1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus

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Title	1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus
Recorded date	May 11, 1978
Location	Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
Number of tapes	3 x 60 from DM
Other recorders audible?
Alternate versions exist?
Source	Jake and Dave Mettle
No. of MP3 files	Jake = 5 mp3, from DM add intro, file "0"
Total time	32 + 32 + 32 +32 + 21 = 247 min. = 2 hrs, 27 minutes.
Transcription status	SH distributed 8/28/2012
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
Audio quality	Very good
Identifiable voices	Intro by Lou Khourey
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus
	For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20150310123036

updates

Date cues: "The last lecture I gave here was what I call the Psychology of the Observer."

Notes

Times are based on recordings from Dave Mettle’s collection. However, this tape has to be redone because of flaws, so timing may be off

This has a lot of Q& A and therefore a lot of practical advice, along with some details that don’t appear elsewhere, such as what happens with an absolute experience. The last X pages are on possession.

For email.

Teaser: There are a number of items that don't appear in print elsewhere.

p 21-23: what happens before an absolute experience

p 39-44: everybody's favorite topic, entities and possession.

to check

R says on side 1 min 13-14 that he only met Paul Wood one time. Seems like somewhere else he said two times.

File 0 intro

Intro by Lou Khourey

File 1

total time = 29:34

00:00 I’m glad Lou didn’t say what I’m going to talk about because I have no specific topic. In the last series I have opened the lectures more to questions from the audience. Some of my talks had been maybe an attempt to be too scientific, or too much into the Zen system, and a lot of people are not acquainted with Zen. Or you may get people who are well versed in Zen, and they don’t want to hear tedious descriptions of ways and means to arrive at an experience. Other talks may have been too shallow. And I concluded that I get more across if I just answer questions, or if I get on a vein that is popular in a particular place. But I feel that nearly all of you have had some experience, or you’ve done some reading, or you’re spiritual people, and you’d like to find out what there is to know about spiritual movements – so you’ve got an angle that you’re coming from. So I’ll give you a brief outline and then I’ll let you ask anything you want, and we’ll go into that.

01:58

However, I will not argue. I mean, these points are not arguable, because in matters that have to do with abstractions, such as an absolute condition, an absolute state of mind, or a final answer which is an ultimate that may not be expressible in relative terms – it’s a real folly to argue because you’re going to argue in relative terms. Even people who have been in the group maybe three or four years will sometimes say, “What is that out there?” And I’ll say, “There’s nothing out there; what you see is largely illusion.” A fellow wrote me a letter from the Los Angeles group the other day and he said, “Why all this suffering and all this travail?” And I said, “That suffering is in your head.”

03:09

And I can see the aim of attending a talk such as this is, number one, to find a formula, a system of buttons that a person can push to reach a certain mental exaltation. And another is to find all the answers to the universe: why the black holes exist in space, and where is God in relation to the black hole, etc. And I’ll tell you frankly that I don’t even have an opinion on the matter. Because what you discover is something beyond the mental dimension. All of these things exist pretty much as our mind’s response to physical observations, and in the final analysis the mind does not exist. I’m throwing out some statements that would upset a psychologist, perhaps, whose whole career is based upon the existence of the mind.

04:08

So let me approach it from this angle, that you can pick me up if you’re in rapport. Now if you’re in an argumentative mood you’re not going to be in rapport. Maybe I’m crazy, and if you pick that up, that’s wonderful, you can go screaming out the door. If there’s something solid here, you may also pick that up. The best I could do when I was younger, when I was searching – I would pick up a book and read it and feel a meaning between the lines. And I would always reach for this. We were talking earlier about Paul Brunton; , I could always read Brunton, and I never found discrepancies in what I call the inter-linear meaning. The man rang true; I felt that no racket was being run, no empire was being built on the words, that sort of thing. So this is the way I conducted my life and my search. And I did this with people also. There are people who say one thing, but they are leading another type of life, like the preacher who gets drunk on Monday morning after the sermon’s over on Sunday.

05:25

What we come back to, basically, is whether we can speak sincerely and be understood. And this is the most you can get. There are a number of things involved. One is that you have to approach a person’s experience somewhat to understand what they have. You can’t just demand it to be verbalized ad infinitum. In fact, in most of my talks I prefer not to talk about the maximum spiritual experience, not to verbalize it.

05:57

But whether you want to or not, if you start on a spiritual path, eventually you’re going to approach, hopefully, the maximum spiritual experience. We’re talking about people like Jesus Christ, case histories from the book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke, , people who have reached this maximum experience. Buddha was supposed to have done it. Of course I say “supposed” because all these people are historical. But the need then is to be able to listen to the person’s doctrine, their Bible or works. And also the type of followers means a lot: Who believes this stuff – idiots? People who are very susceptible, nerve dominated, who are impressed very easily, their antennae pick up vibrations without any common sense behind it?

07:02

All these things weighed into my search. And the only thing I can do is to extend the same yardstick to the people who are listening to me, that if you pick something up and it sounds right to you, then you haven’t wasted too much of your time, perhaps. If it doesn’t, well, that’s your intuition and that’s what you have to live with; and I’m not saying you’re wrong. There are many paths and this is only one of them. And incidentally, Zen was not my path. I started out in the Christian faith, specifically Catholic; I studied to be a priest. And at the time I had my experience I didn’t know what the word Zen meant. But Zen is a language to me.

07:55

Paul Wood

The most profound experience I’ve encountered in another human being was a man who never taught. His name was Paul Wood. He was a Christian, a Protestant, from Texas, and a pilot or bombardier in World War II, and he knew nothing about esoteric philosophy or anything of that sort. But he had read the Bible, and had been taught the Bible. He was dropping bombs on Japan, killing people, and it occurred to him that according to the Bible, God observes the fall of the sparrow; and if God observes the fall of every sparrow, what was going on in God’s mind when the bombs were falling? So he became upset, and he became so upset that they got him out of the army; they retired him or sent him home.

08:52

But he couldn’t let go – because he had encountered a problem he couldn’t solve. The chaplain over there was blessing the bombs as they sent them out, and at the same time he’s saying that God’s watching everything that happens. So there was a gap that had not been solved by that religion. So he continued to worry with the problem in his head. Of course when he came back from the army his wife said, “You’d better get yourself a job.” And every job he got, he lost, because he’d be daydreaming about this, worrying about it – and drinking I think, because when I saw him he looked like he’d been through a barrel of the stuff.

09:33

But he kept praying. He said he went to the Bible and encountered this, that if you’re troubled or you want to know the answer, you should pray to the Lord thusly, and what followed was the Lord’s Prayer. And since that was the only religion he knew, the only book he knew, the only formula he knew – he applied it. He lived the Lord’s Prayer. He meditated on it, memorized it, analyzed it. In fact he devised a little system for cutting it apart and taking it item by item, and seeing where the truth was and what he wasn’t supposed to take too seriously. ,

10:13

Well, he said that one day his head snapped. He was working as a salesman in an auto dealership, and one day he was sitting at the desk and he thought he couldn’t take it any longer – and his head came apart. He remembered praying for God to kill him, because he didn’t have the courage to commit suicide, and he didn’t want to live with the trauma that was in his head. This was long before the time that people overdosed; he was strictly on booze. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital. And in the week or ten days that he was in the hospital, that he was out, away from society – he saw the All of the creation. And when he came back, of course, he was beyond care.

11:15

Before that, he had difficulty holding a job; and now he didn’t care if he had a job. His wife left him, his children rejected him. But strangely enough every place he went he found money, he found a job, he was secure. And he spent the rest of his life, at least until I lost track of him, trying to advise people to take the Lord’s Prayer, to find the maximum answer.

11:45

Nobody listened to him. He was in Texas and he came up to Akron. I was in West Virginia at the time and a friend of mine called me; he said I’d like for you to meet him. And I went up and listened to him talk. He was a double for Jackie Gleason’s buddy Crazy Guggenheim; this is what he looked like. Don’t get the idea that all these people are supposed to look skinny and ascetic – a little bit of fat doesn’t hurt if you get hit in the head

12:17

But I was utterly amazed. I never opened my mouth when I listened to him talk. We had some scientists, would-be scientists, heads of departments from Firestone I think it was, and they were all sitting there with a cynical look on their face, asking him very cynical questions. And he told his little stories – all he knew was to tell you what happened – and he said, patiently, “You can judge for yourself. This is what it did for me and if you think it will do something for you, okay. And if it doesn’t, I’m doing my part.”

12:59

And Bob, the friend of mine, said to him, “Paul, don’t talk about that stuff.” He was talking about some miracles that happened around him. Bob said, “I’ve had a hard time convincing these scientists that you’re on the level, that you’re real. When you talk about these strange miracles that occur around you, I know they’re not going to accept it.” And Wood just smiled and kept on talking. And I turned to Bob and said, ‘He don’t give a damn whether people believe him or not. That’s not his motive; he’s not here to sell anything.”

13:32

Well, that was the one and only meeting I had with him. I heard from him for a time, and he went from there to other places. He would send out pieces of paper with the Lord’s Prayer analyzed, and he’d tell you to meditate. But what he failed to see was that this was the way it happened for him. That somebody could get the same thing, dropping bombs on the Japanese, coming back and losing a wife, children, trauma, selling cars – you can’t set that path for another man. Each man’s experience is different. Each person has their own trauma, their own lesson which leads them, if they’ll allow it to. So you have to have a language. Well now, the language of the Lord’s Prayer is in front of us all the time, and mostly to us it means nothing.

14:34

In my own case I went into Asian philosophies, esoteric movements from the other side of the world, after becoming thoroughly disgusted with what I encountered in the Catholic Church. I was young at the time, not quite twenty. And I can see the same tendency in millions of young people today. The first thing you reject is the parent – and the parental religion too – because you’ve got to get free on all scores. But I noticed after years and years of studying Buddhistic philosophy, comparison of the different writers, the initiations of yoga, the experiences of people like Buddha – and then matching these with people like John of the Cross – that there was a great similarity.

15:34

So where is this? God only exists in Tibet, or he only exists in Rome? – this is nonsense. He exists in the heart of every person. And when I say “he” I’m talking in metaphors. I don’t like to use words I can’t prove, and I can’t prove the word God to you. But I’m saying this in a poetic fashion, take it for what you wish. But regardless, this thing of the truth being in a geographical place or in a cult or a movement alone is nonsense. It’s in the individual.

16:06

But I have advised different things as being instrumental in bringing you closer to an understanding. One of these is the Gurdjieffian movement; he goes as far as the psychological aspects of man. Also Zen. Now all the writings on Zen are not beneficial; most of them are a waste of time. There are a few that are good, like Huang Po and Garma Chang. But D.T. Suzuki was a historian. They give accounts of things, but there’s no mechanism. All of this stuff of koans – this is nothing more than artificial trauma; it’s like concentrating on an algebraic problem. If you concentrate on an algebraic problem you’ll have an experience, you’ll have an exaltation. You can get a satori by studying mathematics; the definitions are pretty much the same.

17:15

Exaltations

So while we’re on the subject, let’s get into the idea of exaltations. I borrow from the Gurdjieffian system that we have four major grades of man: the instinctive, the emotional, the intellectual and the philosophical. And people in these grades can only indulge in a philosophy or way of life that their nature will tolerate. An instinctive person has a highly physical religion, and his salvation is when he transcends that. He makes a step. And the transcending of the instinctive nature is when a man falls in love, preferably with Jesus or whomever his spiritual ideal is. So he becomes liberated. He no longer identifies himself as his body, as the hedonistic principles of that body being the most important thing.

