1976-Spirit-of-Zen-Pittsburgh
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| Title | 1976-Spirit-of-Zen-Pittsburgh |
| Recorded date | 1976 unknown date |
| Location | Pittsburgh |
| Number of tapes | 1 x 90 |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | Nevins |
| No. of MP3 files | 2 files, 48 min; 43 min. |
| Total time | p1 min. |
| 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? | Searchwithin.Org http://www.searchwithin.org/download/pittsburgh_1976.pdf |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | Sound volume low, white noise, probably need headset |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1976-Spirit-of-Zen-Pittsburgh |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150205112732 |
Richard Rose Lecture in Pittsburgh
1976
Notes
Whose transcription? Seems like Jake. Possibly Mike Fitz.
Need to compare with the recording.
Files are from Shawn Nevins collection
Bart Marshall may have a version. My note says: “Edith Cavell story in bm version is not on side 1 or side 2.” and “Check Fragment II, may be a duplicate.
Probably 1976-1021-Student-Union-Pitt
A) Page 26 says: “I go to Columbus tomorrow” – possible key for date.
So it has to be this: 1976-1021-Student-Union-Pitt-missing-tape Mentioned in PZ Newsletter Nov. 1976. 1976-1022-Wesley-Foundation-Columbus-missing-tape Mentioned in PZ Newsletter Sept. & Oct. 1976.
Checking the PZ talks, this is the only day Columbus comes after Pittsburgh.
B) Page 3 he says this – fits in with first lecture of the school year being in October: “, but I did intend to go through some brief outline of my life's experiences because I think that once a year from the first lecture that I give at any given university, I try to introduce myself a little bit and I'm generally faced with a new crop of students or a new group of people.”
C) Page 14: I give a lecture occasionally -- it's called the Lecture of Questions. I gave this over at Mt. Lebanon a couple of weeks ago.
File 0 – Introduction
Mike Whitely: I'd like to say good evening and welcome you to this Pyramid Zen lecture. Our lecturer tonight will be Richard Rose, author of The Albigen Papers, founder of the Albigen System...
I'd like to say that we have a man with us tonight that's a rarity in the field of religious and philosophical and transcendental evaluations. Richard Rose, I think, has acquired this unique position, not through the granting of some title, or not through degrees or not from libraries, but as a direct result of years of personal research and evaluation. During this time he took a look at a tremendous number of systems and methods and teachers, and explored quite a few different philosophies and religions all in the hope of finding some kernel of truth or some path that might lead to some kernel of truth. From his teens, Mr. Rose has always had a profound interest in finding Truth. This lead to seeking, looking for different systems and methods, and during the search Mr. Rose encountered and investigated, evaluated Christian theology, various Yogic systems, different cults and movements, and just generally [did a] tremendous amount of philosophic and psychological evaluation.
His personal search culminated at age 32 when his conviction and persistence brought him to an experience that he considered direct seeing into man's ultimate nature. As a result of his personal unpleasant experiences, and encounters with the many insincere people and groups that he encountered along his search, Mr. Rose has tried to distill the results of his years of evaluations into the Albigen System -- a system for helping people to accelerate their own search and possibly save them wasted years that they would spend on fruitless endeavors. So that truly sincere people and seekers of all kinds could have a chance to accelerate their own progress on whatever spiritual p they would choose. With that I would like to present a man to you that is a teacher, a scientist, an author, a man with a direct perception of many of life's more meaningful questions and on many of life's ultimate answers -- Mr. Richard Rose.
File 1
Total time: 43:44
sn-00:00
Mr. R. I think Mike said it all, so I'll go right to the questions. That's what I was going to say. Actually, I didn't know what introduction I'd have, but I did intend to go through some brief outline of my life's experiences because I think that once a year from the first lecture that I give at any given university, I try to introduce myself a little bit and I'm generally faced with a new crop of students or a new group of people. So for those who are older students, you'll have to hear it again, probably. We have a title or name called the Pyramid Zen Society and we had that name before Flanagan wrote his book on pyramid power ... we had a lot of people who would come in and think we were into the business of mixing Zen and pyramid power. And, well, in a way we are, but it's a different kind of pyramid. It's a different kind of Zen, too. When I first started talking about Zen, the current knowledge on Zen was contained mostly by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki. The other books were not available unless you were a student who was translating sutras for yourself or something of that sort.
