1980-Winter-Psychology-and-Metaphysics-Columbus
Return to list of all Recordings
See all Categories Spreadsheet: Recordings-Source-List
Metadata repository: https://data.direct-mind.org/
This is the first lecture attempted on this site. Thanks to Emmanuel for his hard work.
This is version 1.03. Check history for last set of revisions.
Data Template
Title | 1980-Winter-Psychology-and-Metaphysics-Columbus |
Recorded date | Winter 1980 |
Location | Columbus, Ohio |
Number of tapes | |
Other recorders audible? | |
Alternate versions exist? | |
Source | J |
No. of MP3 files | 8 mp3 files: 22 min; 10 min; 17 min; 15 min; 15 min; 17 min; 17 min; 15 min |
Total time | 128 minutes |
Transcription status | Emmanuel completed 4/10/2009. Distributed 4/14/2009 |
Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
Published in what book? | |
Published on which website? | |
Remarks | Refers to an earlier, recent talk in Pittsburgh, probably 1980-Winter-Metaphysics-St-Stephens-Pittsburgh |
Audio quality | |
Identifiable voices | |
URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1980-Winter-Psychology-and-Metaphysics-Columbus |
For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
Revision timestamp | 20150106161528 |
Introduction
PC: Tonight, our speaker, Mr. Rose, speaks from his own experience that has been gleaned from a life-long study and search for self-definition and truthful answers. It became an intensely personal search but has, over the years, involved literally hundreds of individuals in a very direct psychological manner. As in all of his lectures, there’s a very honest and, I think sometimes, heroic, attempt to make what are often times complex and obscure subjects, as simple and understandable as possible. The approach to such subjects as psychology and metaphysics are always approached with the goal of personal and practical self-application… and I’m pleased to introduce Mr. Rose.
Start
Rose: I brought this along because I wanted to demonstrate that I don’t look anything like the fellow they advertised, in case you think there’s an impostor here. [Laughter]
I gave a similar talk to this in Pittsburgh and I’m going to touch on the same material. The word 'metaphysics', of course, is used differently by different people. It has lead to a lot of confusion to a point where people avoid it. The word 'psychology' also has lead to a lot of confusion. And yet people can’t afford to avoid it because they’re stuck - they have to do something if they become bewildered.
The word metaphysics implies something beyond physics, something beyond science, a belief beyond science. Metaphysics is an outgrowth of religion. Psychology is an outgrowth of religion. So they’re not as far apart as we think. The psychologist would like to think he’s a scientist but his whole science is an outgrowth of religion.
There are two things I want to talk about and one of them of course is the relationship between metaphysics and psychology and also the relationship of metaphysics and psychology with religion. We’re going to touch upon a very unusual aspect of this combination of psychology and religion; the reason we have to use both words is because both are involved.
Psychology
There’s a tremendous trend today to scientize the science of the mind, so to speak. I was reading here before I started talking, somebody had stuffed a paper into my hands in Pittsburgh and I just had a chance to look at it. They discovered that the human being had evolved from the lizard, and they came to the conclusion that the lizard had a neo-cortex or an R-complex, a section of his brain which made him automatically violent. He operated on violent and reproductive patterns without any thinking, so to speak. And then, supposedly, centuries later, the lizard, which is supposed to have been our ancestor, developed an emotional part of his brain.
I don’t know whether the writer was a scientist or not, but he said that we were descendants of the single brained lizard - and then in the next sentence says that the human has three minds, one of which is the neo-cortex, the second one is a higher mind. And immediately I saw a discrepancy. One moment they’re talking about the brain, and then the so-called authority loosely throws in the word 'mind' as though it’s synonymous.
This is a tendency in psychology today to presume that there’s no such thing except the brain. So you can use the word mind very freely. And yet there is a difference between the brain and the mind - and I don’t think it takes very much introspection to come up with this. But it makes it easier for the people who are presuming they’ve established a science from a subjective matter.
The science or study of psychology deals with subjective materials, and the scientific approach would like to make it a materialistic science. But you can’t make a materialistic science out of a subjective matter, it’s that simple.
I’ve had some experiences in my life. And the direction of my life was spent not upon psychology, although I started off studying psychology hoping to understand the human mind.
I started off even back before the days of fanatical behaviorism - they were just coming into it then - they’ve [now] learned to draw the normal curve. And the psychology courses in college at that time were very primitive. They were stumbling about trying to set up some sort of guidelines. The prior authors - Freud was very recent at the time, Carl Jung was hardly mentioned - but it was philosophical psychology; if you got anything new it wasn’t from laboratory analysis. But, they were trying desperately to get statistics, to use statistics as scientific material by interviewing a lot of people and getting opinions, that sort of thing.
I maintain that psychology is an evolution of religion. There may be some who don’t want to admit this. I started off as a very base materialist myself; I believed in nothing. I prided myself in being a total atheist, because I demanded proof before I accepted anything. And, of course, because I was cognizant of the material world and not cognizant of anything else, I felt that everything had to be explained, likewise, in material terms.
So I was for trying to get a thought in a test tube or analyze the brain and find out which parts of it contain thoughts and chase the origin of those down - and then you might get some real understanding of human consciousness. Of course I never got anywhere, I’ll be honest with you. But I was attracted to the study of psychology. When I found out how little the psychology courses had to offer at the time I got out and transferred to Chemistry. I thought, "Well I’ll crack the atom and see what’s inside of that." Of course, I didn’t have enough money to finish college, so I didn’t get to crack the atom, or make a fool out of myself trying!
Religion
I read some instances [in the Bible] that really amazed me. I came to the realization that I had become an atheist, or kind of proud of the fact I was demanding proof. But I still would occasionally pick up the Bible or hear someone quote something, and I would be reminded that my discoveries paralleled things I had encountered in the Bible. I thought, "Geez, at least I understand that a little better!"
I thought, “Well, maybe Christ existed, maybe he didn’t.” When I was in my early twenties and such, I was pretty cynical about the whole thing. I thought, “Well, somebody wrote a good story”. I didn’t like the way it was written because there were four copies and they were almost identical and they were supposedly written by four different people. And that kind of slowed me down in accepting any of it.
But there were instances in it that showed, casually - what strikes me most about biographies, or about things that really tempt you to look in to things, is a casual occurrence or something casually mentioned. Not the crux of the matter but something very casually thrown in.
I was interested in this business of quantum energy. I believed that healing occurred by the transfer of a quantum that a person generated, which they could pass it on to other people. I’ve since pretty well corroborated that that is a definite form of healing.
If you can retain the quantum energy and you learn the little technique of zapping, or projecting the energy to another person, you can heal, within limitations, as you know. We’ve had a lot of faith healings but we’ve never had anybody put any legs back on. There seem to be certain limitations to the belief, but nevertheless, there are miraculous things that have happened, and not just 2,000 years ago; they’re happening every day.
But the thing that corroborated this for me was a mention in the Bible of a lady who followed Christ. It was said she was troubled with an issue of blood. And she was bashful, she didn’t want to come up and ask him, but she was confident that he could help her. So she crept up behind him and touched the edge of his garment and she was instantly healed.
And this didn’t seem like anything in itself, but the significant thing that I think most people missed was that Christ turned and said, “Who touched me?” In the Bible the words were written, “He felt the virtue go out of Him,” meaning that he had a quantum energy that chilled him when he lost it. He knew that somebody with a vacuum had siphoned it off. This corresponds to things that I later corroborated with fellows like Norbu Chen. There are healers who use that technique.
Healing, Cayce, Ambrose Worrall
Now, there are healers that I discovered and, like P. said, I’ve spent my life digging in this direction. I think I could have developed into becoming a healer if I wished, but I avoided it. Because I watched a healer – an older man before me [father-in-law?] – heal people that went out and became sick, diseased, from acts that were morally irregular and health-wise degenerating.
They would come in and profess their belief that they’d be healed - and 2 or 3 years later they’d be back in the same situation. I thought, “That’s a hell of a way to use your energy. I’m sure it can be used in some other direction.” So I decided that I was going to put my energy into finding out WHO was doing the healing, WHERE the healing was coming from. But not only that - WHO was the healer? WHO is this fellow, besides being an egotist that just likes to show off and show how clever he is that he can do this? In other words, Self-Definition.
So my whole life up to that time had been a struggle for self-definition and when I arrived at the self-definition, certain other things started to corroborate themselves about my previous intuitions. But on top of that, I learned some things I didn’t anticipate. And one of them was that there’s another method of healing that doesn’t require the loss of quantum energy. I had just a rough outline of it in my head.
Just a few years back we were putting on Chautauquas - in fact we held one here in Columbus. Our chief engineer in that department failed us and I had to go out and look for some speakers myself. I’m from West Virginia, and I heard about this fellow in Steubenville, Ohio that had contact with quite a few healers.
I looked the man up and it turned out he was also from West Virginia, down in the lower part of the state. He’d come up to Steubenville and started a little machine shop. He was still a good old hillbilly, you know. As soon as you met him you knew where he was from; you felt that you could talk to him straight, without any amenities, so to speak.
I was surprised; he had no formal education. In fact, he was self-educated as far as the machine shop was concerned, it was amazing that he was able to handle taking big contracts and stuff. But no formal education. I doubt he even finished grade school.
Then what had surprised me even more when I sat down in this lobby of this little factory was that he had some books on esoteric philosophy and healing there. One of them was on the woman who wrote about Edgar Cayce, Gina Cerminara. And I said to him, “I wonder if she’s still living?” He said, “Of course she’s still living, I was down her place last month!” He said, “I talk to her on the phone almost every month.” And I said, “Geez, how do you get around to talk to all these people, you don’t look like you’re that rich.” And he said, “I don’t make any money, but I write a lot off on my expenses. All these phone calls can go off on my business expense.”
