1983-0626-Are-We-Complete

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Title	1983-0626-Are-We-Complete
Recorded date	June 26, 1983
Location	Possibly Akron. 2 1/2 hours from farm.
Number of tapes	MJ = 2 x 60 ; Inventory and RA = 2 x 90
Other recorders audible?
Alternate versions exist?
Source	MJ, RA
No. of MP3 files	MJ: 4 files: 30 min; 31 min; 31 min; 31 min
Total time	123 minutes
Transcription status	Transcribed by Jake
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?	SearchWithin.Org
Remarks	Needs page formatting - subheaders need to be refined
Audio quality
Identifiable voices	Intro by Dave Gold? Al Fitz. Harnish? John Kent, Possibly Helen Harnish.
URL at direct-mind.org	https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1983-0626-Are-We-Complete
	For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org
Revision timestamp	20240327145719

Notes

Location unknown.

a) Intro by Dave Gold?

b) Intro says "TAT farm about 2 1/2 hours from here"

c) not Kent because he talks about going to Kent.

"See me or see Al at the back table"

Chautauqua last week, another in about 3 weeks

update 2024

Alternatively could have been Brimfield Township or maybe Springfield, Summit County. (Gary gave an event in Springfield, told me Mar 27, 2024.)

Actually, Columbus is 2 1/2 hours from the farm also. Need to listen again for cues.

Title, etc

ARE WE COMPLETE?

Transcript of a talk by Richard Rose

Transcription

I noticed something the other day and its been on my mind ever since. This business of truth.... If you have a disease, there's a true cure, there's a true medicine. If you have a psychological problem there's a true psychology. There's only one true psychology. There are not two or three true psychologies.

When you go to school today you find out there's different schools of thought which certain groups of people endorse in psychology, and they're all supposedly true. 'Especially if they're accepted by the political group at a certain mental hospital or university.

I went at this thing because when I was 21 years of age -- which was a good while ago -- I saw the politics of education then. I saw that authority doesn't bring the truth. Authority is merely a political method of getting things done..... With chemistry you can't kid people. With physics you can't kid people. 'But with psychology you can, because nothing is proven. You're dealing with abstract manners, and a person can come up and weave a garment out of gold clothe that's invisible, and people say, "Well that sounds logical. Maybe its the truth." If you get two or three hundred professors, or a couple of degenerate experts -- such as Fritz Perls -- to endorse something, and people like that type of psychology -- you're going to get your psychology system warped, and this is what's happened to a good deal.

What I started to tell you a little while ago, was something I noticed in the business of continued inconsistencies in the way the American people live, and possibly people throughout the world. Our bureaucratic structure is responsible for a lot of the evils in our learning system. For instance, the big worry when you go to college is are you going to be funded when you get out. If you're learning to be a physician, you don't have to worry about being funded. But if you're getting a degree in social studies or psychology, you're almost going to have to be funded. You're may have to create some lunatics in order to have a mental health depot to take care of them. Which I think they are doing rather efficiently by virtue of their chemotherapy -- to cut things short.

What struck me was.... We had a Chataqua down at the farm and we had a speaker who was a behavioristic psychologist. He was a teacher. He wasn't a practicing psychologist, he was a university teacher. 'So god knows how many people he was able to infect. The thing was that he was speaking without reason, he was speaking without logic. He was speaking from a political viewpoint. 'Because everybody likes it. They like behaviorism. They like to think that people can cure people, by inducing them into a certain drug state, or altering their drug state with another drug. 'Or by a mass amount of inducing a state of mind in people that they think this is going to be alright. The result is an extreme drift in the country towards behavioristic psychology.

This is alright if we take some of their tenets and are honest with it. For instance, we are basically a bunch of conditioned reflexes. We are basically only reactors. From this premise they're valid. But the thing is, what every human being has been trying to do ever since they started reading the books of the Bible back in the time of Christ, was to somehow adjust their own conditioned reflexes. 'To somehow have a better life by going in from a different door. 'Because there was no chemistry. There was no brain-nerve understanding at the time. They just observed people's habits.

So out of all this muddle..... we come to the conclusion, for instance, that people can vote the truth. In other words, because 51% of the people vote something -- this is the truth. God must be on the side of the voters. But those people can raise an army and god may not be on their side and the army may not be victorious. So it is basically nothing but a human vote. The other thing is that those 51% or 99% can be wrong. The truth is the truth regardless of the normal curve. The normal curve does not make a truth. The normal curve basically means nothing more that there's a certain percentage of people that over-balance in believing, in whatever you want to believe, whether its religion or politics or whatever's subjective. 'That can't be proven, incidentally. It goes back to belief.

The country was founded on this type of thing, which we've been addicted to, which is belief or acceptance through plurality. When 51% percent of the people vote for George Washington, he becomes President. In this constitution that we drew up, and in the rules thereafter, we came across these words, that all of us are to be treated equal, because all of us were created equal. I was thinking about that the other day, but you hear these things so much that you pay no attention to them.

This implies, that whoever drew that up, made an edict back there that we had something that was equal. What was it? It couldn't be our sex. It couldn't be our bodies. It couldn't be our mental ability. Some are stronger. Some are weaker. What was basically this thing that we were created equal about? It had to be something internal. Right? Or tell me if I'm wrong. We'd have to been based on the human soul. The inner spirit of man..... In other words, we announced almost by national edict that the human being had a soul. 'And in this was his equality, and because of this he should be treated justly, equally, and when you killed him you said, "God have mercy on your soul" and not on your body.

So now, here comes in a whole new group of psychologists who don't believe in a soul. Now these people are being funded by that same government. I can't understand the fact that there are so many intellectual and intelligent graduates can't see the discrepancies that go on here. If we are treating only bodies, then there's no need for equality. Lets get it back to common sense. If there is no soul, then we must be judged according to our inequalities, not that which is equal in all of us. We're going to have to face this somewhere along the line, because these people come right out and say there is no soul, there is no mind.

These are the people that are teaching today's generation of young psychologists.

Now, why am I so imperative about this? Number one.... this is only one thing, this is only the tip. You can look through government as opposed to educational systems, and you can see the chicanery that goes on with almost every profession. Every profession.... first of all they are brain-washed in college because the educational system does not want to appear inadequate.

I talked in Kent years ago right after the men were shooting the place up. I told some of the boys, "You're mistaken rebelling about the war in Vietnam. That is not going to do any good, or harm, because we're going to lose 50,000-100,000 people one way or another. But what matters to you is something that you can control here, right here where you are at, and that's the college system." A college system that makes old men out of people before they get there PhDs.

When they get their PhDs they're an old man. Then they've got to out and try to start all over on the domestic scene, readjust themselves to what they were maladjusted to all through college, which was the opposite sex. Invariably, my guess is, a great percentage of them will be so maladjusted that they will be poor people to teach anything to people about compatibility. They might as well forget it, because they are the most incompatible people on earth -- are some of your PhDs. I came to the conclusion a long time ago. I'm not talking from prejudice. I'm talking from discovery. I have discovered a true psychology. It's open, my books are open. They're open for controversy. I have healed people with the product of these books. I have straightened people's lives out. I have been talking for ten years. About 20% of the people here tonight are people who have been with my group in this area -- one area or another -- for 6-7-8 years, at least. If you talk to any of them, they can go into detail if you wish.

But this works. We have people we know who were put on stellazine and they're addicted to stellazine. Which is wonderful, because it keeps the psychiatrist working. I had a boy in Pittsburgh that came down to my place. He had a tremendous inferiority complex. He had a masters degree in biology. At our Chataqua he was one of the speakers, this last time. He's now teaching up in the Boston area. He's married. His inferiority complex is completely whipped out. He's aggressive, one of the best speakers we have, in fact. He couldn't open his mouth above a whisper, at that time. He was hooked on cigarettes. He was hooked on anything that wanted to hook him. He didn't resist anything.

So I had a conversation with him going down from Pittsburgh to Wheeling one time in the car, and I said, "Your trouble is that you've split yourself, in order to punish yourself. You're a masochist." He kept talking about himself in the third person. I said, "All you have to do is stop that, and you'll be free." So he went back up.... They were sitting. There was a psychologist, who did nothing -- a psychiatrist really, not a psychologist. You can't work with psychology until you're a licensed psychologist. That means you've got to have a PhD. and in most states you've got to pass a test, which keeps out the people who didn't go through the apprenticeship or don't talk the right language. That means politics.

But anyhow... He went up to this group and there's about ten of them sitting there. There was a psychiatrist sitting there with a little pad making notes... or maybe just scribbling to pass the time away. Because it didn't matter what they said. He'd ask them a question: "Do you have a headache. When did the headache start?" or "Do you have an obsession or a fetish? When did the fetish start?" Just simple little questions that you keep throwing at the people to keep their mind occupied. He stood up and he said, "If you people want to get healed, there's an old guy down in West Virginia that can take care of you." And he said, "That's what happened to me. I went down there and I got healed." So he got up and walked out. Of course I had some people that attended the next lecture who I couldn't handle...... you know.... I had no cages to put them in. (laughter) Some of them were violent. Regardless, they sensed that there was something.

