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	University of Pittsburgh
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
Total time
Transcription status
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?	Psychology of the Observer. See note.
Published on which website?
Remarks	See extensive notes for reconciliation of versions here: 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU
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Identifiable voices
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1979-0403-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Synod-Hall
	For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20150225144048

Notes

DM and MJ have versions

MJ version – Undated-Psychology-of-the-Observer

In MJ there are 11 files – ten are approx 30 min and one (##6) is 7 minutes.

File numbering-Jake’s files: 1, 3b, 4x, 5c, 6, 7d, 8, 9, 10, 11

This is in Pittsburgh but not at U. Pitt. (file mj1 at 03:22)

At start Rose says the book is typeset and coming out soon.

Tape 1 = sides 1 & 6

Tape 2 = sides 2, 3

Tape 3 = sides 4, 5

Tape 4 = sides 7, 8

Check other versions: Category:Psychology_of_the_Observer

1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU

1977-1012-Psychology-of-the-Observer-Kent-State

1977-Psychology-of-the-Observer-commercial-recording

Psychology-of-the-Observer-book-text

File 0 - intro

Total time: 1 min 34 secs. This was split off of File 1 Intro by Mike Whitely:

00:00 Some of you are familiar with Richard Rose already He’s kind of a hard man to define I could say maybe that he’s a writer, or maybe a researcher, or maybe a philosopher I could say he’s a father But I think they would all be off the mark a little bit but all of those things the only thing I have left to do ... R. Don’t tell them about the time I spent in jail.

M. I was just getting to that. But now that he’s filled you in on that little tidbit, the only thing I have is to present Richard Rose, who’s coming to share his insights on psychology and whatever. R. Thank you Mike.

File 0 intro ends at 01:34

File 1

Total time: 30:18 i.e., original 31:53 less the intro of 01:34

00:00

(Rose) We’re going to talk tonight about the psychology of the observer. That might sound, well, it doesn’t sound too complicated, but I think it is a new direction, a new psychological direction. Possibly a new way of working an old direction. I have a, I’ve still got the, the book on this is coming out (Wikipedia says published 1979 – check Al’s book) and I have the typeset duplicate here and I just want to read to you the thing that on 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 which was created, creates; not only by reproducing but also by projecting mental creations.

In other words, we create with our head as well as our body.

And all of this was designed to transform the robot into a self-sustaining unit. 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.

mj1-01:53

I maintain that man does not observe; he thinks he observes. So consequently, this little treatise was written on the basis of the erratic observation. And out of this erratic observation comes let’s say 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 that 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. In other words, we get the idea that we’re doing things. In other words, we do not always catch the fish. Sometimes the fish catches us. The thing that we go out and seize, for our, seemingly we’re doing something, is actually – we become the victim of the doing.

mj1-03:07

Now the basis of a lot of this self-study is the understanding of the Self. [capital “S”] I remember a couple years ago I gave a talk over at the University of Pittsburgh [so this is where? Duquesne?] and we were talking about the definition of self. And a man put up his hand and he 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 a voice, and a body – which wasn’t his Self. And this is what I’m going to try to demonstrate.

mj1-03:46

When you ask yourself, “Who are you?” – and this is the old question that was asked by sages. They say, “First know thyself.” Because when 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. And of course for the materialist, the first impression is to say, “You’re looking at it.” Well, maybe that’s all there is. But again, I’m saying that behind that, there’s something looking.

There’s something, 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 are 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

I distinctly separate the view from the viewer. This is the analogy. In other words, the view is never the viewer. The man who looks out on the landscape is the observer. The landscape is external. 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, I know we’ve got a lot of people who think the body’s all we’ve got. We’ve got a whole system of psychology that would like to say that all you’ve got is a body with a bunch f conditioned reflexes and all sorts of little wires and genes and DNA molecules running around to compose and stimulate thought and that sort of thing. But this body – we can cut the biggest part of it 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 – and when the person revives, he senses should have been extinct, but he remembers things distinctly. He comes back and he lives again. This seems to imply that the body isn’t – the eyeballs to 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 way, “What is ‘us’?” Well, we don’t know. If we knew, we’d have the answer immediately. But that if 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.