This man had emphysema, and he had been running up to Pittsburgh to the Holistic Society up there to try to find something that could heal him of emphysema. And it happened that while I was looking at him I was watching a button on his shirt, and I don’t know why - you look at somebody and you don’t know why you look at some particular part of them - but I was watching this button on his shirt.
And he said, “You’re healing me aren’t you?” And I said, “No… Why… I don’t know anything about it.” He said, “I feel something when you look at that button. I feel something in my chest. You’re a healer!” And I said, “Well, I never intended to be and I’m not going to lie to you. If anything like that’s occurring, I’m very happy for you but it’s no intent or nothing of mine!”
I said, “In fact, I’m curious about this business of healing. For years I thought this was a total waste, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there are healers that don’t lose the energy.” And he said, “Absolutely,” and he quoted Ambrose Worral. Well, it so happened that we were trying to get Olga Worrall, his widow, on our program to speak. And I knew that when Ambrose Worrall died he was over 70 years of age and still healing people.
Whereas Norbu Chen in Houston, Texas said he was good for two years of zapping and then he was done, because he would be burned out. And I used to hear this among some theologians occasionally, when they would be talking about Christ. I don’t know where they got it from, I don’t see any Biblical reference, but they said if he hadn’t been crucified, he would have died; that he had exhausted so much energy in spreading the word, so to speak, and healing people in order to spread the word.
Well, whatever it's worth I – of course we didn’t get Olga Worrall, she was too expensive – but I had a very interesting conversation. But what amazed me was: here was a man without any formal education, who had been quietly devoting his entire life to something and had a tremendous authority and had discovered things that I should have discovered myself, 10 or 15, 20 years ago.
Now I’m mentioning this because we’re getting into this business of how this comes about – what is the mechanism by which this is done? It’s very simple, and yet it’s almost impossible. If it weren’t impossible, people would be learning it and be stopping the dice on the dice table and everything else. It occasionally can happen, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Benoit
But the main thing I wanted to get into before that is this idea of psychology and religion. They seem like they’re miles apart, and yet it’s only by the contemplation of both – if you only study books on psychology you’ll never become a psychologist, if you only study books on religion, you’ll become a fanatic perhaps. But it’s the comparison of the practical and the intuitive that makes for wisdom.
I had a hunch that maybe I wouldn’t have a blackboard here so I’ve drawn some stuff on paper with a magic marker. Are any of you acquainted with Hubert Benoit? Benoit was a revolutionary psychiatrist. He wrote on Zen; he wrote ‘The Supreme Doctrine’ and he had another book, the title was ‘Let Go’. I began reading Benoit because Zen is almost a perfect psychology. It’s a perfect therapeutic psychology; it’s a perfect self-analysis. But because it comes under the word Zen, and people associate Zen with Buddhism, people turn away from it: ”That’s some cult,” or some racket, because we’ve had our belly full of rackets from Asia. So I think Zen has lost a lot of weight, but it’s a very valuable thing to study.
Benoit had a highly orderly mind. A lot of people that get into philosophy and stuff are more inclined to dream. They’re dreamers and concept builders and seekers – they hunt underneath the bowels of rubbish that other men write for some grain of truth.
But Benoit had a very methodical mind, he sounds like a scientist, and he illustrates the difficulty people have in writing scientifically or sensibly about a subjective matter such as fate, or such as Realization. And in his book he has the straight line which is perhaps what you call lateral thinking. This straight line is the relative world. The line at one end is one pole and the other end is another pole. Black and White. I think you can see this. He draws the straight line which is White and Black - and then for the first time we realize gray. Not by looking at black alone. We’re tied up with black, just like I said – but it’s the idea of standing off in another superior position, in which you give both equal credence or equal attention, and you begin to see gray. You realize the existence of another shade.
Now [on the diagram*] we go down below, and we’ve got religion as one polarity and psychology as the other – the two approaches to the Self. I maintain that both of these will take you to your Self, which is God; or the religion could take you to a better psychological understanding of yourself, the mundane self.
- Need to replicate the diagram.
Now on this line, which no one wants to leave, most people who pretend to be psychological scientists, like B.F. Skinner, don’t want to leave their little domain, their paradigm they’ve built up, because they feel very comfortable in it. Like in the presidential debates: As long as you leave them inside their paradigm they can give you a lot of fancy answers.
And the same way with these different departments. I studied when I was a very young boy to be a priest and I would try to talk reason to these monks that were teaching me. And they would say, “Oh, we’re above all that. We’re above all that logic. Because you don’t find anything out until you believe. So after you believe a while, then this great reality descends on you and you don’t have to reason.”
But unfortunately I couldn’t accept that. I say that the so-called preacher then, has lost something here and never found it – the ability to communicate. A man who has found the celestial eminence has to talk dog language if he’s preaching to dogs. And people who are ignorant – and the only knowledge that they have, the only language they can use, is an objective language – somehow have to have that explained to them in rational terms or objective language. You can’t just say, “Oh, stick your head in the sand and chant this mantra until you believe it,” or “Say these prayers until you no longer resist.” No.
I believe there is a method of digging, and that is observing everything, keeping your mind open to everything. The result of that is, when you take what Benoit called the superior, conciliatory position, in which you use two eyes to see both things at once, you widen your perspective; you have metaphysics. It’s a conciliatory position and right below it I have another word called Betweenness. All of this procedure that Benoit demonstrates is Betweenness; not the fanatical leaning toward any one thing, but comparing it, all the time, comparing it with its opposite. Is the opposite true? How much of a degree are you sure of yourself, and how much of a degree is it possible that the opposite is true?
Reason & Intuition
So then we go on and we find that religion and psychology represent two faculties of the human mind, strangely enough. They’re almost good metaphorical words for reason and intuition. The religionist is drawn and functions, or joins, because of his intuition. He can’t give you logical reasons why he believes Mr. X is the savior, he just finds, that’s all.
And yet – this is another weakness of course – we like to rely on democratic thinking. We like to have statistics. And with the number of statistics, if 51% of the people believe that green is composed of black and red, then green IS composed of black and red. We change the truth to suit the democratic system of choice. This isn’t true of course. Things are whatever they are and have been from the beginning of time – the only thing is that we’re going to distort them a little bit by trying to force them into our particular political or conceptual paradigm. Now I’ll explain the use of the word paradigm if you’re not acquainted with it.
It was first brought up by a fellow named Thomas Kuhn, I believe [Structure of Scientific Revolutions]. And it’s a very appropriate word, because it implies that we do not have truths at all. We have indulgence of paradigms. Every science has a paradigm. In other words, if you go down to the penitentiary you’ll have a language down there that they’ll talk that people can’t understand anyplace else. You go in the army they’ll have a language. If you’re working in a research laboratory, they short cut and abbreviate words, or in the operating room in a hospital. And a person who is not acquainted with that language will be lost.
Chilton-Pearce brings this out incidentally; he believes that the paradigm is responsible for our belief in illness. Whatever fits into the language of the people is going to contribute to existence; things that appear are the result of belief that they will appear. Now, whether that part is true or not doesn’t matter, but what does matter is – it’s easy to see that we do function in paradigms. We get carried away. If you’re in the army paradigm, what does the sergeant say, “You better believe it.” I’ve heard this a hundred times. “You better believe it.” Why? Because it’s easier to live in the paradigm than say: “Why do you say this? Why do you insist on this thing that doesn’t seem true?”
But anyhow, reason is the representation of the psychological direction in man. That is, to objectify the thinking processes, because he feels that the tangible world is very important and he tries to make his thinking tangible. The intuitional thing somehow seems poles away. The people who are more intuitional can’t talk or can’t communicate with people who are very strictly logical, or demanding proofs of every step of the way.
So, we take this straight line again. It starts off as a line of lateral thinking with tremendous polarity in it - reason and intuition - that will never meet. But when they DO – when, from a superior point, a conciliatory point, which is off the line so to speak – you have wisdom. Philosophers are people who observe both sides of the story and they'll study everything that relates, not just things that agree with them, and that’s the only way you can arrive at it.
Betweenness
Now, down below the word wisdom I have written something else: Being and Between-ness. You might say you’re going to find your way to heaven by believing a certain doctrine. Maybe so. But the way you find your Self, your Inner Self… The outer self is the fellow you think you are, the fellow that smiles at himself in the mirror, you know, when he’s feeling good. That’s your lower self. But your Higher Self is synonymous with your Source.
And you don’t learn this. You don’t learn it through reason, and you don’t always learn this through crude superstition or crude intuition; it has to be perfected intuition and perfected reason. By that I mean that reason has to be tempered with intuition. And what results with the wisdom is a change of being. When a man learns, he changes. It may be gradual and may be so gradual he doesn’t notice himself changing. And what has changed him is what I call Betweenness, because I have no better word. It sounds like a very plain word, but it’s the conciliatory principle and the things that result from being between, never allowing yourself to flop out dogmatically or fanatically on just one polar way of thinking.
Now we have the same thing in our scientific thinking on material space and time. We have the line. At one end of it is ‘space’ and at the other is ‘time’. And nobody sees any relation. They’re two separate things which we like to describe our event called life: we live so long and we occupy so much space. But, observed from a conciliatory principle we have a perspective called ‘space-time’.