I don't believe in insanity, except as a brain lesion. I believe the biggest part of the trouble with people is that they get into complexes or habits. You can get into an alcohol habit or you can get into a dope habit, and that will leave a distinct state of mind with you. To live with that, and to try to go back and live with people who have another state of mind such as "Make the million, real quick, at anybody's cost" -- there's a bit of a clash there. So a lot of people just feel that they don't fit in. They prefer to maybe retreat and hide, just stay out of sight.... and become a zombie.

The reason I'm saying this is that there's an overview to take. You cannot study the mind with the body. This is the great fallacy in behavioristic psychology. You cannot study the mind with a testube, with chemotherapy, with chemicals. You can only study the mind, weakly, with the mind. 'With the Mind -- introspection. You'll get a weak idea, not a complete idea.

But the only way somebody in the first grade of school studies, is to be taught by somebody who's been through the eighth grade. The only way you can go to college, is to be taught by somebody who's gone to college. In other words, you don't have a true perspective of yourself all the time, unless there's some sort of comparison. So that the true way to studying the mind is from some vantage point above the mind. I'm not talking about anything mysterious. In other words, you become an observer. I have a little booklet I've written called The Psychology of the Observer. You become your own observer. This doesn't have anything to do with someone observing you. This has to do with you observing yourself -- inside. 'The internal operations of your mind, inside. You hedge-hop over the body. Because the body is heavily programmed, from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg, and it starts breaking down into different cells, and classifications of cells. All of it runs according to pattern.

The only way you can do this is to somehow step outside. Don't conform to the body and pretend you're conforming to the body, when you're not. This is another thing. In other words, we are basically animals. That's our aim -- to rise above animals. An animal can't heal an animal. To heal someone you have to become a little better than an animal.

Yet, these behavioristic psychologists would have us believe that we are all animals and there's nothing to hope for but animal behavior, and to encourage animal behavior, encourage degeneration. He may get angry if someone says "Be Moral." Get angry, this is the reaction. "Who's telling these children not to have fun!" This is what one fellow said. In other words, having fun and paying taxes is the field of the modern psychologist. "Get these people back into society."

I heard the other day -- somebody gave a lecture -- and they said that the only thing that mattered in psychology was to make people compatible, so that they could get along, so that they could go back to work, so that they could pay their taxes. 'And if they had to enter into any sexual perversion to get that done, or if they had to educate their children into perversion, that's all right. 'Keep the children open so that nothing will impede their mixing -- with this great cesspool, called humanity. Now, I didn't intend to take that direction alone with my talk. What I'm trying to get at is that we have gross misconceptions on a tremendously large basis.

I've had people majoring in psychology, just a few months from getting their degree, want to drop out, when they listen to me talk for two or three months. I never encouraged them to because I'm hoping that a few psychologists will emerge, that are not indebted to the degenerative type of behaviorism that is sweeping the country. So I encourage them to stay.

Now, how do we get at this business of correct thinking? I maintain the truth is the truth in everything you do. There is only one solution -- when the neighbor's dog bites your kid. There aren't two solutions. I mean there's always one that's best. Maybe you can't get away with the best one, so you have to get the second best. But I'm saying there is a truth in every thing. Training the mind to see the truth is the first step of any scientist. When you go into a qualitative or quantitative chemical exercise, you're not in there to kid yourself, or to find out what you want to believe, or to validate what you want to believe, or to validate what's good for society. You're going there to find the truth.

Nobody. Nobody has a definition of sanity for all these hucksters that have graduated. Nobody knows what insanity is. Nobody has defined thought. And yet we talk about thought. I had one psychiatrist, when he was pumping stellazine into one of our people in Brown University, say that, "We have a chemical for every thought." He bragged. "This fellow thinks. We'll shoot him up with something that makes him change his way of thinking." Meaning that if the way of thinking doesn't fit into the group around him.

So, to do this, you have to begin at a very early age. Any time is never too late. 'To think the truth. 'To face the truth -- whatever it is. If you can do that, then you make of yourself a functional computer. You make yourself a being, that doesn't want the untruth, doesn't want to kid itself. Every place I look today -- on television -- people are getting together to kid themselves. 'To play-act a certain little role. They're going to be helping their fellows. They're making sandwiches down in some church to feed somebody, and this exalts them. 'And nobody in this country needs sandwiches that bad -- that they'd have to go to church to get them.

Regardless, we've got these games going on all the time. They interview a little girl, and they say, "What do you want to do?" "I want to help people." This is nonsense. This is a damn lie. Everybody on this planet wants to help themselves.

Okay.... Face that. Help yourself to the best spirituality. Help yourself to the best psychology. This is what counts. Learn your own mind. 'Cause when you come down... five or ten minutes is you're unlucky enough to die slowly -- you'll face this at some time in your life. If you're lucky you'll get hit with a Mack truck and you won't have to think. But some time this computer runs all this stuff through rapidly and says, "You have been a fool." 'Because you climbed aboard the wrong band wagon. You climbed on the wrong freight train, going the wrong way. Now, how you going to get back in twenty minutes? This is the truth about the human mind. 'And you'll get it before then. Sometimes people get wised-up by little incidents. You know -- disappointments in life. They'll start to go back and recheck what went wrong, what went wrong in their heads.

Lecture of Questions

'To get to this point. 'To bring your minds to this point. I've got a couple of sheets of paper here, that I'll read to you. When I'm through, or... when you're tired, we can discuss this.

What do you know for sure?

Does a man own a house, or does the house own him?....... I often see people fishing, and I think, "The fish has got him." (chuckles)

Does a man have power, or is he over-powered?

Is man a predator or victim?

Does man enjoy, or is he consumed?........

In other words, all this behavioristic psychology promises a big lollipop. We're all going to have a-wonderful-happy-time-together. They are the most miserable-looking people I've ever encountered, and to hear them talk -- they have no hope. They have no hope. 'Unless they can stagger into somebody who replenishes all the energy they have... wasted. 'And now the lack of it interferes with their thinking. In other words, I don't think you can think.... You can't do everything at once.... To be a thinker, to be an introspective thinker is even more. Just to be a thinker, you have to shut off the out-going part of the computer. You can't let it run wild. So if you want to think -- shut off the tap -- and then you'll be able to think better.

Does a man really reason, or is he so programmed?....... How much of this stuff we call reasoning -- analyze it. See how much of it is programming. "This is very logical." Ok, analyze it, and see how much of it is programming.

Can a man learn that which he really wishes to by himself alone?

Can a man become? Of course you're going to say, "Become what?" 'And I'll just say, Become! 'Just become. 'Not become a plasterer, a bricklayer. I say just become. In other words, "Who are you? 'And what are you going to become?"

How shall he know what he should become? I kind of determined on that when I was twenty-one. I realized before that I was kidding myself.

Why build ant-hills before knowing what an ant is?

Why do we build conceptual towers of Babel about human thinking before we know that which thought is? ...... How can we go into a science... How can anyone have the brass to go into a science without defining.... How can you prescribe chemicals. This is what happens every day.

Down at Providence, Rhode Island, I was talking to a psychiatrist that was pumping this fellow full of stellazine. Before I had asked him, "What is your diagnosis on this man?" He said, "We don't have any. We can't get him to talk enough." And I said, "Well, what are you giving him." He said, "Stellazine." I said, "That's the first time I ever heard of a doctor giving medicine without a diagnosis." I said, "I think you're a fraud." But he thought I was endangering his balanced set-up there. He had all these people convinced that he was helping them.

How can we dare to define thought without knowing the source or cause of all thought? ..... Where did it come from, or the essence of thought? What is thought? What is the very essence of it? Now, I'm not asking these foolishly, because I maintain that I have gone to the point where I knew this, or I wouldn't be asking it. I have the answer. I've had it for ten years. I've had it for longer than that, but I couldn't talk. In other words, I couldn't find the necessary words beyond a poem in a back of a book, to describe the experience I had that showed me what thought was, and what the human being was.

I don't think that you can just see it. You can't study behaviorism of an ox by studying his footprints. You can't study the mind of a person by analyzing his protoplasm, or his neuro-chemistry. Incidentally, I think the neuro-chemistry is going to bring out more and more of the things I have spoken about ten years ago, without any scientific knowledge. It came from a knowledge of my overview of the human mind. Like the neuro-transmitters today, the prostaglandins, seratonin. These things are the seeds of genius, that we are wasting. So there's a point there, if you want to make a note. If you want to start thinking, and stop wasting. When we describe bouncing, do we describe the striking object or that which is struck? In other words, you throw a ball against the wall -- which bounces? Apparently it looks like the ball does. But we know scientifically that both bounce. So bouncing isn't the ball, its an act.

