1975-Man-As-A-Liar-University-of-Pittsburgh
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| Title | 1975-Man-As-A-Liar-University-of-Pittsburgh |
| Recorded date | (unknown) <<< probably 1975 -- see notes |
| Location | University of Pittsburgh |
| Number of tapes | 1 x 60 |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | SN - only copy |
| No. of MP3 files | 2 |
| Total time | 45 minutes |
| Transcription status | SH distributed Jan 24, 2015 |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1975-Man-As-A-Liar-University-of-Pittsburgh |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150124000010 |
Notes
Recording says 2 versions, SN and DM – can’t find DM, need to look for it.
SN = 2 files = 31 min + 14 min.
Probably 1975
Two date references so far:
Should likely be 1975 because he mentions Transmission Papers (Wikipedia says published in 1975, is this correct? Was there a private copy first?) and he mentions Norbu Chen as being recent.
Says the Fate Magazine issue with Norbu Chen was “a couple issues back”. That issue was August 1974. In 1974-75 Fate was a monthly (see spreadsheet) so by this, the date would be late 1974 or early 1975. But Rose is very general about past dates and often underestimates the passage of time.
http://selfdefinition.org/norbu-chen/norbu-chen-fate-magazine-august-1974-full-article.htm
Closest thing on the list of missing tapes is 1975-1002-University-of-Pittsburgh-missing-tape
Check Dave Gold’s book for possible references to this talk.
File 1
File 1 = length 31:23
[This is brutal in places but it’s short. The Q&A session is missing; this would have shown Rose’s more compassionate side.]
The talk tonight has to do with the reasons for the so-called spiritual search. And I came up with the idea, or the conviction at least, that man is a race of liars. A race of liars cannot find the truth, and the majority of these people will never find the truth. But those who are able to witness the errors, the discrepancies and inconsistencies may somehow break away from that mass of people who are playing the big game, and do something about it.
01:24
And you may not think this. We engage in this game and we agree to it. And there’s a tremendous mutual back-scratching that goes on: you tell your lie, I’ll tell my lie, and we won’t interfere with each other. Like the deal between the alienist and the judge: one gets a license and the other gets some support when he wants to send somebody to prison as being sane.
The professions
But we take the doctor: he sells us placebos. He claims he doesn’t. He has a certain good code that he operates by. But there’s more than one way to lie than being an outright liar – you can neglect things. You can neglect to help people when you’re protesting that you do help them. You can keep your practice going: for instance a knee brace may cost about fifteen dollars, and to take out a C cartilage might take six hundred dollars. So we find that they generally recommend the operations. Because two operations a day is better than one operation a day, especially when you’re getting five or six hundred dollars apiece. So they don’t always tell the truth.
02:49
The dentists lie. They tell you they’re busy. These professional people make themselves hard to get: they’re very valuable and you must wait in line. I’ve taken the bother to check a few of them out, and they’re not very busy. They keep things going that way.
The mechanic who overhauls your car: he talks about getting them for the bundle. You drive in and if it’s a lady driving he may find that she needs a new battery when she really doesn’t, something of that sort.
So we’re going down through these, in case you think that there are just a few here and there. The man who builds our houses lies: he builds cracker boxes. And how does he do it? With the aid of lying inspectors, lying government agents, FHA people. And the government goes along with this. A lot of the merchandise that we get has a short life. The food we get: the meat’s full of water.
The druggist sells us pills that have a fractional value. Now I got this from a druggist myself. Check it out; you don’t have to take my word for it. They give them a name, a very complex title, and the Food and Drug Administration checks this stuff for the actual value in it and tells these people, “Now this thing is only worth two cents a pill and you’re charging fifty cents a pill.” So they change the name and they add a few molecules more of corn starch or something, and the Food and Drug Administration has to start all over and reexamine the pill and qualify it for a certain price.
