1989-0212-Zen-Is-Action-Columbus

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Title	1989-0212-Zen-Is-Action-Columbus
Recorded date	February 12, 1989
Location	Columbus
Number of tapes	Two 90 minute cassettes
Other recorders audible?	No
Alternate versions exist?
Source	SN. Also have TW, PS, BM
No. of MP3 files	Four files: 42 min; 42 min; 46 min; 29 min
Total time
Transcription status	Published TAT Forum, 6 parts, Feb 2015 through July 2015
Link to distribution copy	http://distribution.direct-mind.org/
Link to PDF	http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
Published in what book?
Published on which website?
Remarks
Audio quality	See notes on versions. SH error in recording. Side one is very loud and overmodulated, while side 2 has low audio volume. Side 3 & 4 are normal.
Identifiable voices
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1989-0212-Zen-Is-Action-Columbus
	For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20150620111345

Notes

Published in full in Forum. Parts 1 through 6 as follows:

Part 1, Feb 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-02.htm#6

Part 2, Mar 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-03.htm#6

Part 3, Apr 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-04.htm#6

Part 4, May 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-05.htm#6

Part 5, Jun 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-06.htm#6

Part 6 of 6, Jul 2015: http://tatfoundation.org/forum2015-07.htm#6

PS version 4 mp3 files: 42 min, 42 min, 46 min, 29 min. This particular copy may have come from different sources. Side one is very loud and overmodulated, while side 2 has low audio volume. Side 3 & 4 are normal.

SN version way loud and overmodulated – done by SH

BM version audio seems to be better. e.g., audience questions, start of file 4

Where is venue? OSU, Wesleyan Center?

File 1

Forum Part 1

File 1 – 42 minutes.

00:00

Zen, basically, is finding answers, as all philosophical or religious or spiritual work is; finding the answer to self-definition: Who am I? Where am I going? Where did I come from? And people – blissfully or stupidly – lead their lives and never give it a thought, until they’re ready to die. And then they hurry up and pay their dues, thinking that will do it.

00:49

I’m not going to try to explain Zen to you, because Zen is action, not words. But I’m going to read something to you – I’m going to read some questions to you. I’m going to ask you some questions. And I’d like for you to try to pick out five of them perhaps that you have an answer for, and we’ll get at them when I get through reading this.

01:48

What do you know for sure?

Anybody ever ask you that?

Does a man own a house, or does the house own him?

Does a man have power, or is he overpowered?

Is man a predator, or a victim?

Behind some of these words is a whole philosophy, pro and con.

Does a man enjoy, or is he consumed ? (by that which he thinks he enjoys)

Can a man learn that which he really wishes to, by himself alone?

Why build anthills before knowing what an ant is? (meaning of course houses)

Why do we build conceptual towers of Babel about human thinking before we know what thought is?

How can we dare to define thought before knowing the source and cause of all thought, or the essence of thought?

When we describe bouncing, do we describe the striking object or that which is struck?

03:07

According to physics, the wall hits the ball as hard as the ball hits the wall

Is thought the process of bouncing, or the object struck?

Everything strikes back with an opposite reactive force.

Can you start thinking?

Can you stop thinking?

Try to stop thinking, first. Because you’re always thinking. Try to stop it. Then, make up your mind before you go to bed what you’re going to start thinking about when you wake up. See if it will work.

Is thought a sort of somatic emanation?

Behavioristic psychology says it’s just a little steam coming off of the body.

Do we think, or are we caused to think?

Meaning, can you stop thinking?

Is negative thinking, as commonly discussed, negative to man, or negative to nature?

In other words, you hear somebody saying a person’s got a negative attitude. Sometimes the people who accuse him have a negative attitude.

Does the brain generate thought like a radio generates a message coming from its speaker?

Is thought limited to the brain?

When a tree bends over, does it create wind by waving its branches?

What are you doing for certain, versus what is done to you?

What is telepathy?

Does thought travel beyond the head?

Does only the head think?

What is the vehicle for thought travel?

04:51

What’s it riding on, out across the space, when you have a telepathic communication?

Does the body manufacture thoughts, or does the body only serve as a conduit?

Where in the body are thoughts received during telepathy?

Where are they sent?

05:11

We don’t seem to be interested. We carry out telepathic experiments but we never bother to go to the root.

Do chemicals such as serotonin and other neurotransmitters create thought?

Or do they merely facilitate the penetration into our consciousness, of strictly sensory data?

Where will the answer to this question lead us? (multi-dimensional contacts)

How many full hours do we spend analyzing our thought processes? Or do we spend any?

Is it important to observe our reactions?

Are we only a body?

05:52

This is the dictum of our present generation. It’s much easier to pretend to cure the body than to cure a mind. So the psychiatrists are strictly body-curers.

In what part of that body is the seat of life?

06:09

We can cut off an arm or leg, or cut out and replace lungs, heart, kidneys and still live. I think that some of the ancient nationalities believed that our soul is in the liver; so if they cut it out, there went his soul. We can have our nervous system severed at the neck, with paralysis except in the head, and still live and think. We can remain unconscious for years while the body continues to live, noting that a person who is brain-dead according to medical instruments can continue to live, breathe, and at times recover and function consciously. Where were they then, during the interim?

Do we think, or imagine that we think?

Is our thinking automatic?

Do not our thoughts come before we have time to replace them?

07:04

Try. Try to replace one.

When we decide to search for the source of thought, why do we become mentally weary, or find our thoughts able to find objective or describable distractions – but unable to describe, name or systematize the progression, origins, or duration of thought processes?

07:29

Is man only a blob of protoplasm which is programmed to react according to a schedule, or is he a free agent? (conditioned reflexes, they say)

Are thoughts likewise only reflexes from programmed or calculated stimuli?

07:44

07:47

I remember reading a snatch from an old Sufi book, the guy had supposed to have written it a thousand years ago, and he said that the greatest enemy that a spiritual person has, or anybody has, is conditioning. And of course that’s the trend of our modern psychology.

Who programmed? Who stimulated?

Can we observe our thoughts?

If we observe our thoughts, who is looking?

That’s serious – when you see your own thoughts, who is looking?

When we observe our thoughts, are we not thinking about thinking?

Is such a thinker someone who dreams of yesterday, thinking that he watches a dreamer?

Or is he a detached watcher of past and present thoughts, who is awake and aware of the mechanical man?

What are we, an animated body in a suppressed, stagnated soul?

Do we have a mind? Are we mind-stuff? Or are we a programmed body and mind?

Do we actually know that which we are doing?

If so, why do we repeatedly regret things that we do?

Does the metazoan, insect, animal or man know why it reproduces?

Everybody’s so noble, but they run right out and pop little ones, and go through the necessary machinery or role to do so.

Do the trees create wind by waving their branches, or is it always moved by an external force?

Does a person seduce another, or are they both seduced?

What does man do besides fertilize?

Are you a hero or a victim?

Are you loved, or are you consumed?

Do you have possessions, or are you possessed by them?

Which is more evident and apparent to you: your divinity, or your animal appearance?

If we wish to plan our lives, do we not need to consider while planning that it may be all planned, and that we have no choice?

How do we plan around that possibility?

10:15

Must we not define our limitations?

When we define our limitations, do we automatically need to define ourself?

Do we discover more accurately the nature of our Self?

By Self I mean with a capital “s”. When we talk about finding the Self or defining the Self, we’re talking about capital-“s” Self. For the small-“s” self, I agree with B.F. Skinner, that that’s the animal self.

How much of human action is fated, predestined?

Is the knowledge of factors of any value in the face of possible predestination?

If we’re predestined, why act? Or why refuse to act?

What do we know for sure? Do you believe more than you really know?

Is all our reality merely a collective belief? A paradigm?

Of course, if you want a reference to that theme, it’s Joseph Chilton-Pearce. , Chilton-Pearce believed that we can create our own paradigm. I think a lot of people are going about things that way. The big game in life today is to create by agreement, by whooping it up: “We’re going to create a perfect world.”

11:46

Is science a mental feat created by mankind, or is it only a human discovery of a mental set?

You’ve got a mathematical set, and we carry it on – we find out that we can build greater sets with the aid of the little sets, and the result is possibly a science. I’m just asking, “Is it?”

Or is scientific reality only a progression of events, planned and expedited by a mentality of cosmic or spiritual proportions, which utilizes the mentality, egos and energy of humans?

What is life?

What is death?

Are these items ever properly defined except in terms of each other?

Life is not death, death is not life, and we’re satisfied.

Can theological facts be established by voting?

Is Mary the mother of God, or is humanity the mother of God? Or neither?

Is God determined by victorious armies?

Is virtue established by psychological edict? By ecclesiastical vote? Or by the requisites of our ultimate essence?

What is sin? An offense against yourself? An offense against your fellowman? An offense against God?

Is an offense against God recognized by divine outcry, earthquake or cosmic catastrophe?

Is it a sin to eat meat?

15:29

Are the animals our brothers? Are they possessed of intelligence and soul?

Do animals sin when they eat other animals?

Or are such sinning animals pardoned for keeping ecology in balance?

That’s one of the great whoop-de-doos today, keeping ecology in balance. So we might absolve them from their sin.

Is it wrong to kill except for food?

If so, why do we do wrong by not eating the people we kill?

14:01

Who is knowledgeable about good? (in the item of goodness)

Is good that which we desire, or that which is in itself good?

What is the condition of being “in-itself” good? (or in-itself whatever)

If a man drives a horse through a plate glass window, should the man be prosecuted or the horse?

If a man steals to feed his children, should we prosecute the man or that which drove him, the children?

If a man rapes a girl should we prosecute a) the man, b) the girl who tempted him, c) his ancestors for his genetic inheritance or glandular inclination, or d) the force that designed mankind?

What is equality?

Was Samson equal to Delilah?

Is a baby equal to a dying man?

Are you only half of a plan by virtue of not possessing both sexes?

Is peace of mind more important than global peace or herd-peace?

15:16

Who or what are you?

Are you only a body?

Are you rather a complex organism, a cell colony, a nature-oriented bundle of conditioned reflexes?

Is the brain a monitoring station, designed for the organism’s indefinite survival?

Or is our body programmed for death, following procreation, like the corn and the wheat?

I’m speaking of the death gene now. In other words, once you reproduce, you’re no longer needed.

15:56

Is all religion and philosophy merely rationalization, emanating from the computer, to answer constant cellular awareness of death?

In other words, is religion an outgrowth of the fear of death?