Can you start thinking? Get down to business of thinking now. Try to start thinking sometime. Did you ever start thinking? Did anybody here ever start thinking? Did anyone here ever stop thinking -- unless they got hit in the head with something hard? Can you say, "OK now I'm going to stop. In a little while I'll start thinking again."? We have no control over it. 'Absolutely no control. Every thought depends upon the previous thought -- until you run out of some sort of electrical compound, that neglects the synapses, so the voltage doesn't get there.... so the brain relaxes, and the body goes asleep.

Is thought something received, or something projected? How much thought is projected into your head -- now not by the previous thought alone, but something outside is able to come in, better than you could ever insert something in there yourself. In other words, you could be thinking of raising a field of potatoes, and a pretty girl walks down the road in a bathing suit, and that injects itself into your thought. You weren't planning on that. You were trying to figure out how to raise bigger, better potatoes. But how much is projected into our thinking mechanism?

Is thought a sort of somatic effluvium? It is a tangible, physical substance -- not meaning electricity. 'Like a tenuosity, an ectoplasmic tenuosity?

Do we think, or are we caused to think. We ought to change perhaps, the saying that "We think." 'Although I say it is possible to start thinking.

Is negative thinking, as commonly discussed, negative to man or negative to nature? You're negative to the other fellow, that's all, generally. When people accuse you of negative thinking -- you do what they don't agree with. That's basically what it amounts to.

One of the things I think we have to take into account, is that there is a sovereign area of nature. Most everyone senses that you can't violate that. I can remember when acid was heavy on the scene, and some came down to my farm. They looked at the trees and started worshiping them, and I thought "Oh, there's something wrong with these people." You know..... "The grass was beautiful." I'd been looking at it for fifty years and I didn't see any beauty in it -- it was work taking care of it! The thing is, that there was a strong vein through these people that saw a purposiveness in nature. 'And they'd say that. But they were enemies of nature, by the same time they said it.

The same thing is, as I pointed out, there's a discrepancy in our political and our psychological thinking. There's a discrepancy in our understanding of nature. A lot people think that as soon as you enter into a psychological or spiritual path, that you have to make an enemy of nature. This isn't true. I think that one of the worse things that happen in modern psychology is that very thing -- is to ignore nature and think that we're going to re-make it. "We're going to re-vote it."

I had one sociologist tell me that she was going to create an African culture with the help of some other people, and when enough people came to believe it, it would be a fact because enough people believed it. The theologians, years ago, by the millions, believed that if they believed in god in enough numbers, god would exist. So millions and millions of them devoutly believed and died, and today -- they killed him, or tried to. In other words, it doesn't take much of another god stepping up and taking his place. Regardless, this belief has a strong effect on the human mind, but not upon fact. Its not going to change. ......

[gap in tape]

Now here's another angle on thought. (Is thought like) the radio that generates the message that comes from its speaker?

I think there is a bit of belief. I heard a speaker that talked as though there were certain chemicals developed in the body, and these transfered to the brain through neuro-transmitters which caused thought. I'm more inclined to believe that they facilitated sensory precepts coming through and recording. Is thought limited to the brain? In other words, do we think with our brain? I don't know how many people have got into this possibility, whether we think with our brain or our thinking is elsewhere. If you want to discuss it, keep those things in your head and we'll get into it. I think a tremendous lot of people think that all our thinking is right there.

Here's a similar angle. When a tree bends over, does it create wind by waving its branches? In other words, we look at things and look at the effect, rather than the cause. The trees are moving, and we can't see the wind, but we can see the trees. The body is moved by thought, we can't see the thought, so it must be the body that is creating the thought. See, the same way as a tree would create wind by waving its branches. We get back to this business of the voting booth. Can theological facts be established by voting? This is tried too. You hear it in the paper. 'The bishops are meeting someplace, and they've decided that this which was blasphemy before is legal now.' But I just throw it out for what its worth. Can't we disguise what's going on? Can we abolish certain things which we said were true interpretations of divine law.

Is Mary the mother of god, or is humanity the mother of god, or neither?

Is god determined by victorious armies?

Is virtue established by psychological edict? I can remember the time when most young people had virtue, and they looked spiritual to me. I don't see any spiritual people anymore. Children don't even look spiritual. I think laisez-faire is sweeping the earth. Parents are proud of indoctrinating their children into degeneracy, thinking they're normal. 'This is the latest thing. This is the way to go.'

Is virtue established by ecclesiastical vote? 'Or by the requisites of our ultimate essence?

First of all, is there a blueprint, or isn't there a blueprint? Where do we get so many fat-headed people who think they drew the blueprint? 'A million years ago.... This is the outcome. What's here today is the result of a million years in the making -- according to our own scientists. What makes people think they're drawing the blueprint?

What is sin -- an offense against yourself, and offense against your fellow man, or an offense against god? Is a offense against god recognized by divine outcry -- earthquake, or cosmic catastrophe? (Evidently I don't believe in sin.)

Is it a sin to eat meat? Are the animals our brothers? Are they possessed of intelligence and soul? Ask yourself that -- seriously. Are we anything special? Do animals sin when they eat other animals? Or are such sinning animals pardoned for keeping ecology in balance? The powers met and said, 'Pardon them,' because they're keeping ecology in balance. They're no longer murderers. Is it wrong to kill except for food? If so, do we do wrong by not eating the people we kill? In other words, this is another extreme. On the one side of the thing is an extreme laissez-faire, an extreme degeneracy, debauchery. On the other side is a rebellion against an impossible logic. Theology proposed us a way back before we knew how to read and write.

Who is knowledgeable about good? The idea of goodness -- what is 'goodness?' What's a good meal? To a cat it's a mouse.

Is good that which we desire, or that which is itself good? Let's look at this thing. What are 'things in themselves?' Not by what we describe, or what we like to believe about them.

Is evil the child of good, or is it a twin?

If a man drives a horse through a plate glass window, should the man be prosecuted or the horse?

If a man steals or robs to feed his children, should we prosecute the man, or that which drove him -- the children? 'Or maybe his wife.

If a man rapes a girl, should we prosecute: (a) the man; (b) the girl who tempted him; or (c) his ancestors for his genetic inheritance, glandular inclination; or (d) the guy who wrote the blueprint. What is equality. Again we get back to this thing of equality. This is a big euphemism. I think that we are trapped. We are so confused that whenever a policeman walks up to us and says, 'That's the law," we kneel down an kiss his foot. 'Because we're so confused by the things that are apparently accepted by the public, and built up by the media immediately. These things are encouraged.

Was Samson equal to Delila?

Is a baby equal to a dying man?

Are you only half of a plan by virtue of not possessing both sexes?

Is peace of mind more important than global peace, or herd peace? I mean that's a very serious question there I think. Is peace of mind, your own peace of mind, more important that going out here and trying to solve the problems of the world? I turn on the television once in a while and get irritated. I think 'Oh those dirty devils, they're doing it again!' And then I have to say 'Shut up, Don't pay any attention to that. You're not going to change it. Nobody's going to change it.' You can't hold the tide back with one hand.

Who or what are you? This is a very serious question. It's not just a cliche, a question given in the form of a cliche. I'm very serious about this.... We never bother to.... In other words, people sitting here now, ten years from now, will have an entirely different definition of who they are then. And they will criticize the person who is sitting here now. So that means you don't know who you are now, because you will disagree with that person ten years from now. You disagree now, with the person when you were ten years old. You say, 'That boy was a fool. That young man who went out on this escapade was a fool. This young girl who went on this other escapade was a fool. I'm not that type of fool anymore. I'm a mature person.' See? But talk to somebody ten years older, and see what they say about the people at this point.

Are you rather a complex organism or a cell-colony? This is some of the biologists' simplification. In the book I mention a class of thinking which is called "oversimplification" and theory-building, just building up theories. You've got a theory, and you patch it up and say 'Well, it could be this way. Yes, and these other things will fit into this theory...." So we get a pretty good little jigsaw puzzle put together and it looks harmonious, and we accept it. These are the things if you're looking for the truth that you'll get wise to and say, 'Hey, here comes another concept-structure. Let's examine it and see why we conceived this structure.' Did we conceive it from facts? And I'm not saying that you can get facts on a subjective matter. This is another thing. There is a way though, of getting less garbage, and less garbage, and a greater approach to fact than something that was manifestly ridiculous. This is the only way you can go. I call it retreating from error. 'Not striking out and saying, 'This is the truth because professor Jones says so.'

This is the way I think you have to go with an analysis of yourself also. You don't have any point to start from, so you have to pick out the most manifestly ridiculous aspects of your nature and somehow they'll change as you recognize it. And you go from there back to things that are less ridiculous, but will now be as you go forward increasingly ridiculous also.

[gap in tape]

Is the body programmed for death through the death gene? 'Following procreation. In other words, the day you're born, you're also numbered.

