1979-0418-Direct-Mind-Approach-to-Absolute-OSU

Return to list of all Recordings     See all Categories    Spreadsheet: Recordings-Source-List

Metadata repository: https://data.direct-mind.org/

Data Template

Title	1979-0418-Direct-Mind-Approach-to-Absolute-OSU
Recorded date	April 18, 1979
Location	OSU, Columbus, Ohio
Number of tapes	2 @ 60
Other recorders audible?
Alternate versions exist?
Source	DM has 2 hours. BM version is partial
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?
Published on which website?
Remarks	VERY FAMILIAR, WAS THIS DONE ALREADY?
Audio quality
Identifiable voices
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1979-0418-Direct-Mind-Approach-to-Absolute-OSU
	For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20151201231849

Notes

have versions from: MJ, DM, BM, GH, DW

times are from DW version. Bart’s version mAay be better.

Side 1 at 05:35 Rose says: “I was out in L.A. giving a couple lectures a couple of months ago, , I think it was in February.”

Rose still saying “32” not “30” for his age when he had experience.

File 0, Intro

Total time: 1 min 8 seconds

Intro by Art Ticknor - does not start at beginning

or if you wanted to find out about the topic, which is the direct-mind approach to union with the Absolute. in the wrong room. But if you’re searching for meaning, purpose then you’re in the right place

is there part of me that survives death

a man who has found the answers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he can’t tell us those answers directly aren’t anything that can be put into words

point a way or a direction for us to find out the answers for ourselves.

So with that intro let me turn the talk over to Mr. Rose.

File 1

Total time: 28:41

dw1-00:00

Well, the last couple of times I’ve come up here to talk, I had a prepared talk; the last time was Psychology of the Observer. 1978-1979-Psychology-of-the-Observer-OSU-missing-tape Now I find that when I give these talks, I pick up a, I judge too by the questions I get afterwards that as high as 90% of the people have a different idea than I do about what I was trying to get across to them. They don’t pick up what I’m trying to get across, let’s put it that way.

So the subject here has to do psychology in relation to Zen, or a self-interrogating, self-analytical system. I maintain that Zen is basically a – it’s not a religion, it’s a word, it’s a system. And the same system, the same self-realization can be brought about by psychology. f course I maintain that our modern psychological systems are going in the opposite direction. They are more or less trying to create rather than identify that which is. In other words to try to build by democratic or wishful thinking a mental world of tomorrow, which I think is going to be an utter failure. But that’s neither here nor there.

dw1-01:36

What I am going to do is give you a brief rundown on myself. I have a diagram here, this is a schematic. I don’t know how many of you are acquainted with Zen or Hubert Benoit. Hubert Benoit was a psychiatrist who got interested in Zen, and he drew a little diagram about the difficulty of thinking. And the bottom line [of the diagram] if you notice here is the plane of mental existence. We live in a sort of trough or wallowing place between the positive and the negative, between, in the relative mentality, let’s put it that way.

dw1-02:23

We live in a relative world, we have a relative appreciation of that world. Our head is bicameral and our senses are dual. And all of our philosophy has to do with one school? of another, something in opposition to something else. So that the human mind never has direct knowledge. And I maintain that the only true knowledge that you can get is by direct knowledge. You have to somehow transcend this [?] to know.

In India years ago or In Tibet, supposedly, if you can believe the books, they studied astrology, the yogis studied astrology not by devoting themselves for centuries to books and texts but by studying a certain planet, just meditating on it. Theoretically – at least that’s their explanation for it – they became one with it. They understood it. Now manifestly the old astrology that predated Christ, these people had some concepts they couldn’t have gotten with telescopes or mathematical computations. So we’re a little bit at a loss to figure out [sentence] unless they had some sort of direct mind appreciation.

dw1-03:33

But anyhow, we go back here and I say, why are we talking about Zen? As soon as we start talking about Zen, again, we get a split in the audience. There are some people who have heard of motorcycle maintenance, Watts-type Zen, Philip Kapleau-type Zen, these are all different. Zen and the art of flower arrangement, koans, haiku poetry. And if you get into the philosophic analysis of Zen and the place that it carries in let’s say spiritual development, [Rose’s method] you’re branching off immediately from the field that a tremendous lot of people are used to when they think of Zen. Let’s say a definition; each person has their own definition.

Also the depths: the depth of realization is different for every person. People have preconceptions about what they think is the best for them to find the total answer. And I’d say with 90% of the people perhaps who are sincere, it’s a devotional path. The percentages of people who are in a movement that goes by direct-mind mentation are possibly one hundredth of those who go to church every day on Sunday in an established religion and don’t question that which they are believing.

dw1-05:10

I think that it’s easier to believe than to question. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of people prefer to believe the unbelievable: not something that is a cut and dried, methodic system of inquiry. I was out on the West Coast, I was out in L.A. giving a couple lectures a couple of months ago, I think it was in February, and I ran across an outfit out there that was headed by a lady who has made a million dollars out of it in the last ten years. And her little gimmick is the “ascended masters”. It’s always something that you can’t put her finger on; Clare Prophet , is her name if you’re interested in following up the ascended masters. You get all sorts of elaborate descriptions of crystal spiral staircases, and a particular holy person like Clare herself who might tell you what the masters want you to know. I was rather stupefied that she could attract thousands of people. We drove out past the place and I’d say there were 500 cars on an off day.

dw1-06:27

But the thing is that the books, more adults Tolkien’s books, more college students read Tolkien’s books than they do philosophy or Zen, no not just Zen but an introspective philosophy. The reason I know is a lot of boys who have been to my lectures, I’ve seen the books in their hand. It becomes quite an obsession to follow this line of fairy tales; little gnomes and elves and this sort of thing fascinate them. Maybe it’s something that goes back to childhood and they feel young once more, being able to dream the impossible.

But this is the thing with religion: give them miracles, give people miracles and they’ll believe them, although they don’t exist. Build up a figmented structure, some sort of movement that depends on, something that is almost ridiculous, and people will seize that. And I’m amazed because these are adult people, professional people, that go out to Mulholland Drive – doctors, lawyers, businessmen, millionaires – and of course that’s the type of people she wants.

dw1-07:45

But anyhow, there’s only a small percentage of people who realize first of all they don’t know anything and are willing to start from there, instead of a basis of belief. And if you read many books on philosophy, you’ll run into certain little aphorisms that should give a hint. One of them is “first know thyself.” And you find that in some of the old philosophers and you find it in religious works; that the admonition is to know yourself. Well, by knowing yourself it doesn’t mean standing in front of a mirror. The character who is standing in front of the mirror is something that you project. At least your interpretation of it is projected. And you sometimes waste 50 or 60 years of your life trying to force somebody else to believe that projection.

And of course some people realize rather young that their projection isn’t working so they change it; they’re like chameleons. We adjust to suit society, and then we come to believe we’re that which adjusts that which is the final picture. But there is no final picture; it’s just sort of a chameleon-like thing to adjust to other people. So that we wind up one day if we ever face ourself, if we don’t die suddenly, someday we’re going to have to face the fact that we were kidding ourselves, throughout our entire life.

dw1-09:04

Well, I got this in my head when I was about 21 years old. And I decided that I’m going to try to find out the answer to this riddle. And immediately you run into, people warn you, “Be careful. Don’t become a fanatic on religion, you’ll drive yourself crazy.” The other one of course is that you get sick, you can experiment with certain yogi exercises you’re liable to strangle on your own tongue or get your leg wrapped around your neck and perish. Or you get prostate trouble from prolonged asceticism. And I looked at this rather candidly in the face and said, “Okay, if that’s what’s going to happen, okay, I don’t want to live this way. I don’t want to live, forever like a fish flopping around from one concept to another, trying to keep up with the other people’s opinions of what I should be.”

dw1-10:04

My first big excursion was when I was 12 years of age; I studied to be a priest. In those days they could take you rather young, the younger the better, the softer the head. So I went away at 12 to study to be a priest, and I picked up a few foreign languages and an increasing sense of nothing going anyplace. And I got out. But again I was like a cork afloat; I didn’t know what else to latch onto. So I got into everything that I thought had promise. I don’t mean I just grabbed something blindly. Because I thought, the basic thing in life is to find out who you are. Of course you can’t just say that, you’ve got to have what they call a point of reference. As soon as you seize a point of reference you’re back in relative thinking. But we have no choice; we have to function from some point of reference.

dw1-10:57

Well, the point of reference in my estimation of living is dying. Or vice versa: the point of reference in dying is living. We presume that we live, so therefore we have to examine death to make the complete picture, if there is anything after death. So I got interested in spiritualism. And I dug into spiritualism and I went so far as to witness what I considered a genuine materialization. And quite a few of these phantoms came out and talked to me, talked to other people, not me alone. There were about 18 of us there, and incidentally, it was just a few miles north of here, in a little town called Delaware, White Lilly Chapel, if you’re interested in seeing spooks they might have them yet.

dw1-11:43

They brought a medium down from Lake Michigan, and he is now dead; his name was Aldred. But I came to the conclusion after several years of studying this stuff and travelling all over the country hunting for genuine people who are authorities on death, is that these things knew nothing. You ask them questions and you got echoes. And this is true, all of those, there are no accounts in spiritualist phenomena of an entity giving you the straight dope on what happens to you after death. You can say, “Is Uncle Jake there?” “Yes, Uncle Jake, here.” Even if you don’t have an Uncle Jake you’ll get the answer. Because there’s something vapid about the intelligence of these creatures. It seems in the tone of voice, incidentally that they all seem to have a similar tone of voice.