Or is the universal belief in life after death an intuitive reading from that computer? – a reading not completely translatable into computer symbols, which are limited.

Is there a soul? Did it exist before the body, or must it be developed, grown or evolved?

Nobody seems to care.

Prove the following: mind, other than somatic awareness; subconscious mind; ego, id, superego; chakra, kundalini; tisra-til; astral, etheric, causal, desire bodies; aura, halo, ectoplasm; spiritual ear (there has been a lot of money spent on that one), spiritual nectar; conscience.

In other words, these things are being thrown about – that’s the reason I listed them – and we somehow manage to put a lot of importance on them.

What is time?

Does time pass, or is only you who passes?

Is space-time a stable matrix, while we are only transient visitors?

17:38

How much of life is only a mirage? (some people when they’re dying might see it as that)

Do we see this world infallibly, or obliquely?

Are the senses fallible, or infallible?

Can you see, hear, feel, smell or taste time?

Is time only a relative conceptualization? What is the reality of time?

Does the ant or amoeba interpret duration the same as a man, or does its time pass more swiftly?

18:19

In other words, does he lead a long life? – or does the fruit fly live only a few minutes of our time. Maybe he lives a long life. [to him]

What is duration? What does a lifetime feel like?

When you get to be my age, you’ll know a little more each year how much it feels like.

Does it feel different to a child than to an old person?

What is the relation of memory to time?

Do we remember a duration, or measure it, if we have no clock at hand?

Do we remember how long a pain lasted, when it occurred a year ago?

19:00

Would women become pregnant as often if they remembered the duration and intensity of the pain of childbirth?

Did you ever talk to them about it? The ones I’ve talked to didn’t think much of it, after a few days had gone by, or maybe a few weeks.

Do we have a real sense of time when we hear a clock ticking? Do we then know what a second is, or what stretch of consciousness exists for others in that second?

Do the wings of a hummingbird move rapidly or slowly, to the gauging of the hummingbird?

To the time sense of the fruit fly, is his life long or short?

Is the sense of duration, or passing time, proportional to the mass of the entity that experiences it?

Does time exist other than as a fascination which seems to be brief or longer of duration?

20:00

If the sun is our ultimate clock, of the earth’s rotation as a measurement, what is our measurement of time after the death of our senses?

Is time an illusion that prevents us from experiencing a Self that has no motion?

Have you ever heard a clock ticking in a delirium?

If the mind can be distorted in a delirium, or in an LSD trip, does the mind ever understand the true feeling of a second?

What is nostalgia? Is it the soul’s viewing of a previous feeling?

What is space? Is space interdependent with time?

Are they not measured by each other?

Such as with a light-year; time is determined by spatial phenomena, rotation.

Do space and time exist at all except in reference to us?

What is the understanding of insects, of the distance to the sun or moon?

If they could look up and see that, what would their appraisal be as far as time is concerned? Because they have no clocks. [note: mixes time and distance] [Forum part 1 ends]

Forum Part 2

sn1-21:24 [goes to 41:19, the end of file 1]

Do we have a true picture of nature?

When we appreciate nature as being beautiful, is such appreciation of life, or of death?

How much of what we consider beautiful is the ebbing and flowing of life?

One time a fellow came to my house and it was springtime. The birds were chirping and the grass was beginning to grow, and everything looked promising and wonderful. I said, “Did it ever occur to you that they might be screaming? They’re eating each other out there while they’re doing that.” They don’t lose a meal, you know.

Have you ever watched the war that goes on in a drop of water, or in a cancerous tissue?

22:11

How many protozoans are required to sustain the world’s metazoans? Can they be counted?

How many protozoans are eaten alive every second?

How many microscopic metazoans are eaten each second by larger metazoans?

Is death painless for these beings? Do they scream?

How many small metazoans are needed to feed one worm or one insect for a day?

22:38

How many worms or insects die every minute to feed the birds?

How many worms or insects are needed to feed a pair of birds and their fledglings each day?

How many worms or insects are needed for one hen’s egg?

Boy, you’re getting a lot of life there.

In the summer we hear the hum of many insects. Is the hum beautiful, orchestral, or a bedlam of screaming?

Are not trees more attractive in autumn, when dying?

Which is the true destiny of all beings: a growth into individual eminence, or a means of energy-food for higher beings? – meaning predators.

sn1-23:26

[break in tape – something missing – check against other versions ]

[Maybe this is the WV Joke]

Was his last name God?

Now this is what I call a theological section:

Should self-definition have priority over concerns for health?

Is the idea of personal immortality, before such an idea has been proven by experiencing immortality, any more than an egotistical idea?

What are the mechanics of divine healing?

Should the search for God have precedence over using an unidentified divinity as a healing utility?

24:06

Some people are searching for God, but some people are just able to learn how to heal and they ascribe that to God. Or at least they think they’ve got a toe-hold on God because they healed somebody, and in healing them call it divine.

Is God a gigantic gestalt?

Why are we here?

Are we accidents of evolution, animals that accidentally evolved upon a planet that accidentally evolved?

The chances of accidental evolution seem unlikely in view of the complexities of protoplasm, such as the ability of the cell to produce milivoltage components and to possess memory. Can we say that all this came about by an immediate or instantaneous teleological prompting which had to take thousands of years to develop, after the million years needed to evolve less-specialized cells similar to plant cells?

25:14

In other words, look at the time between these. If it’s a theory that we evolved from ketone enzymes, for instance, how many million years for that type of evolution? And then you look at a thing like synapses in the human brain and neurotransmitters, very delicate chemicals – how would these very delicate chemicals evolve?

25:44 Were we created by a skillful biochemist? If you look at a building or an airplane and you see the components of it, there had to be some skill there, rather than evolution.

What is the process that would result in the evolution of synaptic voltage? How would we bring it about if we tried to synthetically?

[Question missing, something like: “Is it possible that all life is a dream?” << this is confirmed here: http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/arQuestionsLecture.htm ]

Is it possible that all life is a dream?

If so, is it not a very detailed and consistent dream, showing few variations, seeming to strictly adhere to a blueprint?

In other words, if it’s a dream or an illusion, it’s abiding by some sort of blueprint.

Is man manufacturing this blueprint, by setting up a rough paradigm, and creating details such as brain chemistry as he goes along?

That’s what Chilton-Pearce thought, that we were doing it ourselves. A lot of people think that we’re making this a nicer world to live in, and all this kind of stuff. But can they? Is it possible?

26:47

If so, has man lost control of his creation, if he cannot find an alternative for disease and death?

When our lusts reach a certain peak, it seems as though new diseases come along to keep us busy

What are the odds for an accidental synthesis of a ketone enzyme? (Just accidentally, in a little puddle of water.)

What is the significance of common denominators? Are they valid for evaluating religion and behavior?

We use this thing of common denominators to evaluate a truth in mathematics. Can we do that by saying that just because they exist in great numbers, they must be important?

Is there a body-manufactured force?

This is another realm of research or thought – such as [anodile? anodyle?] vril, élan vital, or quantum energy, capable of tremendous magical power, transferrable and projectable.

27:53

There are two windows, states of mind, which are not consistent with each other: they are the daytime view and the nighttime view. The latter, with its dreams and horizontal speculations, upon awakening forms a strange field of thought and threatens the convictions of daytime. How do we balance this force?

What bearing do these often morbid night states of mind have upon violent acts?

Is there any value in speculating on the genesis of biological or human life, weighing the value and importance of slow evolvement against the possible perfect instantaneous creation? And weighing the suffering and dying against perfect or unchanging immortality?

“Don’t worry,” they say, “you’ll be born again.” So you suffer a little, pay your taxes.

Are ecologists possibly trying to thwart the ordained directions of the engineer who designed the evolution of life?

29:02

Sanity and syphilis – are they both approved by democratic voting?

If man did not cause himself, then that which caused him is invisible, meaning not apparent in this dimension. What reason would a superior engineer have for creating life as seen on earth, all flora and fauna?

29:32

How rational are some of the reasons given for the acceptance of the creator-concept, and a set of morals presumed to gain tolerance from that creator?

(Not much more to go.)

What is talk? Why is talk necessary?

What causes different perspectives?

What liabilities are incurred with unavoidable states of mind?

What is a state of mind?

I’m dead serious. I’d like for you to know. Because these are the things that move every human being: states of mind. They’re not in the psychological glossary.

30:19

Are our perspectives rooted in valid bases and definitions, or in indefinable feelings? – which may be as valid or meaningful as definitions.

Does a given color cause the same reaction in all people?

Why do some perfumes enchant one person and cause nausea in another?

What is beauty?

How do perspectives which are influenced by feelings affect science?

Do they help of hinder?

Can a scientist totally rule out feelings of judgments?

Did the scientists of Columbus’ time feel that the earth was flat, or know that the earth was flat?

How about some of them today, then?

31:06

What is wisdom?

Is it foolishness or wasted effort, unless it is restricted to objective or materialistic values?

Is all wisdom unbiased?

Is a wise man just one who gets along with his fellowman? (We’d like to have that belief.)

Is wisdom just adaptation, symbiosis, or blending with others to a point of losing personal identity?

31:38

Is silence a trademark of wisdom – even if the silence is caused by cowardice?

Who or what is the authority in regard to human essence or nature?

Does a man love, or is he incapable of loving?

Does a man desire to be loved while pretending to love others?

Does a tick love the host, or the blood of the host?

Is love of every kind programmed and projected onto us?

Is there only one dimension?

Does not the possibility of multiple dimensions weaken our significance and our pretended potential for controlling the environment?

32:32

What is God?

What are his dimensions?

What is the soul?

Are these just aberrated ideas?

Why do people use words like God or soul without going to some effort to define them?

What is an idea?

Is there a thinking self, or only an awareness that witnesses reaction, and possibly witness a pseudo-ego or self?

Can a man have spiritual or essence clarity and be psychologically confused?

[repeats this for emphasis]

The savant idiots, the starets of Russia – plain nuts, they say.

Are we an individual, or a conglomerate of several selves?

If there is such a conglomerate, how is the real Self isolated?

Have we just now isolated the real Self, by taking the position of an external questioner?

Is thought a possession or an obsession?

What is the relationship between thoughts and glands?

What is sanity or insanity?

34:09

Is sanity only somatic healthiness?

Are unpopular people insane? Or outside the normal curve?

Could sanity ever mean that state of mind with perfect understanding of all problems? A state of mind from which the altering lens of ego has been removed from mental vision or perception?

