1977-11-Method-of-Going-Inside-Pittsburgh
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| Title | 1977-11-Method-of-Going-Inside-Pittsburgh |
| Recorded date | November 1977 - Note the "11-01" was from Excel - not valid date. |
| Location | Says “here in Pittsburgh” on side 3 at 31:02. Pittsburgh is not used in title because "going inside Pittsburgh" sounds silly, as does "Pittsburgh method". |
| Number of tapes | Presume two 60-minute tapes - 3 sides. There's a break at the 45 minute mark, so original was likely 2 sides of a 90 minute tape. |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | Jake |
| No. of MP3 files | 3 mp3 files : 31:05 ; 31:00 ; 31:25 |
| Total time | 93 minutes |
| Transcription status | SH distributed 4/13/2012 |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | This is NOT the commercial recording “Going Within”. |
| Audio quality | Poor - needs headset |
| Identifiable voices | "Dan" gave the introduction - referred to by Rose, but intro is not on tape. |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1977-11-Method-of-Going-Inside-Pittsburgh |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150309200607 |
Notes
Appears to be two microphones, one for Rose and one for some questions (not all) – perhaps a mixer was used for this tape.
Says “here in Pittsburgh” on side 3 at 31:02.
See talk page for comments re LSD trip.
After spot-checking some keywords, I can’t find any of this included in the book Psychology of the Observer.
File 1
Time = 31:05 minutes
00:00
I’m going to give you some information tonight on a method of going inside. Previously I’ve tried to give some rather knowledge-laden lectures. I gave one here a couple years ago on the transmission of energy and it went over like a lead balloon – because the terminology was evidently vague, and if you haven’t read along these lines, a lot of this stuff is alien to you.
01:10
The whole purpose behind any esoteric or nonconventional spiritual search is the finding of the final answer; you could use such terms as ultimate answer, or absolute truth. In the pursuit of this, if you follow the histories of people who pursued it, we find that it isn’t a systematic intellectual, logical, or even philosophic presentation. We don’t find the truth by proving it in a court of logic. After digging for maybe ten or twenty years you discover that you find the truth, or you’re liable to approach it, by becoming a different vehicle. Not by attacking something and trying to digest it, but by changing your nature, so that you’ll be able to assimilate something of an absolute nature. Because you are finite and relative, and a finite, relative creature may not be able to assimilate an absolute truth.
02:38
Regardless, this is where all of the hatha yoga movements end up: in raja yoga. All of the manipulatory religions wind up in what they call an esoteric core – the “less finite”. Dan mentioned that I studied to be a priest at one time, and in the seminary they talked about the Thomistic theology in which the statement is made that the finite mind will never perceive the infinite – and this is very true. Now this was written at that time to discourage people from looking for the truth, saying you’ve got to believe the hierarchy, because there’s no place to go; you have a finite mind and you’re not going to get there. But the thing they overlooked was that the finite mind can become different; the finite mind can become less finite.
03:40
We’re not going to get into the system of that tonight, but I’m going to try to try to take you through a simple process of going within. And if you can remember this it will be of value to you, because this is the crux of all of this path, after you reach the decision that you have to change your nature, that you have to become. It’s based, first of all, upon five properties of the human mind. Now I completely avoid and bypass what is known as current psychology, the psychology that has developed down through the years to where it is today, and certain definitions they have of the mind.
At one time I believed that there were only three qualities of the human mind: perception, retention and reaction. If you look at it for a minute you’ll see why I said that; basically, you can get all of the things that happen to a human being down into those three categories: you perceive, you retain as memory, and you react. But these are not necessarily properties – they are things that happen to us, without us controlling them. When you look at it a little deeper you see that there’s something else that can be added; they’re still limited to these three categories, but there’s a variation in two of them. So that we have two types of perception: sensory perception and mental perception. It’s still perception but one of them has to come through the senses while the other can come directly. The mind itself can see. And after you meditate or think on these long enough, you’ll encounter this thing called visualization. Now visualization is one method of mental perception, and there are others. The mind can be trained to see directly, such as in ESP, astral projection, these things. The mind can see by itself. It’s still perception, and it still records on the mundane memory.
06:06
And there’s another quality we add to these three and that is projection; as things come into the human organism, things also can be sent out. Now projection would seem to be the only thing that the human being does. He can’t stop perceiving; he can’t prohibit or stop remembering – the action called memory is going to happen whether he wants it to or not. And he can’t stop reacting, although perhaps he can desire to react a certain way, which is called morality, a moral reaction. And of course there’s some question as to whether you can even control the moral type of reaction. But this projection would seem to be something that we can control; that it’s the first time that we do something. We’ll see if it’s possible to actually control that – I don’t know whether it is. But as far as everyone generally thinks, we can.
07:16
Viewer and the view
Now this whole theme hinges on a very simple point: that the view is not the viewer. In a search for the self we are looking for the viewer; we are looking for him who sees. We’re looking for the self, in other words. There is a self. But strangely enough, the smartest people, meaning intellectually smart – men of degree and reputation, doctors even, psychologists – very seldom really define “I” or “me” or “self“ properly. This is a massive assumption that is crossed over, to the extent that when you start defining this thing you’re going to get into endless discussion and proof. But it’s just a very simple and logical deduction that if you’re looking for yourself, it’s not the environment. Now – where does environment end and “me” begin? Where is the “me” that is the essence-me?
08:41
Let’s take a simple situation: a person lying in bed smoking cigarettes. Let’s just first present it in a picture: Your toes are visible, and possibly by smoking you’re even aware of your lungs. But we realize that the toes are not us, basically because you can amputate them and keep on living. And by the same token, if you smoke too many cigarettes they might even take out a lung. You might take out a good bit of your body and still live.
09:31
So you’re going to have to identify the rest of the body likewise as not being us, not being the central “we”. And when you do this you start to embark upon what I call a retreat – a retreat from the common definition that is assumed by most people: that “us” is the body; that “us” is that which we would like to think we are; or that “us” may be body and mind or body-mind. Modern psychology seems to hint that there’s no such thing as a mind outside of a body-mind, a reaction mechanism. Incidentally, this little five-part formula for the human mind’s attributes doesn’t argue with modern psychology in this respect – except possibly for the idea of projection – that the body can be blamed for a tremendous lot of this: The body is the one that perceives through the senses, the body is the brain, the brain is somatic, the DNA molecule is somatic. And the reaction is automatic – it’s like an electrical current triggering something and causing a reaction. But I think after you dig awhile you become aware that the somatic mind is identifiable and it is not us.
So when you start looking, you start by looking at your actions – and you generally don’t see your actions until you get a reflection from someone else, or you run afoul of society and run into criticism, or you get sick. So let’s say in the process of smoking a cigarette the person develops a cough, and he gets the fear that maybe he’ll be going into cancer. And this is when he realizes that the one who decided to smoke the cigarette is not him, because he argues with him – and by this he finds himself looking inside. We’re going into a meditative process now – this is what we’re trying to do tonight – take a person into a phase of simple meditation: what you would think about if you were lying in bed smoking a cigarette. This might be what would enter your mind. And this will lead you back to just simply analyzing your actions, to see which of those actions are you and which aren’t you.