Now, you might wonder why I’m mentioning this. It’s because this has to do with psychology and mystical experience. In mystical experiences, space and time are out of tilt. The events of most of your great spiritual experiences are space-time experiences. People who had them thought they were nuts, until they realized that they occurred in a dimension not ruled by those polar concepts. Of course, the reason they rule is because we have a relative brain; that’s the only way we can see.
I call it triangulation. And I mention it in regard to surveying. If you want to determine the center line of a hill, you can do this by standing away from the hill a mile. By sighting on a straight plane, a mile away, and then sighting an angle to the top of the hill, you can get a line from the top of that hill to the center of the hill, which you can’t touch with an instrument. By computing with trigonometry, the angles plus the distance, and get all three angles in the triangle, you’ll be able to find the center line of that hill.
This same thing applies in this business of Benoit’s triangulation. It’s very similar. We can’t see anything. We have to do it very arduously. We have to climb the hill, to the very top, and then bore a hole down through the center, then bore a hole through the side, to get that same triangle. And the same thing applies to psychology. But by the use of this type of triangulation you’ll discover things. And you generally discover by accident, and then you go back and explain them like I’m doing by triangulation, by using some formula of that sort.
But now we have a thing called ‘thought’, and at the other end of the line we have a thing called ‘no-thought’. In the Zen experience, you have a person who starts off as a very thinking creature and he comes to a point, he tells you later, in which there is no thought. And sometimes, if he comes to that experience under the influence of dope and he strongly believes in the place he left, he’ll have consternation; because that happens occasionally when the mind ceases to think.
But there are conditions, if the person’s energy is right, that from the point of triangulation he reaches what I call Absolute Realization; a combination of thought and no-thought, a combination of something – or everything – and nothing. It can only come to you through thinking about things being everything, or the polarity of nothing. But when the mind puts the computer to work on this problem – the result is Absolute Realization.
Paradigm & Aborigines
Now, we have a system of magic that results from this form of triangulation. At the bottom of the diagram we have a thought of a paradigm. It’s a system. The paradigm may be the paradigm of faith - or it may be the belief in entities, like in Shakespeare’s Tempest where you ought to know certain entities that will be able to swing the deal for you. But anyhow, whatever it is, it involves a paradigm. It might be some Kabalaistic ritual, that’s a paradigm.
The thought of a paradigm, paradigm X, I have. On the other side of the straight line is ‘no-thought of that paradigm’. And at the peak, we have the creation of paradigm X.
Now, I came across this not by talking to Ambrose Worrall, but by reading accounts of strange things that people did. The upcoming issue of the TAT Journal - this one is unusually good, it’ll be coming out sometime after the first of the month - has to do with what we consider a miracle by the Aborigines of Australia.
What happens is that they would have a young man do a test, and the test would involve running. These Aborigines live in a place in Australia that many white men died trying to just explore. And they survived by knowing – for instance they could throw a boomerang and hit a rabbit on the other side of the hill, that they couldn't see with their eyes. In order to do this they lapsed into what they called Dream-Time, contacting, what they described sometimes as, an Elder Brother. We, the Western observers, are inclined to think this guy’s making this up or something, but we can’t dispute the fact he hits the rabbit every time with the boomerang.
So their survival depended upon it, this wasn’t accident; these people are even suspected of having rejected culture because they had everything sewn up. They had control of this plane from another dimension. They were getting help. Everything they needed in the line of food was provided for them just by going inside their head, and getting into Dream-Time, and then throwing the arrow or trotting over a certain hill to find a deer or gazelle or something, where food was very scarce incidentally.
But anyhow, this was just a side issue where they would have this fellow cross the desert. [Proceeds to read from the TAT Journal issue 10]:
- To test their proverbial tracking skill, a single man traveled on foot for many miles over widely different terrain, sandy desert, marsh, rocky country, following no trail, leaving no detectable trail. The route was nevertheless followed unhesitatingly a year later by a cooperative aborigine.
Just to prove the case. He would follow it in detail.
- Their ability for “ground reading” is famous, but here the contemporaneousness with the Two Brothers was called on.
These Two Brothers are capitalized, meaning their Elder Brother. What would we call it, astral partner or something of that sort? I don’t know.
- The Aborigine had to have an article of clothing from the man leaving the original trail. This he held while going into Dream-Time. The Two Brothers, of course, were contemporaneous with the original event. Having made his connections with the Two Brothers the tracker connected with the event which was then contemporaneous with himself.
Now, if you get the point of what he did - he was back one year. He retreated one year and followed the other man across the desert, along side of him. He put his mind into a situation where he would be contemporaneous with the original act. And that’s how they’re tremendous trackers. If there’s a murder over there or somebody disappears, they can find them. They’re almost 100% accurate.
What did he do? What did he do on the relative dimension? First of all, he changes the paradigm. He doesn’t live according to our paradigm because we don’t believe the thing can happen. And the second thing is: he visualizes his system; he visualizes what he’s supposed to do. He reminds himself of the piece of the fellow’s clothing. He actually retreats in space-time. (That was the reason for the triangle I drew on space-time.) Space and time no longer exist in his paradigm. He is free to travel in any segment of that, now solidified, space-time experience. Or to describe it.
So consequently these people whom we look upon as being Aboriginal – they have the secrets. We don’t find it in our scientific books, because we have to laboriously prove everything every step of the way. Whereas there are other people who do them – just do them – and then leave it to us to figure out how they did them.
Hunas & Magic
There was a fellow by the name of Max Freedom Long. My hillbilly friend from West Virginia introduced me to his books also. Max Freedom Long wrote about the Hunas [of the South Pacific islands]. The Hunas had their own paradigm. And they too were able to create a condition – that is a language – that was entirely their own. They were seemingly immune, or superior, to space and time.
I remember he mentions one incident in the book about a boy. They were capable of casting spells on each other. They were capable of healing instantaneously, broken bones and stuff – but they were also capable of casting spells that would kill you in 48 hours. They claimed they cast a spell on this boy. (He hadn’t seen this colony since he was 14 years old, and he was now 20 or 25). But this witch doctor in this village on the other side of the island could accurately describe, any time he wished, what that boy was doing. And when the boy ran across this fellow of the name of Brigham, and Brigham offered to save him from the curse, this was witnessed by the fellow who was putting the curse on the boy. And he rushed to take the countermeasures, to offset it, but of course he was too late. He got caught in his own trap and was killed by the reversal of the thing.
Now this may not happen to one of us because we don’t indulge in the paradigm. On the other hand, it might well happen to us if we think that strongly on it. We succeeded – our paradigm outbalanced theirs – just by legal maneuvering. We made it illegal for them to cast spells, and even heal people, without a doctor’s education. So the AMA and the Barrister’s association put them out of business.
Al Ghazali & Indoctrination
They’re discovering today things that were known in the past, and they’re failing to discover phenomena today – they’re failing to explain them, let’s put it that way – that are very practical and very useful. Somebody had sent in to us some books on Sufism, and I’ve never been attracted to much of Sufism… maybe because I had associated it with Dervishes, and I thought Dervishes went crazy. I didn’t pay much attention to it. Idries Shah was the author; I forget what the name of his book was – but I copied this out. In the first pages of it, he mentions Al Ghazali [1058-1111]. Al Ghazali quotes in his Book of Knowledge this line from Al Mutanabi:
- To the sick man, sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.
Now, if I had read that just anyplace except in a Sufi book, or even in a Sufi book, I would have said, “So what? That means the sick man can hallucinate.” Or, you know, the sickness causes it to taste bitter. I wouldn’t have drawn the conclusion that was supposed to be drawn from his statement. But what it means is: The sick man is now in a different paradigm. When a man is sick, somehow, his whole paradigm becomes reversed. And he’s very capable of now believing the opposite of what he believed when he was well. And Idries Shah goes on:
- This could be very well taken as Ghazali’s motto. Eight hundred years before Pavlov, he pointed out and hammered home, often in engaging parables, sometimes in startlingly modern words, the problem of conditioning
… which we thought we discovered and were going to execute upon people, so as to make a better world.
- In spite of Pavlov, and the dozens of books and reports of clinical studies of human behaviorism since the Korean War, the ordinary student of things of the mind is unaware of the power of indoctrination.
- this is in a footnote -
- One of the most striking peculiarities of contemporary man, is that while he now has abundant scientific evidence to the contrary, he finds it extremely difficult to understand that his beliefs are by no means always linked with either his intelligence, his cultures or his values and is therefore unreasonably prone to indoctrination.
In other words, we submit to indoctrination which seems to go at right angles to our intelligence – “It just doesn’t make sense” we say – but we accept it. It’s like when you go in the army. Why do you accept the indoctrination? Because the guy says it’s easier to get along that way.
And if you want to do well in business you go join the local church. But your intelligence tells you otherwise. I remember one time I was in Houston, Texas. I’d gone down there to interview a witch doctor to see what his paradigm was. I ran into a Reverend Green from Steubenville, Ohio - who had written a thesis on telepathy, on ESP. He had written his doctorate on it, he was a minister. And he had his parish, he had his church there, and I talked to some of the people in the congregation.
And this one guy was a very friendly fellow, very intelligent man, a prominent business man there in San Antonio, and I said, “Why do you go to Church?” He said, “I go to church to take my kids to church.” I said, “Well why do you take your kids to church?” He said, “To keep them out of the penitentiary.”
