1991-Unitarian-Church-Raleigh
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| Title | 1991-Unitarian-Church-Raleigh |
| Recorded date | 1991. The year is all was have for a date so far. |
| Location | Unitarian Church, Raleigh, NC |
| Number of tapes | |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | SN = Three 60 minute tapes. DW 2 versions: 3 x 60 and 2 x 90 |
| No. of MP3 files | SN = 7 files including introduction: 3 min; 28 min; plus 5 x 32 min |
| Total time | |
| Transcription status | |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | Lots of biographical details. |
| Audio quality | SN: Audio very good but is only right channel. Sides 5 and 6 have some awkward splicing in an attempt to raise audio volume in audience questions. |
| Identifiable voices | Bart Marshall, intro by Augie Turak. |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1991-Unitarian-Church-Raleigh |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150301172032 |
to add
Remove the following:
Rose met Sokei-an prior to his death in 1945 but did not consider him a valid teacher. See 1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus.
See below: "where will you be when the world goes up in smoke?"
This is a Pulyan quote:
/pulyan/letters/1960-0928-pulyan.htm
Also:
The Zen Master asks: “What happens to you when the great Universe disappears in fire?”
pulyan/letters/1960-0827-pulyan.htm
2 Peter 3:10
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
http://biblehub.com/2_peter/3-10.htm
Notes
Cassette tapes available: 3 cassettes Tape 1 (side 1 = 32 minutes; side 2 = 32 minutes) Tape 2 (side 3 = 32 minutes; side 4 = 31 minutes) Tape 3 (side 5 = 31 minutes; side 6 = 32 minutes) Other tape recorders audible? No, but there are splices in this version, so it is a copy. MP3 files created : 7 (including file #0, introduction) Technical info / audio quality Audio very good but only In right channel. Sides 5 and 6 have some awkward splicing between microphones in an attempt to raise audio volume in audience questions. Identifiable voices Augie Turak, Bart Marshall Tape 4 – min 22 – there is a crucial gap in the Jane Slater story. Does another version exist, or is the other track available, pre-splices?
File 0 - intro
File 0 = 3 ½ minutes. Introduction by Augie Turak.
File 1
28 minutes total 00:00
I have to pay him [Augie] a little. He gets the clerical discount.
00:31
[Bart says “stereo”]
A man just handed me this. I’m so used to people handing me notes that say, “Help!” – somebody’s in dire distress and they want to be healed,” or something. I just read, “Dear friend, I need your help.” And then I looked up and it says, “George Bush.” I’ll keep it anyhow.
[noise]
01:17
Well,. I want to read a couple things to you. I don’t know how much you’re acquainted with Zen, and first of all, let me state, Zen is a method, and there are other methods, there are other doors to realization. I consider it a psychological system first; it’s one of the greatest psychological systems there are. Because it attacks definition, it attacks the person, to define himself. And it’s not a religion. I don’t know what conceptions people have of Zen, but Zen is not a religion. It’s a movement, and of course because people clustered together to work together they’ve had monasteries. I think at one time in history it became, it almost destroyed its own purpose, or ability to spread the word, so to speak, or get people interested. Because there’s no dogma, there’s no doctrine to learn.
02:46
The thing is that people got together and challenged each other’s thinking, until finally it produced some answers, or quasi-answers if nothing else. And from that thing as it evolved, some of them found a maximum answer.
03:08
And if you have trouble with your personality or your life even, one of the first things people will tell you – if they’ve got any experience in handling people who are troubled – is to examine yourself, study [yourself], look inside, see what’s troubling you, what’s made you sick, what’s made you ill. This is basically what Zen is. Of course there are always things that grow up around it, such as Zen poetry. Zen poetry, very little of it was made by people studying Zen; it was mostly made by, you know, westerners who were impressed by it and put something in poetic form.
04:00
In fact, I was giving a lecture one time in Pittsburgh, and a man stood up and said, “Have you studied haiku poetry?” I think that’s what he called it, haiku. I said, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” And he said, “Well, you know nothing about Zen, if you don’t know about haiku poetry.” But knowledge has nothing to do with music, poetry or anything like that; knowledge is separate. It’s alright to beat the drums and play the music if you’re happy, but not to try to incorporate too much.
04:34
I have some – you’ve heard of koans maybe. One of the methods, because, that they use was the koan, and some of the monasteries in China – incidentally, they didn’t call it Zen then, it was Ch’an. And some of the monasteries held as many as nine thousand people. [not in Suzuki, or Garma Chang] I kind of think sometimes that the poor went there, the kids that didn’t – you think that’s impossible, well maybe that they would be more highly motivated. But regardless, they had to teach nine thousand people at once. And so they put a riddle out for the day or something, and the riddle was the koan.
05:30
And when you hear them and you read them – they translate them into English – and I don’t think they mean much. Such as, “Ten geese flying backwards – what’s the meaning of it?” It means demented geese, to me. But they would try to make that into something stupendous.
06:00
So I came to the conclusion [question] – why do we look into this stuff? I looked [into it] and I’ll explain to you later, my looking [?] the evolution I went through. But the reason most people look into things like this, or esoteric philosophy or something of that sort, is because they want to know the answer. The Answer.
06:29
And they don’t have it, and they don’t get it. And what do you get today? And when I was a child, a boy, I was twelve years of age when I was shipped off to a place in Pennsylvania to study to be a Catholic priest. [footnote] And I didn’t, I realized they didn’t necessarily have the answer. They had beliefs – galore – but no answer. And when I got to be seventeen I left. But I didn’t stop looking.
07:05
Koans
So – these are questions. And they’re not mysterious, and they’re not oriental, that is, you don’t have to translate anything. And if you can answer them as I go, you’ll realize that your head is moving in a very important way, I think.
What do you know for sure?
Does a man own a house, or does a house own him?
Does a man have power, or is he overpowered?
Is a man a predator or a victim – or both?
Does a man enjoy (we’re talking about pleasure now) – does a man enjoy or is he consumed?
08:08
Does a man really reason – he likes to think he’s a rational character; he can argue and reason with you – does he really reason, or is he so programmed?
Can a man learn, that which he really wishes to, by himself alone?
If we’re by ourself alone, we can only learn that which we already know, which as a child is very little.
08:23
Can a man become?
Why did I use that word?
How shall he know what he should become?
Why build ant hills before knowing what an ant is?
We can translate that into houses.
Why do we build conceptual towers of Babel about human thinking before we know what thought is?
How can we dare to define thought before knowing the source or cause of all thought?
09:09
Where does a thought come from? We have psychologists galore, and none of them can tell you what thought is. Where does it come from? From the preceding thought; no great secret. But what happens before the first thought? In the morning when you get up, what is the first thought? The remembrance, the last thought maybe of the day before, or some important thought you had.
09:43
When we describe bouncing, do we describe the striking object or that which is struck?
This is like using the word karma. Or a statement such as [when] some gets killed, or gets sick. I remember reading somewhere, they asked Christ, “Why is this man sick? Is ii his fault or his father’s fault or his grandfather’s fault way back there?” And he said, “He was made sick so that I could heal him.”
10:29
In other words ...
Is thought the process of bouncing or the object struck?
Everything struck reacts with an opposite equal force.
Can you start thinking?
First of all we’ve got to stop thinking, because you’re thinking now. So try to stop thinking. Try to make your head a blank, so that you can start thinking. When you get up in the morning do you start thinking? Sure, you start thinking. But you can’t start from zero base. You can’t, once your mind is open, you have to have something, what do they call it? – an influence or impulse, to cause you to think.
11:13
In other words, we are out of control when it comes to thinking. If there isn’t something captivating our attention, we don’t think; and we think about that which captivates our attention. And of course from there on it may scatter out or change until – maybe we go to school that day and we do a lot of thinking, a lot of studying of diverse objects.
11:38
But the whole process of thinking is almost separated from the person himself. He doesn’t really control it. He’d like to think he does. And of course after he thinks a lot and acquires a lot of data, he’d like to lay claim to possession of the knowledge of that data.
11:58
Is thought something received or something projected?
Is thought a somatic emanation?
You know why I ask that? because that’s the current concept of thought. There’s nothing here but the body, say the materialists; also the modern psychologists. There are conditioned reflexes: you stick a pin in the protoplasm and you get a reaction, and that’s all we are, just reacting protoplasm. But I’m not saying yes or no. I’m saying, “Think about it.”
12:44
Do we think, or are we forced to think?
Can you avoid thinking? The more you try to avoid the force, the more force is put upon you it seems.
Is “negative thinking” as commonly discussed, negative to man or negative to nature?
What do we mean when we’re talking about negative thinking? When you’re accused of negatve thinking, it’s when you walk up to somebody and say, “You’re a louse.” And he says, “You’re thinking negatively.” He [?] may be right. He may be a louse. It’s not necessarily what we think is negative, or what people like to throw at you. In other words, modern society if full of people with clever, brutal, cutting clichés – not wisdom.
13:30
Does the brain generate thought – we get into thin thing about the source of thought again – like a radio generates a message coming from its speaker?
Is thought limited to the brain?
In other words, what is the limitation of thought
When a tree bends over does it create wind by waving its branches?
In other words, what are we doing for certain and what is being done to you, or to us? Is thought something we do, or is it something done to us?
14:09
What is telepathy?
Does thought travel beyond the head?
Does only the head think? When we get into telepathy – and I think there’s substantial evidence for the fact that people get messages at distances; they’ve checked and that sort of thing – what’s going on? We’ve got something now we’ve never bothered to look into. It may have happened quite frequently, in the country, and we accept it, say, “Oh, yes, they picked up these things.” And we get all sorts of experiences like what happened at Duke University years ago, about controlling the roll of the dice. They were causing them to roll a certain way. So it gives us an idea that whatever this is, it’s something that’s outside the head, as well as inside. How? The psychologists don’t tell you how.
15:04
What is the vehicle for thought travel?
Electricity goes by wires, but how is this stuff shot out in space to another man’s head say a thousand miles away?
Does the body manufacture thoughts, or does the body only serve as a conduit?
Where in the body are thoughts received during telepathy?
Where in the body does a person think? Where are they sent? In other words, this business of thinking – especially if somebody picks them up, picks up the thoughts – it almost makes it a tangible substance of some sort. So where does it generate? If you want to focus, suppose you say you want to focus – you’re creating something – and hoping that by some form of magic to get that idea across to somebody, maybe as an experiment, or maybe it’s a message.
16:13
And when you read these cases – you don’t have to go into technical books, but just you can talk to people who have lost somebody, accidents or something, and it’s quite current [?] that person will turn to another person and say, “Joe just died.” “How do you know?” “I don’t know; he’s dead.”
16:38
Maybe you get a telegram or a phone call a few hours later: “Yes, Joe died.”
16:45
All of you have read this sort of thing, and a lot of people have had it happen to one of their relatives. So this implies that by some method there’s a conduit, although it’s invisible, that actually carries this. There’s data available
17:05
Do chemicals such as serotonin and other neurotransmitters create thought, or do they merely facilitate the penetration into our consciousness, of strictly sensory data?
Where will the answer to this question lead us? Multi-dimensional contacts?
How many full hours do we spend analyzing our thought processes?
In other words, it’s almost like sometimes the movements of the human race seem to be like – you have a cow, and you go in [?] dairy so you don’t want the calf to hang around. So you take the calf and you sell it for veal, or I’ve known farmers to hit them in the head and throw them over the hill, so that they could get the milk. And the cow complains, mourns for its calf, and it knows that it’s lost it, the same as a mother would, it has to find the child or the calf, or be troubled with the inability to keep this offspring.
18:312
And yet, what happens? Within thirty minutes, sixty minutes, the cow will completely forget and it will go [back to] eating, and that’s the end of it. And the same way with a lot of animals. There’s a small pause, a short pause for mourning and then back to ... in other words we are all troubled with the business of nutrition or survival, to a point where we can’t take too much time to go to the funeral home when our friends go. We don’t – and once we go home we don’t give any thought to it.
19:12
And this is something that’s always puzzled me. When that happens, why don’t people say, “Hey, this is a person who died [and] who I love. I’m going to find out what happened. It’s my responsibility to get an answer for this. Are we all just like animals that are going to one by one going to get knocked off, and somebody’s going to make some soothing quotations from a holy book or something, and assure you that your friend is in heaven and the angels are taking care of him, and let’s all go back to work.” - ? And [this is] if you’re there at all, because very few people attend at all who don’t have to
19:54
Im what part of the body is the seat of life?
This is something that was argued way back in Roman days, the days of Rome, some of them thought it was in the liver. We can cut off an arm, a leg, cut out and replace lungs, heart and kidneys and still live. We can have our nervous ssystem severed at the neck, with paralysis except in the head, and still live and think. I’m talking about cases I’ve actually met, who were only alive from the neck up, and lived for years; automobile wrecks particularly.
20:33
We can remain unconscious for years while the body continues to live, noting that a person who is brain-dead according to medical instruments can continue to live, breathe, and at times recover and function consciously. So sometimes if you think about this long enough you get to wondering whether the medical society is really got all the information it needs, before they start to cut up the corpse.
21:01
Do we think or imagine we think? Is our thinking automatic Do not our thoughts come before we have time to replace them or prevent them? When we decide to search for the source of thought, why do we become mentally weary? Or find ourselves able to find objective or describable distractions?
When you get into this thing you start, “Let’s read this book on the mind,” and after awhile ou say, “Oh, boy, this is ... I can’t make any ... I can’t build on this,” and put it aside.
21:52
So this goes on to every phase of life. There are so many things in life that we do, and we don’t question it. Like I said, “Does a man do things, or are they done to him?
22”22
Are you loved, or are you consumed?
Do you have possessions, or are you possessed by them?
Which is more evident and apparent to you, our divinity or your animal nature?
Do you ever feel that divinity, and forget about your animal nature for awhile?
If we wish to plan our lives, do we not need to consider while planning hat it may be all [already] planned, and we have no choice?
22:57
How do we plan around that possibility?
Okay, you’ll say, “Okay, let’s plan around, that’s a factor, let’s get around that factor now, and keep on going.
Must we define our limitations?
People like to define our potential. Everybody’s talking about potential, and most of the ones who talk about them have nothing but words. But we should define our limitations, and then we’ll learn more about ourselves.
23:27
Do we discover more accurately the nature of ourself?