34:37

Would such a version of sanity imply the need of perfected logic, or perfected intuition?

Intuition is another item that is not seen much in your psychological texts.

What is intuition? How does one arrive at it?

Is thought a reaction to an electrical stimulus?

Now this seems to be the biochemical idea of thought, that it’s an electrical stimulus caused by voltage, leaping across the synapse.

If we cannot willfully think, do we ever make decisions?

Or is it possible that only the people who realize that they cannot enforce decisions, are the ones who eventually may find ways and means to make things happen?

If we think about thought, is thought then objective and separate from the thinking self?

Is thought an entity, or an emanation of sorts?

Can sanity be gauged by logic? (It should be.)

Is behavior considered normal by virtue of percentages of incidence?

Is all such “normal” behavior always logically excusable?

In other words, if fifty-one percent of the people in this country become murderers, it will be normal. Is that logical?

Is sanity a way of measuring the skill of survival?

Or is sanity also involved in the skill of checking factors such as motivation, correct reasons for living, quality-control of morality, and the control or evaluation of environmental factors?

Would our behavior be the same if we discovered by logical or even common-sense means that our environment were greater or less than we previously believed it to be?

36:52

In parenthesis I have “More mind dimension.” The sanest bird cannot outwit the rifle, much less the higher technology of poisoning.

Would we behave the same if we discovered beyond speculation that there was no life after death?

If we really got that proof someday – absolutely nothing but oblivion – how would that affect our behavior?

37:23

Are we not caught somewhere between, and is not this materialism a bit of fence-riding, that says on one hand we can accept only that which we see, while refusing to look for or see new factors not immediately accessible to our senses? Or new truths which would give new definitions to life and new meaning to existence.

Psychiatry contains opinions rather than pure scientific findings. Has psychology become a cult?

Does psychology or psychotherapy rule by edict rather than by reason?

If the high priest says, “That’s it,” then that’s the law.

Is there any science in the modus operandi of these current mental therapies?

38:16

Is it safe to allow psychologists to monitor our lives if they are only cognizant of body-survival and would program us only for that?

Are psychologists who work in advertising and promotion a boon to mankind, or are they the manipulators without proper respect for the victims of selfish or spurious interests?

Can the psychiatrist produce sanity in a person if he has not adequately defined sanity?

38:50

This is their stock in trade, those words. They have nothing but words for their stock in trade and they can’t define the words.

If he defines sanity, should the psychiatrist not be required to bring sanity to every patient who is any degree insane?

Now they admit they’re insane, because they’ve got to get their money. But lately there have been lawsuits when somebody runs amok after dealing with a psychiatrist, and I presume that that’s a proper thing. They should either be a good witch doctor or no witch doctor.

What does behaviorism prove?

What do the tracks made by an animal prove? Do they tell you about the essence or purpose of that animal?

Does a normal curve define normality and morality?

39:50

Can we study the mind by ignoring brain chemistry and behavioristic testing?

I call that introspection, structure-less.

Is it more important to know what a man is thinking or capable of doing, than it is to know who is thinking or doing, and what is thought?

Are the conclusions reached by introspective thinking corroborated by sciences such as brain chemistry and the statistics of behaviorism?

40:27

Now I’ve got a point here that I just realized the importance of lately; I throw this out with no indicated partisanship:

Is the photon an intelligent messenger of God?

Is the photon a distraction-being, that dazzles the human eye so that he cannot see the realities found in introspection?

Will you ever be free and at the same time be aware?

41:03

That’s it. What are the five most important ones? [Forum Part 2 ends] [silence] [tape ends at 41:58 << trimmed off dead space. Now ends at 41:19]

File 2

File sn2 – 42 minutes. First 4 ½ minutes of side 2 was blank (so deleted in mp3).

Forum Part 3 - Intuition

sn2-00:00

[gap in tape: sn, ps, bm, tw versions] Q. [SH added question about intuition, which R appears to be responding to.]

Q. Could you say more about intuition?

R. Intuition is something that I don’t find in any books; I don’t find an analysis of it. Our thinking is limited to a set of symbols, composed of an alphabet when we speak of it. We examine things interminably, battling back and forth, making graphs and charts, thinking we’ll get some mathematical formula.

But I maintain that the human mind has a factor which the whole psychological system has dodged; the practitioners have no knowledge of it, can’t use it. And that is, that intuition leads to direct-mind communication. Intuition doesn’t come from learning. It comes with the child. The little child has no language. I always said that children are born like gods, angels, and we seduce them with language in order to put them to work. Somebody said way back there, that little children would have access to the kingdom of heaven. He also said the kingdom of heaven is within you. It’s through this childish intuition that the road becomes wider. And there are ways and means of developing your intuition.

sn2-01:57

Q. Care to say what they are?

R. I won’t tell you – because it’s different for different people. But to give you an example of where it applies, I used to work on the atomic submarine, up in Alliance, Ohio at a research place. They were using atomic isotope power for intense heat. They had NaK, which is a compound of sodium and potassium, a liquid metal that looks like mercury. They were trying to get pipes that would carry that to a boiler, and it burned up everything they put it into. When they put it through copper tubes they immediately melted. So they devised a big pipe with a hole through it about the size of a pencil so it wouldn’t blow up, and they had to pump it. But they couldn’t escape getting into the impeller of the pump, and the impeller floats on bearings that are greased; as soon as NaK hits water or any water compound it blows up. So they were at a dead standstill on creating a pump.

sn2-03:54

So what happened, there was a man there, a Christian Scientist – I’m not touting Christian Science; in fact I used to needle him all the time because I thought he was leaning too much on belief. But this man had no chemistry or physics. I had majored in physics myself so I knew a little bit about it, but I knew nothing of what was going on, and this man had no education in that field. But he said one day, “Why don’t you pass the NaK between the field and the central armature.” And they said, “Oh, that will never work, because it’s a metal and it will probably wrap around and unite with the copper.” And he said, “Why not try it?” Of course it seemed like it was doomed to failure because of the heat element. But they did it. They tried it, and that’s the reason they’re pumping it today, because a man who wasn’t even a scientist had an intuition. , ,

sn2-05:02

Another thing is, you look at these savant-idiots as they call them. , You say to the guy, “What’s 350,000 times 242,999?” And he thinks awhile and tells you, and they check it out on the computer and he’s right. That’s intuition. That’s an instant knowledge of something that’s seemingly unknowable. But he’s got some key. All these other doors are shut off, so he can focus on intuition. Also, the animal has intuition: the animals know when to run when they’re attacked. But we are very complex beings, we have trained ourselves to be mechanical: “Don’t move until you’ve added up the column and subtracted it correctly, so we know exactly what’s going on and we can predict it next time.”

sn2-06:03

Intuition brings up a lot of things, very valuable, that can’t be duplicated – because the operator doesn’t even know why. When I was in the seminary I was just a kid; I went away when I was twelve years of age. I didn’t know anything about religion – except that I always thought God was in the altar. Also I thought the nuns and priests had no intestines, that they had no bowel movements or anything like that. I thought they all had to be saints. Of course I was disappointed in that, you might say; I found them human. But I just sensed that they weren’t sincere. And I got out. I left them, just because of that sense. If I hadn’t, I’d be a slave yet today. I’d be a slave to a dogma I couldn’t prove.

sn2-07:15

Now I can’t prove a lot of things that I know, but I can show them to you. We had a meeting, I think it was in this building, [which?] and we were doing experiments in hypnosis. The reason for this is to show that through hypnosis you can see the human mind very clearly. After you get into harmony with your audience you can start to tell which ones are susceptible. There’s no reason; you can’t say it’s the blinking of an eye or what it is. But this intensifies. I used to walk through the audience and point at a person and say, “You have a headache, don’t you?” Now a lot of people might say that you’re suggesting it, because there’s a hypnotic background. But the hypnosis was to remove the headache.

sn2-08:19

We had a Chautauqua up in Pittsburgh and two doctors were sitting there; one was a chiropractor from Cleveland, Leslie Hauserman, and the other was an MD from Ravenna, Ohio, Fred Bissell. And not only could I see the headache but I could put my finger on it. Then I would take the headache away; I pulled it out the top of their head. Hauserman said, “Something like that happened to me.” He said he had a little girl who came in with her mother, and the girl said to the doctor, “You have a sore shoulder.” He said, “How’d you know?” She said, “I know, I can see it.” And he said, “Can you point your finger where it hurts?” This was a twelve year old kid; she walked over and put her finger right on it.

sn2-09:43

This is intuition. You don’t have to believe this, but you’ll run across incidents in your lifetime and people will tell you these things. Now this is without the formula. But there is a formula, and you’ll understand it once you see enough of it. In the book The Direct Mind Experience there’s a chapter on betweenness, that explains how it happens and the way you hold your head for it to happen. The things that we define by intuition are shouted down by the verbalists, the people who say, “Prove it.” But the proof is in the pudding. You can get a scientific doctor who can’t cure you, and then somebody like a savant idiot comes along and patches it up. [laughs, referring to himself]

sn2-10:46

This is very important because when you’re into self-definition – the possibility that you have an interior or surviving self, or that there’s a dimension that you enter after you die, or you have an experience and come back, and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you lived beyond that experience – this can only be done if you have intuition. Without this, everybody is looking for mundane things, they’re not looking for truths. The truths in this line are subjective now: the body’s no longer here, the body’s no longer conscious.

sn2-11:31

How many accounts do you hear of it? You’ll get them in Moody’s book, Life After Life. These are starting to come out now. The reason they didn’t come out before was that people in the operating rooms, the nurses, the doctors, were told not to repeat the things that they heard in the hospital, because it would lead to arguments or maybe even lawsuits. That feeling is gone now. People are very curious about these things. One of the signs of an impending disaster is when people start getting interested in esoteric philosophy. They’ve had their religion with them for a hundred years but it didn’t answer the question. So, “Let’s go down to the witch doctor, see what he says, just for the hell of it.”

sn2-12:46

Q. At this point in your life what do you hope to achieve? What motivates you?

R. The approaching death. I’m trying to do something before I die.

Q. When you say, “because of approaching death,” do you mean your purpose is more self-caring as opposed to altruistic?

sn2-12:22

R. No, no. I know what’s going to happen to me. I’m just saying I’d like to run across some real people before I die, that’s all.