And I don’t know how many people have the same opinion, that this is a good way to keep the children out of the penitentiary. But how many people go to church to find the Answer? I’m amazed. I thought, you know, that people who had astute or complex thinking processes or computers, would not be able to rest until they applied that computer to the maximum problem, especially if you’re in the business of theology. But they don’t. They go to church and they submit to the indoctrination. There are hundreds of doctrines, hundreds of churches, hundreds of denominations and nearly everybody says they’re all false but the one they belong to. But they all follow the same path of indoctrination, you know, a little bit of singing, a little bit of repetition, a little bit of comfortable atmosphere, maybe it’s incense, maybe it’s music. But the thing is to get people functioning in army fashion.
Shah goes on:
- Indoctrination is, in totalitarian societies, something which is desirable provided it furthers the beliefs of such societies.
Now we’re talking about philosophers
- In other groupings, its presence is scarcely even suspected.
This is what makes almost everyone vulnerable to it. We don’t suspect it. We just hope that everything goes smooth, you know, and the kids will be home for Christmas.
- Ghazali’s work not only predates but also exceeds the contemporary knowledge of these matters. At this time, informed opinion is split between whether indoctrination, whether overt or covert, is desirable or otherwise, whether too, it is inescapable or not.
We’ve got to the point where perhaps we can’t escape it. If you want a job selling insurance, you’ve got to submit to so many weeks of training, in which they condition you to say the right things, and they go through all the possible questions that can be thrown at you, and tell you what to say.
- But Ghazali not only points out that what people call belief may be a state of obsession. He states clearly in accordance with Sufi principles that it is not inescapable, but insists it is essential for people to be able to identify it.
Now this is the sad situation we’re in, and that psychology is not leading us out of; it’s leading us into. We can’t identify when we are snowed. So here’s this noble science that looks at religion and says, “You people are unreasonable as hell, you’re dreaming.” But in turn it’s using that same tactic to create a profession with its own paradigm and an almost invulnerable wall of protection; the paradigm becoming so complicated that you can’t even discuss it without going through a master’s degree. And by the time you get the master’s degree, you think to yourself, like the Sergeant in the army, “You better believe it” - because you’re going to have to eat from that table.
The reason I’m mentioning this is not so much to point out the present situation of psychology, but these things that I mentioned, such as that which the simple aborigines did, he did them because his psychology was pure. His paradigm was simple. There was no baloney. We make fun of the guy that builds totem poles. That’s all we have in our scientific world: paradigms, like totem poles. And we’re not going to get anywhere with our thinking. And it’s only after we’re able to identify them, as Idries Shah says, that we free ourselves and we move on to a point where we can find a conciliatory principle. And from that find some wisdom, and from that, accidentally, find these power mechanisms, that stop the clock, that heal people.
Betweenness (radio interview, orphanage, movie about gambler)
I know this may be a little difficult for you to tie together. As I said, I gave a similar lecture in Pittsburgh here just a week ago or so. They fixed it so I’d appear on the radio and explain the coming talk. I went down to the radio station. And if you ever feel foolish, it’s trying to explain a philosophic point to somebody who has three minutes before you go on the air to understand what Betweenness means. That’s what happened.
This lady came up to me and she said, “We’re supposed to ask you some questions on the air,” and she says, “What is this Betweenness? Should we ask you about that?” And I said, “Sure, that’s alright.” She said, “Well, what is it?” And I said, “You got 2 hours? Maybe longer?” Then it dawned on me that maybe I could say something. And I said, “Did you ever roll dice?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Ok, then you know what Betweenness is.”
Any man who has rolled dice or played poker has always had it at the back of his head that if he held his head a certain way, he’d win. This is the instinctive feeling that every child has – that nature is perverse, but if you hold your head the right way you’ll come out on top. Every human being has this peculiar thing.
When I was young, I was a kid under 12 in an orphanage – and I was amazed at the kids who were putting their noses up against the window in this time of the year. A few flakes would come down and they had visions of making a snowman or going out and playing in the snow if it got deep enough. So they were kind of agonized whether it would finish snowing or not. So this one little fellow was chanting a little bit of stuff:
- "Snow, snow, go away, come again some other day."
And I said, “What’s the matter with you, are you crazy? We want it to snow!” And he said, “If you want it to snow it won’t snow. But if it knows you’re indifferent, it will snow."
Do you get the point? Thought, no-thought, creation. The child’s mind had it. They don’t know the laws, they don’t know the manipulations, but they know intuitively something is there, if they work it right. And this is right down the line.
I mentioned also that this occasionally gets into the minds of people who write plays or movies. I saw this movie - I think it was Cameron Mitchell who played the part. The guy who played in High Chaparral. But anyhow, that’s the only fellow I can remember out of the play. I saw this on TV I think, a rerun. And I was again amazed at whoever the author was and where he came up with this knowledge of magic.
This Cameron Mitchell was a drunk who staggers into a real plush casino in the Mediterranean area, and he’s got a dollar, and he wants to bet it on the roll of the dice. And there’s an old man there that’s a kind of a host, who says, “You can’t bet a dollar here.” Most of the people just ignored him, brushed him aside. He says, “You can’t bet a dollar here. The chips cost a thousand a piece.”
“Oh,” he says, “excuse me.” He staggers away, goes over to a slot machine or something, and comes back with a thousand dollar chip. And so he says, “Can I bet now?” and they said, “Yeah”.
And he puts his single chip down but he recites a bit of doggerel. And the doggerel is almost meaningless. But while the dice are rolling he recites his doggerel and the dice comes up on a certain point. So they roll the dice again, and he wins. Each time that he rolled it (I don’t know how many passes he had to make to double his money, but of course we’re dealing with fiction, and the way the story was written). But before he moved away from that roulette table, he had a million dollars.
And he’s still drunk. So, there’s a sleek looking lady there who says, “I go with the winner.” So he gets his glass full of champagne, and it shows him staggering off, and the old fellow who advised him that he couldn’t play the first dollar is trying to say, “Now take it easy, you’ve already drunk a lot.” Of course he’s got a million dollars so he doesn’t argue with him on what he drinks or pays for.
So they’re going into another room, supposedly to be alone with this lady – if that’s the proper word to use – but he goes in there and drops dead. That was the climax of the story. The realization finally – he was not a million dollar man. These other people were gambling hundreds of thousands every day and they could do it. They had their belief, their paradigm. But what happened with him was that he used a paradigm that a child might use to win a million bucks, and he didn’t have the capacity.
I was so amazed by this bit of drama, by this show, that whoever had written it knew that there was a law someplace. There was a law. This fellow created a fairytale paradigm and held it in his head and the only way he could do it was he was in no-thought - he was drunk, he was just in the right degree of drunkenness. Now, how many people you know who haven’t told you, “I won 500 dollars, I don’t know how I did it - I was drunk” or “I never expected to win,” or under strange circumstances they would pick this up.
Quantum energy
But anyhow, there is a method of doing things, of changing material events. Max Freedom Long in his book on the Hunas mentioned something I have told to the electronic or electrical engineering students here. He said that the Hunas believed that the human being possessed enormous amounts of voltage.
I mentioned a little while ago quantum energy – I use the word voltage occasionally for want of a better word, but I never thought it could be measured. I do know that there’s a certain voltage you can measure on an electroencephalograph, but I don’t know what those are measured in – thousandths of a volt or something of that sort. But he maintains that though the voltage is very high the amperage is so low that it doesn’t hurt you.
Incidentally, this article I read, about the discovery of the so-called three brains of man, you know, the neocortex, and the other brain that had the sympathetic or emotional aspects to it, and then the final one, probably the cerebrum with its logical aspect – he claims that the Hunas believed this centuries ago. And that the history of these people, both the Aborigines and the Hunas, goes back 16,000 years. So this is a psychological system that is tremendously old.
Now, he speaks of 2 – 3 million volts that the human being can produce, he just states it flatly and drops it. And I’m wondering if he really means, you know, some sort of very low amperage…Then he goes on to say this is proven by science.
But anyhow, the whole thing is that these people’s knowledge of human nature and knowledge of the mind was something we haven’t quite caught up to yet. Freedom Long and Brigham before him spent two lifetimes just studying the native language there, the Hawaiian language, for the purpose of finding their secrets, which in both cases (the Aborigines in Australia and the Hunas) were tightly kept. They weren’t spoken. They were only given out in initiation. I think there are a lot of people today claiming to have the knowledge of the Hunas – but Freedom Long says it’s lost. He claimed that when they did away with the practice by law the people themselves neglected it, until they lost it.
Quantum energy, betweenness, context of belief
Now, what is necessary to arrive at this sort of thing? Let’s say you’re facing an old paradigm that is negative, or destructive, or is filled with words such as disease or cancer and you’re trying to supplant it with a paradigm without those terms. This is where your difficulty comes in. I think that any society that have such, would almost have to do like the Hunas did: they would have to find an island, to live somewhere where they wouldn’t be overrun and their whole belief system put in danger. And I think that the next thing of course would be, possibly, to transmit this only to a very few people. I don’t think it could be written in books, this is the other thing. We like to put everything in text books and say “here’s how you push the buttons.”
In other words, the conditions for which you have success in these lines are first, a form of belief in your environment. Christ couldn’t perform miracles in his own home town, they said, because nobody believed him. This is another thing a lot of people overlook in the Bible, the claim of Divine Healing. But if it were divine healing it wouldn’t have mattered whether it was his home town or not. It was said: ‘He did not do many works in this town and He left there.’ He went elsewhere.
The form of belief depends upon your success, because if the other paradigm is too strong then you’re going to have an audience that pays no attention to you. The audience is important too, if you’ve got strong disbelief.
The second thing is the capacity of the students who are taught in accordance with their ability to understand. Only people with ears can hear. That’s just the students, that isn’t the people who are going to be adepts so to speak.