12:39
And we find that we’re a composition – our so-called personality. We may have abandoned the idea that we’re the body by looking at our toes and our fingernails, and saying that this evidently isn’t us – because in seven years the entire body will be changed, it will be a different us. So where is the unchanging us? Where is this thing that is really us forever? Or which is the most durable part, if it is not that? But we come to some conclusions: that we eat and we want to eat, we want pleasure, we want power, peace of mind and a few other possible objectives – and that some of these things conflict. They conflict so strongly that we decide at some given time that they are not us.
13:41
Now take the case of a fellow who drinks. He once decided that it’s a harmless pastime, it’s just a few beers – and the next thing you know he’s an alcoholic. And eventually he gets put in jail or he gets into a fix – he may lose his property or something like that. But he gets into trauma, and he realizes that this is not him. And then he goes – he doesn’t say, “We’re going down to the doctor,” no. “I’m going down to get rid of this monkey that’s on my back.” He finally realizes that it’s a monkey on his back. Before that he thought it was one of his voices or egos – he was expanding, he was using alcohol to stimulate his business and become rich and powerful and popular and everything else, that it’s a great social lubricant.
14:29
So we find that the personality, the thinking process that we took to be our mind, that we thought was us – we find that the mind itself is playing tricks. Over a long period of time – sometimes ten and twenty years build up before a person realizes that something inside of him has played tricks on him. So we’ve got a dichotomy. There’s a manifest dichotomy, no way around it: how can a person play tricks on themselves? But this is manifestly true. A fellow is put in jail and somebody says to him, “You’re a drunk,” or, “You’ve got a habit.” Or he’s in jail because of some social habit, or he rapes somebody or he steals. All of these are the result of appetites. And these appetites are the result of what I call voice-drives. And these accumulate – they don’t necessarily start spontaneously in a few seconds.
13:35
So the person goes along in a certain way and suddenly has to face himself. And it doesn’t have to be a really violent or traumatic thing that brings about this revelation; there are lots of little things – just the fact that you don’t get along with people. You build up a certain phase in your personality that you believe is you, and you go along and you prosper with it. And then one day it falls apart. Your personality gets you fired from your job, or your girlfriend or boyfriend drops you and says, “I can’t stand you anymore; you’re too hard to get along with.” And then we see that there’s some part of us that we don’t like. And all of us will admit this dichotomy, that there’s no such thing as a monistic mentality, a monistic mind. We admit the dichotomy now.
16:27
Umpire
I maintain that this is our first view of the mind. And a tremendous lot of people assume that this is the only mind there is. But I call this mind the umpire. It’s part of the program, the computer. This is a physical mechanism, and the physical mechanism is set here for a certain purpose. It’s programmed to produce its own continuation; it’s programmed to survive. So that these different impulses, which conflict with each other to a certain extent, are still parts of the person that are thrown into the computer when the person is born. They’re implanted.
17:33
So then, why is a person born? Manifestly, if you take the end result of what happens in what people do with their lives – we’re manifestly born to reproduce. So we have a sexual urge backed up by a survival urge – everything has a survival urge – and here are two urges working together, reinforcing each other. And then add the pleasure urge. All of these things seem to harmonize together to make a powerful drive toward reproduction.
18:12
Now, say the person has the desire for reproduction but maybe economically is not too keen – has trouble getting a job or something of that sort, or maybe has too much of a reproductive urge – lord knows what causes it – but we hear of a lot of people getting into trouble because of their reproductive urges. And the fellow gets rebuffed – whether he gets rebuffed by his mate or his would-be mate, or whether he gets thrown in jail for rape or whatever the score is. But it’s possible that one of these urges that we identify ourself with very strongly can be so obnoxious that we finally will not identify it any longer as being us. It is something that afflicts us. So then an interior sense, an interior voice says, “Hey, that is not you and you’d better do something about it, if you want to live.”
19:12
And that’s what happens. Something is watching the man raping and going to jail, or getting rejected or losing his job – and this is the viewer. This is the viewer, the rapist is the view. The umpire becomes the view. We are watching. That which watches is the essence, and that which is rejected by that anterior mind is not us. If it were us, well then we’d be suicidal; we would be allowing one of these voices to destroy us. (Well, we generally do anyhow. We generally wind up destroyed by the various voices. Ambition or sex or booze or something gets us, because we can’t hold a balance with all the different appetites that assail us.) So there is in the computer, built in, an umpire, which is not us. We can watch it working, and if you can watch something that’s working, whatever is working is the view.
20:32
Process observer
So what is watching the umpire? I call it the “process observer”. These are simple terms; rather than use complex psychological terms, or try to keep abreast of psychological terms that would be similar, I prefer to pick something very simple. Now we’re going through a meditative process in what I consider an orderly, common-sense way.
There’s another analogy that I’ve used at times called the camera analogy, in which I liken man to be a ray of light that comes out of a camera towards a screen. And the screen is the void. These are more or less Zen-ish terms, in which the world is looked upon as an illusion – which is a hypothesis because that’s not known until you prove it’s an illusion. But regardless, there is a way. In our meditation, if we feel that we are nothing but a ray of God or something of that sort, there’s only one way to approach that. And that’s not to theorize in dictionary-terminology such as theology might employ, but to actually get into that ray and go back through the camera. In other words, go to the source, instead of verbalizing.
21:53
But what we’re doing here is a much simpler way, because you’re watching your own actions. You watch your observation of the umpire, of this decision-making process, and you find out that you’re aware; you become aware that you are watching it. You’re watching processes, you’re watching the manipulations of the mind which are not us. And this is why in Zen occasionally you’ll hear this term “kill the mind”. This is the mind they talk about killing. A lot of people think that when they say “kill the mind” it means to overdose on drugs – that this is the path to enlightenment, to kill your head or something. No – this is the trouble with picking a word out of a text, from an old philosophy that has been translated for four or five hundred years, and trying to explain it or trying to use it fundamentalistically for your own use. When they say “kill the mind” they mean to kill the mundane mind – not to kill it necessarily, but this is a sharp word to emphasize that something drastic has to be done. But you have to get beyond the umpire. You have to get beyond this need to continually ride herd over these appetites and the counterchecks to the appetites and all this sort of thing.
23:20
Before we got to the process observer it was very simple observation: We see a bottle of whiskey, we see a thirst, we have a sensory understanding that these two things can cause trouble or pleasure, or both. But when you get into the process observer your mental observations become gestaltic. Now when I use the word gestalt I’m talking about pattern thinking, not in the Fritz Perls idea of gestalts. The original idea of gestalts was that we think in patterns. Sometimes a single word may symbolize an entire philosophic approach. A few seconds of thinking along a certain line may embody a whole philosophy – this is what I mean by gestaltic thinking. The process observer is a gestaltic operator. And it starts watching. This is the real meditation that sets in, the real raja yoga or whatever you want to call it, whereby a person watches his mind go through certain loops and shenanigans, gymnastics and so on.
