginia they think his last name is Damn. So everybody has their own theology.

dw3-02:59

Consequently, what you have to do is avoid the garbage. Set yourself certain principles that you go by. And this is what I did when I was 21 years old. I made up my mind that I would never listen to any cult or movement that charged and reaped enormous sums of money, or even more than it should for basic expenses. I believe that everybody should work for a living. I don’t believe that we should take our salvation from the blood of slaves, or the sweat of slaves. In other words, 10% here and 10% there, only ten people in the congregation is all you need. That gives you a day’s wages. Why do you have to have 200 or 2,000? – on the 10% basis.

But anyhow, this business of certain rules you follow. Another one of them is rank: altar boy, priest, bishop pope and so on, all sorts of rank. This has no bearing. We start to get a sort of respect which is unnatural, that we think that this person is holier, more important. Nobody is more important than anybody else. We look upon certain people as authoritatively wise because they have shingles, they have degrees. And [for] what we’re talking about, you people here are the wisest people on earth for you. because you will find what you’re looking for inside, not in a teacher. So you are the source of your own wisdom. You have to go inside.

It might take some stumbling speaker like myself to point the way a little bit or give you inspiration. But you’ll ultimately find it by yourself, by your own bootstraps. So consequently you don’t need a lot of the traps that are liable to take up too much of your time, or where you get into routines which take up too much of your time, when you could spend it better just sitting or walking and thinking.

dw3-05:16

The other thing is secrecy. I used to hear some of the fellows talking who had been into a lot of these movements. And they said, “These movements that require secrecy are generally the people who appeal to the wealthy; they just love to be in something that nobody else can get into.” You have to get in by invitation or something of that sort.

So I noted this when I’d be travelling around. And I spent most of my young years travelling, after I got out of the seminary. I travelled, and I looked into every group, anybody who would stand still and talk to me, I’d say, “What do you know?” I’d come right to the point, “What do you know for sure? Do you know what you’re talking about? Have you talked to God?” Or, you know, “Do you know where this magic comes from, that you’re implying?” And generally you’d get an evasive answer.

dw3-06:16

I don’t want to digress too much. I want to go on to this third category. A person who is intellectually inclined will free himself in his lifetime – some people die in the emotional phase; they just live and die in that phase – others will free themselves from it, saying, “Hey, I shouldn’t take the word of anybody else. I’m taking the word of somebody who says that he’s a representative of God Almighty. I’d better find out for myself.”

But he doesn’t know where to look. So he takes the more scientific type of books. And I did this. I got into astrology, numerology, the kabala, and I thought that maybe by some confusion of the brain or added exercise of the brain I will get something out of this. Because there’s evidently some very wise men in it. When you read the books, they are very astute literature.

And you can go on up, the same way, you’ll get a graduation, which I call the “wow!” experience. And you can also get it from studying algebra or math. And lots of people have. I know when I was in college I studied math, and I thought it was the most absurd thing, especially algebra. It was the most absurd thing I had ever gotten into: somebody wants to know the value of x in relation to a, b, c or something. And I thought, “What nonsense is this? If you don’t have the figures, if you don’t know what a, b, c are, what do you care what x is? But I had to keep, I had to take this because I was majoring in chemistry at the time. I had to take it, so I kept on belaboring myself with it. And one day it popped. And from that time on it was all downhill.

dw3-08:06

This little phenomenon will occur with you in your spiritual search as well. You belabor yourself. Don’t give up. There is noplace to look, except anything; under any stone I always say. Turn every stone over. But anyhow, what happens is that a person starts that, and he gets into this algebraic wow, or he gets into a certain Zen training which will do it, and they call it satori. It’s “Wow! Oh, that’s what it is. I see. Now things are clear.” And you think you’ve got all the laws of the universe down; that all you have to do is keep applying the algebraic formula.

