1984-0426-Peace-of-Mind-in-Spite-of-Success-Irwin-PA

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Title	1984-0426-Peace-of-Mind-in-Spite-of-Success-Irwin-PA
Recorded date	April 26, 1984 << Transcription on SearchWithin.Org is dated 4/19 not 4/26
Location	Irwin, PA
Number of tapes	2
Other recorders audible?
Alternate versions exist?
Source	Paul Schmidt
No. of MP3 files	5 mp3 file. #0 is 21 minutes chit-chat pre-lecture
Total time	20:57 + 24:49 + 45:47 + 45:51 + 15:10 ==
Transcription status	Done except 21 min pre-lecture
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?	SearchWithin.Org (dated 4/19 not 4/26)
Remarks	Needs section breaks
Audio quality	Audio quality very good - microphone
Identifiable voices	Bill King, Vince Lepidi
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1984-0426-Peace-of-Mind-in-Spite-of-Success-Irwin-PA
	For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20150104141923

Notes

File 0 - pre-lecture 21 minutes

File 0 = 20 min 57 sec.

Horrible noise before start – at about min 3

Rose talking about AIDS and dope

5:30

hypocrisy of previous generations.

So-called religious people not meeting them.

Interviewed by Gerry Sharp – arranged by John Kent

“No, I don’t believe in the Bible” – translated by very shrewd politicians.

Sodom and Gomorrah story

Two angels struck them blind.

Old Bible at home, 500 years old Latin version of story

Get your wife out of town, we’re going to destroy it.

Angelos means messenger.

Bob Martin’s interpretation, “lord” meant king.

Introduction begins at minute 14 – Bill King - TAT Foundation, not one particular dogma. Auspices of friendship. To know thyself. Farm retreat. 4 meetings per year. TAT Journal – issue 13 will be out in a few weeks. Meetings in Pittsburgh. RR founder, changed lives, heads on straight.

R: “Thanks Bill.

Talk begins at 20:57 – next file

Transcription from SearchWithin.Org

Peace of Mind Despite Success

by Richard Rose

Irwin, PA—1984

We're a small group, and we can pretty much get more accomplished if it's informal. I'm going to try to give an outline of what has been accomplished over the last ten or twelve years, and the means by which it was accomplished, and the direction and the reason for it. Then I'll stop and open the meeting up for questions.

And I want you to feel free to ask questions. What you have in any group when you give a talk are people of different interests and different levels of interest. I'm talking this stuff every day, and it gets to a point where I'm so familiar with it I just presume everybody that I talk to understands what I'm saying. And lots of times there is a percentage of people with no real rapport with what I'm saying, and their language is different.

At the last talk I gave over in Pittsburgh I sensed that there were some very sincere people there -- and I'm inclined to be rather blunt with a lot of things that I say -- and I had kind of an afterthought in the back of my head, "Be careful. Don't say certain things tonight." Because there's some people there that might be hurt. Their pet theology is everything they've got in the world, and if you give that a kick that's no good.

Now for young people -- I think young people need to be shocked out of ruts that they might get into. But when you get somebody that's sixty, seventy, eighty years of age...

I often think of my mother as a case. My mother was a very devout Catholic and had her concept of where she was going after death all mapped out for herself. And I had to stand by her bedside as she died, and I kept biting my tongue from saying anything. Because I was afraid that even consolation might betray the fact that I didn't believe what she believed about where she was going. Which is the best thing to do.

I used to give talks up at Kent, Ohio and I'd ask a few people, "What are you interested in?" People weren't interested in esoteric philosophy. That was back in the early seventies. They were interested in dynamic characters like Don Juan, a lot of them were reading Alan Watts. But they were not interested in a really deep research into the heavier Zen writers like Suzuki or the deeper philosophies put out by people like Paul Brunton or Gurdjieff. They didn't even know their names. And consequently if you start quoting Gurdjieff and three fourths of the people have never heard his name, you're wasting your time.

So we have to break every once in awhile and let somebody ask some questions, and then we'll try to draw a parallel about what that fellow said and what his contribution was. Incidentally, I think Gurdjieff made a tremendous contribution to psychology. I think he's the greatest psychologist produced up until 1950. [Gurdjieff died late in 1949 - Ed.]

I've got a little special message I'd like to bring, if I can get it across tonight, and that is the importance of what we're doing, or what I'm trying to do, let's put it that way. Again, it's difficult to get that across, because we're talking in terms of people's valuations of a common commodity, being wisdom, or achievement on a philosophic line. So anybody that ever dabbles in a philosophic direction is going to have a different idea of what he thinks is valuable.

But it goes back to 1972, when I finished writing a book. The first printing that came out in 1973 was just an 8-1/2 by 11 thing [i.e., Xeroxed, with heavier paper covers, and bound with carpet tape]. But the whole substance of this book was a direction toward clear thinking. This clearer thinking can be applied to any walk of life. And the reason we chose for the title of the flyer for this talk tonight -- Peace of Mind in Spite of Success. The reason people don't ever have success is because they don't do clear thinking.

We have a case just yesterday or the day before, where the young Kennedy boy [David] overdosed and perished, and he had all the stuff at his disposal in the line of wealth in order to create an environment. He could have created any environment he had wanted with his wealth, but somehow his thinking still wasn't clear, and he settled on something that made him miserable.

Last night on television Ted Kennedy's remark was, "I hope he is more at peace where he is now than what he was before." That he found peace, at least, someplace.

But anyhow this book (The Albigen Papers) was a story of notes I had taken -- I was fifty-five years of age when the book first came out. Now those were notes that were taken from the time I was a young man, and I had never put them into any form at all except a heap of notes. I had started to put them together and type them out, and I was going through quite a labor of sorting them and trying to keep from repeating myself, because many the notes over a period of years repeated things I had noted before.

In the meantime I got an opportunity to speak up here in Pittsburgh, at the Theosophical Society -- it was the first time I had talked on the subject. Just about that time was when the 8-1/2 by 11 copies came out.

Well, things started happening. Some boys hitchhiked over from Kent to hear me talk -- I knew the father of one of the boys -- they went back and set up talks for me at Kent State, and from then I went it seemed very rapidly from one university to another, and by 1973 I was putting the book out in a 5 by 8 [i.e., professionally printed and bound] instead of the 8-1/2 by 11 format.

A group of people formed, and at one time there were over a hundred what I considered dedicated people, who were living the life. They were using The Albigen Papers as a guide for their life, and it worked. The amazing thing about it is that you don't look for amazing things to happen. You don't go into it saying, "I'm going to put so much energy into this and I will get X amount of returns." That's not the formula.

There is a definite formula in the book. But the book is a handbook. It's a handbook for a lifestyle. And to have things happen, to put all the energy into the venture you can possibly put into it, without any egotistical idea that you should have what you want. You should have a reservation, that if that's in the cards, if that's part of the master plan, part of the engineer's blueprint, then we say "good," we'll rejoice. If it's not in the cards, we'll keep on working anyhow.

So this is a rough idea of the attitude that a person would have from the book.

The book is jammed. It's a condensed thing, because it was notes I had made, just like I'm using notes here to talk by so that I don't forget something. But it was pretty much condensed because I was doing the typing myself and my coordination wasn't too good. So I was making mistakes, and I would shorten the sentences so I could get the thing over with sometimes, I think.

In the book was a list of laws, which I had noted. Some of them you're acquainted with, some of them you may not be acquainted with. I'll mention a couple of them to show you the scope of the thing:

"The Law of Proportional Returns." Now this has to do with any type of success. I maintain that these things in the book apply -- basically they were written for philosophic reasons -- but the application of them will fit into any lifestyle or any plan of life, whether it's economic, financial, or a power struggle, even.

As I said, the procedure has to be selfless to succeed. This is one of the great blocks that stops people from really having success.

I could not get this through my head when I was younger. It was slow sinking in, I think, because when a person is in their late teens and twenties, up to the time they're about thirty, they have the conviction that they can bull through with their shoulders and create a wedge in the plan, the social pattern, and make a place for themselves, and chop out a little area in which they will get rich and get happy, and everything they want will be there, and they're going to do it all with sheer determination, will power, etcetera.

They've got a few other little things, too, like knowing the right people, and that sort of thing.

But I realized -- it just came as a sort of a hunch -- I had been doing this -- I'd been bulling my way through for many years. And I was in my late twenties when I came to the conclusion just by accident.

I didn't have too much love for humanity, but I had a lot of anger for fraudulence, for hucksters. And throughout this business of esoteric philosophy, and with religious people as well...

I mean we have the multi-millionaires on TV. And they're getting the money to pay for the TV space from little old ladies who can't afford to pay, in my estimation.

... So we've got hucksters and we've got phonies and we've got sometimes sexual deviants, where that's the only thing they can work at and at the same time get their sexual partners without too much trouble; get them inside the sphere of their religious preaching.

And I'm not exaggerating. I found these things in my own search. You're going along somewhere and you think somebody is sincere, and you find they've got an ulterior motive; they don't have a motive for truth at all. They've got a personal motive. And when you get them cornered...