mj1-06:24

Okay. So – I don’t doubt that 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. To me, the whole process of meditation, the most, I consider the most sensible and fruitful form of meditation, is not on accepting what I consider, and what Chilton Pearce might have considered the projected plan. That humanity projects in front of it and says, “This is the world and this is life.” [sentence]

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 thing, there’s a very simple psychological system of self-observation that we get into which points the way. And I think it does it rather quickly. And I of course, if we do it quickly here, but if you try it yourself it may take years. the system may take years.

mj1-07:45

And I start with a very simple; I say 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 beyond your knees you’ll lose them. Your arms likewise, and a lot of the thing can go.

Okay, then we go back and a person says, “I am my thoughts.” And of course this is a, seemingly at the time a revelation to the person. 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 awhile 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.

mj1-08:46

Our whole thinking processes are programmed upon us. So that we’re, if we’re looking at the DNA molecules or 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 that sort of thing. So that the individual – we’re looking for an individual identification, an identification of some part of us that has, is an individual essence.

Now I’ve got a little drawing here, and this flat line at the bottom where it says Negative and Positive represents the realm of human experience. We are relative creatures, and everything is defined in terms of something at the other end of the spectrum. So that there’s no such thing in the relative as a cold, clear definition. It’s only defined in terms of the opposite. So that if you pick up a dictionary and you define “good”, you’ll find that the definition rests upon the definition of “bad”, and the definition of “bad” rests upon the definition of “good”. And you never really have anything except the opposite of something else. When you look up the definition of a cat or a dog, 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 that is not a cat, and the cat is that which is not what’s in the rest of the dictionary.

mj1-10:16

So consequently, we’re, in our whole thinking mechanism, we’re tied up in this wobble, or this thrashing about between the positive and the negative, between existence, the concept of existence and nonexistence, of thought and thoughtlessness, of up and down, or well, good and bad – anything that you think of. So 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. And we’re trying to do it with a mind that is continually – well, in other words, at each end of that little line could be a philosophy. You could have a philosophy for libertarianism and one for determinism, at two ends of the line; and they argue for eternity. And this is what goes on through religions and everything else. Is that 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

Okay. So there was a writer called Hubert Benoit who wrote on Zen. And he was the first fellow (as I ever read, I don’t have ?? there might have been somebody before him) to come up with what he calls the conciliatory principle. And I remember when I first came to Pittsburgh [first lecture, Theosophical Society. This would be George Blazer] there was a man in the audience, and we were talking about Zen and a few other subjects, and [afterwards] we went down to a little restaurant. And he put his finger on the table and he says, “There’s this,” [to the left] “and there’s this,” [to the right] – he put his finger over here, but he said, he hesitated, he said [whispering] “but there’s this.” [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.

In other words, to go back to human action now, to go back to the individual things that happen to you in your life: we say, 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 that moral code will take us by some religious means or some scientific means into a better state of mind.

mj1-12:42

And immediately we get – 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. Now this is the supreme paradox that we’re always wallowing with. So what happen is, we take a certain act. And we say, “Well, I want to follow a certain path.” Let’s say it’s a macrobiotic path; we want to purify ourselves and take nothing but macrobiotics. And we form a whole philosophy that eating the poor little animals is wrong. And so we tune to that mode? of philosophy around it, and we decide that killing is wrong. And then we encounter somewhere along the line the need to kill. Maybe to survive: we have to injewct 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, or something of that sort.

mj1-13:51

So we start to come up with thing of the ridiculousness. All of a sudden we see in some instances, this concept that we’re clinging so tightly to seems to be ridiculous. It’s like the – I often think of the Christian Scientist, for instance, who believes that he doesn’t need medicine, or some religious person who believes 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. Have they been kidding themselves? Okay.

mj1-14:45

So the point is, what I’m getting at is, everybody has gone through this to some degree or another. And we – by self-observing these patterns, this wrestling with the two extremes of our thinking in the relative dimension – we come to the conclusion that something is guiding it. We have a judge inside of us. And some of the old religious writers called it the conscience. I call it the umpire.