18:22

And he floats along in that salvationistic experience. And I’ve seen people, known them personally, who spent their entire lives in that. They were fortunate enough to have that experience, but that’s as far as they went. They believed that there was someone, the projected object of their love, who was their salvation. And it was. It saved them. My sister-in-law for instance was on dope and cigarettes and booze, anything she could get her hands on. And one day in Texas she put her cigarette out on the church steps, walked through the door and started pounding her head on the floor – and was relieved of the dope, the cigarettes and the booze all at the same time, plus sex. Now sure, we’re talking about utilitarian religion – she was a better citizen. But that’s not what we’re after; we don’t care how bad a citizen you are. But the important thing is, what did it do for her? Did she come up a step? And if she did, then it was well worth it. We can’t laugh at her. We can’t say that’s just a step. That was more than maybe millions of people would have done in their whole lifetime.

19:28

But then there’s a second step, when a person on an emotional level has learned to love this essence, which they think is outside themselves. They may not know it at the time, but it’s the objectification of something that’s really inside. And if they do this, after awhile they’ll come to understand it. But eventually they’ll see that they’re an emotional person and they allowed their decision to come by way of an emotional medium – so they begin to struggle out of this. They start studying, they start comparing religions. They get disappointed with whatever they’ve been in and they’ll go into astrology or maybe cabala or magic. If they’re fundamentalists they can get into a cabalistic interpretation of the Bible, and try to find the truth that way.

20:22

After so much of this, as I mentioned, you have the same result as the person studying algebra – because this is the wrestling with logic, the wrestling with symbology. And the result is what I call a “wow!” experience, the eureka experience, and this is what the definition of satori is. In all the literature you read on Zen, you’ll find that satori is a momentary wow in which everything seems to fit into place. Now a + b = c fits into place too, but what does this really do for you, in bringing you to a point where you know who you are, once and for all? Your particular exaltation can’t be total because it still deals in relative things. And even the idea of bliss – some people experience bliss with salvation, and some with cosmic consciousness – but the thing to remember is that as long as relative things are felt, you are still in the relative world. You’re in a relative experience. This is the keynote.

21:37

When Paul Wood went to the hospital it wasn’t because he was experiencing bliss; he was in agony. And this is what preceded the illumination of John of the Cross. They had him in jail. His own people were fed up with the fact that he was probing into things more deeply than the beliefs of the papacy.

22:03

Going beyond the wow experience, the next one is where you give up on the vanity of your intellect. I went through this when I was in college; I majored in chemistry and had to take a lot of math courses. So I got into this math and I found out that this was a vanity, that it could go on forever: I could be working problems forever, having one titillation after another, conquering this mass of symbols. And I said, “This isn’t it. There’s got to be a shortcut. I can’t have this tangential pursuit the rest of my life,” whether applied to math or the cabala or whatnot.

But at that point there’s nowhere to go. Up until now we’ve been dealing with books and authors and that sort of thing, and the next step is to try to look for something new, maybe find the fellow who says he found something. This requires a bit of travelling, and who are you going to ask? I knew no one to ask. I didn’t have enough money to travel to India, and I probably wouldn’t have made the trip anyway – that would have been a big escape from action. That’s all travelling is. People go running around all over the face of the earth looking for Don Juan, who possibly doesn’t exist, when the real answer is inside. It’s a matter of a system – just a system of thinking, of looking inside. So anyhow, you wrestle with what you have available, and if you have nothing available you wrestle with your thoughts. You meditate, you evaluate ad infinitum – and you hope, because there’s no promise that anything’s going to happen.

23:44

Well, in Paul Wood’s case and in my case something happened. And of course after it happened I had to find a way to communicate it. The experience of nothing is difficult to verbalize; in the final experience there is no relative expression. You can’t talk about this, you can’t describe it. What do you do? Go out on the street corner and say, “Something happened to me.” And the response is, “So what? – do you have a hangover?” Nobody knows what you’re talking about. And be careful who you talk to because they could appoint somebody to your committee and take care of your property.

24:29

Pulyan, Sokei-an

So I just gave up. I gave up trying to talk about it – until I ran into a Zen teacher, a man in Connecticut by the name of Alfred Pulyan, , and I found he had the ability to communicate. And I was amazed at the method. I had no concept that a person could communicate with you mind-to-mind; that words are not necessary to communicate. Now this has happened in various degrees with different people in the group, where you just allow your mind to become one with another person’s mind and boom, they get the picture. This transcends a lot of words. But this doesn’t happen to everybody. You can’t come off ten years of steady drinking or doping or something like that, and imagine that your head’s going to be in a position where you can receive anything. But this is the proof, or some sign that you’re going someplace.

25:38

Any true Zen teacher is able to do this. Incidentally, we’ve had Zen teachers in this country – gobs of them – and it’s my feeling that most of them are phony. Because money is behind it. Whenever you make money the prime objective, you’re going to be concentrating on that more than on trying to get to somebody’s head. I looked into some of these – because I wondered what they were doing more than anything else. I had two Zen teachers. Pulyan didn’t talk about money, wouldn’t talk about it, he didn’t charge.

26:25

The other one I knew, Sokei-an, who was a friend of Alan Watts, had come over here as a boy. I’m convinced that he was a pious Buddhist, that’s all. He was trying to set up his shrine here and he succeeded at it. He wrote a book that meant nothing – I mean it didn’t seem to have too much in it, except the history of certain anecdotes and that sort of thing. And this is what we get out of Zen today, for example with Suzuki Roshi – the other Suzuki, on the west coast.

26:59

But there was more emphasis put upon what kind of shoes or sandals you wore, what kind of tea ceremony you had, whether you sat in meditation with your back to the wall or facing the wall. You bought a kimono, a pillow to sit on, and all this sort of thing. And to me this is sheer nonsense. This has nothing to do with the interior man. So you’re getting back down into another organization, that’s all. And organizations kill the vital part of what you’re doing.

27:34

Q&A

Now this has been a skeletal talk and from here we can open it up for dialog. The last lecture I gave here was what I call the Psychology of the Observer – which is a method of finding your interior self, and we can go into that if you wish. It’s a psychological system. It has nothing to do with mantras or prayers or incense. It’s just a simple way of looking at your thoughts, and it will bring you to the final point if you can stay with it long enough. So I’d like to stop and have some of you ask questions, and we’ll pick it up from there.

28:24

Self and no-self

Q. This “self” you talk about – as I understand it, Zen believes in no-self.

R. These are words. You see, half the people who get into Zen are running around trying to pretend to have a state of no-mind. This is nonsense. You can’t simulate no-mind. You can’t remove your mind. There is no exercise that you can do to remove your mind. The koan called life will remove it for you. But when I talk of self, when I’m writing, I use either a small letter “s” or a capital “s”. The small one is false; the big one is absolute.

Now everything is and is not. And when you describe anything related to what I consider the real, philosophic approach, this always has to be added, that the final experience brings you the knowledge of nothing and of everything. This is the best way to express it.

[break in tape]

[end of side 1 at 29:34]

File 2

Length: 30:58

00:00

So when somebody starts talking about no-self, or no self existing – this world exists. This is all you know until you know something else; this is your only world. But when you know something else, then this doesn’t matter, it’s a picture show. But it’s real now, and after you come out of the experience and go back to Kroger’s to get your groceries, it’s just as real as it was before, except that you don’t care quite as much.

00:32

Q. What about the concept of dualism? As I understand it, dualism is a source of the illusion.

R. Yes, right. But you can’t escape from that. You can only talk in dualistic terms, because we are not monistic. And this is the reason that when you reach oneness you can’t talk about it. As soon as you start to use words, you describe. But what is down the middle is what counts, which is neither.

01:09

Now the small-s self changes. What the instinctive man conceives of as small-s self is sex organs hanging on a body. And maybe that’s all he wants. Maybe he also drinks booze and he’s got a belly. But that’s his “self”. I’ve heard some of them say, “When I can’t do that, I want to die.” He defines that as all he is. But he rises above that when he finds his emotional self, when he finds that there is something, mental or emotional, that is love. And then he says, “Hey, the body doesn’t matter, what matters is love.” He’s now on an emotional plane. So his self changes, but it is still small-s self. When he’s a philosopher, it is still small-s self. This is what people fail to see: the man’s perspective changes but still he has not reached oneness. So there are difficulties in the definition.

02:17

Q. When you say self you mean small-s self.

R. Well, I’ll specify if you ask me. It’s pretty cumbersome to say small-s or large-s all the time. But generally I’m talking about small-s self unless I’m talking about the absolute, the absolute self, the non-observable self. Somebody back there said it earlier, that these things are only experienced. The higher realizations of the mind are not discussable, they’re only experienceable. And that’s because it’s the small-s self who is doing the talking.

03:04

Q. Am I correct when I understand you to mean that dualism is transcended in one step, but that’s not the ultimate step?

R. It’s transcended, not in one step alone, but each step pulls you away from let’s say the grosser misunderstanding. If you’re acquainted with Joseph Chilton-Pearce, who wrote The Crack in the Cosmic Egg; his feeling was that we were trapped in a language, and somehow this language is nothing more than agreement, belief by agreement. For example, when I was in college we had a table of elements in chemistry and they told us flatly that there were only ninety-two elements possible; that even meteorites had fallen out of the sky and they’d analyze them, and there were only a certain number of elements. And there couldn’t be any more because of some harmony in this atomic chart.

04:19

And so every student just accepts. This is one of the dangers of education. It’s what some of the philosophers call a paradigm: a limitation is immediately set. And you’re so burdened in college with getting the lessons in that you don’t have time to go back and ask, “Hey, is this defined properly?” When I was studying chemistry I had this haunting thing all the time. They were saying that oxygen has a valence of so-and-so, and I’d say, “Wait, wait, let’s get into this valence thing. What’s going on?” I never had it explained properly. They said, “If you’re going to take time to worry about that, you’re never going to get these problems solved. You’re going to flunk because you’ve got to turn in a lesson every day.” So the student goes about it like the private in the army in relation to the sergeant. He thinks, “Well, don’t buck that teacher; he’s got to be right and we’ve got to believe him.” And this is what happens generation after generation, reinforcing it.

05:21

Psychology

And one of the worst things is, not in science, because there we eventually find the truth – we finally found that there were over a hundred element – but in psychology. All psychology is based on propaganda. Well, I can’t say all, there are some sincere psychologists. But a person finds a rather clever little explanation for behavior, and he calls it psychoanalysis, and he becomes popular, and he tries to set up a whole string of clinics all over Europe. It explains something, with a certain theme, and people think, “Oh, boy, this man had the courage to buck the peddlers of guilt.” And he did; he brought us out of the smoke a little bit. But now we had a new religion.

06:19

Psychoanalysis of course was rooted in sex and dreams – that man basically does everything as the result of sex – but then psychotherapy came out, the new name, which was Adler, and this was a slightly different theme. But none of these people gets into a real investigation of the true nature of man. I just picked up a book by a fellow by the name of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and instead of anthropomorphism, he’s talking about the trend of zoomorphism, where we’re trying to learn everything by studying rats. And in the process of studying rats we debase the human society to what he calls ratomorphism. So what we have is a Skinnerian ratomorphism: you watch a certain set of reactions in a rat and predict what the human will do. Well sure, it’s protoplasm. But what is the rat thinking about?