And what happens – if you live long enough – you’ll realize that logic is a vanity. You can play those games forever. You can always find a deeper, more intricate form of calculus to play with, or higher math, Einstein’s concepts. And it will not get you to the truth. You might be able to formulate somebody else’s concepts of what the truth is, with math. And some people do that. But after all, the person finds that it’s a vanity. He’s pursuing a vanity. He finds a thrill in this accomplishment; it’s a mental orgiastic operation of sorts, not a realization. So you dump it. But when you dump it you’re lost again. You’re on the desert. There’s nowhere to go.

Now you’ve exhausted everything you’ve got to work with. This is all we have to work with, our logical [faculties] which is mostly common sense. Common sense is fairly logical. But if we have to apply a stricter logic we do it, okay. And now we’ve applied you might say our emotional self, which is a feeling, we were feeling, we thought we felt correctly, and of course we found out we didn’t perhaps. And where is there to go?

dw3-10:10

So you go out and you just keep looking. You read books, you think, in other words meditate or whatever, you meet with people., get opinions that will stimulate your thinking. And this is where I go back to call the contractors law. This is where those other people come in handy. Because it’s a reflection of yourself. You can go down a blind alley as a philosopher and your good friend will come along and say, “Hey Rose, you know what you’re doing? You’re playing a game inside your own head,” with this or that thing. And you’ll realize it when that person points it out to you.

Also, the so-called association with those people is apt to provide a certain amount of protection for you. I think that in anything that you do, any group of scientists, have to have some sort of coordination between their findings, to save time. And this is true about your esoteric scientists as well. It’s good to trade notes. You’ll learn a tremendous lot by talking to other people. You can’t join every movement. But if you can get honest people to tell you what goes on, you’d be surprised what you could [pick up]. And I am learning. I have learned a tremendous lot since I was 50 years of age. My experience occurred at 30. My experience only gave me an answer, it didn’t tell me how I could communicate with other people. It didn’t tell me the mechanisms of the people’s minds and that sort of thing. So you can always learn a tremendous lot.

dw3-11:45

Okay. So what happens in this blind sort of struggling, you floundering about. Again, once more, you’re back to the drawing board. And you start floundering around. But you keep pushing, even though there’s nothing to push. You don’t know what you’re doing. but you still look everyplace, you still try to understand. And you have a breakthrough. This is the first real breakthrough of any immensity. And it’s called cosmic consciousness in our language.

Richard Bucke was, I think he headed up some sort of a university or a foundation up there in Montreal. He stepped out on the veranda one day, and he said the whole city looked like it was in flames. And he said that coincidental with this view – it wasn’t real, nobody else saw it; I can’t describe it, it sounds like he had got some LSD in a way, because the whole horizon was shimmering – but a tranquility came over him, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything was under control. Everything was operating according to order, that God was in charge and we didn’t have to worry about a thing, just don’t try to interrupt things too much. And I can’t explain more than that, except that’s the type of experience it was

dw3-13:13

In Hindu terminology it’s called kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. The English word for it is enlightenment. [cosmic consciousness]. I like to believe that there’s word, that we don’t have to use these terms. The word enlightenment is another word that is highly misused. Some people think that just being wised-up is enlightenment. No, that isn’t it. It’s a decided change and an understanding of your being. As I said repeatedly, a man never finds God except in himself. A man never learns the truth. You never learn the truth, you become the truth or you never know what the truth is.

dw3-14:02

So now we go to the philosophical stage. And once more you become aware, sooner or later – the reason I go through these things is that you may have had some of these experiences. Don’t get too egotistical and think you’re talking to God yet. Because what happens, even in the cosmic consciousness experience, what you’re having is a relative experience. In which the city of [London] is there, colored, which is objective, and relative, it’s there. Motion, which is the shimmering of the color, is there. These are not absolute.