dw1-12:29

Well, I don’t want to offend you if you’re a devout spiritualist; that’s good, that’s your path. But to me it wasn’t sufficient. I moved out. And it occurred to me when I was 21 years of age that a man was never going to learn anything. Because of the simple fact that we’re wallowing continually in this relative dimension; there’s uncertainty in anything that you take. You can take any side, take the thing of the two arguments between libertarianism and determination; they go on forever. They have never solved it, whether we have a free will or whether we’re fated. We ?? with both. A very critical issue. But all of our philosophers have failed to [answer this]. We can pile up evidence and argument on both sides, but it’s never been settled. So the same way with theologies. There are all sorts of theologies and for every one you almost find a counter one: somebody who denies that man’s right to be an authority. So I came to the conclusion that just because of the relative mind, that we would never – and because also of the limitations of our computer. Somehow or another, our computer is not capable of taking on the massive problem of self-definition.

dw1-13:45

So I decided that there was a path, and going back to the old Catholic training I had I remembered something I had from reading Thomas Aquinas in which he said the finite mind will never perceive the infinite. And this is a little slogan that goes down through the Catholic Church whenever you get a rebel or somebody who says, “Hey, I want to get the answer.” So the priest tells him, “Well, you know, you’ve got to believe, because you’ve got a finite mind and you’re not going to solve it. That’s an egotism, that you’re going to solve anything with that finite mind.”

Well, if I had accepted that, that would have been the end of the road. I would have stopped right there. I would have got down on my knees, beat my head on the floor until I believed something. But I came to a conclusion that there were people who knew. That’s the reason we have this pile of books back there. I don’t believe it’s good to listen to my word or [for] anything. There’s a lot of, there are books written on the subject, of people who came away claiming that they had had an experience that answered for all time the question of life and death.

Ramana Maharshi, Richard Bucke, Christ, Buddha. You can read, of course, some of these people didn’t write anything, you have to read about them. Richard Bucke wrote about his experience, and Ramana Maharshi has quite a bit. There are quite a few of them who I think have experienced things. Krishnamurti, it seems to me. I never heard him actually declare that, but I’ve watched his actions over a period of 30-40 years. I believe the man is an honest man. And when I was on the west coast I found that everybody respected Krishnamurti on the west coast. Although he didn’t expound a system. he didn’t say, “Here’s how you get it.”

dw1-15:23

But anyhow, I came to the conclusion that these people found it, and I decided to find out how they found it, before I got too old to do anything about it. But I came to the conclusion that man does not learn, he becomes. And when this dawned on me, I realized the words of Christ, that I hadn’t paid any attention to because we’re too close to them. Just like having respect for the guy next door. We have respect for that which is exotic, like the guru from India. But we don’t have any respect for that which is our parental religion. And I didn’t either. As I said, I got out of the Catholic faith because it was too prosaic for me. In fact you don’t read the Bible anyhow in the Catholic Church. We were, even the young students that were studying to be priests were [not] advised to read the Bible; it was supposed to be something to be interpreted for you by somebody who was infallible. And the peasant wasn’t infallible.

dw1-16:24

But anyhow, I remember reading these old things, and they started to have meaning for me. He didn’t say, ”I know the truth,” or, “I’m going to teach you the truth.” He said, “I am the truth, the way and the life.” And I thought that was a mistranslation, that this was translated wrong, that there must have been a mistake, when I first read it, years before that. “This must bee a mistranslation. He doesn’t mean he is the truth; the truth is a subjective matter and he is an objective person talking to somebody.” But that’s exactly what he meant. He found it. He was the truth. You don’t learn the truth, you become it.

So with this in mind, I set out to try to find the quickest way of becoming it. Well, I got interested in yoga, naturally hatha first, and then accidentally seemingly ran into raja yoga groups. Well, raja yoga means mind-yoga or king yoga, there are two different interpretations of it. But it’s the yoga of the mind, controlling of the mind. And it was a little inadequate, I mean I found that yoga gets into a lot of rituals and, sometimes I think they’re tangential. I think that TM for instance puts you to sleep; that’s a form of yoga, I think it puts you to sleep. And I always maintain that the real, if you want to pursue something, you want to be awake, you’ve got to be a fighter. You can’t be sleeping, you can’t be putting a pacifier in your mouth and lulling yourself into tranquility.

That’s alright for people who are traumatic, incidentally. TM serves a purpose for people who are traumatic. If you’re not traumatic and you’ve got something to fight for and you’ve only got ten years of your life to do it in, before your arteries get hard, then I don’t suggest the tranquil procedure.

So I ran into this quite early in raja yoga. They gave us a syllable, same as they do now. The word was OM, and everybody had the same mantra. And you can find some of the old books and you can read it today. If you want a mantra you don’t have to pay a hundred bucks just go down and get, or pick your own. Anything that’s resonant. And what happens is, it’s like the Krishnas chanting. As long as you’re chanting and screaming you can’t think, and as long as you can’t think, you won’t be in pain.

So that’s not philosophy though. That’s deliverance from pain. So I went at this from the angle of a person who’s attacking it the same way a man would be trying to solve for some chemical compound on which life itself depended. And I had no time to play games with any group. If I didn’t find them paying some dividend I dropped them and went to something else. So I dropped a bunch, believe me.

dw1-19:18

Well, I never got anyplace with raja yoga. I never found any great truth. But I kept it up. The funny thing was, I couldn’t get away from it. And of course, along with this I followed the rules. Whatever they asked for, whatever they said to do, I did. I mean I didn’t smoke cigarettes, I didn’t drink coffee, I didn’t eat meat. I think I ate eggs; maybe I wasn’t supposed to do that, I don’t know. But where I was working, you couldn’t get a, living in town, very few restaurants would serve you vegetables. And so I eventually wound up eating eggs and fish. But I thought, “This is an experiment, okay, we’ll go along with it. Maybe it has some bearing upon the mentality.” You know, starve yourself from something and maybe cause something.

Any experiment is worthwhile if it pays any dividend. I also was celibate for seven years. At the end of which, I figured I’d go and get drunk. I mean, after seven years, that was my conclusion, I have learned nothing, I’ve been kidding myself with a fool’s trip. So I decided the best thing to do was to go out and find a woman and get drunk, get married, or get something.

dw1-20:34

And strangely enough they wouldn’t have me, so I was saved. [laughs] I was probably too introspective or something for the girls at the time to have. I just wasn’t the type. I don’t know. But back to the drawing board, after awhile. Standing on your head, meditating for an hour a day or something of that sort. But with intermittent periods of absolute despair, thinking I was the biggest fool on earth; that other people were out there having a good time. And they were raising kids and asking no questions, and perhaps in the ?? of the? almighty? the search, a hell of a lot better than what I was doing. And I’m there more or less like the snake with its tail in its mouth, in a circle from which I couldn’t escape.

dw1-21:24

But anyhow, when I was 30 years of age – I got into this when I was 20 - something snapped in my head and I went nuts – according to definitions. In other words, I blew through the top and I visited a dimension I couldn’t describe. As he said [introduction] I can talk about it, but actually, in the back of the book that I’ve written there’s a thing called “Three Books of the Absolute”. And what you experience is a realization of the Absolute, that which is. It is neither right nor left, it is. And from that time on I was very satisfied to live with it. It was all I needed in my life.

22:03

I came back and within a year’s time I was married and was starting to hatch a bunch of kids. So it seemed like everything was pretty well planned for me. Of course, I thought I was doing it all, but I think sometimes that a lot of it is planned for you. You can help it. There’s a little saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I never can remember it exactly, there must be a block in my head. But it has to do with being able to know the things that you can do and the things that you can’t do, having the wisdom to know the difference between those two and then acting. No I don’t know how it’s said, but it struck me as being one of the greatest bits of wisdom that you could possibly carry home with you, carry on a little card in your wallet if necessary, should have one, [?] so I can at least carry it to somebody else.

dw1-22:50

But it’s a, this is the whole thing about people, is that we are not omnipotent. And because you find out a secret of nature or something means [doesn’t mean] you have control over everything. This is one of the things that people think: “Oh, we’ll get this, and then we’ll be able to have magical power, or we’ll be able to see through our neighbor’s lifestyle and tell him [what?] or foretell, or heal. This is not true. Because there is no reason to do it. There is no, it’s all worked out. The thing that we don’t understand is that it’s all worked out.

dw1-23:26

Now, I say also that you can – we go back to determinism and libertarianism – it isn’t all worked out. It’s apparent that people who struggle are the people who succeed. Now it could well be that the people who succeed automatically struggle. But regardless, they seem to go together. And the people who don’t struggle don’t seem to move either physically, financially or spiritually. They just don’t go anyplace. So I maintain that the struggle is necessary – you’re not going – I thought this. I thought I could chant Om for two or three years, and things would pop, my head would open up and all the secrets of the universe would flow in, and all the powers that I needed to get even with my enemies would be there. Just by chanting Om. This is nonsense. It only came about by the continuous stimulation and irritation of the computer with the problem: Who am I? Who is talking?

dw1-24:29

need heading

Well, now think that this is about as far as I can go except that – this is what happens – I’m going to run through something roughly. For some of you it might not mean anything, it doesn’t matter, then I want to communicate with you. Because you have questions ad you have a certain experiential background which I will communicate with. I can’t communicate with a background that you don’t have, whether that’s beyond me or behind me.