The third thing is a small circle of people who will share the understanding and the knowledge which is derived from direct inner experience. It goes back to a point where you are able to develop or tap your insides for answers. Not just specified answers, ANY answers.
When we look at these different movements that have come up with the new paradigms, we find this is a common denominator. Christ and Buddha both came with a message. Both had to find the environment of belief. They had to leave their home town. They had to find a larger mass of students than what they had of the inner circle. In other words, there were supposedly at least 70 disciples, but only 12 apostles. Because the percentage of people who have ears still isn’t the percentage of people who have the ability to act. In other words, he had 70 who had ears, but 12 who could act, 12 who carried the load.
This applies to anything. You can’t have a single Huna in other words. I don’t think it would be effective. You couldn’t have a single Aborigines, because they lived in a place in Australia where everybody believed the same thing and talked the same language. They telepathically communicated very accurately. They knew when their relatives were sick, they knew if the relative died; they didn’t have to go to see. They didn’t have to learn it from the mail. If you were around them they said they would know it, immediately, they’d say, “Well, we’ve had a death, a cousin has died”, or something.
Now, getting back to psychology, I’ve got a few comments I want to make and then if you wish you can ask questions.
Belief
Belief is functional to culture and survival. We like to think that psychology is above belief; that psychology is going to deal only with proof. But belief is germane to our culture. And psychology deals with all the elements of our behavior. I’m presuming modern psychology doesn’t believe in the psychology of the psyche, the science of the psyche. The 1930 definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary of psychology was ‘the science of the psyche’. The ‘logos’ and the word ‘psyche’ come from the Greek. The word ‘logos’ stands for science.
But in recent dictionaries you have sometimes only one definition which says, ‘The science of the reactions of the mind, taken loosely or together’ or something of that sort. I’ve noticed occasionally a dictionary will add the other definition also, that it is the science of the mind, just not behaviorism, just not man’s actions taken collectively. But I think that this, again, is the attempt to change the paradigm to suit the inability of the witchdoctor. The witchdoctor can’t cure, and what he can’t cure he leaves out of the dictionary. He doesn’t have a psyche so he doesn’t have to cure it.
I maintain that belief is a tremendous functional part of everybody’s life. You can’t apply reason to everything. And I can give you examples where the psychiatrists are at war with each other. If you don’t believe me read Harold Voth - he wrote ‘The Castrated Family’ I believe, and the fellow who wrote ‘The Psychological Society' [Martin L. Gross, New York: Random House, 1978].
These people come right out and say we’re miles off base; that we’re destroying the American family with our present psychology. Now, on the other hand, you’ve got B.F. Skinner who destroyed his own daughter by putting her in a glass cage [Snopes.com says this is an urban legend] - and yet pretends to be the authority on who’s going to monitor the behavior of everyone in the country and maybe the world.
So I maintain that the reason for this trouble, the reason for this difficulty, is the refusal to accept the subjective part of man. It’s possible that you’ve got something inside your head besides spirochetes. There might be a radio set in there that picks up intuition, or messages or something from another dimension even. And incidentally, the psychology of the Aborigine works. It works. He proves it. Our psychology doesn’t work.
Blame & responsibility
What happens invariably in modern psychology is there’s an attempt to blame society for the individual’s erratic motion. And some individuals pick it up very avidly, and say, “OK I’m not to blame. Society’s to blame.” And he goes out and commits a crime, or maybe he just gets unemployed and fails to take an interest in society. So then of course he gets hungry and somebody says, “You better go down to the mental health depot and let the people who have canned answers or canned advice tell you what to do. Or at least you can stay there until you straighten yourself out.”
And so he goes down to the psychiatrist there and the psychiatrist says, “Man, you know what’s wrong with you, you’ve got to take responsibility for your actions.” That’s the first thing they tell them. And this is just the opposite of what he’s led his life by, which is this idea that society is responsible; man shouldn’t worry about anything; if you feel like getting drunk, get drunk; if you feel like being immoral, be immoral. Don’t worry about it because it’s just an experience and you’ll broaden. Of course, if you get broad enough, you might terminate. If you take in too much experience it could be fatal.
But the thing is, there’s no real logical remedies in the field of psychiatry or psychology, and most of them will flatly admit that. Read William Seabrook's book called ‘Asylum’ – that was Bellevue, the famous nuthouse in New York. They candidly admit they just allowed them to stay there and cure each other. They saw certain degrees of capability and they’d move them from one ward to another. Seven grades of capability - when they can wash their face then they put them in with the others who could wash their face – they got closer and closer to the Exit door. And this was an author (Seabrook) who was committed there for alcoholism, so he could make some pretty objective observations.
Self analysis & discrimination
I believe by the same token that psychology had a tremendous stabilizing effect upon religion as well. For instance, it gave us – somebody gave us – systems like Zen, where the whole spiritual search, the whole search for the spiritual man is not done by reading texts in the Bible, it’s done by looking inside yourself – a system of self-analysis. And when you reach the end result of that self-analysis you’ve got the same answer that the person did who sat and meditated or came to the conviction that there was a supreme being of which he was a part. But I think the difficulty is the polarity between them. On too many cases they refuse to recognize each other.
I’m not going to burden you with a lot of these quotations. I read one of the oldest authorities on yoga, which was Patanjali. You go back and read this, this is pure psychology. You go back to Buddha, what does Buddha talk about? Discrimination. Correct action. This is psychology.
Strangely enough, I don’t believe that you’ll find a single lunatic in the Aborigines of Australia. I don’t believe there are any of them that are, that have an aberration. I think we’ve fitted this too deeply into our paradigm.
Miracles
I want to give you some of the instances of this. The idea of the use of Betweenness – I use this word because, as I said, there is no other. This is the key word for a magical system. There’s a waiting for the mind… a waiting for events to take a certain turn. This is part of it.
This was brought up when Christ was at the wedding. His mother tried to get Him to serve the guests some wine, and I think she implied that he should produce some by magic. And he turned her down momentarily. He said, “My time hasn’t come yet.” And this thing kind of stuck in my head. Why did he do this? If he had this divine power it should have been available all the time.
But when you get into this business of observing the way people function: the Aborigines doesn’t just throw a boomerang. He waits until a certain time occurs, he calls it Dream-Time, and then in that Dream-Time a certain thing has to occur. And of course, since he lays no claim to divine help, he has a very simple explanation for it. This idea of a cognition we can have, I think all of us have it. There’s stuff that occurs in the lives of either ourselves or our neighbors that we can hear about, that shows that the human mind is in touch. Now he calls it his Elder Brothers. We can call it the Guardian Angel or something of that sort. But my idea is that the human mind has to be able to contact something else besides its own memory bank or computer bank.
And this happens accidentally, enough to where we can say with validity that the human mind can, under certain conditions, contact other dimensions, or another Space-Time Dimension; a far part of this dimension, another space-time episode. In this we have Déjà-vu experiences. A lot of experiences people list are Déjà-vu, where you see a wreck before it happens. You don’t get on the airplane because you sense something’s wrong.
We were talking earlier about the bridge collapsing in West Virginia and certain people that didn’t go on and certain people that did – their time had come so to speak.
Intuitional knowledge of deaths in the family; dreams that are precognitive. The dreams that are precognitive seem to imply that there is such a thing as space-time. Something that can be viewed in the present manifestly has to be happening now. For that person, it’s happening now.
There’s a whole background of so-called healings and magic that have come down to us through the centuries that we’ve more or less ignored, and I think when you start to look at these as a whole, instead of isolated incidences, you begin to get a picture of something.
Psychology, three factors
Before I close I want to give you these three factors that psychology can produce for us. And when I say psychology I’m not talking about current conventional psychology. I’m talking about the true analysis of things.
First of all, psychology can give us a better look at our daily lives and see where we are not harmonizing. The second thing is that psychology is a validation for metaphysics, religion and intuition. Psychology is a scientific explanation of things. In other words the intuition predicts. The intuition postulates a certain psychic condition which science, or psychology as a science, proves. The idea of ESP was pretty much ignored and frowned upon or smiled at, up until the time J.B. Rhine decided to conduct his experiments with psycho-kinetics. And here was an instance where ESP became valid. It became scientifically acceptable as a result of science. That is, psychic science became a science.
The third thing is the realization of tremendous psychological powers. We hear of psychological powers. It isn’t mind reading. It isn’t being able to guess what number is coming up on the stock market or the lottery. But there’s an ability to change the condition of matter. And it’s a very simple method in the way you approach it with your mind. And I maintain that the formula lies in this bit of triangulation. It’s not simple. It’s simply said but it’s not simply done. Yet there’s enough evidence to show that we don’t have the limit yet. As I said, it seems like you can’t put a leg back on a person. Yet there are tremendously larger enterprises that have been carried out.
Colin Wilson mentions this thing in his ‘Mind Parasites’. It’s a book of fiction but it’s an amazing instance of where an author is able to present in fiction a better rendition of what he supposes might be, than to try and put it down in scientific and mathematical form.
So, the witnessing of the minor things that people do, if you want to call them minor, such as the Hunas, which are miraculous cures and that sort of thing - I think these are only the tip of the iceberg. I think that the individual is able to affect a tremendous wider scope. I don’t know how far it could go, nobody knows until you go there. But this is my hope for this direction that we like to call psychology today, if it can take a turn.
Well if you have any questions, I’d like to swing over to that because I’ve got some other references but I’d like to see basically what you are thinking about, what you’d like to dwell on.