How much of the human action is fated, predestined?
Is the knowledge of factors any value in the face of possible predestination?
If it’s all fixed, what’s the use of worrying about it? But do we know it’s all fixed? That’s the catch.
Is our reality – I use the capital R in this – merely a collective belief, a paradigm?
Now this is, if you’ve ever read Joseph Chilton-Pearce, - he wrote a book called Crack in the Cosmic Egg, and he wrote it because his wife had cancer, and he came up with this theory that the reason people have diseases is because it’s our language; we believe in them. So his idea was to remove the word cancer from all the dictionaries, never speak the word again, develop a new language that will be positive, or at least not dwell on illnesses, or something of that sort. He puts it across pretty thoroughly, because – he sold a lot of books. It’s an idea at least.
Is science itself a mental feat, created by mankind, or is it only a human discovery of a mental set?
What is life?
What is death?
Are these items every properly defined except in terms of each other?
25:14
“Life is not death and death is not life, Okay, let’s get on with our talk [?], see. Let’s not worry too much about defining death.
Can theological facts be established by voting?
Is Mary the mother of God, or is humanity the mother of God? Or neither?
Is God determined by victorious armies?
Is virtue established by psychological edict?
Do you know what I’m talking about? When I was a boy they defined virtue differently. Now the psychologists say that the things I avoided in my youth – I was stupid or narcissistic or something like that, I should have let go and enjoyed myself – in all the pastimes which we did not in those days consider virtuous. Because they voted on it. They have no proof of it. They don’t know what is virtuous or what is healthy. Eventually they will [when they see the consequences].
Is virtue established by ecclesiastical vote?
Or by the requisites of our ultimate essence?
In other words, what are we? What is affected besides the protoplasm? Is is possible our ultimate essence is ... [does not finish]
What is sin?
This is a big one too, occasionally. It’s nice if you’re masochistic to name it. [laughter]
Is sin an offense against yourself? An offense against your fellow man? An offense against God?
Is an offense against God recognized by divine outcry, earthquake or catastrophy?
Is it a sin to eat meat?
Are the animals out brothers?
27:20
A lot of people are going nuts over animals lately.
Are they possessed of intelligence and soul?
Do animals sin when they eat each other?
Is it wrong to kill except for food?
If so, do we do wrong by not eating the people we kill?
27:46
That’s been [That had been] said during World War I. Somebody happened to see all the bodies and he said that. He was from Africa and he said, “A lot of people are going to waste. We wouldn’t do that back home.”
Who is knowledgeable about good? – the item goodness.
Is good that which we desire, or that which is in itself good?
What do we mean, what is this condition, of things being “in themselves” something, good or bad?
We have to have a comparison to decide what it is. [file 1 ends at 28:24 [break in tape]
File 2
File 2 – 32 minutes. Breaks
00:00
Is evil a the child of good, or is it a twin?
That’s a very important thing to examine. What we think – lots of things we think are evil, and that possibly are, you know, it, maybe, in some other, looking at it from another angle it may be good. It may be bad. [?]
If a man drives a horse through a plate glass window, should the man be prosecuted or the horse?
If a man steals to feed his children, should we prosecute the man or that which drove him?
If a man rapes a girl, should we prosecute a) the man, b) the girl who tempted him, or drove him, c) his ancestors, for his genetic inheritance or glandular inclination, or d) the force that designed mankind?
01:08 Why didn’t He make him better?
What is equality?
Was Sampson equal to Delilah?
Is a baby equal to a dying man?
Are you only half of a plan by virtue of not possessing both sexes?
Is peace of mind more important than global peace or herd peace?
Who or what are you?
01:36
I could put in another half hour – I’m not going to – it’s just to, you get the idea. There are questions, hundreds of questions, that we never think to ask ourselves. And now I’m going to change the thing a little bit here. I’m going to write [read] you something that hasn’t been written too long. This is a book that just came out. We just published it in 1989.
I come to you as a man selling air, And you will think twice at the offer and price, And you will argue that nothing is there, Although we know that it is – everywhere.
I bring a formula largely untold – Of forces, mixed with between and betwixt, And only seen when allowed to unfold, And better felt when the body is cold.
I have a map to the home of the soul, Beyond the mind is a golden find – The paradox is a guide to the goal – Though doubt is sacred, each man is the Whole.
03:04
Now we’ll get back to some of these. Now I’ve got some other questions here that are, or propositions, of the, the path to knowledge. A couple things I want to mention to you. If anyone’s curious about Zen – I’ll explain to you later how I got into it and that sort of thing.
But the essence of Zen is spoken in the year 574 by a guy by the name of Bodhidharma. The aim of Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures. Imagine that, back in 574 they were smart enough to know not to go by something somebody wrote No reliance on words or letters. Direct pointing to the very mind. Seeing into one’s nature.
I was talking to somebody today, where, I don’t know, on the phone. They were asking me something about God, relationship to God. You do not, you cannot find God in a book. When you find God you’ll find it in your own nature.
04:33
Now you can find a lot of stuff [that] you would like to believe, and you can wave flags and that sort of thing. But when you look down through history – and I made my life a study, from day one, of all the concepts – hoping I’d run into something that I could say, “Yea, I’m going to stick with this, stay with it, it will take me to God, or it will take me to an understanding of myself.”
04:59
[But} When you find God, you will become God. You will find it through yourself. You don’t study theology; you don’t study the mysteries of life and death, or the existence and nature of a soul. You become – a soul.
But getting back to this once more:
A special transmission outside the scriptures.
[If] you write something down and somebody changes it – and I saw this happen. I told you earlier that I studied to be a priest. And one of the things that discouraged me was – well, there were a lot of things that seemed to be inconsistent. One thing was the necessity for – I’m talking about the New Testament – of repeating something three times in a book, when it was very difficult to make those letters a thousand [2,000 minus say 100] years ago. They had to chisel them out of a rock or something, or write them one at a time on papyrus or something. Once would have been enough; all they had to do was to duplicate that.
06:12
But the thing is, those things when they were written down, may have been from a very honest, truthful source. But when the politicians got ahold of them, later, when you got schismatic revolts in the membership, the group of people, they twisted it to suit themselves. Just like psychology today is twisting the definition of things.
For instance, one of the things that irritated me years ago, I studied psychology when I was in college and I realized I was always coming up short. [?] And so what they’re doing, they’re coining words to confuse you, but to pacify people who are not complete. We’re twisting our philosophy and our psychologies; such as, there are words, such as “exceptional children”. Do you know what exceptional children are? To me they’ve always been little geniuses. No, no – exceptional children are retarded children. And how they – when you say, “Why are you using that term?” they say, well, they want to make them feel better, number one. The other is that they’re the exception to the rule. So this is he way they squeeze it in, so you can’t refuse and say it’s not reasonable to use that word.
07:30
But anyhow, the thing is that the scriptures – and this is written, this pre-dated the invasion of China by the missionaries, you know, so this was philosophy, the scriptures were, the writings that they, mostly written by some patriarch.
No reliance on words or letters.
You don’t wear gowns, you don’t give people titles – and with the title comes a three-layered hat, or a pancake hat, or gold braid. This is – we have to put something across on the public; it’s a bit of an act.
Number three is what’s important as advice is:
Direct pointing to the very mind.
We have got to go into our mind. We’ve got to watch it, and answer ourselves on why our mind goes in this direction or that direction, try to form some pattern, because of the way that/it? finally winds up, for instance, in all of its forms, an individual form or a mass mind thing.
09:06
And of course the fourth is:
Seeing into our nature.
You go down and question yourself about why you do things; physical things also: why you take a certain direction. Like in the questions, perhaps you may come up with a, the idea that very possibly you have no control over it. That somewhere down the line there comes a day when you’re programmed to change, and you’re going to change whether you want to or not.
9:40
When a child becomes an adolescent he changes, whether he wants to change or not. Or she. And so we watch this and you study it and you try to come up with reasons: Why is this necessary? Why do people have to be educated; why can’t they be born smart enough?
10:04
Now the other thing is, I want to point out: Zen is not a religion. Zen opposes belief. I was on the radio, Monday I think it was. Someone called in and he said, “I don’t see why that ...” – what is the title of this church, Unity? Unitarian? “Why the Unitarian would let a person go out there and talk about a cult.” This is not a – my answer to him was, “I do not believe in any cult, or any belief system. Because that’s not complete, it’s not final. If we’re going to be satisfied with just appraising [?] something and believing something, and saying, “Well, we can’t find the answer, but let’s all get together and pretend that there’s a city of gold here, [in] back of the mountain. And we’ll have to learn, we’ll go to church, we’ll build a temple, we’ll find some method of getting psychic enough to find this city of gold.”
11:21
And incidentally, that very little story is involved in a lot of spiritual writings. I don’t want to get into the individual ones that do it, but it’s in one of the prominent movements of the east. They always talk about the, man created the city of gold, temple of gold, just for somebody’s wedding; he did it with his magic.
And so people believe it. And what is the basis. [In Latin the word] “religio” means “I believe.” It doesn’t say, “I know.” The word “cult” – you look it up in the dictionary: cult is defined as a system or organization of religious belief. My definition of a cult, and I think a lot of people, it’s not necessarily a system or organization of religious belief, that would be the same as a church.
12:21
No, we like to pin, like to think that a cult is something unnecessary, fanatical, not based upon reason, maybe treacherous, you know, maybe composed of people who are insane or something of that sort.
So I replied to the party that called in on the phone, I said, “No, I don’t believe in any cult, and that includes the Christian cult. I do not believe in belief. If you want to believe – okay. Sit down and relax, take it easy, and let the old life flow. Because you’re never going to discover anything by believing. Or by taking someone else’s word for it, unless you validate that word. And that goes for me [too]. I’m here to challenge your thinking; I’m not here to indoctrinate. I’m here to say, “Hey, isn’t some of this stuff a little bit off the beam?
13:24
Zen procedure, incidentally, this thing of transmission. There’s a thing called transmission. It’s difficult to describe. It means you can transfer things that you know mind-to-mind. And weve demonstrated it. Not that it’s a, you know, that we can write a formula out and put it on paper so that you can do it. It’s a magical thing – things of magic require special, a special procedure, that’s all.
14:06
The Doctrine of Buddha
The thing that I got out of the doctrine of Buddha – when you hear it you won’t think it’s anything unusual. I’ll read it first to you. His advice was to learn to think of one thing. And this is good advice, because – if you want to be a chemist, don’t try to take on two or three different majors; just major in chemistry and that’s one thing. The second thing is to expand until we can learn of everything, or think of everything. And the third thing is to think o nothing.
14:45
Why? Does anybody know? Know why we think of nothing? No ideas?
[silence]
Q. We’re thinking of nothing. [laughter]
R. What’s your first name, Mr. Nothing? [chuckles]
R. Well, what happens, when you think of nothing the door is open. The doors open – and you attain. A place from which you can see almost everything.
15:33
And that’s a paradox. But this – I’d like to, I could go into this deeper. I’d rather do it [elsewhere] – because I know that most of you are not interested in magic. But there are things – the reason we go or follow a certain religion is because of magic, not because of philosophic proof. A person comes out and he heals the sick; or he guesses what AT&T is going to pay tomorrow. And then you say, “That’s guy’s on the inside track.” This is pretty much the same thing, because ...
16:14
But he [Buddha] has a special system. There’s a special system of finding out things. And this sounds like three sentences without much meaning. But we have to – all of our – I’m laying out the method of using the head. And we have to start. We can’t let our mind wander. So therefore you have to be able to focus.
A lot of education goes to that. Which is, the kid stop looking out the window, we’re going to look at the blackboard, you’re going to learn how the letter “A” is written. See? So then, as that, as he progresses in being able to focus on one thing you expand that, to where he’s able to take in quite a few fields of science, fields of education.
17:06
So then of course he gets carried away – it’s like a man who gets addicted to working crossword puzzles, only on a little higher level. So if you get around him he’ll rattle all the time of all the data he has, you know, on whatever science that he’s supposedly studying at the time. And he doesn’t get anything, he’s spread too thin. He can’t come up with an invention in anything.
17:37
So what happens? He makes his mind a blank – and let’s things happen. And that’s when the magic occurs. And when I say “occurs” – how do you heal somebody? Suppose you want to heal somebody who’s sick. You go pray over him?
The method of doing it is to first of all remove yourself from it – totally. You’re not going to do it yourself. You remove yourself from it. And then you wish for that man to be well. But you wish at the same time that you do not cross any rules in order to – you don’t shake the mechanism, the overall mechanism – just “Heal this man of his sickness.” In other words, you remove yourself from it. Take no credit. Think of nothing. And without thinking say, “I hope you get better. Let me put my hand on your head.” And walk away. Don’t wait to see the effects. And this is the way people can be healed.
19:04
So all of this is what we’re after – what is a person after? You hear, when you go through life you’re barraged with all sorts of claims and all sorts of paths. And some people stick to them doggedly, and die stupidly.
19:22
But we have to find that which is the truth. And again, it’s like the discovery of God: we do not find the truth, we become the truth. And this happened to me, and as I said, I was anti-religion at the time. And I’m not preaching religion now either. I’m saying that this can be spoken in simple terms. You’re a – when you get to the point where you’d like to have something done, the first thing you have to do of course is to let it be known; that regardless of your motives, you’d like to have it done. At the same time, you don’t want to have it done for yourself – for glorification, is what I’m trying to say; it may affect yourself, but not for self glorification, so you can say, “Hey, I can heal people.” – i.e., prediction.
20:35
[gap in tape]
... make? that you’re a healer, or something like that. And then make your wish that the person is better, and go away. Don’t tell anybody; and forget about it.
20:48
Do you remember the story of The Magnificent Obsession? You ever hear of it? This is a book – they made a movie out of it – it’s a book written about a doctor who found the magic of, a procedure for helping people. He felt that – this was his goal in life. He was an MD, but he was going to make this his goal in life, because he found this law, and the law worked.
21:20
And he would do things to accumulate a certain type of magical merit. And he found that as he was doing it, everything turned better and better for him. Salesmen all have techniques, which they hope someday – by keeping their fingers crossed, wearing a black sock and a white sock, or anything that [??] become a successful salesman. But the thing is – I talked to a few, and I’ll never forget, one fellow said, “First of all, you’ve got to throw a lot of mud at the ceiling.” It’s not going to happen unless you show that you’re willing to plug in there, and sacrifice some of your energy. And he said the other thing is to forget the profit; absolutely do not work for profit. You’ll get paid, he said; you’ll always be paid. But he said [to] make up your mind that you’re going out there for service, that you’re going to do anything – that those people, if [when] you knock on the door, you’ll do anything to help them, not to sell them. And be totally honest about what you know and what you don’t know. And then walk away.