But I paid no attention to Suzuki and less to Watts because I sensed that Watts was somewhat off the beam although he was in close communication with a man I had met years ago in California, that was Sokei-an. But it was amazing that I would get a different impression than Watts would get about Zen, and Watts was supposed to have spent some time in Japan, in some of the monasteries there. But I have received a lot of questions from the people at the lectures about the reason we chose the word "pyramid" and the reason we weren't affiliated with one of the so-called, and I used that word emphatically and purposely, so-called traditional Zen. There is no traditional Zen.
Since that time, of course, I've picked up a few books that I consider very valuable if you're interested in Zen. A person shouldn't be interested in the intellectual part of Zen. Zen is a way of thinking. It's not a wisdom that you can gather from reading books. But regardless, you can't talk without using words and you have to have a language because whenever you talk on a given subject a language develops and definitions result even down to the point of someone trying to define enlightenment.
And the best definition of enlightenment that I have encountered was not in any Zen writing at all, but in a book by Ramana Maharshi, who was a Hindu, an Indian mystic and a holy man. Paul Brunton brought him to the American public in his books. But the thing is that we're after a Real state of mind, and I use capital "R" because there's a small "r" and a capital "R" in philosophic matters. In other words there's the final or ultimate Reality and there's the temporary reality in all things. For instance, two plus two equals four is relative reality, and the final ultimate existence of the soul or the universe is capital "R" Reality.
So there's a bit of a difference there and we have to incorporate these things into our language and understand them when a person is talking along a given line saying this is real or this is reality and he'll agree to be challenged. And the reason he's reading challenge is because he seems to be inconsistent, that small "r" reality is not reality to a student of Zen or a person who understands Zen. But regardless, there are some books in Zen that are interesting; that will give you a different idea than what you pick up from reading beatnik Zen or Kapleau Zen. There are some, or there was a Suzuki Roshi group on the West Coast at Tassajara -- they were tea-drinking Zen.
There's a difference between formality, ritual and dogma, and real thinking. In other words, the reason I got into Zen was because I was pretty much disgusted with the ritual and dogma within the parent church -- the church I grew up in. I saw that this couldn't be the truth -- that the amount of sequins on a priest's robe didn't make him holier in the long run. I revolted against the idea that merely by putting on certain vestments, or having titles, or being given an accolade after so many years in college would not make a man a possessor of knowledge.
And you find out on all levels of knowledge, you'll find people that are engineers that got through on a football degree, perhaps, and they know little of engineering when they get through. And another fellow never goes to school, and I've known some of these personally. For instance, I worked on the atomic submarine with engineers who never graduated from college, and they were the top in the country. They hired a man there who was an expert, who was not a college graduate, and they put him in charge because he had an imagination.
He was one of the people inclined to create now in one of these various think tanks around the country. There are some people that are capable of using imagination and intuition in the development of inventions, whereas an engineer is so tied up, his head is so full of numbers, it's like a computer. Nothing will come out except what's fed into him. Whereas a person with a good intuition may come out with an invention, with very little symbolic knowledge.
So it goes back again to wherever I went I found that pomposity was no gauge for capacity. Just because a person could act like a bishop and be called a bishop, didn't mean that that man had any particular knowledge. And we find this now going into Zen. Zen is being corrupted by people with titles, the (inaudible word) as they call it. And Frank brought this to my attention a couple of days ago. I ordered this book myself, by Garma Chang, and some of the ideas that I had been functioning along for years, I found expressed in this book.
This man had translated, supposedly, some of the old history of the Zen teachers. Another book was, I think, Huang Po. We hear a story, for instance, of a Zen teacher who was approached by someone and they were talking about enlightenment in China, and he said there is no Zen in China. Now this was 600 years ago, perhaps. And he said what do you mean? You've go so many monasteries and each hold maybe 500 people, and how can you say there is no Zen with all these people. And he said there is no Zen because there is no transmission. He said, there's not a Zen master in China that can transmit. But this doesn't seem to deter the assembly line production that goes on in this country in certain monasteries, where they'll take you in for a thousand bucks and rubber stamp you.
So these are the things that I've been trying to avoid and trying to advise people against ever since I've been a boy myself. I believe that there is no price on truth. Now that doesn't mean that you actually don't contribute. If you go to church, naturally you have to pay the mortgage on the church, if you want to go to that church. But as far a fattening people up, or people running rackets on whether it's religion or esoteric philosophy, this is one of the yardsticks that you have to set for yourself, if you want to get anywhere. If you want to kid yourself, okay. If you think people say, well I want to buy a pair of shoes; I'm going to pay $40 for a pair of shoes because I found out I get quality for money extended. And this may be true, again, on the relative plane, but this has nothing to do with the esoteric. You pay forty dollars for spiritual advice and nine chances out of ten you're getting nothing. Whereas if you talk to the right person, you may get it for nothing and there's no restriction put on you.