04:38
In the case of the buildings and much of the merchandise that hits us today that is highly advertized, the lie is in the advertisement, that this thing is good. It isn’t good. It has a high turnover. And this is encouraged by the government because every time a new item is sold there are more taxes for the government. So obsolescence goes along with our system.
The newspapers lie: that’s our big, shining knight that’s supposed to save us from all these crooks. They lie by direct lie and by omission. If they don’t like you they omit the truth, and that puts the people who are speaking erratically or in a mercenary fashion in a better light.
05:34
But our children see this. They see the judges being bribed, they see the millionaire politicians. And they see the politicians who are persecuting the other politicians also as liars. And they see that even the government – if you want to live in this country you almost have to be a liar to survive the ritual we call income taxes. Anybody who gets ahead is a liar. So the thing that the children see right off the bat is that you have to be a liar and you have to learn to lie adroitly.
And for the poor honest man: we do not have a system where a man can go before a judge and say, “Yes, I committed something wrong, and I’m sorry. I wish I had more knowledge of what I was doing.” And the judge, very much like God Almighty says, “Well, I have no control of the law and you did this, and you’re going to jail for it. And you saved us a lot of money for the trial, thank you for pleading guilty.” But there’s no leeway in our society, no advantage for telling the truth.
06:56
Everyone wants to be protected by some guild or trade union. This is not for the good of society, this is the right to extort. Education is a lie: It’s a Frankenstein, besides being a lie. The people today, especially our young people, are burdened down under a tremendous weight of garbage courses, which the educators tell them they have to have. A mother with a high school education can teach children in grade school up to the fourth year, but no, she’s got to go to college for four years. They’ve got to go to college to teach anything; even in high school today you have to have a Master’s degree or PhD. And this is protecting the guild, that’s all.
The result is that by the time you deny yourself normal living until you’re 30 years of age, you’re not fit to teach anybody. The larger percentage of people are disgusted, alcoholics or they’re burnt out dope addicts by the time they get to be a PhD. Or I’ve been looking at the wrong people. This is all to fatten up the system, that’s become entity-conscious: it becomes an entity and the entity has to feed itself. Don’t let too many people into the medical profession; keep them out and the prices up. Don’t let too many people in the brick-layers’ profession, that sort of thing.
08:41
The people who are supposed to protect our justice are some of the biggest liars. We live daily in a jungle, in a cave of jeopardy – and a lawyer, when he graduates and passes the bar examination, buys a franchise for that system of protection. We cannot protect ourselves except with his permission. We can’t even write up a legal document, unless we want to be arrested for impersonating a lawyer or something without a license. And yet these are the same people whose money is made by virtue of being experts in tort. They would like to have us believe, that yes, they know the law, but if we give them enough money they can find the loopholes.
09:38
Religion
Now let’s go to religion. Either religion is a game or it should teach more than just anything. Belief alone is not sufficient. We’re talking about why kids deviate from the religions of their parents and that sort of thing. But you can look around you: we have a sort of paganism; we’ve thrown out the old icons and we’re worshipping glossy pictures now. Of course some have gone into other phases of belief, transcendentalism they call it, esoteric philosophy; but it’s still a system of belief.
10:38
All of these things should have some function, or they’re lying. There’s some function that should be attributed to these movements. And what is that function? To make you feel better? To make your business better? – as you’ll see in the little pamphlets some of them put out: “Better business”. Is that what we’re after? Or is there some basic question that the other sciences haven’t answered, that religion’s domain should answer?
And I think you can narrow them down to three questions that cover it pretty well, and that is: Where did we come from? Who are we? And where are we going? It’s that simple. Where were we before we were born? Who are we now? [pauses]
Q. Where will we be?
R. Thank you. [laughs]
11:34
Religion is a lie by name-dropping: “God told me to tell you. I’m his emissary; I know the fellow personally.” Or, “I know. My guru was a guru’s guru, and by that sticky chain we’re glued to heaven,” by some technique or another. By a philosophy of concept structures: saying, “This sounds good; if we rehash this paganism a bit, we’re going to come up with something that’s more palatable. So let’s try this, throw in some brotherhood; this is going over pretty well.”