Is all religion and philosophy merely rationalization emanating from that computer to answer constant cellular awareness of death. Death always goes on in the cells, and our body is always aware of death, so that ultimately the computer has to become aware of it, without any help from outsiders. But we build up a rationalization so that we can go about playing the game of life.

Or is the universal belief in life after death an intuitive reading from that computer? 'A reading not completely translatable into computer symbols which are limited.

We touch on another subject which is necessary. In this business of subjective thinking, you can't do objective analyses. It'll eventually get to where you have to take a choice, and the only thing that can guide you is your intuition. And the intuition is a developed form of logic. Its a logical-emotional approach. In other words, you feel, and then you analyze it to make sure its not all feeling, that there is some message coming through from the computer. Consequently, your intuition sometimes can reach the accuracy of perhaps 95%. You may get some wrong readings on it. I think those 5% are readings from some wishful part of your nature that doesn't want to accept the reading. That's my catch. I think that a well-developed intuition will give you a correct answer if you cleared out all the wishful thinking, all the somatic-desire thinking.

I don't want to get into all these (reading from a sheet). I'm just throwing them out because these are factors of human thinking.

Is there a soul? Did it exist before the body, or must it be developed, grown or evolved. Are you here to talk along this line? There's a lot of terminology.

What is time? In other words, if you take Einstein's concepts of relativity and apply them to some of the theological concepts, you're inclined to start to pick out some of them like the Indian concept of the Atman and the Brahman, of the soul and the over-soul. 'The ray and the central sun-burst, that sort of thing, the image of the Brahman and the Atman. 'Because of the unity of space and time, meaning there's no such thing as time without space. There's no such thing as space without time.

What is time? Does time pass, or is it only you who passes?

Is space-time a stable matrix, while we are only transient visitors? How much of life is a mirage? How many times have wakened up and said, 'Am I dreaming? Or am I asleep and this is a nightmare?' Which is the nightmare? How can I wake up? Which is the most real at that moment. There's a reality which settles on you at that time, in which you are convinced is the Real Reality, and somehow when you wake up you'll slip back into something that wasn't quite as true as what you encountered in the nightmare.

Do we see this world infallibly or obliquely? When we talk about sanity, when the behaviorist talks about sanity, he talks about mundane sanity. '"small s" sanity. 'Molecules and cells working happily together to produce a reproductive tax-paying vehicle. When I talk about sanity, I'm talking about someone that Knows where they come from. 'That knows their Source. I use a capital "s" for that.

Are the senses infallible? I'm sure we know the answer to that.

Can you see, or hear, or feel, or smell the taste of time? Can you realize it with your senses? in other words.

Is time only a relative conceptualization?

What is the reality of time?

What's the relation between this word "time" and the word "duration?" Does the ant or amoeba interpret duration the same as man? 'Or does its time pass more slowly, or more swiftly? We see a fruit-fly that lives a few seconds or a few minutes. What's the duration of its experience, its thrill, its pain, whatever it goes through?

What is duration? What is the relation of this duration to the essential part of man? -- the person who perceives the duration.

What does a life-time feel like. Think it over. What do you think of your lifetime? Has it been a long time.... or a short time? '30 years, 40 years, 60 years? What's it feel like? I just wonder. I'm very serious. I'd like to know. Because mine doesn't feel like anything. Until I look in the mirror, then I feel bad. (laughter)

Does it feel differently to a child than to an old person? It seems like when I was a kid, time went very slow. I just couldn't get it moving fast enough. Now I don't have enough time. I talk to fast.

Do we remember a duration? Do we remember how long a pain lasted... when the pain occurred a year ago? What was the duration of that pain. Why is it that women who have babies forget their pain very quickly? The duration is forgotten.

Do we have a real sense of time when we hear a clock ticking? You might say, "Oh this is it. This is the unit of time."

Do we know what a second is, or what stretch of consciousness exists for others in that second? In other words, we have an ability to absorb a certain amount in a second. We have an ability for a certain amount of experience in a second. Does everybody have the same amount? Have you ever heard a clock ticking in a delirium?

If the mind can be distorted in a delirium or in an LSD trip, does the mind ever understand the true feeling of a second? I can remember a delirium when I was a child, and each second sounded like a bomb going off in my ear. The fever was high. I know it couldn't be anymore than a second, but it was a tremendous, painful duration.

What is nostalgia? Is it the soul's view of previous feeling? Take some of the instances that are very nostalgic to you and look back. Is that your mind, or is that something deeper? Pick up an image that was very dear to you.

Do space and time exist at all except in reference to us? What are space and time in themselves? Suppose we got a sort of common voice from people in other galaxies, and compared what everyone thought time was.

Do we have a true picture of Nature?

When we appreciate Nature as being beautiful, is such an appreciation an appreciation of Life, or one of Death? Did you ever notice that? When we watch the birds.... they're like undertakers. Every five minutes they bring in a worm, or a little bug. They make such beautiful noises. But when you analyze the pattern, this is a slaughterhouse. The planet is a continual, perpetual, screaming slaughterhouse. But we can interpret it as being very beautiful, and write poetry about it. Have you ever watched the war that goes on in a drop of water under a microscope. You get an idea there. Keep it down in that very small dimension. Everything is trying to eat everything else.

How many protozoans are required to sustain the world's metazoans? Can they be counted? How many protozoans are eaten alive every second? How many microscopic metazoans are eaten each second by larger metazoans? Is death painless for these beings? How many small metazoans are needed to feed one worm for a day, or one insect? How many worms or insects die every minute to feed the birds? How many worms or insects are needed to feed a pair of birds and their fledgling each day? Go on through this picture of nature and be realistic. Don't kid yourself. Anything -- whether its nature, politics, or whatever it is -- we are trained from the time we're little children into a fairy-tale life form. This fairy-tale life form may begin with believing that the little creatures are very beautiful, that the little kitten is very beautiful that grows up and eats a lot of little animals.

The next thing is that we go to the show and we're programmed, because there's a certain mood put out on how you should act, meaning how the top star and starlet play out their roles. It isn't real life. You can always be shocked when you find out the roles they play as opposed to their real-life habits. Nevertheless, these things influence the life of people, even the type of actors.

"Should self-definition have priority over concerns for health?"

In other words, "Why build ant-hills before knowing what an ant is?" Why don't start some time early in life finding out "Who's talking?" I think everyone realizes the need for this, especially when they've found that the person they thought was themselves was not their real self. So then there is evidence at that point -- an admission at that point -- that they should go back to the drawing board and see who's talking. When it gets to that, it becomes a laborious project at times. One of the excuses people give is that "I'm afraid if I get into too much of this, I'm liable to go crazy." That's possible. It depends on what your definition of going crazy is. I'm just saying, What do you think about it? Do you think it should have a priority, or should we be intimidated by a fear that something's going to fall out of the heavens and smash us if we start looking for our own definitions?

"Is the idea of personal immortality, before such an idea's been proven by experiencing immortality, any more than an egotistical idea?"

Immortality is a supreme egotism. But you've got to shoot in that direction. 'If that's true. If Oblivion is the answer, then Ok, then its not an egotistical idea. 'If it's the true answer. Almost everyone I run into says, "Oh, oh, Mr. Rose.... Someday you'll believe the way I do!" "Someday you'll go to church, or join this cult...., and you'll see these magnificent truths that I understand." But they haven't experienced death. So how do they know that they are immortal. Are they merely talking it up? Can a person do this legitimately, and is that anything more than an egotistical idea? Or on the same token, you've heard people say there's no life after death, there's nothing but oblivion. Is that person doing any more than taking the lazy way out? This is also an egotism, a reverse egotism of lethargy and laziness.

"Should the search for God have precedence over using another identified divinity as a healing utility."

A lot of healing is going on today, and its been history for hundreds of years. When a person gets into healing, its a "divine power." This of course quiets the A.M.A. because you can't put a person in jail if God's doing the healing, you have to put God in jail. A lot of your healers took that direction, when basically a lot of their healing was either a transfer of energy by a group of people, or creating a status of belief in which momentarily they were pepped up and got over a psychosis or neurosis of some sort -- permanently or temporarily.

Is it right to use this? Should we search for the god first or should we go out and heal and pretend we know him? Or should we go out and quote books and say "He's told me to tell you this, so you better believe it, because I'm now an authority." I believe -- getting into fundamentalism which is a touchy subject -- the book also says "Seek and ye shall find." When you seek in order to find, it means that you have doubted, or you wouldn't be searching. People who seek are not believers. You seek in order to get the truth, not some half-cooked, half-baked concept-structure which kept the people in order for a certain period of time.

I'd like to stop here, and I know there's some thoughts in your mind, I can feel them from here. Ha Ha. If you wish to voice them or ask some questions or discussion, lets get down to that.

How do you discover the nature of thought?