But this is, if you’re acquainted with Hubert Benoit, he was the first guy who drew the triangle in relation to Zen. And that’s the positive and negative, without which the conciliatory principle we wouldn’t act. [sentence] Notice that I have a “U” there; that’s for umpire. [Point C in the chart] We have a thing that runs our body, it’s a somatic umpire. It’s a racial umpire [human race]; that our lives are largely programmed. That our good and bad – I maintain that everything you do is decided – or you think you decide – to whether you take the elevator or take the steps, whether you come here or you go to a beer joint, whether you comb your hair or don’t comb your hair. And each step – whether you go up a certain path or go up another path, whether you wear a blue shirt or a white shirt – the thing is that these things are decided by some little liking or disliking. But at the same time, everything that you do – whether you choose booze or dope, or you choose sex or food – because you can starve to death having fun with sex – but the umpire has to make that decision.

dw1-26:20

Now we find out that this is sometimes a rather fickle character. Because a lot of people with seemingly a pretty good umpire still commit suicide. So there’s something wrong with the computer that allows people to commit suicide. Or sometimes he’s willing to throw himself on a bayonet in a battle, or to do something that will actually shorten his life. It appears that the umpire is involved not only with the survival of that individual, but also with the survival of his species.

And Ron Hubbard, incidentally – Ron Hubbard is quite a huckster today, I think – but he came up with something I’ve never seen repeated any place else. And that is that the human family has three types of survival: personal, family, and tribal or national. And this is the species, that a man will throw himself on a hand grenade and die to keep his species going. And this doesn’t jibe with the umpire, who says, “Hey, that’s dangerous,” and ordinarily he would get away from it.

dw1-27:22

But anyhow, this is strictly a somatic, and a human-species type of decision maker. It judges all of the steps. [there’s a chair here if you can’t find anyplace else to sit] But we find out that this, after we observe this, I call this the Psychology of the Observer. It has nothing to do with Zen. You can go this whole trip without using the word Zen, or a Japanese or Chinese word or theory. It’s strictly psychology. Zen was the purest form of psychoanalysis that has existed, long before Skinner loused it up with behaviorism.

But we have another form …

[break in tape]

file dm1 ends at 28:04

File 2

00:00

[long blank space at start of side bm2 -- same on dw version] [words missing in BM, DW, check others]

[Try: We have another type of] knowledge, another form of apprehension of things, of judgment. And it’s called intuition. And you might say that intuition is a silent computerization, if you want to try to express it in computer terms which is a whole, let’s say millions of percepts, millions of things recorded. And we belabor ourselves with what’s up front, generally, with the umpire, just the thing of the moment: “Should we eat or should we go hungry?” Or, “Should we retreat or throw ourself on the hand grenade?”

But there’s another thing in there, that is the saving grace. Because if we had nothing but this, we would be nothing but animals, protecting our species. And this is the reason the “positive” is on this side, because it’s a more positive trait. That when we start to view things with both the logical mind and the intuition, that’s when we first start to move, philosophically. You can’t do it with logic alone. And of course you can’t even do it with logic, but in the business of trying to verbalize things you have to use words and you have to use some sort of thinking pattern – until as I said, one day the thinking pattern explodes and you have pure direct-mind experience. In other words, it’s neither right nor left.

dw2-01:20

And this goes on up until] – what happens, is all the time you’re doing this – we’re talking now about something, [sentence] and we’re talking about watching a scheme of things going on in the human mind. We’re watching ourselves thinking. We’re watching the processes of our own thinking. Now I maintain that we are not two people. We are not the observer and the observed. We are only the observer. And if you keep that in mind, and realized that your body is part of that which is observed, you start to move into clearer, purer thought.

Then if you see your thoughts, your relative thoughts, as being objective, as being observed – you can watch his thinking process go on, and you can even watch yourself moving your mental head. I’ve explained this on the paper I’ve written on the Observer <<<<<<<<<<< then your observer becomes more impersonal and becomes more of a pure mind or direct-mind faculty.

dw2-02:17

But still, you can observe the processes. This thing [point E in chart] is a process observer; it observes these processes down here, opposed? the? anterior? observer. And by going back, watching all of these mental problems, no matter how much [?] ramifications exist, you accidentally become on another relative plane in which you and the, an unmanifested mind experience each other. And you don’t go beyond it. There is no way that you find, or determine, a conciliatory principle until it happens, and that’s the end of the road. The conciliatory place is the absolute. There’s no place else to go.

dw1-03:04

Now, what the mechanics are of that, I can’t give you quantum formula for how much energy it takes to do that. But this is the, by a simple process of just watching your thoughts, and simplify it that way, if you want it simplified, just watching your thoughts. And then you’ll watch the thought patterns. You’ll notice that you think in certain patterns. It’s like gestalts, whole philosophies will batter back and forth inside your head. After you study the whole philosophy you’ll be bouncing them against each other.

And these are processes of thinking and means of thinking, and you never completely rise above the process observer. But in reaction to the unmanifested mind – now that’s a term that I use because it’s not the verbalizable mind. It isn’t the mind of definition. It’s a pure mind realization of awareness, basically, of just awareness. And you’re aware of awareness. Now you can be aware of awareness, but you can’t be aware of awareness of awareness. You’re just aware.

So consequently, but studying this thing, the idea that there is a mind that observes, and there is a mind that is aware, and you continue to see these things happening and influencing your life, and the desire to understand what is behind that – brings you unconsciously to an absolute point of realization.

dw2-04:51

Now I’d like to talk to you. I’d like for you to pick up the ball and ask me some questions about something you’re interested in. Because if you’re not interested in anything, we might as well all get a can of pop.

Q. What role does creativity play in your ?? ??

R. I really don’t know what you mean by creativity. I find that the majority of people who use that word use it rather facetiously as though the human being can create.

Q. Okay, exteriorization then, of that which is going on inside your mind, in an artistic or literary or useful sense.

R. I really wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. See, I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know how to, for instance, I believe that there have been musicians who have written music that would inspire a man to spiritual work. I believe that possibly there are poets who have written poetry that would inspire a person to look within themselves, look inside themselves. And sometimes it isn’t always a direct philosophic poem.

Like Omar Khayyam. The poems of Omar Khayyam are very significant. Have you, are you acquainted with him? The man who visited the sage: “... myself when young did eagerly frequent the house of sage and scholar ... But I went out by the same door wherein I went.” This shows that he was a seeker, and that everyplace he went he ran into either frustration or disappointment. And of course he supposedly turned down an empty glass at the end of the poem. It sounded like it was eat, drink and be merry but I really don’t buy that. I believe that what is was, when a man finds the answer you go back and pay your debt to nature. You drink your wine and what’s left is an empty glass; because it doesn’t matter.

dw2-06:57

But I don’t know how a person can do this though, unless – see I can write the poetry – if you write it before you’ve had the experience, then you’re writing about something that you’re liable to confuse somebody about. Because you don’t know. You don’t know how to direct them. And I think a lot of stuff has been written by people who have found, and it takes maybe a poet or an artist to pick it up. Or maybe another person who’s spiritually inclined, I don’t know. But I think there is a lot of literature that does inspire. Now if that’s creativity, then that’s good, but I don’t believe that all art is aimed in that direction. I think that some art is merely, I consider that some art is just an outgrowth of the ego.

dw2-07:48

Q. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t necessarily mean the production of things for other people as much as I mean the process of doing things which you enjoy, which seem to speak to you and about you, that you ??

R. Well I don’t see, see, unless you know who’s enjoying, there’s no use in enjoying. Or think you enjoy. [sentence]

Q. I feel like you’re setting me up.

R. Well, I don’t think there’s such a thing as pleasure. So you can’t enjoy yourself. Pleasure is that which is defined as pleasure. And which we all, we have a paradigm. The human race has a paradigm which we all agree upon. We agree that things are green when chemically perhaps they’re everything but green. The whole vision that we see of life is a paradigm. Then we have this personality thing: “I’m going to accept you if you paint yourself a certain way.” As I said, people spend their whole lives trying to paint themselves in a certain way. A Congressman wants to look dignified, so he manages somehow to look dignified and that draws him respect.

We want that, we want to be a very functional part of the paradigm. So we try to read it. But I don’t think that there’s a, I don’t buy pleasure or pain. I do know that there are experiences. And I maintain that if you’re going to have to live, even if pleasure is an illusion, it’s better to have the illusion then to have the pain. But I know by the same token that this is a head trip. And if you get to contemplating the fact you might find out that something is feeding thoughts into your head.

dw2-09:40

It’s a bait. My mother-in-law was just a plain half-Indian woman from West Virginia and she said something that really struck me as wisdom when she was about 45 years of age. She said sex was a trick that nature plays on both parties to continue reproduction. So that romance, the love affair and everything else is projected in. And the people who are in the trap never see it. You have to be 50 years of age, most people have to be 50 years of age before they realize they’ve been had. Not by the other party, but by nature. And by DNA programming, genetic programming – or who knows what is eating? Who knows what harvests the energy? But evidentially there’s energy absorbed in the process.

dw2-10:29

So I think that this is one of the most foolish conceits that we have. And of course this is the province of the young, that there is something as pleasure or happiness. There is only that which is. And I thing when you ever come to the point where you – I don’t think you have to be enlightened; I think almost every man, if he’s not been a lecher all his life, when he gets to be about 70 or 80 years of age, he comes to the conclusion that he’s been snowing himself for so many years of his life, about this big rapturous thing called life.

dw2-11:07

Q. Starting? with psychology, other actual proof, results, ?? that would show that the actual human is actually far more intelligent that he realizes? [?]