There's only one restriction put on anything that's given spiritually, and that is that you pass it on. That's the only restriction, the only payment a person should have to pay, is that you pass it on. And of course try to pass it on to the right fellow. Just don't go out and hand it to someone that doesn't know what you're talking about.
But getting back to this, this was the reason that I didn't go into Zen directly. And Mike was talking about the experience that I had when I was 32 years of age. This wasn't the result of being in a Zen monastery or being with a Zen teacher even. It was the result of an intensive personal pursuit. And I started off, as I said, when I was quite young.
Well, first of all I studied to be a priest and I started off when I was in my early teens and I became dissatisfied, to put it mildly, and decided to look elsewhere. And around 19 or 20 years of age I was into spiritualism, and I thought, well I want to find the answers, these people are evidently basing the ... in other words, the traditional or conventional Christian churches are based on faith. Now sometimes that's the faith of immanence or the faith of fundamentalism. It always goes back to faith -- believe somebody else, don't look to yourself. And yet the Bible quotes Christ as saying seek and ye shall find, and the Bible also quotes Christ as saying, listen to me, believe on me and you'll be saved. There's a paradox there. There's a paradox, and I think the difficulty lies possibly in not hearing the man talk personally. Because both of these things are true. I can see where they're true where a person would say, hey, I've got the angle; I've found something. Let me tell it to you. And this is when he's saying: believe what I'm telling you. At the same time he's saying go look for yourself, go search things out for yourself.
In other words, I can't see the need for blind adherence to anyone, so I got too much of that and I looked into spiritualism. I was fairly young at the time, and I thought, well if you want to find out what happens to you after death, pretty much of life hinges upon an understanding of death. Because life has little meaning unless you take that into consideration because statistically, it's simple arithmetic, you're going to live for a period of time and you're going to be dead for a period of time which makes the first period of time infinitesimally small. So if you value yourself in existence in relation to, let's say, time itself, infinite time, it pays to have a look at this. It's possible that you're going to live beyond that infinitesimal life, so consequently I advise it's better to do some digging than to just believe what the first person you run into tells you, or the preacher that advised your parents. And of course, I got into the seminary because this was a parental religion.
Well, I found that in my pursuit of trying to talk to dead people, to find out what they had to say, I found out they didn't have much to say. And I did go all the way. I chased back and forth across the country until I found a genuine materializing medium, and I talked to a genuine entity or two -- eighteen of them in fact, on this one evening. And there was not one bit of knowledge about what happens to anybody after they die. It was amazing, talking to creatures that come out and identify themselves with relatives of people in the room, and they are recognized by those people. Yet when the questions were put to them -- Where are you? How are you doing? -- you had an inane answer. And if you suggested something, they agreed with you. So I went on from there. I thought I'm not going to spend my life fooling with these phantoms that don't seem to know too much.
So I went on from there and I got into things like yoga, and everything I got into I found a lot of holes in it. In other words, you're treading on uncertain grounds. It's almost like a swampland. You're liable to get into quicksand. There's all sorts of racketeers. Some people are in it for money, and they build up quite a ... you can see the jet planes have all landed in India and are safe with their load -- maharishis and maharajas and Lord knows what. And then there are other people who are in it for private purposes, selfish little personal purposes, and I encountered those, too.
So it was rather discouraging, but I came to the conclusion that I had to find ... there were so many cults and so many movements, so many authorities and so many extensive studies that you can get into that take your lifetime. For instance, they claim you can find the truth by studying the kabbalah. Well, I bought the book on the kabbalah, but I took a look at the book and I realized that I could spend as many years as I could dissecting the atom, finding the nature of matter, and the nature of reality, so I kind of set the kabbalah aside. And I came to the conclusion that there had to be a direct method -- that there was a direct method -- and that some people had reached it. So we go back to our libraries and we pick up these people that claimed they have reached it, and we don't know, but we have to have an intuition to read these books. And again we're beginning to get into the complexities of what I call a spiritual search.
That you can't go down to the beer joint six days a week, get drunk, and then wind up in the whore house on Saturday night, and then go to church on Sunday and expect that you're going to find the truth just by the simple fact that you apply so much time to a given set of books, or five minutes of meditation, or twenty minutes of meditation. This is all garbage. It's nonsense. The thing is that you have to develop tools to work with because your science now is no longer in the areas where you use a slide rule. No longer can you apply just cold logic, and yet it has to be sensible, you have to have common sense.