What I would have to do is take you back through. It could take hours to describe it. It could be something that's written down. Thought is automatic. All the thought is automatic. Until you can get behind and watch the thought, then you can proceed. Its basically a play between opposite. All thought depends on the polarity of to do or not to do. To eat or not to eat. To eat eggs or eat fish. To go to the right or go to the left. So all thinking ends up in this type of thinking. Its a polarity experience. Benoit points this out, if you've read Benoit's Supreme Doctrine. He points out the foolishness of trying to use linear thinking, which is composed of two poles, ignoring the grey in between -- which is the body of what we're studying. To see this view of black and white being grey -- excepts for the tips -- has to be done from a superior position, meaning above.

You have to observe your own thinking processes. This is correct meditation. Meditation that puts you to sleep, that has sonorous syllables and this sort of thing, is garbage. 'Plain garbage. You have plenty of time to sleep in a cemetary. You have plenty of time to relax then. Its a struggle.

Its a tremendous struggle to find out the nature of your own self. You do it by stepping behind yourself, watching the actions of an hour ago. You can't watch them now, right now. You can come up to that but you have to start in the past. By starting in the past, for one thing, the past is cooled off and its easier to see mistakes. Those same things if they were done just five minutes ago, you'd stand and declare were right, but two years from now you'll say "That was a mistake." This is the way you correct your thinking.

It's seen that that thinking isn't yours. How did you come to make a mistake? I maintain it's the decision of a physical brain umpire, the physical somatic mind. Its a mind. Its all located and dedicated to the survival of that body. This is the total range or domain of the modern psychologist. That's as far as he goes -- its the body.

But we step behind that and you watch this manipulation. First you watch just a reflex-thought. Then you watch what I call "gestaltic patterns." The word gestalt forty years ago had an entirely different meaning when I studied psychology. It meant thinking in patterns instead of a simple reflex. Now it means something else. Lord knows what, I don't try to keep up with it.

You see processes going on. I give the example in the book of a man driving a car. When you're driving a car, you pre-live, you preview what will happen under complex driving conditions. Then when a car pulls out in front of you, you may have all this worked out in your head. Its better that you do. When that happens, three limbs will move at once, two hands, maybe even two legs, you'll shove in on the clutch and the brake, two hands will swing the wheel the necessary direction. If there's an impact you might have sense enough to shut off the key. This'll all be done in a second -- one second. You couldn't begin to do this by reflex at the time. You couldn't say "I'm supposed to remember this, therefore I'll do this...." This happens just in a second. That's a gestaltic pattern in action.

These are processes. When you observe the mind from this viewpoint you begin to get a view of this animal, and then you realize you are watching the animal. This is the point. Throughout this you realize that your main faculty that enabled you to do that was intuition. Not only are you observing, but you're observing and you're intuitive. In starting to observe the intuition, and applying the intuition to different thoughts, you automatically graduate to another linear thinking and another pyramid of realization. That's the top one (in Psychology of the Observer diagram.) You don't go beyond that.

This is the overview. I hope I made it simple. Its difficult to make it simple with words. I use a diagram in the book of three pyramids on top and interlacing each other. This is the nature of thought. Thought until you get to observe it is strictly reaction, and a person without the observation of himself is an animal. He just has animal reactions, and the Umpire -- which some people call the conscience, that is similar to it, but the conscience isn't always interested with taking care of the body... We have this domain of nature and it's evident that the main purpose we're put here -- if you want to go to the truth of the heart of things -- is for biological reasons, reproduction, fertilization of a planet. This is what seems apparent to us.

Any spiritual thing that you grab, you grab by damn hard work. It's by relentless introspection, relentless watching this creature, until you know what thought is, and you know which thoughts you can stop, and insert something else in them. You develop a system of "milk from thorns." 'A profit from all this harassment instead of just having to put up with the unnecessary reminding of things projected into your being, that the big thing to do is turn on all your spigots and pretend you're enjoying life.

One question I didn't get to is "What is your definition of pleasure?" I'm always amazed at what people think pleasure is. My mother-in-law, about the time I married her daughter, made a remark I thought was one of the wisest things I ever heard her say, and maybe in that line anybody say. She said "Love is a trick that nature plays on two people to cause reproduction." We glorify it. We don't need to glorify it, we're victimized.

To get time to do this without violating nature is a problem. I don't believe in violating nature. This is what I maintain that the present psychologists are doing. They're violating nature by endorsing anti-natural acts. You can't violate nature and find out the truth. If you're a man, you're a man, if you're a woman, you're a woman -- don't kid yourself. Its that simple. You can't go down this road one foot by starting off with a lie, because somebody said "Its alright!" "We voted on it, and the votes in, and its OK." No. What is, is.

You have to go and add to. In other words, I found that there was this room for natural beings to reach at a supernatural condition. 'Not for natural beings to welter in the fact that all they can ever hope to have is a natural expression. This I think is the crux of the matter.

Q&A

Q. You said the sane person is the one who knows their source. Can you elaborate on that?

Yes.... I think that a person should never stop until they know the source. The word Source is the right word, because if you say anything but that you are postulating in advance. We should find out the answer. Strangely enough, when you find out the answer of any thing, you'll know the answer of everything. The truth in this matter, once it opens up, the answer to all of this becomes apparent.

I don't like to make statements without the need to launch into a description of subjective realization. The realization was more than just subjective. The realization was other-dimensional, meaning we are no longer on the relative scale. We are in a position where man is truly One.

People talk about it. They prattle about "be here now," everything's now, there's no space-time, but they are only prattling. They don't know that there's only now. They're just prattling about it. You'll hear this statement that "we're all One," and it sounds so good in terms of social compatibility, but they don't know that we're One. That's just prattling. When you know you're One, the politics won't matter. Nothing will matter. This is basically the point that you get. The thing the theologians stumble around on trying to prove with words, you realize with finality. From that you retreat your steps and then you say "Oh! Now I know why this other thing is! Now I know why we think this way."

I don't know why the blueprint was drawn. I don't know who drew the blueprint. The blueprint is there, beyond a shadow of a doubt. But at the same time the blueprint doesn't exist. Now if you can understand that, you can understand where my point of discovery was. This (world) does not exist, except as an experience. Yet to stand here and make a tremendous issue of misinterpretations of that which does not exist, seems a like a fallacy or foolishness.

Q. It's helpful what you have said because it helps you get pointed in the right direction, and you have it all laid out.

Everything I've said -- and I always like someone to remind me so I can say something else -- and that is Doubt me! Doubt everybody. What we've got stuck with is too many speculators, too many people who've written books of speculation, too many concept-structures, too many "easy way outs." When people don't know what thought is, they say it doesn't exist. When they don't know what a soul is, they say it doesn't exist. A question was brought up by a moderator to a scientist in a panel discussion. "How do you account for all of these testimonies, this manifest evidence to scientific people which are doctors and psychiatrists about life after death?" There's Mood and Kubler-Ross. Of the fellow had no answer, because its very simple to ignore it. Its much better to ignore it than to answer it.

The psychologists' domain is the domain of the psyche. He's not a vetenarian, he doesn't claim to be a vetenarian, he claims to be a doctor of the psyche. Then he breaks the word down to make it mean somatic. He changes the meaning of it. But anything that happens to that psyche or mind, he should answer. If its a dream, he should have an answer for it. 'Or if a person says "I died -- medically dead, came back, here's what I saw." This corresponds to a thousand other recordings of people who died and came back. Now isn't the statistics worth something to the psychological science? 'It ain't worth a damn thing. Because, number one, they are not going to get into what happens to the psyche. Its that pure and simple. They're biological doctors.... and poor ones.

Q. You said that you have to live a certain way to do this work. What did you mean?

I've had a desire to know more about this, because I knew that certain people could heal if they lived a certain type of life. Certain people build up certain immunities. Nearly all your famous healers were celibate, single men -- Christ, Buddha. Most of your so-called spiritual leaders were single men, that is, they sleep with themselves. Down through the years I took all the books I could get coming out of Asia about great yogis, so-called saints of the different religions. They all endorsed a sexual retention plan. Now Why? The medical doctors says you're crazy, you'll get yourself prostrate trouble. What happens to the female, she doesn't have a prostrate gland? She just goes nuts for no reason at all -- supposedly. We've got some chemicals that have been discovered that only the male has is quantity..... They are predominantly created in the male..... The predominance comes from the male testicles.

There's an old idea that came up and printed in a book by Percival -- Thinking and Destiny. Percival taught sublimation, the old yogic doctrine. Sublimation would cause the raising of the "seed-atom" from the testicles of the male to the brain. That was their definition of it, the description. Its not proven scientifically, but when you get something that is manufactured in the testicles that promotes the neuro-transmitting in the brain -- then we have something, although they drew it up from imagination. You can see the wisdom of people that were back there practicing this before they knew what they were doing. How did they do it? 'By intuition. Their intuition told them. This one is the pastime of animals. This other is the right of kings, and they even called it Raja-yoga. (Royal-yoga)

Consequently, these discoveries are verified, the things I lived my life with. When I was 21 years of age, I decided I was not going to engage in anything, not even coffee. I'm drinking it now, but I'm half-dead now so it doesn't matter. (Laughter) I put in ten solid years of abstaining, just to see what the effects would be. In other words, I made myself a laboratory instead of a cesspool.

