1979-0403-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Synod-Hall
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| Title | 1979-0403-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Synod-Hall |
| Recorded date | April 3, 1979 |
| Location | Synod Hall in Oakland, PA near the Pitt campus |
| Number of tapes | DM = 4 @ 60 out of order (see notes) ; MJ == 10 files |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | DM, MJ (mj was "undated") |
| No. of MP3 files | Tapes are two lectures combined. See reconciliation in notes. |
| Total time | |
| Transcription status | Pramod 121 pages sent Jan 20, 2016. SH working on draft Aug 2016. |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | Psychology of the Observer. See note. |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | See extensive notes for reconciliation of lecture and book versions here: 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1979-0403-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Synod-Hall |
| For access, send email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20240203100905 |
Mapping of DM and MJ files
DM and MJ versions are numbered the same.
dm0 = mj0 = introduction Pittsburgh
dm1 = File 1 Pittsburgh
dm2 = File 1 KSU
dm3 = File 2 KSU
dm4 = File 2 Pittsburgh
dm5 = File 3 Pittsburgh
dm6 = File 3 KSU
dm7 = File 4 Pittsburgh
dm8 = File 5 Pittsburgh
Note: The commercial recording is the talk at KSU :
1977-Psychology-of-the-Observer-commercial-recording is now renamed 1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-commercial-recording which is also 1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Kent-State
Notes
Dave Mettle and Mark Jaqua have versions
DM version: Undated-Psychology-of-the-Observer
In DM there are 9 files – 7 are approx 30 min and one (#8) is 7 minutes (intro excluded).
File numbering-Jake’s files: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 << See Pramod’s chart for renumbering
At start Rose says the book is typeset and coming out soon.
Physical order on (DM) tapes Tape 1 = sides 1 & 6 ; Tape 2 = sides 2, 3 ; Tape 3 = sides 4, 5 ; Tape 4 = sides 7, 8
For all versions see: Category: Psychology_of_the_Observer
See extensive notes at these next links for reconciliation of different versions of Psychology of the Observer:
1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU
1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Kent-State << Same as commercial CD
1977-Psychology-of-the-Observer-commercial-recording << same as KSU
Psychology-of-the-Observer-book-text
Need to check all tracks at CD baby to see if they are included: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/richardrose4 There is no mention of the location on CD Baby page.
venue KSU portion (or possibly Cleveland)
Tim Calhoun, Tim Franta, Harnish speak. Rose speaks to Andy.
venue Pittsburgh portion
Venue is Synod Hall, Oakland, PA, see Whitely email below
This is in Pittsburgh but not at the University (Pitt). (file mj1 at 03:22)
At dm5-18:36 – Rose gives location as Pittsburgh
At dm4-21:52 Rose says, “But what time is it ? Oh it’s 6 o’clock.” April 3, 1979 was a Tuesday – odd that it’s so early.]
Email from Mike Whitely, Feb 3, 2016: “We could not get a room on the Pitt campus, so that year we had Rose speak at the Synod Hall, a community room next to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It's on Craig Street in Oakland very close to the Pitt campus. So you could say Synod Hall in Oakland near the Pitt campus.
dm7-07:11 [Grating noise (some kind of machine?) here same as the noise in the unknown “ashram” tape, but happens only once. But it may help establish that the ashram meeting was in Pittsburgh]
File 0 Pittsburgh, Intro (mj0, dm0)
Total time: 1 min 32 secs.
Introduction by Mike Whitely:
dm0-00:00
Many of you, I’m sure are familiar with Richard Rose already; but some of you may not be, so I’ll try to fill in a little bit. He’s kind of a hard man to define in a lot of ways. I could say that he’s a writer, or maybe a researcher, or maybe a philosopher, and those things would be true. And I could say he’s a father and he raised a family. Or he was a contractor, because he did that for years. Or that he was a teacher. That’s what he’s interested in now. And those things would be true, but I think they all would be pretty much off the mark a little bit.
I could say that he spent a lot of time seeking himself and studying different systems, eastern philosophy, western philosophy, joining a lot of movements and evaluating them; because he was curious and he had questions that he would really like answers to. And that would be true too. But I think all of those things, even though they are true, all of them miss the mark. So that kind of leaves me in a quandary and the only thing I have left to do now is to ….
R. Don’t tell them about the time I spent in jail.
[laughter]
M. I was just getting to that. But now that he’s filled you in on that tidbit, the only thing I can do now is to present Richard Rose, who’s coming to share his insights on psychology and whatever.
R. Thank you Mike.
dm0 ends at 01:32 – mj0 ends at 01:34
File 1 Pittsburgh (mj1, dm1)
Total time: 29:32
dm1-00:00
[Note for Transcript.] Transcript by Pramod Babu.
In this lecture Mr Rose reads and comments on selections from Psychology of the Observer, available in paperback from Rose Publications. richardroseteachings.com/PsychObsBook.html
We’re going to talk tonight about the Psychology of the Observer. That might not sound too complicated, but I think it is a new psychological direction, possibly a new way of wording an old direction. The book is coming out soon and I have the typeset duplicate here. I want to read something to you from the front page.
I consider everyone to be robots, incidentally.
In the robot, the Designer placed a little curiosity, to keep the robot moving once it was assembled and born, so that the Designer would not have to perform every motion for every robot. But the robot became curious about his origin, and immediately the Designer became a direction of this curiosity. In the robot the Designer placed an ability to recreate, so that that which was created creates, not only by reproducing but also by projecting mental creations. All of this was designed to transform the robot into a self-sustaining unit.
So we create with our head as well as our body.
And thereupon the original creation with its orderly intentions was placed in jeopardy. And the robot forgot his curiosity about his Designer, and projected phantoms of false hope and monsters of desire. And darkness was projected as light.
mj1-01:59 --- dm1-01:59
I maintain that man does not observe: he thinks he observes. Consequently, this little treatise was written on the basis of the erratic observation. And out of this erratic observation comes a tremendous lot of man’s difficulties, including his misconceptions on philosophy and religion.
Man in his present mind is expressed by his personality and beliefs. That is, the man who we see on the street does not observe; he is part of an observation process. Man, as we know ourselves, does not experience; he is experienced. We get the idea that we’re doing things, but we do not always catch the fish; sometimes the fish catches us. The thing that we go out and seize – seemingly we’re doing something, but actually we become the victim of the doing.
dm1-03:07 – mj1-03:10
The basis of this self-study is the understanding of the real self. I remember a couple years ago I gave a talk over at the University of Pittsburgh and we were talking about the definition of the self. A man put up his hand and said, “I know who I am.” And I said, “Who are you?” And he says, “I’m the fellow who’s sitting in front of you.” But he was identifying himself as a voice and a body – which wasn’t his self. And this is what I’m going to try to demonstrate.
You ask yourself, “Who am I?” This is the old question that was asked by sages. They say, “First know thyself,” and then if you know yourself, everything else will be answered. But it’s said glibly and it’s taken easily, and nobody gives it any serious thought, this thing of questioning who you are. Of course the first impression for the materialist is to say, “You’re looking at it.” Well, maybe that’s all there is. But I’m saying that behind that, there’s something looking.
There is something looking which we fail to take into account. Even the fellow who says, “I’m the fellow sitting in front of you,” sees himself sitting in front of you. He hears himself talking to you and telling you that he’s in front of you. So he observes this process. And my point is, that if we’re going to define ourselves, that which is us, from the very beginning, it’s going to be that which observes, not that which is seen.
mj1-04:50 --- dm1-04:46
I distinctly separate the view from the viewer. This is the analogy: the view is never the viewer. The man who looks out on the landscape is the observer. The landscape is external. For the man who looks at his own body, that which observes the body is the true self. The body is not the true self.
Now a lot of people think that the body is all we’ve got. We have a whole system of psychology that says that all you’ve got is a body with a bunch of conditioned reflexes, and all sorts of little wires and genes and DNA molecules running around to compose and to stimulate thoughts. But we can cut the biggest part of this body away and we can still think, and we can still observe. We can even cut parts of the brain out. We can have people pronounced dead, that the body’s totally gone; but when the person revives, his senses should have been extinct but he remembers things distinctly. He comes back and he lives again. The eyeballs of this person who was seemingly dead were closed, yet he saw things in the room. I’m going to refer you now to works like Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody.
But the body necessarily is not us. So again we say, “What is ‘us’?” Well, we don’t know. If we knew, we’d have the answer immediately. But it’s evident that the most substantial part of us is not that which seems material and substantial, but that which observes, that which witnesses.
dm1-06:35 --- mj1-06:45
Now there are other attitudes that can be taken on that. But I carry this through for a specific reason – because this is the way I did it. To me, the whole process of meditation, that which I consider the most sensible and fruitful form of meditation, is not on accepting what I consider, and what Joseph Chilton-Pearce might have considered the projected plan, that humanity projects in front and says, “This is the world and this is life.”
I think the most important thing is to find out more about the looker; find out that which is conscious, that which is aware. And as you start to get into this, there’s a very simple psychological system of self-observation we get into that points the way. And it does it rather quickly. Of course we go through the system quickly here; but if you try it yourself it may take years.
Body and Mind
mj1-07:46 --- dm1-07:39
I start with a very simple thing: you look at your toes, and that’s not you, basically. If you get diabetes you’ll lose them and you’ll go on living, clear up above your knees you’ll lose them. Likewise your can lose your arms; a lot of the thing can go.
Okay, so then a person says, “I am my thoughts.” This is seemingly at the time a revelation. They think, “Well, if there’s any part of me that is constant or able to escape from the corruption of death, it must be the mental part.” But after a while you realize that you’ve had a wrong idea about your own thinking. That your thoughts were not necessarily “you” as much as they were imposed upon you. That’s what I meant when I said that man does not experience, he is an experience.
mj1-08:44 --- dm1-08:36
Our whole thinking processes are programmed upon us. If we’re looking at the DNA molecules or the genes or that sort of thing, we’re merely the continuation of some life strand that goes back to our ancestors who thought similarly to us, had the same drives and so on. But we’re looking for an individual identification, an identification of some part of us that is an individual essence.
I’ve got a little drawing here, and this flat line at the bottom where it says Negative and Positive represents the realm of [mundane] human experience. Jacob’s Ladder diagram
We are relative creatures, and everything is defined in terms of something at the other end of the spectrum. So there’s no such thing in the relative world as a cold, clear definition. It’s only defined in terms of the opposite. If you pick up a dictionary and look up the word “good,” you’ll find that the definition rests upon the definition of “bad,” and “bad” rests upon the definition of “good.” You never really have anything except the opposite of something else. When you look up the definition of a cat, the cat is defined as a certain type of animal, it goes down through the genus and species; but you find out that you’re defining everything else in the dictionary but the cat, and the cat is that which is not in the rest of the dictionary.
dm1-10:06 --- mj1-10:15
So in all our thinking mechanisms we’re tied up in this wobble, or this thrashing about between the positive and negative, between the concept of existence and nonexistence, of thought and thoughtlessness, of up and down, good and bad – anything you think of. And we’re trying to define ourselves with this type of mind. We’re trying to look for a spark of particularized essence or whatever, that we will say is us. We’re trying to do it with a mind that is continually struggling. At each end of that little line could be a philosophy: You can have a philosophy for libertarianism and one for determinism, at two ends of the line, and they argue for eternity. This is what goes on through religions and everything else; you’ve got opposite concepts which seem to be just as sound as anything else, because they’re defined with the same dictionary.
mj1-11:19 --- dm1-11:08
There’s a writer Hubert Benoit who wrote on Zen. , He was the first fellow I ever read to come up with what he calls a conciliatory principle. (I haven’t read them all; there might have been somebody before him.) When I first came to Pittsburgh we were talking about Zen and a few other subjects. There was a man in the audience who went down with us to a little restaurant afterwards. He put his finger on the table and he says, “There’s this,” [to the left] “and there’s this,” [to the right] – then he hesitated and he whispers, “but there’s this also.” [in the middle] And we all thought, “Boy, what a joke is that?” Everybody laughed at him and thought he was an idiot. But this was the thing. It isn’t the extremities, it isn’t the polarity. It’s this conciliatory principle that gives us our definition.