For instance, I studied right above Pittsburgh here years ago. I started off when I was twelve years of age, studying to be a priest. They took them at that age, right out of grade school, the Capuchins, up here at St. Fidelis in Herman, Pennsylvania, five miles from Butler.

I was rather dismayed one time when I was hitch-hiking up from Butler. I had gone down to Butler for a walk, and one of the parents of one of the priests picked me up and gave me a ride back. He said, "You from the seminary?"

And I said, "Yes."

And he said, "My son is down there. That's a wonderful place," he said. "He'll never go hungry."

And I thought, "Jesus! Is that what it is?"

A feedbag -- just a place to eat. This is what he was looking at. Security. I read this book The Nun's Story, about a nun that became a doctor and went down to Africa and took care of sick people and that sort of thing. In her book she mentions that the convent was full of women who came from poor families who couldn't afford to feed them. They couldn't afford to keep them, so they encouraged them to join the monastery.

I think that my mother thought I was crippled and wouldn't be able to earn a living. She encouraged me to go because she thought I was weak. Which I was. But I managed to get my health built up and do a little work. (Laughs)

But out of this picture that I grew up in, I determined...I got angry. As I said, I didn't have much sympathy at first for humanity, but I had a lot of anger for these people who were parasitical. So I just had an inborn determination to make it known.

And I didn't have too good of tools. I wasn't illiterate, but at the same time I wasn't used to writing philosophy. But I made up my mind to get the point across if I had to write it longhand and Xerox it and hand it out for nothing. To get the thing across.

So, as a result of that -- that was automatically a gesture of concern for my fellowman. And I didn't even know it at the time. Because from that point on I worked for the future in which I would be able to help somebody else.

And only then did it start to pay off. It wasn't too many years after that that something happened. I had an experience which confirmed my search.

OK. We've got these laws, as I said, that I encountered, and they started manifesting themselves; and I think they're good to know, because they're applicable to almost anything, to any venture that you want to get into.

One of them is the Law of Proportional Returns -- which we're all acquainted with. In other words, if you put so many pounds of coal into a steam engine, you can predict the amount of energy you're going to get out of that steam engine. That's the Law of Proportional Returns.

If you do so much work as a salesman and keep it up -- they call it "throwing mud at the ceiling" -- some of it will stick. It will eventually pay off, and you will become successful by putting out the energy.

The next one is the Law of the Ladder. This refers to the business of helping other people. That you can only help the person on the ladder rung below you, and can only be helped by the person on the ladder rung above you. And any attempt to reach too far down results in crucifixion. And any attempt to reach up too far would not work because you would despise the man on the second rung above you. You can only understand the one right above you.

There's another law, and that is the Law of Friendship.

We have a few other things we do in the TAT Society. We're always trying to move with the times and come up with any invention which will lead us closer to that rare group of people who understand what we're doing, and who understand the philosophy.

In the last ten years we've settled on a farm down there [the Rose family farm] -- we've got a country retreat of about 160 acres -- and just recently also we've acquired property for a women's ashram. We segregate the women from the men so that the one won't distract the other. In fact, we're thinking about turning the women's ashram into a baby colony. We're going to make one of the requirements for the women there that they have to be pregnant or have a young child. [Jokingly:] We're going to get some followers for this movement one way or the other. So maybe we'll do like the old missionaries -- get a school started if we can't educate them any other way.

Basically what I'm trying to say is we are here to help people. And there are many layers and levels of helping people. The hardest thing that you can try to do is to think you can convince somebody of your line of thinking if they haven't already thought about it. The most you can do is find people who think pretty much the same as yourself and inspire them to remember that they knew it before.

Now, of course in saying that, I also believe that all information in the world today is in everybody's head here tonight. All the information that has ever been known in any department, whether it is electronic science, chemistry, or whatever -- that is in everybody's head. And there is a manner of tapping it, there's a manner of getting to that information.

In other words, if you concentrate on things long enough, your head opens up to the information that was there all the time. And I say this because of the evidence of some people like savant idiots, if you've read of those recently, of people who are really like mongoloid idiots that suddenly come out with information that is wisdom. (In the TAT Journal [Number 12] we have an article on the savant-idiot.)

For instance, they had one on TV, a fellow who could play classical music on the piano like a virtual genius, and that's about all he could do. He was the equivalent of an imbecile or a mongoloid idiot. Another fellow seemed to look very normal, but there was something wrong with him. But he could tell you any date of any year -- you just name it, and he would give you the day of the week. And they'd check him mathematically and he'd be right. They had him in front of the TV camera, and in just a few minutes he'd come up with the answer. For instance they'd say, "In April 28, 1432, what day of the week did it fall on?" And he'd tell them within three or four minutes.

And how he did it, no one could understand. But the wisdom -- both these people, when they asked them, "How'd you do this?" -- both of them said, "God."

So I am never disappointed when only a few people show up. Because your hope is always to find people somewhat in the same stage of savant idiocy as yourself. And then you can communicate. And you're very lucky if you do, and you're much more lucky if you get a good-sized crowd.

What I'd like for you to do, when I run out of wind, is to start asking questions. Because one of the things in communication is -- I'm talking to people with all different backgrounds. As the old farmer said, "Many paths lead to the barn." So nobody has a priority with a singular path. Although I have a singular system, you might say, that encompasses a lot. But all systems are somewhat singular.

I take issue with some systems, especially if they're led by charlatans or people who are ripping off millions of dollars. I'm not happy with that; I don't think it's necessary to get at that in looking for wisdom. Regardless, all things basically fill some sort of need. Although some of them we don't need.

Also about TAT -- TAT is not the issue here tonight. The issue here tonight is basically truth. The truth about peace of mind, the truth about success, doing things, being mobile, and yet at the same time not trying to set the world on fire necessarily -- until you know who's trying to set the world on fire.

Well, this goes back, as Gary said [in the introduction - Ed.] twelve years ago, in 1972, I wrote a book. And the book was basically a tremendous attempt -- I thought at the time; it was very difficult, being that I had never written very much before -- a tremendous attempt to describe the absolute nature of man with relative terms.

And in the process of doing this, in the process of meditations that I had gone through for years before that, I had come up with certain psychological realizations, if you want to call them that. Because, basically, if you want to know the truth, you have to know yourself. The first thing you have to know is yourself.

Because the misconception of who is thinking about the truth can lead you on a tangent -- which most people are on. And of course I find out -- when people attend a lecture, most expect to come to get some goodies while still clinging to all the previous baggage they have accumulated down through the years. And this baggage could easily be erroneous.

We go about pleasing each other. I met a man in Pittsburgh who came to a lecture -- we had a very poor showing, but this man was a gem. He came up to me [after the lecture] and he said, "I was doing the same thing you're doing. You're doing it a bit differently than I did. I had enthusiastic meetings. I never stayed up behind the podium. I went down and jumped around among the audience and kept them excited and made them all feel good and whooped it up, and they thought they were going places. I never said anything negative. I followed all these little things that you're supposed to do to keep everything positive, and reinforced people."

And he said, "Five years ago I had two hundred people here in this same room you're talking in. And I lost them all. And during your talk I found out why: You used the words 'the Law of the Ladder.' I tried to please everybody. I had a big turnout, but I had no substance. You don't seem to care about a big turnout, but you've got substance, and you're still alive after twelve years, your group is still alive."

But he was going back in. He was telling me he was going to start a restaurant near Irwin, PA, and they were going to paint the Zodiac and things on the walls to make people meditate while they're eating.

We get to the thing that everyone in this life, everyone sitting in this room, is dissatisfied and will be dissatisfied until the time they die -- and by the time they get down to die, they'll be a tremendous lot more dissatisfied. And why is that? Because of a lack of clear thinking. And because of a gestaltic thing -- states of mind, I call them.

We get into states of mind. And states of mind sometimes we borrow from our parents and borrow from our school teachers, educators. We borrow from the newspapers and what the movies tell us, tell the young people: "This is the pretzel you have to be, to be socially acceptable."

So everybody's trying to twist themselves into a pretzel, which they think will bring them popularity and success. Sometimes it isn't that. Sometimes they want to also inject all their private little wishful thinking systems and their desires into the picture as well. And invariably they get rebuffed.

We narrow this down to one word, this system of selfish thinking -- the word ego. And the biggest part of the difficulty is the individual egos, which God knows where they start. Possibly when the person's a child the parents encourage them to have that ego. They flatter the child, tell it that it is superior to other people, to other children, that the family is superior. I don't think there's a family that hasn't got that idea across to their children, that they're exceptional children.

Well, this writing [The Albigen Papers], in the point of trying to get an image across -- the picture across -- of the reality that I discovered, I realized that I had to eliminate -- brush aside -- all of the erroneous thinking that a person can have. Meaning -- we're approaching now a true psychology, a pure psychology. Because what happened to me was that my head was empty. It was empty of my egos. And in order to arrive at that, I had to drop every ego that I had, every idea of even my personal self, my survival, and I passed through death and became nothing. And I would have believed that I was nothing except for the fact that I remembered that I was aware of everything that was happening.