07:23

And we’re subjected to rat, or let’s say mass programming, and this is what’s going on; they’re programming people to behave in a certain manner. They’re starting with the sociologists, who want to create culture, and the psychologists are going to create an atmosphere where there won’t be any riots, , by masturbating the lions. Consequently, we get a whole perverse thing by virtue of propagandizing – with the help of the government, with the help of the powers that be. And on the other hand, the psychologists who want to be funded don’t dare deviate. They have to serve as a public function, as a smoother of trouble, not as a student of the truth about the human mind. So we’re lost as far as using psychology, except for psychological introspection or group analysis – by people who know what they’re doing, not people who are all just trying to get into bed together.

08:34

Gurdjieff

Q. You talk about the observer a lot – do you think that the overall idea is to become aware of everything you’re doing? For instance, I notice that when I talk I become less aware of the things around me. Is the idea to increase your overall level of awareness about everything?

09:04

R. Well, no. Sometimes there are misconceptions – as I said, I advise people to read Gurdjieff, , that is, his system as described by Ouspensky. Some of Gurdjieff’s own writings are pretty dense, what I’ve read of them. Meetings With Remarkable Men is a very interesting storybook, a book of biographical sketches. All and Everything to me is just absolutely too confusing – the truth doesn’t need to be hidden that completely. Consequently I lean to the Gurdjieffian philosophy through Ouspensky [In Search of the Miraculous]. Ouspensky put out a system called the fourth way; this is good. Any system is good if it causes you to think about yourself or encourages self-observation.

09:54

But their concept of self-observation and mine are different. They wanted to be conscious of themselves totally, at all times. Now this may make you a very alert person, but sometimes it’s better if you daydream a bit, if it takes that to go back inside and watch your past traumas and get the answer for them. But for instance, Ouspensky ran around London before he died, trying to remember everything that ever happened to him in his lifetime, every place he’d ever been, to be able to remember this at the moment of death, so that he would be there forever. Who wants to live in London forever?

10:32

But this seemed to be the trend behind it. And that was what gave me the feeling that neither one of these people had ever reached the final step. They talked about man number seven, but I don’t even know of man number five or six. When you transcend the philosophical [which is what Rose calls man number four] the next step would seem to be man number five. But in my view, when you transcend the philosophical, you’re there.

10:55

Trauma

Now to say what type of consciousness you should have, I’m reluctant to advise. Because I think the type of consciousness everybody should have, preparatory to having a breakthrough, is trauma. Now this is diametrically different from the advice of all the gurus who say you’re going to bliss your way into eternity, which is sheer nonsense. When you find out what the score really is, you’re not going to be whistling Dixie. You’re going to have a sad experience. Not the experience itself – the final thing is not sad – but what you leave behind only goes of trauma. When you bid your children goodbye before you’re electrocuted, that’s not going to be a joyous occasion.

11:42

Q. Is that a relative experience too, because it’s based on sadness?

R. Right. But that isn’t the final experience. Earlier I was talking about the book, and in the book I describe the onset of experience, and I mentioned not to pay attention to this as being the final experience. The final experience is nothing. The only thing I can do is to describe what happened on the way up, and when I woke up again on the way back down – those are both miserable experiences.

12:49

God

Q. Is it both theistic and non-theistic?

R. Well – there are no gods but yourself. I don’t know if you can say that’s both theistic and non-theistic. Man discovers that he is God.

12:38

Q. What do you mean by that?

R. You find God – I’m using that word loosely. This is something that’s within everyone. In other words, I can’t tell you which way to look, but most people look outside. Most people build alters and put statues on them, to meditate on, to concentrate on, external mantras, prayers to say. And if they’re fortunate they’ll find that it’s not out there.

13:19

I remember one time I was in a car wreck with a very devout person; we were coming down the hill and the thing was on fire, and I could see he was praying. He was looking up through the windshield – because he thought he was going to be up there. He wasn’t going to be up there, unless there was a bardo up there. I don’t know what was up there. But instinctively you look up. I don’t think this occurs much in the Orient, that you look up, except in what they call kriya yoga, and that’s the third eye. But I think in most Christian practices it was designed to be auto-hypnotic. Looking up puts you in an auto-hypnotic state; it doesn’t show you heaven. But what I’m saying is that what you find is not out there.

14:15

Q. Would you say that nothing exists but God?

R. I would say nothing exists, and I wouldn’t add the latter. I should say nothingness exists. Now everythingness also exists. And this is what you encounter, everythingness. Here we’re getting into definitions, and if you can pick this up, okay. You experience that you are God. But before you experience that, you know that you are nothing; you have to go through the experience of nothingness.

15:06

Spiritual business

Q. What is the goal of all of this? What do people expect to gain from all of this self-searching? Where do you come down on this?

R. Pure foolishness. No goal.

Q. Then why put yourself through this?

R. It won’t get you a nickel.

Q. No powers?

R. No powers.

Q. Happiness?

R. Happiness – what is that? It may get you the knowledge that there’s no such thing.

Q. Then who needs it?

R. Right.

[slight gap]

15:40

Q. I came across some articles trying to correlate Zen philosophy with the Western framework. One is called “Zen Perspective in Social Casework”, another is “Zen in Management”. It seems like spurious uses of Zen. And I hear you saying that this is somehow fraudulent

R. How about motorcycle maintenance? They’ve got one on that too.

I’ve never been in any monasteries in Japan but I heard that a lot of military people sent their children to Zen schools in order to train them; they seemed to make better statesmen and soldiers after they came out of it. Of course, I figure they had a safety valve to keep them from getting enlightened, because if they ever got enlightened they wouldn’t make good statesmen. But nevertheless it was like an encounter group of sorts: the koan thing was like a massive encounter which shakes a man’s head up and makes him think.

But whenever anybody mentions something about this being useful – “What good will it do me?” – that’s the end of the conversation with me. Because if that’s your game, what do you want out of it? If you’re after philosophy you’re not going to be concerned with money. If you’re after the truth, that’s what you’re after; you’re not after converting it to cash.

17:20

Unfortunately this has become big business in Asia. For instance, they have almost like a university in different parts of India where they teach people how to zap, how to perform tricks. Some of these are considered miracles, maybe even the equivalent of miracles that Christ supposedly performed. But these are basically manipulations; these people do not know who they are. It’s like a chemist who produces a new plastic, a new sensational fabric. He doesn’t know what the essence of the fabric is; all he knows is that if he puts certain chemicals together, something else comes out of that tube. And it’s the same way with this. This is done because they don’t export much steel from India – they don’t export much of anything except gurus. These people are experts; the British conquered the country, but the gurus have infected the British thinking for the last hundred years with their very clever concepts. So this is utilitarian: they go to study under some guru in the hopes that they’ll learn to focus their attention, to drive a car blindfolded, or to zap somebody. And if they can come over here it’s worth a million bucks. All they have to do is hit the right person, the right pocketbook. And then they take an airplane load of junk back to the ashram in India.

19:02

So I deplore this type of thinking, and I think if you’re sincere you will reject this. When I a kid I went to every cult I could meet in the country, out to the west coast and other places, and wherever I found dollar signs I came out just as fast as I went in. Because I knew that these people would be concentrating on their bank account and they wouldn’t be concentrating on philosophy – so they had nothing. Because if a man has true values, he doesn’t have money values; he can’t have – they would be in conflict with each other. Money, ambition is obsessive; too obsessive. And in terms of utilitarian value, tell me what I want. I don’t want anything. What would you want, that wouldn’t get you into trouble or cause more trauma?

20:00

Yardsticks

So there were a number of yardsticks I used. First, no money. And any group that had regimentation or pomp, ritual, degrees – the Maharaj Ji and the Maharaj Joe – these don’t mean anything. Titles do not bring you knowledge or essence. Also, extreme organization: organizations become enormous white elephants in which the people become so busy keeping the thing alive that they don’t have time to do anything; and also jockeying for position for who’s in charge of the checkbook.

20:40

Another thing was secrecy: There were a lot of groups that I got into when I was young that said, “Hey, this is the truth – don’t tell anybody.” Because if they get me for ten thousand and I keep my mouth shut, no one will ever know and they can get somebody else for ten thousand. That was my suspicion and some of it was corroborated; I found that some of them were strictly on the clip.

So there’s no need for secrecy. The only thing is, that if I talk to you and you’re not ready to hear, you won’t hear. Maybe you’ll be thinking, “I could convert this into dollars.” Okay, that’s your level. Secrecy perhaps was needed back in the Middle Ages when they tortured you for opening the wrong book. But we aren’t obsessed with that type of thinking today and we can get away with a bit of investigation. I think the biggest trouble we have today with esoteric investigation is not from the so-called Christian establishment, it’s from the anger that’s been built up from the oriental movements that came over here and ripped people off. I don’t think we would have had the friction without the rip-offs.

22:14

Albigensians

Q. What does Albigen mean?

R. It’s short for Albigensian. , Bring raised a Catholic, when I found out what happened to the Albigensians I resented it. So I more or less dedicated the book to them without saying so. I consider the Albigensians to be a pure element in the Christian Church which was destroyed. They were massacred down to the man, woman and child, in France, in the province of Toulouse I think it was. So that’s the reason.

23:00

Are you sure?

Q. Is there anything whatsoever, personally, of which you are absolutely and totally sure?

R. Yes.

Q. What might that be?

R. Well, I can’t tell you. But except for this one thing, I’m sure that everything else is unsure. I know what you’re getting at. Generally the thought in the back of a person’s head when they ask that is, “How do you know you’re there? Are you sure, once you see this?” For instance we list these various exaltations and people ask, “You mentioned the four steps: the salvationistic, the wow experience, the comic consciousness [kevala samadhi] and then finally the sahaja samadhi. Why aren’t there sixteen more?” But you know. Now of course if I say I’m sure, I am sure. But how can I tell you that I’m sure? How can I demonstrate this? I can’t. But I know that everything else is unsure.

24:23

Scientific tests

Q. Do you think any factor of the Zen experience can be subject to western scientific tests?

R. They have done it; they wired up some yogis to these alpha wave, biofeedback machines, and they find that they have a different vibration. They were doing biofeedback tests in Pittsburgh and one of the boys in the group was involved it, and he said, “Why don’t you go over there and let them test you?” And I said, “Sure, set it up. It’s alright with me, I don’t care.” I didn’t even care if they didn’t find anything. They never got around to it. But there’s no point in it – it wouldn’t matter if they put the wires on me and the machine blew up; that wouldn’t prove I knew anything.

25:35

What you’re implying of course is tangible proof. They tell a story about the fellow who approached Buddha and said, “If you can prove to me you’re authentic, I’ll follow you all the days of my life.” And Buddha answered, “The proof is in the following.” So it’s the trip, not sitting and debating. Now that sounds like a long shot, to put your whole life into something with no guarantee. But you’re going to put your whole life in anyhow. And it doesn’t take that big a piece out of it; your life still goes on. You don’t have to shut life down. It’s just a choice of a way of living. Sometimes it’s no more than a simple thing, that when you see foolishness or when you see yourself kidding yourself or lying to yourself – just quit. Change abruptly, change your lifestyle. Don’t continue to lie to yourself.

26:37

I consider this the most scientific approach. It’s like when you run a qualitative analysis, and what you want to know is the truth. You don’t want to have two chemists where one says, “I think this is sodium,” and the other says, “I think it’s potassium,” and each tries to prove it. No, science says we’ll take it for what it is. The truth is what we want.

27:06

Becoming

My conception of the approach to the final experience, the final knowledge, is the same thing: no baloney. If you’re a liar you can’t perceive the truth. We have no other vehicle except the mental vehicle that we witness. So what we do is we become. Christ didn’t say, “I know the truth and I’m going to sell it.” He said, “I am the truth.” I read that and for years it didn’t mean a thing to me: Why did they write it that way? Why didn’t he say, “I have the truth”? It seemed to be superlative – until I had my experience. Then I realized what this man was saying – or what they were saying, putting words in his mouth. I don’t know. He’s been dead for a long time.