22:38
And I’ve seen this happen. And I said to him, “Where’d you learn this? What books have you been reading? And he said, “No books. My father-in-law told me.” His father-in-law before him had discovered that people, you know, we like to do everything in a greedy manner, and yet get by with having people think that we’re just nice guy, and really, we sharpen our teeth. We get, in our salesmen we get brutal. I’ve see them go off and laugh, “Boy, we took ten thousand from that guy, and the job was only worth three thousand.” And what happens? They’re unhappy people, in their whole life. They may have some money, but they get to be very unhappy people. And they have no magic. They have no magic.
23:36
temp
I want to tell you a little about myself. I don’t know what this stuff is here; I don’t know whether I’m supposed to be talking into it or eating it. As I said, I was a kid twelve years old when I went away to the seminary in Pennsylvania. And I realized that it was a system of belief; I realized that [from] the actions of some of the people there, that they didn’t believe even. nd years later when I got out of the place – I was a little flippant, you know – and I ran into one of the priests. I didn’t know what to say to him, but I thought I’ll prod him a little, you know, make him uncomfortable. He said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Nothing, but I have a strong temptation to start my own religion.”
And he said – I thought it would be a joke and that he’d laugh at me and go on – but he said, “You’ll never get away with it.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “We’re too deeply entrenched.”
In other words, when he said that, his concept of the thing was – when somebody says “entrenched” – that’s an army, that’s a power, that there’s going to be a resistance. I didn’t say I was going to form a religion in competition with him; I was just going to form one. I didn’t say I was going to compete with him, but [to him] it was a threat, immediately. And so – anyhow, I thought, “The answers are not here.”
25:23
And of course everybody, no matter which church you go to – I know there are some Catholics probably here tonight, and don’t feel offended. I’m – I feel justified in criticizing myself and my family and my mistakes. And there are some good people – by good people I mean people who you’d like to live beside and that sort of thing; they’re not crooks.
But I believe that there’s a mechanism that you have to learn; you have to talk the party line. And in the process of talking the party line and believing, you shut off this natural desire to know, the natural desire to justify, verify: “Let’s look, let’s read further.”
26:15
Consequently – I felt a little shaky at the time; I had been brought up to believe that you’re going to hell if you crossed the line, if you do something else. But I did it anyhow, I just went out and started searching. And this was back – I was born in 1917 and I was about 17 years of age, and I’d go from library to library hunting books, and that sort of thing. Well, for one thing, down the line, the road, I got interested in Spiritualism. Why? To me it was very logical: If you want to know what happens to you after death, talk to a dead man. What could be better? So I tramped all over the country looking at these institutions, and up in a place right above Columbus, Ohio I saw my first materialization. I saw a materialization.
27:11
Now, you know you’ll hear talk that it’s all hokum, just a charade put on. No. There was a preacher that came out, I’d say about three feet tall – it hopped, it hopped around. I couldn’t see any legs, it looked like a female because it had a dress on; a very ugly face, a very prune-like face, with vertical wrinkles and that kind of stuff. And it jumped around me and called me “Baldy”, “professor”, you know, ridicule – speaking the truth about the hair, but ... [laughter]
28:05
But I came to the conclusion – there were some people – two carloads of us went from Wheeling [and Steubenville] over to Columbus. We got the address of this place where this medium was coming in, and some strange things happened, incidentally. There was a man in front of me who came from Lithuania as a child, no it was his mother who came, she was pregnant with him, and she had no husband, and she became a scrub lady in Philadelphia, she just worked menial jobs because she couldn’t speak good English. And finally they got to a point where they moved into Steubenville, Ohio and he started a store up there and he did pretty well, and was pretty well fixed. [Kapitka?] And his mother was still living. A devout Catholic, incidentally.
28:56
And when we went – this Presbyterian minister from Steubenville and his wife went with us – they knew the fellow and had seen him produce these things before. And I had a contracting business and I took them up, there was one young man who was a foreman who heard me talking about it, so he wanted to go.
29:21
And this [other] man, who was running a parts store at that time in Steubenville, he and his wife were there, with his mother. this was the old lady who used to work as a scrub woman.
And a man – a figure came out – there were quite a few of these figures that came out – a figure came out to me, I’ll tell you about it later – but it came out and asked for him, his name was John. “I’d like to talk o John.” It was a man. And he went up, and you could hear him talking to him, and he said, “I died across the water.” He said, “I am your father.” Imagine that, you know, he was an illegitimate child, so to speak; the guy wouldn’t marry her and she came to this country where she thought she could raise the kid better.
And he said, “I want you to go back,” he knew she was sitting there, and he said, “I want you to go back and ask your mother to forgive me.” And he left.
30:27
And I thought this was tremendously unusual, you know. And of course, I had talked with the medium before he went in. Incidentally, it was a concrete floor, a cement block building, it wasn’t too expensive, it’s still there, it was up in Delaware, Ohio, and it was called the White Lilly Chapel. And these things went through the floor, some of them, on the way out.
30:57
And – I remember Mrs. Kapitka, she, her parents came out together; both her parents were dead. And she was talking to them, and they said, “We’ve got to go,” and they start going down like an elevator, and she’s pleading with them, “Can’t you stay a little longer?” and this sort of thing. And they said, “No, we have to go.”
And so – when she came back – this room wasn’t as long as from here to the wall – I’d say it was eighteen feet long and maybe ten feet wide; it was like a vestibule in a church. And the “cabinet” consisted of no more than a string across the corner from two nails and a cloth thrown over that. That was the cabinet in which he sat. And why they sit in a cabinet instead of out in the open, I don’t know.
[side 2 ends at 31:48]
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File 3
00:00
When they came out to John – my foreman was sitting between me and John – no I was sitting between John, that was it, and the foreman couldn’t see, and I moved, the boy I brought with me, I moved and let him go over and sit beside John. And this spirit came out and said, “We want to speak to the man beside Baldy. You know, this spirit was coming up front and wanted to speak to the man beside Baldy, John, and called his name.
Well, I was surprised at this because when we went in before they turned the lights out, I had been sitting beside John. But after the lights went out I moved so this fellow could see better, and I discovered something by it – was that these things couldn’t see. The people had been more or less mentally photographed by the medium or somebody, and then they picked them out. But it wasn’t the medium talking, it was this “Gizmo” that was talking.
01:17
And I realized then that these things did not really see us as we were sitting there. They saw us – somebody saw them, or they picked it up from their head or something, when the lights were on. But after it was over they just accepted – if they asked you to come up, they knew when you got up there that you were the one they had seen before.
01:38
And I thought – sometimes when you’re investigating this stuff you run into little things like that that tell you things; that these are looking right at you but they don’t see you. At least in that particular case.
But anyhow – I had a pretty good idea that there was something here. It wasn’t, there was no smoke or cheesecloth. A lot of your spiritualistic shows or circuses or whatever you want to call them – they have cheesecloth – I was in one onetime, I saw the safety pin – it was a spirit with a safety pin there you know. And of course my reaction was to throw something through a window. And the fellow with me said, “No, don’t do it. Leave ‘em alone.” [laugh] I resented the abuse that they were doing. They would get people and they’d say, “I’m your mother,” and they’d start crying and they’d hang on each other. [but] you could see who it was, it was somebody in cheesecloth.
02:47
But this incident, in Delaware, Ohio, it was, there was no cheesecloth; that much was certain. In fact, the cheesecloth would have had to come off when they went through the floor. So there was what you call a genuine materialization. But what’s behind that, we don’t know: whether that’s a show put on for us, see, it could be a show. But they get information from someone. They know – what came out to me was [chuckles] a priest. A priest came out. Somebody had passed the word I guess that I was a Catholic, that I had been a Catholic. And out comes this priest. A nun came out too. [laughter] Not after the priest. [?}
03:42
I had been in an orphanage, and this nun was the image of this old nun that took care of us kids in the orphanage. I had been in an orphanage for awhile, and the orphanage was, because there was a Catholic orphanage, and there was a church and a school nearby, and we lived out on a farm, so they stuck me in there so I’d have to be close, I’d have to go to school in the right place.
04:04
But this one did look – except she had no eyeballs; it was a face with no eyeballs. The priest came out, and he said – repeated monotonously – “I am a Catholic priest, I am a Catholic priest, see my chastible, see my stole, I am a Catholic priest.” And I said something in Latin; I had five years of it when I was studying to be a priest. I had studied Latin for five years, I studied Greek, and so I started speaking to him in the church language, so to speak. No answer. And I said, “Come on, come on. These are the things we say in the Mass, don’t you know it?” And he said, “Oh, that’s been so long ago.” So I thought, two plus two equals four – forget it.
04:52
But I went on; anything that looked like it had the truth in it. And I even tried to study psychology. I had some kind of, I had a hunch that any wisdom had to come through the mind, so perhaps the mind could be attuned to pick it up better. So I’d read all I could on psychology.
And when I was about 21 years old or so I got into yoga. Well we didn’t have too many books those days on yoga; there was a lot of stuff written but most of it was – some guy’s dream of what he thought yoga might be like. There were people who would claim they had been there, or something of that sort. But I read it, and I heard their exercises – sitting where you break your legs putting one beneath the other. And that’s a good way to sit after you get used to it; you don’t fall over; you can sit there for hours and read books, you know. But maybe there’s a sacred word that you speak; or even you breathe – you breathe this way and that way.
06:00
And I followed the rules. I became a vegetarian, I wouldn’t eat meat. I became celibate. They said that if you’re looking for things, you should center your energy. I stayed completely away from the opposite sex or any sex – you’ve always got to add that. [laughter] Today you don’t know who you’re talking to.
But this went on – and I wasn’t getting anywhere. You know, after awhile you get aware of this. That it might be a magical system but it’s not working on me, why I don’t know. So I’d get disgusted, and I’d think, “Well ...”
06:45
And when I was in my twenties, twenty-three and along in there, I finally got into college – I went with a girl there, you know – the Depression was on and I couldn’t afford to buy her a Coca-Cola, much less rent a motel, so my celibacy was aided by my poverty.
07:13
And of course I didn’t have enough money to finish; I went only a couple of years. I studied chemistry. But she was a nice person; I always say that, and she remained nice because she got rid of me. Her parents thought, “Get away from that bum, he’s broke.”
07:37
But anyhow, I went down to Baltimore and I got a job. Everyplace I went I’d hit the library and hunt for books. And then I discovered that there was a thing called raja yoga. I had been doing hatha yoga. So I started looking into things that had a little bit more of an intensity to them, meaning mental yoga rather than physical yoga.
08:06
And I think it was good for me to follow some sort of path, because as long as I ws doing that I wasn’t doing something else. But I didn’t have any, I didn’t go anyplace. And I’d get this idea, you know, “Geez, what’s wrong with me?” You know, “I haven’t hurt anybody. I followed tthe rules, all the rules.” If anybody came up to me and said, “This is the rule of our religion,” I’d say, “Let me follow that one too.” I just made up my mind I was going to make my body like a chemical laboratory. And we’d test them all. Anything, if it felt better, if it felt like your brains were improved, I’d stick with it.
08:47
But I never found anything that – my intuition didn’t tell me I was going anyplace. And it finally got across to me that – what really happened to me was – in 1941 I think it was, we got hit by the Germans, and my brother got killed right off the coast of Florida, in a merchant ship. And he had the same drive that I had; he was always trying to find books on philosophy and read them, and we would compare notes occasionally.
But when he got killed it had a rough effect on me because – I realized that he was – when you’re working on a ship you’re on four hours and off four; that’s the way they work it. I don’t know how they keep that up – you don’t have a straight eight hour shift. And it seemed as though he took the shift that would cause him to be below decks in the boiler room at dawn and dusk, and that’s when they attacked. They attacked when – [well?] they could [?] be seen from the air and that sort – and the lights in Florida silhouetted the ship for them to hit, and they were knocking quite a few of them off because the people left their lights on, along the coast
10:16
Anyhow, I thought to myself, “This man was as important as I am, or better, and here I’m egotistically going about thinking I’m going to discover a great religious secret, or a great thing about the human race – and perhaps I’m just an animal. But he’s dead and he can’t search. He gave his life for people who still could be left around to search or make fools of themselves or whatever they wanted to do. But they were still alive, because some men were dying.
10:46
And I realized that – this brought back to me the whole thing that I had been doing from the time that I was fifteen years old, and that was that I was on one hell of an ego trip. Because I considered myself something special, and if I kept my toes crossed a certain way and walked a certain way, the gods would smile and they’d reach down and put some information in my head, and I would go along with a victorious smile on my face, and I’d start popping off as an expert – perhaps.
11:17
But regardless, I saw very clearly my whole life before that – although I was complaining and griping because I wasn’t making any progress – the reason was that – my reason for making the progress was to expand my own idea of myself – illumination, and I was no more than the other animals in the human race.
11:45
Well, not only that, but I realized that if I ever found anything, having come to the conclusion that I was no better than anybody else, if I ever found anything I would make it known. Because in the process of searching I ran across so many crooks and thieves – in other words I found out that people weren’t really interested in religion. The so-called experts were interested in making a name or themselves, or pulling a big scam of some sort, or doing it for money – it’s an easy way to make a living, you don’t have to work in the coal mine – get yourself, or become a yogi or a guy who pretends to know about eastern doctrines, or even Christian doctrines.
12:35
And I thought, “Oh, boy, this is – it angered me. My urge was to go get a – like Carrie Nation – chop the windows, go in and confront them and say, “Hey, you people are liars and thieves.” And I thought, no, you can’t do that, that won’t get anything else done, between chopping windows and going to jail. So forget about that.
13:00
But I did make that promise, that if I ever found anything I would make it available. Well, I didn’t expect anything tto happen, and of course I was dissatisfied. One of the things that disturbed my ego down through the years was that occasionally I’d get the idea of getting married – of throwing this hole thing overboard, you know, this possibly narcissistic track that I was on. I thought, “I’ll dump this and if I can get a girl that – I even wrote poems – I’ve got a book of poetry incidentally – you want to find out about the real idiot, there’s a book out there I wrote, I’ve got a book full of poems I wrote down through the years.