So go back to human action now, the individual things that happen to you in your life. For example, we want to strike a moral code. We don’t know what a soul is, we don’t know what the mind is, but somehow we want to strike a moral code, hoping that this will take us by some religious or some scientific means into a better state of mind. And immediately, because we haven’t defined ourselves, we get into trouble trying to define the moral code. But we think the moral code will take us to our self-definition. This is the supreme paradox we’re always wallowing with.
mj1-12:56 -- dm1-12:42
We take a certain act; we say, “I want to follow a certain path.” Let’s say it’s a macrobiotic path. We’re going to purify ourselves and eat nothing but macrobiotics, and we form a philosophy that eating the poor little animals is wrong, that killing anything is wrong. But then we encounter somewhere along the line the need to kill, maybe to survive. We have to inject some serum into the children’s bloodstream to keep them from getting a disease, or we have to kill the rats that are trying to get into the house, if you have babies around.
dm1-13:35
So in applying this, all of a sudden we see in some instances, this concept that we’re clinging so tightly to seems to be ridiculous. I often think of the Christian Scientist or some religious person who believes that he doesn’t need medicine. And then you find them going through agony: they can face it themself, but when their children get sick the crisis comes about. Have they been kidding themselves? This is what goes through their head.
dm1-14:08
Everybody has gone through this to some degree or another. And by observing these patterns, this wrestling with the two extremes in our thinking in our relative dimension, we come to the conclusion that something is guiding it. We have a judge inside of us. Some of the old religious writers called it the conscience. I call it the umpire.
The umpire, I maintain, makes decisions for every act that we do. For instance, if you had two things to do tonight – one of them might have been to go out and get drunk, the other was to come here. One was cheaper than the other, so you came here. [laughter] But regardless, there was a decision made. Everything that you do has an alternative. Constantly, thousands of decisions are made per day. To step here or to step over there. Everything. This is the umpire.
mj1-15:32 --- dm1-15:14
When we notice that this is going on inside of us, we decide that we’ve discovered the real self. We’ve discovered the fellow that’s running the body. We’ve discovered the observer, so to speak, the observer of the actions, the thing that weighs them. I contend that this is the somatic mind [point C on the chart]. When you start observing the umpire, you see that this is something that works almost automatically, from the time a person is a baby. There are decisions made because of resistance, pain, pleasure, whatever. So it starts to gauge itself, and it expresses itself through the umpire, or through the decision maker, or the conscience. And when we see this, we think we’ve got a complete picture.
dm1-15:58
But after you watch the umpire, you start to see that some of these decisions, say that were made last year – this year you don’t approve of them. Supposing you were a devout Quaker or something of that sort, but you got drafted into the Army and you fall into that state of mind, and you go out and see the need for maybe killing people, doing the opposite of your prior convictions. And there are times that we see that these umpire decisions are not always the best for us. They’re good for a certain period of time, and then maybe a new rationale comes up and we find out that this wasn’t us either; it was imposed upon us.
I’ll give you an example; it’s more blatant or commonly understood than the average set of things that go on. We have appetites that we respond to, like eating. You get hungry and the impulse is to eat, but also perhaps to eat too much; and the umpire may say, “Don’t eat too much.” So if you get sick the next day, then your umpire failed you the day before. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Then there’s a new decision made by the umpire to correct this, and you start to inhibit yourself.
mj1-17:44 --- dm1-17:24
Another thing that happens is sex. A person gets a few years on them and they decide they’re capable of sex. So they go out the same as with the food – they may fall in love or fall into a situation where sex seems to be the only important thing to them in their life. They lose their job over the love affair and they stay in the motel for two or three weeks and get hungry because they lost their job. And another set of dissatisfaction sets in for the individual. The umpire has to balance things now and says, “Hey, you got to stop this and go out and get a job so you can continue to support the person you love, etc.”
All the time this is going on, we see that this is nothing more than an umpire between appetites, between different directions. But it doesn’t always follow through for the best of the individual. We set up things according to the social patterns that exist in your particular country, for instance, and the sexual decision made by our umpire would not be the same decision that would be made in Iran, from what I hear. There would be a lot of dead people around. Consequently, their umpire is going to have a different decision.
Now why isn’t this universal? The reason it’s not universal is that it’s a somatic mind. It’s only interested in the survival of this individual, this body. When we study that, though, we discover that something else says to us occasionally, “Sex is bad, period, boom, slavery. It doesn’t do any good for you. Sure it’s necessary but it’s a trap.” You can get your head cut off in certain places, or something of that sort. Regardless, even if you’re not in Iran, certain decisions are going to come through your mind sooner or later. I generally hear the very old men making jokes about how stupid the young people are, while the young people are looking at the old man and saying how stupid he is, because he hasn’t come up to the modern forms of degeneracy.
mj1-20:12 --- dm1-19:47
Regardless, what I’m talking about now is another plane of thinking that develops, and the man becomes aware that he has an intuition, and the human mind doesn’t work by logic alone. Unless the human mind, the logical somatic mind, which seems to be very reasonable, is not balanced and supported by an intuition, it isn’t complete. Much of our lives are guided by intuition – down to the point where if you’re a salesman and you meet somebody on the street, in five minute or five seconds time you know who you’re talking to, because you’ve developed this faculty that’s not logical. It may be direct-mind experience and it will lead to that. The development of an intuition will lead to direct mind experience.
What happens then is you begin to apply this, almost consciously. If you pick up a book of philosophy you may start to apply the logical or somatic mind to it, but your intuition might tell you that this is what you want to believe. What really is the truth? Are you picking something that you’d like to believe? Or are you picking something that isn’t related to body talk?
But all the time, what we’re talking about here is somebody observing processes. That’s what we’ve been doing: we’ve been observing mental processes. I maintain that the observer is the person. So that we are not the somatic mind, we are not the umpire, because that’s in the scenery, that’s part of the view. We are not the body, we are not the body-mind, we are not the intuition because we can observe it, analyse it, talk about it, watch its manipulations.
mj1-22:04 --- dm1-21:38
What is this that’s going on then? We’ve got a process observer, a person observing processes. You go into meditation and you think about thinking, and you’re thinking about ten thousand different ways of thinking – hundreds of tracks you’re thinking gets into, directions it takes, attempts to control thinking. And this becomes very intricate. Incidentally, when you get as far as the process observer in this sort of contemplation, you have progressed more than the average person. The average person does not bother to think about processes of thinking. He may sense that he’s got an intuition and he’ll give it a little word like an instinct or he may even claim to be intuitive.
But you sit back and watch this thing going on. And when you watch your intuition and your somatic mind, you start to get a very perfect picture of all the traps that you’re falling into. You see the traps as you go along. And you think this is the end of the line. Ordinarily you’d say, “I am that which watches.” But this isn’t true either. There is another. Again, we’re still a relative creature and we’ve only hit one corner of the line [point E on the chart]. Now if you notice, these triangles interlock, because the conciliatory principle of one becomes only the corner of another triangle.
mj1-23:33 --- dm1-23:04
So we continue this process of attacking thought. I’m getting now into experience and history, not into logic. I don’t know that there’s too much logic in anything I’m saying, and I don’t expect you to take it from a logical viewpoint. I’m expecting you to take it from an intuitional viewpoint, that some of this stuff may ring a bell. But for the mystic, the philosopher, who sits and watches his processes and struggles with them, trying to analyse them to find out who is having the process thinking – this is what he’ll become aware of. Somebody is watching these processes, and he immediately becomes aware of himself.
When he becomes aware of himself as a process observer [point E] then something peculiar happens. He becomes aware of the awareness of consciousness [F] by accident. So the movement goes in this direction: it naturally comes up here [E] but it goes over there [F] because as soon as you’re aware of one thing you immediately have to be aware of the opposite, in a relative plane. So he becomes aware of consciousness. And when he’s aware of consciousness, he’s reached a stage similar to cosmic consciousness or what Ramana Maharshi might call kevala nirvikalpa samadhi.
dm1-24:33
It’s the mountain experience, so to speak. And again, though, he returns; he’s still a relative creature. He returns and continues, let’s say, to fluctuate back between these, still puzzling because he doesn’t know for sure the final answer. All he knows is that he’s aware of awareness. And this results in an endless attack on this line, [E-F] which brings you to another conciliatory principle which is the total answer. [point G]
mj1-25:45 --- dm1-25:12
Now, there’s a whole lot being said there, I mean a whole lot implied, let’s put it that way. And all I can say is that if you take the life experience of anyone who has claimed to have reached total consciousness and you analyse it, you will find that it’s pretty much the same thing told in other words, in other terminology. When I wrote the book, it was before I had heard of Ramana Maharishi and I …
[break in tape – MJ version, also DM version. MJ version is very low quality beginning here. DM is also muffled. DM version is better quality here than MJ version]
mj1-26:19 --- dm1-25:46
….of the human mind. The mind is like a roll of film which is continually photographing things and storing it away, and almost simultaneously projecting it out. In other words, we are almost creating our universe from our mind as we go. We’re seeing something that stimulates it, but at the same time we’re projecting it out. I tried to describe that in the book, rather clumsily I think, but then I ran into Ramana Maharishi’s book, and he had done this I guess thirty years before. He used almost the same terminology, using a camera analogy. Incidentally, I recommend his book. If anybody wants to get into this, the terminology and some of the examples he uses are very clear; they’re very simple and come right to the point.
mj1-27:20 ---
Notes from the Text
I have a few more notes to read and then I want to open it up for questions; this is the most important thing. I don’t think this is clear to you. We made a tape on this but I don’t think it was sufficient because you have to identify this; you have to relate it to yourself.
See 1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Kent-State
mj1-27:41 --- dm1-27:07
Again, we were talking about the self, what the self is.
When man discovers the umpire he realizes that previously, the self that thought it was functioning was not the more real self. All of one’s actions are recognized as automatic reflexes or as pre-natal programming.
For instance all this work from the umpire down could be very automatic. It’s more or less imposed upon the individual. I draw the analogy of the newborn child. No one speaks to a calf or a colt, a young horse and says, “Hey, there’s a breast and you’ve got to find it and get fed.” If the horse’s young doesn’t find the breast within a couple of hours, it dies; there’s no hope for it. But that animal gets up on its feet and staggers around with just a few hours of life, and goes right to where it’s supposed to get its food and it eats. Now we think we’re very smart, but humans do the same thing. We do a lot for the baby that maybe the baby would do for itself. But what I’m saying is that all of our decisions on the relative plane, with the human body, no matter how much philosophy we put behind them, are nearly all programmed.
dm1-28:44
Now when you get considerably beyond that, the thoughts themselves may not be programmed, because meditative thoughts and philosophic thoughts don’t result in action all the time. But all thoughts that come to our head and result in action are generally programmed. And I’m going down to every little bit of dream and reverie that a person gets into. The biggest part of our reverie-thoughts originate in the glands. That might sound hard to you, but I maintain that the glands can cause thoughts and the thoughts can cause the glands to function. There is a tremendous physical relationship there. So we are tremendously programmed. And you discover that only when you get to watching from a superior position which as…
File 1 ends at mj1-30:18 --- dm1-29:35
File 2 Pittsburgh (mj4, dm4)
Total time: 31:03
[This continues of dm1 – has some overlap, no loss of words.]
mj4-00:00 --- dm4-00:00 --- DM version is bettter
[repeated text in red]
... that a person gets into. The biggest part of our reverie-thoughts originate in the glands. That might sound hard to you, but I maintain that the glands can cause thoughts and the thoughts can cause glands to function. There’s a tremendous physical relationship there. So that we’re tremendously programmed. And you discover this only when you get to watching from a superior position, which as I said, Benoit called a conciliatory position.