We lie with our gimmickry: Now gimmick sounds like a crude word. I overemphasize it perhaps, because I want to attract attention to things I consider very vital. So I may use a harsh word. I consider healing to be a gimmick. I consider meditative techniques that bring you peace of mind to be gimmicks. Techniques that are supposed to give you an enormous amount of strength, where you can stick your fist through a steel door or something. I’m not saying that these don’t happen. You can heal. And we have the formulas in our group; there’s a paper on how this is done, how the energy is raised to heal people.
13:16
In this line you can pick up Fate Magazine a couple issues back, about a guy named Norbu Chen in Dallas, Texas. He went over to Tibet and paid the fellows a few hundred dollars and they taught him how to heal. Of course, they had to lock him up in a cave until he built up his energy so he could do it. So then he came back to Dallas. He looks and talks – at least the quotations I saw in the magazine – pretty much like a football player or something. Before he went over there he was a secret agent, I think, for the Governor of Kentucky, doing some rather cloak and dagger work. And he had to hide out awhile. He went into the penitentiary and posed for the Governor to get information or something, so they wanted him.
14:00
But from there he went to Tibet and he learned this healing technique and came back, and now he’s zapping people, he calls it. And it works. He cures them. But the mistake is in tying it immediately to spiritual value. This man doesn’t tie it; he’s just a pragmatic healer. But another fellow comes along with the same technique or some little trick, and he tells you God is on his side. And then he has you building a church.
And the average layman doesn’t have the time. He trusts. I went into a research laboratory when I was 23 years old; I was working on the atomic submarine. And I was really flattered by the chance to work among all these brilliant physicists and mathematicians. I thought, “I’m going to talk to some of these people and see what they think. Because they’ve got good computers, trained computers.” (I mean their heads.) “They should have some good answers about the problems of life and death.” So one by one, myself and another fellow went through: “What are you thinking, about the riddle of life or death? What do you think happens after you die?” And they would utterly be amazed that I even asked the question. They had never thought of it.
So finally one fellow said, “Hey. You know what I do? I pay the shoemaker to fix my shoes and I pay the preacher for that. He takes care of that.” This is this exalted intellectual level that we think knows everything, that we trust as authority. I didn’t find any of them – some of them had joined a few lodges, one of them was a 32nd degree Mason, another had joined a few cults just to see what he could get out of it – but none of them had any desire, seemingly, to find out about who they were.
15:45
But anyhow, these gimmicks are coming out of India like steel comes out of Pittsburgh. They don’t have too much production over there and can’t export anything else but gimmicks. So they study these things, and some of them are very valid. I can’t go into all this stuff tonight, but as Frank said, I was initiated into some of these guru movements. One of them, Kirpal Singh was a schismatic of, his group. Eckankar was a schismatic of the same thing. And I went in for the purpose of picking up: “What do these people have that is so great? Why do people kneel at their feet and all that sort of thing?”
16:29
Okay, we go on through the reasons we can find, that the religions are lying to us. This protest of popularity: People go to the church that has the tallest steeple and the best parking lot and the nicest front. People have the concept too, we have in our minds a disease called democracy. We think that everything can be settled by it, these millions of ignorant people making a decision. Now I understand that Cotton Mather and Burke, of two polar parties, both came up with the realization that the common people can’t think; they can’t come up with anything worthwhile. You would think that if you get 200 million people together you’d have a good answer, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. But they think that all you have to do is vote. And this is exactly what’s causing all the hell in the country today, where people are voting on social issues and making edicts of them – which are immoral and are destroying the fiber of our youth.