28:01

But regardless, this makes sense to me. You become the truth, you don’t learn it. And the only way you can become the truth is by being truthful on basic, elementary steps, until you can become truthful on massive gestalts or philosophic steps. Then you become one with it. Then your computer is trained, not for wishful thinking. The computers today are being trained to be deceptive. We’re being trained to act like animals and pretend that we’re super. And that’s not going to work. We’re living a lie. This Skinnerian trip is basically a lie.

28:46

Desires

Q. I notice that when I’m lying to myself, it always seems to happen because of something I want or desire. How do you get around that?

R. You said something that immediately gave the key, that you want something – but who is it who wants? It isn’t you who wants. You think you want. The human being is controlled largely by his appetites, and sometimes an appetite runs away with him. Now in the process of finding the individual, or the self that approaches the capital-s Self, there is something I call the observer. If you’re watching something in yourself and saying, “Hey, this thing is destroying me; this is a feature I don’t want,” you’re not talking about yourself. In this psychological process, the view is never the viewer. The viewer approaches the absolute self. The view is the objective thing, the mundane, the materialistic pretense, the belief structure. Humanity collectively agrees that we have two legs, two arms, two eyes, etc., and certain habits, propensities, which are us. As I said, the guy thinks, “I’m a sex organ; when I can’t have sex I want to die.” That’s what he thinks he is. But when he’s saying the word “I” he’s mistaken. Because someday he might have an accident and find out that that’s not him at all.

[break in tape]

[side 2 ends at 30:58]

File 3

side 3 is 31:00 total

00:00 [Eventually he sees] that these appetites are not him. They’re only one part of his reasoning.

... living that these appetites are not him. They’re only one part of his reasoning.

00:50

Umpire

Now I maintain that there’s a thing in the human being I call the umpire. Some people call it conscience. But I think it’s nothing more than the somatic mind at work, deciding for the ultimate life of the vehicle. That with the aid of what I call little witnesses – DNA molecules, genes and stuff, experience recorded in the computer, this all goes in – the umpire sits in court and says something like, “Hey, you’re gaining weight. When you get that fat up around your heart you’re going to croak.” But the guy might be a compulsive eater and he says, “I want to eat.” But he is not wanting to eat – a voice, an appetite wants to eat. Or he says he wants to drink, to get drunk, or that he wants power. Again, he doesn’t want power; that’s just one facet. Now when he sees these things going on within himself he becomes an observer. He begins to observe himself, and as soon as he does that, this umpire becomes external, as not him, not us. And then we go still further back.

I’m giving you the process of meditation I mentioned earlier, and if you can pick it up, this is a correct procedure if you want to go inside yourself. You observe your physical drives which are not necessarily you. They’re identified as not being you because they’re observable. We know we’re watching.

01:47

Process observer

The next step, stepping back behind the umpire, we watch our processes of thinking. We go into meditation and say, “What is going on inside here? What is the motivation? Why am I created this way?” Or, “What happens after death?” All of these philosophic problems enter into our head, and we watch our head working.

And in doing this we also notice other little things. For instance, I read in the paper that each person is subjected to 1,400 advertisements every day. It’s amazing, but maybe that’s possible. And some of these advertisements are swaying our head. So we stop and think, “What’s happening in this computer while 1,400 signals are going by?” Naked women, booze advertisements – whatever they are, they’re counting up and they’re encouraging a whole philosophy of thought. Two days out of the week the guy’s a bishop, but the next thing you know he goes down to the porno shops and then he’s no longer a bishop. His whole philosophy changes; he says, “Well, maybe this isn’t so bad.”

03:05

Anyway, now we’re watching the mind. And only when you do this do you realize that the mind is not you. We were talking before about Zen and no-mind. You can’t approach this by simulating what you think the symptoms might be. Some people try to go blah, keep their mind flat, nothing. This will get you nowhere except maybe the nuthouse. You read a book and the guy says, “A real saint folds his hands, he looks up here and pretty soon he’ll see something.” Maybe he will, but this is simulation. The real saint, you can’t tell anything about him. He doesn’t look in any direction particularly, because it’s basically inside himself.

03:56

So when you observe the mind and wrestle with these gestalts, these processes, this is what I call the process observer. We’re watching the mind at work – and one day it blows up. This is what happens; the mind literally comes to a dead stop. Because you’re able to watch everything. I think Gurdjieff hints at this in some of his writings, that there’s so much confusion that occurs, and when the mind stops, the door opens, and there’s only oneness.

04:33

Now, of course, when you first start meditating you’ll think, “This could go on forever: I’m going to see myself acting and then rise above it, I’m going to see myself emoting and rise above that, and then I’ll see myself thinking and I’ll rise above the thinking – but my thinking will just get more complex and I’ll have an infinite number of anterior selves.” This is not true. The process observer is the last self, the last self to go. And incidentally, one of the reasons you can’t simulate an experience, is that what happens in the final experience is the dissolution of ego. The dissolution of ego cannot be voluntary.

05:15

Proper order of egos

This is another mistake made by a lot of people going into esoteric work, that they try to relinquish, to become unattached, and they try to have experience at the same time. They say, “Well, it doesn’t matter, I’ve risen above my body, I don’t pay any attention to it. So I take dope.” They relinquish their so-called pride and they go down the street filthy dirty, and pretty soon their mind starts to become closer to the ground. And this becomes manifestly noble to them; they think that they’re getting someplace because they’re detached from trying to look pretty, and that’s a virtue. So they get hepatitis from being in filth, and the next thing is they’re in the hospital and overdosed or dead. So this is not a path to spirituality; this will take you no place except the cemetery.

06:25

You have to hang onto your pride, you have to hang on to your morality. You have to hold every ounce of energy and use it for the maximum advantage. Don’t get the idea that you can throw everything away and come up with a superb answer. You have to guard your energy all the way down the line. And then what happens – it’s taken away. The head explodes. You don’t pretend to have no-mind, the head blows up. A big hole blows in it. And then you’re there.

06:58

Q. As I understand it, you’re saying that good and evil are useful concepts to keep in mind in the struggle for enlightenment, but once you’re enlightened you see it’s dualism.

R. There’s no such thing as good and evil – in this dimension or the next. Now that’s not for everybody to believe. It’s important that children believe in good and evil until they come to a different philosophy, but there’s no such thing as good and evil. This is one of the hangups you get over very quickly. But you have to hang onto that if that’s your only safeguard. Man has to be disciplined until he can discipline himself. And it’s better to cling to a blind faith than it is to run around loose through eternity like something that went wild.

07:57

We do have these egos. We have the personal ego of keeping your body healthy, keeping yourself looking neat, feeling good, energetic. This is one of the things people think about in spirituality, because they’ve read it in the old Christian books – they say, “I’m going to be a spiritual person; I’ve got to find a dunghill like Job and be real crummy.” The result is that if you get enough parasites in you, you’re dead, that’s all. Or you’re tortured to death and you won’t be able to think.

08:34

There has to be a certain amount of peace in your head. There has to be trauma too. But you have to build a healthy body and a healthy mind so that you can tear it apart. You have to fatten up your head so you can cut it off. This is the way it goes. And it’s only at the last moment the time comes for the physical ego to drop. They all go down like dominos. You lose respect for yourself and your physical body, you lose the hope of physical immortality, you lose the hope of mental survival or mental ability. You realize that all you’ll ever been is just a kind of a soggy bag that impressions have been made on, and that you’ve been you’ve been putting out wild reactions to.

09:19

Then you lose your spiritual ego. You know that you were never really sure that you ever had a soul, that this was just a concept. A man who tells himself the truth doesn’t say, “I have a soul.” He doesn’t use the word God. He doesn’t know. Consequently, as that ego goes down, going in the proper sequence, then you die. You actually go through a death. But if you were to drop those egos prematurely or in the wrong order, then you destroy your path and there’s no way to reach the goal. But that will happen, and all you have to do is pursue this investigation, meaning you try to eliminate ignorance.

10:10

After death

Q. Are you’re saying most people really aren’t looking for truth; they just like to think they are?

R. Most people are looking for truth as they define it. I ask people sometimes, “Did you ever stop to think that you may not go to heaven?” Maybe they will – they’re called bardos. “But maybe you’ll arrive someplace where grandpa’s not there and your parents are not there. What makes you think they’re going to be there? What proof do you have about all this comfort? What are you going to do for the next two billion years?” They never stop to think about this. But don’t tell them that they’re robots. Don’t tell them that they’re automatons. They just say, “Hey, that’s enough; I don’t want to hear that.” So what you’re experiencing with this person is a bag that will hold only two pounds, and you’re trying to put four pounds into it. So you move away.

11:19

Buddha nature

Q. Don’t all people have the Buddha nature and are capable of enlightenment?

R. No. They all have the Buddha nature, all before God. But they don’t have the vehicle or the timing or the destiny – or whatever the factors are, I don’t know. They talk about future incarnations, perhaps, but what are future incarnations if there is no future? I think that every living creature that has sentience has this same thing, this same ray. It’s seemingly the projection of – I don’t want to use the word divine, this is a connotation we give. What does divine mean? What is is-ness? Is-ness is not divine, is-ness is. That which is, is. But I think every being is.

12:28

Now, why is it that some are aware of stuff before they die and others are only aware of it when they die? I think a tremendous lot of people break through at the moment of death. If you get case histories you’ll see that there are a tremendous number of illuminations at the point of death. So how many of them reach that? Then again, some of them come back and their testimonies are different, as in Kübler-Ross and in Raymond Moody’s book. , These accounts of after-death experiences show that what the Tibetans call bardos is where these people went: back to more of the same. So how long are they in this, and when would they be conscious in their so-called Buddha nature? Again, these are words.

The Buddha nature to me is nothing more than the vein of the absolute that’s in every human being. But what will it take for it to be conscious, for the person to be conscious of it? What it amounts to basically, I maintain, is that everybody is unconscious; and when a person realizes the Buddha nature then the small-s self and the large-s Self are both conscious of each other for the first time.

13:41

Umpire

Q. Were you saying earlier that when you become aware of your umpire, you see your small-s self and your suffering, and using your umpire you can find your way to your capital-s Self?

R. No, no. You don’t do it by virtue of the umpire, you just see through the umpire. What happens is your life becomes adjusted. These are the signposts or milestones. That once you’ve gotten behind the umpire and see what’s happening, you don’t have to fight quite as much. You’re not at war with yourself. Maybe you’re not at war with your neighbor any longer. The wife and the husband aren’t fighting because they recognize that it’s the person’s appetite and not their inner self that’s screaming for attention. So there’s a lot to be learned along the road in this line. But this is only adjustment of the somatic mind. This study of the different umpire voices will not bring you to the realization of the final truth – but you have to go through it. And you’ll be obsessed with doping it out.

Q. That’s a big step though.

R. Absolutely. Some people don’t do it in their entire lives; they don’t even get that far in their entire life pattern.

15:22

Q. What happens when the umpire fails and the individual ends his life?

R. I don’t know.

Q. Well, how much power do you attribute to the umpire?

R. The basic motive of the umpire is the coordination of the different voices to keep them all alive. All of them.

Q. I’d say that suicide is the total failure of the umpire.

R. Yes. And incidentally, after the umpire becomes aware that the observer has put a factor in there called spiritual survival, he also takes this into account. Up until then the umpire is only concerned with individual survival and family or genetic survival; it’s not concerned at all with spiritual survival. So when it has to deal with that, then of course it may use it. For instance, the umpire may use a religious concept of sin to fortify the individual against extremes that would kill him. Consequently, that becomes an artificial factor or voice that’s thrown in, created by the umpire or at least encouraged by the umpire, to exist – although it’s basically not concerned with that.

