1978-0406-Zen-The-Most-Perfect-Psychoanalysis-Pitt

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Title	1978-0406-Zen-The-Most-Perfect-Psychoanalysis-Pitt
Recorded date	April 6, 1978
Location	Pittsburgh
Number of tapes	Probably two 30-minute cassettes
Other recorders audible?
Alternate versions exist?
Source	J
No. of MP3 files	3 mp3 files: 32 min, 29 min, 32 min
Total time	91 min
Transcription status	First pass in process May 2014. SH update Jan. 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	Tapes are screwed up. File 1 begins some time after the start of the talk. The start of the talk is in one of the other files. This needs to be sorted out in the transcription, and the files need to be cut and spliced in the proper order. File 1 is too fast a rate, voice is higher and faster than normal. The other files are at normal speed.
Audio quality
Identifiable voices
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1978-0406-Zen-The-Most-Perfect-Psychoanalysis-Pitt
	For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20241219193022

Best date estimator

Says on side 2 at 35:13: “The last lecture I gave here was on that subject, the Psychology of the Observer.” So date this by finding that talk. From the 3 dates below, the most likely candidate is April 6, 1978, (Jake’s date and D. Weimer's date) because the Psy of Obs. talks were dated Oct. 1977. Caution: The Psy of Obs at Pitt was 1979-0403-Psychology of-the-Observer-Pitt but there is nothing on the present tape to indicate a date on 1976. So it's possible that there was also a Psy of Obs lecture at Pitt in Oct 1977 along with the others.

1) This part 1978-0406-Pitt" (date and venue) is based on Jake's date and Weimer's date/name.

2) The title is based on the newspaper article. See notes on 1978-0406-Zen-The-Most-Perfect-Psychoanalysis-Pitt-missing-tape

Notes

This is same as 1977-0224-University-of-Pittsburgh

Sounds more like a lecture than a meeting. Introduction by "Bill". Says "will open it up for questions. Small applause at end. Need to check.

Was: Energy and Entities Lecture misnamed – Date and conflicts to be resolved

Nevin’s version is 1976-0726-Energy-Entities-Lecture-Pittsburgh-Misnamed

MISNAMED - R does not talk about E&E in this meeting. Name comes from meeting on same day or maybe misdated.

http://www.direct-mind.org/index.php5?title=1976-0726-Energy-Entities-Lecture-Pittsburgh-Misnamed

2 @ 90 min from Nevins. Audio quality bad. Is there a different version? Yes – see below.

sn-version – tape slips on side 2 where marked

This is the same as Jake’s tape: 1978-0406-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh In Jake’s tape the tapes are out of order, and one runs at too fast a rate.

From the “Notes” file: Side 3 and 4 are verbatim of side 1 and 2 of Pittsburgh 2/4/1977.

Says on side 2 at 35:13: “The last lecture I gave here was on that subject, the Psychology of the Observer.” So date this by finding that talk. From the 3 dates above, this would be the most likely candidate: April 6, 1978, (Jake’s date) because the P of Obs. talks were dated Oct. 1977.

Source: Jake Tapes are screwed up. File 1 begins some time after the start of the talk. The start of the talk is in one of the other files. This needs to be sorted out in the transcription, and the files need to be cut and spliced in the proper order. File 1 is too fast a rate, voice is higher and faster than normal. The other files are at normal speed.

File 1

37 minutes. 00:00

To continue where Bill left off, I didn’t study Zen. I don’t endorse any particular system. I’m pretty well fed up with the ?? frame? brand? of Zen that’s offered. I’m pretty fed up in fact wirh most eastern gurus that hit the shore with moneybags waiting, or some other racket.

And I looked into it. I’m not just saying this idly. I studied under a Zen master. But I had already achieved the maximum that I thought I could achieve for [in] my lifetime, but I had no language to talk to people. So I made contact with a Zen master, who is entirely unknown.

00:56

I had heard that there was, at the time, I was not into Zen at the time I met him. I was recommended to him by a fellow (Macintyre) on the west coast, who had been dabbling. And I was rather surprised. You know you get an idea that people who look after spiritual matters are spiritual-looking people: I’ve never found this to be true. The most spiritual people I have found in my life – some of them are drunks and some of them look like drunks.

01:21

But the young so-called pert [?] and preppy generation can look bland, while between various sessions of dope or sex – to me is not a spiritual person, although they consider themselves to be very spiritual. A spiritual man is the man who has been through the meat grinder. And some of them have been – even Alcoholics Anonymous – the founder of AA, I think was an enlightened man, by reading from his literature. [Interesting, never met, what about Bob Martin, lived in Akron.]

01:50

So – we’re always looking in church for truth, and we find hypocrisy. We get dissatisfied with the conventional form of hypocrisy at home so we look, we seek for hypocrisy overseas. And we get it. And so I can tell you frankly that Zen is not institutional. Whenever an institution is set up it always, begins immediately to detract from Zen. And there’s a lot of garbage that goes along with it, like Zen poetry [Rose was an accomplished poet] , Zen flower arrangement, Zen archery and Zen ?? literature? you can have? that has nothing to do at all with the system. [Interesting that he uses the word “system” – Pulyan said there was no system, although he had an obvious technique]. And if you think it has, then entertain yourself. that’s your path.

[pause]

There’s room up front if anyone wants to ....

02:46

But anyhow, I discovered a few men in my life that I considered genuinely enlightened. One of them never heard of Zen, and probably still hasn’t heard of Zen techniques. But he had reached it with mental and spiritual suffering. And he was a Christian. A devout Christian, until he got to drinking and then he ... the war, destroyed a few Japanese cities, bombing them, and the Bible ?? when he started to pray, and he never stopped praying, because he thought there was a gap some place he couldn’t bridge. Here was a Christian nation that followed the teaching of Christ, and the belief that God watched the fall of the sparrow. And here there were enormous bobs falling and no one was paying attention.

03:41

So this perplexed him until it drove him into frustration and deep anxiety and they cashiered him out of the air force and sent him ?? And he kept on praying. His wife left him, his family, kids left him and he became a bum. And finally he got a job, he worked, he had to work, but every time he’d get a job, he was a flack? that had ?? at this particular time, he asked God to kill him, prayed for God to kill him. And he put his head down on the desk and passed out. And he woke up in the hospital. And in a period of a week or ten days or so he experienced all there is to experience, the maximum experience that any human mind can experience.

04:32

I heard him give an account of it in Akron, Ohio. We were meeting with a bunch of mathematicians and engineers from Firestone. The man who introduced mew to him, at whose house we met, was an engineer at Firestone, a research physicist in fact. And they sat around sneering at him, wondering why, he had a very beautiful wife, waiting on him. Incidentally, this had happened after his experience – his wife never came back and he remarried. And they pecked at the wife a little bit, to see if she would give us some insight as to why she latched onto this bum. He looked like the Crazy Guggenheim, still did, he was pretty well cooked in booze. But regardless, I knew that what the man was saying was true. He didn’t care. He didn’t care whether they believed him or not.

05:29

So the we’re mentioning this is that Zen is not the only path there is. There’s no such thing as the only path. The only path is inside yourself, whatever takes to get inside of you and find out, prove? yourself, who you are. that is your path. And if Zen does it, that’s good. If going to a monastery, some Buddhist or Christian monastery, or going to jail or Alcoholics Anonymous does it, that’s good. But the thing is, the key factor involved, is that you have to have a dynamic, sincere desire to know yourself, regardless of what that knowing is. And you have to tell the truth, and it doesn’t hurt to pray

06:15

But – so – because the system is so much like Zen, the language I chose was Zen. And now as he said, I’m advising them to stay away from the word Zen, because it has become corrupt with hucksters. Zen can’t be bought or sold. The truth cannot be bought or sold. No men [should] feed on the altar. You should go work in a mill or work in a factory and feed himself. That’s what I’ve done all my life, and until I was able to retire and waste a little of my time in this fashion, why, I didn’t talk.

06:52

But I want to read to you, I want to read a little from a book by Pauwels on Gurdjieff. I just picked it up? Bohdan Hodiak sent me this through the mail; I just got it a couple days ago. Incidentally, the Gurdjieffian system is very similar to the Zen system, except that there was no – there’s an implication of man number four, but no real proof, or let’s say – I couldn’t tie anything together that showed that Gurdjieff showed you how to get there.