So you have to develop what is known as intuition. And incidentally, in many of the books on Zen there is very little talk of intuition, but you will find it. I think that Garma Chang mentions this, and the sacredness of doubt. The thing that besets us in the Christian world is the fact that people are terrorized by sins and guilt. And they're always directed to have faith. It's absolutely necessary never to falter. It is -- again, a paradox. It is necessary to have faith, and never to falter in the faith in yourself. In the faith that possibly someplace, sometime, there would be enough energy applied -- being your total priority energy -- that you can find something.
[Long pause]
So we get back to this business of doubting and the business of yardsticks. In other words, you have to examine everything. It's not fair to just say, well ... some people come out with the reaction that everything is venal and everything is garbage, so what's the use. That no one's going to find it, this is one of the clichés. This is of course a rationalization from fatigue or laziness. We just say, well I'm going where everyone else is going, and everyone's being taken care of because God has got that planned in his package and why should I worry about it. This may well be true, but before you go any further you have to stop and examine what you've just said and realize that the very statement, "God," is a postulation. That unless you find him, you're just taking again some word that came down and has changed through the ages from possibly a Hebrew word "Jod" (which isn't too flattering to the quality of God), and has been changed and deified, so to speak, and a lot of importance placed on it without the people who use it ever examining what they were talking about. Or encouraging the idea in themselves possibly to find that God -- find out what the intelligence is that's running the universe.
So, we go back again to the yardsticks. Well, how can we gauge a cult or a group? Yet, we have to gauge them, there's thousands of them. They're like confetti. You can pick up any of them and spend ten years of your life in a given movement. And I decided from the beginning -- of course, some of this is advised in the old esoteric books. You get this advice if you read enough of them -- that there is no price on truth. This is the first yardstick. When people charge -- that is when I say charge, make it as a business -- then nine chances out of ten they're phony. Or you can dispense with them; you can go somewhere else.
I remember when I was digging around, we were limited of course in the number of cults when I was twenty years old in comparison to what exists today in this country. It was mostly limited to Theosophical groups and Rosicrucians and a guy name Dingle appeared on the horizon with some sort of lesson in the Subud and outside of that there wasn't too much unless you wanted to go clear to India to find a group. And I went out on the West Coast and I looked into the Rosicrucians. They have a group in San Jose called AMORC that's advertised in all the cult magazines, and they charge. They're interested in getting so much a week out of you for a pamphlet -- they call it a mandamus.
I went on down to Oceanside, California and there was a group down there that didn't charge. I found their information was lying on a table. You could pick up a book, and buy the book. Cosmo Conception was one of the books -- very informative thing, about what they were doing at least. I don't say it contained the whole truth, but it was just for the price of the book. You didn't have to pledge yourself for the rest of your life to the weekly payment.
And I found, of course, that accidentally, too, there was another group of Rosicrucians and that was in Pennsylvania, around Quakertown. Swineburn Clymer was the operator of this group. His was strictly big money, so I didn't get past the inquiry stage with that because as soon as I saw the big money involved, and the appeal to a certain higher financial bracket, I stayed clear of them. But it was one of the exclusive clubs that you could join. So consequently, you have to set these [aside]. I couldn't go down to these places and save money for a year to join Clymer's outfit just to be admitted in the door and find they had no more knowledge than the man on the street. And almost everything you get into has this.
Now there's another yardstick, and that is wherever there's excessive ritual and dogma, or like where you see people getting titles where this fellow is a deacon and this guy is a sub deacon, and this guy is a sergeant or whatever, or you find them wearing a particular type of robe. In other words this is to attract the attention of the public and convince the public that they are unusual people. They could be crummy as anyone. In the book I've written, I have a little paragraph stating that if we could take the population, especially the professional men, the people we look upon with respect such as judges, lawyers, policemen, psychiatrists, priests, and take all their clothes off and mix them up in a room together, you might mistake the judges for the pickpockets, or an alcoholic. Because most of them ... you can't hide that whether you have your clothes on or off. But most of the legal profession are ... I find they do a lot for the beer business.
So this business of putting on a certain robe or a wig and a cloak, or a general puts on a uniform and you have to ... and he's no longer Joe Schmoe, he has to be saluted because of this uniform. And we carry this like children playing games in the backyard. We carry this to extremes of giving recognition or importance to people just by virtue of the clothes they wear. Well, we have to be careful of this, especially in spiritual groups. That this pope or bishop or swami, whatever you want to call him -- believe me, I know a couple of swamis that are just three inches out of the penitentiary on morals charges. And that word swami doesn't do a thing for them except convince some kids, perhaps, that they have something.