13:47
And anyhow, I’d approach one, I’d approach a girl I’d meet and I’d say something about getting married – it never worked. I don’t know why. And I remember that went on for years. Of course I was lazy. I didn’t take it too badly, I’d just go back and stand on my head for awhile and go to the library and get another book and get fascinated by something, and I’d get all churned up again, thinking I was on the road to truth, and that would keep me going.
14:31
As I said, I was about twenty-nine years old, and I looked in the mirror one day and my hair was falling out and my teeth were getting bad, and I thought, “Who in the hell is going to have me in another year or two? So I’d better get married while I’m still presentable.” So I got a letter from a girl in Seattle – a woman, I shouldn’t say girl – she was a woman and she was nineteen years old, but she was a woman. And she took a liking o my poetry, so she got to writing to me. I knew her husband – she had divorced him. And she invited me to come out, and I thought, “Oh, Kismet.” So I get on the bus and go out to Seattle.
15:24
And when I got there I got a job, it was down along Lake Washington’s edge, a little outfit called the Seattle Tennis Club; they were all millionaires who went in there, and drank more expensive drinks. Nobody played tennis; I don’t know why they called it a tennis club – they just went there and drank, and danced a little.
So I got myself a room, like a little apartment with one room, and a kitchen nailed on the side of it. So this girl worked at that airplane factory over there, Boeing Aircraft. The other thing, a little bit greedy, she was the only child of parents who were millionaires and grandparents who were millionaires. And I thought, you know, “This might be comfortable. If she’s got money, and you know, she looks like she might be a little sinful, I’ll change her. And in turn for which maybe I can live on her money while I’m writing books.” Which was another ambition I had.
16:56
So it was back to the egotism or whatever you want to call it. But anyhow, it didn’t work. She [laughs] I have to tell you this, it’s embarrassing but ... She was from Columbus, Ohio, her people ere, and occasionally she’d come back to see some of the relatives. So when she came back I got ahold of her and took her down to West Virginia. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events that happened, but we went back on the bus together to Seattle, Washington [error] . No, we didn’t, that’s the reason I hesitated. She went ahead, that was it, and I came out later, and stopped in Denver, Colorado, got a job at the National Jewish Hospital as a chemist and worked there for awhile, and then I decided to follow her up to her place in Seattle.
18:26
I think she had a stop with some relative in Ohio or something. The reason I know it happened this way is because I went there – she wasn’t expecting me, and she was in the apartment house, lived upstairs on one of the floors. And I looked for the lady in charge, the landlady who owned the property and asked if she was there. And she said, “Well, I’ll call her on the phone.” She had a local phone there. And she rang her and said, “Yeah, she’s here, do you want to talk to her?” And I said, “Yes.” And she didn’t ask me who it was, and I got on the phone and said, “Hi.” She said, “Who’s this?” I said, “You know who this is.” And she said, “Yes, you’re Bob. That’s Bob. What are you doing here Bob?” And I said, “It’s not Bob.” She said, “All right, come on, let’s knock this off.” She said, “You know I told you not to call me, not to come around for a couple of weeks, I’ve got a ...” – I forget the word but it was something like a “bumpkin” – “coming out here from West Virginia. And he’ll only be here for a couple of weeks, so I want you to stay away.”
19:43
So I said, “This is not Bob.” And she said, “Oh, yes it is.” And I said, “It’s Richard, not Bob.” And she said, “Oh. Why didn’t you tell me?” She got angry, boom. So of course from the very beginning I thought that, I could see with that conversation that she was hoping I didn’t show up. [That] there was no great promise. Why she talked about marriage I don’t know, maybe just flattering me at the moment, I don’t know.
20:19
But anyhow – I visited her a little bit. And I went down to the library and found out they had some esoteric books in the library, and I was reading. And once in awhile – we didn’t work he same shift; I had to work the day shift and she worked midnight shift or something, so we didn’t get to see each other. And so [one day] the sentimental bumpkin decides to surprise her, get a day off, take a day off, and catch her when she’s coming off of her shift.
20:58
So I surprised her – with another woman. So I got on a bus – I made up my mind, “I’m going to get out of here. I can’t win [in] this business. So I went home – and I was still sitting in the yogi posture, sitting on the bed with my feet under me, and I’m reading a book. And all of a sudden I get a pain in the head. And I thought, “Oh, boy. This is it.” I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was going to kill me. And the last thing I remember was thinking, “How will they get the body back to West Virginia?” I didn’t think there was enough money on me to ship the body back.
21:45
The next thing I realized, I was going out the window. It was a couple stories off the street. I remember looking down at the street as I was passing through the window. And there were snowcapped mountains out in that direction, the Cascades I think they were. And I thought, “Boy, that’s where I’m headed, that looks like a nice place.” I liked the hills, and ... And away I went. And when I got up there, there were no mountains up there. There was something, it was a high place, but no mountains. There was no snow.
22:21
And I stood there for while. I knew I was standing, because I felt conscious of being in a vertical position. I wasn’t too sure of the substance I was standing on. But it dawned on me that I was dead. And I thought, “Buy boy, what fun. Boy, you can travel. [?] ” So I was really exhilarated by it. And then I thought, “Well, I wonder where I am. What is this place? And will I ever see the people on Earth again?” And I wondered what the thought, passed, “What would the human race look like? Where are the people?” And when I thought that, I could see them coming up the hill, in front of me. And as the knowledge came to me, this was everybody who had ever lived – everyone who ever would live, or had lived – this knowledge came to me.
23:24
And I thought to myself, “I wonder if I can see myself.” I saw myself in this ?? you know. Well, this didn’t occur to me until it got later – you’re involved now in three people: a body in Seattle, and a guy watching myself on top of this high place. But it didn’t bother me because I still felt that I could do pretty much of anything I wanted. And what occurred to me, that I was the Maximum. I was the Absolute. I had absolute access; whatever I wanted to see, I could see.
24:01
I’ve run into one other man who had that same thing – he brought it back with him. And he was from San Antonio, Texas. I met him, and – I’ll explain it to you later what he went through and what caused it; he was a bombardier and he bombed Japan. But anyhow, I thought to myself, “This is Everything. I’m in control of everything.” And then, “What is the opposite?” The relative mind had to come back in, the memories of Earth, instead of taking it as it was. I wanted to know what nothingness was.
24:44
And when I wanted to know what nothingness was, I fell through a pit; I could see no bottom to it, just passed down through it. And I thought, “Oh, well, I made a mistake.” [laughter] “Here goes nothing.” And I woke up on the bed, in the rooming house, it was like an apartment house.
And I thought, “Well, that’s what I’ve been looking for all my life, and there it is.” Well, it wasn’t so good, because – I don’t know the sequence of the thinking pattern, but I was traumatic. I got out on the street – I got up and got out and went on the street. And one thing I didn’t do, I didn’t write anything down. It didn’t occur to me, it was just to get out. And to this day yet, I don’t know how many days I was out like that, how many hours. There was no time – from when I flew out the window and when I appeared back in the bed. But I would go out on the street, and the first thing, that obsessed me the most was killing myself. I didn’t want to live here. And not only that, but there was something troubling me, tremendously. I can’t explain what it was, except that I started weeping. And I walked down the street and I must have looked like a real idiot. One time it was in the middle of the night, I’m out walking in the dark. And I thought, “I’ve got to find somebody who’s gone through this,” to see what I had to do to stop weeping and so on
Everyone I saw the first several days of walking was transparent people. They were all transparent; I could see through them. I presume they were real, but to me they were transparent. 26:45
And I mentioned this last night when I was talking, [have tape?] that this carried through later – there were times when it would come back, and I’d look at a person and I could see through them, and I got so that II could see illnesses inside their body, tumors in one case. And – I didn’t want to make a business out of it – I kind of marveled at it, you know, this is amazing.
27:17
But the thing was, I wanted to, first of all, get to a point where I could stop [?] for [?] the human race. Well there’s a saying in Zen, that before the experience in Zen, the hills are hills and the valleys are valleys. And when you have your experience, the hills are no longer hills and the valleys are no longer valleys. The place where you’ll be will not be the same as on earth, in other words, even though your body and cognition may be on earth. And then after you return, the hills are once more hills and the valleys are once more valleys.
27:58
In other words, once you go [come] back you’re an animal again. You’re functioning as – we like to think we’re high-grade animals, i don’t know how high the grade is. But we’re basically animals. And in order to live here, I had to be able to talk to these people. And I couldn’t talk without weeping.
28:20
So in the middle of the night I’m walking down, and I saw this building, it was a Catholic parsonage. And I thought, “Geez, maybe one of these guys in there, they’re supposed to be spiritual people, go in and see if I can get a priest who knows anything about this stuff.” Knocked on the door and a guy about thirty years old comes out, he’s got a big stomach on him and a big proud look on his face. [gruff voice] “What can I do for you?”
28:45
And I looked around an I knew, “This guy can’t do anything for me,” and I didn’t like his looks. So I looked around him and said, “Don’t you have any older priests?” Because I figure that this man’s not had any experience – except eating. And he frowns at me and he says, [arrogantly] “Why do you have to have an older priest?” And I said, “Well, I’ve got a problem, and I don’t think you would be capable of answering my problem,” you know.
He saw me, I was crying, all the time, and he said, “How long has it been since you’ve been to confession?” And when he said that, that was the slap in the face that brought him back to normal. If I’d had a gun I would have killed him. This arrogance, this pompous arrogance – here’s a man who’s half nuts and sick, and he’s talking about confession. And I don’t believe in sin.
29:43
So I wobbled away and finally got on a bus and got out of town, went to come back. But it stayed with me. And things would turn weird – and I don’t know how much of this was weird, or how much of it was weird Cleveland. I got off the bus, I didn’t have a lot of money, and I rented a room in a flop house, by that I mean an old thing that was up over a restaurant, you had to go up stair. And everything was strange. I went up and there were old men sitting around – people on pension I imagine, that’s all they could afford. And they had a radio going, there was no TV at the time. And there was a ball game on.
30:30
And nobody got up to wait on me. There was a counter there, and everybody was sitting in these overstuffed chairs around, listening to a radio and a ball game. And I didn’t say anything; I sat down, I thought, “Well, I might as well be polite and wait until the inning’s over, or whatever it is.” And this one fellow had a cigar in his mouth, he was about sixty years old, and he was pounding on the side of that chair, “Boudreau, you S.O.B., get in there Boudreau.” I never forgot that name, Boudreau. I was so angry, you know: who’s Boudreau? They were playing baseball, getting the results over the radio. And he’s pitching there, pounding on the upholstery. And I thought, “Oh, my, I don’t know if I want to live with these people.
31:15
So he came to the desk and he said, “What can I do for you?” at the inning. And I told him, and he rented me a room. So I stayed there – I didn’t want to go back to West Virginia because – they would think I was nuts, and I didn’t want tto argue the point. So I stayed there and got a job.
I went out one day walking on the ...
File 3 ends at 31:38 [break in tape]
File 4
00:00
... and – I think it was a Saturday or a Sunday – and I happened to look back, and down this big street, big wide street, there was a mob coming. And they were like marching, five abreast. And it was eerie – no words spoken. No words spoken, none of them, I couldn’t see a one of them saying a word. And they walked right past me. And I thought, “Oh, my – a catastrophe. Somebody’s bombed Cleveland or something, and they’re in shock, they’re in a daze.”
00:37
So I said to this one fellow, as he went past, I said, [hushed voice] “What happened?” He looked at me like I was crazy and didn’t answer me. The next row comes marching by and I said to him, “Where’s everyone going?” And he said, “The ball game.” Eighty thousand people on the march – I’d never seen it before. You talk about getting disgusted with the human race – verything was back, it was like the nightmare I had when I was in Seattle. And they were all from Parma. I don’t know if you know anything about [Cleveland], but Parma is all Polish people, and they just love baseball. And they didn’t understand anybody who didn’t understand baseball. So I hit them right at the right time.
01:27
And this is – finally an adaptation [?] what would cure me a little bit was the anger. Something I could have that would make me angry and I then I’m starting to realize that, “Well, reality is nothing nice; this is the way things are.”
01:50
But then I – I got married after that. I met a girl and married her. I was thirty [then, so it was, ?]three years later [check] – and I started making notes. I got into the contract business, and I’d come home and I’d write letters. I’d write letters to esoteric magazines, to Fate Magazine, and people would be wanting to know about esoteric philosophy and want to correspond with people. And I’d rite letters to them back – Gurdjieff or Ouspensky or yoga or Zen.
02:27
And I finally heard about a Zen outfit, and I got in touch with this fellow. He was right next to the border of New York with Connecticut, in a little town there. And he was a Zen teacher. This word “master” is nonsense. You have to have a word. It’s like a rubber stamp. Zen has got a lot of I think phoniness to it. If somebody is not enlightened, you’d better name somebody, because this thing has to be carried on, see. And besides that, you have organizations that are – they know nothing. They’ve just got a book and they’re going to capitalize on it, that’s all. So they learn a few words – and you never find anybody who’s made the trip.
03:32
But this fellow had. He never published himself, I mean he never wrote any books. But he would take people into his house, he’d meet with them at places, and that’s all he did. It was like questions – he would ask you questions, and then he’d analyze your inability to answer them. And little by little, this system of challenging the mind – I saw what he was doing. But I knew that I wasn’t going anyplace because I’d already been there, same as he had. I knew he had been there too. It hadn’t been so traumatic with him.
04:12
And I could see that he was kind of experimenting; he knew that some people didn’t react the same as other people. So you almost had to get used to studying certain types of people, and then using a specific questioning method on them; it didn’t fit with everybody. But I never told him about my experience. And I watched him awhile, and I found out how he transmitted. And this is one of those points – “A separate transmission outside the scriptures”. There’s a method of transmitting this to another human being, mentally, from head to head. And I don’t know, I just grasped it, just by being around him and watching him. And I don’t know what he knew about me. But what I picked up from him, I picked it up like a rat and ran, and took it home.
05:13
So, I’d run into people who were interested, and we’d develop little groups. And we had what I call rapport sessions. And in these rapport sessions you could get in tune with the other person’s mind, and when you got in tune with the other person’s mind – they thought with your thoughts. And when they thought with your thoughts, they lived what you thought – and you lived what they thought.