So in this view of psychology I wrote the book. And the book has a tremendous lot in it that you can use -- it doesn't matter what you want to do with your life. I think everybody should function. The function is totally unimportant, but it is very important that you function. Because without motion we get inertia, and inertia leads to the undertaker rapidly.

So you have the choice of keeping some sort of program going, to keep the vehicle going, until you come across that which you think is very valuable to do -- then you'll have a vehicle and the locomotion necessary to do it.

You're not important in that respect. The thing that I found that is most important in life is that sometime in your life you find out who you are. I would like for you to think about that. Because I know a lot of you right now are thinking that it doesn't matter, that you can accept what's here. But what is here? In Pittsburgh one time I said to the people in the group, "You don't know who you are." And this guy put his hand up. He said, "I want to correct you. I know who I am -- I'm the guy that's sitting in front of you."

But he didn't realize that possibly he wasn't sitting in front of me. The fellow that he thought was sitting in front of me, he may ten years later discover that that man was totally false, that there was an absolutely different personality, a different being, than who he thought he was. And that's the point I was trying to get across to him. Not that there wasn't a body sitting there. There was a body there, but his interpretation and definition of that body was something else.

In the process of writing this [book], I broke the mind down into the functions that it performs. Now I got into psychology books when I was seventeen years old, and that was fifty years ago. For fifty years I've never found anything of substance in the psychology books. Because they're looking at the mind with ink blots. They're looking at the mind with electroencephalographs, biofeedback, electronic equipment. Or patterns establishing normal curves. And chemical tinkering. "Give the guy a hypo, and see how he reacts -- mark it down on a piece of paper, and then we'll get a science built out of this chemotherapy."

Some of this could very well be damaging to the vehicle that the man may need later on to pursue some real definition of himself. In fact -- I'm not speaking idly, I know some people who had slight nervous breakdowns and were pumped full of Stelazine and got hooked on it for the rest of their life. And then they got more helpless, and more weird, until they became bed-patients, just from having a simple nervous breakdown -- which a lot of people used to have in the old days, and they came out of it and functioned. But today when they get through with you, with the chemicals, you may not be able to do anything.

And this is because of a lack of knowledge of the mind. The behavioristic psychologists are correct in one respect, in that we are a body, first. We cannot deny that the body is there. The thing that you can deny, of course, is that we are more than just conditioned reflexes. We are conditioned reflexes until we're able to somehow reach a point in which we witness, and then influence, our condition. Or stop it. That is the point.

The fallacy in the whole thing of behaviorism is that we are robots. And I heartily agree with this -- most people are robots. But the fallacy is that there's going to be a magical robot who is going to program all these other people. His philosophy has to be robotic. Where is it coming from?

It starts with the man who wanted to be funded by some federal agency -- and that's all the wisdom there is in it. Because what they're saying I one-hundred-percent agree with: We are robots. You watch the animals in the barnyard, and then go in and watch the people in the house, and you'll see them going through the same systems. Except that we place more importance on what we're doing.

But I'm quite sure when the two goats are making love they have a tremendous lot of importance on that, too. We never bother to ask them, that's all. We think that they're just stupid animals, that they have no cognizance. But the motions are quite the same. The psychological attitudes of people and animals are very much the same. We work with compulsion; we battle right down like the old billy goat to the very hour of death pursuing the next hundred dollars, thousand dollars, million dollars on the stock market. We just don't give up, that's all. But it's the same thrust. Where one is eating leaves off the trees, we're putting nuts away for the winter. And that becomes a science -- putting nuts away for the winter.

I found out that the human mind has basically very few attributes which we could call its own. We are plastic -- we are born of plastic type protoplasm or neuroprotoplasm -- but there is something programmed in it. And this is where the idea of the automaton comes in -- meaning that it's manipulated by something else. And it's manipulated by whoever created the first blueprint.

This blueprint has in it two things which I consider very significant. One of them is curiosity, and the other is desire. These are not ours.

The reason a boy goes to college and becomes a philosopher, becomes a theologian, is not that he's born of God, or that Jesus inspired him. It's because he's curious. There's nothing wrong with being curious, and if he wants to get curious about God, he may become a theologian. But he won't become a theologian by going to a theological school. He has to respond to his native curiosity and in turn get milk from thorns. The thorns are his own stupidity and the fact that he refuses to accept the fact that he's programmed.

Curiosity is our leeway. You can turn that curiosity into wisdom if you wish.

And of course desire -- we have desire because without the desire we wouldn't eat. We have to have the desire to get that first drink of milk or that first blade of grass and continue from that time until we die, eating the milk or the grass or whatever. And from it comes all sorts of egos -- you know, having a better place to eat the food in, houses, restaurants, etc. Wealth, vehicles, and all that sort of thing -- that's all from desire.

This, too, incidentally, can become sort of a catalyst -- the alchemical formula for turning lead into gold. The desire can become a catalyst to create more energy, to channel more energy into the business of what curiosity takes us into.

So what does it mean? First of all, you channel the curiosity. You say, "I'm no longer curious about what the guy next door is doing, I'm curious about what's going on inside me. How did I get here?"

I often wonder how people can take it for granted that they're here. That's all they need to know -- the fact that they're here. It doesn't bother them. Somebody says, "Oooohh, Jesus told me to tell you that you came from upstairs." And then I find this guy chasing my wife or stealing my money. And I don't know whether he's inspired by Jesus or not. I see some of them make millions of dollars, and I wonder if their real Jesus isn't the money.

So, anyhow, if we can channel these programs, then that's the only time that the robot has any meaning. He has no meaning -- I don't care how great a scientist he is, how much wealth the man has acquired, or anything else -- he may cast a long shadow, but that will not mean anything because he won't know who's casting the shadow.

The second thing is that we have basically nothing more than a sensory system. We start off with nothing but a sensory system. You watch your children: they're like monkeys -- they basically repeat, imitate, in their process of learning. The whole thing for eight solid years is nothing more than rote, repeating what the teacher says, repeating what the parents say, imitating the parents' actions to get what they want, etc. Although they're very cute -- these little people are very cute -- they are doing nothing but the same things a monkey would do. And too many adults clear up to the time they're ninety years of age don't do anything but what a monkey would do.

But the thing is that somewhere along the line we discover that some of this energy, salvaged from our desire, if held in check can develop a thing called intuition. Now we take another step.

The intuition will lead us in discriminating the data that comes in from our curiosity. We will know which books to read, which ones are phony, which speakers are phony, which movements are hollow. And when we hear something or read something, a bell will ring in our head. That's basically what intuition is. And from that, then, you get closer and closer until the mind develops certain powers.

As we get closer, it gets tremendously abstract. Gary mentioned direct-mind science. I've given some demonstrations down at the farm a few different times on direct-mind functioning. At this stage, as far as a direct-mind ability, you become like the savant idiot: You go directly to what knowledge you wish, and it's yours.

And this is demonstrable. This is what we did at one chautauqua -- demonstrating that you can get yourself into a frame of mind -- it can be like the Oracle of Delphi, in which you'll see the future, or you will twist the space-time illusion into another illusion, and solid things will result. And the mind itself -- you can feel it. Two minds can enter into these experiments. You can tell what the other person is thinking.

So as you move, you're starting to move considerably away from this idea of being nothing but a programmed hunk of flesh.

Now this is all demonstrable. I can't get into the techniques of it tonight, but I could cite you a lot of instances. When people first hear them they think, "Hey, this couldn't hardly be true." Some people are born with it, as the savant-idiots are. Some people can acquire it much more easily than other people; for some people it seems to be tremendously hard, and to other people it seems to come very quickly.

For instance, they had a boy -- they used to put him up in an airplane and fly over the land, and he could look down and see oil beneath the ground; he would tell them there were oil deposits there. It's not too far-fetched from the fellow with the dowsing rod: that fellow also had some way of seeing the oil -- he had a mental faculty that he developed which caused him to twist the stick himself. That's what happened -- his hands had to twist it.

So these things fall into this idea of the supermind, or the direct-mind concept. Precognition, being someplace else -- these things have happened to me a good bit throughout my life. Although not in a consistent manner; I couldn't tell you for instance what the stock market in AT&T is going to be tomorrow, or something like that -- that doesn't happen. But every now and then this thing pops up.

If I put a great deal of weight upon it, if I didn't have some work to do that I thought was more important, I could allow myself to develop in some sort of medium, healer, Lord knows where it would take me. For instance, I've been able to see into people's heads. I've been able to feel and take pain out through the top of their heads. And -- no science. Except what I call direct-mind science. There's a science to the procedure, but when it comes, it's spontaneous and unpredictable. And I always have to check to see if it actually happened.

I feel what I'm doing -- I can feel pain in a person's body. The first time it happened was just on a hunch. It was with a man's wife -- a man and his wife came to my house, among the first of the people that came into the group back at the beginning of this twelve-year period. I could sense something taking energy out of the room, and I looked around and it was she. She had a tremendous headache.