R. I think that the human computer, I think he has the potential in there for solving a lot more than what he solves. I grant you that. And I think that’s the reason that, in order to solve an actual problem, like the definition of life, you have to shut down the other problems. I think the solution to it is to refuse to feed the computer with distracting thoughts which would produce parallel solutions – or parallel problems would be solved at the same time. In other words, our computer is generally solving anywhere from a dozen to hundred problems a day simultaneously. We may not notice it. But one of them may be don’t forget to take the garbage out. So all the time we’re running back and forth in the house we maybe have that in the back of our head: “Somehow I must get the garbage out too, besides these other things.”

So the thing is that you shut yourself down. That’s the reason for entering into one of these systems. And you don’t have to shut it down for eight hours, but maybe shut the computer down for an hour a day or something like that. But limit it – and when you try to do it all hell breaks loose, because the mind doesn’t want to set still. The body doesn’t want to sit still, and the mind wants to ramble. I know when I first got into this thing of meditating, I had hundreds of get-rich schemes running through my head, get up and go to work on them. Because the mind would cook these up rapidly, and it would be hard to sit still. Because the – some of them I put into execution; some of them were valid.

dw2-12:58

But this is the whole thing. [? shutting down?] And I do believe the number of transistors we’ve got in there will solve a tremendous lot more. And I think this is what happens, is that the computer has the evidence – from birth, before birth, genetic memories perhaps – all the stuff that is available to the computer. And this gives you the data necessary for the solution to the problem of where did you come from and where are you going.

But you can’t consciously do it, because if we sit down with a pencil and paper and the first thing you have to do is form symbols: X stands for that; Y stands for this, and then you get tangled up in logical thinking or symbolic thinking and that’s the end of the trip. You can’t, nothing happens, another problem interferes and you forget about it.

dw2-13:43

Q. Is there a relation there, with what you have on the board, with the ?? with the brain?

R. I don’t know. I don’t know what the effects of – see, what I, when I did my thinking it was long before they discovered the alpha waves and beta waves. I don’t know whether that aids? you or ?? it. I know that there are certain chemicals that will sure shake up your thinking.

Fr instance, I know that drugs will open doors. But they don’t – by paralyzing possibly a lot of the other centers. But nothing solid ever comes out of it for some reason.

In other words, they’re very? inspiring. You can get a, for instance, a lot of people have taken LSD and come to the conclusion from the results of LSD, that there was another dimension equally as valid and as solid as this one, maybe more so. And that caused them to look into esoteric philosophy. [aside: is this thing working?] But none of these people were able to hold on. Instead of helping them to concentrate, it was like letting the water out of the balloon. They couldn’t concentrate. They were strictly open to impressions, but they couldn’t concentrate or focus their computer and force it by some repetitious method, of just actually going back and letting yourself think. That’s the rest of the method, just sitting there until something pops, just like a silent command to the mind: “Come up with the answer.” Or sometimes a conscious command, say, “Who am I?”

So I don’t know about the beta waves to be honest with you. I don’t know what the mechanics are. I’ll tell you something; that’s the reason I try to simplify. There’s a lot of terminology that comes out of India and Tibet and Japan and it’s all tangled up with foreign words. Like Ramana Maharshi uses the words sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. And I can say it in one word, the knowledge of the Absolute. That’s English. But people like to throw this around, because it makes them sound lofty. And they like to be authorities on Hindu philosophy. I’ve spent my life, I’ve studied oriental philosophy, and I find that our heads work just as well with English words. You can even have an English mantra if you want one, and it will get you just as far.

dw2-16:12

Q. Could you explain exactly what you mean by the “Process observer”?

R. What is seeing? The process observer – that’s required to see the processes. The process observer is that observer which stands behind and watches the logical mind deciding, in conflict with the intuitive mind, or the intuition at least. Which is, let’s say, the somatic mind is the body-mind and it’s also the logical mind, where we think with symbols. In other words, the somatic mind can’t think – if you have a, if you’re hungry you think of an apple, the somatic mind would. But with the intuitive mind you would just have the urge; you’d just be hungry. But the somatic mind might pick up a, might have a vision of a piece of food, some type of food.

The somatic mind might belabor itself with syllogisms. The intuition doesn’t. The somatic mind and the umpire are the same thing. Now you’re watching this, we’re talking about it. The fact that we’re talking about it means that it’s objective, not subjective. You draw a line, that which is subjective is that which observes, that which watches the show. And that which is objective is that which is watched. The view is not the viewer – that’s the whole principle behind this line of thinking. The view is not the viewer. That which you see, the body is not us.

And we take this step by step: you cut your toes off, your fingers off and you find out that’s not you. Your consciousness remains the same. You can cut whole sections of your body out and get paralyzed from the neck down, but your consciousness will remain the same. Consequently the body is not us. We might say, “Well, maybe it’s the head.” Well, sometimes the head is out but the body is still working. So if the consciousness isn’t there – or if it awakened later, we find out that it wasn’t necessarily the body.

dw2-18:27

In other words, we are that which watches. So consequently, when you go back behind that, in other words, you watch yourself watching, so to speak. This is meditation. Anybody studying meditation has to go through this. They have to watch themselves watching. This is the basic, simple psychology, without going into a lot of verbiage or thoughts: if you want to know yourself, watch yourself. Just sit there and watch yourself.

dw2-18:58

For instance, I have a paper written on meditation, I don’t know whether they have it back there or not, but it’s traumatic meditation. You don’t meditate on peace and quiet. You go back 3 or 4 years to where you’ve had a trauma. And I say don’t try to relive it. Don’t get excited. Just run it off like a roll of film. And pretty soon, if it was the neighbor next door you’ll see things like you would on a film, maybe a fight, a fistfight, events, a house, somebody throwing something, and maybe your getting your nose punched.

And in the process of that, because it’s a cool experience now the anger is gone because it’s a couple of years ago, we may realize that you [we] were wrong. Because you’ll see, you’ll have a perspective without the heat of the ego, thinking that you have to be right because it’s you. So consequently, this type of meditation – then you can work your way up. Because you say, “Boy, I tried to put that across on that fellow and it didn’t work; I got my nose punched.” And then it will dawn on you that yesterday you pulled the same thing.

dw2-20:07

So it brings your self-evaluation right up to the present, and you start to change. It’s irrevocable. You have to change, if you admit; if you see the evidence, you have to change. You realize that you’re not the king that you thought you were. So consequently this is a simple process, when you watch this, this very thing that we did, you say, “There’s a change.” Now we’re observing a change, we’re not observing a man getting his nose punched anymore, we say, “Hey, what are we doing here? We’re watching a process.” And the guy who’s watching that process is the process observer.

And that’s as high as you can get; that’s as high as that type of awareness gets. This thing going on in the unmanifested mind is awareness, that’s all. So you’re aware of your awareness, and you’re aware of the processes of the somatic and the intuitive mind. And it’s only by reaching that point ...

The average man is lucky to recognize this in his lifetime. He’s lucky to recognize that he has an umpire. In religion sometimes they call it a conscience, but that [term] doesn’t answer [for] all the things that are decided upon there. The conscience generally is supposed to decide moral questions. But everything is decided. A step: whether you step to the right or the left – that’s a decision. So this umpire – so a lot of people don’ know. A lot of people think that they are the person who gets married and reproduces.

dw2-21:38

Q. Does it ever decide that man? should change? his? life? What does he do inside? of? him? seeing? his? world?

R. Well, there is no motive. See, that’s the idea. The idea is – as soon as you say – in other words, if you’re starting out to find your definition for the purpose of a motive, then you’ve colored the discovery. You’ve colored it immediately. You can’t have a motive. The only motive is to find out.

Q. [Australian accent] Yes. The thing the observer is doing is watching the whole show. ?? ?? it must be doing it for a reason. Or it’s fighting? to make an ??

R. Well, I told you the basic reason that caused him to be discovered was curiosity about the self. So that is the reason.

Q. That’s the reason he’s been discovered, that doesn’t ?? You are a priori, you observe ...

R. Right. That doesn’t prove where he came from.

Q. I’m not asking where he came from. I’m asking what he’s ?? besides ?? Why, you know, you climb? down? you’ve created this scene, and seeing it there. How can you rationalize what it is? And then, to say what you describe as the absolute from what in fact is the absolute, if there is an absolute [??]

R. You’re a little difficult to understand. [because of the accent] But let me answer, maybe I can answer this to you. That when you discover, you’ll find that each man is a ray. This is an analogy, because it could be that he’s an electron, but let’s say he’s a ray, and the sun is the source. So that each man is a ry. Now each ray observes, within limits. It has a capacity limitation. And it can observe both ways. The whole idea behind this is that by some accident it becomes aware of its source, which if you wish you can call God. Now why that ray is extruded, I don’t know why it’s there. I don’t know why God is, or why the absolute is.