Q&A begins
Betweenness, examples
Q: You were talking about the thought of Paradigm X on one side, and then no-thought of Paradigm X, and then the creation of Paradigm X. At first, I didn’t understand that at all, and then at one point when you started relating that to Betweenness, and especially that story about the kid who wanted it to snow, but said, “Snow snow go away, come back another day.” I had some sort of intuition but it’s just not clear.
Rose: You have to see it. I know that. I know that there’s a big gap here. We’re talking about something that’s entirely new to you. This came about, for me and for other people, some of whom are present here today and have attended these things. What started out as, for instance, in our philosophic group, as a rapport session, often developed into a healing. The healing was not intended. I don’t intend to be a healer – as I said, when I was looking at this fellow's button. I don’t intend to get myself psyched up to healing and to getting a reputation for healing because you can’t do too many things well. And I have a message to deliver and if I can find the words for that, I’ll be doing my job well. I don’t want to branch out in too many things.
But these things do happen. The thing is: there’s a way to do it that makes it effective. There’s a speaker who will be here two weeks from now – Frank Mascara. When I first started lecturing in Pittsburgh, Frank and his wife came down from Pittsburgh every weekend. They taught school, but on the weekends they’d come down to my house and we would have a sitting. We would sit in what we call rapport, waiting for mental realizations to occur.
Now these sittings, there’s nothing weird about them. They’ve been doing this for centuries. The early Pentecostal religion used to sit in this fashion, for what they called "tarrying", waiting for a message from God if you want to call it that. But it was the idea of sitting quietly so that the third party would join, which might be the spirit or the Holy Ghost, or some voltage in the room. Now when I heard the word voltage in the Huna doctrine, it reminded me of what happened in these meetings, where actually there would be a voltage pass through the room, and everybody could feel it and know exactly where it was – they’d all agree upon its location. It was almost visible.
We were sitting this one day and I noticed that Frank’s wife was out of tune. And I looked at her and I saw a headache in her head, just because of the frame of mind that we were in. We were in a neutral frame of mind – or I was at least, I don’t know what everyone else was. But I said to her, “You have a headache.” And she said, “Yes, I’ve got a splitting headache.” And I sat there for a minute and a thought occurred to me, “Take it out. Take it out of her head.” I got up, walked across the floor, I cupped my hand over her head and pulled the headache out of her head. There was nothing scientific or logical about that. I did that as a result of, not desiring, not fearing, but doing for the hell of it. If it worked, wonderful, if it didn’t, Ok, I’m still not ashamed of the fact that I tried, if it failed. That’s the attitude that you’ve got to hold your head in, when I say you hold your head in a certain way.
So she says, “Wow! What happened?” And of course I was as surprised as she was. But for a long period of time, I could see headaches. I could see pains.
When the voltage occurred people would have spiritual experiences, is what I’m driving at. One of the men came down, he’s also from Pittsburgh and there was no voltage in the room. So we were sitting there for three quarters of an hour and generally it happens within 20 minutes. So I looked across, I shut my eyes, I could see better if I had my eyes shut. And I could see the vacuum, so I could see the pain in a person and I turned around and saw a black wedge. And I opened my eyes and I was looking at Bob Ayers. And I said to Bob, “You have a pain right here.” He said, “Exactly. My head’s splitting.” I said, “Then let's quit, let's go out to the kitchen and get some coffee." This is the end of the road, that’s all.
This happened with increasing frequency until we got into allowing too many people, curiosity seekers, to come in. We thought they had a good intention and everything, but they weren’t. They were just, you might call it, drainers. They came in just to watch, maybe even to pick up a healing or something. But nobody should do anything like that for a cruddy selfish purpose. Even to get healed. This is the point. This follows the lines of the central part of neither desire nor fear, neither ego nor extreme humility. “Do it! What the hell you got to lose?” That’s the attitude to have. And if you fail, well it’s like mind reading. You can practice mind-reading and after a while you get so you can read minds. But don’t worry because you fail once in a while. You can start off with ESP cards or something like that.
But when you get into this stuff you’ll know what I’m talking about. I can’t write a book on it, although I’ve written some books that will lead you in that direction. You have to be a certain type of person. You have to be able to control yourself a certain way. You can’t be bombarded with all sorts of ambitions and desires and furies and at the same time effect a change in somebody else or a change in matter. And, again, I don’t want to go into all of it – but we’ve had a tremendous amount of phenomena occur from this type of mind holding. And I think that there’s an unlimited, a tremendous unlimited condition. I think that events can – you can kill people with it if you wish. You can heal people with it. You can keep people from dying.
Spontaneity
Q: You say, first off it happened very spontaneously, in other words, no desire at all for it to happen. Then later on when it comes under your control, there is intention. It isn’t spontaneous anymore -
Rose: If there is an intention, it ceases. No, no. There can’t be an intention. What I mean is that you can’t have the intention of making a profession out of it. Don’t get me wrong, you can [do these things] - as long as you don’t mind helping somebody. But if you get the idea that you’re going to capitalize on this or build a science out of it, then I say it wouldn’t work.
Q: I’m just trying to understand the…
Rose: We never sought these instances, is what I’m trying to tell you. We weren’t there for that. We were there to try to get a spiritual realization, not a healing. They came by accident. We gave Chautauquas down on the farm and I went around and pointed at people in the audience - I could tell them where the pain was. Sometimes they could see it. Now I didn’t do that because that was, you know, the feature of the day. You just get into saying, “Well, let’s try this and see if it works.” But if you’re going out to do strictly that, and doing it for show, I don’t think it will work.
Thought, no thought & Chilton Pearce
Q: I don’t think you see exactly what I’m asking. What I’m asking is more – not any particular phenomenon that you want to happen or to show. I get all that – I just want to know the mechanics. It seems to me that this triangle has a general kind of thing. It seems to me to relate to what Patanjali called Samyama, where there is thought and no-thought and then there’s some sort of a realization.
Rose: Right, right, right.
Q2: If I may – I think I’m sort of an intermediary here. If you’re looking for a model, I think Joseph Chilton Pierce provides one in his books. If you think of the paradigm as a system of ‘no’s or a system of negations, which I think you mentioned, then tie in with that. The first step of no-thought… If we define consciousness as always having an object and that object as consisting of the ‘no’ – an object is defined - well, in a linguistic system for instance, an object is defined by what it is not –
Rose: Right. That’s the first time I’ve heard anybody say that. And I’ve known that for years.
Q2: Ok. In any system, that’s the way a system works. It works by differentiation. Number 9 has a position relative to number 8 and so on. So a paradigm is comprised of 'no’s, and consciousness intends a ‘no’, and therefore consciousness is limiting. But a reverse kind of consciousness, ‘no-thinking’, is what Joseph Chilton Pearce describes as the clearing the forest. Instead of thinking of a specific thing which implies all these ‘no’s, because it is part of a system, you think in a way which has no specific object. It’s kind of a passive thing, and yet it requires some effort to do this because we are so attuned to thinking in terms of objects and in terms of negatives and in terms of ‘no’s.
So when you create this clearing of the forest, you eliminate paradigms, you eliminate restrictions, you eliminate limits; that makes it possible for the affirmative to come in, you can replace that paradigm then with some constructive thought, whether it be hitting a rabbit or curing someone. An infinite number of things can fit into that space, the space is infinite, there are no ‘no’s in it. And I think that’s the model you were working with.
Rose [to Q1]: Yeah, as soon as you get into human consciousness you get into relativity. You got two sides of the coin immediately, and as soon as you get the two sides of the coin another paradigm arises, just like he says. We’re trying to explain how this thing can be done and I’m saying it can be done without thinking. And as soon as you start to use words, even the words he [Q2] used – I think he very ably described the process, you know, and the cause of the reason we can’t see it. But as soon as you do that you build another paradigm.
To give you an example, in the time of Christ the paradigm was extremely negative and I suppose it was one of hate, violence, killing, you know, to be effective. And a man comes along and says, “I’m going to change the paradigm. We’re going to have love. We’re going to supplant a lot of this stuff and put the accent on love.” And the new paradigm worked. It worked for a long period of time. But it too became a paradigm. And then, it began to fail.
Q2: The paradigm comes in when people solidify the second aspect of this, the clearing of the forest. If they separate – that’s why, as you said – this perfect society has to be taught by teaching people directly. And that part’s invisible, you can’t put it in textbooks.
Rose: Right. The most important thing you can do is go put your hand on a person’s head and shut up. That’s what we find. If you sit in rapport – that’s the reason we don’t talk. You remain silent and then the awareness grows - non-verbalized awareness. And then from that awareness comes an impulse, with no logical reason. There’s nothing sensible that says, “Do this and something will happen.” You do it! Don’t try to do it every day, you know, or set a calendar where you’re going to do it tomorrow. No. You have to be spontaneous – of the moment; then forget about it, if you want to be effective.
And this is the reason the word Betweenness is used. It’s between the raindrops. It’s between the thoughts. It’s not the thought, it’s between the thoughts. If you hold your head between two thoughts you can perform miracles. It’s that simple; it’s that complex. That’s what we’re driving at today. Betweenness. Between the thoughts.
Q2: That’s exactly where the ‘no’s are. Like I said, a thing is separated from the other thing by not being that other thing. The ‘no’ is what separates so –
Rose: Well, the two thoughts are the negatives and in Between, there’s no thought. When you’re functioning at your best, it’s when you’re totally… blank. But aware. The awareness is very high but you’re not taking the opposite. The opposite of bad is good. You don’t contemplate either bad nor good. You look right down the middle.