Now the umpire, I maintain, makes decisions for every act that we do. In other words, if you have two things to do tonight – one of them might have been to go out and get drunk, the other was to come here. And one of them was cheaper than the other one. [laughter] So you came here. But regardless, there was a decision made. Everything that you do has an alternative. There’s an alternative thing you can do. And so constantly, thousands of decisions are made a day: to step here or to step over there. Everything. This is the umpire.

mj1-15:32

When we notice that this thing going on inside of us, we decide that we’ve, well, we discovered the real self now; we’ve discovered the fellow who’s running the body. We’ve discovered the observer, so to speak, the observer of the actions, the thing that weighs them.

Now I contend that this is the somatic mind. [points to chart, point C] When you start observing the umpire, this is something that works almost automatically from the time a person is a baby. There are decisions made because of a resistance, pain, pleasure, whatever. And so that it starts to gauge itself, and it expresses itself through the umpire, or through the decision maker, or through the conscience. And we think we’ve got a complete picture.

mj1-16:16

But after you watch the umpire and you start to see some of these decisions, say that were made last year – and this year you don’t approve of them. In other words, supposing you were a devout Quaker or something of that sort, but you got drafted into the Army and you fall into the state of mind, and you go out and see the need maybe for killing people, or doing the opposite.

Anyhow, 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 maybe a new rationale comes up and we find out that that wasn’t us either, that was imposed upon us.

Now I’m going to give you an example of – it’s more blatant or commonly understood than the average set of things that go on. For instance, we have appetites that we respond to – like of eating – and the umpire may say, “Don’t eat too much.” You know, in other words, you get hungry, so the impulse is to eat. But – the impulse is to eat too much too, perhaps. But if you get sick the next day, then your umpire failed you the day before. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

mj1-17:40

So there’s a new decision made by the umpire

File 1 ends at 31:53

File 3b

[there is no file 2] Total time: 32:02

mj03b-00:00

[red letters – text verbatim in 1977-1004-Psychology-of-Zen-Science-of-Knowing-OSU]

... he means that it does not exist as permanently as another dimension. He looks from this other dimension, and uses words on us that have been used to explain the validity of the material universe. From this practice results an endless explaining of limitations of language, and of the limitations in the listeners’ minds, that is explained itself best in the use of the word “paradox”.

The paradox seems to permeate all of this talk of esoteric phenomena and enlightenment.

We take a stand on good and evil, for instance. We say that life is good and death is evil. For the pig about to be butchered, death is bad. But for the man about to eat the pig, the pig’s death is good, as it extends the life of the man. However, for the man who has become afflicted with trichinosis from eating the pork, the situation may change, and death as evil for the pig once more becomes evil for the man. However, there is still another point of observation: the man may sometime later view the whole scene from another dimension and decide that neither pig nor man held the same values as before, and that death, good and evil were simply positions of observation, or the results of man’s position at the time.

mj03b-01:25

Most of us don’t like to accept the possibility that we might view the physical universe from a dimension of other validity, other than this. We cannot accept this possibility until we realize that we are demanding that a non-material dimension make itself material so that we can measure it with material standards.

In other words, as soon as a claim is made by a psychic or a mystic, the pseudoscientific psychologist or materialist hops up and says, Prove that.” And of course he means, “Prove it by my standards.”

Of course this cannot be done except by ineffective word-imagery, if that dimension is more real than the physical universe.

mj03b-02:13

Up until now I’ve only hinted that these new dimensions are possibilities that might be surmised by pattern observation, and by taking note of pattern thinking that results from inadequate physical senses.

In other words, we’re getting these patterns from senses that are manifestly – we know that – they’re inadequate.

That which happens to the process observer is that this consideration of possibility of alternate natures for things apparent, brings the observer to a point of high confusion – once you realize that this is a possibility – that puts all physical evidence in jeopardy for him – the world starts to melt – and then puts all mental process observation in jeopardy too.

Which is what it should be.