It’s only when you get clear above that umpire, that somatic mind, that you’re able to see it for what it is. You can’t see it while you’re in it. When you’re in it, you think it’s God. You think you’re the God, you’re the big shot, you’re doing everything. People do nothing.
mj4-00:43 --- dm4-00:44
[ Long pause, possible wait for tape change. 18 seconds ]
dm4-01:01
R. Now of course, one of the things everyone’s trying to do is to pull the strings of life before they find out what’s going on. Somewhere there’s an instinct that people have, that as soon as they find the answer, we’ll be able to do that. But I think that to do anything really, that hasn’t been programmed by some other force, would require a tremendous amount of knowledge; almost the knowledge of the why.
I can see where every railroad or automobile accident, every marriage, every divorce and all this stuff, is planned ahead of time. We just experience it. Because there doesn’t seem to be much of a way of avoiding this. We think in a highly complex culture that everything that’s happening is due to chance or accident. Maybe so. But I think a lot of this, after you get a few years on you and you look back, you see that things seem to happen almost magically, in retrospect. And they went in the right direction. And lots of times the direction at the moment was one we opposed. If we had had our choice, we would have wrecked things.
dm4-02:29 – mj4-02:31
What I’m trying to say is that there’s almost a master plan, so to speak, and in order for us to affect that, to cause one action of our own, we would have to upset that whole master plan. It’s almost like the electrons in a molecule: if we’re able to find the science to disrupt just one of those electrons, we’ll upset a tremendous electronic field in the process. And I think that this would happen with us.
I maintain that what we fail to pick up in the analysis, is that the human being lives in a dimension that he thinks is the only one. But there’s a parent dimension. Our dimension is projected from that parent dimension, that being Mind. I think that this entire picture we see is an emanation, a mental emanation, which is somehow projected into the human consciousness. And we in turn project it with common agreement – agreed-upon definitions, agreed-upon landscapes – in anything that we see.
This is brought out by Chilton-Pearce in The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. I’m going to mention a few words about him because you may not have read the book. His wife was dying of cancer, and Chilton-Pearce came to the conclusion that the reason was, that everybody had agreed upon cancer. We see that in individuals, where a person will tell you, “I’m going to die of cancer; I’m smoking too many cigarettes.” And the next thing you know, you find out he’s got cancer.
dm4-04:25 – mj4-04:31
But even beyond that, there’s the mere fact that we accept it, the mere fact that we say that cancer is. That’s the old fact – if you’ve read anything in the kabbalah, it speaks of the laws of creation. The law of creation was the will plus the imagination plus the fiat. , And when you spoke it, God help you, you had it. This is what happens: we talk and we say it is, and then it is.
Okay, I can’t prove that and neither did Chilton-Pearce. But he came up with this concept that maybe he could divorce himself entirely of this whole paradigm that humanity had created, the verbal paradigm. “In the beginning was the Word,” and after that there was nothing but chaos because words created words. Now that seems maybe a vulgar analysis or translation of a statement in Genesis. But regardless, our biggest enemies are words, perhaps. And the idea was that we could create a new paradigm in which there were no diseases. Even the Christian Scientists would agree with this: that we believe that the diseases are there, so they’re there. And if that could happen, then Chilton-Pearce could cure his wife. Well, he never cured his wife; she died. But he did get a couple of books out, and I think he opened this up to something. There were others beside him who felt the same way.
We are just now beginning to get a breath of knowledge about the mind. Before, it was, “I have a mind.” Then the second mistake was, “I am a mind.” In the diagram here is the somatic mind [point C]. But this [F] is neither.
We come from the mind. The mind is a dimension. And in order to change this life of ours, we have to know all of the causes. If you you’ve got a disease, the doctor may say to you, “What did your parents die of?” because you emanate from something, and that has a relationship to whatever affects you. And we emanate from a mind dimension.
Mary Baker Eddy way back there, sensed this. That if you were able to change the mind, to affect the universal mind, then miracles might happen. At least “miracles” as viewed from our relative viewpoint. I think there’s a basic failure in the idea of Christian Science in this respect: Faith will not move mountains. No one ever put a leg back on.
I remember an argument I had with a man I used to work with in Alliance, Ohio, on the atomic submarine. There was a Christian Scientist who worked there, and he was very touchy about everything we said, because his belief was that it was made flesh. Don’t curse people because it becomes real, and that sort of thing. I thought it was a huge joke. But we’d get into some interesting discussions and arguments. I said to him one day, “Hey, knock it off. Do you really think that a massive belief will change this world?” And he said, “Sure.” I said, “What about these healers, running around all over the place pretending to heal people? They can’t put a leg back on when it gets chopped it off.”
dm4-08:14 – mj4-08:26
You can possibly heal a person of a mental syndrome or something of that sort, or convince them that they didn’t have it in the first place. And I don’t even deny that maybe you can change some things. It’s my belief that there are certain limitations within which you can change. But there are limitation: there’s a limitation to our knowledge of this mind dimension. Faith will not move the mountain because two hundred million people don’t believe it will move, if nothing else. You’re not going to move that mountain over on top of a city and smash a lot of people. The people just refuse to believe it. This negative form of belief is what Chilton-Pearce was up against, and he couldn’t do it himself.
But there are cases down through time where people have discovered ways of affecting this mind dimension. This is the catch. And it’s done through intense application. I maintain that if you concentrate long enough on anything, you will get an answer. You might be crazy when you get it, but you’ll get an answer. I believe that if you desire to be a millionaire and you push hard enough, apply total energy, throw enough mud at the ceiling, you’ll be a millionaire. But you’ve got to shut out everything else and put total energy into it.
dm4-09:47 – mj4-10:01
I maintain that if you want to find yourself, you apply the same principles and you’ll find yourself. If you want to know something about the mind, I think you can do that by applying the same amount of energy. Now I don’t say, that in some cases people won’t quit short of the goal, rationalizing that they’ve found the answer, because we’ve got no yardstick for that.
Modern Psychology
This whole thing has a bearing upon what I consider the errors in psychology and sociology today. The theme is, the word goes out, “We’re going to change the world.” I talked to a sociology teacher one time and she said, “We’re going to create a culture.” I said, “What you’re teaching is lies.” And she said, “Yes. But if people believe those lies, we’ll create a culture.”
dm4-10:49 --- mj4-11:05
And this is the drive. I see that this has been happening a tremendous lot recently. Get in and brainwash the public en masse. You’re getting it right now on the price of gas. Because a tremendous educational campaign is going out to convince people, so they’ll believe eagerly that they must sacrifice. I remember World War II when everybody was getting into the big self-sacrifice thing and we were short on everything imaginable. But these are experts at impelling moods, and they go unchallenged because people want to believe.
I found out something else about the human being in relation to religion. The majority of people want to believe the most impossible thing. Alice in Wonderland. They don’t want a simple, basic psychological analysis to human nature, or to the next dimension, or to where they’re going when they die. No. It has to have pearls, it has to look like a Christmas tree, you have to have categories of deities, you have to have indulgences and blessings, favored sons and bastards who are going to hell. It has to really be elaborate, and then you have to run between the raindrops – and pay every step of the way.
dm4-12:15
I don’t know, I sometimes think that all of this is programmed. I one time was initiated into a sect out of India called Radha Soami. Some of you may be acquainted with it. Kirpal Singh made a tour of the country recently; he was branch that splintered off the Radha Soami sect. One of their headquarters is in Beas and another is in Kashmir. They also have one at Agra. But they had something that caught my ear. They maintain that there were seven planes of existence. This one was the lowest plane, possibly. There were three low planes in which we kept reincarnating: we’d run up three steps and down three steps, up three steps, down three steps. There was a creature in charge of this, a god, the head of it, called Radha Soami. And he had made a deal with a character that was running a concession on the lower three levels. This was what we would call the devil but they call it Kal.
dm4-13:44
Kal had priorities. He had the right to keep these people from escaping. Only the very shrewd and few, escaped from the third plane and got up into the fourth plane. There are Indian names for them but I’ve forgotten them. I went through the initiation – I’m sharing something with you, but it didn’t cost me any money. You’re supposed to wait for people who are ready, but I don’t know if anybody’s ready.
But they said Kal penetrates everything. For example, you’re going to try to escape from these dimensions so you start a religion. And soon as it starts, some thief steals the treasury and runs off with it. Or he sells the leader out for a few nickels. Or he becomes a schismatic. Right after Christ died, I think, Peter was arguing with one of the other apostles and he says, “Already we have begun to dissemble.” In other words, the man is hardly dead in his grave and they’re chewing at each other; one of them is going this way with the dogma, and the other is going that way.
And this was the work of Kal. It may have been true or false, but to see the analogy, if that’s all it was, was very good to me. There’s something that wrecks the progressive efforts of man on a spiritual or a psychological level. It may be nothing but his head. Maybe the endless variations that occur when anything is brought up. He’s got to face these endless variations and the result is confusion. So he never really finds his way out with a dogmatic or mundane religion.
dm4-15:24
Now just in passing, another fellow came along who also believed that we were robots, and that was Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky formed a kind of a team. And I think Gurdjieff was the greatest psychologist who ever hit the western world. I think the majority of psychologists today are behaviorists. I say it’s like taking soil samples to discover what’s at the core of the earth. This is behavioristic psychology: taking nerve reflexes to discover the soul of a man, or the destiny of man, or the ideas of the designer. But who wrote the blueprint? This guy knows the score.
dm4-16:14
The guy taking pinpricks or testing reflexes or inkblots – or conceptualizing – does not know from whence the man came. Yet he’s going to legislate for the purpose of keeping himself in office. This is my belief. Our psychologists are not pure psychologists; they want to be funded. The only one I had much respect for was Carl Jung, because I think he was an honest man. Freud was a merchant, basically, and he wanted to have a string of clinics strung through Europe – and possibly America if he had lived long enough – selling one product and packaging it with the nicest words possible. Confusing words that is, so that nobody could challenge him: psychoanalysis.
Another guy comes along, and the word he’s packaging is psychotherapy. Then Viktor Frankl comes along; and each of them comes up with a word. Kübler-Ross wants to be the chief merchant in charge of death and dying. Before you can die you have to consult her or some of her disciples, who will worry the hell out of you while you’re dying, not let you die in peace.
dm4-17:36
To me the whole field of psychology today is backing up the establishment paradigm; the paradigm that teaches degeneracy so there will be no riots in the streets. We have adopted a degenerate psychology. And you can find reasons for any psychology you wish. As I said, the dictionary is a big book. It’s the same with the Bible: you can get the Bible to back you up, if you search hard enough, on almost anything you want.
But I don’t believe that they are going to the most important thing, which is looking at the source of thought. They’re not doing that. What are the tools of a bricklayer? Or an engineer? He has a calculus book that he can refer to and he’ll give you reasons for his actions. The domain of the medical doctor is the body. But the domain of the psychiatrist and psychologist is the psyche, not the body. The body is biology; that’s veterinarianism. We’ve got veterinarians raking off fifty dollars an hour. To me the domain of the psychologist goes back to the very soul of man. To find out why a man thinks, you’ve got to find out why this machine was created to think.
Now, that sounds impossible, and they say, “Well, we can’t do that. We’ve just got to patch these guys up and get them back into the field and have them pay taxes. Because if they don’t pay any taxes and don’t hold a job, they can’t pay us fifty dollars an hour. And the government isn’t going to fund us and they’re not going to hire psychology professors in colleges, so the whole thing will collapse. We’ve got to keep this paradigm going.” Now I don’t know why we got into that, but we’re into it. [laughter] dm4-19:30
Awakening
But what we’re trying to do is pull strings. This whole idea behind discovering yourself is possibly to affect that from which you came. Gurdjieff had this idea of the “sly man” approach. That there are little things you can do to awaken another person, but you can’t awaken yourself. We are, as I said, robots, sound asleep, grooved in. Try to stop, try to change your course, try to set yourself a thinking pattern, and see how quickly it’s interfered with.