17:46
By quoting: When they don’t have any theology, they quote. They quote a book or they quote an important person. They use undefined terms. This rates a respectful attitude: terminology. It’s like the doctor when he writes his prescription, everything used to be in Latin. This kept the peasants puzzled for a long time. But now we have words like satori, moksha, nirvana, nirvikalpa samadhi – this sounds much better. It’s mystifying. And it’s much better to use the word nirvikalpa samadhi than it is enlightenment because – well, that’s maybe worth a little money even. But we use these unvalidated terms also as the basis for a truth system. And some of the terms involved with philosophy: “Well, it came in the book with the rest of the stuff,” so we automatically accept the words. And as the result of this we accept a whole philosophy without giving it much evaluation.
19:21
We talk of people abandoning Christianity for the Asian movements, and we’re wondering why. But the strange thing is, people have a level. And you’ll find that people who abandon Christianity say for being fictitious, or being an emotional-devotional movement rather than a philosophical-thinking movement, will go across the sea and pick an identical movement. They will not pick up a philosophic movement there; they will pick up an emotional movement. If that’s their level, that’s where they’ll go. And they’ll just trade masters, that’s all. They will not raise themselves one iota. But they’ll have different terms for things: instead of “sin” they might use the word “karma”, or something of that sort.
20:14
Religion has abandoned the search for the soul, or self-definition, and has entered politics. As a social service it wants to be funded. And it’s a manifest charade. Politics needs no help from the God-impostors; it has enough impostors. Religion also makes the observation that spiritual values are priceless: that we should never put a price on them. But everywhere you go you find that there is a price; they’re charging. Well, either bargain days are here or we’re getting some counterfeit. Because there are a lot of religious leaders flying jet planes back and forth.
21:13 Here are a couple equations I’ll leave with you before I get into psychology:
A candle is purgatorial bail money.
If you love your guru, love equals a jet plane and a palace.
God is a $10 million cathedral in the middle of the slums.
A holy man can be known for his wealth.
21:48
Psychology
Now we have two ways of going about this if you’re serious and want to know who you are. Of course, when I was young, between 20 and 30, I didn’t see any point in living unless I knew who was living. Now that might not sound too heavy or too important, but to me that was important. And I know that to a lot of people it’s important. There are only two ways that we have – two doors open, as I see it – to look for a definition of the self. One of them is through religion or the associated things like esoteric philosophy or religious philosophy. And the other is psychology. Psychology is a science of ...
[break in tape]
22:40
Well, of course, there’s a little bit of friction between these two fields. Because quite a few of the eminent psychologists have denounced all religious effort as being a symptom of disease. They call this medical materialism. In other words, that people who are unsure of themselves or hysterical or have a liver defect or something will go in for religion. They’d like to have us believe that all these people are sick.
But again this goes back to this professional thing of wanting the whole field. At one time the psychologists considered hypnosis a fraud. They said this doesn’t exist. When I was going to college myself, people just laughed about it. Some of the boys were learning to hypnotize and they said, “Oh, they’re playing tricks.” The psychology professors said, “Oh, that’s just nonsense. They agree to get their mind in a certain frame and then they play tricks.” But once it was validated, then they wanted the property rights on it; they wanted a franchise. They wanted to make it a criminal offense for a person to practice it – and it is a criminal offense to practice hypnosis in some states unless you’re qualified first. Everything rests on the word qualified.
24:07
Psychology degenerated into a behavioral utility. In other words, it’s another back-scratching deal. Because there’s no money in finding out who you are; you can’t build a psychological system in which people pay to find out who they are. But people will pay $50 an hour for some sort of comfort – or to get back into the game, back into the rut, to become a diligent taxpayer. So everybody says, “Let’s have that type of psychology. Let’s have the type of psychology in which we can have an influence on our customers if we’re salesmen, or have an influence on our laborers if we have a personnel department. But all of this is to learn how to twist wheels which we really don’t understand. We don’t understand what really makes the wheels turn in the first place.