Now at the time, there’s no way you know there’s anything above that But if by some chance later on you transcend the philosophic level, then you’ll have what is called enlightenment, or sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. And this is the union with the absolute. And you can call it God if you want too; although when I had my experience [some noise in the room] – what happened? [laughter] What was that? Oh. I hope I didn’t say anything wrong.

dw3-15:21

But I never met, in the transition to the experience I saw humanity, the entire scope of humanity, but I never saw any man with a long beard. And yet I knew the answer. Because basically, I was the answer. And of course when you go through that experience, you too will be the answer. Which seems paradoxical, because how could everybody be the total absolute answer? ?? But regardless, that’s the experience.

dw3-15:58

So consequently, it’s when you reach this point that you first have an overview, a complete overview, of human life and its purpose, and the mechanism of its thinking, and the things that are programmed. You are programmed. There is no evil, because you respond to things you’re programmed to do. And maybe to learn. I think of course that this is one of the errors, that everybody is attacking evil. Ayatollah Khomeini thinks that if he chops your head off he makes you holy. So he’s going about chopping people’s heads off.

dw3-16:37

You can’t have a physical, frontal assault on a subjective matter. Especially when the subjective matter is only the polarity of another undefined thing called “good”. There is no good nor bad, there is only that which the engineer designed. And we’re not smart enough to change it. And that goes for our so-called social systems, and that goes for ecology. We’re trying to change the ecology. We’re not doing anything wrong. I think we have a toss-up: whether we burn all the coal and the oil and cause a carbon umbrella, in which we can’t breathe, or poison the streams and everything with tin cans. but do you think we’re going to change any of these? I doubt it seriously. We may evolve; all this may led up to evolving. One of the things that puzzles me, I hear so much talk about the opposition to nuclear energy. Well. I often wonder that if they knew that the black umbrella of carbon was what caused the ice age, and the only thing that survived it were dinosaurs that breathed in [under] water. Things that breathed in the water; that’s where the oxygen was, and near the forest where the water grew to above the forest edge.

dw3-18:00

So consequently, we don’t know what’s in store. We don’t know why we came out of the ice age. But there’s evidence that this can happen. The lowering of temperature can happen very quickly. They predicted that the effect of Mt. St. Helens would cause a change, in a colder temperature for four consecutive years. And we had somewhat chilly weather since then, our winters have been more severe, completely across the country. And they claim this umbrella hangs there, just this umbrella from that one volcano. Now we have one from Mexico also, so we’ve got more of them, a mini-umbrella.

dw3-18:45

Let’s get back to some questions. Yes.

Q. Do you distinguish ?? ??

R. Yes, consciousness is the awareness of the brain. In other words, we have a faculty of awareness. When we look at it, it’s consciousness.[?] Awareness by itself – in other words, some people think that trees are aware. But they can’t think, they can’t see that, perhaps. Maybe they can – I shouldn’t say that. [laughs] [I] somehow [have] the feeling that they don’t have the same introspective qualities. I remember one time a fellow told me he was working with carbon oil, kerosene. He said that kerosene showed signs of life. You know, you get down to basic things like a virus, and a ketone enzyme. The life began in the ketone enzyme. The ketone enzyme may be aware. The amoeba has to be aware. If it isn’t aware, it won’t find any food. It gropes, it speculates, that sort of thing, and it’s aware when the food touches it, it closes up on it and devours it. So that’s awareness, but just the extent of its consciousness is something else, from our viewpoint at least.

dw3-20:16

Another thing is that you have people who are highly aware and people who aren’t. You’ll see people who are just, they seem like they are walking in a daze. And some of them are caused by retardation, some of them it’s cause by shock or something of that sort. But their point of awareness is somehow blocked out for a period of time.