She called it a migraine headache. The only thing I noticed was that after it went on so long her lips got pale and kind of purple -- she was just in pain. So a hunch came to me: Take the pain out of her head. So I walked over like an idiot -- feeling like an idiot -- because I didn't know anything would happen. But I had to follow my impulse. I went over and put my hand on her head. And I pulled my hand away very quickly, and she said, "Boy! -- how did you do that?" That's when I knew something happened. I only obeyed an impulse.

Because -- you don't have time to logically think out the things that can come into the mind, and from the mind. What we're getting into is that the mind is nothing more than a computer. You want to throw a certain subject into a computer and get an answer out -- it takes a certain number of seconds for the computer to shuffle and run it out to you.

The human mind has a vast, tremendous amount of knowledge in it. And these things I'm telling you -- I don't need to write a book -- you live the life and they'll intuitively come to you whenever you need them. It will just come to you, and then the explanation will come later. If your nose is clean.

In other words, don't have any selfish ideas about building it up into a big-feeling empire. Just be glad that it happened and go on about your work. That's the formula, part of the formula. Don't be egotistical. Because it's done by working between. Working between. You desire -- with no desire. That's the basic formula.

So if I run into somebody and see something and have a hunch, "Hey, you can alter that situation," -- I do it, and then look and see if it gets results. In other words, I have the faith that ultimately I'm not wrong -- if the time is right.

Getting back to the computer -- we have, what, ten million, ten billion cells? We have data, DNA molecules, genetic memory, all sorts of places in the body. I think that the basic mind -- the real mind -- is not physical. The brain is physical. The real mind -- and this is again my concept; I'll always tell you that I've got a concept when I'm not talking about something I have conviction on -- touches the body at the synapses.

In other words, there's another dimension called Mind -- and in that, we have a substance called the mind, "our" mind -- which transcends death. But which is in constant contact with us and also records the memories of this body. And I have a reason for what I'm saying: people in these after-death instances -- when they come back, they remember.

There's a lot of stuff that if you read it and contemplate as you're reading it with an intuitive mind -- a lot of wisdom will come to you out of these little books they're writing.

Monroe [Robert Monroe, who established the Monroe Institute], when he was sailing over Atlanta, Georgia or wherever he was, saw and recognized and remembered people. He's out of his body, but he's got his memory and his recollection with him. Meaning this has to record in that astral body, if you want to call it that. But at the same time, it records in this brain.

I wondered why Monroe himself never mentioned -- or any of the other people that have written about astral projection -- that they had a memory there.

My brother had an experience. I don't know whether it was a case of astral projection -- he wasn't conscious of being in an astral body. He was at the point of death from an automobile accident, lying on the operating table. And when he came out of it, he said he was above the table a considerable distance. His wife was cursing the priest -- because she thought he was a devil-worshipper. And this was a hilarious thing to him -- from where he was floating, he thought this was the height of absurdity -- because it didn't matter whether they anointed his toes or not. The thing was that he was happy now, and he'd gotten rid of his wife and the priest, both.

But he remembered all those details and verified them when they brought him back. They called me on the phone that same time and said that he was dying and to get there if I wanted to see him while he was still alive.

So the little pieces of evidence -- if you put them together, you find a tremendous picture. What we're getting down to is that there's a way of contacting simultaneously all of the knowledge that there is in that computer -- and possibly all that connected with that computer -- by holding your head a certain way. And this is one of the aims of this system.

Now as I said previously, we have all sorts of success formulas. They have seminars that charge anywhere from two hundred fifty to six hundred dollars to tell people how to succeed. And what they are, they're exhilarating exercises. You can do aerobics and get the same thing. If you want to hop around and shout "Hallelujah" or "Hare Krishna" or something like that, you might get inspired -- temporarily.

But what happens when reality comes back? What happens when the intoxication is over?

And the reason why there is trauma after that is that the person does not know himself. He doesn't even know what type of success he wants. For instance, if we could run through the crowd and get beyond the point of being reflexive -- [that] is the big thing in life. I heard something on TV the other day I thought really tells the difference between abject behaviorism and individualism. They were describing the attitude of the people in Russia, and the TV announcer said, "If you want to make a young Russian student angry or hurt, call him an individualist." And this is what everybody in this country wants to be, an individualist. But in Russia you want to be zero, no one-upmanship.

And that feeling kind of went through this country a good bit, too. Everyone wanted to be in great togetherness, but no one wanted to excel. Believe me, the whole biological structure of this planet is one of defeating your fellow, going him one better. And that's the only way that the civilization improves, by individuals here trying to be better individuals than the rest -- not just afraid of one-upmanship.

So in this business of finding the robot nature of people, I've done a lot of thinking, and some if it's in the books. This material on the board is the complete psychological structure of the human visual experience. That is, our thinking processes. I class them all as visions, because we do not think -- we conjure. And most of you know that.

When we see something, we adjust. That which we see may be inverted on our retina so that we have to adjust it in our heads somewhere. Or that the colors are not the colors they appear to be -- they may be seemingly the opposite color, or every color but that.

This goes all the way through, down into social living. We're perpetually adjusting ourselves to what we think the spirit of the times is. All your great advertising media, all these people are continually thrashing around trying to find out what the voice of the populace is, so that they can create the right things to sell them. What will they buy today? What's their weakness? Or what's their direction?

People do not see; they interpret. Half of their seeing is conjured. For instance, "Deliberate Mental Projections" [refers to a diagram he was using of the material from The Psychology of the Observer on the six different forms of perception].

All sensory perception is "abnormal" -- basically abnormal, as far as Truth is concerned. We don't know what we see. We interpret everything we see.

There's a little book called The Conquest of Illusion by J.J. van der Leeuw. In 200 pages he very well puts out the explanation of how the world can be something that's an entire illusion, but it's interpreted according to a collective agreement.

And the difference between our existence here and our existence in the next dimension is one of transcending this illusion. Transcending this collective projection.

So "normal sensory perception" is actually abnormal as far as the Truth is concerned. We don't see with our eyes, we only see with our mind. And even a biologist will tell you that. The eyeballs pick up certain impressions, they translate it to a retina, which translates it to some sort of sorting mechanism -- and we get an emotional reaction to it.

But "abnormal sensory perception" is the mirage, the hologram.

This is the whole realm -- A to B [on the diagram] is the whole realm of what I call the physical perception. These are mental visions. They're all called visions -- I use the word "visions" because it's conjured. The "synthetic visions" are those that we have -- we dream of riding a horse or something, and we think that that's very portentous, but it may be the mind putting together little bits of previous pictures that it had. And it sees it very clearly, and it dreams, and it tells you the next morning after the dream that this is a very real dream, there must be some meaning to it. But it may be nothing more than a synthetic projection.

The desire to know yourself, and the relentless push to find that self, leads you to find that there are two selves: small-s self, who you thought you were, and large-s Self, which you find yourself to be. And once you find your capital-s Self -- you don't have to do anything. Except keep moving. Keep functioning until the game, your course, is played.

Because beyond that there's no concern. The capital-s Self is synonymous with the totality of all Essence.

Now we come down to a system. The system isn't too complicated, and yet there's a tremendous lot of information in it, I think. Because again once more we go back to basics: How do you do these things?

Number one, you don't start off doing anything contrary to natural plan. Because we are not superior to it. There's a trend today that's been going on for quite a while -- I shouldn't say that it's just been going on for the last twenty or thirty years, because I see traces of it all through history. As soon as somebody came up with an invention, they immediately thought that they were divine, that the human race was approaching divinity, and we were going to change our environment.

They're worried about the vanishing eagle, or the vanishing grizzly bear, as though that is something that they can do something about. If the grizzly bears are going to vanish, they won't have any more chance than the dinosaur. And if we're going to vanish, we won't have any more chance that the dinosaur.

And we can conceive all sorts of super powers, super-human powers. We're able to do magnificent feats of engineering, create enormous battleships, airplanes, rockets, etc., all sorts of gadgets to play with, even these things here [tape recorders], biofeedback machines, and whatever. And this gives us a feeling of control and divinity.

But these are -- you know -- if the ants had our technology, they'd surpass us. They'd have better cameras than we have. I think they lack maybe the fingers to manufacture the stuff with, I don't know.

But we get a tremendous big feeling that we're going to create human behavior, and we're going to do as we please, and we're going to find a patch for every wound. No correction. No changing the road. When you get a flat tire, you put a patch on it instead of going out and picking up the nails. The smart thing is to go out and pick up the nails. But we get these flat tires, and then we go back to our technology. This is the concept.

And this is what has lead everyone down the road to disease. These terror-stricken headlines that you see in the paper. On TV they had the camera on an encounter group -- I don't think it was an encounter group, I think it was a sympathy group -- where everybody that has AIDS gets together and says, "Aren't we miserable." And not one of them -- I never heard -- one irate young lady said, "Why don't they get off their butts and find a cure for this?"

Why didn't they get off their butts twenty years ago and quit fooling around the way they weren't supposed to fool around? They never think about that. Where's this sense of responsibility that we're supposed to have? We're supposed to be responsible creatures -- we're supposed to be in charge of the universe. And we can't be in charge of our own emotions.