Q. How do you recognize a pure state of spirituality as opposed to intuitive or intellectual development?

R. Spiritual development can’t be tied in with physical or mental development. It’s invisible. Again, we’re going into definition – what you or somebody in this audience would define as spiritual and the way I define it. My idea of spiritual development is a person who is aware of their essence. To merely sit around and declare that God exists because he’s in Genesis isn’t spiritual with me. That’s make-believe. You can’t tell a spiritual person from their looks. Because they’re like savant idiots. If he’s truthful and honest he’ll be himself; he won’t be a hypocrite. So if he looks like a slug and talks like a slug, you’ll think he’s a slug. But he may be spiritual; he may understand himself. And that becomes apparent as soon as you start talking to them.

Paul Wood

sn2-15:06

I met a man one time by the name of Paul Wood, from Texas. At this time I was going up to meetings in Akron. We had some people there who had graduated from Alcoholics Anonymous and now were on something of an esoteric or spiritual path. Incidentally, Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an enlightened man, although he was originally an alcoholic. Anyhow, this group of people had met through Alcoholics Anonymous, and they would get together and were interested in spiritual work.

sn2-15:47

This man from Texas came up to visit Bob Martin, the fellow I knew real well. , And he had been enlightened. He looked like Crazy Guggenheim, the guy who used to be the sidekick for Jackie Gleason. This was a stocky fellow with eyes that sagged down, he was fat, a big heavy fellow, that’s the description of him. But that doesn’t matter. To look at him you wouldn’t have thought he was anything. You’d think he had spent a lot of time drinking, which he did, before he had this experience.

They had brought a bunch over from Firestone or Goodyear or those places. Some of the engineers heard about him being in town, so they came over to look at him through the glass and see if he was crazy or not. And he was telling us about what happened. When the war broke out he was an engineering student, so they made him a pilot or something on a bomber, and his ship bombed Nagasaki or one of those places. Now he was a Bible student before that, and he said it bugged him after he dropped the bombs. So his commanding officer said, “You’d better take a leave, a sabbatical, go home and get some rest.” He couldn’t see sending him out on another mission.

sn2-17:47

He said that what troubled him was that he had believed the Bible, and that this wasn’t coinciding with his beliefs. In the Bible it says that God observes the fall of the sparrow, and here’s a big bomber dropping tremendous eggs and killing people by the eighty thousand. “Where is this God I believed in?” So he came back to Texas, San Antonio I think it was. He was married and had some little children. And he couldn’t have any peace; he just became obsessed with finding that answer. He realized that he was troubled and he said, “The reason for my trouble is evidentially spiritual, and if I’m a fundamentalist I ought to go into the Bible and find the answer.”

sn2-18:55

So he got to searching through the Bible and he found where Christ supposedly said (I’m quoting him, because I don’t read that much), “If you would have something granted to you, pray thusly,” and what followed was the Lord’s Prayer. So he meditated, concentrated, analyzed the Lord’s Prayer twenty-four hours day. He and his wife were quarreling because he wasn’t making any money. He got a job as a car salesman in a dealership but he wasn’t doing them much good; he was acting a little buggy. He said that he was just overwhelmed one day and he prayed for God to kill him. And he said he passed out.

sn2-19:46

When he woke up he was in a hospital. For ten days he travelled in space-time. All the time he was in the hospital he was conscious, while his body seemingly was unconscious. One amazing thing was that his trip doesn’t coincide with some of the other incidences of enlightenment. He was more like Swedenborg; he could drop into almost any time category he wanted to. He’d be walking down the street with this friend of mine – Bob Martin used to relay a lot of this stuff to me – and he’d watch the battle of Gettysburg, or he’d watch something going on in Europe. He would describe it accurately, and then brush it aside as though it didn’t mean anything. But he somehow had gotten past time as being independent of space; that they are both one so to speak.

sn2-20:50

Well, the engineers from Firestone and Goodyear were kind of sneering at him. I didn’t say anything; I just watched him. And I came to the conclusion that he had been there. I knew it, just from what he was saying. And they started throwing questions at him: “Well, if you know so much, why aren’t you rich?” and all this sort of thing. They didn’t seem to get the importance of what he had become or discovered. We do not, incidentally, ever learn in this life anything of importance on a philosophic basis. We only become. And you never find God until you are God. That’s the simple answer.

sn2-21:51

But anyhow, they were ridiculing him. And he started telling a story. He had been going around trying to tell people to read the Lord’s Prayer, to get this enlightenment. Of course, it didn’t work, because not everybody was like him; they hadn’t bombed Japan. But he believed that he would be taken care of. He didn’t look for food. His wife had left him, the kids left him. So he got a little place by himself out in the country. And he said that every time he’d get to the point of starvation one of the ranchers who lived around there would bring in a quarter of beef or something for him to eat. They seemed to know he didn’t care whether he lived or died.

He said that one time he was really down and out and had nothing to eat except an onion and a soup bone of some sort. And there were people there who had come to visit him. So he said, “All I’ve got is some broth.” And they said, “Okay.” So he cooks up this big pot of broth, and he said everybody ate it and seemingly they were satisfied. Of course the thought went through everybody’d head, “Oh, this fellow’s borrowing from the loaves and fishes parable and he’s going to capitalize on it.” And Bob says to him, “Paul, geez, I wish you hadn’t told that story. I’ve been telling these people how sincere you are.” And I looked over at Bob and said, “Bob, shut up. He doesn’t give a damn whether they believe it or not.” He told it because it was true, that’s all; he didn’t care if people believed it.

sn2-23:47

People want words, formulas. When you tell them about any spiritual experience they say, “Here’s a thousand dollars, can you do it in fifteen minutes? I’ve got to catch a bus.” And that’s the unfortunate direction most people have. But the only way the person can ever experience this is by going the same road and going through the same troubles, if that’s what it takes. Whatever it is.

sn2-24:39

Q. What are you reading those questions from?

R. This is the most recent book the TAT Foundation has produced, and in it are some of my writings. That’s a talk I gave, “The Lecture of Questions.”

OPTIONAL: Q. How would somebody get a copy of that?

R. The little man over there with the smile. [laughs] I shouldn’t say little, he’s as tall as I am.

Q. I like all the questions but I can’t pick out the most significant five.

sn2-25:16

R. Sure. You’d have to sort through them, I know that.

Q. Your question, “Can you be free and at the same time be aware?” – this is something I have been struggling with.

sn2-25:34

R. I think you have to be free to be aware. There are a lot of things, once you get to figuring them out: for instance there’s humility. When I was in the seminary they were trying to teach everybody to be humble. Do you know what humility can do for you if you ever get thrown into jail? We have to have enough pride; you have to carry yourself with pride and self-protection to a point where you no longer need it. This is a jungle. We have to be realistic. You can’t be humble with animals.

sn2-26:28

[Q rewritten by SH – partly inaudible] Q. The more I try to be aware of what I’m doing, the less I seem to understand what’s real. I’m wondering if I’ll ever see it.

R. Umm, don’t worry about it. Because what you’re doing basically is being your own therapist, and evidently not a good one, because it’s making you unhappy. By that I mean, whenever we start analyzing ourself we get to hate ourself, by our previous standards. There’s no great pride in being a human. If it causes disquiet, hey, when I had my experience I wept for a week. But it was the result of what I discovered. So don’t be dismayed if you have some unhappy moments. The happy ones are as much of a mirage as the unhappy ones. Except the happy ones are more deadly because they’ll trap you. The unhappy ones will only drive you away.

[part 3 ends]

sn2-27:53

Forum Part 4 - More on intuition

[shortened question]

Q. You were talking about intuition. How do you distinguish imagination from something you want?

sn2-28:57

R. Well, imagination is nothing more than a free running of associations. But your intuition is a becoming. It’s like growing a new faculty. And it can only be done by a protected lifestyle. You have to protect yourself.

Q. What do you mean by that?

R. I don’t want to explain it to you now, because there are two sexes here. Women are born with intuition, but it kind of runs wild. It can go haywire. A woman is much more sensitive. And I go back to anthropology, if you want to call it that: The woman was gifted with intuition because she had to raise the young, which were helpless, and she had to be able to make an instant decision on how to protect their lives against a predator. Whereas with the man, that wasn’t his concern so much as protecting the wife or just defending himself. So he developed a logical system, of getting a sharper ax to chop up the enemy with.

sn2-30:13

But in the female the intuition does run wild sometimes. I’ve seen women who when their husband was out, they knew exactly which beer joint he was in. They’d just see it; there was a picture. And maybe they’d call on the phone and get him at the right place. And then they would become proud of that or really thought they had something – and then they’d make a fatal mistake in judgment as a result of listening to their intuition. I’ll say this much to you: you can check it. You may be able enlarge on it or excel in it by checking it, and you should. Everybody should perpetually check their intuition. The checking of course is germane to whatever problem you’re on.

sn2-31:12

There was a truck driver who was telling me he had a voice once in a while that would speak to him, and he would always listen to it. But one time he didn’t. It wasn’t a wreck; I think the trucker’s union was fighting somebody and they were trying to hit him. He said he was going around this truck full of bricks and he heard the voice – it called him by name – and it said, “Duck.” But he ignored it, and got hit in the head with a brick. I have watched him over the years follow that intuition, a voice that spoke to him. Now I don’t understand why the voice, but I don’t argue with it as long as it’s giving him information. Intuition doesn’t necessarily mean a voice is going to speak to you, although it did to him. But he was checking it out; he wanted proof. So he got hit checking it out.

sn2-32:34

Q. Are there different states when you can have more or less intuition?

R. Intuition takes you to different states, to higher states. You can’t travel that road unless you have the intuitional guide. Logic is absolutely no good. If you notice, the tone of the reading [parts 1 and 2, link] is that we think we’re operating very much by logic, but we don’t know the human mind. People are practicing psychology and psychiatry who can’t define thought, and this should be against the law. That’s their stock in trade and they should know what they’re talking about. But someone else can come along and heal people; and maybe he doesn’t know how he does it, but he knows that if he keeps his head in a certain way, things will happen. So what’s wrong with that, even though he doesn’t have a license? As long as he’s not harming people. Not only that, but you can’t tell what he might avoid, some physical operation, by what he is doing through those means.

sn2-33:50

One time somebody said to me – they had heard that these things happen around me – they said, “Why don’t you heal people?” Well, you can only do one thing in your life. You shouldn’t focus on too many different things. Number one, I think that people should first try to heal themselves. Find the cause, quit doing what’s making you sick, stop it. Go another direction.