I’ve often thought that this is what Buddha meant when he talked about the Middle Path. A lot of people think it means moderation. I think he’s talking about keeping your head in the center to perform the miracle.
Koans
Q2: Why do they give you a koan in Zen? It’s because you have to mediate, to get the conciliatory principle?
Rose: You can’t do it with reason. You can’t do it with reason. You have to shock the head into a paralyzed point where it doesn’t move either way - that’s the koan. They shock you. You belabor the head until it freezes up. And when it freezes, then miracles result. And also great realizations, the realization of your true nature, relationship to God.
Recovery
Q3: You were talking about paradigms and I was thinking of a guy I know who sort of lost his marbles two years ago. He was strapped up in a mental hospital for two days and since then he’s been back in college and everything. And he commented to me something about how he thought he had programmed himself to go crazy, that it was coming all along. I catch him making comments, every so often, that imply to me he believes that just about everything about the way you are is something that you choose. And you know, I don’t catch this from most people so much as him. He seems to have a real conviction that everything is a function of how you hold your head, like you say. He says, “Well, you could be scared if you wanted to”, that type of thing.
Rose: He had the chance of recovery because he believes he’ll be able to do something. He believes that he’s done it in the past and he’s capable of action. Of course I don’t agree that people are that capable of action. I think of course what they do is they have little paradigms.
We have a case going on in the group. I was watching this happen just the other day, where a fellow who was very clever and clandestine had a whole system built up of never telling the truth, or evading it, because he had evidently lied to somebody at some time or another, and he had to keep this facetious system going. And when I faced him with it, he started crying and he said, “I can’t talk to you, I’m too emotional.” I said, “That’s another barrier. You’re not kidding me, you want to hang on to that.”
And what happens, a lot of people then blow their lid and they find the truth, not the final truth, but a true psychological revelation about themselves. They go out a free man. But the mistake is: the relatives bundle him off to the nuthouse and the doctor shoots him full of dope and then they’re lost out in no-man’s land. Whereas a lot of these experiences, unless they’re dope related, are not dangerous at all. They’ll solve themselves.
Q3: A person usually comes out of them if he’s not being doped up. He’s thinking that he’s just escaped a paradigm –
Rose: Right. Hey, all you have to do – you’ll find a lot of cases in domestic relationships where a man or a wife, they may go together, they get married. Each one has their own little paradigm which, incidentally, they’re trying to exert on the other partner. And they play it to the hilt.
But one day the other party says, “Hey. You’re unreasonable. You’re crazy. Goodbye.” And then come the tears, then comes the nervous breakdown, the collapse, the realization. And, if they’re both compassionate human beings, they can go hand in hand through the rest of their life together. But they’re not going to go nuts. It’s just that that’s what happens when the egos leave. The egos don’t leave quietly. The egos are false, you see? But that’s the steps to go on to find the realization. When you drop all the egos, even the ego of spiritual potency, that’s when your final realization comes. And it comes with tears and anguish and insanity.
Zen & Reality & Time
Q4: I don’t see how your examples of the Zen experience or precognition represent things in a different space-time.
Rose: I didn’t say Zen did. I said Zen is a perfect psychological system, that’s the only meaning I had for Zen.
Q4: Precognition up here is still in the physical world, and you’re not really experiencing the plane crash. I mean you’re having a precognition -
Rose: Well, what is experience? Did you ever wake up in the morning with a dream that was so real you had to examine the room?
Q4: It isn’t real.
Rose: Well - you still haven’t quite approached this thing called reality under the definition of reality. In other words, there are things that our senses tell us are real. It’s like a hologram. Would you believe a hologram if you weren’t told it was a hologram?
I saw one some time ago and it looked like a little wagon inside a tube. The senses are not valid. But I’m not trying to speak on the invalidity of the senses, because everyone knows that. I’ve always said hypnosis is one of the best ways of studying the human mind because the human mind can be beguiled so rapidly, so quickly, instantaneously. You can put somebody in another complete paradigm. They can believe they’re a rooster and start cawing, that sort of thing.
Q4: But they’re not a rooster…
Rose: Huh? How do you know they’re not? How do you know he doesn’t believe he’s a rooster? In other words, his world is what counts to him, not to you. The person who’s crazy, by your definition you may say he’s crazy, the psychiatrist may say he’s crazy. But a spiritual leader might say that man’s a saint. That’s what happened to Swedenborg with his contemporaries. If Christ and Swedenborg were living today the psychiatrists would have made them into a bunch of pin cushions, with their needles. You can’t define these terms except in an absolute sense. And it’s strange that people try.
In other words, we don’t know basically who’s crazy. The only thing, perhaps, that you can, by insight, see is if the person is still there or if he’s believing something to the point where it puts him outside.
Now, we’re getting off the point that you brought up, and that is of seeing a plane crash ahead of time or something of that sort. This implies to me that when you see something happen, that’s real, and if that turns out to be real later, it’s real then. This is simple logic in my estimation.
Q4: But they’re different points in time.
Rose: But if there is no time, there are no points in time. There is no time.
I was giving a talk in Pittsburgh and a man was asking me a question similar to this. He said, “How do you tie this in to the space that we’re on. You’re talking about space-time.” So I stamped my foot on the floor and I said, “This floor isn’t here!” And he said, “What the hell are you standing on?” I said, “Who’s standing? Who’s talking? Goodbye!” and I walked away. [Laughter]
In other words, this is a paradigm conception. This may be a movie show, right? If it’s part of a movie show, then capital ‘R’ Reality is a realization of God. Small ‘r’ reality is an egotistical interpretation of the show; it’s the many, many egotistical interpretations of the picture show projected upon the Void.
Triangulation
Q5: In your speech you said a lot of things, and I may have gotten a little confused. But regarding your concept of Betweenness and regarding your conceptual methodology of triangulation, are you trying to say that, Ok, using the method of triangulation, this is how we can understand in words, this idea of Betweenness?
Rose: Yes, that’s all.
Q5: Ok. Now do you use triangulation for other knowledge?
Rose: Well, it’s brought out to show the ineffectiveness of what I call lateral thinking, where you only have two points of polarity. That we’ve neglected to realize in our thinking that there’s a third point that precedes both. In other words, the limitations of only studying goodness never really leads to knowing anything about goodness, because goodness compares with badness. It’s just like he said on the definition, that everything is defined by its opposite. We don’t have positive definitions.
We talk about reality but this reality we talk about is defined by something else. A cat is defined as everything that is not a cat – the genus or species, a mammal or a reptile. I don’t think the dictionary does that, but that’s its direction, that’s its inference; that everything fits in categories and the cat is not in those other categories. And I believe this does take us into negating, not only negating the things we talked about, but also negating that anything else exists. This is the trouble. If it isn’t in that solid little paradigm, in Webster’s dictionary, then it doesn’t exist. And of course on the triangulation thing – I think this is a very good analysis of the human thinking processes, but I don’t mean to imply that you use a triangulation to bring about Betweenness. You have to step out of this. That’s a paradigm in itself.
I one time studied under a Zen Master and he said to me, “We’ve got to use words until we transcend them.” So you get up here and you belabor yourself trying to bring something very subjective out in the best possible physical terms. That is all you can do. And then somebody in the audience has an intuition that picks up what you’re talking about. This is the only hope you can have.
Creating another language; paradoxes
Q5: Have you ever thought, well, you created the concept of Betweenness and you made the concept of triangulation. You’ve interjected into words that are already used. What about if you re-define, as some people try, to make a brand new language instead of inserting a few words ... ?
Rose: Create a whole new language?
Q5: Yeah.
Rose: Well it would be another paradigm, unfortunately. It would be another paradigm. This is the thing, that I never could see quite where Chilton Pearce was headed. I agreed 100% that the paradigm was what killed his wife. But what’s the remedy for it? I think, possibly, the best remedy is just not accepting it. Don’t try to replace it. In other words, don’t put something else down on the other end of the line. Have nothing down there, if necessary. Contemplate possible nothingness.
Q5: So, are you then saying that, forever and ever, given the limitations of human knowledge, there will always be paradigms?
Rose: There will always be paradoxes and paradigms, sure. As soon as you start talking about it – this is the thing: We mentioned the Aborigine, and they didn’t allow anyone to witness when they transferred this knowledge to somebody else. I think the purpose of it was to keep down the dogma. Don’t write anything down. As soon as you write something down, somebody writes poems about it. Then somebody finds the philosophy in the poems and writes ten books of philosophy. Patanjali – they say he wrote ten pages, and there’s been enormous volumes written about his writings since then. He just had procedures that occupied about ten pages. And that may have been too much, because now that‘s being interpreted and reinterpreted and a language develops around it.
But what I hope for tonight, to be able to bring to you by words - because we don’t have the conditions to demonstrate - that there is a method of getting things done without being tied up, or recognizing every paradigm in the book.
Q5: I just had an incidental thought here that maybe the method of triangulation relates to what Hegel called, ‘Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis’.
Rose: I’m acquainted with that combination of words but I don’t know if he means the same thing. There’s a difference: it's a form of synthesis in many cases, but it isn’t necessarily a synthesis in the result.
Realization
For instance, if you remember, I said thought and no-thought resulted in Absolute Realization. Now that isn’t a synthesis. You can’t add thought and no-thought and get a realization. In other words, you could add a color spectrum and get a synthesis of color, or new color, or something of that sort. Seemingly, what is a new color? Maybe only a combination of the old ones.