07:33

But anyhow, this man (Pauwels) has an excerpt from Aldous Huxley, Devils of Loudon. I don’t know if you’ve read it or not. If you have, it won’t hurt to hear it again. But this pretty much explains the reason I came into Pittsburgh, and the reason I came into the University of Pitt and started to open up little groups in different universities. Was because acid had opened a few eyeballs, just a trifle, just a shade, to where you could pry open a little bit more

08:01

Most people, in generations past and in generations to come, there will be very little interest in enlightenment. When I went to college, anything but the good old-time religion was obscene. You didn’t dare talk about anything but Christianity or something similar to that. So that any speculation was considered crackpot. And we will go back to that. We’ll go back to the ?? and closed doors. And of course, the people who know will silently steal away into the bush and disappear.

08:42

[need to clean this up: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/aldous-huxley--article--self-transcendence.htm

also is here: http://www.psychedelic-library.org/loudun.htm

From poppy to curare, from Andean coca to Indian hemp and Siberian agaric, every plant or bush or fungus capable, when ingested, of stupefying or exciting or evoking visions, has long since been discovered and systematically employed. ...

Well, he didn’t mention LSD ...

The fact is strangely significant; for it seems to prove that, always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in Wordsworthian phrase, "far more deeply interfused." Exploring the world around him, primitive man evidently "tried all things and held fast to that which was good." For the purpose of self-preservation the good is every edible fruit and leaf, every wholesome seed, root and nut. But in another context—the context of self-dissatisfaction and the urge to self- transcendence—the good is everything in nature by means of which the quality of individual consciousness can be changed. Such drug-induced changes may be manifestly for the worse, may be at the price of present discomfort and future addiction, degeneration and premature death. All this is of no moment.

This book was written years ago. I don’t know exactly when, it’s ten or twenty years old at least.

What matters is the awareness, if only for an hour or two, if only for a few minutes, of being someone or, more often, something other than the insulated self.

...

In modern times beer and the other toxic short cuts to self-transcendence are no longer officially worshipped as gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in practice millions upon millions of civilized men and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating and transfiguring Spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and its derivatives, to the barbiturates, and the other synthetic additions to the age-old catalogue of poisons capable of causing self-transcendence. In every case, of course, what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement. The self-transcendence is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal.

[skips several paragraphs]

This raises a very important and difficult question. To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence; As first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being. So long as we are confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the various not-selves with which we are associated—the organic not-self, the subconscious not-self, the collective not-self of the psychic medium in which all our thinking and feeling have their existence, and the immanent and transcendent not-self of the Spirit. Any escape, even by a descending road, out of insulated selfhood makes possible at least a momentary awareness of the not-self on every level, including the highest.

12:20

I realized that the – this was, acid was a degenerative influence. So was pot. But if you can catch them before they become addicted – they had a peek at something great. They couldn’t verbalize it, and they were conscious after having ingested it or after they took it, they forgot how to describe it. They were aware of it while they were in it. But the discipline, the years of discipline that a mystic might go into in order to know what he’s doing when something like that happens, they didn’t take the time to develop it. So the result was tinkering. ? But this answers the question f why I decided to open my mouth and do a little talking.

13:12

Basically, I’d say the difference in my philosophy and some of the other – there are other philosophies incidentally that are not just cut and dried systems of words. By that I mean they’re esoteric philosophies that try to find the definition of man, the source of man. His essence. And I think the Gurdjieffian system points very strongly this way. They are very mystical parts of different established religions, very difficult to find. And some of them are even penalized by the religion in which they live. St. John of the Cross was penalized for talking too much about his mystical experiences. But I think that every major religion has that esoteric core. There have been men in it who devoutly tried to find out, and were able, and encouraged to shove aside the garbage and say, “This stuff is absurd, there’s a certain thing in this religion that’s absurd. There has to be something behind this universe, there has to be a God or something.

14:24

But regardless, there are very few people who write. And this is the thing that I complained about when I was younger. In fact, when I had my experience it was years later that I encountered Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness. I mentioned it in the book I wrote. A minister’s wife gave it to me, she heard me talking, and she said, “You should read this book.” And until the time I read it, I had no idea that anyone had experienced this. I thought that I was a solitary creature. And then I began to meet other people.

15:01

But what it goes back to is, the majority of mankind, you’ve got strong lines, a dichotomy. The majority of mankind are ?? Gurdjieff called them mechanical men. I call them robots. The majority of mankind are robots. And if you don’t believe this, go down the street and talk to, or you don’t even go down the street, go home and talk to your dad if he’s living, your grandfather, the old men in the family, and ask them what they’ve got out of life. Ask them what they’ve done with their life and what they think about it. Was it worthwhile?

And go down the street. Everybody should go. Go down to the beer joint. Why do people drink? Most people drink – if they drink to knock themselves out. They drink because their subconscious is still chirping a bit, saying, “Hey, you haven’t solved the problem? Why are you working? Why are you working at a game you can’t win? Why are you bringing children into the earth, that maybe you’ll regret you brought them in, after you got them here?”

16:10

You know, we dream that certain things will happen. A person gets married and the baby is so beautiful and this sort of thing. But after awhile you find out that you’ve been a doorway. You haven’t been a creator, you’ve been a doorway to let people in.

So – but what I’m getting at is that there’s another segment of humanity who are curious. I think some of the people n your religious institutions are sincere. And I say some. I don’t mean all. But I studied myself to be a priest. And I’ll tell you frankly the biggest part of them are dharma bums. It wasn’t too far from here so I won’t mention the place, because you may have friends there. They were people who became adjusted to prison life. You know, in one place they crack rocks and in another they chant in circles. But it’s still the same thing. They get fed, they get a place to sleep, no worries. Some way or another their sex life is taken care of, maybe not the most ideal way. But this becomes the institutional life.

17:17

But there are a few people in those institutions that – I met a few, who are genuinely sincere, and sometimes they even get so far as to discover something and write it down and write a book about it.

But this is a very small percentage of humanity. So the subject we’re talking about is very unpopular. It’s like democracy: we can decide sanity, that I’m insane, because I’m not in the groove with the rest of humanity. And I could care less. I delight in the privacy of my insanity. There’s not many people to bother me.

17:58

But we have several conceptions. We have several conceptions. (Now this is supposed to be a dialog; I’m going to shut up pretty soon, ?? talk. But I want to get a few notes out, while I can still think about them.) But there are conceptions, for instance brain? conceptions such as, “I’m going to the place everyone else is.” This is a very brave? attitude? “Who are you? Where are you going?” “Oh, I’m the same as you.” And where is this person going? “Well, I’m going where everybody else is going.” They seem pretty sure of that.

18:31

There’s evidence, especially with Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody doing work on life after death now being brought out, that researchers admit what the Tibetans knew 10,000 years ago, that there’s a difference in the death-style of people. Moody and Kübler-Ross haven’t pointed it out in their books, but you can look there and see it: there are about four different grades of life after death in case histories, showing that there are some who reach certain stages of consciousness in death. Others do not. In other words, some meet their relatives, some meet a saint, a mental? saint. Some meet geometric figures.

19:05

And these are almost – they’re categories – of people who die and return to say anything. Now there are other categories who don’t return to say anything. So you can take what happens there. And I mean – I talked to a few who came back, and there was nothing there. They had no vision. In fact, Augie here and I ran into a fellow one tme who had had a heart attack, and we approached him. And he sad, “What happens to you after you die?” I knew he had a heart attack and I said, “Well, you should know. Tell me, what happened to you?” And he said, “Nothing.” He said it was black, and that was all. No ??, see,

19:41

So I figured, why push the point? I knew his lifestyle and it was ?? his ??. He had a heart attack later, his daughter was getting married, and he went up and got drunk and danced all night, and he dropped dead at three o’clock in the morning.

19:58

But we go back and people are very – it’s amazing: we’re intelligent creatures. We’re out here building – some of you people may be studying engineering and will be building dams and bridges, and constructions of fantastic dimensions. And you know nothing of yourself. You know absolutely nothing about who you are. I mean essentially. Sure, you’re a body; but the body’s going to wind up in a mortuary. And very few of us want to admit that that’s all there is to it.