16:38

But when a person commits suicide I generally interpret it – if they succeed and they’re a thinking type of person – as that they realize there’s no future; there’s no more that can be gained in that particular life, that they can’t progress. If you examine the cases of people who commit suicide you’ll find somebody who is maybe hooked on dope and he can’t get out. I know a boy who came back from Viet Nam who was nineteen years old and he took a 45 and blew his intestines out. He couldn’t get the money to buy the stuff and he was in torture, so he just killed himself. Another case would be a fellow whose entire life was spent maybe building up a business, and then the business collapses. This is his whole meaning, his whole concept of life, he’s not young enough to build up another one, so he may commit suicide. Or a person may commit suicide to get away from the pain of cancer. There are different reasons. But it is true that the umpire failed. And of course, the umpire’s not infallible; it’s just the watchdog of the somatic department.

18:01

Q. When the umpire helps you understand certain things, does that mean you’re letting down your ego?

R. Your ego changes.

Q. Your defenses are down, you don’t feel as if you have to be in control of the situation?

R. Well, I wouldn’t say your defenses are down. I don’t think you need to surrender, and I don’t think you should surrender one bit of pride. Foolish vanity is something else, but I mean keeping your prestige within society or keeping your looks up and your health up, or pursuing an ambition, whether it’s spiritual or economic. I don’t think that part of it matters, unless you really come to the conclusion finally that it’s a lie.

Q. The umpire helps you do that?

R. Right. Well, what happens is that you choose. Ultimately you’ll see that the sex is not you, the stomach is not you – if you eat too much it could kill you. Or the power’s not you, because in cases like Richard Nixon or this Moro in Italy, this proves we can go, no matter how big we are. Somebody can shoot you, depose you, tear up your empire – which is a sardine can in which all the little sardines are eating each other. So there’s no real power in this world.

19:33

So what is left? And the person who has hung onto a spiritual path this far realizes for the first time that the real value is not in this stage play, this rat race, this game of eat and be eaten. So then an additional amount of energy is liberated for the evaluation of systems. I don’t say to grab one religion, but you evaluate systems of thinking, psychology, errors in psychology, errors in religious systems, to choose for yourself the true, to sort. And his is where your life will turn abruptly.

20:16

Q. Because you’re not distracted.

R. Right. And with that of course starts the analyzation of the systems of thinking. Your attention is off of the body, its appetites, and even off of the fears, which are egos. It doesn’t matter then.

20:32

Q. Do you lose your umpire at this point?

R. No, I don’t think so. You’re aware of it, you allow it.

Q. You’re not watching it at this point.

R. No, no. You’re aware of it until you’ve reached the final step; and when you come back you’re aware of it. You have to eat so there’s no sense in eating food that isn’t good for you and that sort of thing. That doesn’t mean you should overeat. By the same token, if you’re young enough and it occurs to you to get married, there’s nothing wrong with that, or indulging in a relationship with somebody of the opposite sex. But you’re not going to be carried away with the idea that this is the utopia. If it’s healthy for you to have a relationship, then this is going to be topmost in your head, more so than that you’re going to be the greatest lover on earth. And the same with everything else. If you have a chance to get a promotion in your job, you take it, but you don’t make a big thing out of it. You don’t try to kill off everybody else to get there. If it comes, okay; if it doesn’t, okay, because that’s not the most important thing. It’s generally just a bigger headache if you get a promotion.

22:01

Q. What is the reason for continuing life either before or after a person gets enlightened? What is the significant value? Truth exists whether you’re physically alive or not, whether you’ve reached it or not.

R. Well, after the experience, you’re not dead so you’ve got to go on living.

Q. But why?

R. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I was born. I have a feeling that a physical vector is formed in the pursuit that determines a lot what you do after the experience happens. I also believe that certain things happen that are in the blueprint, but that I didn’t draw the blueprint. Now, I said you experience that you are everything, and that means you must have something to do with drawing the blueprint. But my mundane consciousness is not aware of that. And significant things happened in my life that my mundane consciousness is not aware of. In other words, if I fasten my mundane consciousness on a desire, it has no meaning and it will not come to fruition. But if I fasten my consciousness on something indifferently, it may happen. ,

23:39

Q. In other words, you can divert the divine?

R. I think we have to resign ourselves to that which is. The blueprint’s already made; we’re not going to change anything. Everybody wants to manipulate, and there’s no point in manipulating. You go out into a flower garden where somebody has carefully planted and what do you do, start digging and planting more flowers? No, you enjoy the scene, that’s all. There’s no point in planting more flowers, or tearing them up.

24:10

I believe too that you have a pattern you go through. I think that the thing behind my whole drive was a hunger to find an answer, and a tremendous anger at the phonies I found in my youth. I went from temple to temple and found nothing. If they weren’t after money they were perverts; there was always some game they were playing. And I made up my mind that if I found anything I’d make it available.

24:40

Now reserving this thought, possibly what? – it caused me to fire back into this dimension? Or it opened the door? I don’t know which happened. I think there are a good many people who don’t come back. But I think that if they have a healthy enough body, everybody will come back. If you’ve taken care of your health you’ll come back. But a lot of people, if they had a stroke or something and they’re on their way out, they’ll have a profound experience. But they can’t talk, they can’t describe it.

25:21

And the hope of course is to benefit the other people. We are not alone. I said before that every person is the end of the so-called ray of the absolute. If you want to call it divine, okay. That means that there’s an equality here, a tremendous equality; we are not better than the person who doesn’t realize this. The difference is in the degree of consciousness of our real source. Consequently, there’s a tremendous desire to take care of the kids: your children, other people’s children, people who have got fed up too with the chicanery, with the phoniness. Now maybe I’m playing an ego trip. You’ll have to judge that for yourself; I could just be showing off.

26:26

Artists

Q. Has it been your experience that an artist’s preoccupation in his work with low grade exaltations will keep him from the higher rungs?

R. I don’t know.

Q. Could he say what he means by “low grade exaltations”?

R. If you can pick him up, I think he means that for instance a person becomes enraptured by the ability to create. A man reads a poem and reaches an exaltation, or he writes a poem and has a tremendous feeling. That doesn’t mean he knows the final answer. He may know there is something beyond that, but he lingers in that. And I believe that’s a hangup. I think a tremendous lot of people who have the artistic drive without the artistic degeneration can reach spiritual heights. But most of the artists I have met, somehow couple it with every form of degeneration they can possibly think of, and even wrote it off, excused it as being “experience”.

27:45

Intuition

Certain things destroy the mental clarity. We talked a little bit about emotion: two people can fall in love and experience a tremendous rapture; and I went through the thing myself, to find out a short time later I had projected something that wasn’t there. Consequently, my emotional self is erratic. Everybody goes through this. They see somebody, they project something onto it – maybe it’s themselves that they project – and they live to regret it. And the same with projection of a tremendous affection on a guru or even a system of thinking. So after this kind of experience we go on to the logical approach and we try to solve everything with mathematical precision. We’re going to know right down to the nth degree exactly how to go about this, and we find out it’s a total failure, another fatheaded trip.

But then we find that there is somewhere in between, or somewhere with both, that is the tool we have to use. And that’s intuition. Now there are certain things that you do, that a person can get into, in which their intuition is destroyed for a lifetime. To give you an example, you can take acid and you’ll have an intuition. And after awhile you get to depend on it. People used to come to my lectures: Rose plus acid. “We’re going to get this right through this guy. We’re all hopped up, we’ll listen to him awhile and then we’ll know exactly what he knows.” That is a faulty intuition – which will carry them down a toboggan ride. And a lot of them will tell you even when they’re cold sober that that’s a genuine intuition. They’ve become sold on it.

29:54

But genuine intuition is the only tool you have in the abstract realm. When you’re talking to a man, like when you’re listening to me, the only gauge that you have is your intuition. It’s not in my words; I could be a very clever liar. I could be spinning you a tale. How do you know? Your intuition is the only thing you’ve got to go by. You read a book, and why don’t you throw it away, or why do you throw it away? Because of your intuition.

30:19

One man throws away a book and another man picks it up, and say’s it’s valid. So somebody’s wrong. One man goes into a certain church but another man rejects it. And they all do this by virtue of intuition. But what’s happening is that somebody’s somatic-mind voices are leading him. He’s never bothered to use his intuition and go through the umpire-thinking, so he’s going to the church or movement because they encourage him. The guru says, “What you do doesn’t matter as long as you pay me and chant this word. Don’t apply your intuition. Don’t try to lead a moral life. Just go through this mechanical thing and put the money on the table on your way out.”

[break in tape - question missing]

[end of side 3 at 31:00]

File 4

00:00

R. I’m sure but I can’t make you sure. How should I answer you? You know I’m sure – if I’m not sure then I’m crazy; why would I be up here? I’d have to be a real capital fool – I don’t even take a collection.

00:25

Love

Q. What do you consider to be the role of emotions such as love in your system?

R. I believe that there is a thing called love. In the next issue of TAT Journal there’s an article on love in which I try to demonstrate what genuine love is. Love is a theme. Life is an act. Love is the theme of life, basically. And it has a certain amount of power, but it’s only relative. My concept of love is basically different from what the average person talks about. I’m very much opposed to using the word love. The first thing, if you hear the hillbilly singers, when they talk about love, giving their man a good loving, they’re talking about sex. And in other cases, when somebody is talking about love they’re talking about hypnosis: where two parties are so hypnotized they don’t know where they are, but when they wake up they hate each other.

Then there’s a path of friendship and devotion that lasts an entire life. There’s hell to pay and moments of happiness and this sort of thing – and this to me is the genuine love. It’s the service of the man to friendship; that’s his theme of life. And I don’t think a person can pledge themselves to it; you either work for other people or you don’t. And you can’t work for yourself after you realize there’s no self, that what we considered the previous self doesn’t count.

02:31

I consider the people who are the greatest lovers to be those people who dedicated forty or fifty years to trying to make a better life for three or four kids – doing without things, and quietly doing it, keeping their mouth shut even when hell breaks out. Because that’s their dedication. This is their proof. I’ve met people who wouldn’t pass you on the highway if you had a flat; they’d stop and help you. And you look the fellow over and think, “What’s he doing this for? He didn’t have to stop.” But you recognize a certain type of person. Maybe he’s wanting to do more but that’s all he can do. He doesn’t know what to do, but he wants to be instrumental in helping other people. Now, we have another class of people who are crass hypocrites, people who go around popping off about helping humanity, and they’re doing everything to destroy us. So it isn’t the protestation, it’s the proof.

03:41

Emotions

Q. What’s the role of emotion in general? Is it something to observe and detach yourself from?

R. I don’t think that there are any emotions that really sway you. All through the early days of my searching I had the emotion of anger: I was an iconoclast, I wanted to break things up. When I was seventeen or eighteen years old I went to a spiritualist center – at that time I thought the proper way to get the answer was to find out what would happen to me after I died. All these things are answered if you answer one of them: if you can find out what happens after you die you may get an inkling of what the eternal nature of life is. So the first thing to do is something objective. For several years I made a career out of going to spiritualist churches, listening to messages, going to materializations, seeing the spooks, until finally I got into some that were real. But we went over to one in Chesterfield, Indiana and they were cheesecloth. I could see the safety pin in the spirit’s neck. And this is where my emotions came in. I said to the fellow with me, “Turn on the light and I’ll throw her through the window.” This was my immediate reaction. How can they have these people weeping over a dead person who isn’t there? They’re weeping over a guy with luminous cheesecloth wrapped around him.