Everybody here, I imagine, is tied to a routine that takes him from daylight to dark. And try to break that routine. Try to set up a different self-analysis. It may take you a couple of weeks, or a couple of months or a couple of years. Set aside maybe an hour or a half hour per day – and you’ll go along maybe for a week or so. But supposing in that hour a day or half hour a day you’re provoked to try to do something else: That you’re not going to just sit around and think about thinking, or thinking about ways and means. No, you’re going to find the ways and means; you’re going to experiment. And if you try to set yourself up an experimental pattern, you’ll find that it’s almost impossible.
dm4-20:53
So then, why is it impossible? It’s impossible because your head is set on something: you’ve got to have those cigarettes or you’ve got to have that dope, or you’ve got to have that security, that mansion up at Mt .Lebanon or someplace and pay for those bricks. And you’re not going to stop working until you drop dead – so your wife can entertain some lover in those bricks.
But regardless, we can’t let go of this squirrel cage. It takes somebody from outside. And this has been the theme behind pure religion. In fact, there have been a lot of religions that started out pure. The guy says, “Hey, take a day off; make Sunday holy and stop, so that these dummies can do some thinking.” But then the guy in charge of the religion finds that it’s profitable and he starts selling candles, and you’re back where you started: you’ve got to work an extra day of the week to pay for the candles.
dm4-21:52
Universal Mind
I’d like to stop for a minute. There’s some other information I want to give you about what I consider the examples of man’s ability to see
But what time is it ? Oh it’s 6 o’clock. [April 3, 1979 was a Tuesday – odd that it’s so early.]
Now I rambled a little bit toward the end of that, but I’d like to clarify anything about this diagram you’d like to hear. I didn’t want to get too deep into this business. You can [ask] if you wish. [But] I think there are ways; I think there is a good psychotherapy system if a person wanted to get into it and people are honest with each other, and they could help each other. Prod each other to wake up and that sort of thing. But there are only two ways I know that you can affect your life. One of them is, if you can find somebody you can trust, who won’t pick your pockets while he’s helping you. And the other one is to study for the laws of the mind.
I think there are some laws that were discovered. You’ll see them in operation, and the average person refuses to believe them when they see them. Like with hypnosis: when hypnosis first came out everybody said, “Oh, that’s maybe the work of the Devil.” That’s one nice solution for it. Or it’s a trick. That the subjects just agree, and it’s a little game they play. I used to do some hypnotic demonstrations and people chuckled to themselves, “He’s clever. These people put on a pretty good act.”
dm4-23:32
Hypnosis is one of the minor laws, and that’s just of the somatic mind. But I know that there are people living who can touch people’s minds at a distance without all the routine. And we have been visited by a few of these people from India. They study for years to learn to zap and they can knock you off your feet by looking at you and concentrating. After people lose their children to these systems for maybe ten years, they begin to realize that they were zapped. But prior to this they say, “Oh, that can’t happen here, not under Old Glory; nothing like that happens here.”
But there are people who know some of the workings of it. Now this isn’t the individual mind; this is some matrix that is pervasive. It goes from mind to mind. When you enter this, when you’re able to enter it, is when you have your direct-mind experiences. That’s when you can read another person’s mind. That’s when you can contact your thoughts to them. And it happens; everybody experiences it sometime or another. I remember driving with my wife in the car one time. Neither one of us had mentioned this family for I guess five or ten years, and both of us said at the same time, “Let’s get down to John So-and-So’s house.” There are so many of these it seems to be above coincidence, that there was something transmitted. So there is a connection. There’s some sort of field, which I like to say is a universal mind.
dm4-25:20
Q. Do you think this is the same thing Karl Jung was talking about, synchronicity?
R. These are words. I maintain that Chilton-Pearce sensed something. Colin Wilson sensed it. Colin Wilson wrote it as fiction, which is a nice way to write: you can never get criticized, you don’t have to prove anything. But you can get ahold of his book The Mind Parasites. When I read it I was utterly amazed that he had this knowledge, and the way he put it out. He had the idea that if fifty people discovered this secret they would be able to move the planet. Because the world is nothing more than an illusion, the moon is nothing more than an illusion, but that fifty minds held in a certain position would affect the planet. Of course this would sound like science fiction.
But what he was saying was what I refer to in one of the papers I’ve written as the law of betweenness, where things happen in a peculiar in-between state. , All the wisdom of man, and all the great things, happen in a state of betweenness. This, I maintain, is part of the thing that sustains the universe. That each planet exists in a particular field of gravity and anti-gravity. It extends out so far; a big planet has more of a field of gravity, the moon has a smaller one. But somewhere in between there’s a point of no gravity.
dm4-26:57
This what I mean by the state of betweenness. When the head is in that same thing in relation to the heads of others, then a new type of motion can be created. My theory is if you had a spaceship you could function in what I call that …
dm4-27:11
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dm4-27:14 --- mj4-27:57
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… and I maintain at least that some people in India have discovered it and they use it. And there’s transformation of material and that sort of thing as a result of it. On a very small scale of course: they don’t move any planets. But Colin Wilson made it dramatic by citing that you could move the moon. Has anybody here read The Mind Parasites? Well, you can understand what I’m talking about. It’s just fiction but I think it’s well worth reading because it gives a hint of this.
dm4-27:51 – mj4-28:35
Q. What kind of initiation did you have, that you were talking about?
R. [This was the Radha Soami sect.] Well, it was the naming and the identification of the seven planes, so that when I died I would know, by the sound of certain musical instruments, the names of the deities that presided over them. ,
Q. Did you experience anything?
R. No. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t take issue with them, because they were good people. There was no racket connected with it, didn’t cost a cent. I reject everything that costs money, especially if it’s fantastic sums of money. But these people didn’t charge. Now, they may have operated on donations or something.
Another concept they had was that the guru appeared at the point of death; he would take you over the threshold. You were tied to the guru through Darshan. You establish this bond and then when you died, automatically he’d pick you up. And I thought, “Well, that’s interesting; all you have to do is be around one of them who’s dying and you can see what goes on.” There was an old guru who initiated me and I said to him, “Were you ever around when any of the members of the religion died?” He said, “I missed my wife by a half hour.” She died while he was out of the house. He was hoping that she would say, “Here he is. Here’s Charan Singh.” They were all named Singh, they were Sikhs.
dm4-29:44 --- mj4-30:33
Life after death experiences
But my belief is that somebody appears for you anyhow. There’s a common denominator that runs through a lot of movements and isms: the HGA, Holy Guardian Angel. The Rosicrucians I think believe that the master appears. But also many of them believe that you have a guardian angel, like a protective spirit that follows you all through life. And when you wear out, he picks you up and put you into another system of trouble. [laughs]
dm4-30:17 --- mj4-31:05
People on the battlefield also seem to reach for their mother. I’ve seen people dying who have called for their mother. Old people, I’ve seen them in hospitals dying, and in their last breath they’d shout, “Mother, Mother, Mother,” and look for them. Who knows?
[next paragraphs are repeated at the beginning of the next tape]
But that’s the type of evidence that Kübler-Ross bases her book on.
And incidentally, getting back to the idea of evidence of life after death, both Raymond Moody and Kübler-Ross missed the categorization of these death phenomena. I maintain, that your death scene will measure for you where you’re going.
dm4-31:02
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File 3 Pittsburgh (dm5, mj5)
Life after death experiences-continued
Total time: 31:10
dm5-00:00
[Repeated section from dm4 and mj4 is in yellow]
R. But that’s the type of evidence that Kübler-Ross bases her book on.
And incidentally, getting back to the idea of evidence of life after death, both Raymond Moody and Kübler-Ross missed the categorization of these death phenomena. I maintain that your death scene will measure for you where you’re going. Because it’s just like with LSD: you only get out of life what you put into it. The trip you get is going to be what type of character went into the trip.
And the ones who seem to find other people, even though it’s loved ones, are on what I call the emotional level. I borrow this classification from Gurdjieff, incidentally: the instinctive, emotional, intellectual, and philosophic. And occasionally you hear of people who have the nonhuman experience; that there are no human beings there, but they witness beautiful vistas and sometimes mathematical designs and stuff. Yet they seem to feel when they come back that they’ve witnessed a heaven that they’re going to enter. Still others find that they enter something that they can’t describe.
dm5-01:21 --- mj5-01:24
I always refer to the October 1974 issue of Reader’s Digest. There was a man who died in an automobile from a heart attack. , His wife was there. She called an emergency unit and they got him to the hospital. He was pronounced dead but he came back. He described his experience, and he was quite convinced of what would have happened to him if he hadn’t come back – he would have still been in that experience. He didn’t see any relatives. He was a man who personally didn’t believe in life after death. But he became one with something enormous. He realized that this was the Atman and the Brahman, , which is the best way you can put it although he didn’t have that vocabulary. His nationality was Jewish, I gather from his name. But he made the remark that he felt that there’s no need to fear death. He had experienced this.
Well, I’ve heard different accounts, and I notice they fall into these categories. The business of spatial travel at the end of which is a vista. Somebody takes off and they look down and see the body on the bed. Or maybe they’re not aware of the bed but they just see somebody coming and they reach out their hand and that person picks them up and takes them away. And then somebody else says, “Oh you’ve got to get back. We can’t take you.” You know, “You didn’t pay all your taxes so you have to return.”
dm5-03:11 --- mj5-03:15
I think they correspond to the different levels of the man’s potential. And the one where the person merges with unity was something that he really doesn’t understand, but realizes beyond a shadow of a doubt that he exists and he’s one with God. Sometimes they use the word God and sometimes they use some other terminology. But you pick up the same pattern. They’re naming it maybe according to their religious training, or their atheistic training. And I thought it was amazing that Moody and Kübler-Ross both missed this. All you have to do is talk to enough doctors and nurses in hospitals and you can get a tremendous encyclopedia of death experiences. And not only that but of experiences like I mentioned before: people who are pronounced dead and they witness what’s going on.
dm5-04:11
My own brother was in an automobile wreck and I got a telegram saying he was dying, and I couldn’t possibly get there in time. He lived, but he watched from the ceiling, remembered everything that was taking place. My wife was a nurse and she used to tell me about people who were supposedly unconscious. The other nurses were throwing them around and mistreating them because they thought they were out. When this one party woke up, she said to my wife, “You treated me alright. I know you by your voice.” She couldn’t see her but she knew her voice. “The rest of these people were dogs.” Because they treated her badly. So evidently with the unconscious body there’s still an awareness of some sort.
dm5-04:56 --- mj5-05:04
Q. You spoke earlier of a master plan. Can we know anything of the nature of that, and does that presuppose a master planner?
R. I have no proof of it; I have a feeling that’s all. I have a feeling that this surely isn’t all nonsense. It seems like it is. But I have this feeling, because things work in kind of an orderly manner despite our desires and our ambitions and everything. Things seem to work out. And so my conclusion is – I’m not lapsing into religious superstition – but I think it would be folly to presume that we are forming our civilization and we are creators of the earth. And that we should go any further, or too far or too fast without knowing why.