The result was that I did realize that certain powers were generated. I couldn't put my finger on them, and I didn't try to exercise them, because every time I thought about them, I thought "you do this as an ego-trip." You've got to avoid it. I came to the conclusion that a lot of the healing was done instead of newspaper advertising. They didn't have newspapers so they healed people to get a little publicity. I didn't want any parts of that.

But we have seen this, where healing has happened. After a while it can be done without too much loss of energy. There is a transmission of energy that takes place, which is unnecessary. Its supposed to have burned out figures like Christ, and Nor-bu-chen. Nor-bu-chen is a living example of the transmission of physical energy to healing. I don't know how many of you have heard of Nor-bu-chen, but the last I heard of him he was in Texas healing people. He said he was only good for two years because he was using personal energy. He was depriving himself of sexual expression so that he could zap somebody else -- which that I think is nonsense. I don't say being celibate is nonsense, but wasting it on somebody else who neglected themselves is nonsense.

The same way with these discovered prostaglandins. These things are going to corroborate the intuitions I had and lived by forty-five years ago. At that time I had no physical proof, chemical proof. I think in the future we'll see more of this, and we'll also see more of nature's reaction to flagrate attacks on nature. In other words, don't try to mess up the plan of nature. The blueprint is drawn, and we'll be eliminated if we do, regardless of what it is. I don't even think we can prevent war. I don't see that war is that necessary, but there is some mechanism going on.... Its too complex. Its too complex for us to prevent war.

Q. Is it possible, how can you actually master your own thinking processes?

You have to start checking yourself. You've got to start somewhere. When you first start this it seems utterly absurd. Its possible to do it. Everybody thinks that they are thinking truly. For instance, when you are a child you believe your mother tells the truth. I was very upset one time when I found out my mother was capable of lying, because anything she said was "it" to me. But you have to go back to a point in your life time, preferably your childhood because its cold. You can examine it clinically, you might say. You're not involved, you're not attached to the situation. When you see a consecutive number of things happening, and the more you dwell on this, the more will pop up in your memory of where you lied to yourself, or where you worked under an illusion, under a state of mind which you invited. It was a rock-candy-mountain kind of thinking, wishful thinking, and you invited it and were willing to live in it, until you got a disaster, which shook the thing to its foundations.

Then, you approach the present and say "how much of this conduct am I still copying? If you can get close enough to the present, you'll walk right into the present and see what you're doing. Not only that, but when you exercise the mind this way -- the mind is a computer, it basically works very much like a computer, and you have to program it to truth, not to emotional whim, not to physical titillation. The unreasonableness about it is we don't have time for anything. Death is just around the corner. Its a race to find out who you are before who you don't know dies.

You have to make a priority. You don't "come to church on Sunday," you do this every hour of your day. You would like to be able to do it every hour of your day. You're going to get distracted. Sure, you've got to go out and make a living. I used to do contract work, and while I was painting a house I made the notes for the Albigen Papers, because it was on my mind that strongly. I would go home that evening and write the notes down -- stuff that had come up, the realizations I had had.

Q. You made a statement about the postulation of the soul. Do you think there is a soul?

The reason I said that and wrote it out was that these were basically questions that were common denominators in the major religions, that I had looked into. Some believe that you're a complete soul that hatches out into an egg and a tiny baby, and so on. There's others that believe the soul has to grow, and it comes into this life in order to grow. It seems absurd that we would come here for nothing, if we'd been some place else first. That was just a concept.

There's another of course, that I believe, that we do have an essence. I use the word essence as opposed to soul, because there's two definitions for the word soul. One of them, I think, is referred to as an astral body that disappeared after death. I don't want to leave that impression. It died shortly after the body died. The spirit is supposed to be the one that was immortal. To haggle over words could be a waste of time, so I chose the word essence -- meaning the ultimate essence, whatever that is. I maintain the ultimate essence of every man is indestructable, but..... he doesn't grow, his soul doesn't grow, he has to find himself.

The majority of people do not know that you are a soul. You don't have one, you are that. What you have is something that closes it, something that surrounds it, something that is near the locality of the essence. This is basically a projection. So the projection talks, like puppets in a theater go through their actions. Very determined, like as if they are doing this all themselves. But when a person finds his real essence, he finds that none of that was done. The only thing that you can really do, essentially from the essence, is to desire to be your essence, and to function from there. Then there is a possibility that your essence -- the light, the words, the wisdom, or whatever -- would come through and direct your actions. But I do believe that there is an (essence.) It isn't a question of belief. That's the final stage I got into, was the total Self, the capital-S Self -- which is the Essence. I don't talk about it from a concept structure, I talk about it in an experience. I've written about it.

Q. We're raised and live our whole life in authoritative institutions. Can you say something about social conditioning?

You've got to begin by doubting. I was raised in a religion where you got your face slapped for doubting. There's a lot of people that believe that you have to believe the "authorities." This is bad. I think it is a bad way to raise children. The result was that when I got married I didn't take my children to any church. If they wanted to wander into one, that was their business. 'But I refused to take my children to any church. You can do it yourself. Do you know a preacher? Go to him and talk to him. Say "What do you know for sure?" Put it on the line.

I went into a Spiritualist Church one time, and the fellow went through a little mock thing about seeing my mother come up the aisle. I said that's not what I came to ask you about. I came to ask you what you really know. He said, "Hey bud... I get $250 a month for keeping these old ladies happy. Now please don't interfere! That's what I'm doing -- a social service." I've talked to priests who dedicated their whole lives to it -- no answer, no answer at all. I don't know how much of this I've written down, but I went back to someone who'd taught me in the seminary, to get what they had discovered -- fifty years later -- Nothing.

You have to read. I found that when I was meditating. I didn't know how to meditate, but somehow it seem incongruous to me to pick up these little books on meditation. They all seemed kind of silly. So what happened is that my meditation came automatically. Some of my best meditation came when I was walking or working. When I sat down I'd go asleep. So I would just walk around, or maybe I was working and some book would come out and I would read it.

When I was 20 years of age there was no amount of esoteric books. They were few and far between. I'd travel all over the country to pick up books like Blavatsky. I got one copy of The Secret Doctrine in Baltimore. I got Eliphas Levi in Denver, Colorado. 'Hitch-hiking around the country just to find books. People didn't have them. The good church people who ran the libraries burned them, because it sounded like the work of the devil or something. 'Because it wasn't down the alley of their belief.

Consequently, I would sit and read Blavatsky. There's nothing meditative about it, but its just the idea that you get your mind on something besides hoeing the potatoes, or painting the house -- and the coordinations come in. For no reason at all there'd be a flashback to my childhood, and a realization. "Oh boy! That's what happened! I thought I was right, and I was wrong." These things start to correct the computer in the guy who thinks he's right in everything he does.

I don't say Blavatsky is a hundred percent right. You can read material that isn't a hundred percent right..... You can check Blavatsky out if you wish, and you'll find out. Check your index. Go back, take one word and check out all the different definitions throughout the book. Its confusing, but she provided a tremendous valuable service to mankind, an encyclopedia of information -- and this stirs up your thinking. Mathematics would do it.

There's good books in other words, by people who didn't set out to develop a multi-million dollar cult from them. Brunton's got good books. There's some good business books, like Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. He's got the secret in the middle of the book. Its an esoteric secret, and you can use it to grow rich if you wish.

Q. I wonder about getting back to the true essence of thought, the innocence of a young child who sees things in their natural beauty. Don't you think the world is actually beautiful and wonderful as a child first sees it in its innocence?

There is no true innocence if he's raised by his parents, or any body else. The child doesn't view nature as beautiful. First of all, in order to get a child to live, you have to seduce it. I maintain this. A child merely observes. It looks around, it figures things out for itself, and until it develops a language it's a pretty smart child. Once it gets to understand the language of the parent, and this is "Oh! look at this pretty flower!" -- and it repeats it -- "Pretty flower!" If those things are not taught to it, it won't come up with an expression of beauty.

Q. Isn't that part of the natural view of things?

No sir. That's part of the seduction. "This cereal is very good, very wonderful. It'll make you grow big like us." Ha, Ha! So the child is seduced. The musical noises, lullabies and all this thing, are to please the child so that it will leave the pleasant field of death it has left, and enter into this worse death -- possibly. I'm not saying don't have children. I'm saying this is what we do, we might as well face it, this is the truth. To get a child to live, you have to seduce it, and the ones that aren't seduced are cradle-deaths. If you neglect a child, don't give it emotion, affection -- and lies -- it will die. Even a monkey if you don't give it affection will die. They've established this.