05:38
And – I – you don’t meet too many people. I doubt if there’s two people in this room who could walk out of here interested in Zen. And I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it at all. I think he most important – it is important to talk, it’s important to communicate, and to inspire people to look. That’s very important. And if they pursue it, if they’re determined – at any cost. I don’t mean financial cost.
06:18
You know, when I went out – I had a little group in Columbus Ohio and I went over one time. There were two men there, they had been with me over ten years, well, maybe fifteen years. And they conduct this little meeting. But – this other fellow joined, he didn’t like it too well, and the original fellow who conducted the meeting – he didn’t like Zen too well. He didn’t like my application of it.
The both of them came to a meeting one time with two yellow pads, with questions on them. They were going to question me. And they asked me, they said, “Mr. Rose, how do you coordinate this with life?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “How do you make this compatible with domestic life? You know, having a family.” And I said, “You don’t. If the domestic life wants to be compatible with the spiritual life, that’s alright. But you should never struggle to make the spiritual life compatible with the domestic life.”
07:44
And he pressed it, and I said, his name was Paul, I said, “Paul, I’ve told you repeatedly, when you start on the path for truth you put all your chips on the table; don’t hold any exceptions. If the risk is that you may go nuts – you may lose your mind, you may have a stroke coming out of an experience and drop dead – don’t let it intimidate you. Nothing. Don’t let anything. Make up your mind that you’re going to put your whole being into it. That means if tomorrow you drop dead from strain, or somebody shoots you for a fanatic, okay. But don’t – put something else secondary. If your domestic life is primary and you put your spiritual life secondary, then you’ll have no spiritual life. You’ll be a domestic person, that’s all.
08:45
But this is the – I think on any – I’m not talking about Zen, I don’t care what form you’re taking to find God or to find your inner self, if you don’t do it, if you don’t go whole hog, don’t do it at all, you’re just wasting your time.”
09:06
And it seems that by pursuing it with the right frame of mind, you follow a magical path. And the magical path as I mentioned to you – what was stopping me before? My – I thought I was a nice little boy. I had an ego. the ego was between me and a solver of deep mathematical problems, you know, such as the definition of self. So that you have to get to a point where you’re willing to give your life, your sanity, whatever it is, drop dead. But – and you’re not going to do it for an aggrandizement of yourself.
09:51
It’s that you’re entitled to know. Everyone is entitled to know who they are. But that’s the only one way to go about it. You can’t go in with the idea – you’re going to do it because then you’ll walk tall in society, people will respect you and that sort of thing, and you can get away with a lot of tricks. Because you’re a preacher. Or whatever.
10:20
So – the thing was that I got a chance one time to start lecturing. Some people asked me at the Theosophical Society in fact. They asked me to give a lecture up in Pittsburgh. And so I went up, I talked about Zen. And – it was always magical – groups started to form. And this is where I met Augie [Turak]. I was in the Theosophical Society giving a talk and two fellows came down the street. One of them had a motorcycle helmet on. They had gotten out of an automobile but one of them had a motorcycle helmet I think. He had hair down to his shoulders, you know, he was in that age, of being a good hippie.
11:111
We were waiting for the place to open up – the Theosophical Society had their room two stories up, on the second story or third, I can’t remember which. But we were waiting for them to open up. And I saw him coming. And the thought went through my head, I didn’t speak, because I was convinced, I was waiting for events to prove it, I didn’t want to ask him. And as I saw him coming – he didn’t look like a philosopher to me, he looked, you know, like somebody who had been out smoking pot. But I thought to myself, “That’s the man. That’s going to take the group, establish a group in Pitt University. I had never been in Pitt University, but that’s what went through my head. And I kept it to myself. I didn’t say anything.
12:06
And he walked up and he said, I was standing there talking to another man. And he walked up, and he didn’t speak to me, he spoke to the other man. Of course later I found out the reason he didn’t speak to me was he suspected who I was. Because he had seen an ad that the Theosophical Society’s going to put out this – they put out a little brochure, the speakers of the different days of the week. Discovery I think they call it. And they had my name down, and so he knew my name. But he didn’t ask for it, he asked this other fellow, he said, “I understand there’s a lecture going on somewhere, the Theosophical Society, on Zen.”
12:49
And the guy said, “Yeah, that’s the reason I’m here.” And he said – a few words had passed and he said, “We’re you interested in Zen?” And Augie ays, “Well, I’ve read Alan Watts and I’ve read this guy and that guy.” And he says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not much hope of finding much of anything that’s really worth reading; after you boil it all down.” He says, “I’ve read about Zen and somehow it appeals to me, and I’ve got a feeling there’s something in it. And if there isn’t, then I’m going to quit.” You know, just like that. “I’ve had it,” he says.
13:27
So he came up and he’s been with me ever since. I mean, by with me, I mean, we’ve, he stops at the farm, and we have meetings and he shows up at them. He’s down here with this group in town here now. But at that time he was I’d guess nineteen years old. And we had people come and they’d – they’re still members, after nineteen years. [1972-1991] No form, no dues, no expectations, no obligations. It’s nice if you make up your mind that you want to do something, okay, but you do that on your own. I don’t want to be laying down formulas or orders of the day or anything of that sort. And it’s amazing that anything run in that manner survives. Because nearly all – I – we’ve got a sect back there that’s pretty active now – in the spiritual world as well as the trading of dope and other things, in Asia, they’re called the Krishna Consciousness people.
14:46
I talked to two of the men who really founded it – not founded but got it started – all they do is collect a bunch of people who needed a place to smoke, and maybe didn’t mind chanting – in fact, they got happy chanting. But then they got dogmatic. They became real dogmatic. And you had to believe certain things, you had to chant at three o’clock in the morning. And the people bought it. It was a little paradise where they could do what they pleased. And I mean, the things that they pleased would shock you if you knew.
15:32
But anyhow – I was talking to these two men and I said, “Hey, I can’t quite approve of this dictatorial attitude, of telling people what to think. I think people should discover. Help them discover, not say, “You’ve got to believe.” The belief is the curse. In other words, “You’ve got to talk the party line or we’ll chop off your heads.” And he said, I’ll never forget what the one guy – the other guy, he was ready to tell me off – but the taller fellow said, “You can’t get anywhere in any organization if you don’t have a discipline.” And I saw the picture. You just establish a discipline and people start like sheep and goats going in the stall that you tell them to go into, or eating the corn when you throw it to them. Or going hungry if you’re going to call it “fasting”, you know. And the whole picture was very clear to me. But at least he was honest enough to ...
[somebody hands Rose a note.]
He says the police are on the way. No, he’s right, it’s time to open up for questions. I think that the things I’ve missed, you’ll be able to ask about. so that’s what we’ll do. I’ll go on forever if somebody don’t tip me off.
Q. the guy with the note: Thank you. [laughter]
R. So we’ll get into maybe more essential stuff this way. From here on I’ll answer questions. Only thing, one thing I’ll ask, if you want to create an argument, I will not argue with you. That’s the only thing. I’m not going to wage a spiritual war here with anybody. It’s not necessary. And I don’t want to offend, either, and of course, I’m even capable of that sometimes, if I get crowded too much. But I do want to answer any questions you have, on any level.
18:07
Q. You mentioned quieting the mind in order to open the door, and I’m wondering if the Zen transmission has anything to do with, is there a method of quieting the mind? Is that what is transmitted, or is it something that ...
R. You bypass the quieting of the mind. You bypass that. It will get quiet.
[break/change in tape]
18:39
What happens is, I’ll give you an example, of the first real incident we had. This was with a woman. Some women are very sensitive sometimes. The men are more sensitive. [?] It isn’t just because they’re women that they’re sensitive. But this, the first case I had of a woman – being caught by the mind, you know, where our minds became one. The transmission occurs when two minds become one. And this happens by the same technique of – don’t strain, you allow it to happen. In other words, don’t concentrate, say you’ve got a pattern to follow, no, no. You just let things happen. And if the conditions are ripe, they happen.
19:39
This was, a man and his wife, belonged to the group for several [?] years. The man belonged; the wife thought I was the biggest four-flusher who had hit the road. She hated me. And not only that, I was taking her husband’s time up, and she had to follow him around to protect him.
19:58
So we would hold these little rapport meetings; these were nothing more than like the old Shaker meetings or Quaker meetings – we’d sit there and say nothing, until vibrations occur, until something happens. And what happens is that you get in rapport. You actually get into so great of rapport that you, guys have sat an turned to a fellow and said, “You’re thinking this,” and they’d be right, they’d know what a person was thinking. And this is what it means. You can transmit the mental messages, mental realizations, which aren’t necessarily messages, you just know.
20:45
Well anyhow, she would stay in the kitchen while we were sitting in our circle, our little circle. You should always sit in a circle so you can see each other. And this particular time – and we knew better than to ask, to invite her to sit, because we knew her attitude. This particular time, there was a fellow by the name of Frank Mascara – he was being affected by the mood, so to speak. There are certain things that will happen as this goes along. And it isn’t necessarily with only one person. But I had found that I could see, under right conditions, a spirit moving. I say a “spirit” – that’s loose, it was elongated, like a human body, and it moved slowly around – this was a circle and it would move slowly around that circle, until it would dart and it would hit somebody. When it would hit that person, they would come apart at the seams, and maybe cry, weep for a time. Or sometimes just tremble; it [would] depend, there were different degrees of this.
22:10
So in this particular time, she was out in the kitchen and I heard her. Frank had got – his eyes were getting big. And I looked at him – we don’t talk, we don’t say anything. And he looked over at me, and I nodded my head, I had seen the thing hit him, and I knew what was going to happen to him. In other words, if she hadn’t come into the room, Frank would have got this, and he’d have a spiritual experience. But for some reason, the door opened and in she walked. We never invited her and she didn’t want to be invited. Why she walked ...
[break in tape]
22:52
... clean up the mucous that was coming out her from weeping. And she stopped one time and looked up at her husband – he was sitting in the circle – and she said, “You’re not real. I know that you’re not real. But I also know that you’re there.” And she had seen it. She had see the fact that everything on this planet is an illusion – except what we create it to be. This is the thing you come back from the trip with. That this – that’s the reason it’s hard to adapt to it. Because these are ghosts, they’re transparent, under certain conditions. And yet, this is what you come back to, and it’s what you have to mingle with to be of some use, some help. So he didn’t move. He was, you know, just sat there and stared at her.
23:54
Well, I got a chair and pulled it over, a chair like this, and sat in front of her. And I reached out and got ahold of her head and I said, “you know, you’ll be alright. I’ll see that no harm comes to you. So you can relax.” And in a little while she raised her head. And I said, “You know what’s happened, don’t you?” And she didn’t answer me. And I said, “I am in your head, and you are in my head.” And she said, “You’ve been there all day.”
24:32
And it took me back to when they first came – in fact I had ridden out to the farm with them, and with Frank too, they were friends. And I rode up front with her, and her husband was driving the car. And I noticed – the reason I’m mentioning these, some day, sometime down the road this may happen. And if it happens to you, you’ll know what’s going on, you don’t need to think you’re dying or something.
25:00
But anyhow, when I got close to her I felt [an] electrical – it was like a visible electrical wire, passing between her and me at the stomach level, right about here. And I thought, “hallucination,” you know, “I’m just, what is this?” I never quite had that happen before. But when she raised her head and said, “You’ve been there all day,” I realized what was happening, and it started to happen when I sat down – it wasn’t because she was attracted to me, because she didn’t like me. She thought I was somebody pulling stunts, pulling the wool over their eyes, so to speak. I presume that; she never expressed it.
25:52
But anyhow, the reason she stayed on the floor was because – she had reached – when the remarks she made to her husband when she looked at him demonstrated that she saw the world as an illusion, including her husband, that is, her husband’s body. And this meant that she had reached the stage of the kevala samadhi. In other words, cosmic consciousness is another word for it. n cosmic consciousness, everything appears, everything is an illusion but everything is in order.
26:33
So, I thought, there’s one stage deeper, to actually have a complete experience, is to go to the, there’s only one word, it’s an Indian word, but there are other words used by Zen. Zen uses the word satori. Satori is not Realization; satori is “wow!” Satori is the wow experience. It’s like, you know, you tinker with some ideas and all at once you get some magical result and you wsay, “Wow!” But it’s not a change of being. It’s a successful experiment in which you say, “Boy, that happened.” That’s all.
27:19
I don’t advise Zen as a means of becoming one with God. I have never found anything in all the literature I’ve read on Zen about becoming one with God. The only thing is, that Zen is the system that I chose for transmission. This is one thing they could do; they could transmit [?] And so I – it was like picking from one tree and then another, in order to be the most use to people.
27:55
She stayed there for a while and I thought, “Well how am I going to get her out of this?” I had never had anybody in that position, where they could not break loose. And so I just, knowing that our heads were together, I turned my head away. Not this head, but the mental head. When I turned/pulled my head away, she got up, stood up. After two hours. And she was a mess.
Now she went through a lot of hell. And we broke up the meeting and she followed me out to the kitchen, and she said, “Mr. Rose, I can never thank you enough.” And, “How can I thank you?” And I said, “Hey, stop. You don’t thank me. You go to somebody else. You take this to somebody else. This is what you do. And then you’ve paid your debt – not to me.” Because before that, it’s selfish, and it loses its selfishness by service. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I will, I will.” She was radiant. Her face was transformed, from this weeping and everything, instantaneously she was radiant. And she was convinced. [Well,] I didn’t see her for a year.
29:34
Q. ?? experienced something that you can voluntarily carry to someone else who is interested in having it, or ...
R. Oh yes. the reason for it, the reason for carrying it, [gap] basically, people dodge the work. And I’m not too keen about carrying somebody who doesn’t put out effort. But it’s the idea that, when a person puts out effort and you don’t get any result – you’re dealing with something that’s tremendously subjective – so you’re going to have to give a hint. There has to be some hint. In other words, it has to be a mini-miracle, that says, “Look, this is the result. You’ve got the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg – three fourths of it you can’t see it. This is bigger than what we’re doing. nd that is to encourage them to lead a lifestyle that’s going to make them permanent. They’re going to be a permanent being, instead of a being that’s defined fifteen different ways for fifteen different days. One day one thing, one conclusion, one conviction, and then the next day there’s something else.