That’s my belief and with that in mind, I’m of the opinion that it’s very possible that looking back on our history we haven’t been too long inside of clothes even, much less in the business of creating planets. So I have a feeling that there is a plan to it. Of course, my idea of the creation is not the creation of matter – I don’t believe that matter exists as we believe it. And I don’t believe that it’s strictly create-able either as the Christian Scientist would believe it. That just by a half a dozen people getting together you can remove a tumor or something of that sort.
dm5-06:39 --- mj5-06:49
I believe that what we have to do, to get a true apprehension of anything, is to go back into the source where we came from, which is the mind dimension. I maintain that we emanate from mind stuff. The reason for saying that, is this is the best way I can draw the picture that I travelled. There again, somebody else might be able to express it differently. You get all kinds of pictures when you get analyses of experience. But the experience I had resulted from an incessant application of concentration, and observation of my own processes. In other words you go within. This is the true way to go within. You don’t go within by just concentrating on your navel or your toes.
dm5-07:32 --- mj5-07:47
Q. Tonight you’ve been painting a very bleak picture for humanity, that man is sort of following this programming, caught in a prison camp, say. Now I know you claim to have escaped from this prison camp somewhat. For the people like us who are prisoners following this around, I wouldn’t put much value on that kind of life. I don’t know if you do. Now that you’ve escaped, now that you’re free, what value …?
R. I’m not free. I’ve momentarily seen, or it feels as though I’ve seen the score. But you know, I still have to eat and I still have the pay the price for it. And I have to believe or leave.
Q. Are you familiar with the “cave dwellers”?
R. Oh, Plato? Yes, this is described by Plato in the Republic – the cave of shadows, man’s comprehension of reality. I thought it was amazing that Plato said this. We deify modern thinking but they don’t come up to Plato. If they had the insight of Plato they’d have a different insight into psychology. He maintained that men are chained with their back to the mouth of the cave and they see the shadows of the things passing outside. They see the shadows on the wall of the cave and they interpret that as reality. And the only way they can find the real reality is to break their chains and get up and turn around and go out into the daylight. This is an analogy of course, but very true I think.
dm5-09:16 --- mj5-09:31
Q. So all you’ve done is just seen the prison and you’re still stuck in it like everybody else?
R. I think I’m here. Sometimes I wake up and think that I’m going through some motions, and one day I’ll find out I’m dead. But I’ve got an idea that I’m still here.
Q. I don’t think you give us enough credit for our abilities to change our realities.
R. Oh, hell. Let me give you all the credit you need. I’d like to see you do it. Where are your implements? That would be more difficult than Archimedes with his fulcrum and lever, moving the earth. How can you change if you’re programmed?
Q. I don’t believe in the finality of that program.
R. See that’s your privilege. I don’t want to upset your belief. In fact I think hope springs eternal. And only because hope springs eternal do the little ones keep the wheels turning. It’s necessary for you to have that hope. I can live without it.
dm5-10:30 --- mj5-10:47
Q. Can you give a couple of more examples about how to spot the umpire at work?
R. There’s a very simple one: when you hear an argument inside yourself. Did you ever hear an argument? – when you say, “Hey I want to get off those cigarettes,” and something says, “Well, one more won’t hurt.” That’s the quibble that’s going on, and whatever decision is made, is made by the umpire. That’s my point. It’s very plain and very evident in the basic appetites. Now, there are other decisions that are made when you start watching yourself, meditating upon your actions; they will become more evident. But it’s very evident to watch a person making decisions about: Which pleasure shall he have? Shall he have vanilla ice cream or raspberry?. You know, shall you have a big fat woman or a skinny one? All night? Two weeks? You want to drop dead or do you want to get back to work? That’s the umpire.
I maintain that this applies to everything. I’ve known people for instance, they sit in a house – I don’t know how it starts, but they can’t get up and go out. They can’t make a decision; they’ll just sit there. I knew a man one time who was 20 years of age and he stayed 20 years in bed. His umpire just failed. He couldn’t make that decision to move. Well, he made a decision – it was to stay in bed.
dm5-12:05
Q. In your dealings with other people, when you’re running on automatic, how do you spot the umpire?
R. The thing of course is to improve the umpire, and I think you do. In your dealings with other people these things are functioning. This is the reason, I think, that psychology is so hard to come up with. The factors are changing. Your umpire decision may be different next month if you make enough mistakes. We’re always trying to predict our relationships with other people. And I think this is one of the mistakes made today; it’s imperfect umpires even.
These geniuses who are going to change the earth are all located down here [on line A-B]. They think that they can take dope, have weird sex acts, and grow in experience, and they make decisions in that direction. The result is, well, we get millions of them who are ploughed under already because their umpires were faulty. They wind up in the nut houses and in suicide, overdoses and that sort of thing. These are classic examples of faulty umpires and a faulty system of psychology. It says, “Hey, you go right ahead. Don’t let anybody tell you that what you’re doing is wrong.” I’m talking about a psychologist who’s interested only in the body, perhaps, the survival of the body. They don’t know anything about the mind, but at least they could help the body survive a little longer. But no, they believe that experience is broadening and people are capable.
dm5-13:51 --- mj5-14:13
I find that the more you learn about the things that go on in the head, making up a decision, the more you’re convinced that you’re ignorant. The more you realize the vast scope of possibility, of factors that go into things. Like a person who sets out to make a million dollars. Maybe he has a heck of a time just saving the first thousand. But after a while he learns to play the stock market and he becomes rather proficient and he thinks he’s got all the factors. But some wise guy gets in there and tampers with the gears someplace; maybe he tampers with a computer in the bank like in LA and their stock collapses. So then he loses his life; he may have a stroke as a result of it, because he didn’t take in all the factors on a simple thing like making money. And there are millions of factors connected with the stock market. So now figure the abstract sciences. Figure the science of the human mind: thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking, ad infinitum, which you have to get into.
dm5-15:06 --- mj5-15:31
Q. I’d like to have your opinion about this incident that happens not on a regular basis but erratically. A person walks into the bathroom and looks into the mirror. And whatever it is, it’s unexplainable. But you look at this face in the mirror and it looks familiar, and you force that form to say a word and the voice is familiar. And yet whatever it is that is watching all of this in the mirror, finds this face and this voice alien and removed from whatever is watching the whole incident.
R. Well, I would have to possibly hear in more detail and depth. Although I think a lot of people have this feeling that there’s somebody else looking back, if that’s what you’re talking about. Now you may be talking about a person that’s obsessed or possessed. I’ve seen people who had a lot of insight into the mirror when they were drunk. They’d have quite an argument going. The one party would be calling the other an SOB and this one would be arguing because he was insulted. I think it’s an ideal place for like a split, a schizoid thing, to take effect, where you can identify with two halves of yourself, and put one on the other side of the looking glass so to speak.
Q. I’m speaking of myself, obviously.
R. Well, you could have something actually interposing itself between you and the mirror too. That’s another mistake in modern psychology. Modern psychology should explain everything in its domain. Or when a better explanation comes up, it should re-examine its textbooks. I maintain that this story The Exorcist is very real. But the psychiatrists and psychologists presume to say this is superstition and it didn’t happen. Ten thousand years of science, wisdom about exorcising and dealing with things has to go down the drain because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist than to face it. ,
dm5-17:51 --- mj5-18:20
Now I maintain that the foolishness has to do with the fact that this [life] is a projection. There are many projections. This is a dimension, there are many dimensions. And it isn’t logical to say they don’t exist because you can’t see them – because you can’t see a virus and you can’t see an electron. But we accept the scientist who says there is an electron. We accept the diagnosis that comes from the guy who says there’s a virus doing this. We can’t see it but [we know] it happens because it’s predictable. The disease is predictable and of course so are certain symptoms. And I maintain that there are such things as other-dimensional creatures co-inhabiting this stage.
dm5-18:36 --- mj5-19:11 Rose gives location as Pittsburgh
And people know this. I’ve had a lady come down to my place from right here in Pittsburgh years ago. I’ve had one from each town I think; every place I lecture somebody comes up to me and says, “I got one.” This lady from Pittsburgh said she had five; five people that were with her all the time. I saw the one, so I’m equally nuts, if she was nuts. It was standing behind her. There are a couple boys present here, I think, who were with me when she came down. In fact they weren’t supposed to bring her and they brought her by mistake. [laughs]
I’m not a healer. I don’t want to become involved in that. But I don’t believe you can disperse them by therapy. In fact, I think the reason we have a high percentage of suicides among our psychiatrists is the fact that they become smitten with diseases that they never dream existed. And that’s the reason they have to go; the only cure is suicide. They can’t handle it.
dm5-19:39
Q. You speak of mind as a dimension and you say there are many dimensions. Are you inferring that all the other dimensions come from this same mind?
R. I presume so. I don’t say that the last thing is the mind. What happens here [line E-F] is that there is an incessant observation of man’s potential – his highest potential of being a process observer and being aware of his consciousness. Aware of awareness. When this is observed with relentless observation you blow your head. Thoughts, the relative mind, the relative world disappears. Reality enters for the first time. Reality.
Now, to an observer you may be a nut. But in that state of reality you have transcended the human mind and the mind dimension; you realize it’s only something you pass through. And nearly everyone who has had these experiences speaks of it, of killing the mind. They speak of it in Zen, that you have to kill the mind. That it’s false; it’s like the crazy house in the circus, the house of mirrors, illusions and that sort of thing.
dm5-21:10
Q. Then the mind is possibly a false dimension like all the other dimensions.
R. Well, the same as this, in my estimation; if you take it seriously it will worry you.
dm5-21:24 --- mj5-21:59
Q. You were talking about out-of-the-body experiences. I was a bedside nurse for a woman who had multiple sclerosis. She had been in bed for ten years unable to move, unable to talk, but she was able to hear and see. She weighed about 70 pounds and she was 54 years old. I worked for her for several months. When I first saw her, in my heart I said, “Oh my God, how can I do this, how can I work for this woman?” But my intuition said, “Yes, go for it. There’s something to learn.”
So through the weeks I learned something about someone who had their mind controlled. I mean who had the power of their own mind. Can you imagine being in bed and unable to move for 10 years and having the will to live and having the will to give and to experience life. She experienced her grandchild – they brought the grandchild to her and put the grandchild on her chest and the baby kissed her. And it was all very moving to me.
What I wanted to bring out was a certain look that she would get in her eyes when I would go into the kitchen and cook for her. There was a mirror in the room in front of me and there was a glass window from the kitchen to her room, which was actually the porch. And I kept an eye on that mirror because there was no other way of communicating to me in case she needed her suction machine. In case she was dying, because she was dying. They told her she should have been dead about 10 years ago but she’s still very much alive.
dm5-23:15 --- mj5-23:51
R. Is she still living now you mean?
Q. Oh yes, she’s very much alive. So I would check the mirror occasionally and there was a strange feeling that I had when I saw her eyes. Because her eyes would go up and there was a definite glaze around her face. I talked to the other nurses about it. She had seen a program on television about out of the body experiences and somehow she had communicated with the angel, that’s what she said to her nurse. She didn’t want anybody else to know.
R. Oh yeah, this is quite common.
Q. And, yeah there was something going on. I could feel it. And to a nurse she said, “The angel comes.” And she’s very calm and very peaceful, and very contented in that situation. The nurse asked her, “Well, what do you say to the angel?” and Corkie would say, “I’m not ready yet.” And the angel would say, “Okay, we’ll leave you be.”
[next paragraph is rewritten for logical order]
R. Yes. I have had some peculiar things happen to me. I don’t consider this a talent and I couldn’t duplicate it if I tried. They just happen, and when they happened they’re there. But I was in the contracting business years back and I had a partner, and when he was 60 years of age he got cancer of the lungs. He was broke, he had spent all his money on doctors and stuff. Two daughters had come up from Florida They were living in a house trailer – they’re called 40 foot trailers but they’re really about 35, about as long as this room is wide. The daughters had little kids about two years old. So the two daughters, maybe three children, and his wife and he were in this 40 foot trailer.
dm5-25:26 --- mj5-26:07
Well, I went over to see him, and he was asking me questions about things. We had never discussed religion or anything else. We just worked together, and it was hard work; we kept that out of the conversation so we’d get something done. We had enough to fight about. Anyhow he seemed to sense that he should ask me a question, and he said to me, “Where do you go when you die?” Now this was just a couple of days before he died. I said, “Well, I don’t know where you’re going,
[tape break (both dm and mj versions) and restarts, small repeat, no loss of words]
but I know what I feel happens to people after death.” And I told him.