But you do get powers. There are powers that come to you, and I was amazed when they first started happening. But I made up my mind not to use them, because I have one objective and that’s the maximum. I’m going for the maximum potential for people, not necessarily where they’ve got to take off a wart, or to stop their bleeding or something like that.

sn2-34:53

I wrote a letter one time to Kathryn Kuhlman. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of her. She was a healer who was on the radio for many years out of Pittsburgh. I said, “How do you operate?” And she wrote back and said, “I don’t do anything.” Of course at that time if you claimed to be a healer you could get sued or the government could stop you, practicing medicine without a license for going into the business of healing. So when she said that, you couldn’t really believe whether she was telling you the truth, or whether she thought you were a detective trying to see if she’s charging for healing people.

But whatever it is: If you want to become a millionaire you can become a millionaire, starting young enough. Some people have done it later in life. It comes from total dedication. If you want to be a mathematician you can become a mathematician, by total application. But you can’t do two or three or five little things with it.

sn2-36:22

Q. What if you find that in life you positioned yourself in whatever factors took you to where you are now, and all of a sudden you realize that that’s not what you’re supposed to do?

R. If you have any intuition, that there is a certain path that you should follow or a certain thing you should do, follow that intuition. Follow it come hell or high water. That’s anything, whether it’s making money or anything else. Of course, I didn’t choose money. When I was a kid I went away to be a priest, and if I had wanted to get rich I surely wouldn’t have gone there. Although my dad said you get free wine. But that was my objective, and I thought I’d keep at it. You do get doubts. When I started to go bald I started looking for a girl. I thought, “Hell, nobody’s going to have this guy if he gets too bald.”

sn2-37:40

Q. And you’ve been on a spiritual path, ever since?

R. Ever since I was a kid.

Q. You didn’t go down one path and suddenly change?

R. No.

Q. Was there any factor that produced this?

R. Yes – I was lucky. I had good parents, that’s one thing. They kept me clean. Of course, that may be something another individual will have to fight out for themselves; they’ll have to protect themselves more.

sn2-38:20

Determination

[shortened question follows:]

Q. A lot of people have an interest to know something, like studying meditation or the new physics. I’m not necessarily needing an answer to whether there is life after death and all those things, although it’s interesting to have a perspective on them. You had a burning desire, and other people did as well. Can I study, just having an interest rather than a burning desire, in order to alter my state?

sn2-39:16

R. I don’t believe you can think about any subject, whether it’s philosophic, spiritual or metaphysical, without going to the root. You chase it back. If you want to know something about meditation, for instance, there’s a lot of material written on it. And some people think meditation is sitting around thinking about girls. Or just having peace. To give you an example, the TM formula for meditation was to pronounce a sonorous word that ended mostly in “ng”. Boing, boing, boing. This had a pacifying effect on the body and mind. But you can’t advance with that. You’re just taking somebody else’s word for it, people supposed to be experts. You’ve got to know for yourself.

You’ve got to be suspicious even. How many of these fellows are phony? One of the symptoms you have to watch for – it’s really unfair to say this, because rich men can also be enlightened – but why did they go to the bother to get money if there was a greater value? So there are little things that are almost like symptoms, to look for a disease. But in the business of chasing anything back, meditation will happen automatically. Like with those questions in the reading. If you start answering those questions you’ll be meditating. You’ll think, “Wow, I never thought of that. So let’s think about it.”

sn2-41:16

But as I said, there’s no point in thinking unless you know who’s thinking. There’s no point in tolerating thoughts if they’re caused by outside entities. So you’ve got to analyze thought: “What is thought? “ You find out that you can’t control it. Your mind takes off in a certain direction; it’s like a goat when it gets downwind on another goat at breeding time. Our mind is attracted to certain pleasures and things. So we’ve got to bypass that and say, “Hey, where in the hell did I come from? And what happens to me?”

file sn2 ends at 42:04

File sn3

file sn3 starts – length 46:12

Part 4 continues - Truth

[break in tape]

[question missing – dm version, bm version, ps version]

Q. [Question not recorded, apparently on the new physics.]

00:00

R. But what is it, basically? We know it’s iron, but what is iron? Well, it’s molecules. What are molecules? They’re atoms. What are atoms? They’re force fields. What are force fields? Mental power. That’s the best definition they’ve come up with yet, that force fields are composed of mental power. I mentioned the photons: if you read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, they say these photons are intelligent. They convey messages to each other at or faster than the speed of light. Now what other messages could they carry? Boy, if we ever get onto this, nobody will be able to cheat on their income taxes.

Q. In physics they had experiments where an electron appears from nowhere and disappears to nowhere. They came from someplace but you can’t tell where the entrance or the exit is.

sn3-01:11

R. I’ll give you an example: just recently in the last twenty years they’ve come up with the black hole in space theories. Which they claim are real, that they can observe them out in the distance. Now Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, practically, writes of the old texts from Tibet and China, in which they measured time by yugas, which I think are 360,000 years. And they talk of the great outbreathing and the inbreathing of the universe. Now this is utterly amazing for people who had no telescopes, two or three thousand years ago. This wasn’t just one little remark they made, but a whole composite thing about time: tremendously great eras divided into smaller components. But they recognized back then the black holes in space: the outbreathing [manifestation] of the universe and the inbreathing, the period of pralaya. [dissolution] So the way this came about – in my understanding and the only thing I can think of – either somebody came down in a fiery chariot and said, “Here’s what’s upstairs,” or else their intuition developed it.

sn3-02:54

I’ve always been more of a scientific mind, but I realize that science is a snake with its tail in its mouth, meaning that it goes nowhere. Because the truth in science years ago is now no longer the truth. I studied under the valence theory in chemistry but now they’ve got something else. So the truths of yesterday are changing with knowledge. But there are basic observations you can make when things happen according to a certain pattern, that indicates that it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. We’ve got a theory. And this is what we don’t take into consideration. All science today is composed of theories; even Einstein’s relativity was a theory, it wasn’t proven. At the time he brought it forth it was just a mathematical theory.

sn3-04:06

I say everybody is looking for the truth. You go down to the steel mill and they’re all trying to make a better grade of steel; they’re trying new alloys and all sorts of things. That’s truth. But once a person starts after truth in any field, it has to go back to basics: Who’s looking at the steel? Who can you trust? When I was a kid I went to church and I thought that these people were infallible. They’re not infallible; they’re making a living. Consequently, I’ve got to go and find out for myself, that’s all. So you read a bunch of books. And you get a place in the country; get away completely, go out there and sit and think. And the coordination occurs then. You run the rubbish past the screen until you sort out something that’s less rubbish.

The process of the discovery of truth is not by direct attack upon knowledge. It’s caused by backing away from error. We have no direct road to truth. The only thing we can do is build a road away from nonsense, from garbage. And as you do that, you do it with your life. Certain things that you do, you should say, “This is garbage. There’s no reason for me doing this. It’s taking my energy.” You back away from it and you think more clearly. You quit smoking, you quit drinking, quit acting like an animal. And then you can think. You don’t have to go to church; all you have to do is sit down and think about it inside yourself, and you know it.

sn3-06:00

This is the whole path. I don’t pretend to be a religious person. I had nothing but bad write-ups for them. I studied to be a priest, and I’m glad I got out as young as I did. I was only about seventeen when I finally broke out. I hunted the gurus and I found that they were just a fancier shade of clipsters. A lot of them. But of course, we’re a nation that loves clipsters. We love to believe the impossible.

One time I was out in California and there was a woman who had a tremendous congregation; her name was Claire Prophet. And I kind of sensed that she was as phony as a three dollar bill. So I talked to a fellow out there who knew her and I said, “How can that woman get out there with no knowledge, no message, and indoctrinate all those people?” She had a great big spread out there on Mulholland Drive and they’d come out there every Sunday. She was making millions off them. And I said, “You try to be honest with people and it gets nowhere. But here she’s telling you, ‘’Oh, we’re all going to be happy together.” It’s hoopla. He looked at me and he said, “She followed a simple rule of thumb of business: don’t advertize your losses.” In other words, if you have a bad showing, you only had a hundred people, tell them you had five thousand. Then the next time, four thousand people will come out to see the five thousand, and you’ll have them.

sn3-08:03

But I’ve done this all my life; I have gone into every cult that I thought was halfway sensible. I don’t have bad words for all of them, believe me. There are some that are nonprofit, that don’t make any money. I never believed that a person should live off another man’s money. Just like myself: I’m retired but I was a contractor. I didn’t get to write any books until I was fifty years of age because I was busy raising a family. But I never charged for anything except for the light bill. We’d have meetings and we’d say, “Let’s chip in and pay the light bill or the rent for the room.”

I made up my mind that I would never keep a preacher and I would never charge. Because that’s the only way you can look people in the eye. Everybody in the country knows what’s going on: this is the day of the million-dollar grab. They don’t grab hundred dollar bills anymore, they grab millions when they go. We’ve got a Pure Food and Drug law, but we have no law against lying in psychology and religion.

And thank God there are no checks and balances on it, because then we’d be killing each other. If we don’t let the liars get away with it the same as the honest people, why then there’d be bloodbaths. So it’s a necessary evil I guess. It serves its purpose. Not everything’s bad. Some people lean and they can only lean. There are other people who fight. I chose to fight. And I turned all my meanness into determination.

10:15

Stages

Q. As far as some people having out of body experiences or being able to receive history, like that fellow in Texas – everybody’s different so everybody’s going to sense reality in a different way.

R. No, the funny thing is, when certain things occur there’s a common denominator. That’s the reason I understood the man. Let’s say he sees a certain section of history. General Lee and General Grant are in their graves, they’re not out there in front of him, but he’s watching them. So if you analyze that for a minute, he’s watching something that’s presented to him. Just the same as we’d see a picture of Lee and Grant, or some movie star who’s dead. That isn’t Clark Gable on the screen; the man’s no longer here. But people react according to a multi-colored filter, you might say. And they react differently. But the key element is always the same.

sn3-11:35

There are different experiences and they come in different levels. Gurdjieff had way of categorizing: the instinctive man, the emotional man, the logical man (the scientist and mathematician) and the philosophic man. The instinctive man is a person who lives to live. He’s sanguine and he loves to eat, to drink, to have sex, to laugh, to be boisterous and so on. And that’s life to him; it’s like the puppies bouncing around over the woods. And he’s selfish. He or she is very selfish.