30:56
In other words, once they set their course and stay with that, then the other will follow. And I think too that if a person is on the verge, if they got to the point where the time is ripe, that type of transmission will break them in, completely into the total samadhi.
[break in tape]
[side 4 ends at 31:26]
File 5
File 5 = 32 minutes.
00:00
[a repeat] And I think too that if a person is on the verge, if they got to the point where the time is ripe, that type of transmission will break them in, completely into the total samadhi.
[gap]
[an earlier repeat] That one day the one thing or one conclusion, one conviction, and then the next day there’s something else. In other words, once they set their course and stay with that, then the other will follow. And I think too that if a person is on the verge, if they got to the point where the time is ripe, that type of transmission will break them in, completely into the total samadhi. which is what they call sahaja samadhi. Now I may pronounce these incorrectly, I don’t know. I used to be – didn’t like to use Indian words, or Latin words or anything. I’d say, “Hey, this can be said in English.” [But] there is no English word for it. Because there are no – among all the literature, of English, breakthrough of let’s say Christian – Christian saints and that sort of thing – the closest one is St. John of the Cross, which I think is a very bona fide thing. St. John of the Cross had a dynamic spiritual experience. Did you ever read about it? You can pick it up, there are some books on it. He was in jail at the time. They throwed him in jail because he wasn’t doing what the Pope told him to do.
01:40
But I don’t know what came of, why, there was no movement formed, no John of the Cross church formed or anything of that sort. But that book survived. And the Pope who throwed him in jail, we know nothing of. So there’s something magical about the, even though a person’s not, there’s little attention paid to him, for some reason there’s enough people that sees what happened, reads of it, that they tell someone else.
02:20
But that’s the most profound one, the most profound case that I’ve run into in the Christian history. But they can happen. It can happen. An I’ve often wondered why this thing sprung up, at least in, the terminology was oriental, or Indian.
02:48
But it’s a total realization of yourself, your union with the absolute, that’s what it is. And kevala samadhi is like cosmic consciousness. Ramana aharshi describes kevala samadhi as similar to dropping a bucket into a well, and the bucket can be retrieved, the water in the bucket can be retrieved. Sahaja samadhi is where the drop of water falls into the ocean and it loses its separateness; you can’t identify it.
03:27
But the ocean is the God or whatever you want to call it, the absolute, an absolute condition then.
So knowing that definition, why, I could see the difference.
And so I used to, when I was younger, I run into this one fellow and he was always talking about sahaja samadhi, and I’d say, “Hey, shut up, I don’t want to hear that. Say it in English.” But there was no English word, and there is no English word yet for it.
Somebody had their hand up there.
04:01
Q. You were talking earlier, when you first began searching, first it was the hatha yoga, then the raja yoga, and you seemed to imply that it wasn’t what you were really looking for, and that later on you found Zen Buddhism. But just now you seem to have said that compared to satori, samadhi is much superior, or like farther.
R. I don’t say that, I didn’t place any categoric value on the different levels. If it takes hatha yoga to get to raja yoga, hatha yoga is important. But you move away from it because nothing’s happening, and you want to try something that’s going to make something happen. I had studied no Zen before my experience; I had no contact with a Zen teacher before my experience. For some reason I ran into this fellow [Pulyan] afterwards, and I thought – I didn’t quite believe him, in fact.
But incidentally [with Pulyan] – no money. No money changed hands. He didn’t charge me a cent, and all his communications with me were written in longhand. He must not have had a, didn’t use a typewriter. But he knew what he was doing. And I could sense it, but he, the funny thing was that he didn’t realize that I had already experienced what he was trying to prepare me for. And what I did notice was his method of transmission and I took it home with me.
05:50
Q. Did you move away from yoga altogether?
R. Yes. Except I used the sitting posture, because it kept me from falling over.
06:08
Q. ??
R. But as far as vegetarianism, I don’t know if that’s part of yoga or not – they do advise to get away from meat – I never liked meat since then, never have. But there’s times when there’s nothing else to eat, why, you eat meat, that’s all. If that’s all they got on the menu. I think those things are good, though. I think vegetarianism is good. And it has nothing to do with killing the animals. Because, you know, they’re all going to get killed anyhow. It’s like I said, the way we go about things and the way people believe, that possibly we should only kill things that we eat, meaning we shouldn’t kill each other unless we’re going to eat each other. And I can see the attitude of the American Indians; they ate each other.
07:05
Q. The experience of connecting with someone else, and you said there was an electrical spark. Was there an intent to create this spark by either party, or did the spark just occur?
R. Things will not happen if there’s an intent as quick as if you allow it to happen. You will know when you’re doing it that you’re allowing it to happen, not straining to make it happen.
Q. Could it happen to someone who wanted no part of it? Was this something that was put on two people, or was the intent there, not necessarily trying to do it, but the intent that that would be a good thing to happen?
R. I don’t know exactly what you’re getting at, but I will tell you this, that it’s very possible that people have experienced this who had no idea that it was going to happen.
Q. So the intent wasn’t an important part of it.
R. Well, it just wasn’t spelled out. Just like, I didn’t know, when this girl walked into the room – I gave details of her attitude, where prior to that she had no use for me. And I don’t know why, never asked her why. But it happened anyhow. It was the most profound experience that happened to any of the women who had been around the group. And she was really opposed to us. My interpretation of that is, that she had a quality that she didn’t know she had, and her quality responded. So who are we to judge, and say she didn’t deserve it? We don’t judge that way.
09:07
Q. So is our desire for an experience doesn’t necessarily get in the way, block the experience, if one’s going to try to make ...
R. Our desire?
Q. Yes.
R. I ain’t saying that our desire – we have to desire, and not desire. I’m just saying, there’s a middle path. Don’t desire, saying that you’re going to pull this thing off, and then with the splash you’re going to make you’ll get rich in Hollywood and you’ll be in the movies or something. I’m not saying that they actually think that way, but some people have that. In fact, everybody goes through periods of vanity, until you realize that this is, you’re not that important. I realized from the little setbacks that I had, that I wasn’t that important. I was selfish, I was egotistical. When I realized that I was egotistical, that removed me from it. Then things happened. And I’m not saying I did them. It happened. They happened.
10:15
Q. (Augie) Your own experience wasn’t intentional either.
R. Oh, no. It took me by complete surprise. Complete surprise. I went out there, I went out to get married. I went out to take advantage of somebody as well – if possible.
Q. Have you had this experience more than once, since the first time?
R. Just once.
Q. Can you tell us about it.
R. Now when I’m talking about going through the hell again, that happened once. But the experience of transmitting something to other people – you don’t transmit necessarily the whole thing. Transmission doesn’t mean that every transmission is going to result in a total experience. It may result in a person getting a better view, and being thrilled by it, and they realize that they’re in closer now. And of course, if they go the whole way, they’ll – she didn’t go any further than what I call kevala samadhi, the conscious consciousness. She realized that the world was an illusion, a total illusion. But I was hoping that because she was on the road that she would go farther. But – there’s nothing you can do except allow it to. And it happens much better when you allow it to happen.
11:43
Q. It just happens or it doesn’t happen then?
R. Right. [gap] There’s a betweenness to it. There’s a book out there called The Direct-Mind Experience, and in this book there’s a chapter developed on betweenness. This is not religious, this is not spiritual or magic, this is an element of – like we have two hands to pick up things, objects on earth. We have this formula for moving things in the mental dimension. And they will move things in the physical dimension.
12:25
For instance, I got sick one time. I don’t drink, but occasionally I’ll go in a beer joint, you know, and talk to somebody, a nightclub or something like that. And I got tremendously sick several years after I got married. I don’t know what happened to me, but I got incapacitated. I sat in a chair for a year, couldn’t get out of the chair for a year. And so I’d – finally got out and forced myself to walk down the street – I was good for one block, finally. I could walk one block.
13:10
And it was a beer joint, so I’d go in there. People on Social Security and stuff they’d be sitting in there. We’d play euchre. Goodbye. [somebody leaving.] So the euchre game turned into a poker game. And the next thing you know they were betting nickels and dimes, and from nickels and dimes they went to a quarter, and there was seven people playing, and sometimes there would be a hundred to a hundred fifty dollars in the pot.
13:44
Well I didn’t go down there [for that?] – I found out, the reason I played the poker, I found out it took my mind off of myself. I forgot. You get something strong enough to take your tension; it seemed like much of what was wrong with me was rooted in a mental set.
14:03
But anyhow, I saw it was – I was feeling better, because I got abound better. I don’t know – I went to a doctor and the doctor said I had a stroke. But there was no visible signs of paralysis – one leg was a little bit wobbly. But anyhow, I’d get in these games, and I wanted to stick around and have people to talk to and hat sort of thing, just to distract myself from my physical self.
14:37
And I got to playing this game, and I was green. I had to stop? saying – they’re playing wild cards and stuff and I’d say, “What do you mean?” And they explained to me, “here’s what ...” “Okay, go ahead.” And they’ deal the cards and – it was apparent that they knew, they could read me. They could see that my hand shook and then I had a winner, then they’d all drop out. They’d pick up little signs. So I thought, “Oh, I’m down now, I’ve lost five or six hundred bucks in a few weeks, playing this poker.
So I just made up my mind that they’re going to stop. So I went down [there] and I called everything that was – If I was beat showing, I could see by the card that they had exposed that I was beat – if I didn’t see tthat I was beat I called them. And I found out that they didn’t have good hands – three fourths of the time they were bluffing, because I figured that id somebody didn’t have something better, maybe some people would drop out with a better hand. So a lot of them were getting away with it. So I picked up all the odd money that they had been getting away with.
15:54
And all the money I took in – I got all my money back plus. I’d go home sometimes with five or six hundred dollars for one evening. And I thought, “This ain’t necessary. I don’t need money. I’m appreciating the fact that these follows are – you know, that I’ve got somebody I can associate with, that I can talk to, to get my mind off my sickness.
16:21
But I would ask directions from somebody. I’d stop the game and say, “Hey, if a person’s got this kind of cards, are they better than these kind of cards?” To give you an example, they were playing a thing called “low card in your hand is wild.” Have you ever hear of that? Have you ever played cars? Low card in your hand is wild. Okay, so you’ve got a pair of deuces and an ace, then you’ve got three aces. If you’ve got two treys and an ace, and nothing under the treys, you’ve got three aces.
17:01
So I had an ace and two treys, and I didn’t know whether aces were high or low. So I stopped the game; I said, “Tell me something.” Of course, they’re getting an idea of what’s in my hand by the way I’m asking these questions. Or they think I’m bluffing them and pulling a little trick, throwing them off. but anyhow, I said, “Are aces ones, and twos are greater than aces? Or are aces bigger than the King? Which way do you play this game?” And they said, “Aces are always greater than the King.” “Oh,” I said, “in that case I’ve got to raise.” That was one of the rules of the game; if you’ve got a cinch hand you’ve got to raise. I had gone in with an ace and two treys, and there was a man behind me, looking at my hand all the time, and I had to draw two cards. So I thought to myself, “The only way I can win this is with an ace and a trey.
18:05
So I said to the guy [dealer], “Give me an ace and a trey.” Out loud. And I got an ace and a trey. So that’s when I stopped and said, “What are aces?” If aces were high I had five aces. Well, you were not allowed to check [not raise] a cinch hand. That was one of the rules. If you did, they wouldn’t let you have the pot. So everybody had hands – you know, with wild cards like that you get people with straight flushes – everybody’s got something five of something, four of something, a straight flush. And they went around, and they didn’t pay any attention to me because they thought I was stupid – which I was.
18:51
And they came around and raised, and by the time it got to me, to call the raises, I had to put in something like forty dollars. So I said, “I’ll call – but wait a minute, I think I’d better raise.” And so, they didn’t take me seriously. I raised, and they hit me with another raise – there were two ot three hundred dollars on the table before the cards were shown. And this old fellow was standing behind me, and he said, “This guy’s crazy.” He just went like that [gesture] and said, “This guy’s crazy.” You don’t stay in with two trey in this kind of a game.
19:35
So what was happening – I found out, I saw one other guy do this. And this guy would talk baby talk. And when he started talking baby talk, everybody got furious – and he won. He would – half drunk – talk baby talk. He went into that act and he won. And I think part of it was that he got everybody angry, and they lost their cool, so to speak.
20:09
But anyhow, this guy said – I remember one time – I liked picture cards – you know, if you get anything under them then they’re good, if you hit everything above it. [?] I kept a queen, two queens and a jack – imagine that – and letting [?] the low card – and asking for a queen and a jack – and got it.
20:23
Now this you don’t do this twice in a row, because the odds are too great that you’re going to be able to ask for something. Because for instance, to give you an example – what if the other two aces in the deck have been discarded by somebody? They’ve already been dealt out and they didn’t it his hand, so he threw them away. There’s no way to get them. How did I get those aces?
20:48
I mean, this happened under different circumstances. Why? Because the only thing I wanted – I didn’t want to lose money, but I didn’t want to take their money. They were friends. I didn’t want animosity – they were neighbors and friends. So I’d go in four or five hundred dollars, take them all across the river, buy them a steak dinner at three o’clock in the morning. Buy them anything they wanted so that I wouldn’t be going home with too much of their money.
21:18 Bart: But that same kind of betweenness you can use for other things.
R. Absolutely. This business is not black magic, it’s just seeing the way things work that’s all. I think that a lot of your people who rolled up enormous fortunes and that sort of thing had to have some assurance, the way they worked. Because you take – the stock market, you play the stock market, the odds, you can’t study the stock market. There are too many facets, too many variables and stuff happening.
[some noise] R. Asleep is she?
22:15
Q. You mentioned egotism. Where does that go into self-respect, for yourself? How do you equate that, how do you define those, between egotism and self-respect for your own self?
R. Well I believe, see this is always, what you have, you remember that thing I read to you a little while ago? You read something like that, you ...
I bring a formula, largely untold of forces mixed of between and betwixt and only seen when allowed to unfold
Not hungered, not crazy to unfold, just allowed to unfold.
and better felt when the body is cold.
In other words, not fevered-up with desire. And that seems to work, that’s all
23:32
Q. When you had this experience that you related to us, did you feel that at one point you were at one-ness with God, and have ever since, is that right?