A couple of days later I went over and it was the day before Easter, Saturday night. And the women were putting on their coats, going to the Eagles to play Bingo. He was on a studio couch. And his wife kind of knelt down on one knee, talking to him and she’s saying, “I’ll be back at 10 o’clock,” and so on. And I saw his hand reaching up like this, real slow, and he was patting her on the back. So when she got up I said, “What’s wrong with Frank?” And she says, “Oh, he’s in a coma.” Now when someone tells me somebody’s in a coma I presume they’re unconscious but he knew she was there. So I said, “I think he knows you’re there.” She said, “Oh yeah, but he’s in a coma. He gets into those and slips in and out of them.”
[break in tape in dm version, also mj version.]
[Due to the tape gap, words are omitted that Rose took the man’s hand. Inserted here, necessary for the story.]
So I went over to the couch, reached over, and took this man’s hand. Now I know you’ll think this is a damn big lie, but this man actually told me he was dying. And how I translated that, I don’t know. There wasn’t a word spoken. But it was just a slight pressure and I stood up and I said to the woman, “Don’t go.” She said, “Why not?” I said, “He’s dying.” She said, “How do you know?.” I said, “He told me so.” She said, “He didn’t say a word.” I said, “Don’t kid yourself. He’s dying.” I was that convinced. You could have thought it was superstition, or just a hunch I had or something.
dm5-27:48
I often look back upon it and think what an ass I might have made out of myself if he had lived another day, because of the things I did. They took their coats off and they stayed there. I said, “We’ve got to get him into the hospital.” She says, “Why?” I said, “You’ve got these little children here, and when people die with cancer of the lungs sometimes it’s not pretty when they go.” This is what happened to him. When he died his lungs seemed to come up out of his mouth.
She said, “We have no money to take him to the hospital.” I said, “You don’t have to have money when a man’s dying.” I picked up the telephone and called the volunteer fire department in this little community, and said, “We need an ambulance over here.” I took this all on myself. That’s why I felt that it would have really been foolish looking, imposing on somebody else’s domestic situation. We got him into the hospital that night and he died on Easter morning. And he coughed up his lungs.
dm5-28:45
But I think that you can communicate. You run into these incidents all the time. That’s what I call a direct-mind experience. I don’t think it was the hand. I don’t think he talked to me through his hand. I think the contact was made and I think this happens with a lot of people, that you can communicate. My brother, when he was in the automobile wreck, he saw and heard what was going on but he couldn’t communicate with anybody. Maybe if somebody had touched him he could have.
dm5-29:18
Q. I just have the same question I asked before, so I’m trying again: What good is it for a person to know he’s in a prison, if he could never get out?
R. Well, that was the decision I made when I was 21 years of age. I realized I was facing that, and maybe I would find out something I couldn’t change. And I found out something I couldn’t change. But I prefer to know than to die in ignorance. I preferred it then and I think the decision was worthwhile. Because there is a certain equanimity. I’ve been in some tight places and when I get into those tight places, it’s then that it returns to me and I say, “Hey, you know, there’s nothing happening here of any importance.” Then all that importance vanishes. Whereas if I hadn’t gone through that, I would have still been taking things very seriously.
dm5-30:15
Q. As a teacher can you offer us that anything in life has value, any joy, any of these things?
R. There is no such thing as enjoyment ...
[remove, Rose is not responding to this.] Q. Does anything have value?
R. This is the icing we put on the cake ourselves. Nobody enjoys. People are enjoyed. That’s bait. Let’s say the most intense or most wonderful pleasure there is, is sex. Hell, that’s animal. If you didn’t have that you wouldn’t take on the burden. The animals are brought together under the bait of pleasure and they sign up for twenty years of slavery. You’re talking about slavery, but you could be free as a bird if you weren’t hooked on that idea of pleasure. But sooner or later everybody realizes, I think, that they [have been] …
[end of tape] File dm5 ends at 31:10
File 4 Pittsburgh (dm7, mj7)
Total time: 31:00
dm7-00:00 --- mj7-00:00
Q. How about in a person’s relation with his fellowman. Is there anything of value in there?
R. Sure, sure. Everybody and me are the same. That’s the way I look at it. I’d like to be able to treat everybody as myself, but I don’t always do it.
Q. Could you talk more about the connection between thoughts and the glands?
R. Yes. Didn’t you ever have that happen?
Q. Could you explain a little more? I don’t really understand what you mean.
R. Sure, sure. I maintain for instance, that a woman, her thoughts change with every day of her 28 day cycle. And she has no control over this. And I have had women go through, put the calendar up on the wall and write down their mood, their desire, whether they would be in a sexual mood or in an indifferent or an angry mood – they repeat, almost exactly the same day in that 28-day period. This is because the glands provoke the thought. The cow that runs and jumps over the fence doesn’t do it because she logically decides that there’s a bull ten miles away. She does it because the hormones key in. It’s just like a clock; they’ve got a clock wound up inside themselves and they move.
dm7-01:20
Q. Okay, what about a woman who has an erratic system of hormones?
R. It will still be an erratic regularity. She will be erratic in a regular pattern.
Q. Do you think other things could be achieved in that? Let’s say ...
R. Children.
Q. Pardon?
R. Children.
Q. No, no that’s not what I’m talking about ...
R. Well, that’s what’s achieved. What are you talking about?
Q. Well, you talk about a normal pattern, there’s certain…
R. Well, I don’t talk about a normal, I don’t know what normal is. You have to define it when you say normal.
dm7-01:57
Q. Okay, balanced.
R. Okay.
Q. I’m talking about a balance as opposed to an erratic system, okay. One is a level of estrogen and other hormones, and there’s testosterone. If that level of testosterone is interfering, is at an exaggerated level that the other levels of the hormones cannot function properly. How does that affect …?
R. Well, I don’t know anything about that. I’m not an endocrinologist. I just know that everything works, and the people that are crazy and go out and stick their heads under streetcars, it’s all part of the plan. In other words, if somebody’s glands are unbalanced it may be because of, as the Bible says, the sins of the parents or the grandparents. Or it may be that the kid fouled herself up when she was little, see, by playing games. I don’t know what causes it. I’m just saying that regardless of what it is, the individual, she or he, will have a regular pattern that they follow, and they can’t control it. They can’t control it. I was watching them even trying to write it on the calendar and they’d still say, “It happened again.” It occurs again.
dm7-03:08
Q. What do you think about the present state of physics or any of the physical sciences? I mean do you think they’re getting at something? Or are they still stuck in the paradigm?
R. Well, they produce material for meditation. I think it helps. I’ve learned a lot from the laws of physics. I think the laws of physics are reflected in psychological laws and spiritual laws. I’ve written a few of them down, like the law of proportional returns; that’s a law of physics. In other words, we find that there is a non-destruction of matter. Of course I think that’s going to be disproven later. They found already, I heard a guy up there, somebody was [working on that]. In other words, there’s a concept that matter has only so much energy, and it’s indestructible. You can change the form but the energy’s still there.
dm7-04:03
What I read the other day was that somebody was experimenting down in Florida with hydrogen, light, and one other chemical. Did you guys read that?
Q. Chlorine, wasn’t it?
R. Right, chlorine, hydrogen and light. And they claimed that the extra energy seemed to come from the light. And they got six or seven times as much. Like say that you could calculate exactly the Btu in a ton of coal, and that will move a ten-ton locomotive exactly so many feet, as a prediction of science. Well, if somebody threw a ton of coal in there and it took it seven times further, then you destroy that law of chemistry or physics. So evidently that’s coming about. They say the atomic energy did it, overbalanced that law or outmoded it.
dm7-05:03
Q. When you meditate and you find some solutions for some problem, do you feel that it wouldn’t have come except through meditation?
R. Well, when you talk about meditation, you’re talking about stopping a little bit, that’s all. The hours of the day are taken up, so that you’re always running from one exigency to another. And the meditation is the deliberate setting aside of some time in order to look at the situation, that’s all. And when you do that, automatically you’re going to get solutions. I think a lot of the problems, maybe nothing great but the little problems like domestic difficulties and that sort of thing could be solved with a little bit of meditation where you sit down and just look at it.
dm7-06:05
I’ve got a little paper I wrote on meditation and I advise running through the reel of film. Cold history. Don’t meditate on the present, because you’re still angry or excited about it. But if you want to understand yourself, look back about two or three months, or two or three years or so. The things that made you angry you can laugh at now. So you get a better perspective and see what’s wrong. I believe in traumatic meditation. I don’t believe in peaceful meditation. I believe peace belongs in the cemetery. You’re going to have plenty of peace when they plant you. So if you want to discover something, cause some turmoil in your head and get to the root of things.
Yeah, over here, Dave.
dm7-06:52
Q. You mentioned jumping up and taking steps. You talk about that being a function of perhaps determination, awareness of your thinking, your energy level and those types of things. Would you think any one factor is more important than the others?
dm7-07:11 [Grating noise (some kind of machine?) here same as the noise in the unknown “ashram” tape, but happens only once. But it may help establish that the ashram meeting was in Pittsburgh]
R. Well, I think determination is the most important factor. If you want to say, put your energy or your chips on a certain direction, or a certain aspect of the search, I think that determination is important. Because if you’re determined enough, you’ll find ways and means. Some people just wait and study, spend their entire life speculating and buying enormous libraries of books, and the latest thing on this and that. My point is you can throw away most of the books and just go direct into your head. And if you’ve got enough determination to pursue it, then results are proportional to energy applied.
dm7-07:59
Q. You were talking about before of how people cling to beliefs. Is there any way of giving up those beliefs without being traumatized?
R. I don’t believe you give up anything. I believe they’re taken away. I remember one time I had a certain belief about love, and I didn’t realize I was being hypnotized. But once I realized that this girl had not done anything evil to me, that I had done it to myself, then my belief in love as such vanished immediately. I could look at it dispassionately.
dm7-08:40
Q. Was it like something you allowed to happen to you?
R. Yes, well, you allow everything pretty much to happen to you. That’s the proper attitude unless it’s something that’s going to hurt you; you don’t have to allow that to happen. It’s just like indulgence in a religion, say. Suppose you get into a religion and you’re not going to change your belief; you’ll never change your belief, but you may outgrow it. As I said, like he’s a staunch Christian Scientist but his kid’s dying now, and he says, “Ho, I could be wrong.” So then a new frame of mind comes over him and for the first time he has a clearer perspective.
Sometimes it happens by accident. That’s what I say: we don’t deliberately educate ourselves. I think the best thing we can do is make a declaration that we’re open for learning. Admit to ourselves that we want to learn, admit to ourselves that we hope something gets ahold of us and teaches us something. And then ride with it. If you start saying, “Well, I believe this and I’m going to enforce it,” you’re done. You’ve cemented yourself in.
dm7-10:03
I can remember when I was a younger, I had a belief that men were thinkers and women were zero, that they had no capacity for thinking. And with that in mind, I got married. And you know, I was fortunate: I met somebody who wasn’t too particular, but I survived it and I learned. [laughs] I learnt a hell of a lot about the human mind on both sides of the fence. And they’re different, believe me. But I couldn’t have forced myself on my own. If somebody had said, “Rose you’ve got to learn female psychology and understand the uniqueness of this person, and the importance of this person,” I wouldn’t have done it that’s all. It had to be that it happened in the path of living, having children and that kind of stuff. And the result is I think that I have one of the best marriage relationships that there is: we’re divorced. [laughs] But we’re good friends, always will be. But we don’t have to live together to be friends. That’s more important than being nuts about each other. dm7-11:23
Q. Did you learn a lot from raising kids?
R. Oh yes, I think so. I began to see myself. Some of the mistakes I’d made, I’d forgotten about them. I saw my kid going through them and I said, “Ye Gods, that happened to me and I overlooked it.”