So when we start to use these yardsticks we narrow down rather rapidly, and this of course is what I call the path of retreating rather than approaching truth. In other words, there's absolutely no way to find God. There's absolutely no way to find capital "T" Truth. The only way that you can find them is by avoiding the opposite. How do you know what God is unless you know where God is? Well, we do know what the opposite of truth is so we don't pursue God. We start off with a fallacy; we start off with a postulation when you say I'm going to find God, because it's indefinable. And you can take all the definitions, just to go through the definitions of the different movements, and you'll find out that their definitions are so conflicting that it would be an impossible task to pursue any of the definitions and give it justice in view of the other definitions. But you can pursue an avoidance of error. You can pursue an avoidance of untruth. You can be truthful. And in being truthful you automatically approach. Of course, when you first start to be truthful you're going according to relative truth standards. In other words, the truth is in, say, not lying to your neighbor. And above all not lying to your friends and your family. I think if we have to lie to the policeman on the corner, that's all right, because our social structure is set up such that he demands that we lie. But I mean, outside of saving your life, you try to be truthful and in doing so you develop a machine.
Your computer becomes more or less geared for sorting. You automatically sift and reject, and sift and reject, until someday you find something that you think will work for you -- that seems more sensible than all the rest, and then you latch onto that and give it all you've got. And you find it inadequate. Don't get discouraged. You can latch onto something else that is more truthful, or less ridiculous, and you give it all you've got. And in this manner, man becomes the truth. Man never learns the truth, he becomes it. Now, I could talk a bit longer about ... I don't know, what time is it?
I'll tell you what I'd like to do this evening, as I said I can stand here and tell you things I've gone through; the fact that I eventually did have a realization when I was around 32 years of age. After that time, I approached some Zen teachers because I had no language to talk about it. Zen is a language and it's a mind state, and it's a method of arriving at real knowledge. I didn't encounter this till later, but I encountered it in my frustrations of trying to communicate to someone else something that has no words.
When you have an experience of this sort, there are no words. For instance, in the book I've written, in my description approaching it, I won't say it describes it, but I try to approach the description of it by using the words "everythingness" and "nothingness." So if you can understand what everythingness is at the same time being nothingness, then you understand what a final state of mind is. So that's rather absurd, but still we try to find words. And even the books of Zen talk about the condition. They talk about a condition of no-mind and Watts picks up this statement and says what we're striving for is a condition of no mind, so why strive. There's nothing to strive for. So quit striving. And if you quit striving, you never find anything. And if you continue to strive you find everything and nothing.
Now of course, Watts, I don't think he wanted to buy that, because that seemed to be ... it was a paradox, you might say, a real paradox he would rather not accept, or he didn't understand. So we have groups of people today that are into Zen who are either doing some nonsense koan day after day, or they're imitating the symptoms. And this is one of the diseases in spirituality -- is to first of all postulate in your head that spirituality is a certain thing and then imitate the symptoms. For instance, we like to believe that a spiritual man is a man who goes around with his eyeballs up in the air and his hands folded, but I read in a macrobiotic book that people who have their eyeballs up in the air are sanpaku. So you never know who to trust there.
The truth of the matter is that there are no symptoms, there is no way that you can tell a spiritual man. He isn't a person that goes out and preaches love and brotherhood. And they say if you don't preach brotherhood you're not spiritual. How do they know? How do they know? How do these people who know nothing define spirituality? Spirituality defines everything, perhaps, if you know the final answer. And in it, it finds a place for all of humanity, but not preconceptions of brotherhood -- not preconceptions of equality or that sort of thing, or preconceptions of holiness or sweetness or what's nice.
You find out that nothing is nice -- in the final analysis -- nothing is nice, everything is nice. Everything is nice. The killer, the murderer, is just as sweet as the two-year-old baby. And we don't like to hear that, see? But yet they'll tell you God made everything. These people who know nothing about God will tell you God made everything. But when you say, hey, who made that murderer? That's part of the picture; that's part of the drama. We're criticizing, we're sitting in the audience criticizing the playwright. And we know nothing of the playwright's intentions, see?