The process observer is the mind in its deepest potentials. This becomes with relentless meditation and [observation of] pattern possibility, and observing-the-observer process, a dynamic study of the mind with the mind. And the results are an explosive quandary.

Disaster.

mj03b-03:29

This is the first time that we really realize, that we have been studying the mind itself. When we talk of an anterior observer to another objective observer, it looks like we are either chasing our own tail, or that man has an infinite number of observers. observing the observer

That’s the first thought that comes to your head: “Oh well, there’s an observer observing an observer indefinitely. This is not true.

[ From here check against 1977-1004 for direct matching]

However, if we take another look we will remember that we are really thinking about a purification of the definition of ultimate observer – as the real Observer, capital-R Real, unfolds, or is simply known more clearly. There is only one observer. When the umpire is known and the correlative functioning of the umpire is seen, then it immediately is an observation, not an observer. We have then become mental in center, which we only know later. stop here with mj03b-04:26

File m03b ends at 32:02

File mj04x

Total time: 31:53 mj04x-00:00 [this is a different timbre, different recording that files mj01 and mj03b. check the Mettle tapes against this [muffled audio] ... that a person gets into. The biggest part of our reverie thoughts are originated in the glands. That might sound hard? harsh? 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 that 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 ?? or 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.

mj04x-00:44

Q. either long pause or inaudible [18 seconds]

mj04x-01:02

R. Now of course, what we’re trying to do, one of the things that everyone’s trying to do, is pull the strings of life – before they find outt what’s going on. And I think somewhere there’s a ?? ?? that people have, that think as soon as you find the answer there? any? – will be able to do that. I think that to do anything that really, that hasn’t been programmed by some other force, could require a tremendous amount of knowledge, to begin with. Almost the knowledge of the why. [?]

In other words, I could see where every railroad accident, every automobile accident, every marriage, every divorce and all this stuff, is planned ahead of time. In other words, it ?? experiences. Because there doesn’t seem to be much way [?] of avoiding this. We live in a ?? complex culture that everything’s happening is really chance or accident. Maybe so. But I think that a lot of this, after you get a few years on you and you look back and you see that things seem to happen almost magically, in retrospect. And they went the right direction. And lots of times the direction at the moment was one we opposed. Either that or chose to ??

mj04x-02:33

So that, what I’m trying to say is that there is an over, a master plan, and in order for us to affect that, to cause one action of our own, we would have to upset that whole master plan, so to speak. It’s almost like the molecule, the electrons in a molecule – if we’re able to find a science to disrupt one of those electrons, we’ll upset a tremendous electronic field in the process. And I think that this would happen to us.

And I maintain that what we fail to pick up in the analysis here, is that the human being lives in a dimension that he thinks is the only one. And there’s a parent dimension. And this [human] dimension is projected from that parent dimension, that being? mind. I think that the entire picture that we see is an emanation, a mental emanation, which is somehow projected into the human consciousness. And he in turn projects it with common agreement: agreed-upon definitions, agreed-upon landscapes, in anything that we see.

mj04x-03:56

Now this is brought out, it might sound weird but I’ll give you a reference, in Chilton Pearce. He came to the conclusion that – I’m going to mention? a few words ?? ?? because you may not have read his books. But his wife was dying of cancer, and he came to the conclusion that the reason his wife was dying of cancer was because everyone had agreed on cancer. And having agreed upon cancer – you know – and we see that in individuals. A person will tell you, “I’m going to die. I’m smoking too many cigarettes,” or something. And the next thing you know we find out that he’s got cancer.

stop here with mj04x at 04:31

File mj04x ends at 31:53

File mj5c

Total time: 32:02 audio very clear !! mj05x-00:00

(Rose)... that’s the evidence, that’s the type of evidence that Kübler-Ross [umlaut = alt+0252] bases their book on. And incidentally, getting back to this evidence of life after death, both Raymond Moody and Kübler-Ross missed the categorization of these phenomena, these death phenomena. There are some people – I maintain that your death scene will measure for you where you’re going. Because – it’s just like LSD – you only get out of life what you put in it. You know, the trip you get is going to be what type of character went into the trip.