24:39
And then somewhere along the line he becomes aware of the process observer itself. Because we’re watching this thing now: something is watching the observer watching the umpire. Now what are we getting to? We’re getting to where we might think that there’s no point from which you can’t watch something else. So it looks like the real self is going to escape you; it’s just going to go further and further back – every time you look it’s going to be behind you, or behind that operation. But this isn’t true; it’s simply a matter of purification – a purification of the concept of self.
25:21
So that when you come down to the final self it will not be by logically finding a kernel inside of a kernel inside of a kernel. It will be a cracking of the final kernel. And when this occurs, then all of these things are – not illusory; in their own dimension they are real and necessary – but they are not the real self. They are all relative and describable. The final realization of course isn’t necessarily describable, because of the nature of what happens, and by what has been demonstrated or talked about by people who made the breakthrough.
26:14
To give you some hints on the type of mental processes you have to take into account in order to get behind this process observer (and you really have to get behind it): What happens in the observer who watches the process observer, is that this person just watches. This is awareness. This self watches, and that’s all. And when you get to the point where there’s only watching, and no qualification, you’re getting pretty close. Now how does this happen? We’re getting close to an absolute watcher. We’re not getting something that defines things as good or bad, white or black, high or low, in or out. And the reason this type of observation is necessary is because of the field that we’re studying.
27:19
Observation process
And I came to the conclusion that our whole observation process is erratic, and let me see if I can take you through it. Our scientific world is based upon matter; and this materialistic or matter-philosophy is based upon measurement – measurement of matter with matter. In other words, if we want to measure a foot, which we divide into twelve inches, we use a thing called a ruler, and somebody has to make the ruler. Along with this, we find out that there are limitations in our science itself – and this has been noted by others besides myself: Chilton-Pearce was one, and Thomas Kuhn. In Ornstein’s book , he talks about the duality of the mind; he splits the mind in half, one hemisphere of the brain being a subjective dream-type side, which he calls the “dancer”, and the other being the logical side. In this book he brings out that we don’t have much of a language in science. We have what we call agreement; that basically, everything is tentative. We have a tentative agreement, even in such very strict disciplines as mathematics and chemistry.
29:24
We find in mathematics that there’s a certain philosophy given that more or less throws all mathematics in jeopardy. I have cited the case that when I was majoring in chemistry forty years ago we had ninety-two elements – and we had the fiat along with it that there would be no more: Man had dissolved the universe in a test tube and there would only be ninety-two elements. Our whole universe was composed of ninety-two parts, and now all we had to do was go to work on those ninety-two and find out the real nature of the universe. Since then of course in our atomic chart we’ve got over one hundred elements. The agreement has changed. The agreement changed on oxygen from phlogiston; the scientists who were venerated two hundred years ago believed in a substance called phlogiston, and it evolved into oxygen.
30:28
And we’re inclined when we go into a classroom to take anything as law that’s put into a scientific textbook. Because the average student doesn’t have time to disprove it, although he may have intuition enough to sense that everything is not as proven as the author of the book would like to have him think. Now, what I’m getting at – this is a very important point – is that our understanding of the universe is an agreement, and that is all.
[side 1 ends at 31:05]
File 2
Time = 31:00 minutes [no break in tape, because there is overlap side 1 and side 2] [no paragraph]
We have measured matter with matter.
Definitions
Now what is the definition of these? And what is the purpose of a definition? A definition is the description of something relative to something that it is not. It’s a comparison of opposites, not a comparison of similarities. We don’t say that bread is bread; we don’t say that a cat is a cat. We say that a cat is not everything that is not a cat. In other words, we use all sorts of terminology that relates to almost the rest of the dictionary, to bring us around to the fact that a cat is just something that is not everything else. Now if you analyze the definition of everything else, this is what it gets down to, that we don’t have any clear-cut definition of things except in relation to each other. We are only relatives; we are only measuring our degree of relation and agreement.
01:09
Now what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong with it is basically that in order to understand matter, I maintain you will have to be removed from matter and define it from an outside category. We can define an apple in terms of a pear, or by genus and specie, but when you take matter itself and start to define it in terms of matter, you can’t do it. And who is going to do it except the psychic? – somebody outside that dimension. So the person possibly from a deep spiritual experience may give you a better definition of the universe, the construction of the universe, by virtue of being the only person able to define it properly, because he’s outside.
01:56
The mind
Now here you get into a mental world. You start watching the mind, and the mind becomes tangible and objective – as soon as anything is observable it is objective. And we can’t get beyond it by our relative, tangible, objective method of studying the mind. We can do it for awhile – we can isolate, we can retreat from it, we can observe, and watch the process of observing, and write books and books on psychological observations. But we’re stuck, because we’re defining the mind with the mind, which is equally as fallacious as describing matter with matter. So we somehow have to step outside the mind. All of your works of psychology, no matter how many centuries they’re indulged in, will not bring us an understanding of the mind until we get behind it, or get beyond it.
02:59
In other words we are only able to describe it in agreement, and that’s unfortunately where all psychology is today, the same as all your material sciences, only it’s worse. Because the people with a political aim or who wish to be funded for various social services control a lot of it, and it’s a worse situation. I consider psychology as the new religion, the religion that has supplanted the old conventional religions possibly, that were destroyed by their own superstitions. But now we’ve got a new religion and a new set of superstitions that will be more tyrannical, and are more tyrannical. Where one sent you to the stake, the other can send you to the nuthouse, or can execute you or testify before a jury that you’re sane and responsible for your acts – and no human being is responsible for his acts.
03:56
But anyhow, we encounter this introspection in mysticism, we encounter it in psychology; and I maintain that you can find yourself through this self-analysis. When we talk about self-analysis we’re talking about the highest form of psychology. Anybody can compare inkblots, anybody can stick pins, get reflexes and reactions, and map charts on how many people jerk to the left and how many jerk to the right, and form a behavioristic psychology. But how many people know what the mind is? I challenged the psychiatrists – we had a Chautauqua down at the farm and some came to the Chautauqua – and I have challenged every one of them I ever met to give me a definition of thought, give me a definition of mind, outside of a loose agreement. I read one book where they say the mind is a loose collective personality – but then we’ve got to define personality, and it just turns around to be anything you wish it to be. You even say a man thinks or a man wishes – but what’s a thought? what’s a wish? And yet these people can pump you full of counter-drugs, thought-drugs.
But getting back to this – we’re not interested in the machinations too much, except that there are some mechanics running around who can destroy the machinery.