So we have to start and face simple, very simple facts, that you know nothing. Don't start to postulate what spirituality is ahead of time. So we get back to this. I'll give you a little definition on Zen, and you can trace it back to Bodhidharma, and you can apply this to some of these movements that have sprung up lately and see how they weigh. And the one is that there has to be a special transmission outside the scriptures. In other words, Zen may have a lot of sutras and stories and history which by this statement means nothing, or very little. It may form a language, but the first thing is that this is the definition, the requirements, the precepts of Zen -- that is has a special transmission outside of the scriptures. There's no point in having a group, there's no point in having a school, if the teacher cannot transmit. And this is what the master was talking about in Huang Po's book when he said that no one in China can transmit, so consequently there is no Zen in China. Now, the second thing is that there's an avoidance of words and letters. Meaning that titles, words, pomposity, all this stuff is foolishness and that you can't define, and take words, you're trying to define things with words and you're missing the point. And the third one is going directly into the soul, into the mind of man. Directly going into yourself. And of course, the fourth one is the penetration of the self and arriving at Buddha.
Buddhahood is a word, again, that has to be defined with caution because they're not talking about Gautama Buddha, they're talking about a state of mind. Because all through Zen literature you'll find the word put out -- you have to learn to kill the Buddha. And, in other words, you kill the idea of a Buddha God, or a personal God, which you might call Buddha, and instead become a Buddha in yourself, or become complete and have the same knowledge as Buddha had with the same enlightenment he had, but you have to do this by killing your reverence for the idea of Buddha.
I started to say a minute ago that it's good to talk, and maybe half this stuff I've said some of the students of Zen already know. But what I like to do at these talks is to involve the group, the audience, as much as possible, in order to have a dialogue, if you want to call it that. In other words, we can get directly to people's evaluations, their heads, if you want to call it that, by virtue of question and answer. The only restriction I put on the question and answer thing is that we don't develop an argument. In other words, I don't pretend to be able to convince everyone here. So I find that if a person wants to find out, and the way I went about finding out stuff when I was younger, sometimes I hung around long enough with a fellow until I found his language and he was rather cryptic at first.
But it's a matter of listening to see if a fellow's crazy or deliberately lying or has some game or is kidding himself, and that's the most you can do. If a person is not sincere, then the thing to do is walk away from the person. It doesn't do any good to argue. So I would appreciate any sincere inquiry, but not loaded questions. You know, occasionally, I have people in a lecture who will parry with a real loaded question to show me how clever they are -- and, you know, I am not interested in their publicity campaign. So if there is anything that you'd care to know in this line about details of digging along these lines, why you feel free to ask questions, and from there we can come to your particular corner of inquiry and maybe enlarge upon it. This would do more good than me talking in general.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, yes, there's loopholes in Zen, too, a lot of what I consider chicanery. But Yoga has several facets. Everything is not the same type of Yoga. There's Hatha yoga and Raja yoga, and there's three or four other categories. I believe that through listening or learning with Raja yoga experts, you can reach enlightenment. In other words, this is the advice put out by Ramana Maharshi and I think it's very valid -- that you can go to the same thing with Raja yoga. Of course, Hatha yoga is just health. That's just like going down to the gymnasium or something.
But as far as the phonies, I don't know. In other words, I think that being cheated is proportional to the amount of stature claimed by the person who cheats you, if they're phony Yoga teachers. For instance, if a person's taking your money for teaching yogi exercises, just Hatha yoga exercises, it's the same as charging for a card in the YMCA -- it's exercise. There's no real theft going on. But if he claims to be able to save your soul, then you're getting into valuable property if he doesn't deliver. Especially if he charges money.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. You don't always experience. A lot of the things people think they experience, they don't experience. The whole thing of Zen, I would say, is the learning to experience -- to really experience. So many of the things that we consider experiencing ... I give a lecture occasionally -- it's called the Lecture of Questions. I gave this over at Mt. Lebanon a couple of weeks ago. And a lot of the questions I throw out are: are you the person that drinks? are you the person that enjoys? or are you enjoyed? Lots of times we suppose our greatest pleasures, our greatest experiences, are not ours. It's something else taking a piece of you.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. In the final it is ... in the final. If you can get to the point where you know that is happening, you don't have too much to worry about.
Q. [Inaudible]
You have never read the Three Books of the Absolute, have you? And it says in there, are you the dreamer in the dream or the dreamer of the dream -- are you dreaming both? This is the whole thing.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. I have no idea. I have no idea. [laughter] I'll tell you one thing about this: some people do. I've talked to people that ... my father used to think he lived before, especially when he was drunk [Laughter]. He had better times back there. But I think it can be a rationalization and procrastination and I think so many of the [missing section] ... what was going on, what they were thinking when they were lying in their mother's womb, much less two years before that.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Right. Well, not only that, but I'll give you an example. When Bridey Murphy came out -- I don't know how many of you are acquainted with the book Bridey Murphy -- but it was a book by ... somebody had hypnotized, I think the fellow was out in the west someplace name Bernstein. He had hypnotized a girl or housewife and taken her back to a previous incarnation where supposedly she was a girl in Ireland by the name of Bridey Murphy. And they went on taking notes for quite a while, and Bernstein did until he got enough to write a book.