And people who seem to find people, even though it’s loved ones, are on what I call the emotional level. I classify – I borrow this from Gurdjieff, incidentally: the instinctive, emotional, intellectual, and philosophic. And occasionally you hear of people who have the nonhuman [experience] – there are no human beings there, but they witness beautiful vistas and sometimes mathematical designs and stuff.

stop m0j5c at 01:17

Note, from the book – six types of visions: 1. Normal Sensory Perception 2. Abnormal Sensory Perception. (includes hologram) 3. Mental Visions 4. Visions Without Projection by the Perceiver. 5. Visions of Mental Processes without sensory percepts (process observer) 6. Deliberate Mental Projections.

File 4 ends at 32:02

File mj-06

Total time: 31:54

mj6-00:00

... perception is simply the mind projecting upon the mind. The external world is shut off.

Reaction visions. [this is #2 above] Ghosts, visitation – the mind projects these visions from unknown source, or sources, upon the physical world. And these type of vision besides ghosts are the hologram and hallucinations.

These are reaction things. In other words, there’s something there. But the mind projects them upon the physical world now, not upon the mind itself. It projects them out there and then witnesses it again – and then wonders, and projects again, what it saw. But the first thing is, it projects them. It is aware of seeing it before it’s aware of projecting it. If you’re startled by a ghost, in other words

Mental perception. [#5 above, process observer] Now mental perceptions involve true revelations from an unknown environment acting upon the mind. And introspection is another one, mental perception, where you’re seeing inside the mind. [#5 above, process observer] and it’s mind reacting upon the mind again. But not projecting. It’s mind reacting upon the mind. And perceiving itself doing it.

[Deliberate perception]. Now we have another thing such as deliberate perception. This is the fifth category. Deliberate – the creation, the deliberate creation of visions. Now the deliberate creation of visions is ESP, astral projection, mind-zapping, and the creation of tulpas or anything else that you can create and cause it to materialize.

So it’s a powerful element of the mind that is deliberately overlooked. But there is no way – the thing is, that, I maintain that modern psychology does not properly identify the source of these phenomena. And scientifically, in any scientific field where phenomena exist, and the field fails to explain its own phenomena, its own range, field of phenomena, then that science is lacking. The science of psychology should know the cause and root of everything that happens to the mind. It should also define the mind.

mj6-02:22

Q & A

Now we have a little time and I think I’d like to, since I’ve read so much, I’d like to talk a little in the form of questions, or answering. You can ask some questions if you wish.

Q. In some of my self-explorations, the anterior self you’re talking about beyond the umpire, would come very close to destroying the umpire, and the umpire would throw me out of the game, throw me right out of the ball park. I was not allowed to continue.

R. Right, right.

Q. Is that a phenomenon that has occurred in your experience?

R. Right. See what happens is, you either kill the umpire or he kills you.

Q. He kills you.

R. Right, right. See because, see basically what happens is that the umpire can be taken over by any of the constituents. The umpire has to do with the balance of the desires, the balamce of the fears and the appetites, the ambitions. The ambitions are desires. But all these things have a power, and they’re reinforced at certain times. So in the event that the umpire isn’t wise enough, that momentarily, meaning for maybe twenty years, a person can be taken over by one of the constituents, one of the desires, mainly the desire to reproduce.

mj6-03:46

A person can submit to the desire to reproduce and for twenty years pay the penalty, until the kid’s twenty years old. Maybe later, if he’s an idiot. So consequently it’s the, the umpire is not infallible. And this is the reason, the need to study this umpire. And as you study him, this is one of the first things that happens, is that the umpire becomes more balanced, more capable of actually preserving the life of the individual. He doesn’t have too much sex, he doesn’t have too much dope, he doesn’t drink too much booze. He doesn’t work too hard either, or get too ambitious and kill himself with a stroke trying to make a million bucks. He starts to live.

mj6-04:32

And this is what I maintain about the spiritual path that nearly everyone overlooks, and even people who I’ve been associated with in the group for three and four years, is that they think that they can immediately hop past all physical adjustment, all umpire adjustment, and go directly into this pipe dream called enlightenment by studying the symptoms and saying, “Pop! there I am. I’m in no mind,” or something. “I’m just going to act like I’ve got no mind.” And of course ...