Now you say, “Well, that’s a game, okay, the world’s full of games, that isn’t so bad.” But where it does get bad is when these people get up on a witness stand when a man’s life hangs in the balance, and define sanity, so that he goes to the electric chair or he goes free by virtue of some man who has never yet in his life defined sanity. No one has defined sanity. I defy anybody to come up with it. Because when you define sanity you’re going to define the human mind; but all we know about is the effects of the human mind, not the human mind. We know what happens, we know the results of the human mind’s workings, but not the human mind.
So this is an imposition, this is the big lie, this is the great psychological crime. We don’t know what thought is. We’ve got a lot of words. And when you get into the dictionaries and that sort of thing, you’ll find that the words are largely circular. It gets back around to where a thought is what everybody agrees that a thought is; that’s what it comes down to.
Psychology refuses to accept that man could possibly have an essence. Now when you’re in a chemistry experiment, running something qualitatively, you don’t discount a priori anything that could be in there. You keep your mind open toward anything that could be in the substance you’re examining. But this field says, “No. This is a hysterical idea people have, that they have a soul. It’s not seen, it’s imagined.” Or, “The personality is the only thing that exists; that’s the sum total of that man’s wigglings.” But they give out a heavy pretense to establish themselves with the right to adjust our behavior.
27:11
Okay, so let’s say it’s a limited science then: it knows nothing about life and death, or thought, but it’s a behavioral expert. And like the doctors who can’t cure something but refuse to turn the patient over to another doctor for fear of losing the fee, they pretend to have an answer for everything. So there are certain things that may not properly be defined, such as possession – it doesn’t exist to a psychologist. Possession is defined as schizophrenia. Psychology defines a tremendous lot of unexplained phenomena, which a mystic or a transcendental experiment will run into, as individual or collective hysteria, or imagination. Witchcraft, sorcery are denied. But if witchcraft is ever workable, believe me, they’ll want the charter on it. They’ll want to be the only operators.
28:27
Too many people refuse to admit their limitations, not only the psychologist. But to an abstract or intangible study, he tries to apply objective methods, laboratorial procedure. And of course as long as he does this he’s going to come up short.
Incidentally, most of all your therapy is done by letting the patient heal himself, such as by sitting in some encounter groups – where there’s very little done except the man sits there with a pencil and takes notes, and lets everyone hassle themselves. You can read William Seabrook’s book Asylum on this. He was an alcoholic, had himself committed to Bellevue. And he tells what goes on and how people there were automatically, accidentally graded upwards until they were graded out the door. They were all more or less doing it on their own, or at least from the energy they worked with collectively.
29:47
We lie too
Now we sit here and call a lot of people liars. And that should make us all feel good because we’ve seen a lot of liars and we are not, presumably. Of course I maintain that we are too. We lie too. We don’t define ourselves. And when we attempt to define ourselves we resort to a lie. Occasionally in our confrontation we’ll say, “Who are you?” And supposedly the only thing Ramana Maharshi’s pupils did was to question themselves with that one question. That was the only discipline that was necessary to find enlightenment, just repeat over to themselves, “Who am I?” until they start answering it, start looking for an answer.
But the average person will say they know who they are. In one of our meetings I asked somebody, “Who are you” and he says, “I’m me. I’m the fellow who hears you.” But are you the fellow who also sees, smells, tastes? Are you more than ears? And if you are, then you may be plural.
[break in tape – overlap, no loss of words] [file sn1 ends at 31:23]
File 2
File 2 = 14 minutes.
We also lie – cont.
[no paragraph]
And he says, “No, no, I’m not ‘us’, I’m just the observer of these senses.” But still we can observe this little action too. We can observe our bodies or our senses or our reactions, and we can observe the process. So we witness a person with somatic feelings, seemingly a body that feels, and an observer who feels, And immediately we have to admit some sort of duality within ourselves. Again, the rationalization or the answer I picked up from him was, “Well, basically this body thing is just happening and I’m just watching it.” Now this is maybe something that Alan Watts would come up with.