Okay, you're not supposed to be in charge of your own emotions in all directions, because we are supposed to have children. That can be a tremendous burden. But -- you can get away with it. You can get away with having children.

Once more we go back to this thing -- nature. That's evident, it's laid out for us. By trial and error for ten or twenty thousand years, we have grown a certain wisdom on how to live -- which modern behaviorists tried to throw out in the last twenty years. And they're not going to do it; they're not going to be able to do it.

Our wisdom goes back to the earth -- from which we get food, from which we develop flesh, from which we develop neural energy. Nerves, brain -- all from the food of the earth. There's our beginning of our divinity.

[Break in tape] ... in intense concentration, to come up with a solution to a problem in algebra, on how to build a better house or a better battleship. All from transmutation. The isolation of students in a classroom causes them to think. To force thinking is the process of transmutation. Sometimes it'll happen when they're not in the classroom, but that's the best way of getting the largest number of people transmuting energy at the same time with a single teacher.

From this -- we can draw the diagram -- and show how mental energy is transmuted beyond the body. If you want to do it. I don't say there's any particular purpose, but it just shows the ability -- that you can create a vector of yourself to a point where you'll get dynamic direction of energy.

And this human energy is the energy that Christ used when people were healed. Because if you read the little story -- the woman who was bleeding touched the end of his garment, and what did it say? It said he felt his virtue leave him. This is physical energy -- energy that can almost be calibrated. This is a transmuted energy.

Now with that same thing you can project thoughts, you can enhance the computer. But most of all, the most valuable -- it isn't valuable to heal people -- most people who get healed don't work to get healed, so they get sick from the same cause. So healing becomes a vanity -- it's a glory trip for the healer. Generally always a glory trip.

The thing is to try and get the person and show them how to transmute their own energy and convey their own energy and heal themselves. Until the time comes to die, and then die without maybe too much noise. Because the intuition gets these instantaneous readings. The logical process takes hours. Even in the computer, it takes quite a bit of time for a logical process to take effect. But with the human being, as with the savant-idiot, in one, two, ten seconds, information arrives that would have taken logically three of four lifetimes.

Now I started out when I was twenty-one years of age. I dedicated myself to the Truth. I didn't go join the church. I didn't announce my dedication to anybody but myself. I said, "I don't care too much for this life. So if I'm going to live and put up with this environment, I'm going to spend my time finding out who is here -- who I am."

The result was of course that by the time I was twenty-one, I knew the path that I had to follow. I realized that I would never learn anything. The only way that I would ever discover anything was to become. And this is the little blueprint I laid down for myself. And I searched out ways. Instead of going to the psychology books, I left the psychology books and went inside myself. And strangely enough, I was accidentally successful.

And I don't think I was accidentally successful. I think -- in fact, I was quite an egotist at the time. I was going to find out something and then, once I discovered that, I was going to be powerful. I sensed that I would be powerful. And that appealed to me because I was young.

But about seven years went by, and nothing was happening. And I came to the conclusion about being -- like Omar Khayyam, in too many wrong heads -- that the truth must be evasive. In fact, so I became angry at all the phonies, all the facetious books that were written, all the brainwashing institutions called churches which you had to go to, to find the truth.

And in my anger I made a pledge that if I ever found anything, I would help my fellow man. In other words, that I would try to find the people with the little crack in their heads where the light might get into, and I could communicate with them. And that's what I would do with the rest of my life.

And it was only at that point, from that point on, things started to turn. And within two years I had an experience. And I don't go around trying to prove this experience to people because of the simple fact that you can't hear unless you have ears. But I do hope to find people that will someday make that pledge to themselves, that they want to help somebody else sincerely down the road.

And then -- if you continue plugging and plugging, for no reason at all except for the sake of the truth -- you'll find it. You will find it.

In the process also of writing this book, I ran across some little psychological laws, and I want to talk about them for a minute because they don't appear in the literature everyplace. These are the things that I discovered. And what happened after I had my experience -- I had no words. I mean I had never realized that I would have to come back and try to say something to somebody.

And to say something -- for instance, my experience was of an absolute nature, if you understand what I'm saying. It had no relative definition. And to talk to people, you have to talk in relative language. Which means that as soon as you say something is a good thing to do, then that can be paradoxically interpreted by somebody as being negative.

For instance, there is no such thing as "positive thinking" without the parallel comprehension and agreement that the opposite is also true -- or can be proven as true as you can prove that which you think is positive. But nevertheless, I recognized this polarity. It wasn't until many years later I ran into a book on Zen by Hubert Benoit [The Supreme Doctrine]. And in it he had a little diagram, a triangle, and he called it the triangulation of thinking.

In other words, what we have from our viewpoint is a line at the far end of which is the word "black," and at the other end is the word "white." And we realize that in between those two are millions of gradations of gray -- which can only be viewed from a superior point. From the apex of the triangle, you can look down and see both ends. From the superior point, you can see the entire line, and there's no mystery.

Now this is the view of the physical world. You have to get to a superior point from which you can look back and see it -- as not something in space, and time-related, but in space-time as one.

So you come back to language. I was talking in Pittsburgh one time, and there was a man there from India. And he said, "What you're talking about is the Buddha mind, isn't it?"

And I said, "I don't know what you're talking about. You'll have to educate me with a whole book on Buddhism in order to find out what we are talking about." Because he didn't know what I was saying, and he was trying to get me to translate into his terminology.

Basically what you have to do is find somebody with this little light of intuition, and then work on it together. Ask questions. And pretty soon, as it becomes important in your mind, you'll see it on the street every day while walking. Instances of what you are trying to understand will come to you in everyday life.

But I found these laws, incidentally, and we'll run through them. These are psychological laws, laws of nature, laws of the spirit. Everything has its echo, its mirror in the different dimensions of thinking.

One of them is the "Law of Proportional Returns." It means that if you put out energy, you will get, in proportion. And I thought, "That's very good if you're lucky, maybe. That will work if you're lucky." No -- it works. It works.

I saw a tremendous example of this one time. This man didn't know what he was doing, but intuitively he practiced this type of procedure. He ran a small business in downtown Steubenville. And I stopped in to see him. He was selling painting equipment, paint spray guns and tanks and so on. He had coveralls on, and he didn't look very much like a businessman because he was mixing some paint. And a young man came in. So he walked over to the counter and the fellow said, "I want to see some of your pressure tanks."

And he told him, he said, "Well, what we have is all there in front of you. We've got them anywhere between two hundred dollars and seven hundred dollars. That one sitting over there is about four hundred dollars." And the fellow looked them over and said, "I can get that same thing down at Sears and Roebuck for about a hundred dollars cheaper."

And the fellow said, "Yes -- probably just as good. The only difference is -- I'm stuck here on this corner, and I have to repair them if they go bad. And Sears doesn't. But Sears backs up their stuff. I'll tell you -- I will give you a list of some other people, too. You should shop around and make up your mind where your best buy is." So he gave him the names of some other places he could go that sold tanks -- a hardware store in Wheeling, and so on.

He was very cordial about it. And I watched the fellow walk away, get to the door, turn around and come back. And he said, "Oh, hell, give it to me."

Now this was a man whose wife was interested in the group work. They had a little group going in Steubenville at the time. He was interested in his business. And he would come in, and we'd be sitting in the front room, and he'd go out in the kitchen and make himself a martini. And about the time he got that martini about half down he could tolerate our philosophy. And he'd get somewhat in tune with it.

So I said to him, "John, you are a philosopher. I watched you operate. You didn't try to sell that fellow. The only thing you tried to do was help him." And he said, "Right. I learned that strangely enough from my wife's father. I watched him do it. You don't have to go out there and twist people's arms. Make yourself available, that's all. Just make yourself available."

There's an old expression I heard a salesman say one time: "If you throw enough mud at the ceiling, some of it'll stick." If you hit enough doors, believe me, one of them will open. But go at it from the idea of being of service to those people, not the idea that you're going to steal from them.

Another one of the laws I call the "Law of the Ladder." This is what the man in Irwin said to me he'd learned from my lecture. He wrote it on a little piece of paper. He said he'd never made notes at lectures before, but he wrote that down because he'd realized that not knowing the law of the ladder is what caused his lecture series to collapse.

The law of the ladder says that you can only learn from people one rung above you; you can only teach one rung below you. If you reach down too low, they pull you down by the hair of the head. They crucify you. And if you reach up too far, the guy on the second rung above looks like an idiot to you. You can't comprehend him.

This I learned while standing year after year on a ladder, painting houses. I realized that there was a significant symbol there at work.

Another law is the "Law of Friendship" -- that we are stuck with humanity. They seem at times to be a despicable mess of protoplasm, but this is all there is. And when you transcend the flesh, you're still stuck with them. If you go anyplace and you owe them money -- you still owe them money.

We have this human family, which is our total environment. The trees, the mountains, the planets will fade away. But the relatives will still be there, and the friends will still be there, and so will the people you didn't do so hot by.