20:28

Very few of us also believe what they tell you down in the church. You come to the conclusion, watching the private of the lives of the saints, the so-called saints. But they don’t believe in the ?? they are dealing in the ??

20:43

But we wind up with very clever little definitions of what we are. And some people will say that, “Well basically, I don’t believe we’re anything but an animal.” And sometimes I think they should say vegetable. It would be a ?? see.

Or a soul. An animal could get away with a lot of stuff because he’s not supposed to be smart. But some people say we are a soul, or we have a soul. And I’d like to pose the question, “Are we an animal with a vegetable soul?” Because we don’t use it. We seem to have a capacity. There are all sorts of books and sacred writings put out that everybody professes to believe in, from the Pope down to Anita Bryant. But no action. There’s no action taken, just talking. So that everybody blesses their pleasure. You bless your marriage. You bless the wine before you drink it. (That takes the edge off it.)

21:55

But we’re basically vegetating. We act in a vegetating manner while having pretense. And do you think you have a soul because you want one? Everybody wants one. I’ve heard remarks, “Well, I wouldn’t want that kind of heaven. Oh, no, I wouldn’t want that kind of heaven. That’s not for me.” But what proof choice? do they have. They don’t know? if they have a choice?

22:18

Okay, then we get into this idea of analyzing. We take the man and analyze him. Some people ty to do that. Psychology is a good beacon. I think in fact you can find enlightenment through psychology – true psychology. But what is true psychology? We picked up an old book out of the archives and had it Xeroxed the other day. I’m not going to tell you what the name of it is because you may publish it. You may get there before us. [laughter] But this is a man, an unlettered man, a very brilliant hypnotist in his day, at the turn of the century. He wrote a book, and I picked it up when I was a kid. And I have advised some of the people in the group here to get a copy and read it.

This man knew the human mind, better than anybody I ever encountered. And there’s bales and bales and bales of pretended literature put out by mechanical psychologists, people who want to take ink blots and monkey gestures and dog tracks, and make of it a science – instead of going directly, and knowing how to go directly into the mind of man. And some hypnotists can do this.

23:20

Well, he said then, his complaint then was that the “alienist” – that’s what they called it in those days. They didn’t have the lofty titles of today, they weren’t turned loose to – they testified at trials, they had a certain power, but not quite as much as they have now. They have their own jails now. But he said then that these alienists were a curse on humanity. And I was amazed at the courage he had, because he was not a – you know, everybody likes to hear that the man who criticizes the man with a degree, that he has a degree himself. [sentence]

23:53

Gurdjieff incidentally had no degrees. And Gurdjieff I think was one of the most astute psychologists I think the world has known. He could do things with the human mind. The proof is in the pudding. Very few psychiatrists can even hypnotize, to give you an example. But can a psychiatrist even walk out of his body to see two hundred miles away? Or can a psychiatrist knock you off your feet, by concentrating on one of your nerve centers? And these are done by the Oriental, the or Tibetans, the Oriental psychologist, or magician, whatever you call them

24:34

Do you feel secure? Do people feel secure? Are they satisfied? Or do they [the psychiatrists?] just put it off? And I’ve seen a lot of this. I’ve seen cases of it in fact, where people kept putting it off: “Well, when I retire I’ll get into that stuff. I won’t have anything else to do, the wick will be burnt out, and I can, I’ll put the whole thing in, looking for God.” And then by that time they’ve got cholesterol piled up in their blood veins, and they don’t know if they’re coming or going, but they go through the motions. So you see them teetering in and out of church.

25:14

But what do people have? I can’t, what I see about humanity is – a mad scramble, careers, people go after a career and go after piling up money, or piling up house some place, getting a house, and getting some so-called heritage. ?? heritage is what they’re leaving their children. actually hopeless: there is no hope in this world when it ??

25:46

Now of course this is my personal opinion. I can’t [?] argue if you want to argue about it. But my belief is that the sardine can is getting so vicious that as soon as you get a nickel, you’re going to have to get a strong box, because somebody is going to grab it. And it could be a government agent, it could be the cop on the corner, it could be a gangster. But everything, this idea of dedicating ourselves to our children, or dedicating ourselves to some career – I see these people winding up discarded like dishrags in the corner.

26:24

They go through – they get disgusted with their own professional people. [?] Most of them get disgusted. I’ve talked to hundred of – I mentioned this at a meeting we had at Cuyahoga Falls – that’s the man who had found enlightenment. Those people were all scientists, and the older they got the more they became disgusted with their very work. They were proud in their youth and they wondered what they were doing when they got to be about 40. They couldn’t get away. They would have liked to get out and work with a pick and shovel for a change. They couldn’t get away. Because we get trapped in our security, our senority or ??

26:56

Well, anyhow – to me it may seem psychotic – a lot of people accuse you of this if you’re looking after values, spiritual values. You’re accused of being an escapist, a coward. You’re afraid – the robot is afraid to go out and start looking at his insides. He’s a coward if he does. He’s supposed to believe he’s a robot, go out and dutifully rust himself out collapse, and let somebody else prosper off the fertilizer.

27:32

And so – I’m pretty much of a – in the minority, on this respect. So what has happened though in my life is – I went out and put some effort out. And I did it in very difficult times. You people have a certain – you have a socialistic security, which we didn’t quite enjoy when I was a kid. There was still an element of starvation or struggle. Today you can get on relief and they’ll take care of you pretty much, and you can bum, around quite a bit.

28:02

But to me, I had to search for my spiritual values while scratching for a living, and I mean sometimes starving. But I put up with it. And I turned a lott of things aside; I turned a lot of opportunities aside. And made up my mind I’d accept nothing until I found it. And I found it. And I found the answer, I was satisfied. And I don’t want to – I’m not saying? this to bait you with curiosity to know what the formula is. I won’t give you the formula. Not tonight anyhow. It will cost you later. But I’m going to talk about everything else

28:42

I’m going to open this up for – the reason I’m going to open this up for a dialog is because – I can get up here and I talk. I’ve come here down through the years and talked about a direction that would lead – to gently lead an audience into a curiosity about defining the self. I have spent – I have been up here three or four years arguing with great reason about the unreasonable, with the reason? With great emotion about the foolishness of emotion. And I think the time is come to graduate, for all? of? us? to graduate. I want to give you just some simple answers to your level. And the only way to do that is for you to ask questions, and what you’re curious about, and we can touch on that and go from there.

29:25

Q. Which country do you like, if not America?

R. It’s hell here, so any hell is good. And there are books here. Maybe there are no books in Russia, I don’t know, or in China. But it may be hell there too. I presume there would be hell anyplace you go. Because there’s a lot of tension Tension’s the name of the game now. But tension is one of the factors that you know? for the production of enlightenment. So if you have access – I mean, if there is a country in existence where you don’t have access to people to compare notes with, then you’re somewhat alone, you’re a hermit in the desert.

30:05

Yeah, I believe we’re here because we’re supposed to be. I believe I’m here. [for that] I used to think I’d used to like to travel and think I’d go out and meet some wise men and that sort of thing. And I found the wisest – I didn’t find any wise men but I found a wise woman, my wife.

30:19

Q. How would you define – psychology defines sanity in say maybe an opposite way ?? ?? to find sanity.

R. Oh yeah, psychology is nothing but conformity.

Q. How do we recognize sanity?

R. Well, you can only recognize sanity by – you can’t just define it and approach it. What you have to do is retreat from garbage. To give you an example, it’s sane not to take poison. That is, it’s more sane not to take poison – unless like Huxley says you want to poison yourself momentarily to see what it’s like to be healthy. With some dope or something. But you do this with the whole scheme of life. The whole picture of life has to be approached this way, in which you, our definitions, our previous definitions of sanity change.

31:14

The world’s definition changes. Real sanity’s definition never changes. Sanity is that which is. Sanity is a state of mind which is closest to the essence of man. Not a system of apology for the appetites. Modern definitions of sanity are conformity to appetites. In other words, if you’re a good taxpayer, an unprincipled whoremaster, indulging in anything that comes your way – this is sanity today. It wasn’t sanity at the turn of the century,

31:54

This is the same as the truth. Scientific truth as well as psychological truth. The definition changes in the books – and are later disproven. People later – as I said, in ?? – I used the word “phlogiston”. I majored in chemistry when I was in college and we read that years ago they believed that the oxygenation process was due to something called phlogiston, and that was taught as the truth. The students of that time – and the students of today, sitting in the classroom, that are too busy doing the exercises so that they keep you from thinking.