Then the emotional man is the step above that. That’s when this instinctive man gets religion or falls in love. If he gets religion, Christ is his lover. He finds something greater than himself. And only when a man finds something greater than himself does the ego of all this fun-making disappear or diminish. Now he’s elevated on a different plane and he feels better for it. And if he falls in love he feels there’s nothing as significant as the other person. (Now when I say “he” in this instance it applies to women as well. I don’t like to go through this paranoid routine of naming all the sexes, all six of them.)

sn3-13:22

And of course he languishes in this love thing for awhile. He loves his children and thinks his children love him as much as he loves them. But the kids grow up and kick him in the face, and the wife kicks him out and gets a younger man or whatever. Then he realizes that he’s been projecting values instead of actually seeing them, actually knowing them. He realizes he’s being used by nature and he’s no longer needed by nature. So then maybe he gets into religion, an emotional religion. He becomes a born-again Christian or something, or he goes to a guru and throws himself at the feet of the guru.

sn3-14:10

But then he transcends that emotional thing. He says, “This is all nonsense. I’m going back and analyze the Bible and prove it right or wrong.” Or, ‘I‘m going to make a liar out of this preacher; I’ll find out who’s telling the truth.” Or, “I’ll get into something that’s scientific, instead of something that’s just believing.” So what does he do? He becomes an astrologer or a numerologist, because he considers those to be hard figures he can work with. And maybe he can find by studying astrology who made the zodiac, the first one. And ultimately after many years of that, he finds out that this was another ego trip: he’s proud of his brain and he thinks he’s going to do all this with his brain.

So the next step – you don’t know where to go, so you look under every rock. You just start examining all the religions of the world. This book, Profound Writings East and West , has excerpts of some of the ancient works. And the reason we put it together is that they’re individually not available. I had a hard time all my life trying to find the Platform Sutra, for instance, or the Upanishads. These are writings that take you clear back to where the first con games were played. There are different stories of enlightenment. There‘s the poetry of Francis Thompson, an Englishman, who had as profound an enlightenment as any yogi in Tibet. He was a devout Christian, but he was also a devout drunk, and trauma brought him through. (By the way, years ago I knew a married couple here in Columbus, and I used to spend time talking to them about Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.) Some of the other ones are Elegant Sayings, Himalayas of the Soul, The Voice of the Silence, the Bhagavad Gita. Those are the ancient ones.

sn3-16:53

It shows you what those people were thinking back then. It makes us almost ashamed that we’re piddling with what we’re piddling with. Those people didn’t have the mathematical education; they had very little scientific knowledge, two thousand years before Christ. But they had a profound philosophy. And strangely enough, the more complicated our technology develops, the greater our egos become, collective and individual. We think we’re powerful people, that we’re going to change society, that’s the big thing. We will only change what was already planned to be changed. The only thing we can do is predict it; we’ll not change anything.

sn3-18:06

Q. If you observe your own thinking, who or what is doing the observing?

R. That’s a question I wanted you to answer. But don’t you get the point? Doesn’t that pose to you that there are two people? That there’s a schizoid thing, but it’s a good schizoid thing if you’re getting a profit from it. What happened to me in Seattle – when I went out the window so to speak – I saw myself back on earth. Now I’m not saying that was accurate, but this was an amazing thing. I couldn’t see my feet but I knew I was watching. So which is the real observer? The real observer was the man who was watching. And when you become an observer, when you start to watch your actions, you’re starting to watch the animal, and you become the opposite of the animal.

19:46

[shortened question follows]

Q. What good does it do to tell us these things? It seems like everything I’m hearing is just kind of brushing the surface, and we’re not going to understand what you’re talking about anyway until we actually reach enlightenment.

sn3-19:59

R. This can’t be communicated in words. We can do this for two solid years and you wouldn’t learn anything, just talking. But when you’re face to face with it you’ll know it. Now again, that sounds like I’m brushing the surface. But I can show you. I can introduce you to people who had one second of contact, or just a few seconds of contact, and they knew. That’s the way it happens. And that happens in any of these experiences. You don’t learn, you become.

But what you’re almost demanding of me is that you allow yourself to be distracted by life, and then you say to me, “Why don’t you make sense?” And I say, “Why don’t you quit being distracted by life, and become sense?” Then, when your mind is prepared to receive, it will open. And when somebody says something you’ll see the honesty and the truth behind it. Then after that, another door opens. It’s a progressive thing. The reason for the koan, as they say in Zen, is that nobody believes what they’re told. They say, “Give me proof.” And I can only say, “Make your life a search for truth.” Don’t say, “Give it to me.” It can’t be given. You can’t get it like a possession, you have to become it. When man knows God, he is God.

sn3-21:49

Q. But can we understand it by getting it from other people?

R. You are getting it. This is as close as you may get. There ain’t too many of us around.

[Forum Part 4 ends]

sn3-22:07

Forum Part 5 - Near Death Experiences

Q. What do you think is the difference between an out-of-body experience and say dreams or even an acid trip?

R. I’m going to tell you something. The acid trip is a departure from the outside ego. Years ago I was lecturing in universities, and people would come who had been into acid and seen another dimension. And through that dimension they realized that it was as good as this one; not because it was pleasurable but because it was real. There was some message. They didn’t know how to decipher it because they didn’t go into it with the idea of deciphering it. Sometimes pot will affect people, but I think the heavy drugs are strictly destructive.

Timothy Leary and some of those guys were psychologists. , They said, “Hey, this is the cure. This is the truth.” Well, it wasn’t. But one thing it certainly was, it showed that there was a dimension besides this relative dimension that we labor in now. And with that as a background, they said, “Tell me more. Show me how to get in there.” That was, if they weren’t too completely blasted. I saw that in 1972. I saw that the door would open for some people. And I said this is the time to go to the universities and see how many I can salvage. Because that type of dope is an intuitional thing. But it’s confused; it doesn’t come in the English language. There’s no explanation that comes with the package.

24:16

Q. [mostly inaudible question about the ultimate observer]

R. The ultimate observer is God. Now “God” is a word. And God in my estimation – you can take this as fiction if you want – is the ultimate destiny of man, hopefully every man. But it’s not the totality. When this experience happened to me I realized that I was a total consciousness. And I thought, “This is everything. So what is nothing?” And I fell into an abyss. I thought, “Oh, oh, this is nothing.” And wound up back in the hotel room. I came back to my mundane consciousness.

25:26

Q. What organ or part of body if any do you think the soul of man resides? The heart, the head?

R. None of them. That has shifted down through the centuries. The Greeks used to think it was in the liver. Some thought it was in the heart, because when you stab a guy in the heart he dies, so that must be his life center. But basically, your real life is outside your body, in my estimation.

26:09

I’m going by analysis of people who have had operations and that sort of thing. My kid brother Vincent was in an automobile accident, and while he was supposedly unconscious he saw everybody in the room. He described the operation to the doctor. His wife was a rabid Holy Roller and he was raised a Catholic. When they called me to find out what religion he was – they said they didn’t expect him to live – I told them he was raised a Catholic and he’d probably want a priest. This was out in the desert near an Army base, so they called and got a Catholic chaplain to come out and give him the last rites. My brother’s wife was anti-priest: her religion believed that all priests were demons and devils. And when the priest came in she started cursing him out, right there at the bedside, trying to drive him out. And my brother watched all of that, knew the motions they went through, and told them later.

27:31

You can get some of this material and read it. Raymond Moody’s book is factual. He was on this Geraldo Rivera show – I can’t pronounce his name – the guy who got his nose broken, getting into politics. They had four or five people who survived death. And they fall into certain categories. When people recover from death they talk about different kinds of experience that seem to be peculiar to a certain type of life, whether they’re instinctive or logical or whatever. Moody himself was astrally projected, if you want to call it that; he claims it was like a death experience. But these fellows manifest something of memory. You remember where you were, you remember what the streets look like. He said that when he was travelling over the streets in this town, he recognized people he knew on the sidewalk. And he checked with them later. He was headed for Washington DC, he said, and he knew what to expect.

28:55

This means that the fellow carried his synapses with him, seemingly. His synapses are in his head, so if he dies you would think he’d be blotto, that there wouldn’t have been any thoughts. But he’s still thinking. So this means that there’s a correlation, or a correlated double, where the stuff that you learn in this life is also deposited in an astral or spiritual memory bank, the same as it is in this bank. Consequently we realize that memory can transcend death. Now when Paul Wood was conjuring up the battle of Gettysburg, of course, the only way to check would have been to get some evidence of what he saw.

29:57

There’s a lot of evidence now that we can pass out and see things with our eyes shut, when we’re unconscious, medically dead even. The people in this Geraldo show had a common thing: two of them said they passed through a tunnel and at the end of the tunnel there was a bright light. One of them said that the light was God. The other said that there was a man there, which he considered to be an angel, leading him into another dimension, another field.

30:42

There was a lady there, I don’t know if she was a psychiatrist or what, but she made the remark that the greatest enemies to this spiritual investigation are the federally-funded psychiatrists and psychologists. She said they seem to be trained to write this down as a disease of the mind, and that anybody who survives death should be forced to have psychiatric care.

31:28

Q. I was in a bookstore and I asked the man if he had one of your books. He rolled his eyes, and I said, “Why did you roll your eyes?” He said, “Well, we don’t really consider him a true Zen master.” What do you think of that?

R. What’s his name? I’ll tell you his name ...

Q. It was on the west side.

R. Yeah, that’s him, a duplex. At one time he was some kind of authority in the Theosophical Society here. And somebody else moved in, I think his name was Sibert, and took over. So he went back to his bookstore. I met him in Pittsburgh. And he offered very graciously, he made the remark to me, “Well, I’d like to hear you speak, Mr. Rose, and if I like what you say, we’ll invite you over to the Theosophical Society for a talk.” He was a rather pompous guy. So I hope he didn’t like my talk; I didn’t want to go to his Theosophical Society under pressure.

33:01

Q. In all this life after death stuff, what do you think about Shirley MacLaine?

R. I don’t know about Shirley MacLaine. But it seems like a long drag if that Ramtha guy took 26,000 years to learn English.

Q. You disbelieve all that stuff?

R. Oh, this is the age of creation. Create anything, and the bigger the lie the better. The public will believe the biggest lie. And if you’re wealthy then you must know something, so the wealthier you get the better you are. But it’s like crystals: for anybody to pay attention to crystals the way people are doing today, it doesn’t say much for evolvement. Believe me, the desert rats out in California two hundred years ago would have known something about the beneficial values of crystals, because they had to dig through them to find gold. They chose the gold.