05:15
The thing is that we’re trying to get behind the human mind. And the only hope that you have is for some mechanism by which you can get behind it. Now I’ve outlined something that will take you to a point where your head stops. And up until now what I said may have been very reasonable to you, but the rest is experience. When you reach a certain point in this self-analysis your head will stop and a phenomenon occurs. The phenomenon is the knowledge of nothing.
05:56
pause
06:08
When you start looking at the mind with the mind intently you reach an intense frustration. When you start watching all of your actions clear from the sensory impulses and perceptions up to the very complex process analyses, you become more and more despairing or frustrated – finally to a point when it seems like you’re just inclined to say it’s hopeless. I went through that myself, where I just thought, “I can’t get beyond this; this whole thing’s hopeless.” But some urge that stimulates you, or prompts you, some bullheadedness or some tenacity in you to keep on plugging away at this, may bring you to a point of what I call an explosion. And this is when it’s no longer the mind, but the awareness that is in the front. The simple awareness is out front.
07:11
Now when this experience passes, of course, you will try to verbalize. You go back to the relative dimension of speech and you’ll try to verbalize what you’ve experienced, and it’s very difficult. And the result is that when you read books, from accounts, unless you’ve had the experience yourself you’ll consider most of them a bunch of liars or people who were hysterical, or who were seeing from quite a few different viewpoints. The truth of the matter is that this is just the result of the difficulty of words, a person trying to verbalize an absolute experience or an absolute type of experience. And each one will verbalize it with the personality he had before and with the language and vocabulary that he had before, and perhaps the philosophy he had before. So that a John of the Cross will have a Christian experience, and a Chinese philosopher may have a Buddhistic experience, or tie it to Buddhism. It doesn’t matter. The thing is that it’s internal. But his words may be different when he describes it.
08:24
More about the umpire
There’s another thing you’ll see, let’s say as your perspective broadens. As soon as you start watching the umpire you’ll become a trifle indignant. And I think that you might be able to measure religions or philosophic movements by how far they went in their self-analyses. Some religions reach a point in which they do nothing but denounce the umpire, or denounce the inabilities of the umpire. And they call this the devil; the umpire seems to be the devil. The umpire neglects to properly take care of the person. So the word evil or devil is chosen to lay the blame and start a battle. Because it’s evident that people wanting to get off the hook want to do some type of battle, and we have to have an adversary to do battle, so we create one.
09:42
After you watch this umpire for awhile and realize that it’s just a programming that nature put in you to keep you alive long enough to reproduce – then it’s no longer a devil. And what I mean is that this umpire is basically here exactly for that purpose. For instance a person getting into sex too young – there’s an instinct in mankind against that, at least in this country up until the last twenty or thirty years. We’ve lost all our survival instincts I think on that line. I think the tendency now would be to educate children on sex starting in the first grade, so that by the time they’re twelve they’ll be so completely debauched they won’t have any drive left to go out and rape anybody or get in trouble. But the whole purpose is simple: if you have a farm you don’t let your heifers in with the bull. It’s not a question of elitism or fear or prudishness. If you want to raise healthy cows you keep the heifers away from the bull until they’re two years old. And if you want to raise human heifers that are healthy and productive, you keep them away from the bull until they’re fifteen or eighteen years of age, or you’ll have runts. It takes a certain amount of time to produce a healthy creature. And you can’t say, “Well, they did it at fifteen, let’s try it fourteen. They did it a fourteen, let’s try thirteen. It didn’t seem to hurt at thirteen, let’s go back to twelve.”
11:36
So what it basically amounts to is that there are certain fears and certain antagonisms in human beings. Now some of these are for each other: jealousy and that sort of thing. But legislation is put down to preserve the body so that it can properly reproduce, and not only reproduce but to support the child. So that if a guy’s bombed out of his head to a point where he can’t keep a job, he can’t support a child – he’s an enemy of nature. Now this is basic, somatic, natural psychology. You’re no blasted good if you can’t support your children. You shouldn’t reproduce if you can’t support your children. There’s not an indefinite entity called the establishment or the country or the government that should support all the children that all the dishrags would like to produce.
12:30
So this is built in by whatever you want to call it: God or the engineer, or the automatic blueprint that was put into the human being – as in all the animals; we’re just a little bit more egotistical form of flesh. But the blueprint is in there. This voice, the umpire, is there to say, “Hey, don’t eat too much, you’ll blow your gut and you’ll not reproduce tomorrow,” – or you’ll get so fat that you won’t be able to, or you’ll get some disease, your heart will get bad and you’ll be inclined to have a heart attack and you won’t be able to raise your kids.
13:11
And the same thing goes for the power complex, or any of them. Any of them can kill us. But nevertheless, these egos, this survival ego, these vanities are put in us. Because if we weren’t vain we wouldn’t pursue. The male has to have this tremendous rooster complex: that he is in demand, that all he has to do is go out and make a few flourishes with his feathers and things will happen, and that this is his main purpose on earth. The computer somehow puts him in check, and then at some time or another it also turns him loose. Now – I say the umpire us not us and it’s not even a good protector. And once your purpose is served, you’re expendable; somehow the computer or the umpire seems to have done its job, it disappears, and somebody else replaces you – with an equal amount of vanity that you had when you were playing the rooster.
14:15
And I think that all of this is in order. There’s nothing wrong with it; this is just nature defending itself; nature having blueprints – which all of the erudite sociologists and psychologists are going to change – they’re going to reprogram it. They’re going to reprogram us so that we will survive; we’ll get vaccinated against the detrimental qualities of perversion, dissipations, narcotism and alcoholism and God knows what.
So this is just basic survival. If you’re just interested in basic survival, then you get as far as the umpire. You may even form a religion, you may even call your actions sins, in order to help reinforce yourself against an early death. This is basically what religion is – it’s somatic, that type of religion. Now there are religions that go beyond that, but they have so little popular appeal that the meetings are held in caves and God knows where.
[break in tape – apparently at the 45 min break ]
15:38
Perceptions, projections, visions
There’s one other point in the basis of perception. As I said before, there’s more than one type: there’s sensory perception and mental perception And it’s necessary to understand this. Because we see a lot of stuff and we like to think “we” see it, but we don’t define who is “we”. We don’t define what’s going on when we’re seeing.
16:14
For instance, suppose you see a green apple – this is visual perception – and you throw the apple out the window. And then we can visualize the apple sitting right here on the table. We can still see that apple in our mind’s eye, sitting right here. We can even close our eyes; we don’t have to see it sitting there, we can see it in our minds. And we can see almost anything that way. Now of course they call this memory. But – supposing we have this apple in our mind’s eye and we decide that we’re going to have little red diamonds a half inch apart all the way around the outside perimeter. We visualize an apple with little red diamonds. Incidentally, there are a lot of cults – and I identify them as cults – that do nothing but visualize. I was listening to this tape the other day and somebody is saying, “See o-r-a-n-g-e. Now see blue.” And so on. And he’s taking people through this course, a hundred and fifty bucks for a weekend, for seeing different colors, being able to visualize them.