Q. What is true innocence then?

True innocence can be in the mind of an eighty-year-old man dying of cancer, just the same as in a child. The child is innocent. It would be very difficult to raise a child in total innocence because language is the debauchery of true feeling, of true understanding.

The child's mind is somewhat singular. I think if you practice this you can do it. I'm sure mothers know it. I'm not a mother but I've always sensed that mothers know this. They know what the child thinks. The child knows and doesn't think. It doesn't think in the same reaction-pattern we have. It thinks by direct-mind. A child has a direct-mind to the people around it. Mothers know this. They feel when a child is sick or unhealthy, or something of that sort. This is the pure innocence. The lack of innocence is when we become split, schizophrenic by polarity of definition of words. We don't go directly to the person's mind. If you want true psychology, develop the ability for direct-mind apprehension of the person's mind..... The wisest kids are autistic, but we can't have 200 million autistic children running loose.

On this thought of man's being "predator and prey," in what way can a man become prey and not predator? By creatures from another dimension. Yes, we're victims. We think we are the top thing on the totem pole. The whole psychology of life is drawn up by somebody in a light-hearted mood, in a quatrain. I can't remember it exactly but it is:

Little things have smaller things upon there backs to bite 'em,

And bigger things have bigger things, and so on ad infinitum.

And if you want the science of life and you want to survive, you've got to know that which you're eating and which eats you. If you don't, you become a meal. Its not evil. I'm not talking about the devil, I'm talking about Nature.

You're entitled to a vacation. You don't have to be eaten. You can say "Stop the meal! -- until I learn something. Stop this! I'm not going to eat anything, don't eat me until I get what I want to know." This is legitimate, but you don't go out and oppose nature. Too many people get twisted by trying.

Napoleon Hill

Q. What is the secret in Napoleon Hill you were talking about?

Why don't you get it and read it. I'm not selling it. I just think that if you get it and read it, it will be integrated into your experience. While if I tell you, you'll forget it tomorrow morning. It's the same principles that I'm talking on. If you want to do something -- if you want to be successful, you make a total expenditure of energy to the greatest ability. You put your whole being into it. You don't do it two hours a day. You make a total commitment to that, and this involves all levels.

I was surprised one time by a young married woman who came to one of the chataquas and got to talking about sex. She very blatantly was approving of all the different forms of sex. I said to her, "Some of this stuff you're not supposed to do. Its in the Bible." I don't like to quote the Bible, but you may believe that if you don't believe me. You might say I'm just nuts. But in the Bible it says "Don't eat of the fruit of the tree that grows in the middle of the garden."

She says, "Oh heavens! I thought that was marijuana." There's a reason for that. Why would a tree just geographically placed be evil? 'Unless we're referring to anatomy. She was quite shocked, and said "Oh, that's ridiculous." She belonged to Unity, so she mailed me one of the books of Filmore. I generally don't have time to read. Reading can be a loss of energy in a way. But I opened it, and Charles Filmore says exactly the same thing. I had never read any of his literature before. I wrote back to her and said "Why don't you read page 55 in the book you are selling."

Most of your honest people -- I think Filmore was an honest man -- will tell you the truth, even though you don't like to hear it.

But that was only relative to Hill. His advice was if you want to do anything, was to make a total commitment. Don't go at it half-way. If you do, you can do anything you want. You can be a millionaire if you wish. You can find the definition of life if you wish. At one time I didn't know that, but I know it now that you can. He wasn't talking about esoteric discoveries. He was talking about making money, being a successful salesman. But he gave the same formula, and its true for any human enterprise.

One of the things in the book I oppose is to be quoting other people. I don't like to be quoting. I think that a person in their heart -- knows.

Hucksters

Lots of times I inhibit myself. It depends on what type of gathering it is. I don't like to talk at the chautauquas..... If I was out to make money, I'd be singing the song of the other hucksters. "Do what you will! Just leave your money in the basket!" "Give me 10 percent, do anything you want to do, and come in on Saturday, and I'll forgive your sins. 'And we'll start all over again on Monday -- cheating and whatever." I've watched all of the hucksters that've come out of the Orient. There isn't hardly a one of them that would advise on morality. I have never run into one, and I've personally looked into some of them throughout my lifetime. There's still remnants of some of them around today. I've been initiated into some of their sects, just to see what they had. 'Like the Radha Swami sect, Kirpal Singh. I don't know if some of you have heard of him. We had people who deliberately took the initiation for Kriya Yoga, and who'd come back and share this information.

You can't run through them all, but if you get 3 or 4 people to follow up on these different things.... One fellow was into Yogananda. Another boy here from Akron was into Subud. So we got the scoop by just having a little group and meeting, and saying "What did you find out?" Some of them are very valuable. I thought the Radha Swami was a very moral thing, but they would not advise.

I talked to someone from India and said, what is going on with the theology or yoga of India? Where's the moral structure? He said that India is not a moral place, by your definitions, but we don't talk about it -- either on the street on in the temple. Nobody talks about morality, because it's too touchy. They leave it out of their philosophy as well. But you can't leave it out. You can't leave it out and let twenty years of your life go by in the wrong direction. 'Unless that's what you want to do. 'Unless that's your game.

Q. You made an impression on me earlier when you said that for any situation there is only one truth. It seems that everyone tries to view their life from a certain perspective, or be a positive thinker.

What is positive thinking? This is one of the cliches that wrap people up. It entraps people in the sales departments. I had somebody tell me one time, "The other fellow's always right. You're the one that is wrong." This is a "positive-thinker." Don't think that his ideas are negative. People can come in with a hundred different directions and you're going to say "They're all right! All of us are all right!" This isn't true. Some of them are manifestly manipulating. Is that right? Even no matter how smooth it is, everybody manipulates if they can get away with it. 'Some for very small amounts, some for a million dollars, some for affection, some to take over your house -- whatever. Its a slow process, and you have to be intuitive enough to decide when that's happening to you. You can't just say everybody's good.

Action

Q. Does that mean its time to act?

Sometimes it requires action. Its action away from destruction. In other words, there's a time when you have to leave town. "Dust your shoes off and leave" -- if there's no hope there, if that town won't tolerate an idea, an idea that is wholesome, that is manifestly true, if the politics are too strong. 'There's too great a political feeling, or everybody in town is crooked and you can't drive down the street without getting arrested. Well, then, you leave town. That's all.

I maintain that what we have is an approach to truth. I'm not saying that anybody should stand up and say, "That guy's wrong and I'm right!" Its very possible that you may be more wrong than he is, when you finally get back to thinking the thing over and facing yourself. But what I'm saying is that there is a tremendous scheme going on with everybody trying to steal their million, without anybody knowing about it, and all the time they're pretending to conform to all of these pollyannic codes, of positive thinking, reinforcing the other guy. 'Encouraging them to think they're doing fine. All this is what we need, to back them up, to pet them, stroke them -- all this sort of thing. 'When basically what we're trying to do is take advantage. Now if we can divorce ourselves from the idea of taking advantage -- then you are approaching truth a little closer. If someone's trying to take advantage of you, you'll be able to see it more clearly.

In the business of science, one time the truth of the action of oxygen was called "phlogiston." That was the truth. Now we call it oxygen today. We have a different understanding of the work of oxygen and its not a consuming element. Consequently, there is only one truth, but nobody back then knew the truth that we have today.

There's no approach to truth, there's only the retreat from manifest lies, the retreat from unreasonable garbage. The retreat from things like you're going to hell because you reacted the way you were designed. These are the things that are absurd. When you free yourself from that sort of thing, and then start trying to accumulate something that is you, then you get closer to it, and you'll have revelations all your life. All your life you will have revelations, things will become apparent to you. Everybody has them.

Q. You say there is a Design. Do you work against the design?

Nope! You don't work against the design. I maintain that in the design, room was left. There was room left for spiritual realization. Its left in every creature. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have been there in the first place. This is the point. There would have been no consciousness at all necessary. There would have been no realization.

Any time that there is a realization that occurs, the finding is, and all the people who have made that discovery, report the same thing -- that they are immortal only in the Eternal Oneness. The meaning is that this is an indestructible Light, an indestructible Essence, a living Essence that is indestructible. Consequently you can't undo that. There's no way you can commit total suicide. You can destroy the body, which is all you can do.

You mention using celibacy as a tool, in order to be totally committed. You also say that if things haven't worked out by forty, that it may be too late. You refer to men on this, but what about women? What I'm saying is that these figures are data, from people like in Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness. People who had reached it, all reached it before the age of forty, who were recorded. This doesn't mean that it is impossible after that, but I think what is important is that it should be started or conceived early in life. This is the reason I make so much noise. Its because I don't think it does any good to exhort somebody that's already glued or crystallized into their thinking patterns, and possibly limited in their ability to die and return.

I'm not saying it can't happen, but in order to have the experience you have to die, and to return from that death it requires a fairly young person, because when you get older you just don't return, that's all. The advantage in returning is to be able to sound off -- and say "Hey! There's Hope!"