So basically, awareness is a fundamental quality. And incidentally, on the other end of the spectrum, this is a relative quality, and the other end of the spectrum is this process observer. This business of, a thing that sees without the eyeballs. A thing that watches thoughts. This is a process observer. This body watches decisions, like if I pick up an apple, this is a body-decision, the right apple. But the mind that watches thoughts is a higher form of awareness. This has a specific identity. And this identity continues after your mind and your body are both gone.

dw3-21:32

As I said, you have to be prepared to give up your body, but you don’t – this thing comes in stages. You can’t say, “give me the formula and I’ll jump off a bridge.” No, you have to take care of your body. You have to be an egotist to where you get strong enough to do it on your own. You can’t think with a diseased body.

So consequently, you’ve got to have something of a methodical way of going about your thinking processes, or you could become a raving fanatic and go bananas, just from a so-called pursuit of the truth. And this is caused from improper thinking. Now what happens is, there’s something wrong with the awareness of your own awareness. You’re unconscious of things, factors and that sort of thing.

dw3-22:25

But when you pass, when you really realize, your whole thinking mechanism disappears. I talk about fattening up the head before you chop it off. You can’t be a dummy, you can’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to relax. One day at a time.” This is nonsense. This is the philosophy of earthworms or rocks. Of where we’re going to be here now; they haven’t begun to be here, much less now. You have to come out fighting. A man fights. The woman is acceptance. A man fights like heck before he learns to surrender. The woman has the ability to surrender more quickly, and consequently reach that point.

I hope I haven’t drifted too far from what you asked me. Is there anything else? Yes.

dw3-23:29

Q. You talked about the process observer. Is it not a [inaudible]

R. Yes, it’s an observer. An observer isn’t an actor But so is your awareness, very passive. There’s a strange thing that happens; I haven’t explained it to you but it’s part of this formulation. While studying your mind, the mind seems to be, like the brain seems like a blob of flesh, but the brain has the mechanisms in it that I believe are in contact with the mind. I believe the point of contact is the synapse. And the reason for the construction of the synapse, it’s like a spark plug, there’s a gap there. And this voltage crosses, there’s a small voltage that crosses the gap in the synapse, and it has to have a purpose for crossing that gap, otherwise it would be continuous wiring. And I believe that this is the contact between the physical, sensory pickup, and the mind that transcends the body.

dw3-24:54

And there’s increasing evidence of this forming all the time. There’s a book by Raymond Moody, he was a psychologist, doctor of some sort, called Life After Life, and a lot of people who were totally atheistic have had these experiences, and it caused them to reexamine their perspective. And he projected astrally [No, this was Robert Monroe?] from someplace in South Atlanta or someplace, clear halfway across toward Washington DC. And he was able to identify places, see people he knew and that sort of thing, en route – and think while he was up there. While he was up there he was thinking. And he made a decision to come back to his body.

dw3-25:48

Now this means that the mind is not limited to the brain. This is another fallacy. Of course, psychologists, incidentally, don’t accept the mind. There’s is mostly – I mean behavioristic psychology now – tends to say that all we do is react, and that this is a somatic reaction. And of course, what they do is simplify their science; you can’t question them too deeply. They’re not going to get into a corner, but at the same time they’re never going to advance the human race on the knowledge of thought

dw3-26:20

And this is worth looking into: What is thought? And every psychiatrist I run into or every psychologist [student] who has a BS or BA degree I ask them, “What is thought?” And it never occurs to them. There’s no book that tells you what thought is, except reaction.

Okay, but we ultimately, that’s too poor an answer. When a person is floating somewhere above Atlanta, Georgia and he’s looking back and he says, “I’d better get back in my body,” and he remembers this, then he’s thinking outside his head. Not only that, but surgical cases, people in the operating rooms – my brother was in an automobile accident, watched his own operation. He was in an automobile wreck and he was far from home, he was in Arizona, and they took him to the closest hospital. He had his ribs smashed in, the car rolled on him. They said he’s not going to live, a slim chance of living, maybe because of punctured lungs and Lord knows what. So they took him in, and they hauled him to the closest medical center, which was an Army station. And they had a doctor there, so they immediately put him on the table and started working on him. And he watched this from the ceiling.

dw3-27:44

The ironic thing happened, his wife was a Nazarene, and he was born and raised a Catholic, same as I was. So a priest, who was a chaplain came in and proceeded to anoint his toes and his nose and so on. And his wife came up at the same time; she came up from Texas, they were living in Texas, and she got there. She immediately, right in the middle of all this trauma she starts cursing this chaplain, called him a devil-worshipper and a few other things.