05:22

So you may have emotional reactions. I had them. I didn’t care; I encouraged it. That fired up my pursuit to go further. You can’t just be bland and say, “Oh, well, we’re going to drift and observe.” No, I think sometimes if you’re determined and you’re irritated, you develop a love for that which is selfless and good – and an anger for the stuff that’s using up people’s lives. My complaint is that you only have a few years in which your mind is flexible enough to do this battle; it doesn’t do you any good to get into this when you retire. This has to occur in your youth. But the people who are being driven the hardest and allowed to think the least, who are propagandized the most and have the most pressure put on them are the people in that age bracket.

06:19

Consequently, my anger was against this wholesale prostitution of the minds of the young people. And I resent the gurus who come over here with their little mantas and clichés and their adoration of the flesh – the personal guru and all this sort of thing. To me this is malarkey. And I don’t need to come out and be anti-social. But what do they do? They all reinforce each other; they have conventions in which they all pat each other on the back. It’s like a candy store: “You want some of this junk, that junk and that junk? Take your pick. We’re all genuine.” Back-scratching deals.

06:58

No, I say there’s a true and there’s the phony. And when you finally develop an intuition to where you can discriminate this, then you help the poor sucker who doesn’t have the discrimination if you can – if you can get through his thick head and say, “Hey, you’re being snowed.” And don’t be afraid of the consequences. So that may be emotion, and I’m still an emotional person.

07:20

Q. What about an actual physiological state of say euphoria?

R. No, no – trauma, trauma. Don’t get euphoric. You find euphoria in the cemetery; for years and years you’ll enjoy it. Indulge in trauma while you can.

07:40

Q. What about any emotion, not necessarily euphoria?

R. Well, I don’t say that all emotions are bad; but I equate euphoria with non-action, placidity. When you enter these various states, when you enter the salvationistic state, it’s euphoric. We climb and we hit a plateau, and you get a reward when you hit the plateau, because this is a rest. The mind rests for the next struggle, and sometimes it rests for what seems like a long time before it gets to thinking again. So we have a way of breaking that up. This is one of my aims, because I know that people will go through these stages and I don’t like to see them rest twenty or thirty years on one plateau. Take a little rest and let’s start fighting again, let’s try going for this truth again.

08:35

Consequently, it’s better to allow yourself to become irritated by the untruths around you, rather than to say, “Oh well, it all comes out in the wash.” Now in the final analysis you may discover that everything in the world is perfect the way it is. This is the reason that once you find out, you’re not going to go into politics or anything, because it doesn’t mean a damn. But right now you don’t know that. You’ve got to fight like hell to find out that it doesn’t pay to fight like hell. There’s no choice. Don’t accept my word. Some so-called teacher or writer says that in the final analysis everything is taken care of by God; whether it’s the fall of the sparrow or the fall of the bombs over Japan, that these are all things that are supposed to happen. But that doesn’t stop you from being concerned, and the concern stirring up your head. Allow it to stir up your head, and after your head is clear, then you’ll realize it was a play. But don’t take my word for that.

09:58

“World is terrible”

Q. I still don’t understand how you can say something like that. Our world is in terrible shape. Don’t you think we should all be trying to do something to make it better?

R. Yes – commit suicide. [laughs] I know him, that’s the reason I answered that way. It is in terrible shape. And each to his own method. Some people go out and shoot people over it, and other people talk about Zen. Because everything is wrong. No matter who’s in office they’re wrong, no matter what thing is sweeping the country it’s wrong. And no matter where you go, there’s brutality, suffering, hate and all this sort of thing. So I used to joke and say the real way to solve the earth’s problems, the solution for mankind, is to kill everyone off but one man and let him commit suicide. Or to rise above and find out that it isn’t that important, that terrible. I was saying earlier that I got a letter from this fellow on the west coast. He read the Three Books of the Absolute and he said, “I went into agony reading that thing; this is an agonized view of the world. Everything is terrible.” I’m not going to tell you exactly the words he used, but it was in unpleasant terms. But the truth of the matter was that it was his viewpoint that was terrible. Our viewpoint is terrible.

11:43

Q. But you must admit that in the present world situation things do look pretty bad. We can destroy the world fifteen times over if somebody mistakes a meteorite for a nuclear missile. Or if there’s a major accident at a bacteriological warfare plant, this country could be wiped out in a matter of a year.

12:11

R. All right, you give me a hundred dollars and I’ll see that you go to heaven when that bomb goes off.

[Rose whispers to somebody, “Don’t take him seriously.”]

Q. [crosstalk]

What do you think I can do for you? I can’t help it. It’s just a play, you know. Like this actor Evans who played Shylock in Shakespeare – it took two men to walk him up and down the alley after the play, shouting in his ear, “Remember, you’re not Shylock. Remember you’re Evans.” So this is the same: you have to continually remind yourself that it’s not that serious. It’s just a play.

12:51

Umpire

Q. I’m trying to nail down what you mean by the umpire. Is this just a concept-building thing which seeks to arrive at clarity of mind, using intuition and verbalization?

R. No, no. We have to be the observer that is aware of this.

Q. But you don’t equate the umpire with the capital-s Self or anything?

R. No, no. It’s the somatic mind, basically. It’s a combination of the influences of the body, the appetites, the fears and that sort of thing. The person is born with clarity but he loses it. We have to become as a little child, as the Bible says. You have to regenerate your intuition. But this doesn’t always occur to you; I think you have to have a bit of intuition to know you’ve got to generate your intuition. And this is the reason some people are so irrevocably lost. They get sand-trapped; they don’t know how much they’re limited. They just presume that everybody is similarly limited, with certain thought patterns, life experiences, answers and so on. And they don’t realize that their computer might be improved.

14:28

I go back to this little story that I got into when I was studying theology: “The finite mind will never perceive the infinite.” And when you start talking with people about philosophy they’ll say, “I’m going where everybody else goes.” They think everybody is equally stupid, everybody is equally limited, everybody is going to die and have exactly the same experience. But now we’re getting books like Moody’s, which show that everybody doesn’t die and have the same experience. So some of these minds must be different.

14:56

Process observer

Now the process observer is the first inkling of an intuition. The process observer may find that there’s something inhibiting the thinking. For instance, I had a daughter who was hypothyroid: she couldn’t think and she couldn’t help herself; she couldn’t clear up her thinking. I saw her standing in a daze one time for about two hours and I gave her hell for it. She started weeping and said, “‘I can’t think.” And we took her to the doctor and he pumped her full of something, a hormone, and then she was able to think. Consequently, sometimes you can’t help yourself. But once she got that balance in her thyroid, then she became functional. Then she could think and say, “I’d better remember to take these pills, to keep myself on track.” And this is the same thing.

16:03

There are things that can get out of whack. I talked about physical pride and taking care of yourself. There are certain improper balances in nutrition that will make it more difficult for you to stay awake and think properly. There’s a lot about this that you can learn. But I think this comes basically from the process observer; he’s watching the difference in your systems of thinking, and then he feeds this into the umpire. So this becomes another factor: the vitamin pill, the thyroid shot, the cold shower, whatever it is to make your thinking change, or to hold your state of mind to get the thought. Most of us can’t keep a state of mind long enough to solve a problem. And these are great problems to solve.

17:00

Animals

Q. Do you think it’s our human condition that gives us these problems; that the rocks and trees and animals have this state and we have to try to get there?

R. I don’t know so much about trees but I’ve never talked to any. Some people have, but I’ve never been fortunate enough to get any answers out any of them. Now there’s something I can’t prove to you, but my belief is that the animals have a much more direct way of knowing. We are confused by our words; the Tower of Babel story is very apropos. We’re confused by symbols and we’re trying to verbalize everything. As I said, I discovered in my lifetime that there’s a way of going directly to the mind. You can debate words ad infinitum. We’ve got to use them, and this is the first thing Pulyan said to me, that words are all foolishness but we’ve got to use them until we can surmount them or get beyond them. I think that what the animal lacks is the ability to work together, or maybe he reaches a point in which he sees the foolishness of it. He may act well within his limitations, to the best of his ability.

18:09

I think it was Voltaire who said that the animals despise the humans and that’s the reason they refuse to talk. And there’s a bit of wisdom to this. But occasionally they will try to communicate if they think it’s worthwhile. They’ll try to have rapport with us, to communicate, if they develop enough attention, if they feel it’s worthwhile or they’re concerned. But I think they have the intuition that what’s going to happen to them is, they’re going to eat so many blades of grass, or if it’s a cat they’re going to kill so many mice and birds, and then they’re going to die and that’s it, that’s their experience. And of course I don’t know why they’re born a cat or a dog, and I don’t think they do. But they know a tremendous lot more than we credit them with. They’re more telepathic than we are, I’m quite sure, because we have so many accounts of it.

19:22

If you stay on a farm for a period of time you’ll watch their understandings go on. They say a lion and a deer will go down to the same water hole. The deer has some way of knowing whether the lion is hungry, and if the lion isn’t hungry it won’t kill; so they drink at the same time. Another time they won’t go near the lions. If you notice in these films of African places, there will be deer or gazelle grazing while the predator is right in their midst, practically, alongside. They seem to ignore them, but yet they know when to take off and run. So I believe they have an awareness, they have this direct-mind. That’s my conviction at least but it open for quibble; a lot of people don’t believe that animals think.

20:26

Sufism

Q. Do you know about any investigations on the Sufis.

R. I don’t know. I feel that the Sufi practice is more or less an expeditious way of throwing away false values. I don’t comprehend how you’d safeguard yourself. I’ve not read extensively nor have I talked too long with anybody. But I have kind of an uncomfortable feeling about the Sufi movement, because I could see that if you let go too much, without a proper moral ballast, you maybe could go off the deep end. But I don’t want to pretend to be an authority on Sufism. I know there must be something valid in it because there are some giants in the Sufi movement.

21:44

Martial arts

Q. What about Aikido?

R. I don’t know anything about it. What is it?

Q. It’s a martial art, which was developed by a master.

R. Yes, maybe I’ve heard of this. There are several things they talk about, where people have even learned to kill by shouting, and developing extreme physical and mental powers by concentration. But unfortunately, at least in the manifestation of it that I have learned, they talk about using it to defend themselves [rather than self-investigation]. That’s the reason I fail to get interested in the martial arts. But I’ve heard that they tell their students that you’ll first learn to perfect your body and then learn to use your mind like an instrument. Maybe so, but I’ve never been in it.

22:52

Shocks

Q. [inaudible]

R. This is a misinterpretation. A lot of people think that you have to be miserable all the time. That isn’t true. Life will provide the miseries. All you have to do: if you announce yourself and make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to go for the truth, these traumas will occur to you. They will not be obsessions that last. Now you can go through a crisis which occupies a couple days or something, and when you come out of it you’ll be ready to rest on another plateau, if it was that bad. You may go for a year or two without a trauma. But I don’t believe you should do things like going into autohypnosis, placating yourself by singing a lullaby-mantra to yourself. That’s all they are, they’re lullabies to placate yourself, so that you can’t think.