So we have to function with the idea of friendship. And in this respect, you can function. If I take your money, if I steal your money, if I con you -- I can't function.

And of all these groups -- this is one thing that I am very proud of -- I have never had a crowd much larger than this one in all my time of talking. But the thing is that I didn't pull any tricks, I didn't give out any information which I wasn't sure of, I didn't try to pressure anybody. Of course, I try to agitate people. I'll try to get you to function. I'll try to get you to helping some people yourself.

The reason the group was formed -- there's a little law concerned with this too, and that is the "Law of Extraproportional Returns." An individual by themselves doesn't do much of anything, anyplace, on any level. Of course, an individual in a flat, flaccid group isn't doing anything, either. So you have to find your fellows. You have to find your medium in which you can operate and actually accomplish.

And that was the reason the group was tolerated. When I first started out, I was very much opposed to having anything in a type of an organization. Organizations become corrupted by those who are in charge. Money is collected, and then somebody starts to become a politician. And dogma is developed, and things you've got to believe are developed. And the result is the search for truth ceases. And we start believing, and that's the end of the road.

So I have to keep that -- complete honesty -- on the surface. In full view at all times. And I have to treat everybody as friends, and they have to know I am their friend. Not just be told -- they have to know. Like when the man said to me, "What happened in your experience? Who made the blueprint?" I said, "I don't know, and what I don't know, I won't tell you anything about it." (But I know by the pattern that I witnessed that there was a pattern there, because it was beautiful.)

The next one is the "Law of Change." You start out and you establish a business -- you go to school and they tell you how to open a business, they tell you how to succeed in business even, they tell you how to succeed in a profession. You want to be a doctor, you know what you have to learn? A little bit about medicine but a whole lot about keeping a stern, dignified look on your face. The conceit of knowledge, you have to have -- to show that you know what's wrong with that person.

If you want to be an attorney, you have to also wear a certain mask. Because you're not going to know nearly as much as you'll know ten years from now, but you can't wait ten years before you go into business, so you've got to pretend to know a lot. All the professions are basically poses. The ones that aren't are people who know where to get information. Mathematicians have their book of logarithms; they know where to get the stuff to solve the thing, or the reference books.

So we set down a science -- business science. We say, "Well, we can sit on a street corner, count the cars that go by, call the Chamber of Commerce and find out how much the payroll is locally, find out how many cars go past this corner and how many nickels are in the pockets of the people in the cars -- and they'll stop at our supermarket when we build it. The number of cars will justify the building of a supermarket." And this is a business science.

So they build a supermarket. And somebody else thinks, "That fellow's pretty smart, he must know something." So sixteen people build supermarkets, and everyone goes broke -- because they didn't know all the factors. The unknown factors are in all points of life. Adolf Hitler had to face them. He had everything down -- he was a mental scientist even, on top of it -- but he didn't know all the factors. Because of the Law of Change.

Things change. Nobody knows why they change, but like I said -- the dinosaurs are no longer here, so there's no use in the dinosaurs thousands of years ago making these little plans for the future.

The "Law of Equilibrium." The Law of Equilibrium is expressed in some eastern countries as karma. The Law of Equilibrium says that if you throw a ball against the wall, or strike an anvil with a hammer, the anvil strikes back with the same force that the hammer strikes the anvil. And the ball is struck by the wall with equal force as the ball strikes the wall.

There is a certain equilibrium set in everything, even in the biological pattern -- they call it the "balanced aquarium of life," which the ecologists are trying to interpret and presume to be able to cooperate with -- the law of equilibrium in ecology. But my argument there is that they don't necessarily know about the law of change. There may be laws of change in effect which will upset their belief or their direction.

We come to this "Law of Extra-proportional Returns." I realized when I was twenty-one years of age that I was tackling a monumental problem. And that was to cut the Gordian knot -- to find my definition, to find where I came from, where I was going -- and to do it in one short lifetime. And yet I decided I didn't have anything better to do even if I failed. At least I would die trying. This was my attitude.

So the next thing that I discovered was that there was a short-cut. There were several short-cuts. One of them was the idea that you don't learn, you become. Don't shoot for learning, one logical hypothesis after another until you discover the truth. The second thing was that there is action of your fellow human beings which brings on the exercise of the law of extra-proportional returns.

And I discovered this when I was doing contracting work. I was hiring people, and when I hired the second man, I found out that my bidding was amplified. Say you have two men on a scaffold. Now if you have a third man that works on the ground, he can hand stuff up to them or send it up on a rope, which will save them from running up and down a forty- or sixty-foot ladder. Consequently, the whole job will be expedited beyond, way beyond, what was expected from the addition of eight man-hours per day.

I discovered that if it took me ten days to do a certain job by myself, when I hired another man it took me the equivalent of eight days. I cut two days off. The two of us did it in four days instead of me doing it in ten.

Now you go down the line. You get to three, four, five. No matter what we work at, like in a research laboratory, you get more people involved as the experiment develops -- it ramifies out until it becomes departments. Each one takes over a department -- more people are involved, more people are employed. Then the discovery of some vaccine or some great new drug is possible.

In the spiritual search, or the so-called psychological/philosophical search, it is the contact with your fellows -- the contact with your fellows has first of all the possibility that one fellow can, say, study astrology and devote ten years to it, another fellow can study Zen, another fellow can study Raja Yoga, and then -- we did this, incidentally. In Akron, years ago when I was in my twenties. Some of the people are still alive in fact -- or half alive.

One of them was into Subud. We met every month and laid our findings on the table, so to speak, and discussed things. And little by little you get to the process of elimination. One of them is better than the other -- that's the process.

Incidentally, that's the direction of Truth. The direction of Truth is not a sensational Eureka! discovery. It's a gradual retreat -- from garbage. And you know what's more garbage and what's less garbage, and you settle for what's less garbage until you find something that's still less garbage. That's the path to Truth. Not following some heroic personal creature down some brilliantly lighted path. No, no. You fight yourself out of the mud, out of the garbage.

And you also get that inspiration, that association, that reminder. Because what we need when we're doing this -- your head is on the mundane, your head is on making a nickel, your head is on fighting your way through the problems of life, raising your children, or whatever. But you associate with a group of people, in honesty, with the idea of helping each other.

How do you help each other? You punch each other in the nose, that's how you help them. You stick your finger in their eye. You say, "Hey -- you're slipping. You're kidding yourself. You're getting off the track." And -- this isn't done in criticism -- they immediately say, "You caught me in time." And then you go on.

But if they don't catch you, if you don't have that, you're going to have far less than proportional returns. Because you're going to forget for a year at a time. For a year at a time. And then some little thing will pop up, and you'll say, "Geeze. Ho-ho boy. I'm playing the fool; I'm playing this game like an animal. Where's the thinker?"

So then things start to move. I have seen what I consider miracles in the last twelve years of my life -- absolute miracles -- just from following this concept of extra-proportional returns. (Although it wasn't a concept; it was just work.) And if you work, it presents itself. You don't have to hear it from me. You'll find it.

Now a few more. One important one is the "Law of Complexity." Life is the result of the Law of Complexity. Life is in proportion to complexity. A paramecium doesn't have the manifestation of intelligence that the Homo sapiens has. He's not as complex; he's more simple in structure. So the more complex, the more cerebral convolutions, the more synapses and that sort of thing, the more can be expected.

Likewise, when you get a computer that has as many cells in it as we have neurons, maybe you'll have a very selective computer.

The last one that's very important, that I'd like to leave you with, is the "Law of Paradoxical Immanence in All Things Relative." Once you get to studying this, you find that with everything you approach there's a paradox involved in it. And the paradox allows you leeway to argue yourself out of it, if you wish. But once you know that there's a paradox there, you'll be wise to it, and you won't go arguing with yourself.

You have to more or less really give an extreme example of this to get the point across. One of them is the idea of murder as opposed to childbirth. Now to me, the most beautiful things on earth are babies, and the next most beautiful thing on earth is a pregnant woman. That's always been my view on life. Little helpless people and selfless people. The female in pregnancy is selfless, and totally wonderful.

So we say, "From this must come this wonderful baby. And we must be something wonderful doing this. And I say, "It's better to kill an old man who's dying of cancer than to bring a baby into this world." And of course, what we did right there was to create a paradox: I'm saying the most beautiful thing on earth is a baby, and I'm saying at the same time the worst thing you can do is bring one into this world.

When you kill an old man with cancer, you solve pain, you end pain. You end a miserable trip. When you bring a baby into this world, you damn him to a miserable trip. But maybe that's the only way. I'm not saying why. Maybe it's the only way we can get beyond the human. Maybe that's his opportunity to be beyond the human. That's another paradox.

So all the way down the road, you can't make positive statements, flat statements, about everything. Because we don't know what is on down the road, what they lead to.

You get angry when you hear certain things. I heard they executed a guy the other day. They said he killed 160 people. And there's a certain anger, you know, that he got away with it. At first I thought he was an idiot for killing the wrong 160. He just picked them at random, when there's some people, you know, that you might really like to kill.