Q. ??

R. Yeah, Tim, what do you say?

Tim Calhoun. It sounds to me, when you get to “the paradoxical immanence in all things relative” and I was wondering when we think about, we often think in terms of our environment and survival, and I was wondering whether, even though survival appears illusory, whether it is the most accurate face to keep doing our research. Or should we gravitate toward subtracting things further?

mj6-05:37

R. What do you mean by attractive things?

Tim. Subtractive.

R. Oh, absolutely. I mentioned that when I was talking, is that the vector that we take out our campaign is one of a reverse vector, or retreating from the absurd, not postulating ...

Tim. You said that it may – to some it seems as if the absurd is more sharp in terms of its quality than our own postulization [postulating] ...

R. No, no. It isn’t postulization. You don’t postulate. In other words, if you get gonorrhea, you’ll know you’ve got to retreat from that. See. That’s one of the appetites.

Tim. I understand.

R. And if you wind up in a sanitarium because of too much booze, you have to be dried out or something, then you realize that you’ve got to retreat from that, that’s all. This is just the somatic umpire, see. This is the think. But what I said before was that we’ve got to straighten out – you can’t start, in other words, we like to – it’s an ego. It’s an ego to think, “Oh, I’m a divine creature. I’ve got a soul. I say, “Prove you’ve got a soul.”

mj6-06:44

All we know for sure is that we got senses and fears, and we respond to these things. We start with that. Now I started with a process of thinking, which I called observing the observer. And I didn’t bother to identify who we were. Because I, manifestly indicated right off the bat thgat we are not the body. But yet the body has a tremendous influence on “we”, on us. And as long as we’re living in this body, we’re going to have to understand it. That doesn’t mean that we’ve got to say we are the body. Just that we’ve got to understand it, and the effects it has on the anterior mind.

mj6-07:27

And when you reach a certain point, as I said, when you reach a point where you’re able to see the umpire clearly, he disappears as being us. He us the only “us” we know until we transcend him. He is the only center that we know. And when we discover him we think for a long time – for instance in the exaltation called salvation, where a guy gets saved – this is where he finally finds liberation through a perfect umpiring. If he’s been on booze, he becomes saved from booze. And he’s got a new grasp. He sees things from a different viewpoint. And the liberation, from having a better umpire exalts him. But it doesn’t exalt him from his other egos, of course. There’s other hangups that he has – he thinks that he thinks. That’s an ego too.

mj6-08:26

Tim. To continue that, that same tone of thought, is the umpire, is the one that’s watching him go through that change, that change in perspective?

R. No. The umpire doesn’t, the umpire is not that which watches the umpire. This is exactly the reason that I maintain that there’s an anterior self – an anterior self that seems to be getting away from us, and becoming more and more anterior, which it isn’t. We are becoming closer to it by this process. In other words, I outlined a process of, as I said, once the umpire is even spoken about, that we know that it’s something that works, it’s an observation. It is not an observer any longer. It is an observation. And its force becomes neutralized.

mj6-09:12

Up until that time we’re inclined to say, “Hey, I’m going to marry this girl,” or, “Hey, I’m going to make a million. And if I can’t have these things I want to be dead.” When he says I” he’s talking about, not even the umpire. He’s got an incorrect umpire. He’s talking about one of his appetites.

Tim. An ego.

R. Right, which is an ego, that’s all.

stopped mj6 here mj6-09:33

File 6 ends at 31:54

File 7d

Total time: 31:45

00:00

Q. How about in a person’s relations with ?? [noise] Is there of valuue 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, [a young woman] Could you talk more about, you were mentioning the connection between your thoughts and your glands.

R. Yes. Didn’t you ever have that happen?

Q. Could you explain a little more? I don’t understand.

R. 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 thought.

mj7d-01:42

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.