Alright, so we’re the observer – but then who acts? If this fellow’s a passive observer and is just watching this, kind of letting everything flow and all that sort of thing – then who’s the fellow who acts? There’s something that acts. There’s something that decides. You can say a lot of these decisions are automatic: that maybe we just automatically choose among many things we could do, and we really don’t have the choice.
And I’ll say, “Who is it then that reacts?” Now, your answer to that will be, “Well, I don’t know, whether I really act or not. It could be that I act, it could be that I don’t act. It could be that I’m acted upon.” But still it goes back, that you’re manifestly two people. There’s evidently two: there’s an observer observing himself, or there’s an observer and an actor.
02:10
Our reflexes may cause us to do something. But when we strike someone as a reflex, there’s going to be a qualification of that strike. No two people strike the same. You’ll be thinking, or inhibiting the strike; there will be a direction to it. It won’t be just a blind strike, necessarily. So this shows that maybe we don’t want to hurt the fellow when we strike; that there was just a desire or a fear or something.
And if there’s a desire, we can say that the desire is an act. Being able to desire is being able to act in a directed energy. We desire, and that’s a directed energy. But you can deny that you desire, too. You can say, “It’s a compulsion; I can’t help desire.” But does not the witnessing of this compulsion automatically open a door for influencing the compulsion? And if you influence the compulsion, no matter how microscopically it affects your behavior, it’s an act.
03:25
Observer
We come down to the conclusion that we’re at least an observer. We observe feeling and acting. Complex and rapid decision making indicates that our actions are so infinitely complex, that if there’s really an ultimate observer-actor, he or it is remotely alive, or remotely existent to this mundane “me” that feels, hears, questions, or tries to answer the question “Who are you?”
04:00
Now, what I’m getting at is – when you see an action, try to identify the compulsion, try to identify the desire, try to see the qualification of the reflex or reaction, all this stuff. Observe yourself observing. And pretty soon you’ll realize that you approach a state of possible reality that leaves that little function of hearing way back in a mundane body. The conclusion also reads that an anterior actor, as well as observer, must be accepted if we’re going to identify ourself, the real Self, as being ultimate, and not the apparent physical self.
Now I’ll go through that again. The ultimate or anterior observer, the farthest observer, must be accepted as “us” if we identify our real self as that which is the most ultimate. If we say that the final observer is us, then it’s got to be this thing that is not the physical self. In other words, the physical world did not cause itself and then develop an ultimate observer. The body did not create itself and then create an ultimate observer in that body, or related to that body.
05:44
And this ultimate self is not just the hearing or the seeing, he’s the observer of both hearing and seeing when they occur. So his comprehension or his ability to take this in, makes him more complete, more real, than just the function of hearing. So that one of the little egos is not necessarily the great person, or the whole person, but just a small fragment of the person or the observer. But when we realize this – how the final observer, which is awareness, is more real – then mundane acts and facts have less meaning. And we identify this other experience of facts as being capital-R Reality.
06:41
Now we’ll go back to the individual again. We’ll say, “Who are you?” Are you honest enough to say who you think you are? I don’t believe that people can generally say even who they think they are. They may try. But I’m quite sure that everybody sitting here tonight thinks that they’re sane – that they’re very average, intelligent, and they do everything properly. But let’s run through the crowd and see why you do certain things. Now I don’t know what you do. Most of you I haven’t seen before. But I see people with long hair and I say, “Why do you grow your hair long?” I see a man who shaves, I say, “Why do you shave?” I see a girl who wears a particular type of dress because it emphasizes a certain physical feature, and say, “Why do you wear your dress that way?”
And it’s very possible that the colors you pick, the way you hold your head, the way you walk, the tone of voice you assume – all is an attempt to convey, or create before you convey, an image. Perhaps some shade of the rooster or some shade of the princess, so that we can project this on humanity and make them accept it. ”I’ll look much better with whiskers because my chin is small.” Or, “My head is too fat so I’ll fix my hair this way.” But we want people to believe that we are something, so that we can move with greater facility through the jungle of humanity. This is a lie.