But with all joking aside, we don't know. We don't know what happened there at all. I can't conceive of it happening to anybody. But it happened. He said he did it. We don't know why that was in the blueprint. It was in the blueprint -- for some reason. And maybe we'll see a lot more of that stuff. Because it may be the herald of a catalytic change of something in the future. 

I'd like for you to ask some questions now, so that I can get down to a little rapport or communication with you individually.

Question: The blueprint -- does it start here on this earth, in this life, when you're born, or does it start somewhere else?

Rose: Now here's where the paradox comes in. The blueprint -- as I understand it -- is visible, it's evident. Where it started, I don't know. Again -- did it start? Did it start?

At the time that I was very much aware of it -- was when I was looking at things from an absolute position, looking down on this line of relativity in which there's no motion, there is no time. It's almost like a pencil line that's drawn on paper, just like a blueprint, and things automatically follow. When they get off -- they become out of harmony with the paper, with the space-time continuum, if you want to call it that.

I don't know. I don't have the explanation for it. You know, we can say a lot of things, we can translate it into what I call familiar language -- that a designer wanted things a certain way. And also the designer created a situation where when our egos get too far out in left field, they manifest their egotism by certain acts which would be contrary to the blueprint.

If we look at the goats and the sheep and the cows, we can see very easily that they are operating on a blueprint. We can predict their timing. Everything they do is predictable, down to the fine points. We don't bother to try to predict our own timing. But in time they will.

I believe, for instance, that there's a death gene. I've seen this in biological writings. Everyone is supposed to have a "clock" in their genes that will activate death at a given time. So if this is true, we have a pretty tight blueprint, individually and collectively.

The collective blueprint is what we call the laws of nature. That's what I'm talking about there. That's the perimeter, the periphery of our liberty. Our liberty should only go as far as the blueprint is designed for. And that's basically what is meant.

But I personally feel that it was done by intelligence. This was designed, not happened. I don't believe in evolution. I've got a lot of reasons -- I mentioned in the book about the pterodactyl -- I don't believe this happened by evolution.

For instance, we might get into this thing called AIDS. I don't recall hearing of it in history. Only in the last decade or two. So -- you mean that suddenly there is a virus that evolved? It would almost have to be evolved from some mental source. Because I'm sure it wasn't needed. It wasn't needed to help the growth of biological life. It helped to hurt it.

So there's a tremendous lot of evidence that there's a designer behind this. Now immediately somebody's going to jump up and say, "Oh -- you're talking about God." Well, I find that in an absolute dimension there's only one God. And when you get there, there are not two people. There is not you and God. So it leaves a singular type of being or essence -- the projector of a fictitious thing in the form of a blueprint. A very orderly blueprint.

This world is fiction, in other words. The reality -- this might sound strange to a lot of you, but believe me that is what you'll find -- when the lights go out, you'll awaken to something much more real than this. Much more real. If you're prepared for it. If you hunger too much to visit previous experiences, you might wind up making the trip again, I don't know. If you like it too well here.

Q: Would you say there's a parallel between your idea of the reverse vector and the idea that the mind has a non-somatic basis?

R: The mind, as far as we're concerned, has a somatic basis, because it's tied to it. The physical mind is tied to the mind dimension.

Q: It seemed like you were saying that there is a transmutation of energy that takes place in a non-somatic area, which eventually....

R: Yes.

Q: Is there a connection between that and your idea of a reverse vector?

R: The whole thing is a reverse vector. The natural process -- when I talked about the cycle of food -- it's in a curved thing going back to the earth. The food is digested, which is a transmutation from plant life to human life. When you get up to the glandular level, when all the energy in the body seems to be going to the glands, then it's time for another transmutation to the neural level. But it doesn't have to go up there.

That's the reverse vector. But the automatic vector, the natural vector, takes us back into the earth. In dissipation, boozing, dope, whatever.

This is where the reverse vector comes in. You take it on up -- when you transmute the neural energy into spiritual energy. I call it spiritual, but that's a loose word, because it means "above mental." You transmute food into mental energy, for mental expertise, genius, wisdom, memory, that sort of thing.

Q: Would you speculate on the nature of this material, this spiritual energy?

R: Well, the reason I've got this name for it -- in one level, in what they call "zapping" healing, you go above, you transmute energy up to the mental level. Now from that mental level it goes across and down to a physical level again, to heal somebody. That's the reason I don't advise healing. You go down and you take a corrupt body and rebuild it, to show off. Rather than go on and try to find the break in the stratosphere.

Because what happens in the healing that results from above mental, or supramental, transmutation is non-energy-losing. In that type of healing, there's no loss of energy. That's done by twisting the illusion.

We got to talking to Slim Cunningham about healing, and to Olga Worrels. I don't know how many of you are acquainted with Olga Worrels, but her husband Ambrose Worrels, was one of the most famous healers in the eastern part of the country. And of course, I had presumed these people were either faith healers or else they were zappers.

How we got to talking about it, I was looking at a button while I was talking to Slim -- I didn't want to look him in the face, so I looked at a button on his shirt. And he said, "You're healing me, aren't you."

And I said, "No, I'm not. If I am, I don't know it." I don't intend to be a healer. But he had emphysema. And he said, as I sat there and talked to him, his lungs seemed to clear up, from me staring at his button. Which I think is pure coincidence, or maybe he wished it, I don't know.

We got around to the idea -- I told him I didn't approve of the contact- or zap-type healing. I said that you could do it without that. You do it by creating a warp in the mental picture. Mary Baker Eddy had the same thing with fewer words -- it was considered faith healing. But it isn't necessarily faith healing. There's a little twist in the mind that does it.

So, consequently, you're no longer doing anything with your physical vector. You made a kind of quantum leap, and you're now in a mental dimension -- no longer a physical brain/mind dimension. No, you're above the body-mind.

The blueprint is harmonious -- if you don't mind the fact of the predators and the victims, the pageantry of eat and be eaten, in the beautiful world. Everything's being eaten and destroyed and killed and slaughtered, etc. Still, it's a very beautiful pattern. The grass is green in the spring because a lot of things die.

But -- I think the pain [Rose is referring to the pain in his head that preceded his self-realization - Ed.] basically comes from physical reaction to the mind being taken out or disconnected from the body, that's all.

Of course, when I tried to find somebody who knew something about it, I looked for years. I found very little mention of it except in St. John of the Cross. I don't know how far John of the Cross went -- he had an illumination when he was in prison. But a lot of people have had the different illuminations. Under stress -- times of death, sometimes before a firing squad -- it will happen. In times of tragedy, thinking is forced; you have to think about it, and the mind is opened up.

But there was physical pain. I got out of the body far enough -- the circulation in the head might have been down, I don't know. And people have asked me this, but I never thought to time it. I don't know how long I was out. I was alone at the time, and...

Questioner: Was there pain when you came back into your body?

Rose: The pain was when I was leaving. The pain got so intense that I left my body.

Q: I have astral-projected and never experienced any pain.

R: See, this is something a little different I think from astral projection. Because I have projected astrally and didn't have too much trouble. But this seemed to be something tremendously different. Most astral projection, if you notice, is limited to the geography here.

Q: About losing your ego -- the ego that you're talking about is your will to survive, or your life. You left your life -- something happened, and you died. That's the difference between astral projection and this.

R: The thing that I faced, number one, was -- I had a lot of little, real lousy, egos that I was trying to put across at the time. But also in the process, when I was sitting there and I knew that death was approaching, I had to face the fact, very quickly, that all of a sudden I was going to be possibly zero.

In a natural death, when a person dies slowly, they go through that change. And I went through it rapidly. I accepted death, knowing that very possibly it could be zero. You have no choice. Any bit of protoplasm -- animals do the same thing when they realize that they're going to be killed. Nature has the sedative.

Q: This was a mental thing that happened to you, and you mentally accepted the fact that you were dying. It felt reasonable to you because this is what life is about.

R: Yes. The total absurdity of one and the inescapability of the other. Everything just like dominoes -- the whole thing went down very rapidly.

Q: You just can't do that on the spur of the moment; certain things have to fall into place.

R: I couldn't bring it about, no. I don't particularly think that I'd care to.

I know there's a difference between whether I astrally stepped out of my body and went to see somebody I knew. (That would be a nice little trip, but I would say also that a bus ticket is cheaper.) It's not as traumatic. To go through this -- you can't plan it -- there's no way you can plan it -- because you'd have to put yourself in a state of mind in which you would be beyond relativity, beyond concern.

One time it happened after that, and it just came upon me like a flash. It didn't last too long because it wasn't traumatic. It was traumatic in that I saw very clearly all the people that I really cared for on this earth as not making it. I knew that certain ones weren't going to make it, they were going to be stuck in the illusion. My own family. And there was a lot of sadness in that, because naturally you'd like to take your family.

Q: What do you mean, not making it? Here in this life?

R: I find that there are different levels of people. And the best explanation I ever got for them was in Gurdjieff's system. He was what I consider one of the greatest psychologists that ever came out of the Western world. He died in 1949. He had a tremendous psychology. He found his through a prefect psychology as well.