R. I felt I was at one with the Absolute. I never saw God as a person or an image or anything like that. But I knew that there was something that I was a part of, that had absolute power, absolute ability to create – possibly what I [?] created [?] was images, even.
Q. Whether you call it God or what, you felt that it was there, and you felt that way ever since, that experience?
R. Yes. U-huh.
[gap] 24:14
See I don’t – my idea is, we get, man makes God in his own image and likeness, and that’s where the mistake is made. I presume that it’s a unit. We can’t understand it. You know, there’s a force there. But you know, God has to have sympathy, he has to have love. People talks about God loving you – why would God have to love you? He don’t have to love you. He can tramp on you. He’s not going to be smaller; two or three thousand people dead are not going to be any smaller.
I thought they had a glass here.
24:548
Q. Mr. Rose, do you have any thought as to where we’ll be a thousand, ten thousand years from now, a billion years from now? What it’s all about?
R. The thing is that time will not be the same. i don’t know how we’ll handle the time. i mentioned before [lecture of questions] – well i didn’t mention it but i had some things i wanted to get to, but I knew I couldn’t cover them all. And that is, that we have to work from a point of reference. If you go out and solve a problem, you’ve got to have a point of reference. And our point of reference for instance in finding the truth is our own mind. We have to first to find out what is looking for the truth. Is it just a vain wish, or is it a part of our essence that wants to define itself? – what is this essence?
26:05
And you get immediately into conditions that you want with it. That truth has to be acceptable, understandable. If it isn’t acceptable or understandable, we have to continue to labor to where we can understand it. It’s fatal to start off with the conviction that God has human feelings, that God is a person. God – nine chances out of ten – is an absolute creature.
And when I say absolute – we are measured by the Sun. Without the Sun there would be no days or months; so the Sun sets up our measurement or calendar. So this is beyond it [that]. When I had my experience I saw no sun, I saw no planets, I didn’t go by any planets. I went directly to something that was totally alive. I saw no face. But I knew.
27:15
And what convinced me was that I was able to do anything I wanted to do. I just made a mistake I’ll never make again, and that is to ask what nothingness is. That was what broke the spell. Because I’m [I was] shown what it was.
Q. So up until that point there was nothing but good feeling then, is that right?
R. Oh, yes. Happy. I had no desire. I had not even a backward look. I wasn’t even concerned with what was doing with the body, whether it was dead. I wasn’t concerned with it. But I think what it is, I don’t, as I said, ever since then I’ve wished that I had written it down. I never carried a diary, because I was travelling, for one thing. And I’d like to have known how many days I was unconscious, [and] how many days I was not responsible, you know, walking around the streets weeping. It wasn’t too long. I know it wasn’t too long; it wasn’t no more than a week, the whole thing.
28:33
Q. The experience lasted a week, or the time – do you have any idea of how long you were actually out of body?
R. That’s what I was referring to. I don’t know how long I was out of the room.
Q. It could have been as much s a week?
R. It could have been. I have no idea. I would have known, I would have known immediately if I had been keeping a pencil and a piece of paper, and put the date down, and the hour. But my feeling was that this was totally the end, it was a death.
29:15
Bart: Paul Wood knew how long his was, it was about ten days, because he was in the hospital.
R. And that was another fellow – I keep my ear to the ground all the time – and I’ll tell you about this. This fellow was in Texas. [Bob Martin] ran into him in San Antonio. That’s where we first encountered him. He was one of the bombardiers who bombed Japan toward the end of the war. We had a little meeting one time – he came up to Akron, Ohio, a friend of mine lived there, and I came up and met him there. He looked like – he was heavy set, looked like this Crazy Guggenheim, one of the guests on the Jackie Gleason show, very red-faced, real hooded eyes, talked slow, precisely. This guy [Martin] had invited over to his house. This guy, my friend, worked at Firestone in the engineering department, mathematical department, and he had got some of these heads of the departments, they wanted to meet this guy. So they came over.
30:43
And of course, what they started to do was to pick at him, to ask him questions. And he would answer them. Somebody asked him if there was anything magical that had happened. And he told them – he had originally been from Oklahoma, and he moved down into San Antonio to get a job or some sort. And he said [told them] how the experience came. He was sent home on aa rest and recreation deal, because he had – after he got through bombing the place – he was a devout Christian. And it didn’t match for him; he said, when he realized that he had helped kill maybe 80,000 people with one bomb, he said he couldn’t help bu think about his ch ...
[break in tape]
[side 5 ends at 31:33]
File 6
File 6 = 32 minutes.
... that, in the Bible it said that God sees the fall of the sparrow. And he said if God can see the fall of the sparrow, where was he when those bombs fell? Why did he let us drop them? In other words, where’s God when the real killings occur? And so he said it bugged him, and I guess he said, he got to talking to other people and asking them, and they suggested he take a leave of absence to go back and get over it.
00:32
So he come back to the States, he was married, and he’s not making good sense. I mean, he was almost insisting, and he said that all he knew was what he – I don’t know what church he belonged to. He was, belonged to a Christian church. And he said, he’d been brought up with quotations from the Bible. And he said it dawned on him one day that in the Bible it said that if you would know something, desire something, pray thusly, and what followed was the Lord’s Prayer. So he got to praying the Lord’s Prayer, over and over and over. And then he would sit and think about it, about the different segments of the Lord’s Prayer.
02:23
And one day it got too much for him. He said – at that time he was working in a place selling cars. And he said the customer come in and they give him a bad time, maybe he gave himself a bad time, and thought it was the customers. But he said it was just too much, and he said he put his head down on the desk and prayed for God to kill him. He didn’t want to live. “I didn’t have enough guts to kill myself,” he said, “so I prayed for God to kill me.” He said, “I passed out.”
He was out for over a week, unconscious in one respect. But he had travelled into history. Now the amazing thing about these, if you find honest accounts – they’re not going to be all the same, the things that they experience. Why he traveled through history? But he could go anyplace in history. And that was after he got over it. And he had something very similar to me, because he had just moved out [?] what he was curious about, he got answers to.
02:34
But he said that when he came back, why, this curd him, he was at peace with himself, so to speak. And he’d be walking down the street with you [not with R] and he’d laugh or something, or make a sound. And they’d say, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “Stop, stop,” he says, “I’m watching the battle of Gettysburg.” And he would give details on it, what he saw. It was spooky, whether he was really stooping time, or was just putting himself – I wish – I think you can, because we’re, if you analyze this, a lot of physicists believe that this is a space-time continuum, and that any tempering with the time is possible, any tampering with the space is possible
03:30
For instance, when I went to the, wherever I went, that was, that spatial trip, time, I didn’t keep track of – which I would have liked to, to find out how long it took me. But anyhow, he had the same idea that I had – this got to be passed on. This is tremendously valuable to people. But how did he tell them to go about it? The way it happened to him: pray the Lord’s Prayer.
03:58
But nobody paid much attention. I don’t know whatever happened to him, but he used to send me the lessons, he had them typed out, how to meditate on different parts of the. And I was real honest with him. I said, “I can’t do it,” I said, “because there’s something in there that I don’t believe, and as soon as I hit it, and that is, ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive others,’” or something like that – the different Lord’s Prayer writings are different on that. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” – that’s one reading I’ve heard. But that was what hooked me: I don’t believe in sin.
04:38
Q. Why do you not believe in sin?
R. Because a a human I’m too stupid to know what’s right and what’s wrong – in the celestial dimensions: what God wants. So God’s going to have to wise me up about the rules. There is no sin. This is something I believe that’s been employed to intimidate children, or people who aren’t smart enough to look beyond things. It’s like a goat – there’s things that we call sins that are sexual – which I don’t approve of – I think we should try to control our sex. Not because it’s you know immoral or a waste of time, but because it’s a waste of mental energy.
05:31
We can’t have both. We can’t be burning the candle at both ends.
Q. How about ?? if you ?? and murder somebody – you don’t see that as sin?
R. No, it’s murder. I said this one time before, maybe it was last night, but I’ve said it all my life, that – what’s going on today? We have got a tremendously fouled-up set of values. For instance, I see nothing wrong with killing somebody my age, especially if I’ve got cancer and ain’t got the courage to shoot myself. But killing babies? They’re helpless. An old man knows what he wants, but these babies are helpless. And I can’t condone [it] – I don’t even like animals that come in and kill the babies of other animals – that irritates me – because I’m programmed, I see them as beautiful and wonderful. But the man is tired and ready to go. He ain’t got the guts to jump in front of a train or something like that, it’s a little messy, okay, how am I going to do it?
06:51
Q. Have you ever wondered why you haven’t had that experience again, or do you feel that once is enough to last a lifetime.
R. Well, I think it lasts a lifetime. I never forget it. I never forget the feeling. But I think you can have it again. It happened to me, but it wasn’t as violent. I was sitting in my room and I saw the future of my son in it. It came out exactly. Years ago, when he was just a child, I saw his future, and it was sad. I mean it wasn’t anything happy to look at. But that’s the way it turned out.
07:29
Q. And it came to pass just that way?
R. He’s thirty-seven years of age now. [1991-37=1954]
Q. And even though up ahead, there was nothing you could do to head it off?
R. You can’t. There’s things you can’t change. ?? set it up – it was supposed to – change the things we can, and ?? ?? ?? where we can’t.
07:51
Q. So I guess in a way it’s better not to know the future then, know what’s going to happen tomorrow.
R. Well, yeah. See, I think, out of these, I’m talking about magic here tonight, but I don’t believe in magic for the sake of ?? magician. Magic to do something, within the limits of what – you know, I think there’s a gray area, where that it isn’t controlled strictly by fate. And at the same time, we don’t know whether – good night – it’s beneficial or we’re going to hurt something by changing. For instance, you might want a certain condition to happen, and if it happens, down the road somebody may get killed as a result. Give you an example, say a person wanted a Cadillac – what’s wrong with wanting a Cadillac? You know, it ain’t much, I’ve got enough, I’m making enough money, why shouldn’t everybody have a Cadillac? So maybe you get the Cadillac, and your kid gets in the Cadillac and kills himself.
09:05
Now I’m using that as an analogy for all of the things that you might want in life. A lot of the things that we want, we wish to hell we never had them. And to me it shows that we don’t have the necessary perspective to judge. So we let somebody else judge. We let it up to a flip of the coin, and hope he catches it in mid-air. You know, and knows what we want.
Q. It strikes me, I’m reminded of my father saying to me, “Be careful of what you pray for, my son, you just might get it.”
09:45
R. Right, right. A lot of us get, a lot of us fight tooth and toenail, and live in hell with the result. We fight to get it, and then after we get it, it’s a perpetual koan.
10:06
Q. How do you think human beings are meant, meant for us to pray, as far as praying to God?
R. I don’t see the point in prayer. Man’s life should be a prayer. Man’s life should be a prayer. Words are cheap. Words are vain. People like to be seen praying. And I see that, and then you see it’s more vanity than sincerity, sincere concern for their fellowman. That sort of thing.
10:36
Q. What would you say for man to live his life, if his life should be a prayer?
R. With me I’d have to say, live the way I’ve lived. And I don’t know whether you could live that way or not. But not, but say, “I’ll be happy when things come to me, but not angry if I miss, don’t get them.
Q. There is no systematic way, like, you yourself said you were searching for truth, the whole time. Would you recommend that for every single person?
R. Oh, yes. I think this is what separates the man from the animal. And maybe I’m saying something I shouldn’t dare, because I’m not too sure the animals don’t know things. I have a farm and I’ve watched things happen among the animals, for instance the mourning at the death of another animal, one of the herd. The cattle will mourn. And why are they mourning, you know? They sense – we think they’re stupid, that they don’t know that some of them get killed. They know there’s death.
12:01
Q. This is kind of a two-part question. In response to what you were saying about the possibility of us being reflexive, reactive, protoplasm or something, which I find is probably true for the most part, in myself – in line with that, what do you think gives some people the drive, as you have shown, to find something more or to find truth? And others don’t seem to care, one way or the other, whether there is more or there isn’t more.
R. I’d have to answer you, I wrote this down, it’s in the book out there:
I know not why I ever sought unless in my young heart caught the urge to gentle be, to love, yet fear the web of love.
And that was why I sought, you know. That’s the best way I could have ever put it, is, I think that – we feel there’s a destiny. I think you feel – you feel around. You feel around when you’re growing up, or undertaking something, and, “What should I do? What should I work at?” And of course, my answer is, work at that which you like. We don’t have to be miserable. You can, you know, whatever occupation you want. If you want to be a student, if you can get it from books – wherever you work, you can go get the books, take them home, and when you get a chance you read them, that’ all. You can cover a tremendous lot of territory.
14:02
And, give you an example, the things that I have worked at – now if I were to try to tackle them, I’d think, “Hey, this is impossible.” I had two years of college. I worked as a metallurgist and a chemist, and a chief chemist in one factory, head chemist – they made radios, Bendix factory in Baltimore, made radios and telegraphic equipment and that sort of thing.
14:33
And you might say, well you got to go through college to get [that, there?] I worked on, helped them develop streptomycin and aureomycin in the National Jewish Hospital in Denver. And I wasn’t a biochemist, I was just a simple chemist, and not too good of a chemist. By that I mean, not too good at answering the definitions as to what is a salt and what is an acid and what is a base. One time I went to apply for a job and that was what they asked me, what is a base and what is a salt. I didn’t even know the definition of what an acid is – I think it’s the addition of a hydrogen atom or something like that.
15:18
And the guy said, “Well, you didn’t answer the question.” A high school kid would remember it; you learn it in high school. But I knew how to take a book of directions and test chemicals – it’s mechanical, in qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis you work in a fifteen foot square room and the entire wall would be covered with tubes full of chemicals, to test the stuff that you’re digging up out of the ground. And in this particular case it was a borax mine in California. I worked there as a chemist – and you just open a book, that’s what they call it, a cookbook, you open up the book, and it’s a boron, a lot of boron over there, sodium hydroxide, that kind of stuff, so you know the test for it. You don’t have to know it, it’s in the cookbook, you turn the page, sodium hydroxide, and it says put sso many drops of this in, shake it, put something else in, and the results maybe put on a blotter, you look at the blotter, if it’s green it’s a certain thing, if it’s red it’s something else. It’s very simple. But of course you get by, you get past this thing of worrying about what a base and a salt and an acid is, the three basic forms of chemical solutions.