32:27

I do not approve of this system of having different classes in the daytime. A man needs a whole day to think out a chapter in a chemistry book; you can’t do it if you’ve got to be running to the math class, you’ve got to be running over to musical appreciation class – which a chemist doesn’t need but he’s got to take it to keep this bum living. So in the meantime you’ve got your mind shook up to a point where you’re never allowed to think the problem out, and find the truth.

32:53

You’re continually bedeviled and scattered, so that you don’t look beneath the surface and find out the fellow up at the front of the room doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So this is modern education. I mean, he does know what he’s talking about, because he copied it from somebody else; but he didn’t think it out for himself.

33:09

So the whole system – some of the writers call it a paradigm. You get into scientific paradigms in which people set up a set of symbols. And they seem to work. And then they build on it – until it blows up. And the result is that some people like Chilton-Pearce think that all of our sickness, all of our lack of health, all of our misery, is caused by our belief in some of these paradigms that have been set up. And suggests possibly that we dump the language and the symbols, and go back to starting all over with a new set of symbols.

33:42

But sanity itself comes from – the amazing thing about, in my estimation, real sanity comes from looking inside yourself. And when you start to read books – I tried this when I was young – to get a psychology book, sometimes you run into this, the one I was telling you about, the man who was a hypnotist. [sentence] I pick up these psychology books that I find, 30 or 40 years ago, the fellow wrote a book and said, there’s seven qualities of the human mind.

34:06

From here on, this is copy-pasted from the page for 1978-0406-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh The times in 1978-0406-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh appear in parentheses

He’s an authority – because there’s nobody else big enough to shut him up. He was an authority of – Horowitz? Corowitz? I think was the name of the fellow. Then another fellow comes along and says that no, there are not seven, there are twenty or eighteen.

34:24 [05:47]

And then in come the Jewish mafia in New York, with a whole line of psychiatrists and psychologists in Europe: Freud, Adler, Frankel, all these people – were packagers; they were running a pawn shop. And the result is – that they had a clever little system. They confused the western civilization collectively more than any other school of thought – by trying to package something and put it out for sale and set up a set [string] of clinics, incorporated clinics around Europe or [and] America.

34:58 [06:22]

And the result is we’ve got words like psychoanalysis which mean little or nothing.

Freud goes back – for instance, the definition of man according to Freud is somebody who is divided into certain parts, like ego and superego and libido, I can’t remember because they didn’t mean too much to me, and these emanated from a thing called id – it reminds you of a comic strip. What is id? Don’t ask – that’s forbidden territory. That’s anything that you don’t know.

35:30 [06:54]

Q. ??

R. Okay, I’ll tell you why. Freud peddled psychoanalysis. What was the other one? Adler was psychotherapy, and Frankel had logotherapy. And I was deeply interested in Frankel when I read the first chapter of his book, because he said [that] man’s pursuit, man lives, the purpose behind man’s existence is his desire or will for meaning. And I thought, “Oh, a psychiatrist who’s really hip on the real motive of mankind.” Which I believe – that all people live to find out why they live. Some successfully shut it out.

36:22 [07:46]

But he invents a word and then he makes a cult out of it. And the man himself thought more of a bundle of papers when he was in the prison camp than he did [of] his wife. He clung to this bundle of papers and they took her to the gas chamber. Well, maybe he made a good trade, I don’t know. Something has to go for something.

36:44 [08:08]

Q. It just seems a bit of a simplification ...

R. Sure, sure.

Q. I don’t see that psychology is so much saying than man should be

File 2

45 minutes. Continuing with the copy-pasted from 1978-0406-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh The times in 1978-0406-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh appear in parentheses

08:08

Q. It just seems a bit of a simplification ...

R. Sure, sure.

Q. I don’t see that psychology is so much saying than man should be – I see that psychology is breaking out of the ...

R. I agree. I agree that there is a Jungian effort ...

Q. ?

R. Well, I don’t know too much about Maslow. I have heard that he’s ...

Q. ??

R. But these people aren’t known. Who’s calling the shots in this country today?

Q. Freudians.

R. No, the Skinnerians.

Q. It depends where you’re at.

R. Listen, where you’re at is in school, and where the books are – you go down for a job or a governmental attitude [aptitude?] and one thing that’s passed out to the police – the reason you’ve got pornographic shops all over this country is Skinnerian philosophy – masturbate the lions and they won’t cause trouble. Yes sir, this stuff doesn’t happen by accident, it comes from Washington. All these big moves come from Washington.

01:06 [09:20]

Q. Okay, well people, [if] psychology, is just Skinner and Freud, then it makes sense to throw psychology out.

R. Well I’m not throwing it out. I’m trying to clarify. I’m not saying that there aren’t some good people. I’m only harping on the bad ones. You can bring up the good ones.

Q. That’s what I mean. Are you going to try to ...?

R. Well, what’s my point? My point is not to tell you [that] you’re right – you can tell yourself that at your leisure. [laughter] I’m trying to point out, maybe you’re perfect, but the rest of these people here may not be.

01:43 [09:57]

I maintain that we’re under – this is a trend. I’m not saying [when] it started now either, it doesn’t matter where you go in history, there have been powers that [have] pretended to know something about the human mind; there have been witch doctors before there were psychologists. The priests were the psychologists in medieval Europe, back to the time of Christ, and lord knows how they handled it. And they gave us a lot of – well, they gave us the guilt complex; they managed to add to their list of mental troubles.

02:14 [10:26]

But the modern psychologists of course are building institutions to house the people they’re driving crazy. I’m not exaggerating – that’s my profound belief, that they are making them. They are encouraging behavior and, especially in the younger people, in the absolute disregard for the consideration for the innocence of children and this sort of thing – in which you’ll have a race of animals, and you’ll need institutions to house those animals, and you’ll need good healthy people to waste their lives to take care of them.

02:48 [10:59]

Q. Do you think that about Jung?

R. No, no. I have a lot of respect for the Jungian movement.

Q. Don’t you think that ...

R. I’m talking about Jung. I don’t know who perverts it, if anybody does. But I’m saying that Jung himself, the stuff I read about Jung, I have a great respect for Jung.

Q. Well don’t you think it’s fairly simplistic movement? I think that ...

03:12 [11:24]

R. Of course, you know what I’m wondering, I’m curious about is that you seem to be more interested in debating [whether] somebody is nice or isn’t nice, as opposed to trying to find out about yourself. This is the point. It’s good if you – I know that there is a Jungian movement in Pittsburgh, but I don’t know how aptly this handles the job of discovering yourself. I’ll give them credit this much, that at least they are meeting and they are doing some community confrontation of some sort, which is the direction [that I’m in favor of]. And if that’s what the Jungian movement is all over the world, then I say that it’s good. I don’t know what Jung himself intended.

0400: [12:15]

Q. How long would you say [it is until you] become enlightened? How long do you have to search?

R. Well, do you have a slide rule? [laughter]

Q. That’s what I thought you would say.

R. And then I’d have to take your personal factors that are involved, and we’d have to take a few years to get into those. You know, how far your head will stretch, how long you’re going to live ...

Q. Let me ask you this, then. Once you become enlightened, can you lose it?

R. There’s nothing to lose.

Q. I mean, if you don’t continue to search.

R. What would you search for if you found everything?

Q. I would imagine you constantly have to keep growing.

R. How would you grow if you’re at the end of the road?

Q. So you’re saying you come to the end of the road at a certain age?

R. At any age, yes.

Q. At any age, and then you just stop there?

R. Well, there’s no more – if there’s nothing to know, and we’re talking about a road of achievement, and if there’s nothing more to learn, then that’s the end.

05:12 [13:27]

Q. [different person] Wouldn’t you have to apply what you know now?

R. Why would you have to apply it? What would you do with it, build houses?

Q. To be who you are.

R. Well, in a sense you’re right. Because you’re going to have to apply it to help somebody else. That’s the only place where you apply it. But it has no value. This is a mistaken thing – I hear – it’s like let’s say Unity [Church] the little book they put out – better business. The implication is that if you join Unity you’ll have better business. But there is no utility ...