Q. Only an older person would know this, but speaking of sex, that is the one point where a potentially intelligent person becomes a total idiot. [laughter] All thought, all cerebration is wrong; as you are highly sexed you are going to be an idiot. You’ve got to get past that stage before you can start even thinking.
R. Sure. I believe you’re entirely right. A classic example is the billy goat: it drops dead doing that.
dm7-12:23
Q. Are we obliged by something or someone to make this climb?
R. No.
Q. So for what purpose? Is it more comfortable there ... ?
R. See, you’re talking in utilitarian terms. You can’t view it that way. Everybody says, “Will that help my business?” No, no. Just what is, is. Do you want to know what is or do you want to be comfortable? And do you think when you’re comfortable, you’re really comfortable? No, nobody’s comfortable. So I say you dig. Or you go up to the top of the mountain to see what’s up there, if for no other reason.
dm7-13:06
Q. There was a man in this physical therapy class who we worked with and he’d been in a car accident and lost his wife and his child. A young man, about 23, bright red hair, strong body; he’d been lifting weights for a long time.
R. You must have been attracted to him if you remember all that stuff. [laughter] Go ahead, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Q. I was working as a physical therapist. He was good looking. [laughter]. So …
R. Those were the days, huh?
Q. So I would watch him work out and it was inspiring to see he had a lot of will. As a physical therapist assistant you get to see a lot of will. People would come in, all kinds of conditions, and they had been through a different experience than I had been through. And I thought well, there’s something to learn about will here; because these people don’t play games like a lot of normal people do, who have all their facilities.
But after the car accident they told him he’d never walk or talk. He was in a coma for three months. He probably weighs close to 200 pounds now, but he weighed about a 120 then. So when he’s coming out of the coma, the first thing he saw was himself and he was in heaven and in the clouds – this is how he described it to me. He was standing on a cloud, dressed in black, and there was a man at a podium in a white robe with a long white beard. It was like a God or something. So the boy said, “Hello”, and God said, “Well, hello. It’s not your time to come with us now. You’ll have to wait; you still have more work to do.”
dm7-15:50
So he said okay and then he signed off and he came back into his body and then he woke up and he got out of bed, got up to start walking; well, he landed flat on the floor like an infant. And he said, “Hey what’s going on?” So he taught himself to crawl and he taught himself to talk and he said, “Damned if I’m going to be in bed the rest of my life as an invalid not walking or talking.” So now he’s walking and he’s talking and he’s doing quite well. Anyway I thought that was interesting experience.
R. I think this an example, you’ll run into them every once in a while, where according to science, people were doomed to a form of a life but somehow persisted and surmounted it.
Q. The doctors pronounced him dead three times and he kept coming back.
R. In fact, I think you can keep other people alive. I’ve seen instances of this, and I don’t think it’s a good idea. Just with sheer will power. You can keep them alive but I don’t think they appreciate it.
dm7-17:09
[30 seconds of silence]
dm7-17:38
[somebody in audience snaps fingers twice]
R. No, no! See that was alright. We were having a rapport. They didn’t know it but we were having a rapport. It’s really pleasant to know that everything’s plain and no explanations are necessary; now we know. That happens quite often when I’m talking. If you just let it ride you’ll find it. Everybody’s getting an insight, right? Can you confirm it, anybody, insights when that quiet is there?
[more silence]
Six Types of Visions
dm7-18:32
I’ve got a little thing here that I’ll leave with you before I go, for what it’s worth. I’ll have to read it. We were talking about this business of observation, and this is a little angle that many of you may not have thought about; maybe you have. I maintain that you don’t see. People do not see; they have visions. You have incoming stuff that hits your eyeballs or your ears, and this gets together inside the head, and you have an accepted projection then. You project.
There’s a little book on it, Conquest of Illusion, by J.J. van der Leeuw. , He brings this out very well. He says that we may well be a point of light, that’s all, and all the rest is interpreted. By that I mean we just project things out because there’s an agreement in the paradigm. But anyhow, we know this, that we project what we see. We have for instance a color spectrum which the animal doesn’t have; he can’t project the same thing, so we don’t exactly live in the same world. Although the animals accept our interpretation of the life and what’s around us.
But when we run through these, you’ll get an idea of what I call the different visions that people have. When you see something, that’s a perception. But a vision is something that is created, concocted so to speak. The human being has six types of visions.
dm7-20:51
[Rose reads from Psychology of the Observer]
The first is normal sensory perception. This is ordinary seeing or perceiving. As a result of a sensory stimulus, the mind coordinates the stimulus with previous stimuli, and projects back upon the physical environment that which it wants to see. Only this projection is seen by the individual's awareness.
So whatever you project out there is what your awareness will see. Now the reason we know this happens is that occasionally people project the wrong thing, and they find they walk out to touch something that isn’t there like a hologram.
21:31
To say the same thing more precisely, man visualizes everything that he perceives (thinks he perceives) through the physical senses. It is a “normal” percept followed by a “normal” projection.
This is the reason we have to go through these, if you want to study yourself and your thinking processes; and that gives you a better idea who’s in behind it.
The second one is abnormal sensory perception, i.e., illusory or non-validated phenomena. These are visions which apparently are seen by the eyes (or percepts connected with the other senses; it could be heard by the ears), which later will be found to be invalid or illusory in nature. Included in this category are ghosts that cannot be checked out, hallucinations, holograms, mirages, and hypnotic phenomena that involve the imposition of illusions upon the mind of the subject.
We consider those abnormal because in this unreal world they are even more unreal.
Now the next four categories have to do with mental perception. I maintain that you can see with your eyeballs to a certain extent, but you can also see with the mind. I’m going to demonstrate that with these next four.
dm7-22:49
A while back I discussed the ability of the mind to see or perceive. The examples given show clearly that such perceiving result from initial sensory stimuli. There are, however instances where the mind “sees” independently of the senses. I call this ability visualization-projection not warranted by percepts.
The others are warranted by physical perceptions. Now we get into the third class which is mental visions.
Here the mind watches synthetic projections from its memory bank. We can conjure up an apple with diamonds embedded in the sides.
In the book earlier, I gave this idea of conjuring up pictures. We do it all the time. Kids will sit around and dream up whole fantasy lands. And that’s a mental vision. It doesn’t come from something they’ve seen outside; it comes from inside their own heads or from inside their memory bank, or a combination. And you can see things that never existed, the same way.
For instance we can take an example right now: you imagine a green apple. Everybody’s seen a green apple, and soon as I say it, a picture of a green apple flashes in front of your eye. And then I say, “Put a string of swastikas around it, or diamonds – purple diamonds.” And you’ll see that in your mind’s eye. So therefore the mind is seeing something that was never seen with the physical eye. You see it in your head but it was never seen with the physical eye, an apple with diamonds on it.
dm7-24:27
[Tape break in (both in dm and mj versions) but words repeated, no loss of words]
dm7-24:29 [delete repeated sentence] … seeing something that was never seen with the physical eye. You see it in your head but it was never seen with the physical eye, an apple with diamonds on it.
This is memory revisited and rearranged. This is commonly called imagination. It’s mental vision.
The fourth category is: visions without projection by the perceiver. This is not something projected. These are non-physical visions, valid according to some means of corroboration or laws of reference. Their general corroboration lies in the fact that they often are found later to have been revelations of some sort. They are ghosts that substantiate their presence by warnings or prophecies.
We can say that this thing didn’t exist, but he says, “Hey, don’t take the car today because you’ll have a wreck.” And the neighbor takes the car instead and gets killed. So you realize that something was trying to tell you something. This is a vision of something that you didn’t project.
They are dreams, articulate voices from non-visible sources, and instances of deja-vu which are found to be more than a hallucination.
This lady was talking here, this is the category I think you were talking about, some articulate voices or sights that you can’t tell where they come from, but they seem to prove their existence by some means. Also, proven deja-vu experiences.
It may be that some of these visions are contacts with the Manifested Mind, or with emanations from the Manifested Mind.
I’m talking about an Overmind now, a dimensional mind. They seem to come from a very orderly source but they’re not from our individual mind.
Also in the fourth category are direct-mind communication which we pick up accurately from another person, such as in mind-reading. In the past many phenomena which we now describe under the heading of ESP or Psi phenomena, were previously described for the recipient as being an ability called the sixth sense.
dm7-26:37
[Break in tape – words are missing in dm7, check other versions, but missing words marked in blue are taken from the book]
dm7-26:39
This sense can be discovered and developed. It amounts to a sort of sensitive feeler which the mind extends to the mind of another, using in the beginning all manner of clues from the countenance of the other person and even items of posture and tone of voice, to guess at first that which the other person may be thinking. But after a while, success will breed accuracy, and later still, we will be able to possess a feeling of knowing instead of uncertainty. This feeling of knowing results from persistent checking over a long period of time with the person whom we are reading.
J.B. Rhine got into this, if you’re acquainted with him.
Group sessions for the purpose of attempting to have a rapport and picking up information are good.
That’s the reason I don’t disturb the rapports when they go on.
Now the fifth category is visions of mental processes.
This is the vision where this person as a process observer is watching an abstract function. You can’t symbolize it with any physical symbol at all; you’re just watching the mind working.
dm7-27:39
This is not the same as the third category which is reverie or imagination. This is that which we will later call the process observer. This is the mind which is anterior to the umpire and its phenomena. It is a part of us that sees. It sees the mind, the somatic or umpire mind. It is, in turn unable to watch itself, or any processes peculiar to itself. This is a genuine mental awareness by the real Self, or ultimate Self.
The sixth and last category is deliberate mental projections: that which is caused by some other person’s mind. This is a projection by them which has an impact upon other minds, to a point where the recipient may have the conviction that he physically sees the projection.
In other words, this is a vision projected upon us by another person.
They are visions projected upon the world-scene, or upon our consciousness by another. Under this heading we have tulpas and the Indian rope trick. ,
dm7-28:38
I don’t know how many of you are acquainted with tulpas. There were people in Tibet who were able to project and create a living being. Alexandra David-Neel writes about it. , Or Evans-Wentz. ,
These monks would get lonely up in the mountains and would create a woman, to have intercourse with her. And she was tangible, she was real. This was a deliberate mental projection. But the author of the book questioned one monk on one of these tulpas, and he said that it took him six months, I think, to create her and six years to get rid of her. She didn’t want to leave. [laughter] ,
dm7-29:37
The Indian rope trick is another case of where something is projected upon your mentality. Other instances are cases of bi-location (people being in two places at once), healing at a distance, psycho kinesis, transubstantiation (water into wine, they say), and possession.
Now possession is a case where somebody actually projects something into you.
I would like to devote an entire book to this subject, and to the methods of attaining expertise in this type of projection.
Not that I want to, but I’d like to clear it up for some people.
dm7-30:06
Q. There was one word that you were going to bring out …
R. Oh, deja-vu? You go into a place and you feel as though you’ve been there, you recognize things. And in order for it to be accurate or to be a real phenomenon it has to be corroborated. They talk of a person in England, to give you an example, going to a certain place along the shore and saying there was a convent there or a castle. And he would go and tell you where it stood, in reference to a little ravine, and they would dig down and find the thing.
Now this person would ...