16:47
So I believe, what I’m trying to say is, I’ve worked in a bunch of different things and enjoyed it. And I enjoyed working as a waiter just as much. I just loved to work with people, and seeing that I was doing something that pleased somebody. I’d get irritated sometime, you get somebody who’s overbearing and wanted to throw his weight around, that would irritate me, but the majority of people were wonderful.
So I don’t know which is better, working as a waiter or working as a chemist; it didn’t matter. I worked a an aeronautical [?] engineer. I worked on the atomic submarines, up here in Akron, Ohio. At Babcock and Wilcox, we were creating a boiler. We had to create a boiler that would stand intense pressure, because of the instantaneous manufacturing of steam, with isotopes, atomic isotopes. And it was real touchy work because – one submarine blowed up because they got a leak in the thing that got into this, what was it, an explosive with a sodium compound, and when the water hit it, it was like carbide, I don’t know if you know about carbide – the coal miners used to put a little lamp on their head and put water in it. This carbide would put off a gas, then they’d light that gas with a match, that’s how they’d see, to get down and work in the coal mine.
18:25
And this carbide, that stuff if it gets on you, bursts into flame, eats your hand, takes the moisture out of your hand to feed the carbide, and bursts into flame. This – when I was working on the submarine up there, he kept a thing that held two barrels of water, up over, you ran under it and pulled a rope. So you’d have enough water, so it didn’t take all he water out of your system.
18:53
Bart: Mr. Rose, last night you answered a question similar to hers, somewhat to the effect that you’re almost born into this, maybe not something that’s acquired as much as something you almost can’t help.
R. I think you feel certain, I feel, I don’t know, I think every, you know, if a guy gets into the stock market or something and he makes a million dollars, he may feel as if it wa something he was supposed to – maybe it was. But I got a feeling though that maybe if he goes at it with too much greed, too much thinking that he’s doing it, something fouls up. It fouls him up somewhere along the line. If he can do it for the pleasure of it, and say, “This is a wonderful picture show. I hope it don’t end, but if it does, it was wonderful while it was there,” – that’s the attitude I think people should take. And I think with that attitude, magical things happen.
19:52
When I say “magical” – I think that actually there’s forces that moved in. See, what it is, magic is nothing more than the molecular formation – I’m using molecular loosely, it’s just particle formation of the stardust of illusion. In other words, this being a dream or unreal, an illusion, doesn’t mean that we can’t create an illusion inside of that illusion – by following a certain set of rules
20:34
And you here this thing in Genesis, where somebody said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. I like the words. I think the magic was there. It doesn’t say, “Give me light,” authoritatively, it said, “Let it happen.”
Q. What do you mean create an illusion inside the illusion?
R. Well, the world is an illusion. And what we do when we cause things to happen, we’re creating another illusion inside of that illusion, which is preferable to us.
21:08
And consequently I’ve got a – I think way back there if people sat – no matter what their educational status was – there’s things crop out in the literature like in the Bible that can only come from somebody sitting and thinking, or by some means getting in contact with some mentality or having some spiritual experience, and getting a reading on this.
21:33
And what’s he do? He comes back and says things – like I do – you know, saying, “Hey, I’m a little stupid but I’m going to try to get it across to you.” I can’t – we’re dealing with a new matter, a new molecular, atomic chart or whatever you want to call it.
21:55
Q. Do you think [inaudible – it would probably be] an illusory type of existence?
R. Yes, I think – I was just thinking the other day about – I started talking at the meeting last night [would this be 1991-1006-Augie's-Apartment-Raleigh-1991? – tape missing?] or would it be the 1991 videotape? ] about a point of reference, that proper thinking depends on having a point of reference: you know, who’s talking? who wants it defined? you know, and are you going to put conditions on the defining, or are you going to get a definition of itself, by itself?
22:26
So when I was studying chemistry the professor said there’s only 94 elements [92?] – the whole universe is composed of 94 basic elements – it’s wonderful how he wrapped it up. Today there’s 120. He didn’t know. See what I mean? So somehow man helped bring it about – I don’t know how they did it – some of those elements were caused by man tinkering with electricity of God knows what.
23:03
Q. Mr Rose, in your experience and in all your searching – do you have any idea for what is the reason for being on this planet at all in the first place? For why God wanted us here?
R. I have no idea. I have no idea. You’d have to go into history. [inaudible comment in background.] I realize that. You’d have to go back in history. There’s something amazing, though, about the whole thing. I think – there’s fields of enquiry, things we have to look into down the road if we want to get into the ultimate history of planets and the human race.
23:49
Augie. But I’ve heard you say there’s no time, either, so that history becomes kind of a misnomer.
R. When I’m talking about a point of reference, see I say the point of reference, our reference for time, is the sun. Is our point of reference. If we want to know what time it is, we an’t find out unless we observe the sun. Our rotation around the sun occurs in a certain cycle. We rotate on our axis in front of the sun and we get the day and night. And then we can divide that into 10 or 12 or 24 – or we can have 40 or 50 units instead of 24 hours. But we divide it up for convenience.
24:38
And then the sun changes and it goes through a cycle and we can clock that, and we can call these things years if we want to. And now we go further and even measure stuff as light-years. So what if we step beyond here. Suppose the sun disappears – we lose our point of reference. Or if the black holes in space open up and suck all these galaxies down into a black holes [?] in space, then what happens? They used to say in Zen, “Where will you be when the world goes up in smoke?” Where will you be when everything is absorbed into the black holes in space?
25:23
And I want to bring this up again on another point on the black holes in space. One of the things that I got into very deeply was – you know, I read every book I could get my hands on. Two of the most amazing books were put out by a woman called Blavatsky, and they were The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled. And these are tomes – big books full of solid information. You can’t believe [prove] – you say, “She’s probably right here,” but you can’t disprove it.I remember reading this, and she had the Indian terms, so I think possibly she might have copied this from some Indian documents, or old manuscripts.
26:09
She talked of – they had divided time – they had a different way of figuring time. I don’t know what their basis was, but they talk about centuries, they talked about yugas. Two hundred thousand years or something like that. And they measured time with the yugas, and there would be an evolution change after so many of these yugas. And I’d think, “So what? She can come up with, she can say anything and I can’t disprove it. So maybe she knows, maybe she don’t.” But she says there’s a thing called pralaya. And the pralaya was the inbreathing and outbreathing of the universe, or something beyond the universe. In which all the – God or whatever sucked all these planets back into this place. She didn’t call it the black hole. Then thousands of these yugas later they all blew out someplace else, or the same place, God knows what it is.
27:14
And this is preposterous, you think. I said, “What’s she talking about? Where is she getting this stuff?” The woman, I don’t know, she lived in the eighteen hundreds. I don’t know when she died. Her books are still around. But recently the astronomers came up with the knowledge that there is a thing called a black hole in space, and that’s exactly what it’s doing; it’s sucking everything into it, whole solar systems.
27:45
Q. I’ve heard that they’ve determined that the universe is expanding – they found out it’s going the other way – and [break in tape]
27:57
Augie. Mr Rose, .in view of your experience, if that had been your question, that the information of why was there an illusion would have been available at that point?
R. Why what?
Augie. During your experience, do you think that if the question that had been bothering you was why God had created the universe, do you think that information would have been available to you then?
R. What information?
Augie. Why. He just asked you, “Why is there an illusion?” I was wondering, if you had been curious, in your experience, as to why there was an illusion – if you think that knowledge would have been available to you.
28:36
R. Well, I think there’s a – our means of looking at things may cause part of the illusion. But the other thing is that the – there’s stuff going on, there’s stuff moving according to laws we don’t understand, and that would cause illusions as well.
Augie. Maybe our curiosity is illusory.
R. Well, I think that this – we take it from the other point of reference. Let’s say that we’re not going to look at it from the material side; we almost have to go over and look at it from the mental side. That as far as physical things, it’s composed of atoms, molecules, these planets and all this stuff. But that has to be – that’s destroyed or changed. Why? – see? But one thing that happens is – the dimension – when you die the universe disappears. We don’t know. We don’t necessarily enter into someplace where we can get a telescope and go further out and take pictures, you know, get data. This entire thing disappears.
30:03
Q. [inaudible – another stage?]
R. Well, there’s another, it’s a mental thing. The next dimension is a mind-dimension. It isn’t a physical dimension. When you die and, you enter the mind dimension – of course I think there’s some people that [who] long so hard for this dimension – or they get over and they’re frightened by the fact that all their toys are going up in smoke, or disappearing, and, you know, because they’re not real – they cling to get back into this. They hope to get back into the picture, and perhaps they’re let back in.
This is where the theory or reincarnation comes in. I don’t think people, if they have an experience like I had, want to get back in. But people that don’t have that, they don’t know anything except, you know, the things they like. Like ice cream: “You mean there’s not going to be any more ice cream? Oh, hey, let’s get back on earth, that’s where they sell it.” Or – beautiful mates or the ability to fly in an illusory airplane around an illusory earth. And you know what the average person’s going to say, “You’re nuts – that’s real.” What they say. Like if you think it’s an illusion we’ll light a firecracker and hrow it at you.
Augie. Give you aAn illusory punch in your illusory nose.
R. Right.
Q. But as far as you know, there is no answer as t where we came from? ...
[end of tape 6]
Tape 6 stops to 31:38
Footnotes
Url: place url here For access, send email to editors@direct-mind.org
Need reference.
E.g., Hui Neng. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huineng
John 9:3: Jesus answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chilton_Pearce
I.e., if the essence is not known, or attempted to be defined, what is their basis for morality?
Profound Writings, East and West.
Rose erroneously attributes the quote to Chuang Tzu, corrected here. Chuang Tzu, 4th century BC, is considered a Taoist whose views were akin the later Zen (Ch’an) schools in China. Rose was reading notes from an unidentified text andit’s not known how the error occurred. OLD-DELETE : The Tao of Physics, in which the four principles of Zen appear immediately after a quote by Chuang Tzu. http://www.taoism.net/sanctuary/books/taophysics/zen.htm
This statement plus the ability to transmit indicate the closeness of Rose’s method to Zen, although some followers of conventional Zen have disputed this.
A possible reference point in dating this talk. Also there may be a tape of the radio interview somewhere.
Need reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_Obsession
Tsoknyi Rinpoche: “The word merit itself in the context of Dharma is difficult for westerners to comprehend because in the west, merit seems to imply self-interest rather than preparation for benefiting other beings.” http://www.tsoknyirinpoche.org/2579/accumulation-of-merit-preparing-the-heart-for-bodhicitta/
"God’s not going to let you cheat and have good luck too." - Rod the Hop
So this would be the pump salesman in Steubenville; story told elsewhere. (from memory, can’t find story)
Rose continued his search into Spiritualism even after his experience in 1947. The White Lilly Chapel materialization happened on Labor Day, Sept. 1, 1958, according to correspondence. This apparently marked the end of this endeavor, as the results were disappointing, the entities not having valid information. See catalog of Rose’s papers: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/rr-letters/rose-papers-catalogue.htm
In Ohio then; see 1992-0326-Truth-Lies-Ultimate-Reality-Pitt.
The timeline here returns to college and post-college years, 1938-39 and thereafter.
See employee ID card: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/images/richard-rose-jpfrieze-id-card-1942.jpg
Details in Richard Rose timeline: http://www.richardroseteachings.com/about.html
Prohibition activist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation
Fate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Boudreau
A few are here: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/rr-letters/rose-papers-catalogue.htm
Rose developed this questioning into a group practice he called confrontation, as he details in the Monitor Papers. 24 page pdf: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/Richard-Rose-Monitor-Papers.pdf
Rose mentioned the experience briefly in a letter to Pulyan dated [ ] but it was not well received so he dropped it.
Rose mentions elsewhere he had a personal dislike of Pulyan and didn’t care to be around him.
New Vrindaban.
See Henry Doktorski’s book on the history between Rose and the local Krishna leaders.
Howard Wheeler. The other was Keith Ham. [check]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_flush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
See chart: http://albigen.com/uarelove/sahaja.aspx
See chart: http://albigen.com/uarelove/sahaja.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross
Relatively speaking.
Rose’s friend Robert Martin.
Rose met Sokei-an prior to his death in 1945 but did not consider him a valid teacher. See 1978-0511-Relative-and-Absolute-OSU-Columbus.
Rose “ran into” him as he continued his search to understand his own experience. See Rose correspondence with Pulyan and unpublished article by Alan Fitzpatrick.
From Psychology of the Observer: “To get back to the Manifested Mind, we find that it is the prop-room of the creation, a creation which in relation to the Unmanifested Mind from which it emanates is less than real, and is described as being illusory.”
Timeline of letters by Rose to Robert Martin: 1) May 11, 1947: “I have not seen Jeanne for nearly a week...” He mentions that meantime he has been working 12 hour shifts t the restaurant. This was followed by calm, rational planning about starting a group with Martin, also mentioning the possibility of going to sea. 2) May 15, 1947 (postcard): “Am in trouble. Will arrive Cleveland 8:00 P.M. the 19th. Meet me at Greyhound station.” Assuming the dates are accurate, this leaves a maximum of five days (11th through 15th) to be split between the experience, the trauma afterwards, and the decision to leave Seattle. Assuming a bus trip of three days (2,400 miles, but prior to construction of Interstate 90) this leaves a couple extra days to allocate to Seattle. Regardless, it was trauma either in Seattle or on the bus. (It probably seemed like a lifetime.)
Not according to previous footnote.
Leon Paul Wood (1917-1965). See: http://selfdefinition.org/christian/paul-wood-story.htm
Search on the name Leon Wood in Robert Martin’s book about Rose: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/Bob-Martin-Peace-to-the-Wanderer[Richard-Rose].pdf
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo Rose seems to think Wood might have been involved in the nuclear bombing, but this wouldn’t fit the timeline. Wood’ widow may still be living if anyone wants to do deeper research into Wood.
See prior footnote.
Rose met Wood twice at R. Martin’s house in 1963. Wood died in 1965. [page 96 in Martin’s book]
Unknown here because of the colloquial use of language whether Rose is speaking in the present or past tense.
See employee ID card: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/images/richard-rose-jpfrieze-id-card-1942.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_Unveiled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga
Dissolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pralaya
Need reference: “Everything is created by the mind; the nature of the mind is emptiness; emptiness is never manifested.” Or get something from Nagarjuna.