And my brother was watching this, he told me later, and he said it was absolutely hilarious. It didn’t trouble him, he just thought, here are these idiots arguing over a piece of dead meat. Who cares whether you oil his toes or not?

dw3-28:36

And so many of these things. The experience that I had in Seattle – this is where this occurred incidentally – I went out a window. I went out a window, and I was thinking all the time, I was watching the people on the street. This was broad daylight. I went up over a place, it was the Olympic Mountains I think it is, [This is rare; most times he says Cascades or Cascade Mountains. ] It was snow-capped, snow-covered at the time. And that’s how far I went up in the air, until things changed. I don’t want to get into that too deeply because it’s not, if somneone’s interested in it, but it doesn’t do any good to hear the symptoms of it. But what struck me most when I came back was that I was aware, and the fellow in the hotel room in Seattle wasn’t. He was out. But I was just fascinated. I was so fascinated by it I kept thinking, “What’s next? What’s going to happen next?”

dw3-29:30

So this thinking process doesn’t depend upon being inside the body. And you’ve got to go to the bother of getting some literature. Don’t rest on your convictions or what you were born with, believing. Go out and get some medical history. There’s a tremendous reservoir today of information that was unavailable when I was 21 years of age. You have all sorts of books that are on the bookstands; none of those were in existence. There were few books in the public libraries, because the public libraries always were run by little old ladies who burnt books that didn’t agree with her religion. So you didn’t get too much to look at then.

dw3-30:14

But this business of the essence – you get a feeling, not a feeling but a conviction – that there is more than just the body. And we have to pay attention to these scientists who are reporting it, like psychiatrists and medical doctors. And incidentally, in this business of the …

[break in tape]

Side dw3 ends at 30:36

File 4

File 4 = 24 minutes.

dw4-00:00 [probably no words lost]

... study of your own essence there are mileposts. These are the mileposts I’m describing. You’ll notice when you change from an instinctive to an emotional man. You’ll notice when you have a more clear understanding of the human mind. And as you go along you can look backwards. For many years it’s very discouraging. You think you’re going nowhere. And those were the years I thought, “I’d better go out, hunt up some nice girl and get married and forget about this nonsense. because I haven’t got an answer yet.”

Q. inaudible

R. I just barely got the import of what you were saying. In other words, what do I do with my life afterwards? Is that what you mean?

Q. [will need headset]

dw4-01:15

I didn’t have too much choice of it. I don’t know whether I was, my return, back into the hotel room, was because of my direction or because it was programmed, that it was supposed to be. Number one, I had a tremendous desire when I was a young person to find [oh, I’m neglecting you people here] I had a tremendous desire, first of all an anger, when I was younger, I had an anger at all of the phonies, all the money-makers and so on. The hucksters of truth and so on. And with that anger came a tremendous determination, in which I promised myself that if I ever found out anything, I would sure make it known. And ir wasn’t going to cost a fortune to do it; anybody who wanted to hear it could hear it.

dw4-02:13

And I call this, later, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, except that I was an angry person; angry at the people who were wasting valuable time of the people who are able to pick it up, the young people. You have to have an open mind; if you’re crystallized, well forget it. You’re not going to pick much up. Consequently there’s a tremendous urge to waste the lives of young people. And when I got the opportunity I started lecturing in colleges. And the result is that there are quite a few young people who have got some benefit from it. Not that that is anything in the absolute dimension.

dw4-02:53

But I think – this process of doing this is called creating a vector. Now that’s somewhat of an engineering term, but it applies. You are what you do, not what you know. You can read books, but unless you act there’s nothing done. I mean, you don’t become. The process of becoming doesn’t come from reading; you become a reader. If you want to become the truth, that’s something entirely different.