[ gap in tape – then restarts at normal speed – note – same gap in both tapes - Shawn’s version runs a little slow here ]

05:48 [14:01]

... it’s like, what is it? – we’ll say Unity [Church] –the little book they put out – “Better Business”. The implication is that if you join Unity you’ll have better business. [But] there is no utility. Whenever any religion or any psychological movement, outside of just sanity, outside of just knowing more about yourself and just being clearer [more clear] in your head. Outside of that there should be no utility. People say, “What will this do for me?” What’s it supposed to do for you? You can’t apply it to making money. Everybody wants to apply it to – twist it a little bit and make a sales technique out of it and zap the neighbor, or they’re selling them some worthless object.

06:32 [14:42]

Q. Doesn’t Zen put emphasis on harmony with ??

R. No.

06:38

[gap in tape, both versions. Tape quality returns to normal (Shawn’s version) ]

Q. On harmony with other [people?] instead of ...

R. You don’t have to study Zen to be in harmony with them; all you have to do is die and go into the cemetery. That’s the only time you’re in harmony with other? people?. Once your ego stops.

Q. ?? [inaudible, talking over R] [laughter]

R. That’s the dream. That’s the hippy dream, that everybody’s going to love you while you perform to suit yourself.

Q. Sounds like Alan Watts.

R. That’s true. Alan Watts wrote of Zen and he had this conception. Incidentally I knew the Zen master that Watts talked about, which was Sokei-an. But Sokei-an was not a master. He was another import, moved over here, tried to establish a group all his life. He just came here too young to be enlightened, and he preached enlightenment at the age of nineteen and kept on preaching.

07:29 [ ]

It’s one of the common denominators of gurus, for instance, to tell people, “Just keep on with your dissipations or your deviations or whatever you’re doing, but continue to chant his thing and put you nickel on the basket. And pretty soon you’ll become so agreeable that everybody will love you. The earth will be – there will be a revolution now and everybody’s going to be happy and radiate this, and pretty soon everybody else around you will be chanting, and the next thing you know you won’t have to work anymore.

08:03 [16:15]

You do the chant, and getting [??] what you want – that’s another chant. Chanting ?? to get something about chanting. [?]

08:13 [16:27]

Q. I don’t understand – you seem to be putting a concrete ?? and the transmitting of enlightenment. ?? And at least one ??

R. Right, right.

Q. ??

R. You’ve not read anything on the subject.

Q. No.

R. What have you read?

Q. ?? Well, I just have? this? feeling? ? ?? You don’t just get to a point and that’s it

17:09

R. I’m telling you this: What if you’re wrong? Because – I don’t like to be – I’m not saying this to be autocratic or anything of that sort, but I have to, that’s the only way I can approach it. Because this is the result of a – not only an experience, but if you read the books, if you read Ramana Maharshi, he cuts this very clearly. There’s a thing called cosmic consciousness in which a person reaches a state which is ecstatic, beautiful, seems to be immortal and all this sort of thing. And people read of this. This is the bliss of the mystics. But there is a state beyond that, and Ramana Maharshi describes the ecstatic condition as [of] cosmic consciousness same as, identical to William Bucke, Richard Bucke, Richard Bucke ’s book, and this? is? strictly?

09:39 [17:56]

The cosmic consciousness is kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. Okay. This is dropping a bucket into the bottom of a well – he draws an analogy. You drop a bucket in the bottom of the well. This is the mind in bliss, ?? ?? And any time you can pull that bucket back up and put it back into circulation – as a human being, going back to work in the mill.

18:31

Now there’s a sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi, which is a step beyond this, stepping beyond it, and you’ll know why ?? when you hear his? description? The river flows into the ocean, and there’s no return. In other words, when you reach sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. And then ?? anything? to? do? with? Zen? ?? if you – this is the equivalent of [enlightenment] – now I’m not going to use the word satori because that word is abused. I use particularly the word enlightenment because satori is a momentary “wow” – that’s how it’s described in all the writings. It’s nothing as profound [of] an experience.

10:56 [19:12]

But this thing of joining the river to the ocean means that the soul of man becomes one with the soul of God, and there is no other identification after that time. You know your personality – the person you’d like to think you are – which is generally basically, we have a belief in belief. We are not. We have a belief that ??

11:22 [19:39]

Q. So you’re saying that the point is when ??

R. I use the word God, but I don’t like to use any word I can’t define. And I can’t define the word God for you because it’s used – in West Virginia it’s a curse word; they don’t know anything about the other part of it. It’s misused. Everybody’s got a different definition. Some of, one is a personal being, who’s going to whisper something in your ear, who’s going to show up with some of his altar boys when they die and whisk them off to some paradise.

12:01 [20:19]

The conception, if you pick it up, in this, is what God [would] be is an absolute. This is not a personality. This is not a personality. There is no place to go beyond that. Now – where does God go? That’s a question of sophistry. When we, though we don’t even know who we are, to question where we would go when in the bosom of God or something of that sort, that would be beyond our comprehension.

20:51

Q. You? chose? how? as an example, that how? does? a? river go into the ocean, it no longer goes anyplace?

R. Yes. It loses its identity. It’ there, forever there, but it loses its identity. In other words, the Ohio River flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and when it gets down there you can’t identify which part of that water is the Ohio River.

12:56 [21:15]

Q. To turn the metaphor back to a person though – once s person reaches enlightenment, does this change their absolute? world in any way?

R. Well, there’s an automatic change, because things don’t have the same value, that’s all. I don’t think it would be considered by social standards anything worse [?] than what behavior we had before.

13:25 [21:43]

Q. Something – I don’t, when I try ?? what is enlightenment, I think of a person who’s enlightened, the one thing that I center on that I think is really ?? is compassion, and I wonder what you think of that.

R. Well, I don’t think you should project anything. This is one of the mistakes that people get into, they have certain preconceptions about holiness. You shouldn’t go into holiness with a preconception of holiness. You shouldn’t – in other words, you hear people say, “I love God and God loves me.” They’re liars. They don’t know what they’re talking about. In other words, they don’t know whether God has twenty-four legs or sixteen eyes, or if he’s up there on a cloud or if he’s in an absolute condition, or creature, or essence. So then they start to gauge – man creates God in his own image and likeness. We give him human qualities and say he loves us. He might love us like we love shrimp. [laughter] And the compassion goes out ??

14:39 [22:56]

Q. Okay but like I’m trying to be, the ?? is a lot of interacting with people ...

R. Don’t worry about people. Be concerned with yourself. They’re going to have to make it on their own. You may help one or two, but I mean, don’t worry about interacting with people. In fact you can’t help them when you’re concerned about them. If I were concerned about saying flattering things here, making everybody feel good, telling you all that you’re doing exactly the right thing and that sort of thing, I think my time would be wasted, that’s all.

23:33

Q. I guess it's not the way I would ??

R. You’re going to change ??

Q. I didn’t say all ??

R. You haven’t defined it yet.

Q. No. I just have ?? is the way I feel, not going to have to help save everybody ?? that doesn’t put yourself ??

24:04

R. That won’t do any harm. Every case is different. Sometimes you can give a man a dime for a bowl of soup and save? his? life? – fifty cents now – other times you give him fifty cents for a bowl of soup and you’ll make him worse. He may get dependent and may become as real bum. Maybe if he starved he’d become enlightened. So you can never know. It’s hard to tell what’s compassionate. It’s nice to get up and say nice things. Everybody wants to hear nice things. [but] this is a jungle. This is a jungle – sharpen your teeth.

16:211 [24:48]

Q. I understand what you mean by not being able to experience, understand? but keep seeing a slice? little? as you keep talking of what are you trying to say. And having reached this point. ?? walk? in? a park? I know you say you have reached it. But why is there a concern for telling other people? I mean I keep getting the idea ?? that you would be totally happy ?? that you would be content.

16:57

R. Well, yes, but it isn’t – first of all, there’s no – the contentment is in finally coming to the end of your struggle. As far as for any intense happiness, there’s no bliss ?? ?? Now as far as for people, the reason for talking to other people, it was a commitment I made before I found anything. I was very angry when I was in my twenties. I didn’t find anything until I was thirty. Thirty-two I think when it happened. [It was in 1947, age 30.] But I went for over ten years running from guru to guru and book to book, and found quacks and money-makers and perverts and anything imaginable under the guise of truth. And the longer I searched the more enraged I became. I used to say we’ve got a Pure Food and Drug law but there’s nothing wrong with poisoning the minds of children.