[silence]

dw2-23:58

It just is. I mean that’s the structure. That’s the basic – now, of course the reason I draw this is this is the path I went through, that’s all.

Q. Do you have to apply a set of symbols in order to find out one’s individuality in this respect?

R. No, you don’t have to. In other words, as Art said when I first started talking – when I heard him say it of course the thought went through my head – he said, “This is the good news, that he’s found something; and the bad news is he can’t describe it.” And it sounds like a nice con game coming up: here’s a guy who has nothing, and he says hey – it’s like the buy who made the king’s costume out of pure gold that you couldn’t see; the king was going around naked. They may have the gold in the ?? But it could be a screen for a magnificent bit of baloney.

But the truth of the matter is as I said – this happened to me when I was 30 and I was ten years making notes to trying to form some sort of a drawing, a set of words, to write a book or something, o say to somebody, “Hey, there’s something out there.” And it’s between the electrons, between the raindrops. It’s not in a definite pronouncement, it’s not in a symbol. All you have to do is go inside yourself – the hell with what I say. See what I mean?

dw2-25:26

Q. I am ...

R. Yeah, I am not important. All you need is the determination. I maintain that anybody with average intelligence, if they dedicate themselves to finding out what’s inside, they’ll find it out. But it’s the same thing as the law of the salesman: if you throw enough mud at the ceiling, some of it will stick. If you make enough door calls you’re going to sell your product; there’s a percentage of sales. And spiritual work, if you put enough energy into it you’ll get results.

Now, the rest of the formula is to put the required amount of energy into it. Go whole hog. Don’t do it five seconds out of the year. Or don’t read a book and say, “Well, that sounded pretty good.” Action is what you have to get into. And you don’t need any – I say maybe I can say something here today that will stimulate you to go out and look for yourself. But I don’t believe in let’s say umbrella-type systems, which everybody, I say, “Here, I’m going to save you.” Save, hell, I don’t know the factors in your life. Everybody’s got a different set of factors. Everybody’s got to go at it for themselves.

dw2-26:32

Sure, now there are books that [help] like Ramana Maharshi. Those books help a guy, they give him some words and they give him – especially after he realizes something. They give him some words to kind of reinforce. Like I said, I discounted things in the Catholic faith when I was a kid, and now I go back and find John of the Cross and decided that’s a darn good book if you want to read something on this type of experience. He had it. But I was supposed to, and as a child I was prejudiced. [?] You don’t accept anything that comes from the ol’ man, you know, prove him one better.

dw2-27:09

Q. I was wondering, on that pamphlet of mind? mine? it says “motivation” is? the? only? thing?

R. No. You don’t even reach it. You won’t even know until after you’ve passed it, that you never reached it. [?] These are not steps that you can look up ahead and see. These are steps that you’ll become aware of. You sit down and meditate, and after awhile, especially if you draw this little picture and take it home with you, then after awhile you’ll realize that you’re observing yourself. And you’ll say, “Oh, I know what the hell, he was talking about now.”

Q. So what you’re doing right now is trying to tell other people about it, and it has nothing to do with letting IT motivating you to do that. [?]

R. No, you’ve got to, I think – motivating you, you mean?

Q. No. Motivating you.

R. That’s the reason I threw this open for questions; I think that will motivate me more quickly than if I just got up here and started to talk generally. Because if you have a certain angle – everybody comes in from a different angle, everyone has a different language, so to speak, even though we share the same paradigm. Then of course, that motivates me – it doesn’t motivate me, but maybe my response will somehow kick a trigger.

dw2-28:15

Q. Would you think that that type of elementary, beginning meditation would be significant? What would you do to get started?

R. I would suggest you get that paper that I’ve written. You don’t have to get it if you’ve listened to what I’m saying and remember it. And that is to just sit down and do what I call traumatic meditation, by looking for traumas in your past, looking for moments when you were highly disappointed with yourself, or you were very unhappy, or you had been rebuffed, you know, something that happened.

dw2-28:58

Now this is all a relative thing, I know, but you have to – in other words, most of your traumas in life come from running up against your fellowman, and they basically don’t have any great relation to your essence. But if you can’t get a clear appraisal of yourself in view of this paradigm, how are you going to get anything in let’s say a more subjective field than this mundane life?

So what it is, more or less correcting your thinking mechanisms, by removing egos. This is the first step. In other words, the individual comes as a ...

[break in tape]

file dw2 ends at 29:36

File 3

dw3-00:00

… [which part] is trying to see the truth, and which part of you is trying to force a certain ego as the truth upon the rest of humanity. And if you’re that type of person, and believe me, most people are, all people are, I’d say, everybody. The little child, they try to take over the parents when they’re still in diapers. They learn when to scream so they can get away with something. So this is an ego; this is the individual saying, “I’m going to dominate this picture show.”

And [it’s] only years later, when you’re able to meditate and [that] you can reverse all of that system of thinking, that egoistical system of thinking. So what you’re doing is clarifying your computer. The finite mind cannot perceive the infinite; but the mind can be made less finite when you get some of the barnacles out of the mechanism.

dw3-00:55

Q. I’ve read, I’ve come across some readings about spiritual guides. John Lilly mentioned those two guides and,  ?? Have you yourself experienced this?

R. No. I’d be a little bit suspicious unless they had a union card. In other words, how do you know? I remember – my father in law was a holy roller preacher – and he said that when decided to enter into spirituality he went up on a hill by himself and stayed up there all night and fasted and prayed. And he said he heard two voices telling him what to do. And he said one of them told him to jump off the hill, and the other one told him not to listen to the first voice. So if he had two guides, he concluded that one of them was not on his side. He decided the other one was God. But basically we may have voices, but because we can’t get their fingerprints I advise you to be skeptical.

Now I have a feeling, don’t get me wrong, I have a feeling that I can’t convey to you, I believe that if a man has good intentions – by good intentions I mean he doesn’t go into this for the sake of power or trying to hurt somebody – I think if he’s really trying to find his source, there’s a response from the other side. Now you’ve got to accept this as pure superstition, because I can’t prove it to you. But I believe it for myself, that when you set your mind out to do this thing – you get help.

dw3-02:32

And let people define it as they wish. You’ll see strains of this run through religion, certain esoteric groups, the Catholics ?? it the Guardian Angel. One. Of course, some have half a dozen. I mean, some of the cults, they talk of Master So-and-so, and Master 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The, certain students of magic and Rosicrucianism talk of the HGA. Now I don’t say that they’re necessarily wrong. Because you have a sense that something is watching over you and guiding your life. That’s the reason I say in the final analysis we don’t do too much. We learn that. The more you learn, the more you learn that you don’t do much. You think you do. You put out a hell of an effort to find out that you’re not doing anything. That happened to me, maybe. For me it seems that way.

dw3-03:28

We don’t necessarily do. Yet paradoxically, that’s something you have to remember in philosophy; in esoteric philosophy or spiritual philosophy, the paradox permeates everything. To all appearances it may seem like you’re totally alone; yet you’re not necessarily totally alone. It’s necessary to struggle, but at the same time the paradox says that it may be that struggling gets you nowhere. Or [that] the person who doesn’t struggle doesn’t achieve. We don’t know. But those paradoxes have to be in there in order to complete your thinking. You can’t just take one side and say that’s it. There’s a possibility of both, and it seems like sometimes both factors are in there: that there definitely is help, but there is nobody but you. In the final analysis there’s nobody but you, but along the road it seems that you definitely have a shield. And the shield is there as long as you don’t exercise your ego.

dw3-04:32

But I wouldn’t depend on it. I mean I – I think you have faith. I think a person should have faith when he starts out, determination and faith. Not that somebody’s going to take care of you necessarily so much, but that you don’t have any ax to grind, so consequently you’re not going to cause any reactions. In other words, every force that we exert has an equal and opposite reaction; that’s the law of physics. There’s a law of spiritual thinking too. So if we don’t exert our spiritual force for the purpose of causing a [negative] reaction, then I maintain that the type of reaction we get will be good.

dw3-05:14

Q. inaudible

R. There was a fellow up here in Canada, I don’t know if any of you have heard of him or not, his name was Rolf Alexander. He was a student of Gurdjieff, supposedly, and he devised a system of attaining realization through self-hypnosis. I would question this, for one thing. This [with] hypnosis you can help a person divorce themselves from certain hangups. If the hangups are in the road, like if a fellow’s an alcoholic perhaps you could hypnotize him, he could get ?? sober long enough to ?? and maybe cure himself of alcoholism – or nicotine or something of that sort. This might give him a little life.

dw3-06:14

The advantage of working with a hypnotist is that that fellow’s on the outside and he can rescue you. But when you hypnotize yourself you have no guardian left. You have nobody. You may hypnotize yourself into a frame of mind. I’m not thinking that you won’t wake up or something of that sort, that’s nonsense. But you may hypnotize yourself into a frame of mind in which you will conceive something and grow to believe it, and it will become a tangent.

I was just talking to a former Krishnite, and this party told me that in their religion when they danced in the temple they saw the marble god transformed into a moving creature. It played ?? ?? buddha? And this party kind of laughed and said, “boy if I said that. At that time I firmly believed it, but if I said that now, people would laugh at me.” But no, that’s quite common. Every religion has a hysteria. People were professed to see things – because they hunger for them strongly enough. A man dying of thirst may see water perhaps in a desert.