And none of this was ever corroborated. In fact, some people in, let's say the established church, went to considerable expense to go back to this town in Ireland and go through all of their records to prove that at that time there was never a Bridey Murphy. That doesn't matter one way or the other. There still could have been, but the thing was that we go to experimenting -- and I personally went through a solid year with subjects -- hypnotizing people and taking them into regression as far back as I could get them. And I didn't get very far.
sn-42:57
I was corresponding with another hypnotist and he said you can put them in any place you want to. So I went and stopped by the library to get a fictitious character on the way up to Steubenville, Ohio. And I picked up this Edith Cavelle, the name Edith Cavelle. I looked in the book and got a brief history of her so I'd have something to go on. In fact, she was a spy for the British and executed by the Germans in Belgium or someplace, and she had a, supposedly had a British officer who was a lover -- something of that sort. So I hypnotized this girl who was 32 years of age and I chose this name
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which was safe. In other words, she wasn't born in 1917 when this girl was executed. So she could have been reincarnated as Edith ... she could have been Edith Cavelle reincarnated into her present life. She had time in other words, a few years perhaps between the death and the birth.
So we create a whole case, and I told her, I said you're standing in front of a firing squad and your name is Edith Cavelle, and you're about to be shot. So I popped a paper bag and "shot" her, to make it realistic, to really get the feeling of being shot by a firing squad. She described a courtyard. She described a two-wheeled wagon with hay on it, straw, that was parked nearby. She described a particular type of dress -- I asked her to describe her clothing -- she described a particular type of dress.
And all the time this was going on, a Presbyterian minister and wife were sitting watching it, and the lady was about 65 years of age, his wife was. And she kept nodding rather emphatically to everything the girl said under hypnosis -- she was nodding rather emphatically. When it was over she said, "That's the most amazing thing, Mr. Rose, I've seen because everything that girl said was true. How could she have known it was true?" I said, how do you know it's true? She said, "I lived in England at the time she was executed." She said, "I was a little girl and she became my heroine, so I got into the literature on it and I read every detail of the execution and what she was describing was the British nurses' uniform which she wore when she was shot." The cart that they had there was to put her body on, and this sort of thing.
So here we have a case which wasn't in my mind. I didn't get it out of the encyclopedia, the details of that sort weren't in the encyclopedia. But here was something that was corroborated. Now, of course, you can go and stretch it a bit and say, well, you got it out of her mind, the Presbyterian minister's wife. But the thing is ... what does exist is ... and this had been done repeatedly by hypnotists ... you can place a person in almost any time in the space-time continuum. I'm using this word loosely. That you can put their consciousness back and name them a time era, and say this is 1917, 1817, 1614, or anything, and have some time slot to put them in and they'll go into it and respond. So this negates the possibility of ever proving reincarnation by virtue of regression. So if somebody hypnotizes you, it's very possible that you are getting ideas. Now this doesn't disprove reincarnation, it disproves that method of proving it, that's all. It doesn't say that people don't reincarnate.
I do believe that there's consciousness before death and I believe that there's consciousness after death, but the thing that we're trying to bypass in spiritual work is the fact that you can't remember. And if you can't remember what happened to you before you were born, it could be ten years or ten million years. That means after you die, it could be ten years or ten million years -- or forever. And with this little bit of fact thrust in front of us all the time, I think it's there for a purpose. I think it's there to promote an irritation so people will search.