34:12

But anyhow, it’s just the idea that we’re trying to create. We create God in our own image and likeness: “God wouldn’t do that because it would be unjust.” How do people know, until they know what his essence is? God might like to eat humans. “He’s supposed to act like us. He created us in his own image and likeness.” And we were created in the image and likeness of monkeys and dogs, perhaps. It goes way back.

sn3-34:48 -- ps3-34:11

People are lazy-minded. They can’t help it. Sometimes it takes every hour of your day just to make a living. So what can you do? I can’t see endorsing every movement. But one thing I’ll say is that every movement answers a question for somebody. That’s important. I’m not saying that everybody goes down the same path. An instinctive man may be lifted out of his puddle by some emotional religion, some guru-deal, and he becomes a better person. And I’ve seen people who quit drinking. The formula for getting cured of drinking is to find somebody you can dedicate yourself to and get off your ego trip. So you pick Jesus Christ, nothing wrong with that.

36:01

Then you’ve got people who are a little more scientific and they become Spiritualists. I made my rounds of the spiritualists and I found some genuine phenomena, but they didn’t answer the questions. I talked to the entities, they were genuine. This was right up the road, north of Columbus, a place called White Lilly Chapel in Delaware, Ohio. I saw them materialize. Some of them were supposed to be dead relatives of the people there. But you talk to them and they didn’t have any answers. “Is my brother Joe there?” “Yes, yes, he’s here. He says hello.” “Well, go to hell, Joe, I wanted something more than that.” [laughs]

37:02

We had a fellow in Wheeling who went to a spiritualist church. He had worked in a brokerage house and rolled up close to a quarter of a million dollars. His girlfriend was working there too, and I guess by inside trading she got a little bit of information and made forty thousand. Back in the depression that was a lot of money. So what happened, the head of their brokerage office took their stock, borrowed it to sell it to somebody, figuring he’d replace it. That’s what they do when they’re selling short. He just took their stock out of the till and sold it. And instead of going down it went up and he couldn’t buy it back, couldn’t raise the money. So they lost it. This guy’s name was Hazlett, the head of the brokerage firm.

But this man at the age of sixty was now actually broke. He was wanting to get married to this girl who had worked in the brokerage house for twenty years, and they couldn’t get married; they didn’t have even the price of the ring. So he was very bitter about Hazlett. Well, he said he went to a spiritualist thing. There was a guy named Allen Spraggett who wrote a book on spiritualism; , it’s a muckraking of Camp Chesterfield in Indiana. I’ve been there and what he says is very accurate.

Anyhow he went there, and some guy must have done some research and found out he had a friend by the name of Hazlett who had run this brokerage firm. Wheeling is a small town, you know. So he said, “Oh, we’ve got a spirit here that wants to talk to you.” “Yeah? That’s good.” He said, “It’s a man named John; he says he knows you.” “I don’t know anybody named John, can’t think of anybody by the name of John.” This guy had to make it sound good, he knew it was Hazlett. “Well, his last name is something like Hazelnut, I think it’s Hazelnut, or Hazlett. Yes, Hazlett, that’s what the spirit said, it’s Hazlett.” So he says. “Oh, John Hazlett? Tell him to go to hell.” [laughs] Here’s a guy who had died and owed him a quarter million bucks. So he got to tell off the pseudo-spirit at least.

39:42

Q. You mentioned earlier about an LSD trip showing a different dimension. I’ve had vivid dreams that weren’t relevant to anything I had experienced before, but they seem very real.

R. Well, I don’t know the exact thing that occurred to you so I can’t say. But I’ll tell you, you have to be cautious about any tokens of this sort. You have to check your intuition, so to speak. If you get dependent on a certain line of information like that you’ll get fed false information sometimes, to really wreck you. If you can see for a moment, this is an agricultural setup. We’re here for fertilization, for keeping the human race going, keeping the earth green, fertilized, and that sort of thing. For what purpose? – we don’t know. The average person doesn’t know. Consequently there’s an inclination to buck the harness, quit feeding the fertilization process. And when you do that, immediately – whether it’s our programming or someone who is profiting from our loss of energy – it will start to put ideas into your head. And you’ve got to be able to credit, to find out where they’re coming from. Some people will actually hear voices, and they think, “Oh, that must be spiritual.” Ha. Be careful. It’s better if you don’t hear them.

41:50

Q. I find it hard to distinguish between intuition and what you mentioned, the animal influences.

R. Well, they used to call it instinct with animals; the animal had an instinct.

Q. If animal instincts are negative and intuition is positive, how can you tell the difference?

R. I wouldn’t say that the animal instincts are negative. I think in some respects the animal has it all over us. We’re cursed with language but the animal isn’t. The animal has correct impressions and they risk their life on it. The deer goes in to drink with the lion, only when she knows the lion’s belly is full. That’s the instinct. But that’s an intuition that saves their life.

When you have an intuition you’ll know it. Like I said, there are people who have an intuition when the husband’s in the beer joint; they’ll even call and get the right beer joint. That’s mundane. That’s a power you don’t want to gauge your life on. It won’t work all the time. You’ll get into a real trap sometime. But the intuition about your correct mental thinking is what I’m talking about. Because thinking about the mind in this esoteric business is subjective, it’s not tangible. You can’t put it in a test tube. So it has to be tested with very subtle and carefully thought-out methods, to see if you’re going in the right path. Of course, my feeling is that you don’t have to do much checking if your intentions are right. If your intentions are right, you automatically put like a watchdog in the computer.

44:01

That’s the reason I say it’s very important if a person is on what we call a spiritual path, that they keep their ego out. And you can’t do things for money. When you get money into it then you’ve got an ego into it. So there’s always a danger of that. But number one, I don’t believe in trying to convince people, to sell a fellow a bill of goods. I do believe that there may be certain people, perhaps, sitting here tonight who have a destiny ahead of them in this regard. And if that’s true, they’ll ultimately know it, and they’ll take action.

But I read those questions purposefully because I think it gives you a new perspective on many subjects that people never think about: things that we define, such as pleasure, right and wrong, and that sort of thing.

45:03

Q. What is the spiritual purpose of conditioning?

R. Conditioning is the enemy. There’s a book put out by Idries Shah on the Sufis. Sufism is almost like Zen in the Arab countries. And he was quoting one of those old prophets or whatever you call them. He said the worst enemy of mankind is conditioning. , In other words, we take a pure and simple soul called a baby and we start to condition them, to get them to believe certain things and act a certain way. We know this.

[ end of tape 3 ]

File 4

File 4 – 29 minutes.

Part 5 continues

sn4-00:00

The parents have to keep the kid out of the penitentiary. We’ve got to live in the sardine can, so you have to be conditioned to live in the sardine can; you’ve got to transform that kid into some kind of a pretzel.

In my estimation a child is born with a memory of God or the previous essence. And he’s also born with a tremendous intuition; they can learn real fast whether to trust you or not. They can also learn real fast where their dinner is. But the older that child gets, the more it is seduced by education, until it thinks it has to believe everything. I ran into some guys from the Army one time, and one of them was a sergeant. And he kept saying, “You better believe it.” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard them say that. But I said, “Why? Why do I have to believe something, to go out and get my head blown off? Let’s just blow the head off and don’t give me that stuff.” I don’t have to believe anything. We’re animals out there, fighting, that’s all.

sn4-01:14

But we seem to think that this is necessary. And people talk of discipline: what do you mean by that? There’s no greater discipline than a man who disciplines his own life. He’ll never be much harm to anybody else because he won’t have any reason to. He’s got values. But people who talk about discipline are generally talking about disciplining somebody else. He says, “We’re going to educate everybody. Everybody has to be educated.”

[Forum Part 5 ends] sn4-01:52

Forum Part 6

Q and A continues

Q. You spoke of emotional religion. Could you talk about the transitions you went through and the events that affected you?

sn4-02:10

R. I got stuck in the emotional thing when I was about twelve years of age. I loved my mother and she was a Catholic, and I thought she was infallible, like the Pope. Because all mothers are, especially good mothers; you put your trust in them. So I went away to be a priest, and that was the emotional thing. I thought I would find God, and God would be a lovely creature.

But I found out that these people were just humans, very miserable humans. There were one or two saints among them; the rest of them idiosexuals, two were homosexuals, who the priesthood had warped and twisted because they just couldn’t adapt to total celibacy. So I thought, “Hey, there’s something wrong. Where’s God? Is he watching this stuff?” Then I noticed that they had a brutality about them. They didn’t want you questioning them. Like you people are asking me questions – they didn’t want that. You had to believe. I was just a kid, twelve years old when I went there, and If you didn’t believe, you got your face slapped for being a Doubting Thomas.

sn4-03:33

The result was that later I got to studying some other books and looking elsewhere. And I went through the whole gamut. I went into Spiritualism, groped around until I found a genuine materialization. And I saw the illogic of that. But there were entities, believe me. Don’t ever get the idea that we’re alone on this planet. I don’t know how dense it is, but there are other intelligences here. Some of them can become visible. This is not fiction; I’ve literally seen it, and witnessed an intelligence from them. These weren’t dead people; they were what they call cabinet guides. There’s a whole story to it; I mention it in the Albigen Papers.

sn4-04:33

But I tried by sheer force of logic to develop an approach to the mind. This is a very good way to get into your essence: study your own mind and observe your own thoughts. The little book that I wrote called Psychology of the Observer is just such an exercise. You watch all phases of thinking. And if you watch your own thought you become an external observer, more and more.

It’s like with Hubert Benoit in The Supreme Doctrine. , What we have is a bipolar mind: good and evil, black and white, all this sort of thing. These are creations of the relative mind. In reality there is no such thing as black and white. All we have is a scale, somewhere between two extremes. If you put black and white on a straight line, in-between you’re going to get all different shades of gray. So you don’t have clear-cut, hard definitions.

sn4-05:57

But the observation of your thinking processes, if you pursue it, takes you to a point where your head explodes. I always say that the spiritual path is fattening up the head until it’s filled enough with data, and then you can chop it off. I’m talking about killing the mind, or stopping thinking: out of pure frustration it just stops. And in that moment when it stops, everything enters.