17:50

And that’s what is. The truth, religion should be true. They have no right coming out with poppycock, ?? any ?? do. Maybe lullabies and fairy tales are good for people who can’t understand anything but alibis and fairy stories. So maybe we should retreat and let them tell, put them to sleep and keep them happy clear up to the time of death so they can go out easy – I don’t know. What is ??

18:10 [26:34]

But myself, I became enraged. I said, “Hey, there must be people – you go? to find something and every place you go you find phonies. If I find out anything I’ll make it available.” So I created a vector. With this was the firing power? powder? And I automatically tried soon as it happened, to talk to people. But of course acid hadn’t arrived on the scene yet and most of the people just thought I was nuts. And now there are a few people who take acid who don’t know that I’m nuts. [laughter]

18:45 [27:09]

Q. What do you think about public ??

R. Well, I don’t know where it starts. My biggest complaint ?? college of course. I see that the whole educational system has become a – there’s a certain law – because of the degree of complexity. If you get a complex educational structure, then people try to keep themselves employed. And then they try to give themselves rank: generals, colonels, lieutenants, etc. BA degree, masters degree, PhD and all this sort of thing. And this is the ...

And then there’s movement that starts that there’s no wisdom behind it; it’s strictly unionism. Keep these kids from becoming bricklayers, keep these kids from becoming doctors – the AMA will block them out, the lawyers will try to keep them from becoming – they get too many lawyers, and that sort of thing. So the real thing behind education is not – it’s political too. There’s a lot of politics in education. It doesn’t matter so much how much you know today but whether you’re subsidized – you belong to some minority group, or you’re crippled, you’ve got a lot better chance of getting through if you’ve got some handicap, if you’re half nuts, if you’ve been in the penitentiary – you’ve got a better chance of getting a scholarship than if you study hard, if you just do it on the merits, the people paying their way through. Because I know they’re putting people through; I know personal cases where people are going through college because they’ve been in the penitentiary. They’re subsidized.

28:48

So the result is – this is just one aspect. The other aspect is authority as opposed to learning. The teacher keeps you so darn busy that you can’t question, whatever course it is. So we adopt whatever psychology, whatever sociology is going on at the time and you swallow it hook, line and sinker. And then we go out and preach it, and we think we’re archangels ourselves, because we’re carrying these good tidings for some other schmuck down the road.

20”52 [29:19]

And the result is we have people trying to get a PhD to get a certain job when you can get the same amount of money working in the mill. And you wind up at the age of thirty as a dishrag unfit for marriage, unfit for anything else, but you know a hell of a lot. But you’re unfit to even reproduce, because there’s nothing healthy about the system at all.

21:17 [29:43]

And we go, whenever we do make a change, we rebel against this era of repression, in my – when I was younger there was a lot of sexual repression in colleges – now there’s no repression. So then it works just the opposite – there’s too much. There’s too much leeway, there’s too much encouragement of wasting of energy and time.

21:37 [30:06]

So I think basically the worst part starts with your colleges. But I see it permeating – it’s going into high schools too; the high schools have become institutions. Of course, one thing I think that we should have, we should be allowed – people who want to study science should be allowed to study science and shouldn’t have to study music and art appreciation, and keep a bunch of other people that they’re not interest in on the payroll.

22:02 [30:30]

And the courses should be such that you could go through and take a solid course of physics or chemistry, in your line, study and come out with a certain expertise, get paid for it, and then if you want to go back and study polymer chemistry – okay, go back and we’ll tell you that later. But instead of that, the thing is – well, one it started out here as a way to keep the kids off the street. Much of education is dragged out to keep the kids off the street. And this works, the basic ?? But this is going into in the high schools. You pull up in front of a high school today and you’ve got three times as many cars sitting there for teachers than they used to have. In other words, and they’re all working two hours a day.

22:47 [31:13] <-- end of side of MJ file

Well, we’re diverging of course from the philosophic angle. But that all has a bearing on psychology and how you understand yourselves.

Q. It seems, the only thing I have ?? self-definition is my ??

R. It’s the same thing I’m drinking. The milk.

23:11

Q. It seems like the main ?? I have to work with, the stuff that ?? 9 to 5, but yet I can’t touch 9 o’clock ??

R. That’s right, your mind will be ??

Q. So what can I do?

R. You’ve got to keep studying the mind. This is the point. This is why meditation, this is why they use this word meditation. That’s what meditation is; it’s not sitting there thinking about your mate. It’s trying to figure out how you’re outwitting yourself, and how to prevent yourself from outwitting yourself. How the robot reaches behind itself and finds the transistor that proves life.

23:42

Q. I don’t think there’s that much activity in your head when you meditate.

R. Well, you’re looking at yourself.

Q. I was thinking, from the psychological point of view, any way you want to split? it? – I wouldn’t, when you are in meditation, the mind is still? ?? I don’t think that there’s a ...

R. Who hit you with a hammer?

Q. When ?? when you meditate ...

R. If you meditate that way, sure, I know. You’re talking about one brand of meditation.

Q. ??

R. Right, right,, right. I advise trauma. This TM – TM is for peace of mind. That’s slipping away, leaving the house.

24:35

Q. ??

[laughter]

Q. Are you saying one should look for trauma?

R. Yes. Right. That’s the only way you can – not only look for trauma, but look – the reason trauma does, is brings you an incident in your past, when you outwitted yourself.

Q. You’re talking about looking at [past trauma, not to create new trauma]

R. No, no. No, I mean look for trauma inside yourself. If you suffered a setback, if you had an unfortunate experience that really shook you up, meditate on it. Don’t meditate on peace. We don’t have to meditate on peace. Peace is always there. You can always get that. It comes in a package, six feet deep. Some walk around. Some of them are walking around yet, but others are horizontal.

25:35

Q. I don’t understand the point you were making with her about never being sure about whether you were helping anybody by being compassionate. I’m trying to evaluate. You can’t always evaluate everybody’s situation, and there is a way that you can ...

R. IO believe in being compassionate. But what I’m doing, I tried to get her, I want to know if she’s got a Pollyannic idea of compassion, or if she’s got an impersonal ?? of compassion. You can be compassionate for the spirit of a person or you can be compassionate for their body. And I find myself – lots of times I’m compassionate for people’s bodies – I don’t like to drive them crazy, all at once.

26:23

Q. Are you saying meditation is ?? ?? to be enlightened?

R. Well, you can have it brought on you by outside shocks.

Q. You mean through experiences and ...

R. Yes. People have become enlightened just by living. Sure. That’s the easy way, isn’t it? All we have to do now is wire you up, to give you the shocks. But meditation is – if you’re, that’s what I said – there are people who get enlightened, though, and – the man I spoke of, for instance, could not teach. He couldn’t help anyone. Because he’d gone through no discipline. His came as the result of trauma and disappointment, suffering. But if he had gone through some sort of discipline himself, and got enlightened as a result of it, he might have been able to go back and put somebody else in the same discipline, or in the same language at least.

27:26

Q. I wanted to comment on this. Earlier you said that there was no fact, that there was only one fact, or there was no ?? ??, is what you said.

R. Yeah.

Q. You were telling that there were different ways of finding the truth?

R. Sure.

Q. I would say that there’s only one truth, and there’s different ways of looking at it. Is that the same thing?

R. Yes. Different ways of approaching it – well, when you say there’s only one truth – no matter how many ways there are to look at it, you have to see the same thing.

Q. Well, I believe that. I believe that all religions just teach that, they teach the truth, in a different form.

R. They have a small “T”. There’s a small-T truth, that’s ??, which means sodium and chlorine make salt. That’s small-T truth. Capital-T Truth is that which never changes with time, which is absolute, that leads to absolute knowledge. And this is the same in psychology, philosophy and everything else.

The people who come out with dogmas or theories, what I call concept structures – they’re very clever concept structures, and they’re added onto and built down through the ages, and a certain sanctity is put on them because they were in some sacred institution down through the ages. But they’re all small-T truth.