24:07

If you dedicate yourself to the truth, the irritation will arise. The traumas will create themselves. And lots of times it will come to you as a sort of a shock. Certain things occurred to me, for instance: I worked real hard when I was first married, to build up property and things for my children, and one day the state road came through and wiped it out. They condemned it and took it. And I was irritated. The first thing you do, you get angry and think, “This is the reward for trying to live an ethical type of existence. Maybe I should have been in the gangster business and robbed banks, and I would have gotten more respect.” But then you say, “Hey, the truth is, you don’t own that; you never did.” It’s just the conceit of ownership.

Sure, it’s nice to try to create a situation in which your children will be more secure. But let’s see what happens. We’re presuming that only the right thing is supposed to happen to us, that which was destined to happen. But later I found out that this was the best thing on earth. I couldn’t see it at the time. My eyes were blinded by the success in this rat race, the squirrel treadmill that I was on. I wasn’t getting anyplace; I was never going to get any more money than what I had. And I was much freer then; when I got rid of the property I could start writing a book. Before that I could do nothing but paint and fix roofs on two or three pieces of property. So we interpret things sometimes as being good for us because they are running smoothly, and we’re trying to make them run smoothly.

But I think it’s just as bad to go hunting trouble; I don’t think you should do that either. We get plenty of it. The thing is being able to have some discrimination. The Alcoholic Anonymous people say this very well. I can’t remember exactly – they have a little thing on their card – to give me the grace to know the things I should do, what I can change and can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference. And this is basically what life is. If we want to live the right way, we don’t have to go into a lot of exercises to soothe ourself. I think that most of the people who are soothing themselves are people who have suffered infection; they have done things that have caused their minds to be turbulent, and in the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure they have caused a real mental misery. So then it seems like they almost have to take a mantra as a tranquilizer to get themselves to a point where they will not commit suicide.

27:30

Helping people

Q. You said that we cannot get what we’re not ready for. Once you realize that you’re on the journey, do you try to help others? Or do you just let them help themselves?

R. I believe in something – it has different descriptions – did you ever hear of The Magnificent Obsession? Rock Hudson played in the picture. People recognize, not necessarily from a religious viewpoint, that you can’t go anyplace unless you help. When I was in my twenties, as I said, I was an angry person. I got fed up with all the movements, the religions, the cults. And strangely enough I didn’t go anyplace. I was into a form of yoga, standing on my head and twisting my toes around, and different positions, repeating Om, and it did nothing for me. It seemed that the big transition came in my life when I got angry enough or determined enough, and also wise enough, to realize I was not alone. That I was bitching and griping for an honest teacher but I was a selfish recipient. In other words, I had no use for anybody. I felt superior to them; because most of them I ran into were on a hedonistic trip. And one day I realized that I wasn’t better than these people, and that if I found out something I was obliged to help.

29:14

And I maintain that you don’t have to wait until you reach an experience; everybody can help. You can loan somebody a book. If you find a book that inspires you and starts your thinking processes, kicks them off to a little degree, you can advise or give the book or loan the book to somebody and say, “Hey, read this.” Don’t give it to just anybody. Don’t waste it. Again, you can’t help people who are not ready to be helped. But if you find somebody who is talking along similar lines you can say, “Well, why don’t you and your wife or your husband come over? Let’s get a little group together on Friday nights when we’re not working. And maybe each of us will read a book each month and we’ll discuss it, with the idea of being honest about our results.”

30:07

These things will always work. If you are honest and dedicated, they will always take you to the same place. I don’t care what the sphere is, whether it’s religion, philosophy, psychology or whatever, I maintain that they’ll all come to the same answer. Even psychology: I maintain that psychology is false, but it would be true if people were not concerned with building up professional prestige and holding onto that. So any of these mental disciplines you get into will take you there if you’re honest. And you don’t need me. I’m the roadmap but you can get one from Esso. You can get them out of the Bible, you can get them anyplace. And you get it out of yourself too, if you’re sincere.

[Side 4 ends at 31:00 ]

[ NO break in tape ]

File 5

Total time is 21 min 3 sec.

00:07

But I do believe you should work with other people. And I call this the Law of the Ladder. I was a contractor, and I used to have these little symbols going through my head because of working with them all the time. But I believe that we can only experience three rungs of the ladder: There’s the teacher on the rung above. Then know which one you’re on, in the middle – and don’t get the idea that you’re way up there or way down there. And then reach down to the rung below to try to get that fellow up on your rung.

00:48

Don’t reach down two rungs or you get crucified. That’s what happened – this fellow got crucified for healing people, putting devils in pigs and that kind of stuff. It seemed like a campaign for the public too much, rather than just for the twelve who could hear. There were possibly only twelve who could hear him, and they even got to fighting among themselves after he left. So you can reach down too far, and the big ego is to encompass as many as you can. When a person starts helping people it becomes an ego, and you’ve got to watch that. All of a sudden you become the Florence Nightingale of the esoteric group: you’re going to charge out and beat people on the head with the book. And if you’re aware of this, then of course things will run a bit more smoothly.

01:52

Hypnosis and direct-mind

Q. You practice hypnotism don’t you?

R. I can put people to sleep.

Q. Why do you do that?

R. Well, there are a lot of things I can do. For one thing, I believe that it shows you the human mind. I do it mostly as a demonstration of what is possible. For instance, with the use of direct-mind control you can change the person if they wish to be changed. If a person is killing themself from too much eating you can save their life with it. It’s strictly therapeutic in that regard. If they have a habit they seemingly can’t break on their own, you can reinforce them, very quickly and efficiently. You change it.

Q. You try to make sure that the person can accept it?

R. Oh, yes. The point is not to do it for them. In fact, I don’t use it, except that I like to show, first of all, that the human being is not what we think we are. The best way to demonstrate that a man is a robot is through hypnosis. I can take a person and make everyone in this room disappear to them; they will see no one in this room except themselves and me. These things show us that we have a very unstable thing – that we’re so proud of – our intellect. We put a lot of confidence in it, but we are continually beguiled by things we had a lot of confidence in previously. I think that anyone who wants to teach on an esoteric or psychological level, every psychologist, should be a hypnotist. Because then you realize the way the mind works, that it’s by suggestibility. And then you’ll learn to resist conditioning. We’re all victims of conditioning. The big thing today is to condition all the rats so they’ll continue to function without causing trouble.

04:05

And I think each of us individually has to learn to be alert to this. But at the same time it’s an insight, a peek into the mind that the average person doesn’t bother to get into. Some don’t believe it exists. But in India and places like that they can knock you off your feet just by looking at you. And I’ve demonstrated this sometimes just by pointing at a person, and they’ll go down. This is just something more or less to say, “Hey, watch yourself; you can be impressed.” The television can hypnotize you. A charismatic person can hypnotize you.

04:53

Now you can’t apply that very well to spiritual training. And I am not a trained hypnotist. I got this way by direct mind-to-mind contact. We use that word because that’s basically what it is in our language. But in direct mind-to-mind contact many things can happen. You can heal people, you can deliver them from obsessions, that sort of thing. So if you have somebody whom you think is obsessed or possessed or sick, and it’s worth the expedient measures, go ahead and do it, that’s all. But otherwise, if it’s a habit they can fight off for themselves, and this would build more power for them, don’t go near it. I had people who wanted me to cure them of smoking cigarettes, and I’d say, “Cure yourself; you’ll build up stamina.” If somebody hypnotizes you, you’ll depend on hypnosis.

05:57

Entities, possession

Q. Where do entities, possessions, witches fall into the cosmology?

R. Well, I don’t know about the cosmology, but they exist in this dimension. They exist here. Now the first two, possession and entities, are one category, and witches are something else. I picked up a dictionary of witchcraft the other day and it was really gross, the ideas they had in those days of people who were witches. Some of them worshipped an entity, some of them didn’t. Some of them just got the finger pointed at them and were tortured to death.

06:45

But as for what witches are, I look upon most of it as being nature worship. It’s a form of religion, so to speak, or anti-religion. The witch movement goes back I think to some very primitive beliefs, that if you sacrifice somebody the corn would grow. I understand that in the covens in England, periodically they killed the head man. That was part of the deal; he was the head billy goat for so long, and then they killed him. He knew that was coming. They had a television movie on that about a month ago, “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home”, and these people were butchering off a man periodically, up in New England someplace. The cult that I ran into was from Wisconsin; supposedly the whole town was taken up with this. I wrote about it in the article in the TAT Journal about the witch.

08:06

But getting over to the entity thing, there are entities. This is another fallacy: the materialistic psychologists refuse to believe in anything they can’t put in a test tube. However, we can’t see a virus, but we accept the scientist’s dictum that they exist; he says you’ve got a cold that’s caused by a virus. But when we say a person is insane by virtue of being obsessed or possessed they discount that. They say, “Give him a pill.” And if they give him one big enough it will knock him out and the entity can’t possess him, supposedly. But when he comes back around it will be active again.

08:47

Unless we take these into consideration we can’t deal with a part of human behavior, and also guard against these influences in our own case. This has happened to a lot of people who were mixing weird forms of sex with certain weird drugs. They opened a door. There are certain rules for protection. The infant is born safe. An infant cannot be possessed. A pure person cannot be possessed. Consequently, you show me a case of possession and I’ll show you where somebody’s been tinkering around.

09:32

And here in the last four or five years they did it with almost arrogance. They’d get a book of invocations, get about half crocked, and get into this stuff, mix it up with sex and everything. They thought it was a big joke. And the next thing you know they were babbling to themselves. And I’m not just talking generalities, I’m talking about people who came to me, possessed, and asked me, “Hey, get rid of it.” And of course I didn’t do anything about it, because I don’t have the strength to fight too much of that stuff. It takes a lot of strength to meet that type of energy; there’s a tremendous lot of energy there.

10:16

Q. Where does that fit in with the absolute truth?

R. It’s relative. These are relative creatures. It’s just like if you go up onto another planet like Saturn and you find some people who are diaphanous or translucent; that doesn’t mean that they’re not material. Their molecular structure may be different. These are physical creatures. It’s just that our eyeballs and our senses are only geared to pick up a limited range of messages or vibrations. We only see certain ocular things, but under certain conditions they become visible. Or they’re perceived sometimes with the mind. I go into that a good bit in Psychology of the Observer, in that there is an ability for the mind to see without the eyes, which you develop after awhile.

11:13

You can see without your eyes. I don’t mean if you’re blind. I use the case of a person who looks at an apple, throws it out the window, closes his eyes, and can see the apple in his mind. This is visualization. Everything that we see, we visualize. Nothing is seen accurately. Something impacts upon our senses and we immediately project. We see, we get a light ray, and we project what’s out there. We are never accurate, because we can see only so many colors, we have only so many rods in our eyes, and form and that sort of thing are subject to our projection. They claim that a grasshopper and a horse see entirely different than we do. The grasshopper has many lenses and he may see a distorted image. A horse may think we’re very big, when we’re not as big as the horse.

12:08

Again, I don’t think that there’s anything evil. You can get tapeworms or spirochetes and they can play hob with your head. But that doesn’t mean that they’re evil in themselves. I think they’re all in a balanced aquarium. I think there are laws that govern them so that they stay in a certain place. But we break the barriers; we break the laws, we break our protection and then they get in.

12:43

They’re basically symbiotic. They’re after energy, the same way as maybe the amoeba is a separate entity that lives in us, and it’s after the food. If we don’t eat, it doesn’t eat. So we may have entities that we are feeding. And of course you then would get into a whole system of what this symbiosis is. The entity may be more conscious than say the deer or the goat – the mountain goat that is ten miles from its mate. The mate only comes into heat for maybe an hour or two hours. These are known facts. The cow is only in heat for two hours. But they’ll contact another animal five miles away and call, and within that two hours they will come together.