Now I don’t know whether that answers your question. But between the seminary and the realization I finally had, there was quite a bit of exploration, looking into cults and joining the yogis. I was a vegetarian, I didn’t smoke, I was totally celibate. And at times I thought, “This is a goofball adventure I’m on. I’d better quit and get married, because who in the hell is going to have me after a few more years of this?” But I didn’t quit. I’d always be back on track. I’d walk down the street and find myself in the library, reading another book and starting all over, maybe looking up some guru. There were some good people. I criticize a lot of the movements but there were some good ones, people who were sincere.

bm4-07:21 -- sn4-07:36

Q. I was thinking that education was sort of the problem. But you’re saying to look into different cults and to experience things. What’s the difference between that and education?

R. Basically I advise everybody to look under every rock. That isn’t necessarily education. I don’t mean somebody brainwashing you from the front of the room and saying, “Multiply two times two and four times four.” That’s what I found in chemistry. The guy says, “This is the way you work this chemical equation.” I say, “Why?” He says, “Because of the valence.” I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I still don’t. But I knew how to look at the cookbook, the chemical handbook. You could do whatever they told you to do and it would come out the way they predicted. So a chemist is just a man who knows how to consult the handbook.

sn4-08:54

That’s called education. But what I’m talking about, looking under rocks, that’s the real education. That is experience, first-hand knowledge. When I say under every rock I mean every sect. If your intuition tells you, “Hey, maybe these people have something,” okay, go to the bother to check them out. Check them out, and don’t lack the courage to move on. As I said, they’re here for a purpose. But I’m always afraid they’re here for the purpose of inhibiting progress rather than promoting it.

The greatest spiritual events that happen in a person’s life don’t come from a glorious diploma. It comes from misery and agony and despair. And then the light that shines afterwards makes it all worthwhile.

sn4-09:57

Q. What stage are we in when we realize that there are no answers at all?

R. You’re in a lazy stage. [laughs] You should never give up. Never give up.

Q. Did your enlightenment experience tell you where you’re going to go when you die?

R. You’ll know what happens, yes.

Q. If a person has a negative state of mind, outside of exploring that stage, is there something he can do to change that?

R. I don’t know what you mean by a negative state of mind. A negative state of mind could be philosophically negative, that you’ve got appetites that are negative to advancement. But if you know what they are then you know how to circumvent them. Because in anything of that sort the symptoms are all germane to you; they’re all privy to your memory and your knowledge of your past.

sn4-11:30

I don’t know what’s negative. A lot of times, things that people think are negative are really positive. For instance when I was in my twenties, as I told you, I’d get disgusted because there were no lights, no bugles, no angels. And I’d think, “I’m not spiritual. I’d better pick myself a girl and get married.” But they wouldn’t have me. And then I thought, “Geez, what kind of a curse is on me?” I had hair then, you know. But years later I felt, “My, what a blessing.” Because if I had gotten married, that would have been the end of it. My ear would have been attuned to squalling babies; there would have been no room for any thinking. You’ve got to think when you come home from work.

But I should bring this out: Rose was not self-made. I had help. And I realized this in my experience, that there was something that led me every step of the way. I really wanted the obstacles, I wanted the girl. I never had the desire to drink or anything like that. You’d project on some bit of protoplasm and think it was superior. I wrote a little poem about it:

[... man creates with his imagination and shouts,] “This is my all, my god, my soul. This is mine.” Better say of this choice nebula of dust, “Beautiful is this fond mirror of my lust.”

sn4-13:34

Q. Do you feel like there are still things for you to learn?

R. Mmm, I’ve learned a lot, the things I’ve experienced in the last fifteen years. In fact I got surprised when little things came up like healing. And you learn more about teaching as a job in itself. For instance, when I come before an audience I have to be able to speak in your language. And you may sense there’s a difficulty. Because everybody wants to know, “Please explain to me, give me a picture, paint it on the wall, what this experience is.” And then it’s, “Okay, now give me the prescription. I’ll go down to the drugstore or whatever it takes and I’ll take the pills.” They want to make everything objective and material. And you can’t do this. That’s the reason for those koans I read. It’s more important to me that you start thinking, not just ask things that you’re going to forget tomorrow.

But if you get that little lecture of questions and read it once in awhile, it’s going to cause you to think. Because it’s looking at life from another view, and not just another view, it’s a more accurate view. I believe that those questions are valid, such as “What is thought?” We are thinking all the time, and we just take for granted that we know what thought is.

sn4-12:21

Q. What do you feel were the five most important questions, from your perspective?

R. I have no perspective on them. I think they’re all important.

Q. You mentioned that you’re doing things in West Virginia; what’s the nature of that?

R. I write books. We have a farm there where people come and stay. We’ve got cabins where they can go meditate or starve to death or do whatever they want to do.

sn4-16:04

Q. Is it organized or more like a free-structure, individual thing? R. Well first of all they have to be sincere. Then of course people come for different reasons. For instance there’s the TAT Foundation, for TAT members. They become members and that helps sustain the physical plant. And then there are people who just do as they please, and by that I mean they’re what you call friends of the truth, but not members. They’re just damn good people and we love to have them. But then there’s a school, which I consider the root. The whole basis of the thing are the people who are really trying to find it. And those are the ones I’m looking for, because that’s the maximum purpose for my being. I enjoy the people who are friendly and all that, but my life is dedicated to people where there’s some hope of getting them across, and getting them to pass it on to somebody else.

bm4-17:05

We had a girl come one time, I don’t know how old she was, maybe twenty; she and her husband came down. We’d have these rapport sittings and she had an experience. It surprised me, because number one, she didn’t want her husband attending. She was a little bored. And she didn’t like me, because I was too blunt perhaps. So we went into another room and sat, like Quakers or Shakers, to wait for the Holy Ghost or whatever you want to call it. It’s a power that hits you. She stayed in the kitchen until it was almost over. There was a man there, with his wife, and this thing was settling on him.

When these things happen you don’t need any further proof. You know where you’re at, you know you’re exactly on track. Sometimes I hate to talk about this because it seems like very few people believe it. But in the final essence I shouldn’t care whether people believe it or not. Anyway, this is what happens in a rapport meeting. I can see, generally, a spiritual force. The closest I can describe it is the Holy Ghost. “Where two or more are gathered together in my name, I am in their midst.” This happens when people get together with an honest and sincere intention, with no other motive than just to find something, to find truth. This power generates, not every time but occasionally, if everybody’s right. We generally sit in a circle and it will move around, and I’ll know who it’s going to stop on and I’ll point. Sometimes it knocks them off their chair. That’s what happened with her. It was over Frank and she walked into the room and it leaped across, just like a voltage. It leaped across and hit her and knocked her down.

sn4-20:14 – bm4-19:31

This type of meeting requires a certain lifestyle and dedication. You can’t come in half drunk and that sort of thing, and sit down in such a meeting. So it’s the group of people that matters. I know the ones who are dead-serious, and if they are, then that’s all I need to know. But those are the ones who have access to the cabins, if they want to stay there. The people in the group yet today take a solid month off. I don’t tell them. I don’t tell anybody what to do. I have no rules, no doctrine. I just say that if you want to get a result, try this. I never had to tell them the second year, and they’ve been doing it for years. Every year they take a month off, go to the cabin and sit there for a solid month. No rules. And they invariably come out with a new perspective. Because they see how the last twelve months had been a gradual deterioration into nature.

So that’s what goes on. Other than that, I’m not aware of what you’re curious about, but if you ask me I’ll try to explain it. I do believe that there’s a predictability about this, and a person isn’t around me very long before I know what their susceptibility is to something developing.

sn4-22:19

Q. Is it predictable relative to effort applied?

R. Umm, sometimes it’s weird, sometimes it’s strange. Now this girl didn’t care for what we were doing. She could have cared less. It surprised me as much as it did her and the group. She was antagonistic. I don’t know why she even came into the room. But we’ve had other cases similar to that, where the first time a person sits in a group something happens to them. And for that person it’s like a milepost; you realize that you’re on a path. There are revelations. But they’re not verbalized. And you find a peace of mind, a tranquility, that you’ll never find any other way. I shouldn’t say any other way; there are possibly rapport meetings in churches that are just as good.

But we have that one peculiar method, you might say. This isn’t Zen, incidentally. It’s just something we decided to do, some of the people. And it worked. Now with this girl it was traumatic, very traumatic. But she didn’t get clear through to what I consider the final step. There’s a final realization that she didn’t quite reach. She saw the world as an illusion. This is one of the things you learn down the road. Even if you study physics you find that there’s no separation between space and time; they’re a unity. We separate them because we’re polar and bicameral. Our time is only germane to the sun. Somebody else’s sun might go around more slowly, so we don’t know what their consciousness would be. This is why I asked the questions earlier about duration.

I saw the need a long time ago for a place where people could go and think. I realized this when I was married. I was trying to write The Albigen Papers and I kept notes for it for five or ten years. It’s very difficult when you have little children around to do any thinking. You’ve got to get out. I had a farm so I went out there. I always kept a few head of cattle to have some excuse to go out there and spend the winter.

bm4-24:40

I’m not very much in favor of ascetic monks. Because they start to play another game. Like the theologians trying to determine how many angels you can get on the point of a pin. That sounds ridiculous but nevertheless, theology is a tremendous lot that way. For instance, the Catholic church got into all sorts of breakdowns of how many prayers you had to say to counter so many sins.

Number one, I don’t believe in sin. People don’t sin, they have accidents. They’re used, they’re abused. Not by other people but by the program they’re thrust into in this life. People used to ask, “Don’t you believe that you commit sins?” I say, “I’m too damn stupid to sin.” I don’t know what’s right and wrong, in the absolute sense. What’s right is you die. What’s wrong is that you’re alive, perhaps.

sn4-26:57

Q. We can take one more question.

[no question]

R. Time to head for the high chaparral. Well, I’m glad to have met all of you. Hope to see you again someday.

Optional: I’m in the Wheeling phone book, that’s area code 304. Paul has it. If you’ve got a pencil, these books have the TAT address in it. The best way to get down there is to call somebody, to always let me know. The farm is 15 miles from Wheeling, so it’s better for you to give a call and then we’ll meet you in Wheeling and tell you the best way to get there. This time of year some of the roads aren’t as good as others. In a big snow the ridges drift deep, so you come up Wheeling Creek. But if the creek is high you take the ridges.

Q. Thanks very much Mr. Rose, and everybody.

R. You’re welcome. [applause] I appreciate it.

Mahler: Over there are several copies of past lectures and tapes. Over here are copies of Mr. Rose’s books. And there’s a free catalog.

file dw4 ends at 29:15

Footnotes

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