28:51

Q. Well, don’t you think that psychologists and people who study the mind – don’t you think they could figure out the most, easiest way? I mean, can’t they just analyze the truth? I believe a guy could figure out what is a ?? [sn-version - gap in tape] predicting how you would be in a state. I mean, I’ve read many times, that when you’re in a high conscious state, where both people on a spiritual plane, they just, they were in harmony. There was no conflict going on in their head.

29:30

R. Well, I don’t doubt that. When you reach a ...

Q. ?? peaks?

R. But then there are different states. This is the point. If we had time here, we could go into the different experiences that are categorized. I maintain that they’re categorized in about four major categories. And they come as the result of the transcendence of certain basic sets that we get into, or are born into. And I’ve used the Gurdjieffian terminology there, the instinctive, the emotional, the intellectual and the philosophic man. And when a man transcends any of these he has an exaltation.

30:11

So when he transcends his instinctive nature long enough to fall in love, he joins the, he becomes an emotional person, a person centers an emotional, in the emotional part of himself. So consequently, this is always a beautiful experience: the love, when a person falls in love for the first time it’s a very beautiful experience. And he thinks he’s admiring? the universe, and he things God is up there running this whole show, just for him to fall in love.

30:38

Then he finds out later that he’s been a little fatheaded, so he goes back to the drawing board, and he goes to work and studies some more, and he gets interested maybe in astrology, cabbala, or mystical sciences of some sort, spiritualism or something. He bangs? away and finally he discovers some great truth, through cabbalistic studies or numerology or whatever. And this is the “wow” experience. You can get it from studying algebra. I had the experience from studying algebra, and my head popped – with the realization that now I knew what this was all about. And from that time it was very easy to study. I knew what x meant, and y meant, and z meant. Now that’s satori.

31:26

Then you find out, as I said before, that I used to spend time up here lecturing on the unreasonableness of reason. Reason is not reasonable. It’s a vanity, an intellectual vanity. We could pile blocks up and we say, “Oh, we’re reasonable,” just because we pile blocks up. Count: 1, 2, 3, 4. See? And this is a great achievement for something ?? And we play with a slide rule, and we build buildings and it comes out the way we predicted it. But then we find out it’s a vanity; it’s not getting us anywhere to the real nature of things. We still – we can build a building but we don’t know what clay is, we don’t know what the elements are.

32:08

We sense that the whole creation is something transient that ebbs and flows. We get hit in the head with a hammer, we take an LSD pill or something, and we find that the whole universe is like wax that flows in front of us And we have to stop and think: Does it really flow? What is the real perspective point? Is there a solid universe? And this is where you realize the foolishness of the intellect, then, of this idea of logic: that you’re going to do everything with logic. ?? ?? intuition [?]

32:39

Q. It just hit? that iff I ?? ??

R. Yeah. Sure, sure. It appeals to our vanity. We like to think that we’re very orderly people and we’re going to build a Babel of science. It was one time a Babel of words, but now we’re going to build a Babel of science to outer space. So – we may go to outer space. But that doesn’t say [mean] that the whole thing is not merely a dream.

33:12

Q. ?? you said that ?? ?? do you think that ??

R. Not all. There may be one. [laughter].

Q. ??

R. Sure. You look at yourself. Whatever means you have, whatever appeals to you, to know about yourself. Start with yourself, and with people with similar interests. You have to compare notes occasionally. You’re having trouble looking at yourself, or you can run yourself up a ladder occasionally and come to a dead end in your thinking, and you have to start all over again. And when this happens it’s good to be able to talk to somebody who has been in the same rabbit hole.

34:06

Q. Do you ?? or what?

R. No, no. It’s a – I’m giving you possibly too quickly a very simple technique: it’s what I call going back through the eye of the projector. We are a projection. It doesn’t do us any good to look at the shadows that we cast on the wall, or on the void. Our projection is on the void. We can’t go in that direction. The void is a place of fantasy. But you have to go back inside to yourself. And there’s a simple practice of doing that, that one day you pop through, that’s all.

34:48

You have to begin – you don’t begin with subliminal things, you begin with basics. You begin with your body. You watch your body. You watch your mind. You watch your mind watching your mind. And you watch your essence watching the whole operation of watching your mind. And that’s how you go back. You don’t go [by] imagining that there’s a projector, and then imagining that there’s a ray. You actually go back and watch your own thoughts. If you observe it, you become the perceivable observer.

35:13 Date of talk – P. of O. was Oct., 1978

The last lecture I gave here was on that subject, the Psychology of the Observer. That man thinks he knows who he is, but he always talks about his “self”. When I talk about watching myself I’m talking about two people. And I admit that, because the fellow who I’m watching isn’t me. Always, the fellow that you’re watching isn’t you. You are the observer. Any operation that you can watch is not you. When you make love, that is not you. When you get drunk, that is not you.

35:49

So then you begin to see, you begin to live in a sort of sense of awareness, rather than trying to identify according to a set of symbols: “I am calcium, phosphorus, hydrogen, oxygen, etc.” Or ?? ?? according to the psychology book: ?? memory, perception, etc. We like to think with those words. That [but?] all of that is part of the organism.

36:15

Q. ?? ??

R. That’s true. They’re saying the same thing I’m saying, in that respect. This outer personality is what you strip away. You don’t strip it away – you look at it and it fades. When you look at it strongly enough it fades. This is in all of the – they asked a Zen monk one time, it’s in one of the books, how to cure epileptics or people who are possessed. He said, “I keep questioning it. When you question the demon long enough it leaves.”

36:58

And this is basically what we are; we’re a beehive of entities. Some people call them voices, some people call them demons. Some of them are demons. Some of them are voices. [?] Some of them are egos, if you want to call it that. But when you question them they leave. They are not you. It’s just like a tic or a leach. A leech is not you. What is it that’s taking your energy? You don’t leave your own energy Something’s taking your energy.

37:27

When you take an LSD trip, to give you an example, that, it looked like it was going to be a cheap way of getting a real experience,. But you find out after it’s all over that you paid for it. I took LSD once and for two weeks I couldn’t get warm. You pay. Something uses you, and the idea is to get away from that stuff that uses you.

37:50

Q.  ?? something like a ?? ?? have you ever thought about.

R. It hard. It’s very hard. Because you’ve got to be ?? by certain obsessions. You’ve got to be obsessed. And you can’t – first of all, there will be a – if you reach an enlightenment everything’s going to be dynamited out of the way. You’ll probably lose your job. Like Paul Wood, lose your wife, even, your kids. Because of the simple fact – the reason they’re sometimes necessary to lose is because you acquired them as egos. They were part of an egotistic acquisition. In other words: “I am going to have a woman.” Nonsense. You have nobody. You just – there’s different places where you can find more trouble, that’s all.

38:54

But you sort of fatten up your head, which [?] you’re having something. And then, the next thing, I’ve had, well, this fellow that I knew up in Ohio, he was a physicist, a scientist. He used to say, “I am a scientist.” And I thought, “Oh, God. I don’t want to be a scientist, a big fat head.” But when he got to be sixty years he was a drunken scientist. And he couldn’t sober up. He couldn’t live with himself. [sn-version - tape slips a little] But he clung to that ego; that was his prop. So he can go down to the bar and tell people, “I am a scientist, I work up there at Firestone.”

39:28

But those things are in the road. And if you cling to them – of course, if you can walk on two paths at once, if you’re adroit enough, you might be able to get through. But the tension – I imagine there would be times, when, well, I’ve seen this happen, where somebody would say, “Listen you nut – either that book goes or I go.” And you say, “Oh hell, on’t go, the children need you.” So you sacrifice, you compromise.

40:02

And [But] you don’t date compromise. You have to set – if you want the truth you have to make it your top priority. Same as if you want a million dollars – the formula remains absolutely the same. If you want anything in life, you can’t have everything. You can’t be drunk and [taking] dope and having sex and have a million dollars too. [sn-version tape slips] If you have a yacht on the river and you’re drunk, you’re liable to wreck the yacht. But – you know, wreck the ?? – see?

40:28

But this is what it boils down to. We make the opposite then, for maximum chances of success at any venture we throw all of our energy into it. In physics, results are proportional to energy applied. You want – turning this into metaphysics, esoteric philosophy, it applies. The people who find are the people who dig by God until they find. They don’t fake? it. It is not a mamby-pamby thing where you float blissfully into heaven by saying prayers, burning candles and smiling at everyone you meet, and saying nothing brutal. It’s a fight. It’s a jungle – it’s a spiritual jungle as well as a physical jungle – and you have to fight as a man. You can’t go in there like a mouse. Because there’s no – in heaven, the mice still eat the cats. I mean the cats still eat the mice.