17:20
But regardless, you can. You can see an apple with swastikas on it if you wish. Now what is this? This is actually a mental picture. It is a mental picture that is seen that has never been real; there has never been an apple that grew on a tree that had diamonds or swastikas on it. So this is what I call visualization. This is the ability of the mind to create. And what it does, it projects someplace. As we say, we see it in our head, it’s projected there. A picture is seen. Anything that is seen is substantial. Whenever anything is recorded – like if five people see a mirage – then that mirage is substantial. That’s the same evidence that sends a man to the electric chair – five people, two people perhaps, can send him to the electric chair. If two people see a mirage, that’s legal evidence. It’s scientific evidence, it’s testimony, it exists. Erratic? – sure, it may be erratic; because when they move up to the scene where the mirage seems to be it’s not there.
18:34
But regardless, we have that ability to project, to create. And unless we understand our ability to project and create, we cannot start to look inside of our own head, because every step of the way we’re visualizing and projecting. How many people have been in the process of projecting what love is? – the color of the horse the man had to ride in on, what the horse looked like, what the guy looked like, the qualities that he had inside of him. Then projecting phony qualities of the person who is meeting the man on the horse. We’ve built up a whole phony system of the princess with no faults, nothing but every superlative, meeting the man on the horse, who has nothing but superlatives, and waiting for ten, fifteen, twenty years for this visualization to come true – angrily hating the world, because other people refuse to believe that dream.
19:46
So unless a person sees this early in life we go on. Sometimes we don’t know it; sometimes we think, “Oh, yes, I know what you’re talking about. I don’t get into that stuff.” No – you’re into something else, some other form of visualization. But this form of internal looking is a projection of this process-observer mind. It’s a mental projection. I’ll give you some examples of these different things now.
20:29
Examples
Sensory perceptions: Objects are apprehended. Now when I say apprehended it means the things that you see or things you hear, touch, smell, etc., the five or six senses.
Memory perception: This is remembering and also visualization. But when you remember anything – for instance if I say to you that you would remember that log cabin you were born in, and it flashes back into your head: a farm back on a hillside with a certain slope, the logs sticking out of the corners of the log cabin, etc. – an exact picture, everything coming back to your head. Now this is a vision. This is not a projection. This is a perception. Whenever the memory is stimulated it produces a vision – even if it’s only a split second, if you’re running through things very rapidly ...
[ break in tape ]
21:34
... and you can see that, you can recall that. Call it back and it will appear.
Reaction visions: There are visions that we can only describe as being reactions; we don’t know their nature, we just react and we see them. We react to a certain situation, place, time, etc. – these are ghosts, visitations, mind projections. Sometimes these are things that we project out of the mind and seemingly see with the physical eye. But we project them first.
Holograms: A hologram is a reaction but we just don’t react properly with a hologram.
Hallucinations: Again, we don’t react properly; we see something that’s not there because it twists somewhere inside our seeing mechanism. In other words, our sensory-perception mechanism is not infallible. And this is another reason why we should question our own judgment in a lot of things.
22:34
Mental perceptions: This is a person perceiving with their awareness; true revelations about an unknown environment acting upon the mind, or the mind acting upon the mind.
22:54
Then we have deliberate projections. Is it possible to deliberately project? This is the fifth quality of the mind. We have ESP – that seemingly people do sit down and project. Also astral projection; and there’s another thing called zapping – this has been pretty well substantiated as being a power of the mind.
23:17
Okay, I don’t know whether I got the point across. If not, I hope that some of your questions will bring this across to you.
Man’s purpose
Q. In what you’re describing about nature, what is the purpose of getting this knowledge? To prepare you for the transcendental? [rest is inaudible]
24:14
R. I wouldn’t say that. I’d just say you start to see your purpose. And I don’t think that needs to be the only purpose, and I’m not inferring it’s a negative pursuit. I’m just saying that once you get wise to it, you may not have to suffer, you may not have to drown as quickly. In other words, you’re going to die. We’re talking about death. You’re dying right now; everyone here is dying, we’re approaching a certain end. Now – you can jump out the window or you can do it slowly. Consequently, when you realize what you’re programmed for, then naturally the unspoken thing is – what can you do to prolong it, while you’re taking time to learn? You don’t know, and a erson has to prepare themselves in order to find out. What I’m trying to avoid for you is this idea of blasting yourself into knowledge. And instead trying to take a methodical, possibly laborious course of finding your definition, as opposed to extreme measures. It’s never been done with extreme measures.
25:32
And the other inclination we have, and I can’t argue with it, because every one of us has it: everyone moves as they’re supposed to move. Each person has a certain capacity, and no rationalization will identify their capacity, and you don’t argue with it. I hear people saying, “What good is that? – let’s eat, drink and be merry, because everybody’s kidding themselves who thinks there’s another objective in life.” And the proper thing to do, outside of saying, “Well, what is happiness?” or, “Who is being happy?” is to let the person eat, drink and be merry. Because if he doesn’t have the intuition or instinct or whatever is necessary, or hasn’t inherited the proper computer to do the work, he’s not going to go anyhow. He’s going to do what he was destined or programmed for. But the whole idea is trying to get a breath of relief from the programming, the treadmill.
26:46
Zapping
Q. What is the zapping you referred to?
R. Well, zapping is an instantaneous hypnosis. Zapping is a technique that came out of India. Gurdjieff could zap. The first instance I ran into with zapping – there were certain yogis who came into this country forty of fifty years ago. One of them was Meher Baba, , and he could look at you and you would collapse; he would just stare at you. Gurdjieff could look at you and you’d collapse. Because he established a mind-to-mind contact and then he pulled the strength out of you. There has been enough of this that has happened, and it’s predictable. They can predict they can do it and it can be done. And you can do it if you’re somewhat astute in hypnosis; you can knock people off their feet.
27:51
LSD trip
Q. [mostly inaudible – John Lily’s immersion tank ]
28:04
R: [inaudible – cracks some jokes] I’ve never been in one. I don’t know what it would do for you. It might be worth trying. I just don’t like the machinery there. It might be good. I’ll tell you something else, though: I don’t believe that you can take just anybody and put them there. It’s like LSD. I remember talking back four or five or six years ago with some people who had LSD and psilocybin and some other drugs. And I said, “What does this do for you?” One girl was talking about it, and she was pretty much of an authority on it – she had ruined both her kidneys with it. I don’t know whether the LSD did it or the needles or what, but her kidneys were shot, and she was pretty much of a philosopher in her last days.