13:34

So what guides them for this? For these animals where the population is thin, what is there behind this, if there isn’t some entity that profits by the whole deal? It’s the equivalent of the pilot fish on the shark. They have a symbiotic existence; one protects the other. The pilot fish is safe because nothing is going to attack him when he’s on the bottom of the shark, and at the same time he does something for the shark. So I think this is what occurs. And then of course, some people get the idea that they are going to be real clever and manipulate things, like Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest.

14:31

Q. What does the possessed person get out of the entity?

R. Insanity. I mean if he becomes possessed, he’s done.

Q. Why couldn’t an entity be a good entity?

R. There are.

Q. We’ll you’re saying that they’re evil.

R. No, no; we’re talking about the ones that are negative only.

Q. You could have a good one couldn’t you?

R. We do. I believe that everybody has a guardian angel. I don’t think this is fiction. I believe everybody has a guiding spirit. In fact I’ve often said that behind all my searching and struggling, there are so many things that happened in my lifetime that I could not in my computer have rigged. There were situations that I didn’t even want to get into, but that I found out later were for the best. So I get the feeling that back behind the curtain there’s an intelligence pulling my wires which is for the best.

15:32 [break in tape – both versions]

I think everybody’s possessed. Everybody’s possessed to a degree – by both. They talk of the Hound of Heaven. A person is possessed who searches for the truth. He develops a spiritual fever, he charges out with this spiritual ideal, and that’s a form of possession. He listens to a different tune of the drums. And another person charges out in another direction. So I think that you can get support; it isn’t always destructive.

But there are certain things that happen – that’s the reason we talk about the negative type of entity. Like the case of this book The Exorcist. This was a little boy – supposedly when he came into his adolescence a dead aunt nailed him, a woman who had known him, who had died shortly before that. And she possessed him. That was the conclusion they came to at least, the priests who were messing with the case.

16:41

Now we get people who are not neurotic, who develop symptoms, or else their body chemistry is changing. They have a strong phosphorus or sulfur smell; that’s one of the things you’ll notice around them. And they’re gone. They have a brief moment of anguished consciousness in which they’re pleading for help. So these are extreme cases, of course. But they try treat them as schizophrenia, I think.

17:22

Q. How do you recognize the non-extreme cases?

R. Well, you can tell that some people are dominated. Some people are inclined and dominated and other people aren’t, that’s all. I don’t pay attention in any case, unless somebody comes and says they’ve got it. And I don’t even pay too much attention to them after they say it. But the cases are outstanding enough that you’ll know it’s not just a mental aberration. They talk perfectly intelligently; they don’t have any paranoia or anything of that sort.

18:01

A girl came down to my house from Pittsburgh one time and she was sitting at the table in my kitchen. In fact I had sensed that there was something wrong with her in Pittsburgh, but one of the fellows in the group thought it was a good deed to bring her down. I noticed something standing behind her. And I couldn’t tell. It was not a complete form; there wasn’t a distinct feature or anything like that on it. And I thought I could be dreaming this. But my intuition told me she had a bug on her; that’s what I call them.

So I said, “Do you know you have a demon?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Is it here now?” She said, “Oh, yes.” I said, “Would you tell me where it’s standing?” She pointed behind her, to her right, and that corroborated the location where I saw it, off her right shoulder. So she told me, “That’s the reason I came down. I had five of them at one time.” She was very brave: she had mixed dope and sex and murder. She told me this. The other girl said they had helped a guy bomb the laboratory at the University of Wisconsin; they killed a man up there with a bomb. They arrested a man for it; I guess he’s in the penitentiary now. But these girls were also involved in it; they were Weathermen.

19:40

One time I gave a lecture in Pittsburgh and a guy came up to me, he followed me out to the car. He said, “Hey, you’ve got to help me.” All these people smelled strongly of sulfur. This is the reason I think in the old writings they used to talk about fire and brimstone. They thought that hell was composed of brimstone [sulfur] and these were people who had been down there, that something from hell came up and was visiting them. But it’s a distinct odor you’ll pick up around them. And it can’t be their diet alone.

20:09

You haven’t noticed any odors have you?

Alright, I think maybe we’d better knock off. We go down below sometimes and get a cup of coffee if they don’t throw us out. If there are any other questions, I’ll be glad to answer them before you go.

20:31

[end]

Footnotes

 Url: http://direct-mind.org/index.php5?title=1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus For access, send email to editors@direct-mind.org 
 Original title unknown. 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Brunton 
 Several of Brunton’s books in PDF are here: http://selfdefinition.org/brunton/ 
 PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/ 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Maurice_Bucke  
 http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm 
 The Air Force was part of the Army until 1947.
 This system was apparently part of his mail-order course in subsequent years. 
 Also see Eliphas Levi, “Esoterism of the 'Our-Father'”, PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/magic/   
 See section on egos collapsing later in talk.
 From 1989-0212-Zen-Is-Action-Columbus: “He got a little place by himself out in the country. He said that every time he’d get on the point of starvation, one of the ranchers would bring a quarter of beef or something for him to eat – one of the people who lived around there – they seemed to know he didn’t care whether he lived or died.” 
 Paul Wood and 2nd wife Mary established Inasmuch Retreat Center in Oklahoma City in 1962, still existing 2012. Paul died in 1965 but Mary continued: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm
 Rose met Wood in 1963 according to Robert Martin. Martin met Wood in San Antonio, then invited him to Akron when he moved back to Ohio. See Martin’s account of Wood in his book Peace to the Wanderer, pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ and search for Leon Wood.
 http://selfdefinition.org/christian/guggenheim-gleason.htm 
 Martin’s book says Rose was at his home with Wood on two occasions.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff 
 Zen Teachings of Huang Po. PDF at http://selfdefinition.com/zen/ 
 The Practice of Zen compiled by Garma C.C. Chang (still looking for a PDF). Contains quotes by Huang Po and others. Other books by Chang are here:  http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/
 (1870-1966) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori  Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensho 
  The term “philosophical” is Rose’s take on what Gurdjieff calls man number four. See PD Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 4. http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/ 
 The “dark night of the soul,” or purgation. PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/ 
 He was advocating reforms proposed by Theresa of Avila.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teachings_of_Don_Juan 
 Legal process in West Virginia for insane people.
 http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/Pulyan.htm 
 Also see http://the-wanderling.com/pulyan.html 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokei-an 
 (1904-1971) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunryu_Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind)
 The non-dualists may be the equivalent of this in the current era.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chilton_Pearce 
 PDF here:  http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/ 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy 
 An article in The Academy of Management Journal by Mark Hammer, 1971, attributes the term “zoomorphic fallacy” to Bertalanffy and “ratomorphic fallacy” to Arthur Koestler.  In Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine, 1967, he calls behaviorism a pseudo-science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
 See advertisement from Archives of General Psychiatry, in the era of the 1960s-1970s, picturing a race-rioter, with the caption “Assaultive and Belligerent? Cooperation often begins with Haldol”. Image is at this link: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/images/protest-psychosis-haldol-ad.png 
 The source for the image is an article from 2011, “The Radicalization of Mental Illness”, by Arturo Baiocchi.   http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/23/the-racialization-of-mental-illness/ 
 BF Skinner’s term, quoting the Goncourt brothers, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, page 39. PDF here: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/ 
 Gurdjieff and Ouspensky books mentioned are here: http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/ 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Ouspensky 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_way 
 In Search of P. D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff,  Gary Lachman, page 266, drawing on Rodney Collins’s letters, reproduced in Theory of Celestial Harmony, page 187 of the pdf located here:  http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/  Ouspensky believed in recurrence and wanted to die consciously, remember this life and possibly make better choices next time around.
 In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 4.
 Rose’s poem, “Three Books of the Absolute”: http://www.richardrose.org/ThreeBooks.pdf 
 Story is told in “Rose Biographical Notes” by anonymous. 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriya_Yoga 
 1975 article. http://www.mendeley.com/research/zen-perspective-social-casework/ 
 Unknown.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktipat 
 http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/mentalism/ 
 Cathars in Langedoc were known as Albigensians, after the city of Albi.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism 
 A 46 year crusade against them by the church. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade 
 Massacre at Béziers, 1209, start of the campaign: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism#Massacre 
 Toulouse was the capital of the province of Languedoc. The last of the holdouts were wiped out in Montségur:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Montsegur  
 Need reference.
 A key to Rose’s view of the automaton.
 See Psychology of the Observer.
 The word “because” is ambiguous as to whether it indicates causality or is simply a conjunction. 
 Need reference.
 “Anterior” in the sense of “prior to”.
 Job 2:8  - dunghill in some versions, ashes in others.
 On Death and Dying. pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/afterlife/ 
 Life After Life. pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/afterlife/ 
 Former Italian PM murdered two days earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Moro 
 Part of Rose’s formula for betweenness.
 Franz Hartmann in Magic White and Black: “To be silent: This means that we must not allow any desire to speak in our heart, but only the voice of the truth; because the truth is a jealous goddess and suffers no rivals.”
 http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal_index.html 
 “Tales of Love”, Volume 1, number 4, 1978: http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal-04.html#3 
 See 1974-1023-Laws-Columbus and 1977-0426-Intro-to-Albigen-System-Cleveland.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chesterfield 
 http://www.richardrose.org/ThreeBooks.pdf 
 Unknown reference. Canadian actor?
 From 1974-1112-Obstacles-Cleveland: “He’d be saying, ’I want that pound of flesh.’ And he would become so obsessed by getting this pound of flesh – they’d take two stagehands and walk him up and down behind the theater shouting in his ear, ‘Remember it’s just a play.’ ...  and it would take hours after every play to bring that man down. And this is what life is. This is what you’re doing now.”
 Charleston Gazette, July 20, 1968: “The Rose farm had been labeled a hippie haven by nearby residents and hippie watching had become a popular pastime. The farm tenants have long hair and whiskers, one watcher told a Wheeling newspaper last week. Another reported seeing a girl with hair down to her hips. They dance on the roof of a barn at night, according to still another report, and one man said he had seen them talk to trees.” http://selfdefinition.org/rose/richard-rose-shooting-incident.htm 
 Unknown reference. 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism 
 Rose later spoke favorably of Al Ghazali after reading Idries Shah. See 1980-Psychology-of-Miracles-aka-Betweenness-Columbus and 1980-Winter-Psychology-and-Metaphysics-Columbus.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aikido 
 The Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
 By Lloyd C. Douglas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_Obsession 
 For laws see The Albigen Papers, chapter 7.
 See 1988-0217-Hypnosis-Lecture-Demonstration-Akron 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicca 
 1978. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077399/ 
 Vol. 1, no. 3, “The Pregnant Witch.”  http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal-03.html#3 
 “Rose Biographical Notes” by anonymous has an account of Rose attempting an impromptu exorcism: “He went by M and had the urge to put his hand over his head. When he did, he said it was like opening Pandora's Box, a hoard of demons coming out and attacking him. Rose said the demons blew out of the top of M’s head and they consisted of hundreds of 6-inch lizard-like creatures. ... The blood vessels popped out on Rose's head, he stumbled out of the room onto the porch and retched.”
 See Psychology of the Observer, page 22, under “six different forms of perceiving.”
 Some agricultural sources on the web say 2 to 4 hours; others say up to 14 hours.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban  
 Poem by Francis Thompson (1859-1907).  http://www.houndsofheaven.com/thepoem.htm 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_Roland_Doe 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing 

End