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File 5 Pittsburgh (dm8, mj8)
Total time: 07:18
[continuation of dm7, a few words lost, still talking about deja-vu.]
dm8-00:00
R. [This one fellow mentioned] a boat, with a deja-vu. He had seen it before. Now the psychologists of course, unless they find a foundation or something like that, it’s written off as being [imagination]. It’s like when a fellow predicts [in deja-vu] a train wreck after it happens. He says, “Oh, I saw that train wreck.” And they say, “Well he got there and then he imagined that he was there.” But this is common to a lot of people. You read a lot of accounts in literature of people who went to places and were quite convinced they’d been there before. That’s what deja-vu means.
dm8-00:40
[silence]
dm8-00:55
Q. How do you know you’re not fooling yourself with this answer?
R. With what answer?
Q. With the way that you see things, that that’s the way they are.
R. I don’t feel as though I’m fooling myself at all with what I know. Of course, I could be crazy – you have to use your intuition. But I may be fooling myself a lot with the verbalization. What happens is you experience nothingness and try to put it into words of something-ness and there is where the difficulty lies. As far as what I experienced, I’m not fooling myself about that. Because, well, again that’s something I can’t prove.
That happens all the time in this type of thing. It’s like me describing Cairo, Egypt if you’ve never been there. I could describe it but you could say I was lying. I couldn’t prove that I wasn’t lying. So it’s just one of those things. If your intuition picks it up, you pick it up. And if you pick up the fact that I’m nuts, well, that’s what you got to live with, a nut. [laughs]
dm8-02:09
[silence]
dm8-02:28
Q. You said that a real person is one who observes; that somehow there’s a higher power of reality, that you have this capacity to observe. But observation implies that you’re at a distance from the thing that you’re observing. Therefore you’re not part of it. And all the mystics tell us that we are supposed to be at one with everything and that is the highest point of reality. How would you resolve that paradox?
R. Well, in the first place I don’t believe that you could take, let’s say, advice or just a sentence from a mystic and make it a rule of life. You’ve got to go there yourself. This is the answer. And I don’t think I quibble with that. In the final analysis you are one, you reach one-ness. But I’m talking about the relative. [If you observe yourself, then] one of them is not you. In the relative dimension you are not the cat, you’re not the dog. And many mystics even make that mistake, in thinking they are not the cat or the dog or the horse or the other man. But it isn’t a mistake, it’s strictly the way our paradigm is forced upon us.
dm8-03:53
Okay but you may reach a point by this analysis of the observer looking at the view, to where you blend. If you notice at the top, there’s nothing. There is no more relative adventure. You are the view and the viewer. The only way to learn is not to study with symbology but to become. Now you can’t just become by saying, “I’m going to become.” No, you have to belabor yourself with relativity and symbology. And don’t confuse the idea of this battle of relative things with the idea of unity at the end. Don’t presume there’s unity in the end; you don’t know that. And me telling you that isn’t going to make it for you.
dm8-04:40
Don’t pay any attention to what the mystics say, or what I say. I say there’s a problem to be solved. Solve the problem. And if something I say stimulates you or makes it a little easier for you or accelerates you, good. But I cannot convey this. I think it’s foolishness to take any book by any mystic or anything that I say and act upon it, or put your life’s actions on it. I think that would be bad. I think you have to fight this thing for yourself. That’s the reason I don’t believe in paying into cults and rackets and religions.
dm8-05:16
Q. Didn’t you write that in your book? Don’t follow the mystics, find it yourself, experience it yourself.
R. Oh yes. God is within. If you want to call it God, it’s within.
Q. You can’t do it through another person.
R. Well, they can help.
Q. By inspiration.
R. Yeah. My wife helped me. She put me through hell and I found heaven. [laughs] I refuse to be serious. [laughs] That’s one thing I believe in: I’ve given up everything but laughing. I think a lot of this so-called creation is a joke – so why not laugh? Life doesn’t take you seriously, why should you take it seriously? The least you can do is laugh a little in return. Laugh back.
dm8-06:01 -- dm8-06:10
Q. Raymond Moody, who wrote Life After Life has now written Laugh After Laugh.
R. Good. [laughter] You finally got onto something you know something about.
Q. He’s a Southern boy and he pronounced them both the same too.
R. Yeah, that’s right they do. Life. Laugh. I’ll never forget the first time I heard my sister-in-law pronounce the word “ice”. I was shocked. [laughter]
dm8-06:39
[silence]
dm8-06:53
Well it’s been a nice evening.
[applause]
That was nice. I’ll come back the next time for that. I’ll be reincarnated just for you.
dm8-07:17
File dm8 ends at 07:19
Footnotes
Url: www.direct-mind.org/index.php?title=1979-0403-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Synod-Hall
For information, send email to editors@direct-mind.org
Close to the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Kubler-Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Moody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chilton_Pearce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Benoit_(psychotherapist) The Supreme Doctrine Full text: http://selfdefinition.org/zen/benoit/supreme-doctrine/ Lecture at the Theosophical Society, July 1972. George Blazer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science Franz Hartmann: “Man's consciousness rotates between the two poles of good and evil, of spirit and matter.” Magic White and Black, ch. 8 http://selfdefinition.org/magic/hartmann/white-and-black/chapter-08-unconsciousness.htm The personal experience and history of the mystic. Chart of Ramana Maharshi on samadhi: http://albigen.com/uarelove/sahaja.htm The term is possibly rooted in Rose’s experience in Seattle, where he felt as if he had been transported to a mountain top. From The Albigen Papers, chapter 8. “As we project ourselves back trough the mind-ray we naturally come to the universal or Unmanifested Mind-Matrix. Specialized mind is the result of absolute mind-stuff. And here, it is true, we do experience the truth of our own insignificance, or nothingness in relation to values once assumed by the Individual Mind. This viewing of the Unmanifested Mind is often mistaken for Satori. It is in fact, the ‘mountain experience’ which we often hear described. Often it is quite depressing, depending on how much we remember of our relative selves. Rose wrote The Albigen Papers in 1972, circulated as a mimeograph; the paperback was printed in the spring of 1975. Rose discovered Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi late in 1974. Ramana died in 1950. Rose had read Brunton’s accounts of Ramana Maharshi many years earlier, but Brunton’s words apparently did not register with Rose then. See 1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Kent-State. Diagram 2 in Rose’s “The Mind”: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/writings/richard-rose-the-mind.htm Pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/science/Joseph-Chilton-Pearce-Crack-in-the-Cosmic-Egg.pdf Quote from “The Mind” by Rose, referenced above: “The Law of Creation involves Imagination plus Faith, plus the Fiat. It is said that God imagined, or dreamed up the physical world, believed in himself, and said, "Let there be Light." Eliphas Levi covers this extensively in Transcendental Magic. “So be it; I desire it to be so; such is the last word of all professions of faith.” PDFs here: http://selfdefinition.org/magic/ The phrase Rose quotes.” In the beginning was the Word” is from John ch. 1. The book of Genesis begins with a reference to chaos as follows: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, [i.e., the word] “Let there be light,....” etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Baker_Eddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpal_Singh See http://selfdefinition.org/radha-soami/radha-soami-satsang.htm#cosmology Possibly Paul and Peter in Galatians 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Antioch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff PD Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung Logotherapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Kubler-Ross See http://selfdefinition.org/rose/images/talks/protest-psychosis-haldol-ad.jpg Near Pittsburgh. See 1976-0304-Pittsburgh-Meeting for a discussion of Meher Baba. [group meeting, not transcribed] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson Pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/colin-wilson/ Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission. http://tatfoundation.org/energy.htm Also see “Lecture on Betweenness” (chapter 6) and “Note on Betweenness” (chapter 7) of The Direct-Mind Experience. http://tatfoundation.org/direct.htm Rose met with a Radha Soami group in Ohio in the 1950s. See “Yoga: Hatha, Shabd, and Raja” from TAT Journal, issue 8: http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal-08.html#9 Radha Soami primer: http://selfdefinition.org/radha-soami/radha-soami-satsang.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darsana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charan_Singh_(guru) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Guardian_Angel Franz Hartmann: “The state of consciousness of the fourth principle (the animal soul) … differs widely in different persons, according to the conditions that have been established during its connection with the body.” Magic White and Black, ch. 8. See P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 4, “Seven gradations of the concept ‘man’", pdf here: http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/ Victor D. Solow, "I Died at 10:52 AM." http://tatfoundation.org/forum2003-12.htm#5 Newspaper articles and biographical information here: http://selfdefinition.org/afterlife/victor-solow/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atman_(Hinduism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman Vincent Rose. Meaning is unclear; written verbatim. Possibly that man deserves to know his purpose? Explained here: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/writings/richard-rose-the-mind.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave Equity Funding Corporation scandal, a computer-based fraud. The company collapsed in 1973 but lawsuits were still in the news in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_Roland_Doe See Torkom Saraydarian, “Obsession and Possession”: http://selfdefinition.org/possession/quotes/torkom-saraydarian-obsession-and-possession.htm Franz Hartmann: “Cases of obsession are by no means unfrequent, and many cases of insanity are merely cases of obsession. It is extremely desirable in the interests of humanity that our superintendents and doctors of insane asylums should study the occult laws of nature, and learn to know the causes of insanity, instead of merely studying their external effects.” – Magic White and Black, chapter 7 http://selfdefinition.org/magic/hartmann/white-and-black/chapter-07-consciousness.htm Rose tells this story in more detail in 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU. Vincent Rose. http://www.richardroseteachings.com/about.html The Albigen Papers, ch. 7, “Discernment.” See “A Law of Physics Repealed?” Solar Reactor Corp of Miami, invented by Robert L. Scragg of West Virginia,. Spotlight, April 18, 1979. http://www.rexresearch.com/scragg/scragg.htm#spotlite http://tatfoundation.org/meditate.htm Rose may be speaking of his mother here, based on other stories. From “Lecture at Boston College”, chapter 3 of Direct-Mind Experience: “We have what we call rapport sessions in which we are trying to develop the intuition, and to sort of get the head in a position where transmission can be effected; where direct mind-to-mind can be experienced. ... This comes about slowly but surely, and this is where your head is ready for transmission.” Franz Hartmann: “The explanation which material science gives in regard to the process of seeing only explains the formation of a picture on the retina of the physical eye, but gives no explanation whatever how these pictures come to the consciousness of the mind.” Magic White and Black, chapter 7, Full text: http://selfdefinition.org/van-der-leeuw/conquest-of-illusion/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Jacobus_(J._J.)_van_der_Leeuw Hartmann: “Perception is passive imagination, because if we perceive an object, the relation which it bears to us comes to our consciousness without any active exertion on our part.” Ch. 7. From Psychology of the Observer: “The mind dimension is like a universal agreement of pre-incarnate man. It is the Universal Mind of Mary Baker Eddy, and the Oversoul of Paul Brunton. I prefer to call it the Manifesting or Manifested Mind. The Manifested Mind emanates from the Unmanifested Mind. The Unmanifested Mind might be likened to the Logos, and the Absolute to the Parabrahm, from which the Logos and the Unmanifested Mind emanates.” See Notebooks of Paul Brunton. Brunton describes Overmind as “the sum total of all individual minds.” http://paulbrunton.org/notebooks/para/15032 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine As described earlier in the lecture. The sentence is ambiguous: according to Rose, the ultimate self is beyond the process observer. Alexandra David-Neel: “Tibetans disagree in their explanations of such phenomena; some think a material form is really brought into being; others consider the apparition as a mere case of suggestion, the creator's thought impressing others and causing them to see what he himself sees.” With Magicians and Mystics in Tibet. http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/tulpa-creation/alexandra-david-neel-comments.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rope_trick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_David-Neel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Evans-Wentz Evans-Wentz refers to tulpas briefly in a footnote on page 29 of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954 http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/tulpa-creation/walter-evans-wentz-comments.htm Alexandra David-Neel, With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. Two versions (different translations) of this book are available here: http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/ David-Neel created her own tulpa and had difficulty escaping from her creation. Her account does not include a reference to monks using tulpas for sexual purposes except possibly figuratively, where she refers to her translator as follows: “Dawasandup was an occultist and even, in a certain way, a mystic. He sought for secret intercourse with the Dâkinîs and the dreadful gods hoping to gain supernormal powers.” For detail plus extensive footnotes see 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU. Rose’s trip to Cairo was in 1976, probably March. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/497412.Laugh_After_Laugh