29:19
But she said to me, “You get out of LSD what you put into it.” And I find that this is very true. Certain people take the same LSD – and one has nightmares, pursued by monsters and bad trips or something, while another person will take the identical LSD and have almost a spiritual experience. And I think the same thing goes for any of these experiments. You can’t get blood out of a turnip. If a person has certain basic innate qualities and they go into spiritual research, they either have to change their state of being – this is one of the secrets of it – before they go into it, or they’ll get what they’re going in for. And I think this is the way with a lot of stuff. The so-called workshops that occurred on the west coast – I suspected the motives of the people in it. I don’t think they were clear enough in their head to get the proper results. And I don’t think there’s too much difference between a man going into a tank like that or a yogi going out on a mountain where there is no one else, where he’s alone with the universe and that sort of thing. But if a person just goes out on a mountain with a hatful of vices and hangups and weakness, he’s not going to get anything ...
[ break in tape ] [ side 2 ends 31:00 ]
File 3
Time = 31:25
... [whether that’s] for two lifetimes or ten lifetimes. He has to put something out there. I took LSD once – I was trying to see whether it would break open an experiential field that I had been in before. And I had a beautiful, a very beautiful experience. I died, incidentally. It started off by dying – I went through a death experience, and then I had a very beautiful experience. And I compare this with hundreds of young people that I talk to, and they couldn’t understand: an old bastard like me should have had a rough trip. I had a nice trip. But I think it was because of the way I approached it. I had prepared myself for it too. You can prepare yourself for these things.
00:55
I’m not trying to change a trend today, I’m only trying to sort some people out who may pick up an intuition from what I’m saying, that you can’t indulge in these many voices that the umpire would reject and come up with any good results. There has to be a certain change of being before you go into a search for spiritual experience. In other words, there’s a trend to have experience; there are a lot of people who want experience. And I’ve run into quite a few of them; they’d come down to my place and want to stay there, and I’d find out that they were into – I mean a whole lot of vices – and they thought that they could continue these things, all of these let’s say open spigots on the computer. The computer has to be shut. You have to put the material in the computer and then you shut off the input and the output, if you want a decision out of the computer. You can’t have a bunch of monkeys in there all the time jumping around. You’ll have an experience and what will your experience be? Monkeys. That’s all.
02:16
Words
Q. [Mostly inaudible question on meaning.]
02:29
R. Here’s the whole thing about words: words have whatever meaning you give them. That’s why I talk about the language of agreement. The unfortunate thing is that we don’t always agree on words or understand what another person means. For instance we use this word exceptional – you think that an exceptional person is a genius, but you pick up a dictionary and no, it’s a resident in a nuthouse. Another example is the words objective and subjective: as soon as a subjective matter is under scrutiny it becomes objective. This may be along the lines you’re talking about, semantics or meaning, and the meaning is very vague. The words don’t mean a whole lot, no matter who it is who’s talking. Sometimes the most you can do, as I said, is pick up something by intuition. That’s the key. Because words will confuse you.
03:35
Q. What was it you meant by “somatic”?
R. Somatic means the body
Q. You were talking about somatic religion.
03:54
R. I believe that a lot of our religion is somatic, and a lot of this is rejected. That we can only think in terms of ecstasy or hell. Especially the Christian religions. The tremendous love relationship between a sadistic God and a whole herd of masochistic people, who just love to go to hell.
04:28
Umpire and egos
Q. Once you realize that the umpire is programming, do you gain control over that and maybe stop its vices, or do you just watch its vices go on forever?
04:52
R. We know in almost all cases where we undertake therapy, that the change occurs with the recognition of the error. There’s no sense in trying to change the mechanism. Like with this idea of the survival urge: the survival urge is contributory to death but it also contributes to long life. If you try to mess with it you may get into prostate cancer. But you recognize what’s going on: where previously you thought that you were reproducing, that you were the rooster of the world, now you see that all of it doesn’t matter; it’s going to happen whether you’re there or not.
05:49
And it isn’t a question of denouncing, or labeling stuff as evil, or something of that sort – that’s nonsense. I don’t intend to apply that. I’m just saying that you become detached. And most people when they get older – I’m not saying all; I’ve seen people ninety years of age who couldn’t see, they were blind, they were still trying to feel, and they never got detached – but most people after awhile look upon all of this scheme as nonsense. But by then it’s too late. What I’m trying to do is to age some young people. And that’s basically why they get their detachment, if it’s done.
06:39
I was doing a little bit of reading or digging, trying to find out where this thing of guilt came from. And I noticed the predominance of guilt in the Christian religion. Then I started looking through the religions of India and Asia and Zen and all this sort of thing. And where is the guilt in Zen? You don’t find it. You find that they pretty much ignore it. But there’s a thread that runs through all the Hindu religions, and it’s generally spoken in let’s say little aphorisms. I ran into this when I first started studying yoga, years ago; I was a kid about twenty-three years old. And there was this little aphorism – I can’t remember exactly, but it says basically that all pain is caused by desire. Now where the Christian religion builds up a tremendous monster, “Oh, don’t you do this, because you’ll get so many years in the hot seat,” the eastern religions recognize the fact that man burns himself. Like St. Paul said, “If you don’t marry, you’ll burn.” That man can burn himself by his desires. Now – this means that for anything you desire there are voices. These are egos. And any ego if you don’t develop some sort of detachment from it can burn you. It can cause you pain, ultimately. It can obsess you. It can develop a monkey.
08:20
Q. When you start the spiritual search you discover your selfishness and your egos and your desires. And then you move through that, you keep going and you lose your original reasons for searching. So then what keeps you going?
08:46
R. I’ll tell you what happened to me. Different people have different motivations. My original motivation for getting on a spiritual search was selfish. Looking at it from this viewpoint, I consider it very selfish. I had the conceit, number one, that I could master psychology, magic, kabala, astrology, all of these – which I look upon now as very weird pastimes – I would master all these things and become somewhat of a threat to humanity. But I didn’t go very far until it dawned on me that while all this power was being built up, I wasn’t achieving the big thing I would really want. And that was what? – that nowhere was I incorporating or getting in the general package enough knowledge to prolong my life, beyond the ordinary span of any other animal that was programmed to live so long.
09:59
And I came to the conclusion – and I don’t expect to and don’t particularly care to live any longer than my lifespan – but I realized then that what I wanted was to know the score. The motivation changed, and the ego-prompted thing wasn’t so important. But I maintain that you’ve got to hang in with your egos. This thing of abolishing egos or dropping egos is foolishness. This is the reason people get into too much dope or too much booze. They write it off in a sort of suicidal thing: “Oh, well I’ll go out that way, I’ll return to nirvana.” I heard a person make a remark one time – they found some people dead on a doorstep up in New York who had overdosed – and somebody said, “Oh, what a beautiful way to go.” How do they know? How do they know they went to nirvana, that they dropped all their egos? They may have entered oblivion, because of the range of their experience.
10:55
But regardless, it’s necessary to hang onto the survival ego, until you’ve got something better to replace it with. When you reach your final experience you’ll drop it – you have to die, you have to go through the death experience to achieve it – but you return. And you return once more hanging onto your survival ego, or you can’t function. So these are all implants, necessary to keep you moving. They’re not evil. They’re not evil in themselves. The only thing is to learn how to play the violin, to learn which finger to play, which ego to play. I call it “milk from thorns” – use this interior negative energy to develop curiosity – the right curiosity, not for the porno movies.