But if you get into a certain auto-hypnotic state, this is exactly what goes on. Hours and hours of jumping and chanting – the result is that the mind suddenly grabs something that is told to it. and everything? ultimately? comes from an outside source even if you’re ?? at the time. But it happens that something may fire back from a book you read before you hypnotized yourself. So I think it’s a little bit risky.

dw3-08:02

Q. Your last lecture here at the Cathedral [Wait – Cathedral of Learning is at Pitt] I believe was a talk on Moods [Could be 1978-10-Moods-OSU-date-conflict ] Moods fill a very large part of our life. My question is, developing an awareness of the observer, will this control moods that? rule? your? life?

R. I think that all these things that we have control – you don’t necessarily reach out there like with a monkey wrench and loosen or tighten. I think that the moods are, the things that once you become aware of them are no longer a factor. This is another thing that you have to watch. I talked here the last time about the fact that we are governed – whole segments of humanity are governed by moods; that’s the reason people produce banzai charges and get themselves killed. Or to have a patriotic concept. Somebody is able by certain ?? of suggestion, such as martial music, waving a flag or you know, to get a person into a certain mood: the music plus the person’s admiration for glory or valor or something of that sort, stories are told, and they get a person into a certain mood. The television is a tremendous impeller of moods

dw3-09:25

Now I don’t think that we necessarily use this. I don’t think it’s good to try to propel yourself into a mood, because the mood is a false state of mind. And yet it has – the reason I talked about it is because we fall into moods that have a profound effect on us and louse up our life for years. For instance, we get into a mood called “love” and you’ll be stuck for 20 or 25 years before the last character is weaned. All because you allowed yourself to get into a mood. By a mood I mean a state of mind that bears a conviction with it, that “This is it. This is what I want with my life.” Boom. And we find out after 25 years, after the kids grow up and curse us, that maybe it was a mistake. Or maybe it was that you were had.

dw3-10:30

Yes, Paul.

Q. [Paul Mahler] Just the fact that this meditation, you know how thoughts come through your mind like you said, how to make a million dollars. What is the best way to cut these off? Or should you cut them off?

R. I think you have, well, one good way is to analyze it, because, simply, when you do anything you have to establish a priority. There are certain things that have to come first, I don’t care what walk of life you are in. If you have a family, you’re going to find that you set a priority; that very possibly your children will come first and maybe your wife will be next, and these are priority lines? items? And maybe your ambition will come third.

dw3-11:18

In other words, you sit down and you calmly meditate about it and think it out. And say, “Well, this is my priority.” Now if your priority is making a million bucks, then you get up off your meditation and go to work and do something about it. If your priority is finding a solution to your definition or finding the solution to your existence, then you say, “I’m not caring about this. I settled that decision several days or weeks or months ago.” So you recognize it as an invasion; it’s something butting into your meditation. And the problem is solved. It might butt in occasionally, but you say, “Hey, I could get all wrapped up in that.”

And maybe you did. Maybe a person does get into a few ventures, and find out that they get wrapped up in it maybe too tightly. But I think that the – all of that stuff you can face it. But what you have to keep in your mind is that sometime along the road you’re going to have to make a priority. You’re going to have to decide what your priorities – and you may have to list your priorities, because you have – there are many things that a person wants. You have to maintain a job, or you’ll get hungry and you won’t be able to buy books that you need, or you won’t be able to pay the rent for a place to meditate in.

dw3-12:40

But those things have to be set in priority. And once they are, then the mind will quit thrusting them in. It won’t be important; it will be manifestly a game. And that means that you can, you can do whatever you wish, as long as it doesn’t interfere.

I know one time when I was first lecturing up in Kent a fellow asked me, he said, “Hey, I’d like to get into this, but I’ve got to go to college. I’ve majored in math, it’s a pretty tough course.” He said, “I’m also a chess player; I’m on my way to a master in chess.” Well he says, “These meetings that we have may interfere with a chess tournament. And I’ll also get rusty and won’t be able to win.” I said, “That’s up to you. You’ve got to set a priority. Play chess if you have to. You may have ten priorities. But when the day comes that it interferes, that’s when you make a decision. And for a long time he was able to keep his chess. He did both: he played chess and he went to college. And he kept his head on the problem, at least a few days out of the week or the month.

dw3-14:05

Q. Is there a way that [inaudible, mic noise] ?? advantage on ?? Sleeping and dreams used on spiritual

R. I think that your dreams are good indications of egos, or what’s going on inside your head, if you analyze them. I think it’s good to write them down. Of course, there’s a tremendous message in dreams. This is the computer that’s somewhat putting out problems on its own, putting out answers on its own. And they’re computations of something that’s pressing the individual during the daytime – which we may not have consciously asked it. But lots of dreams are predictive or prophetic, lots of dreams will give us a new view of ourselves. We see that we’re talking to ourselves, or trying to communicate with ourselves, so to speak, through the dream. So I advise people to write them down. If you get – you’ve got to do it as soon as you wake up, or you forget them. They vanish about five minutes after you wake up, most dreams, because it’s the night time. [?]

dw3-15:19

Q. Is the process observer a projection? Is it part of the ray of creation??

R. Yes, it is. See, the truth of the matter is [refers to chart, the triangle] this is what we are, in my estimation. You can take that for what you wish. The unmanifested mind is awareness, which is the best that we have, in reality. The positive is all on this side. [?] But the observer is that which is observing the mundane expression, or the mundane. From here down everything is a projection. This is all a projection. The process observer itself is not necessarily a projection, unless you want to call [it that] It’s the final consciousness, excluding an absolute union. Union with the absolute. It’s as far as the individual consciousness can go. Consciousness, now, I don’t say awareness. The awareness is unlimited, but the consciousness. In other words, that line across there [E to F] is awareness of consciousness and being conscious of awareness. And that’s the problem that you’re continually facing, that’s on that line.

Diagram from Psychology of the Observer:

dw3-16:44

Q. Do those lines maintain? explain? anything about belief?

R. Yes. We believe all this. [Now] this may not mean a thing to you, as I say, unless you’ve made the trip. But what I’m saying is that if you start meditating, you’re going to realize the umpire. And only when you realize it is it real. Up until that time it’s just a picture on a blackboard. But I maintain that if you go through this, that as you move up and start observing these processes, you’re automatically there.

dw3-17:13

It’s just: what is you? It’s what you identify as you, now. This here, when you get up there, you no longer identify as you. This is part of the scenery. That’s the only you there is. And then you notice there is an awareness. Then you realize that those two things are, and then in the struggle to find out what is the conciliatory principle or real truth, which one is the real person, that struggle goes on until the awareness of the absolute would occur. But it occurs by an accident. It doesn’t occur by any computation, because the awareness can’t compute. Nothing computes, you just observe. This is the whole secret. It isn’t a question of analyzing things, it’s a question of observing. The observer does not analyze; it just observes. It becomes aware of. We don’t create it.

dw3-18:10

Q. Did you say that pleasure is an illusion?

R. Yeah.

Q. Okay, now when you get to the top of that chart, are you no longer under [or “in”?] control of that illusion?

R. [mis-hears question] Well, you’re not in control of anything. [?] When you get to the top, when you reach the final awareness, you’re not in control of anything.

Q. No, I mean “under control”.

R. Yes, yes. You are a ray. [?] What was that you asked? What was the first part of the question?

Q. You implied that there was an illusion.

R. Yes. This is what I wanted to bring out; I knew there was something I wanted to say. One of the concepts that we have about realization, and you find this permeating almost every movement, is that this awakening, this final solution, occurs with pleasure, ecstasy, beauty, peace of mind, all these things flowing together. This is not true. This in Ramana Maharshi’s words is the kevala nirvikalpa samadhi, which in English is cosmic consciousness. In the feeling of cosmic consciousness you see the unity of the world, or you realize that the world is a perfected blueprint – without you, with you. [?] Just don’t cause any ripples. That’s what you have with cosmic consciousness. But you do experience an ecstasy and a beauty, and a transformation of the environment.

Add this to selfdefinition.org page: http://www.searchwithin.org/download/richard_m_bucke.pdf

The environment changes. Bucke – the whole city lit up. The jail cell of St. John of the Cross lit up [get reference, maybe is in Bucke] , so light that he could read a book and that sort of thing. A sensory transformation, which if you stop and think about it, it’s still relative. Pleasure is relative, light is relative. The horizon that lit up for Bucke – the city is relative.

dw3-20:01

So that when the man transcends that, he gets into pure is-ness. Pure is-ness, neither right nor left, neither beauty nor ugliness, pain or sorrow. Or pleasure and sorrow. [sentence] None of them exist.

Now these words, if you read up on Zen literature, you hear a lot of this called no-mind. And the person, when you hear the word no-mind you get the impression that this guy went crazy. This is not true. What happens is that the mind stops on dead center. And when it stops on dead center, then anything possible can come in. Any great realization that’s possible will come in at that time. But you can’t stop it on dead center. It will stop there. Does that make any sense?

dw3-20:56

Q. ?? ?? why are ?? break? nature?

R. Well, I think so. I see cycles in all human existence; animal existence maybe.

Q. If you wanted the same thing ?? experience? experiments? in which case they take the individual, the senses, touch, taste, smell ??