Okay, so I think, that when you go through something and you’re helped. [sentence] because I was too stupid to plot. I didn’t even know I was going to find anything. The amazing thing is what I found was contrary, tremendously contrary to what I expected to find. Which led to the validaty of it. Because, you know, when I was going into it I thought, “Oh boy, I’m dying. This is it. I’m just, I’m going out on a limb too far.“ But I think what I, I’ll tell you what happened, when I came back my first thought was, “I don’t want to live on this earth.” I was in Seattle, and I was looking for a bridge. And they don’t have any bridges over Puget Sound, so it would have been rather difficult for me to eliminate the whole thing.

dw4-04:06

Am I running out of time?

Mike: No, they’re going to tow a car. A Datsun 280 [plate number] out back here. Move it and come back.

dw4-04:22

R. The thing is, that I felt that if lived, if I chose to live, that I should use that lifetime to the best advantage, so that someone else would know what’s up ahead. And that seems like a trifling thing, but I don’t think that was decided upon within the first week or so afterwards, because the transition was so painful, and I don’t think I stopped weeping for a week, day and night. I just couldn’t stand the contrast. And I thought, I didn’t see any point in living at first; I thought, “I’ll get on a bus and head back for West Virginia.” That’s where I came from. And of course, I didn’t even go home; I thought I might act strange or something. So I stopped in Cleveland, stayed in Cleveland for awhile.

dw4-05:19

but the result was that whenever the opportunity presented itself, I made myself available. I’ve had people ask me, “Why don’t you do something more useful?” There’s nothing useful. One woman said, “Why don’t you become a healer?” What for? So people can go out and get drunk again and get sick again? That’s just spinning wheels.

Q. inaudible

R. Well let’s say, I think I was conscious of making a synthetic purpose. Not? to that time, I had no intention of trying to do anything except find something for myself. It was ultimately a very personal, and selfish perhaps, motive. Which, there’s nothing wrong with being selfish. This sounds paradoxical, but if you expand yourself in the right way you cast a better light or shadow or [however you want to say it]. So these statements of selfish ness are sometimes misunderstood.

dw4-06:28

But when I found it, I didn’t particularly know what good it was for me to remain on this ... For instance, I explained this to somebody the other day. For instance, when I walked the streets of Seattle – and it happens still to this day sometimes – people become transparent. I can see their motivation, I can see things they’ve done, I can see pains in their body. This can be tremendously annoying if it goes on all the time; so you shut it off. And it doesn’t happen all the time. But at that particular time the human race was nothing more than automatons. And I haven’t had that much of an inkling – I don’t get it until I get into a big city, yet, when I get into a big city I see the massive robot movement, everybody pounding the pavement with an angry determination, going nowhere.

dw4-07:32

So you try to break through to a few of them – especially if they’re – you can’t touch anybody who isn’t already somewhat knowledgeable. In other words, I know quite, there’s a percentage of you people who have an inclination to get up and leave because it isn’t registering. But if it does register, if your intuition matches what I’m talking about, you’ll be curious for the rest of your life. And that’s my purpose. Is to get that curiosity, which is basically an animal implant, a programming in the animal to find food and reproduction. Okay, and we take this milk-from-thorns concept and turn that curiosity to self-definition. Let it go in that direction; welcome it. That’s all you have to do, and things will move rapidly.

[silence]

dw4-08:40

I’ll have some things here, I’ll give, yes, back there.