11:47
But you do change. You create what I call a vector – it’s an engineering term but it describes best what happens – that after awhile you’ll realize that you’re not an individual, you’re not a unique rooster that the world will never forget. And when that happens, the rooster that caused all this seems to be left behind. But what happened in the meantime was that you developed a vector – a curiosity, a dynamic hunger, a drive – and that stays with you. And that is basically who you are when the thing is over. You are not the rooster, you are not the person named Jack or Jill, you are a vector. You are basically a vector. You are what you do. Every man is what he does.
12:55
Emotions, desires, implants
Q. Could you comment on emotions and their application if any towards the search?
R. Well, emotions are combinations of implants and appetites, basically. In other words, we react in a certain way, and the reaction sometimes is reinforced. For instance the emotion of love, the yearning if you’ve had love to be loved again and this sort of thing, is nothing more than an implant. It’s nothing divine. A lot of people like to think that their most mundane reproductive mechanisms are divine. If they are, then so are a goat’s, because I’ve watched them make love and I think they have a real mental experience. But that’s emotion.
14:04
Q. Inaudible.
R. No, they’re confusing. You have to be aware, you have to watch that too, you have to watch that happen. Because it’s a desire. For instance a kid wants a toy and the other kid takes the toy, and then you see anger. First of all it’s artificial. When the little child first shows anger it’s artificial, it’s just a means, of puffing up like a toad or something to frighten the other child out of the toy. But eventually it develops into a lifetime practice of anger – which we would call emotion. But these are basically mechanisms that are rooted in our desires, in our programming.
14:53
Q. Are you making a distinction between desires and emotion?
R. No, no. I mean the desire is basic, the emotion is the external manipulation they go through.
Q. Then the desire is just an implant.
R. Right, right.
Q. And anything else is just a reaction off that.
15:11
R. Yes, the emotion comes off the desire. There are two basic implants that the human has – by implants I mean that they’re programmed inside of you. One is desire and the other is curiosity. And we can’t control this. We can’t control our curiosity, and the thing is to recognize it and then use that in the vector. Use the curiosity in the right direction: allow yourself to be curious about philosophy or self-definition or something of that sort. The desire is organic; there’s no other explanation for it except that when the hormones develop to a certain point we develop desires. And a child, even though it doesn’t seem to have a hormonic domination, still has a desire for possession, desire for what it wants, the desire for a certain status – it doesn’t want the parent to leave, it doesn’t want to be weaned and this sort of thing. Those are all implants. They seem very complex, but after you look at them for a while they go back to a very basic appetite: we have a desire to possess and we have a desire to be in charge. The child has the desire to be in charge of its mother, and it will go through a period when it will try to run the whole house, to get things that it wants.
16:49
But these are all programmed in, and they go from parent to child to child, on indefinitely. You trace certain desire-patterns. Whether they get them by watching the parents or they’re inherited with the DNA molecules, I don’t know. But these are two things that are not us, and they’re organic, animal. The animals have them too. It’s very difficult when you observe the behavior of an animal closely enough and then observe the behavior of a human being, to see much difference in the program. The only thing that I could see is that somehow we’ve got a better choice; we can choose our actions a little better and we can think more. We also have more confusion, and out of more confusion can come more wisdom – I shouldn’t say wisdom, but more realization. In other words, we invented a complex language that gives us something to worry ourselves with.
17:57
Projections
Q. You were talking about projections. Let’s say an individual is looking at a female – could that be a projection that could be pulled back?
18:19
R. Well, you always have some type of projection. The idea is basically that a person doesn’t pull them back, but you outgrow them, you wear them out. You marry the character and then it belches in your face – and you say, “That ain’t a princess.” You just outgrow it. But you have a new projection then, a new rationalization. A new one will be built up. And of course we’ve got some magical words we use to supplant them. One of them is friendship. If we can develop a friendship, we can tolerate all of our disappointments and our projections.
19:05
Q. Could our connection with reality then be changed from that?
R. Oh, my lord yes. This is the whole thing. You realize that the only contact we have with reality is our senses, which themselves are erroneous, as evidenced in the ability to see a limited color range, a limited hearing range, the ability to see mirages, hallucinations and that sort of thing. We have a limited world that we live in. And we realize after awhile that this entire world could very well be projected. All of it. This is the great possibility, when you’re watching your mind – if we can momentarily detach ourselves from this world of agreement and just not agree to all of it, and then see what happens.
20:09
Gurdjieff’s grandmother supposedly when she was dying said to him, “Whatever people do, no matter what it is, do the opposite.” In other words, in order to shake this; to shake this idea about everybody – that the people are right, that the law is right, that the minister is holy. And one by one over a period of years we come to a new state of mind on the thing. We catch the preacher in the beer joint, we catch our judges in similar situations, stealing and so on. But generally by then it’s too late. When you find these things out it’s too late to form an honest appraisal or to look at things differently.
21:08
Q. Is there is a way we can change our perspective and not allow our egos to control us?
R. Well, you can’t. You can’t rise above your own convictions, until they are replaced by themselves. But as Dan said, if you loaf with a bunch of people who are just trying to challenge their thinking, to challenge any system of thinking, this helps. It’s not to denounce, it’s not to say something is bad. Everything’s good, everything has its purpose. Everything lifts somebody up a little bit. But maybe it won’t lift you up. Maybe you already went through it.
21:55
And I know with myself, when I was into this stuff I thought, “Boy, this is it.” I was about twenty years old and I was getting into spiritualism and I thought, “All I have to do is go out and talk to these dead people and find out where they’re at, and get a map of the place, and that’s it, and everything’s solved.” But I found out that you couldn’t tell. I could talk for two hours on spiritualism and the things I discovered, that assured me that you’d never find anything through spiritualism; because everything is evasive.
And then I got into yoga and I thought, “Oh, boy, now I’m finally getting wise, I’m getting away from this nonsense, this superstitious stuff. And I encountered the same thing there. I took initiations in kriya yoga and shabd yoga – Kirpal Singh was one of the teachers. It was the Radha Soami science, basically – Eckankar is an offshoot of it – where you visualize sounds, visualize molasses on your tonsils. These are all little things that when you first hear them you think, “Oh, boy, we’re getting into this magical world.” This is nonexistent. It’s a curse. You’re creating something that you’re going to have to erase.
23:19
Now maybe some of you people are into this and you’ll get angry. “Oh, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because I was in that movement.” Okay, don’t argue with this person, because they have to go through it, that’s all. But if you can talk to him maybe you can save that guy ten years. I talked to a lady one time who was going on to seventy years of age, a Rosicrucian. And believe me, everyone I talked to – if a man told me he was a Theosophist or a Rosicrucian, especially if they’re sixty or seventy years old – I asked, “What did they do for you? What did you get out of it? Were there any great truths brought to you? Do you know the answer?”