R. Are you talking about Lilly and his subterranean bathtub?

Q. inaudible.

R. [laughs] I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know what – I think it might have a profound effect upon the mind; it might cause the mind to stop, I don’t know actually. I’ll tell you something too. I don’t think, you know, I heard, 4 or 5 years ago, I was talking to a girl who was pretty burned out on dope, and I said, “How does it come that these people have, you know, you gt an equal amount of acid in a tab, you take these tabs of acid and you give them to ten different people, and you’d think that the chemical in the human body you’d get the same result, but you don’t. You get ten different trips.” And she said, “You only get into acid what you put into it.” So that a psychic person taking acid would get a tremendously different and more valuable type of trip than some lecher, who is only using it for sensuality.

dw3-22:36

So the same applies, literally and I think, package? permits? Too many people are trying to experiment with esoteric matters without inhibiting their lechery, or without inhibiting other things that they’re doing. I think this is what I talk about, putting total energy in, [into it] Not trying to drink booze, chew tobacco and rub snuff while you’re smoking. I think sometimes they confuse the experiments. I think if they’re carried out under the right conditions you can get some wonderful results. I think there have been wonderful results, even with things like mescaline. But they were done under controlled [circumstances] not sensually-directed experiments. So I think that business of the, what do they call it? Sensory suspension?

Q. Deprivation.

R. Sensory deprivation, yeah. I think it is effective, But how far it would take you, I don’t know. But I think the person would have to be prepared. They should prepare themselves. They should have their mind cleaned up before they get into that, so they’re not ?? ?? dope?

dw3-23:49

Q. ?? ?? if an individual in a low energy state ?? ?? if his mind accidentally stops, would any person ?? ??

R. No. No. There are people whose minds do stop and nothing happens. Because there has to be an extreme amount of [tension] It’s like pulling the arrow back, to shoot the arrow. There has to be a tremendous amount of tension for that vector to penetrate what it has to penetrate. And I’m drawing another analogy that might confuse you. But – there are different ways of stopping your head. You can do it with drugs. Somebody can hit you on the head with a mallet. you’ll still be conscious, but for a moment, we’re talking about p? on the way up. You can take a room and shut the door, you’ll have it stopped. It happens, no great sensation, no great spiritual revelations. The thoughts get farther and farther apart, that’s all.

dw3-25:09

Q. What do you have to say about reincarnation?

R. Well, I always avoid it, if I can. Because it comes, it’s apt to become throughout Asia and the places where they believe in that, rather, with devotion, that it becomes a rationalization for procrastination of effort. The thing is, “Don’t struggle. Don’t try to do anything.” Because – I had a Rosicrucian tell me that one time. “Don’t get excited, Rose, you’ve got hundreds of lives ahead.” I say you’ve only got one. This is the only one that we can really prove.

So – by the same token I realize that we may have. I don’t think I have. I don’t want any more So consequently, I believe that if you can get out of this rat race at all, that’s breaking out of prison. And we find that analogy in Plato’s cave, the story of the cave in Plato’s Republic. The thing is to get out, not necessarily to depend on coming back for a better deal.

dw3-26:20

And I don’t deny that there is the possibility of reincarnation. The only reason I embraced it years ago [?] when I got into yoga was that I, it was a question of my egotistical idea of justice. I felt that the Christian idea of eternal hell for responding to a body which God created was unreasonable. I couldn’t see where some ignorant – I consider everyone ignorant, including myself – and here’s a person so damned ignorant they don’t know what to do – and I’m talking about everybody. Now all of a sudden that responsibility is thrown on that guy. Why is it thrown on him? Who throws it on him? The guy who is collecting 10% of his income. The guy who wants you to bring his building ?? up into a temple, that’s all.

That’s the only thing I can reason that out for. Is that the guilt is imposed. It isn’t real. I don’t believe that people are guilty. They all do, they make mistakes. But I think they can, once they realize, they also realize they didn’t make any mistakes.

dw3-27:26

So consequently I can’t see this idea of paying debt, life after life after life. Or getting a respite or a reprieve, saying, “Well, you might make it this time, but oh [if not] take a crack at it again. Because I think if a person goes into it believing, he will not move. he will always say, “Oh well,” you know, “eat, drink and be merry.” And it’s only after 60 years that he realizes he wasn’t eating, he wasn’t drinking. He was being eaten and he was being used. But it’s too late then. The fish catches the fisherman, in other words. The fisherman thinks he’s catching the fish, but he doesn’t.

dw3-28:17

Q. ?? [noise] zap ?? ?? they’ve discovered their whole life has? been? used?

R. That may be a realization in itself, if it’s really strong enough and he doesn’t die too quickly, if he doesn’t get run over by a Mac truck, he may have a realization. That computer – that sudden forcing of all that data in the computer and the honest recognition of it – he no longer has the egos of youth, very possibly he has at that moment. But for some reason he can’t describe it. He dies with his mouth open but nothing comes out. I get the impression a lot of people would like to say something before they die, but not too much advice is passed down, in that type of realization.

dw3-29:07

I ?? a person according to a – I think there’s going to be a lot of data and people will compile the data, it [that] comes through in hospitals and witnesses of death and resurrection, so to speak, when people revive, such as Kübler Ross and Moody. There’s going to be more and more evidence that there is a survival. But the evidence if they bother to catalog – if you just take those two books and catalog the incidents, of reports of life resurrected and you’re going to find that they fall into distinct categories. The phenomena [that are] described ...

[break in tape]

dw3 ends aat 29:43

File 4

00:00 [has overlap of 2 sentences, no words lost]

... incidents, of reports of life resurrected and you’re going to find that they fall into distinct categories. The phenomena [that are] described, there are distinct categories. And the top category that I have encountered described, available to the public, was one in the October 1974 Reader’s Digest. The title of the article is “I Died at 10:52 AM.” It’s about a man who had a heart attack in a car in traffic in a big city. And he laid there in that car for some time [says 2 hours, incorrect] before the police could get him to a hospital. He was pronounced dead. But for some reason he revived. When he came back he described his experience. He tried to, and he had the same difficulty that everyone has. He tried to describe it, and it was almost, he described grids and vistas stuff. And they said, “Well.” You know. It doesn’t sound like it’s really coming through as an explanation.

He said, “I’ve experienced this, but I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I’m immortal. I have no worries about the future. So consequently – I didn’t get anything from that article [?] if you read it you’ll find the same thing. He doesn’t say what he did in his lifetime. He was a man maybe 50-60 years of age. [he was 56 according to bio page] Maybe he read some books, maybe he had a spiritual discipline, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know.

dw4-01:24

But then you have a category – see that’s a category of non-personal, it’s a non-personal thing. I maintain that there are four levels of man, and I think [as] Gurdjieff hit upon them: instinctive, emotional-devotional, intellectual and philosophic.

And these, if you watch the instinctive man, being on the lowest, he’s the man who lives to live. He’s the guy who’s living for the girlfriend and the next drink of whiskey. Or ambition, excitement, power. And this type of person when they die doesn’t experience anything. When they come back, when they revive them. I talked to a man one time, he was a real hell-raiser and a drunk. And I ran into him down in the little town below where I live. He had a feeling or he heard from somebody that I had written a book on this subject, and he said, “Hey Rose, what happens to you when you die?” I knew he had a heart attack, so I said, “Well, why don’t you tell me what happens? You went through it.” He said, [gruffly] “Nothing. Nothing.” He said, “Things went black and they stayed black until I woke up.”

Now of course the thing was that probably, what we don’t know, is that maybe all the time they were black he could have been talking, so his awareness was still there, but it was blocked out of his consciousness was blocked out. [sentence] That is, his self-consciousness. But a lot of these cases of people who live strictly an instinctive path don’t seem to have any recollection after they wake up.

dw4-03:02

But then you have the party that you observe them as they’re dying. The majority of people who have a devotion, a devotional approach to religion, a religious figure, or a strong tie with their family, like with a parent, when they approach death this is who will come and get them. This is who comes and gets them. They see the mother; the mother comes and gets them. Strangely enough the father, I don’t know what happens to him, but he very seldom shows up. Not even on the battlefield, the boy who gets hit and he’s dying, he hollers for his mother. He never hollers for his father. You’d think the old man could help him out. We? he? could drag her into it. [?]

dw4-03:44

And then you have the intellectual – he’s the fellow who, he doesn’t see – the people leave, in the intellectual, when the man has transcended toe emotional or devotional – he witnesses vistas or scenery, or endless exploration or adventure. That’s the type of stuff he describes. And you’ll see this. When you go through these people [cases] that they are either visited by – the emotional person is visited by the, by Jesus, if they believe in Jesus. He comes and gets them. Or if it’s a strong family tie the mother comes and gets them, or some brother. Sometimes a dead brother, dead father, I don’t know, but it’s always a relative.

dw4-04:29

But these other – the intellectual people have an idea of an endless paradise or something, or a contemplative, conceptualized idea of where they’re going. [move sentence?] And the philosophic people, when they go, they become one with the landscape. They don’t see the landscape, they become one with that which is.