08:31
Now in this business of finding yourself – I spent a lot of time tonight talking about the professional liars. And this is not nearly as significant. These people may have to do this, they may be programmed to fight in the jungle and survive with a few lies. But this is microscopic in comparison to a person who claims they’re intelligent but who kids themselves. It may take him twenty years before someone walks up to him some day and says, “Hey, you think you’re so-and-so, don’t you?” And you’ve thought yourselves that. But you’re not; you’re just a pile of garbage, basically.
09:16
So this is what we’re about. And this is where we have to start. We can’t start with complex terminology and analyze God and philosophic wrestlings with words, or to postulate something like enlightenment, and then try to guess. Or build a concept structure and compare it with a hundred or a thousand other concept structures and say, “We’ll find wisdom about ourself from talking or reading about these people who are supposedly experts on the self.”
There is a simple, direct way, a very easy way that costs you nothing. And that’s to look in the mirror. And start asking yourself, “Who am I and why am I putting up this particular front?” And when you start to looking, you’ll see behind the way your hair grows or the way you part it, that you’re posing. You’re trying to project. You’re not trying to learn the truth, you’re trying to project a certain image on the rest of humanity. And you’re not going to find truth until you face yourself. That’s the old adage: First know thyself. It begins with your shoes, it doesn’t begin with some glorious picture you have of yourself.
10:35
So basically, we must recognize these other things. I consider it abhorrent – a man shouldn’t get into things about political chicanery; that’s not our province. But at the same time we can’t turn our head and say everything’s sweet and nice, and Pollyanna will rule in the millennium. We’ve got to somehow live with it, and ignore it, but at the same time we have got to recognize it. And if we turn our back on it and say it isn’t there, then we will induce our mind to turn away from other problems when they arise. We’ve got to be able, we’ve got to be skillful and intuitive, in recognizing error, or inconsistency let’s say, wherever we see it. And of course we can be mistaken too. We can make mistakes, but as you go along you correct that.
That’s it.
So I would like for you to ask any questions you’d like, and we’ll continue.
11:48
Q. I know that as we get older it’s less difficult to handle emotions. But I was wondering if you had any suggestions to people that might help them, not necessarily solving particular problems, but controlling the confusion and the painful discombobulation of mental life.
13:00
R. Well, first of all, generally the more trouble you have, the better off you are. I mean basically, invention is caused by adversity. Now there’s one other thing, to give an honest answer, that there can be mental confusion caused by things that are adverse but will not bring you any wisdom even. And this I would refer to as being external.
13:36
Q. Can you give examples?
R. Well, the little boy who was exorcised: he had mental trouble and he couldn’t cure himself. But ordinarily, let’s say, if you have a social problem, say you can’t get along with people or something of that sort, you can continue to wrestle with it until you find the answer and become adjustable.
[end of recording – sn2 ends at 14:01]
Footnotes
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Talk is dated 1975 based on a reference to the Transmission Papers, published in 1975, and to an issue of Fate Magazine published in 1974. This contains an early formulation of ideas expressed in Psychology of the Observer, published in 1979. Rose: “I don’t believe that people commit crimes as much as people are the victims of the crime they commit.” From 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission, 1975 http://selfdefinition.org/norbu-chen/norbu-chen-fate-magazine-august-1974-full-article.htm Alternatively, a confidential informant while in prison, depending on who is telling the story. Actually this is Rose’s term. It does not appear in the Fate article or the chapters by William Nolen. At $500 per treatment (1974 dollars). He said it put a tremendous strain on him, and he died within about 3 years of the article according to his then-assistant Joann Parks. Babcock & Wilcox subsidiary plant near Alliance, Ohio. Robert Martin. Radha Soami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Mather http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke In The Albigen Papers, chapter 1, Rose says Cotton Mather and Karl Marx. http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/james-medical-materialism.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Seabrook