Q. inaudible

R. Yeah, well, try to.

Q. Can you hear me?

R. Yes, I can hear you.

Q. Long question, mostly inaudible.

dw4-09:44

R. Well, I’ll give you an example. I studied with a Zen master.

Q. You trained?

R. There’s no point in training. This training is to keep people occupied. Especially if you’ve got a group of them in a monastery; they have to do something or they get out of hand. A lot of this stuff, believe me, I’m going to speak to you from my heart, I don’t know what you’ve, if I’m offending you in what you’ve studied. But a tremendous lot of Zen is useless. The Zen movements in this country are mostly useless. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Suzuki Roshi over here in California.

Q. inaudible [laughter]

R. No. But anyhow, he had a little colony there, and shortly before he died somebody was interviewing him, and his wife was present, and they said, “Are you an enlightened man?” And his wife said, “Of course he’s not an enlightened man.” And he told her, “You could have kept your mouth shut.” But, in other words, there’s no sense in a teacher, Garma Chang writes, or not Garma Chang, Huang Po in China, thousands of years ago, was taking to a group of monks, and he said, “There is no Ch’an in China.”

Q. inaudible.

11:37

R. In essence he said that, the translation that I got, was that he said there was no one capable, there was no one being enlightened in China. They had thousands of people in the monastery and no one was enlightened. This was the complaint

Q. inaudible

R. See what you’re doing? You know what you’re doing right now? You’re no more than a fundamentalist arguing the Bible. The truth is not in words, the truth is in action and being and becoming. And if you haven’t become, those books aren’t going to do you any good. Keisaku and buying robes and being dressed like this is not going to do you any good.

Q. inaudible

dw4-12:36

R. That’s alright. Now you’re taking a stand, which is, you’ve got the podium back there and it belongs up here. [laughs]

Q. inaudible, gets belligerent

R. Hey, I will not argue with you, and you’re approaching argument. I’m not here to argue. If you don’t understand ...

Q. inaudible

R. ... then please let somebody else ask a question.

Q. inaudible

R. I don’t continue to carry this any further.

Q. inaudible

R. What is your objective? To bring this talk to a close?

Q. inaudible

R. Please sit down. You’re not making any sense.

Q. inaudible

dw4-13:32

R. We have a few minutes. If you have appointments or anything, it’s not going to bother me if you go. But these things are, the seminar that we have tomorrow 1983-0611-Seminar-Denver-missing-tape will take off from this business of questioning yourself. For instance, one of them is:

What is thought?

And the other one is little questions like ...

Why should an ant build houses before knowing what an ant is?

Can you start thinking?

To really know yourself.

Can you stop thinking?

Well you can take that exercise right now and say, “I’m going to stop thinking; I’ll prove it.” When you take these questions in mind and examine them awhile, you’ll understand that you can’t stop thinking. And you never thought it [?] before. Now I think under some circumstances, with a lot of training, you can make your mind a blank. But the business of starting to think, deliberately starting to think, say when you wake up in the morning. It’s impossible for you to voluntarily start to think,

dw4-14:53

This whole thing of thought is a dimension beyond our control. So consequently, we have to get a proper definition of it, and if possible, get some sort of control, and know from what point that control is exercised. Especially when we say that the body is not the self.

Incidentally, to define these things properly, we two letter “s” – capital-S and small-s. Small-s is the self that you formerly thought you were. Capital-S Self is the totality-Self, where that which you have found is greater thn the smaller self, greater than just the pretensive, projected personality.

I was in a, for instance, here are some of the questions that you may, if you come to the seminar tomorrow, that you’ll have time to evaluate

Do you think, or are you a thought?

If you are a thought, who is thinking it?

In other words, there’s a very good possibility – and this is implied by some writers – that we are projections from a mental dimension which is more real than this. Now what I find out is that the dimension that you encounter in your experience is greater than this. More real, more solid. This is the illusion; this dimension is an illusion. This is one of the things that you’ll find. And the Hindu, Indian literature refers to this as maya. And none of our Christian literature talks about it.