24:03
Bob Martin and I when we were young went up to Cleveland and knocked on a Rosicrucian’s door – he was the head of this local circle up there. And he opened the door and took us in. This man had spent twenty-four years sending away for those mandamae [sp?] through the mail – two dollars a week for the rest of your life. So I thought this guy should know something; he should have something. And I said to him, “Would you endorse then the Rosicrucian Order?” And he said, “Oh, yes, a wonderful, wonderful group of people.” I said, “What did they do, basically, for you? Is there anything you can tell us, for instance, that would inspire me to follow your path?” And he said, “Let me think – did you ever see a needle float on water?” I mean this is the truth. He takes me into the kitchen and floats a needle on water. And I thought, “Twenty-four years to learn to float a needle on water?” You could at least have him change the stock market or something.
25:04
Then this other lady from New York who was in the Rosicrucians – the purpose of the Rosicrucian Order was to find your astral master while still living in your physical body; the Guardian of the Threshold so to speak. So I’m always curious – because these people spend forty years of their life and what are the results? – that they know which horse is coming in? And so I asked her, “What were the results?” She said, “Well, one day, I wasn’t really sure that I was awake, but he appeared at the foot of the bed and I asked him the two questions.” And I asked her, “What did he say?” She said, “He just shook his head, ‘No,’ and left.” And that was your one shot and you’re done, and he never came back again. So I think that from all the evidence that comes in, it doesn’t justify a lifetime of research. It might justify a lifetime of socializing with the people, if you like to do that. But whole the point in this is whether a person has the intuition to pick it up. If not, then you’ll offend him when you talk about it. So you just have to let them run their course.
26:19
Becoming
Q. I think maybe what you’re saying is that if you are, you are, and if you will be, then you will be, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
R. No, no. What you desire, you may be also.
Q. And you can become?
R. Sure, sure. We have no proof that we’re agents of free will. But unless we operate that way then there’s no other course but suicide. There’s no point in just continuing. In other words, if you don’t have any choice in your efforts, you couldn’t avoid suicide; that would be the next step. So anybody who isn’t committing suicide believes that he can do something. He may be fatalistic, but he believes that somewhere there’s a hope. As I said, we’re all robots, but everybody’s reaching behind themselves for the key; hoping to find the key that will make the mechanism deviate from its original course. There’s a hope of change, and this hope of change creates change; the desire to know will bring you closer to knowledge. The desire to experience pleasure will bring you closer to pleasure.
27:40
Now whether all the people who succeed were basically the people who desire – that it’s just a coincidence, that people were doomed to succeed and doomed to desire success – that could be. Or it could be that certain people who would not have succeeded otherwise developed a dynamic hunger, and the hunger caused them to act. Either one. But we can only operate with the latter: conviction. We have to operate as though we can do something. And all those people who succeed operate with that same principle. They believed that they could.
28:26
Resistance
Q. I find that people in general are afraid of metaphysical thoughts and resist if you talk about it.
28:38
R. Well, the things that I talked about tonight and the experiences I had were years ago, and I kept my mouth shut because of that same thing. I had a family to keep, I had three children to raise, I was in the contracting business and working different places, one place in the capacity of a head chemist. And if you even talked about these things you could get in trouble.
29:06
And I don’t know where this comes from, but I think that nature somehow avoids investigation of nature; that’s the feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but I have a feeling that nature would like to avoid the investigation of nature. So the religions that are natural religions just say, “Well, go ahead.” And this is one of the complaints I have had against a lot of the religions all over the world – Christian, Buddhist and all – that there’s was a certain group of people who searched quietly and they built morals around the search laboratory. And a lot of them pretty much kept their lives under control; they stayed away from extremes in sex and alcohol and that sort of thing. But they preached for the populace to reproduce, and to get drunk so that they could confess.
And this was one of my protests; that I do believe that you can and should take whatever information you have to the general public. And I’ve suffered – if you want to call it suffered – I don’t give a damn – because I’m at the point where I can’t suffer too much. But I’ve come to a point of freedom in which I can say what I please and express the things that have happened to me. And if they do somebody some good, well then I feel as though I’m functional. Otherwise there’s no point in me living. I’m not too good at passing on any other skills. But I agree with you a hundred percent.
30:46
Q. Inaudible.
R. There is a tremendous lot, yeah. Like Dan said, this group that they have here in Pittsburgh basically doesn’t advocate addiction to any religion or group. And because of that they came under criticism for not being true Zen or something like that. True Zen means being true fanatics, to some sandal-cracking groups of people.
[ tape ends 31:22 ]
[ End ]
Footnotes
Url: http://direct-mind.org/index.php5?title=1977-11-Method-of-Going-Inside For access, send email to editors@direct-mind.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Yoga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Aquinas
Psychology of the Observer, pg. 20-21 and 26.
The second form of reaction.
Rose uses the word “anterior” (literally, front) to describe an inner or more real perspective, but in conjunction with words like “getting behind the mind” this seems contradictory; however, “anterior” also has the meaning of “preceding”. Also see footnote #1.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_therapy
In 1942 Rose worked at Julien P. Friez, a manufacturer of meteorological instruments in Baltimore.
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (1973). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chilton_Pearce
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Ornstein
Robert E. Ornstein, Psychology of Consciousness. Rose makes the same reference in Psychology of the Observer, p. 9. In this tape recording Rose say’s “Epstein”, corrected here. General article at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_periodic_table and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemical_elements_discoveries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston
April 6, 1978 Meeting in Pittsburgh: “Yes sir, this stuff doesn’t happen by accident, it comes from Washington. All these big moves come from Washington.”
Imagery congruent with the term “anterior observer”. See footnote #6.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross
Early start and end of puberty results in fewer growing years, while exposure of girls to certain males produces early onset of puberty. New York Times, Mar. 30, 2012, “Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html
Also see Psychology of the Observer, pg. 22-23, “Six different forms of perceiving”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meher_Baba
See 1976-0304-Meeting-Pittsburgh for a lengthy discussion on Meher Baba.
Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey.
Rose details his LSD experience in a letter to Robert Martin, February 18, 1969. See pages 104-105 of Peace to the Wanderer, pdf in this directory: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
By being celibate.
Rose advocated celibacy for young people but believed that extended periods of celibacy for older men could cause prostate trouble.
1 Corinthians 7:9. “But if they cannot contain let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.”
See Albigen Papers, chapter 7, “Discernment”.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, vol. 1, ch. 1, pg. 27 in the pdf:. “From the moment of its arising, [this] became as it were the chief directing lever of my entire whole.” http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/
Richard Rose: “Yoga: Hatha, Shabd, and Raja”. http://www.searchwithin.org/download/yoga.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpal_Singh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckankar
Spiritual nectar trickling down from the chakras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_of_the_Threshold
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