It’s not the idea of adding the two things at the base of the triangle and getting all sorts of variables which are goodies. That’s not it. No. There’s a certain thing that reacts, or results from, the contemplation of both things at once. Not just examining them for qualities of something, but actually holding them in your head, both things at once. And the Total Realization comes from seeing the nothingness in man, or thinking with the koan, like he said, until your head stops and then EVERYTHING becomes apparent to you. Now, I’m using the word everything. EVERYTHING becomes apparent to you. And then, you realize that the only reason everything became apparent to you is because you knew everything and nothing. Immediately it starts off on the other end of the line, which is nothing. And when you know everything and nothing, you become in union with the Absolute.
Q5: Is that like in logic, just to take an analogy, that if both X and not-X are true simultaneously then you can prove everything, but that says, in fact, nothing.
Rose: That sounds very clever [R laughs]. That’s actually clever. I’m not saying that it’s not true, or is true, I don’t know. It’s one of those catchy little things like if you cut the distance between here and the wall in half, will you really ever reach the wall? Or will you always be half way away from it?
Q5: What I was thinking was that if you’re contemplating simultaneous opposites, say, one paradigm here, and the other paradigm there, opposite paradigms...
Rose: They’re not opposite paradigms, they’re just items in a paradigm.
Q5: I’m thinking here that the point at the top must be, somehow, a field of all possible paradigms, kind of a neutral point that doesn’t fade with one paradigm or the other.
Rose: Oh, yeah right, I would say that. Yeah. It would be a point of neutrality, Benoit mentions that. It’s a neutral point. It doesn’t fade with either one.
But the thing is that half of this, for instance, it's like an algebraic formula. I have here [in the diagram] that thought and no-thought result in Absolute Realization. Now that isn’t algebra, because thought and no-thought you might think would arrive at, mathematically speaking, somewhere in between thought and no-thought. Or half-thought. No. What it is, is you try this. You do this. You live it. And this is what happens from that, from that perspective. That you reach an Absolute Realization by looking between thoughts.
Q6: If you take a paradigm, then take the opposite of that paradigm, you're always going to be in favor of one or the other, right? So you’d always almost have to force yourself in a direction that you don’t want to go.
Rose: Well, what happens – you can’t hardly force yourself. But what happens is that you’re forced. Nobody really succeeds intentionally all of the blueprints, for say a spiritual awakening or an accumulation of power. What happens is that they just keep driving.
Now what you have is the pursuit of the Truth. A pursuit of the Truth which we have no definition for. So we find it. It’s crazy, but that’s the thing thrown into the computer. The other thing is the possibility that you’re incapable of perceiving the Truth. So you’ve got action, opposed by a conviction that the action will be unsuccessful. And you live this. A person on a spiritual path lives this, every moment, every day of their life. And they continue to push and push and push. And no logical, verbal, or something that can be written down thing results. What happens is an explosion. Your being changes. Why? Because somehow we are adaptable.
The thing you discover is that in the next dimension, our space and time don’t work. Our time is dependent on a visible Sun. Our space is dependent upon some aspect of our consciousness – you know, something far, something near. Now, when the sun goes out you’re timeless. That’s the reason that, for instance – certain advantages in the water tank that John Lilly conducted. He put the human being in a position where he couldn’t see a clock. He no longer knew whether it was day or night. I don’t know what exactly the details were maybe he was floating in this tank or a rubber raft ...
Q: Salt water.
Rose: Yeah – So this gave him a feeling of spacelessness and this caused the computer to shift to that. Now the computer can’t deal with non-values, it has to have a binary system or something to go by: No-Yes. But nevertheless the problem is there and it says, “solve it.” And in order to solve it the person has to change his being; and he can’t change his being, his being is changed by the triggering of a little procedure, which is the neutral state; the humble ego-less state and continued application with a desire to know.
The algebraic wow
And the same thing applies, I’ve always said, when most people study algebra for the first time. I know this is what happened to me. They get a problem that says, ‘X +Y = C’ or ‘10’ or something like that. And you say, “What could this problem mean? Who cares whether X+Y =10 or C?” No. They give you another problem: XY +2XY and so on. And I don’t know what went through your head, but what went through my head was, “What are they doing this for? I have to take this?”
But one day something popped! I never learned algebra - I became algebra. That’s the only way I can describe it. The whole thing instantaneously became reasonable. I still didn’t see where I was going to apply it in my life but I could see that this was a set of symbols. And incidentally, algebra is a paradigm in itself. It’s a paradigm. It suddenly became meaningful. Before it was pure absurdity.
Now, we work with that; that inspirational realization is something we work with in the development of battleships and airplanes; and they fly, they don’t sink, and so on. So it works. There must be something behind this thing that comes by this type of inspiration, because there’s no logical reason to believe that X + Y = Z. They aren’t numerical values. So the same thing applies when you get into something abstract – and again you don’t even know that it’s an abstract find. You don’t know what’s coming up.
Becoming the truth
When you go after the answer of Life and Death, the meaning of man, the definition of man, you may well come up with an answer such as oblivion, if you’re a student of the truth. You’ve got to accept what comes, not what you can create. So this is what you’ve got to keep in the back of your computer too: no phony answers. That which is, is all that you want.
And you never learn. No one learns that answer. You can only become that answer. Then, you go back: “I read it in the Bible” you know, and it was said repeatedly and I ignored it. And as a result of reading it, I presume that they got somebody who wrote that Bible, somebody that knew Christ real well, somebody who knew something about True Being. Because he didn’t say, you know, “I know the truth.” You don’t find that in the New Testament. He said, “I am the Truth.” And that’s when I realized that he knew that he became. He didn’t learn the Truth, he had to become it. And that’s how he found it. By maybe a tremendously painful, persistent process. It isn’t a magic that you twist and you draw a little triangle, jump up at the top of it, sit there - that’s just a feeble description of how the thing comes about, that’s all.
Q2: I’ve had the privilege of studying under two professors, both of whom accepted your thesis that probably some non-cultures, consciously non-cultured people like the Aborigines, would probably be the highest expression of humanity, philosophically and environmentally in every aspect.
One concluded from that, that all of society was a sham and an illusion, and he proceeded to go and live with such a primitive society. Another professor said that we must continue to perpetuate the illusion not for the sake of the illusion but for the sake of the players in that illusion, and humanity, whose value was absolute because of their potential, not on a cultural scale, but at least on an individual scale, to come to recognize that that is an illusion and -
Rose: Well, see, you can’t help but come up with this thing of, “Who started it, the chicken or the egg?” Who started it and what’s the purpose of it? I don’t believe in condoning the, let’s say, blatant inconsistency in the illusion – I believe that we can merge toward a more …
Living the truth
In other words, I think the truth begins with truthful living, not with astute mathematical formulation or very deep hypothetical thinking. I think the truth has to be – you have to become the truth, and becoming the truth means you can’t afford to be a damn fool. We can’t afford to be snowed! We can’t afford to be snowed on any level, whether the government is snowing us, and I’m sure the government is snowing us - whether the guy who sells you automobiles is snowing us, I’m sure he’s snowing us.
Every place you turn around, it’s open season on the consumer, or on the kids in school. The professional is lead to believe he can make a living with this paradigm. And the paradigm is getting so damn rotten that he’s making more sick people. He’s helping to make a sick paradigm. We’re getting more nuthouses as a result of the science of psychology. They’re not curing people with the spirit, they’re not curing people, they're not saying there's a sane and violent spirit inside this guy that’s Ok, and all we have to do is get inside of his head. In other words, step inside his moccasins instead of treating him as a corpse. You treat him as a corpse, then, you know, he’s expendable.
Q2: So… I don’t understand… what’s the triangulated –
Rose: Well I believe that all humanity – I don’t believe we’re put here to be in a daydream or somebody’s pipe dream, or the Supreme Being’s pipe dream. I believe we’re put in here - I believe all science aims at the truth. In other words, you study chemistry, it’s based upon the hardest material they can get, the atomic chart, see? You study physics, it has to do with the properties of matter which are weighed and cataloged and categorized and they’re pretty consistent, let’s say that.
You deal with psychology or sociology then you deal with nebulous systems. They have no foundation whatsoever. In other words, I went into Brown University, one of our own people, who was down there giving a lecture, and this fellow flipped out. And it wasn’t from drugs, I don’t know what it was from. He just - I think sometimes he was thinking too much. But he went bananas and he fell over on the floor, and he had committed himself to this mental institution.
I went down to see him at the mental hospital before I left the province and he flopped over on the floor and a psychiatrist came over, but of course before he got there, I reached out and grabbed the boy's wrist and held onto it. He changed immediately. He stood up, he was perfectly sane. And the psychiatrist arrived, he saw all I did and I said to the psychiatrist, “Can you do that?” The guy looked at me like I was crazy.
But the fellow was laughing, he was real happy, he was full of energy and that sort of thing. And so I got talking to the psychiatrist. I said, “What are you treating this fellow for?” He said, “Well we don’t know.” And I said, “What are you giving him?” He said, “Stelazine” or something. And I said, “What the hell are you doing, giving him medicine when you haven’t diagnosed his illness?”
In other words he’s a pin cushion. You try this, if that doesn’t work, try something else. If that doesn’t work give him shock treatment, see? It’s like a mechanic working on your car. See if it’s the carburetor. If it ain’t the carburetor, it must be something else. You put on a lot of different parts.
But the thing is that I maintain that there’s a direct system of going into people’s heads and finding out what’s wrong. And of course I can’t enforce this on society. But I think we can question it, question it, question it and say, “Where are you coming from? What is a thought?” Why don’t the textbooks define what a thought is? Why don’t they find what mind is? They don’t! That’s their stock trade, thoughts. They don’t have any definition.
End
x