In other words, we’re led to believe in Christian literature that you’re going to heaven and you’re going to meet everybody who was good. There’s no real evidence for that, except in the cases of certain people who are dying. Certain people who are dying, their relatives appear. The Tibetans say that what we enter when we die are bardos. We’re either liberated or we go into bardos. The Catholic Church for instance used the word purgatory. That’s another word for a bardo. It’s not necessarily a really happy place, or beautiful place or anything like that.

dw4-17:20

So consequently, the concept – what we’re doing here now is playing with concepts, because we haven’t started into a real deep study of what I call pure psychology. So you take these various concepts, and they give you at least a shock from your previous perspective

If thought travels beyond the head, what is the vehicle for this travel?

Now as I said before, our current psychologists like for us to believe that there is no such thing as thought outside of synaptic reaction. But I think this has been proven by scientists. ESP experiments have been proven by scientists. And [there’s] a tremendous volume of statistics where people were aware in the thinking processes of someone a thousand miles away. Sometimes messages were communicated. But the idea of the Russian woman moving objects under a glass, salt and pepper shakers or something, or moving the dice which are not in your hand, necessarily. This implies that if these things are moved 51%, 52% or 75% of the time, then this is a scientific validation. And it means that the mind has some effect upon that. So therefore, the mind has some tenuousity that is able to reach out and do that. Now I’m going to a bit of bother to explain this, but I think all of you have had something in your life which proved that to you.

Does the body manufacture subtle essences called thoughts?

You know the – this is a concept also, that we have thoughts; we have little possessions called thoughts, they’re like entities, and these emanate from the brain like a broadcasting tower. I ask where in the body is the receiver for ESP phenomena. If it does project, where do we receive it?

dw4-19:43

We get into brain chemistry now; there are some interesting questions in brain chemistry:

Do chemicals such as serotonin – they’re called neurotransmitters – create thought? Or do they merely facilitate the penetration into our consciousness of particular sensory data?

They find out that when the serotonin gets weak our thinking mechanism fails. And if enough of these transmitters fail we go to sleep, we quit thinking. And also, the lack of certain neurotransmitters in the human body is responsible for, or leads to an inclination for schizophrenia. So do they create thought themselves, by virtue of the fact that they’re there, only when thought is there, when they’re active. [?? – sentence] Or are they just a lubricant of sorts?

dw4-20:46

Is “sanity” a way of measuring the skill of survival?

This is interesting to look into. What is a sane person? Basically a person who knows what is correct thinking? Or somebody who is just the shrewdest person at survival?

Q. Could you repeat that?

Is sanity a way of measuring the skill of survival?

In other words, sane people live long, people who aren’t sane, you know. Degrees of sanity. Now we’re talking about a spectrum.. Not necessarily insane and sane people. But I’m saying that sanity is gauged – the sanest person is the person whose mental faculties are put to the best use. I’m saying IF, I’m not saying they are. I’m just saying “Are they? Is that the proper definition of it?” Outside of the normal-curve definition of the majority. The normal curve definition would be that most of the people, the mental condition of most of the people is sanity – even if the whole mental IQ could slip 50 points in a few years’ time. If that would happen, they would still be, those people with the highest, [strike out] the majority would be sane.

It’s getting about that time. Are there any questions? I’ll still be glad to – if any of you wish to attend tomorrow, you can make arrangements back there. because we’re going to get into this business tomorrow of digging into your concepts, your convictions – not to change it, not to, there’s no doctrine to replace. Just to within a few hours time to give you a perspective that will call you to think.

[heavy applause]

Mike Casari: I want to take a few more minutes of your time to let you know that there are books by Richard Rose available at the back table. There’s a mailing list back there, if you haven’t already put your name on it. This is for the purpose of contacting you for future programs such as this. Seminar tickets are available; they’re $20. The seminar will start at 10 o’clock here in the library and probably run until about 2 or however long anybody can stand it. Thank you very much.

Casari email June 9, 2015 – there was no seminar. No tickets sold.

Footnotes

End