Q. Okay, what about an erratic sense or an erratic system, and ?? of the wrong 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, 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 ...

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.

mj7d-01:57

Q. Okay, balanced.

R. Okay.

Q. I’m talking about a balance as opposed to an erratic system. But one is a level of estrogen and other hormones, and then there’s testosterone. If that level of testosterone is interfering, is that a, an exaggerated level, that the other levels of the hormones malfunction 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 who are crazy and go out and stick their heads on the street corners, that’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 and the grandparents. Or it may be that the kid fouled herself up when she was little, by playing games. I don’t know what causes it. I’m just saying that regardless of what it is, she’s – the individual, she or he – will have a regular pattern that they’ll follow, and they can’t control it.

mj7d-02:58

They can’t control it. I was watching them even trying to write it on the calendar and they’d still say, “It happened.  ?? See.

Q. Yes.

Q. What do you think about the present state of physics? Or any of the physical sciences. [somebody laughs] Okay, 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 that is, I think ?? later. They found already, I heard a guy, 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.

mj7d-04:03

What I read the other days was somebody was experimenting down in Florida with hydrogen, light, and one other chemical. Did you guys read that?

Q. Chlorine, wasn’t it?

R. Chlorine. Hydrogen, chlorine and light. And they claimed that the extra energy seemed to come from the light. And they got six times or seven times as much, like you’d say, that you could calculate exactly the Btu in a ton of coal, and say we’re going to, that will move a ten ton locomotive exactly so many feet. The prediction of science. [?] Well, if somebody throwed threw a ton of coal in there and it took it seven times further, do we destroy that law of chemistry? So I don’t know if any of that’s coming about. But they say that the atomic energy did it. The atomic energy overbalanced that law. That made it ??  ??

mj7d-05:08

Q. If, when you meditate, do you find solutions to some ?? problem? If you ?? ?? feel that you wouldn’t have found that solution if it hadn’t come though meditation ?? ?

R. Well, you see, I think, when you talk about meditation, you’re talking about stopping a little bit, that’s all. We’ve become so – 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, why, automatically you’re going to get solutions. And this has happened? – I think a lot of the little problems, let’s say, maybe not too great, but 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.

mj7d-06:10

I don’t know if you have it or not, but I’ve got a little paper I wrote on meditation. And I advise the running through [of] the reel. 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. And then you can kind of, the things that made you angry, you can laugh at now. So you can 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.

mj7d-07:00

Q. You mentioned, going back to ?? again, you mentioned jumping up and taking steps. You talk about that being a function of perhaps determination, , of awareness of your thinking, your energy level and those types of things. Would you think any one factor is more important than the others? In the ability to ...

R. Well, I think that 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 the determination is important. Because if you’re determined enough, you’ll find ways and means. If you wait and study – some people spend their entire life speculating – and buying enormous libraries of books, and the latest on this and the latest thing on that. My point is you can throw away most of the books and just go directly into your head. And if you got enough determination to pursue it, then results are proportional to energy applied.

mj7d-08:07

Q. Is there any way of giving up those beliefs – you were talking about before of how people cling to beliefs – without being traumatized?

R. I don’t believe you give up anything. I believe they’re taken away. See what happens, I can remember one time I had a certain belief about love – I didn’t realize I was being hypnotized. And once I realized it, that this girl had not done anything evil to me – I had done it to myself – then my belief in love as such vanished immediately. Then I could look at it dispassionately, and say, you know ...

mj7d-08:50 stopped 7d here Q.

File 6 ends at 31:45

File 8

Total time: 7 min, 30 sec

mj8-00:00

... a boat. You know, he had a deja vu, had seen it before. Now the psychologist of course say, “Well, this guy ...” – unless they find a foundation or something like that – it’s written off as being, like a fellow says, well, it’s like a train wreck.

File 7 ends at 07:30

File 9

Total time: 31:59

File 9 ends at 31:59

File 10

Total time: 29:54

File 10 ends at 29:54

File 11

Total time: 34:14

File 11 ends at 34:14

Footnotes

End