He classified people as being instinctive, emotional, intellectual, or philosophic. He had seven classes, but he stopped describing them in detail at the philosophic. Man number seven he said was the perfect man -- meaning that man was either in tune with the Absolute or his highest state of development.

We go through the different realizations. We start off -- most of the people around, in the pyramid of life -- all life is pyramidal in form. The common element is the greatest -- the instinctive people are the greatest in number. There are very few of the philosophic people.

So what happens is -- there are corresponding spiritual states. You hear of all these different things that happen to people after death. And they happen in tune with the particular type of person having them. An instinctive person seemingly never has a eureka experience, a satori, or samadhi.

First of all, you can't talk to them. They don't want to hear anything -- except "Where can I get another drink?" or "Are there any girls down that way?" Sex, pleasure, accomplishment, raising hell, adventure -- that sort of thing.

Now I had one of those fellows talk to me on the street. And I always figured this, because they don't care to talk about anything about life after death. It seems like they're afraid of it. As well as having you stamped as being a fanatic or a nut, rather than listen to you. So you don't talk to them; you don't try.

I remember this one fellow, somehow he had heard -- maybe somebody told him I'd written a book or something -- he walked up to me in this little town where I was born. And he said, "Hey, Dick, I got a feeling you know something about this stuff: What happens to a person after they die?"

And I said to him, "You just had a heart attack about six months ago, I heard. You're the fellow who should know." And I said, "What happened to you?"

He said, "Nothing. Nothing." He said, "When I came back, the only memory I had was of being obliviated. I was out."

Now what transformation occurs to an instinctive person during this evolutionary thing to where they get a little curiosity-hunger? There's a little saying that you've wandered away like a child from home, the house of the Father. And he can't bring you back alone, you've gotten out too far. There has to be some generation of desire, hunger, nostalgia for the old homeplace. So you start back -- and if you start, you get some more momentum.

The next step above the instinctive person is the emotional person, which I call the emotional/devotional level. The implementation is forgetting the self, forgetting their selfish pleasures, thinking of somebody else, falling in love, thinking of your wife and children, or your husband and children, more than yourself.

This is a step upward from the instinctive person -- the only step that you can go through. Or, falling in love with Jesus. Or falling in love with an ideal. But, regardless, getting some focus beyond yourself, quit thinking about yourself and pleasure. I've heard men say that when they could no longer enjoy sex they wanted to be dead. And every time I'd hear it, I'd say, "When I have to depend on that -- I want to be dead." I don't consider this animal life anything to be snorting about for the next few decades.

This is the same with both male and female, this dedication to something beyond that physical vanity and love of pleasure. When those people approach death, invariably those people devoted to their parents and children -- all you have heard some accounts -- what is it when they die? Who appears? Mother appears; grandfather appears -- they reach over, pull them across a little gap. Because this was the bond of love.

But -- why? Where are those people? They're in a relative dimension. In other words, they are separate from those people. These people, finally, after so long -- for instance, I've known people who for twenty years were in a Jesus movement and then suddenly spring loose from it. "I've got to go back to the drawing board again -- I think maybe I've missed something." Their intuition comes to life again: "Better start looking."

So they get into astrology, numerology, the kabbalah -- and apply the intellect. That's the intellectual person. So after so much of that, they start to see patterns -- blueprints, possibilities, an order in the universe. In which they are a happy part. They transcend the emotional stage, and they find that they're able to approach this, understand it, work with it on the logical, intellectual level.

The kabbalah is a very logical thing, and through studying the kabbalah, supposedly people find great wisdom. Great wisdom, not great being. That’s the eureka experience. The word satori is synonymous with the eureka experience. That’s the Japanese Zen word for their achievement. So, after a while, people get tired of that. The people who die in that state of mind are a category of death experiences. All these things are written up by Moody, Kubler-Ross, and a lot more, and fall into these categories.

There are people who are visited by their relatives, people who see geometric figures or vistas. The next one is people who see like a psychedelic world-creation -- that's Bucke's experience [Richard Bucke, author of Cosmic Consciousness]. He said the city of Montreal was lit up with a rose color -- no one saw it but him. But the whole sky was transformed. And that was before the days of LSD.

So this is the result of the outgoing or liberation from this logic. Because logic is vanity. There is no truth in logic. It only applies to the orderly way electrons pile on electrons. It's a small-r reality. A small-t truth. Science. Which in it’s totality is illusion. So after the person realizes the possibility of illusion, he goes out again as I did. Looking you-don’t-know-where now. You realize you've been dealing with vanity. You've fattened up your head. You're seeking to solve this with your logical mind, and you find out you can't. So you don't know where to look. And that's the reason the last four or five years I was just looking any place I could. I looked under any and every rock. Any place. Listen to people, go out and travel, see phenomena, see if you could tie something together with these different phenomena you run into -- healing, miracles, and so on.

But by that persistence, even though you have no objective -- it's better that you don't have an objective -- then you reach the philosophic realization. This is samadhi.

Now those people don't see relatives. In fact, in the back of The Albigen Papers this is written up -- what I wrote when I came back from it, in which I lamented when I came down that I had lost the friends of my youth. Everything, relatives and everybody -- there was nothing, none of them were there. I felt that the world had melted, and that was the cause of a lot of the anguish as I went into it. I was describing the feelings as I approached it. Everything went.

Now the world wasn't a beautiful place. The world was as it is. All beauty is a projection. It's first of all the degree of refraction by which light bounces off protoplasm. But it's also basically a projection. We have certain impulses, and then we see what we want to see. Like the man on the desert island -- when he sees a cow, it becomes a beautiful woman. That's the downfall of a lot of people.

Q: When someone dies, like the emotional man, does he stay there?

R: I really don't know how long the hang-up occurs. I don't know whether they come back -- some teachers say they come back, they have to come back here before they make the next jump. Someone asked Buddha that, in the Buddhist anecdotes, where people went when they died. And he said that people of a certain religion -- when followers of Confucius die, they'll go to Confucius, and the Buddhists will go to the family of the Buddha. And whatever they're attracted to, dedicated to, whatever they believed in, is what they'll find.

And this has led some people to come to the conclusion that you went toward your desire, to a point where there were different religions. One of them was even called the desire region. There's a class of spiritualists -- a fellow by the name of Curtiss wrote this up in a book, but I notice that some Theosophical writings hit the same chord -- that a person, if they believe something -- once this illusion melts -- the only thing that happens is the collective creation of a homing place for them to converge on.

For instance, I was always amazed -- if you look at these case histories of people who cross over -- there was one I quote from in 1974 -- a fellow died in a car. They pronounced him dead. He was out for about two hours, and they revived him. He had been an agnostic before; he had no belief. He didn't see anybody, but he said he found himself in a place. And he was convinced of it's reality. He said there were no people there, but there was a place, he had landed in a place.

So I think sometimes that we have to free ourself -- in order to actually be a more vital part of the human family, we have to free ourselves from this clinging. We have to be it without clinging. I don't think we lose anybody in death, on any plane. But I think there's an unnecessary huddling together probably for another period of time, that's all.

But these experiences correspond with the types of people. Maybe it's all they can conceive. Take all of the people sitting here, and supposing you were about to die, and you had an absolute experience. How could you even survive in it? This is the difficulty. Without the necessary change of being, there is no comprehension. In other words, you have to become absolute to actually -- it's like going to China without knowing any Chinese: you're lost.

And what we're doing, all of you are sitting there now probably asking questions, trying to relate to it. You can't relate to it. You can't relate with the mundane mind to it. You can say, "Well, these are case histories of things that happened." But to transcend this, to get beyond this....

Even the dead person -- suppose a dead person wants to communicate with you. What they have to do is build a picture in your relative mind -- and I don't know how much trouble they would have to go through to do this -- they would have to build a picture in your mind of relative scenery, with them in the relative scenery. And then you'll say, "Grandpa's alive. I had a dream about him that was very real." But he had to create something that would be familiar to your relatively confused mind.

So with that type of confusion we are rooted in the necessity for the mundane dictionary definitions. Everything has to rest on terra firma. And that limits the understanding.

And if you were projected into it, I presume you would be totally lost. That's my presumption. If you weren't prepared for it, you'd be totally lost. So the whole thing is -- if we all go to the same place just by jumping off the cliff -- let's all get to the cliff real quick and get it over with. Because it seems to be a much better place to be.

But I think there's an advantage in life. I think there's an advantage. If life brings us an experience in which we're able to talk the language when we cross over -- that language over there, not this; this doesn’t matter -- then life becomes worthwhile.

I think the majority of you -- what I pick up from you -- the majority of you have felt that this life is not worth that much, as we previously set the values. The previously set values were not worth that much. There is something worth a tremendous lot more.

Life could be put to a tremendously better use than going down to the bowling alley every weekend, or going dancing, surfing, skiing, whatever. Even cocaine: Kennedy lived high, but I don't think he got the definition. [David Kennedy, son of Robert Kennedy, died of a cocaine overdose in 1984 - Ed.]

chit chat at end

(Discussion of meetings, etc., followed.)

end