I don't say there's any flat laws. I don't know any flat time. I say that if a human hungers, and devotes himself or herself to that hunger, there will be an answer. That follows like night follows the day. But you can't kid yourself. This is the trouble. You can't do it part time. You can't read so much out of the prayer-book every day, or every week, and expect magical things to happen -- it won't.

The statistics on women who have reached this, reached it at or after the menopausal period, not before. So what you have, hopefully, is a person who has had a religious upbringing -- even though that religion was as full of holes as a swiss cheese. 'Their intentions were bent on finding "God." That isn't the idea to look for because it postulates, but regardless, its good enough for a child. If they start off on that score, their intuitions will tell them they're doing something right. This is what we're loosing. The idea is to give those people a chance. Those echoes will be part of their being as they grow older, as they raise their families. They can continue that, and then when that task is over, then -- things will happen.

Cases known were people who raised families. There's not a lot of them because people don't talk. There aren't many who write books about it when it happens. They may describe it but won't go to that length. Lots of people who have had this realization are women.

Woman has a different type of body. Thats the reason I quibble about this business about equality, because things that'll they learn, they'll learn differently. Women are more capable of learning by direct perception. Men by diligently and maybe foolishly pounding out by logic for year after year after year. A woman has the ability lots of times to directly go to the truth, and not act upon it as dynamically as a man would. Its in the head and out of the head. There practice has to be one of reminding themselves to be persevering. They wouldn't, because they'll know they're going to forget. When you get into meditation, one of the things you have to take into account is the things that stop you from thinking, and circumvent somehow the things that stop you from thinking. You just don't say "Oh! my head goes blank" and "I forgot what I thought about last week." You take steps to prevent the lapse, and hold your head on a certain thing.

You were mentioning earlier about autistic children being "superior beings." Would you say some more about that?

We had contact with a fellow in Texas who wrote an article about that (Gordon Broussard.) There's been a standing conviction that autistic children were like a strange anomaly of nature -- they were insane but not insane. They were difficult to handle because they didn't go by the rules of insanity. This fellow talked about going directly to them. I was amazed when I read the article, because he was going at it the right way. He took a direct approach to the child and treated them directly instead of as a "sick object."

Autistic children - Jim Burns

The autistic children I've been around, I realized didn't want any parts of us. It wasn't that they weren't able to communicate, they just didn't want any parts of us. They had somehow reached some level of wisdom in which they saw the games we were playing, they saw them very clearly. They just decided they'd play their own game. "I'll put up a mask of a game." They'd put up a whole behavioral attitude -- they'd chew up the bedsheets or something just to get you off their back. When you approach them with a sort of loving attitude -- and prove it to them, stay with them in other words -- you can communicate with them. I don't think that you could cure them so much as that we could use them, in the best sense of the word. I think that they have a genius, and if we could educate from that point instead of trying to tear it down, we'd have something.

We have an outstanding case of this that some of the people here know. There was a man -- he's about 50-some years old now. He came to my house and he would rant. He would rant and rave, and every thing he said was filled with wisdom. 'But it would come out half vulgar, half curse words -- you know. He just went seven hours of a consistent barrage of wisdom. I sat there and I thought, jeez! where's this guy coming from? He said he was responsible for half-a-dozen psychiatrists jumping out of windows who were trying to cure him. He'd laugh about it.

He went out to the kitchen after this little meeting was over and I looked at him and said, "You were an autistic child, weren't you." And he said, "Yes." And this was one that had grown up. He'd spent half of his life in an insane asylum. He was an enlightened man. I don't say that he was enlightened in the fullest sense of the word, but as full as I know. Judging by the answers he gave, he was aware of the total existence of man, of the individual. But he couldn't..... he was explosive. He just had that explosiveness to his nature. He was an autistic child. He was never able to keep a job because he was liable to react to someone playing a game and say, "Listen, you S.O.B." See what I mean, he was very volatile.

He's got one of the greatest minds, but he's sick half the time. They've got him on medication part of the time. It will take him years. I think he's come a long way from being totally immobilized. This is what they did, they just rendered him unconscious. When he got active, when his brain got active -- they shut him down, that's all. It took him about forty years of his life to learn how to counteract the drugs. So I've got good reason to believe they (the autistic) are super-beings as the result of the excessive demands put on... certain families, perhaps. I don't know why it happens.

Where I go from is that I look into the head of a person. I don't pay too much attention to what they're say. If you pay attention to what they're saying, you might think that they're crazy, or something of that sort. I had a family bring an autistic child to my house one time. This kid went over the furniture. I'd say he was five years old, six years old. His father would kick him every once in a while if he could slow him down. If he couldn't slow him down, he'd kick him on the run. He'd break your lamps, just throw stuff through the windows practically. I watched him and I thought, this kid is in tremendous rebellion against something. So when he went around, I grabbed him. I got one arm under his knees, and one around his shoulders and held his arms tight. I squeezed him real tight and I looked in his face. I just looked in his face and grinned at him. Because I didn't hate him, I wasn't hurting him. But I wanted him to know that he was safe and he was with someone who liked him. No more trouble! He sat down and he was quiet the rest of the day. His old man's method was to boot him, saying "Hey, you're breaking the lamp." So your intuition has to guide you, and I think it'll guide you right if you go about it right.

Possession - a case

I'll tell you another thing, for what it's worth.... This is a little off the beam from what we've been talking about. I've had people who've come to my house who were possessed. There's no psychiatrist in this world who can cure a person of possession. You can't do it with drugs. The reason I knew they were possessed is because I could see their company, when they walked into the room. They would corroborate it. I didn't say, "you've got this or that."

One girl came down from Pittsburgh, and I saw a figure standing off her right shoulder. One of the peculiarities is that her eyes traveled independently. This one would look over this way, and that one would look over this way, and then they'd both look this way. It puzzled me at first. I thought maybe a glass eye was getting out of control. So I asked her, "Do you mind if I ask you a question?" And she said, "No, go ahead." I said, "Do you have a glass eye?" She said, "No, they work that way. They work independently." Then I noticed this cloud-like, as high as a person. I couldn't tell what sex it was, except that it was a person, human, standing there. This was in broad daylight.

I said, "Do you have an entity?"

She said," Yes, I had five. That's the reason I came down to talk to you. I've got rid of them, I think, all but this one."

I said, "Is it here now?"

She said, "Yes."

I said, "Will you tell me where its at?"

She said, "He's right here."

So this corroborated what I had seen. I could have said, well I was dreaming. I didn't believe it myself without that corroboration, but I didn't undertake to do anything. She got it committing a horrible crime, is what she told us. So I felt that she invited it, and if she should change if she wanted to be different. She couldn't change the crime she committed, but she could change her ways if she really wanted to be helped.

It's dangerous to work with them, incidentally. Its very dangerous.

There's a tremendous lot, that I like to present -- not to say "I did this", "I did that," but to say you can do it, anybody can do it, if they want to just simply face the facts of what's going on.

Schizophrenia in its truest form is possession. They will write books about it. Sybil was written by a psychiatrist, but the psychiatric field denies possession. They want to talk about schizophrenia. In other words, you split yourself, and you're talking to yourself, and its just a phenomena. No, its a reality. There's a tremendous lot of things that can be taken away once you know its there. A lot of the stuff that's wrong with people is not chemical disarrangement, its complexes, its states of mind. A person gets into a state of mind, the state of mind deepens, it becomes and obsession. They can't shake themselves out of it because they're now thinking through that prism. Its like a kaleidescope. They can't see the world except through that state of mind. What you have to do is break the kaleidescope for them. Sometimes you can do it with hypnosis, sometimes you can do it just by pecking questions at them. Your true diagnosis comes from "stepping in the other fellow's mocassins," knowing what he's thinking.

Gurdjieff

Q. What do you think the pros and cons are on the Gurdjieff system?

Gurdjieff was the greatest psychologist that ever emerged out of the western world. He had a very astute system of healing, mentally. 'Healing physically too. I don't buy all that he writes. I don't see the point in the "hydrogens." His analysis of the human mind -- nobody's ever done it better. One thing I think with Gurdjieff was that so much of his wisdom was watered down by the need to spend a certain amount of his energy advertising, building groups, trying to build a school. It becomes a problem. In building a school you loose track of the essence of what you are offering. Money was a tremendous factor. He had to support his efforts somehow.

Right. But I also think Gurdjieff was a con-man. He talked about "shearing the sheep." Had no scruple about taking a few thousand off of someone who had a few hundred thousand. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but this is the reason that -- we were talking about this before the meeting started -- our group is relatively small. 'Because I will not do any exploitation. I will not get into that. I don't even like to get into the department of healing. My function is to relate and possibly create a situation where a person can find maximum knowledge -- maximum understanding of the Self.

Credits

Transcribed by M.R.J. from a free public lecture given by Richard Rose on June 26, 1983. Some liberties have been taken with transcription to adapt to the written format, hopefully without alteration of meaning.

End