And when you start to go through, there’s going to be more and more books written on life after death. When you get these case histories from doctors, nurses and that sort of thing, you’ll find they all fit into one of these categories, which tells me that people don’t go to the same place.

dw4-05:12

Q. At the ?? stage/ I think you’d say? that would be intuitional? people?

R. Yes, I think so. I told you I saw a materialization up here in Delaware, Ohio. And of course, we were not there to visit relatives, we were there to ask questions. So several of these came out and we would say, “Have you seen Jesus?” And I have never – I mentioned it in my book – I never got a direct answer. Some of them would say, “Well we have heard that he’s here.” But they were very much attached to the person; i would be like a parent, a brother or something of that sort, supposedly. And even the idea of, well, there was another answer they gave: “We have seen his light.” They said that. They had seen his light. But I never encountered one that said they had met him face to face.

dw4-06:15

And of course the interpretation the spiritualists give on this is that a person has to be prepared, you know, he has to be put in a decompression chamber or something so he can stand the differences in atmospheres or something, and be able to stand the light, so to speak.

[silence]

It’s quarter after 9, is that what it is? If you have any questions, fire them away.

dw4-07:03

Q. inaudible

R. Yes, I corresponded with Gerald Hurd [?] years ago. He was a Vedantist in those days. In fact I visited the Vedantist temple years ago [add to Rose timeline in Wiki] My mother in law had a hotel right across the Hollywood Boulevard I think it is, the Vedanta temple. You look down on the Hollywood Boulevard.

Q. I was there a? year? ago?

R. Did you see Kirpalvananda? [?] When I was out there years ago there was a little Hindu name Kirpalvananda, seemingly a very wonderful person. See, their avatar was Ramakrishna. They had a big picture of him inside there. But I never saw – the thing that I comment on these – I stuck my nose into every cult and every religion that would let me. And I tend to sift them rather rapidly; you only have one life in so many years, and I came to the conclusion that I would examine those that had a system. Some of them are very inspiring. Krishnamurti is a very inspiring person; but he doesn’t bother to give you a system. He doesn’t say, “Here’s how you go about it.

dw4-08:24

Now you have other things like our classical religions that are full of systems, but seemingly full of holes like a Swiss cheese. There’s no real hope in them. After awhile you get the idea that there’s too much system and no foundation. That they’re not going to take you anyplace.

dw4-08:47

But I thought that the Vedanta movement was a very gracious type of investigative body. And I think Herb is still living, isn’t he? Is he gone?

Q. inaudible

R. He was a friend of Huxley if I’m not mistaken.

Q. inaudible

R. That’s Aldous Huxley, isn’t it? Is he dead?

Q. He died a few days after Kennedy died.

R. Is that right? I lost track. He kind of became inconspicuous. In those days, that’s when the new cults were coming in, you know, getting millions of followers and that sort of thing. And the older – I considered the more respectable types of leaders and teachers – were forgotten. Also I spent a good bit of time down below L.A. at Oceanside [need year] Max Heindel – are you acquainted with his group there, the Rosicrucians? There are three forms of Rosicrucians in this country: The AMORC, Max Heindel, and there’s one up there in Pennsylvania, Quakertown I think it is.

[something happens]

R. [laughs] You’ve been saved. You’ve been spared.

dw4-10:13

Q. [Mahler] Just out of curiosity, do you notice any difference in the quality of the cults and the groups now, in the 1970s or back in the 1960s or ??

R. Well of course, I can only give you my view. I feel that there’s a – first of all, I think the cults are vanishing. And the ones that haven’t vanished have degenerated into expert business machines. They’re really making the dough, and that’s the noise before the end. Because when they go in for money, that’s, people will soon realize it, and then there will be a decay of that movement. And one by one they’re going down the drain. So there’s less attention being paid to them.

dw4-11:09

And I think that one of the reasons so much attention was paid to them – but a person had to be half crocked on dope before he could become snowed. I think that that helped. That helped a tremendous lot. That was part of the trip, in other words. So when they, whoever it was that managed to switch the dope on the kids, it sure quit their thinking. Instead of hallucinogenic drugs, most people are just taking uppers and downers. That has? nothing? psychedelic, but there seems to be a comparison [correlation?] between what the people are taking.

dw4-11:48

Now as somebody asked me about the percentages of people who would maybe join a monastery like Thomas Merton did, or the Chartreuse Monastery in France or Switzerland or wherever it is. [it’s in France] And they said, “Do you think that will diminish?” And I said, “No, these were constant.” This is what Bucke bring out: you’re always going to have the same percentages. This is the pyramid also. The base of the pyramid – the pyramid is supported by a base of ignorance. And as you go up you have, churches are supported by ignorant people. All your movements are supported by people who don’t strive for religious realization. And it’s only as you approach the top that you find active people. And it narrows down. But people who are very adept are very few, up in the pyramid.

dw4-12:48

So consequently, that point will always be there, seemingly almost as a result of the massive base. That it can’t help but produce something. That’s going to be a percentage of people that will never vary. I think we’re returning to that. We’re returning to the – in other words, the door is closed for those who were able to get in [sentence] and get something before they were destroyed by the thing that opened the door. I’m talking about the young people today. In other words, dope opened the door and dope would also kill them, or destroy their mind. Dope furnished the inspiration, in other words.

Most of the people who attended my lectures six years ago were bombed out of their heads. And they really, intuitively seized on what I was talking about and come up and say, “Wow,” and forget it in a half hour. [laughs] Because they couldn’t act. They couldn’t carry out a consistent action. So what you had to do, somebody from outside had to reach in and get them by the back of the neck, took? off the dope and try to keep their head clear for awhile. And some religious movements have done that, and it’s been for their own benefit that some of them have it. [haven’t?] Have [gap?] been flushing, went down the drain.

dw4-14:26

Q. My ?? she ?? reached to it – had? the? flu? ?? When you were 32. you? had the experience from 12 years, really constantly looking for that. After you’ve reached that ?? did you stop, did you think you could have gone further?

R. There’s nowhere to go. There’s absolutely nowhere to go.

Q. Do you feel that it has really changed you a lot?

R. No. No. It made me realize what I already was. I don’t think it changed me. I’m the same bastard I was before. You don’t change. I don’t think you change. I think you realize, that’s all. I’m capable of doing the same things I was capable of doing before. The only thing is, now I know I’m supposed to do it. Before, I thought I was doing it.

I think that maybe some things – and the compulsion is not there. When there’s no fever there, then of course maybe some things don’t happen, that’s all. I think – in other words, I can’t get interested in things that other people are interested in. I can’t get interested in drinking. I don’t know, it just doesn’t – or smoking. I don’t – I just can’t smoke. Because it doesn’t mean anything to me. I did [smoke] before. I imagine I could again if I took a notion. But what I’m talking about, my basic personality I think is pretty much the same.

dw4-15:59

Q. Do you feel you ?? and so forth?

R. Oh, definitely, definitely. See the thing is, nothing matters. This is the point. Nothing particularly matters. But the thing is, you think if a person, if nothing mattered, I’d go out and rob a bank. But I don’t, because that doesn’t matter either. But basically, I feel feel very much the same person, the same personality, that is.

dw4-16:29

Q. Do you only experience iyt once, or can you ...?

R. No, you can re-experience it. It’s a death experience, and no one wants to go through death twice if you can help it. Unless you’re going to stay there. Because it’s very painful. What actually happens is that you die. You die mentally and physically. By? that? I mean, in the process, I told you kind of jokingly that I went nuts. But I didn’t go nuts, my head stopped. And I thought, “This is it. They’ll haul me away and put me in an institution. But that was what was happening. I wasn’t losing my mind; my mind had just stopped.

dw4-17:11

And then of course the next thing is you think your physical body is dying. You think, “It won’t be very long before I’ll be dead.” And of course, something inside of you puts up a fight. And then you go through the same thing a dying person goes through, it’s resignation. You think, “So what.” And when that happens, then of course – what happened was I moved out. I just left my body. I didn’t fight to hold it. I was in Seattle, Washington and I remember watching the Cascade Mountains as I went out. The street, I saw the street, saw the people in the street.

dw4-17:45

Q. Was there an observer there? I mean, what was happening from ??

R. Well, yes. I thought? There’s an account of it in the book I wrote, I wrote in the back end, there’s an account in there. That something very strange happened – maybe you can call it strange – there was a dichotomy. In other wwords, what we have is a dichotomy in our understanding of ourselves. dw4-18:08

min 20

Q. period of 10 or 12 years

R. There’s no where to go

Q changed you

R. No realize what I already was

I’m the same bastard that I was before

I can’t get interested in the things other people are

my basic personality is pretty much the same

Q. values?

R. oh yes. Because nothing matters

Q. only once

‘R. you can re-experience it. it’s death and nobody wants to die

my mind had just stopped

something inside you puts up a fight.

“So what?”

Seattle Cascade

saw the people in the streets

Q. observer

R. account in the book

what we have is a dichotomy in ourselves

Cascades

my hotel window faced on them

could see all of humanity

endless hoards of people climbing

refers to diagram

I was the fellow who was watching the show

I was watching the creation

became aware of all-ness and nothingness simultaneously

produces a realization that takes you into your real self

Q. existentialism, Sartre

doesn’t matter to me

Q. other religious system

R. seize the podium

I do not argue.

realize new values in the Catholic Church after I left it

people on different levels, maybe just a different door

I’m not talking about religious politics

like the old farmer said, there are many [paths to the top of the hill]

side sh4 ends at 28:17

Footnotes

End