41:18

Q. Do you think ?? going through certain traumas ?? ?? could be a way.

R. It does. In this respect, that everything you do will wind you up. [sn-version tape slips] But how many hundred years do you have? At first one profession, one incarnation. This is the thing: we’re talking about expedition. [expeditiousness] Sure, you can take your time. You can go out and live – and you’ll get traumas and you’ll get wiser. And everybody gets wiser; every old man or old woman who dies, if they’re past sixty years of age or even past fifty years of age – they’ve got something to tell you before they die. But you’re never going to hear it. They’re going to say, “Don’t.”

42:10

Q. Could you say something about TM?

R. On TM? I think TM is an anodyne. For people who are traumatic [i.e., traumatized or in a traumatic state] – there are times when trauma is too severe to be useful in the line of tension. And in this case, when people need to be healed, then TM is good, for that type of help. And this is the reason that I think that it fell into place; that there were many people who got into TM who were traumatic, who were too far gone, to even listen to philosophy [sn version tape slips], too far gone to get up and get their energy up and decide to fight. They didn’t have any fight in them. The only thing they could have, they had to rest; they had to find something that would wean them peacefully away from something else, but not traumatic ?? I think it came in, as I said, none of those ?? ??

43:20

Q. And the young lady who just left, who asked about compassion, you had already stated that there was no one way to the truth. But then you say to her that she was involved with, I can’t remember exactly how you said it, you said [sn version tape slips] that she could not be compassionate and still reach the truth.

43:42

R. No, no, I didn’t say that. When she used the word compassion, I’m always on guard for somebody bringing up the Pollyannic, and saying that, “Spirituality is love,” and, “God is love.” Where do they get this stuff from? And compassion the same way ...

Q. Well, all I’m talking about ...

R. Sure. The thing is, that everyone I ever met who was into spiritual work, that had any depth in spiritual work had great compassion – but didn’t talk about it. Gurdjieff was a very compassionate man. He was very foxy too. But he didn’t talk about his compassion. Because if you let people know you’re compassionate, then you’ve got leaners; you’ve got people who you can’t shock. And it’s necessary to shock people sometimes. It’s used to bring people out of their quiescence, peace.

Peace is not the goal. Realization is the goal. And all learning comes by trauma. All learning, by some sort of unhappiness, inconvenience. Adversity is the father of invention, they say. These are all sayings that ??

44:52

Q. You said that – alright – you say we should fight before ? spiritual ?? Would it not be better to try to ?? ??

R. We.., it depends on which ones you’re talking about.

[sn version - side 2 ends at 45:11 ]

[break in tape]

File 3

45 minutes. [times are sn version]

[tape – different speed and timbre than side 2]

00:00

... ?? just to give blind obedience r a movement, just because you happen to be born into it. Or because it has the power to hold you.

Now, what are we after, basically, what are the results of this? What is the history of the acquisition? And you say, and we’ve heard now certain aims, or certain formula[s] for acquiring this knowledge, if you want to call it that, and it’s actually not a knowledge. You can’t acquire a realization of the absolute; you can only become. You can’t acquire a change in the state of being, you just change, that’s all. And you can’t describe it, generally, when you change.

But you’ll have quite a few people – if you want to look in the books, there are quite a few books on it – describing people who have found the answer to the algebraic X. That they seem to know. And these people come in certain categories. I somehow believe that the things that happen to a person after death, somehow are parallel to these categories of appreciation or of realization.

01:19

In other words, you’ll hear people saying, “Well, I found God.” Another person will say that they have reached satori. And another will say he reached cosmic consciousness. And still another word is enlightenment. Now there are a lot of other words besides that, but they fall generally into those four categories. [siren in background] And when I was young I kind of thought they were all the same thing, it’s just a matter of [that] one man explains it a little differently.

02:02

But after examination of these, by people who have spent their lives in each one of these different categories, we find out that they’re not all talking about the same thing. So that when a person finds God, sometimes he’s talking about losing his instinctive self. In other words, if you find the salvationist. I like to mention or use that term because most of the people who have been “saved” in Pentecostal movements or in something similar to that, maybe just by searching from the Bible or something, are similar to people who find salvation in a personal guru.

02:58

For instance, it’s the abandonment of the individual ego, the submission to another ego, or another force. And it’s very difficult for a person on what I call the instinctive level – instinctive as described by Gurdjieff – a person on an instinctive level to suddenly leap past all these different stages and finally come into the awareness of everything, without having had some shedding of misunderstandings, misconceptions.

03:30

The instinctive man, or the man who’s merely living for the next drink or the next sexual experience or something off that sort, is not going to give too much thought to philosophy. But he may become dissatisfied with his life, and he may have enough trauma to get him to a position where he 03:48

won’t be able to make a leap to an absolute state, but will go through changes, dropping an ego that separates them from themselves. 

Satori – can walk away from it, not enlightenment; no one walks away from death.

Cosmic consciousness, Bucke’s research, accompanied by light. People want bliss, but it’s trauma to discover and live with the fact that you’re nothing. But you are also everything.

Nothing-and-everything is the keynote of the enlightenment experience.

You should never postulate the symptoms ahead of time but let the chips fall as they may.

Kevala the mind is alive, Sahaja the mind is dead. “Killing the mind.” Kevala the mind is sunk in light; Sahaja the mind is resolved into the Self. Kevala the bucket in the well, can be drawn back (into life); Sahaja like as river discharged into the ocean and identity lost, cannot be redirected, identity lost.

Reads from recent writing:

Thought is a vision. Associated with action or reaction. Mental phenomena. Dreams, visualizations. Mirage. Hologram. Visualizing objects, processes. Thinking is a process, thought is a vision.

Thinking about thinking. Thought is tied to memory.

Most dream-vision is forgotten.

Leads to new meaning to the word reality. There are times in this life when your belief in reality is shaken.

There are times when our whole understanding seems absurd.

So aim is to have more accurate appraisal.

This line of thinking shows that man is unsure of reality.

This is a prolonged bit of evaluation intended as something of a koan.

The eye that looks upon God is the same eye that God looks upon man.

File 4

45 minutes.

After you concentrate on your internal nature you become one with what is projecting things on you.

Q about Christ.

Some aspects suggest a politician, others in tune with being an enlightened man: I and the father are one.”

His admonition to believe in him is analogous to believing in yourself.

Atman and Brahman are one.

It’s very hard to kill your own mind; generally the result of an accident.

The highest state in Raja Yoga is the same as Sahaja Samadhi.

Truth has no religion locked up to itself. It’s in each man.

Relates story of Paul Wood.

Q and A

The mass mind of mankind is the creator of this illusion.

Space-time continuum.

In my day there weren’t as many books and teachers but there were just as many thieves.

Going by the yardsticks can save you a lot of time.

In enlightenment there is no right or left; when you are, you are.

People adopt holy facial expressions expecting a transformation.

If you want to be honest with yourself you realize you’re not running this show. You can’t even control your own thoughts.

But you can operate with that knowledge, with the possibility that we’re not helpless; so you become.

The head busts.

Reincarnation is not proven and can be a rationalization for inaction. We must act in this life.

Don’t try to imitate the symptoms of another man.

Q on helping.

What else can you do except look for yourself, unless you’re a hypocrite?

Zen has no utilitarian value. Our essences have value.

But utilitarian value is simply Vaseline if you don’t know who is being helped.

Spiritual ego of wishing to live forever is dropped when you face extinction.

Everything you have done is in the computer. Learned transmission from Pulyan. Have to communicate with people.

Rapport. Has to be learned.

Deliberately sought him out when I found out he could transmit.

There has to be a certain complexity of thought, plus trauma, for a man to achieve (contrary to primitive existence).

More Q&A

RR spent years in peace but it was struggle and despair that led to his discovery.

On students – the first two years are devoted to getting them off dope.

Bucke says one in a million.

Diet isn’t important. Becomes a ritual.

To give formulas might help one person but damage another.

Need to build pressure.

I’m free of happiness.

Everything is in the head of the magician.

Footnotes

End

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