I believe that the search for your ultimate essence, if you want to call it that, or your God, I think they're synonymous, incidentally -- your ultimate essence and God are synonymous. If you do not have fleas, then you won't scratch. So there's irritation, and ignorance, the apprehension of death and everything, causes you to scratch rather than say, oh well, I'm a brave man, I'm not going to pay any attention to it. That might be a rationalization, too. It might be courage and it might be rationalization.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Zen is the arrival of a state of mind. When I say this, I'm differentiating between Buddhism and Zen. Zen is not a religion. Zen is not an order that is passed down from master to disciple. The only thing is that one person may be able to help twist another person's head a little bit, and you can call it by whatever name you wish. But it's not something that is arrived at by faithfully following the tenets of a given religion, or belonging to a certain church. It has nothing to do with Buddhism except for the fact that it originated supposedly from Buddha himself. He was the one that initiated the thing. But of course Zen has gone through a lot of changes depending on the nationality that it rests in, for six hundred years. Different minds have different ways of awakening themselves.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, you see you're talking about, if you're ... if you say your aims or your inclinations are toward hedonism, then if you were to embark upon, say, an ascetic life, this would be a life of untruth. In other words, there would be no reason for leaving the life of hedonism until you found something more desirable. It's a question of priorities. There is a time comes when people ... for instance, it's a matter of money. Everybody wants to have money. But sometimes we realize that the price for getting that money is so tremendous that it robs us of our sex, life, or our peace of mind. And a lot of people will actually throw their money away, or they'll give it away and say hey, it's too much of a headache just keeping books, so get on relief and relax. It can be that bothersome today, especially in the paper empire that we live in, you know. Records have to be kept so meticulously eventually people get fed up with it.
So this is involved in the business of making money and the same way with sex. Sex may be a wonderful thing to experience, but if it becomes ... you get tied to the point where you're in utter misery, and people have been tied in misery through sex to the point where they've shot the other party, or shot themselves, you know. So we have to set our values. And in the process of setting our values we have to do it honestly, we have to be honest with ourselves. You can't just get a book and say well this book says don't do this. No, find out why. Be honest with yourself and find out what you want. But you can't have everything. This is the whole thing. This is part of the truth, too. The priorities ... if you have too many priorities they'll start fighting each other. In other words, sometimes the head fights the stomach, or the gonads fight the stomach or the head. We're composed of different little voices you know, somatic departments, so to speak.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. I think that ... it's all ... in other words, when you look at the ... if you see it as a person see it who has lived through it, I think it's very difficult sometimes for people to see the foolishness of life when they're in the middle of it. You have to get on the other side of it sometimes to see the foolishness. It's like you're able ... you're twenty years of age or so and you can look at children four or five years of age playing a ridiculous game, and you say, ho, I'm glad I'm more mature that that, but you don't realize that somebody might be smiling at you and saying, boy he's going through the works right now. So we have this business of ... necessity of evolving as a natural being. Manifestly because of the gears attached to that being who was put here for reproduction. And whoever the engineer was that drew the master blueprint drew that in it. So we're not talking about ... I'm always bucking this in my writings and my talks -- it's the idea that some of the religions put down the natural part of man as being evil. I always said that God took the head and the devil had the hindmost. He could have what was below the belt, but god ruled what was above the belt.
So this is a fallacy. When the engineer made it, he drew the whole picture -- there wasn't two engineers working on that for separate purposes. But there came a strong tendency in theology to place a guilt upon man for the fact that he had stuff below his belt. But yet, the reason for all this in religion was caused by people putting excessive emphasis on what was below the belt. Now, it's natural for people to live and reproduce and it's just as natural for man to find out who he is. And I think the whole scheme of ... I could go into this, possibly with the amount of words that you put in a book to demonstrate to you, that both of these exist side by side.
There's a natural destiny of man, which does not have any conflict with the spiritual destiny of man. But it's like walking a tightrope -- that's the whole thing. You have to have a health priority and you have to have an ultimate spiritual priority. But the spiritual priority has to take precedence. They can coexist, and should coexist. But you have to have one priority. You can’t have two priorities. There's no such thing as two priorities. But I think it's in the ultimate Nature -- when I say Nature, capital "N" Nature -- the ultimate Nature of man ... he's here to find out who he is. He's not here to reproduce alone, but he's here to reproduce. Why? Why couldn't he just throw three billion people out on the face of the earth and let them live forever and live a hedonistic life or be instantaneously aware of the answer -- the ultimate relation of their selves to God? I don't know why. I don't know why. I know everything, but I don't know that one. [laughter]
Q. After you received your experience of enlightenment, did you then...[inaudible].
R. Well, you can only stay dead for a short period of time. All it amounts to is the experience of death -- you die. And of course, something returns. But this is the proof. It's a very common sense experience. In other words, if you want to know what happens to you after death, you die.
Q. How did your everyday life change?
R. I didn't have quite as much value on stuff as I did before. In other words, I'm pretty much the same type of person as I was before except that I didn't have any great ... in other words, I admitted I was a spectator in the audience. I wasn't trying to change the script. Before that I was always trying to change the script. I wanted to be the leading actor. But after that you're content to watch the play or get bored and leave. Sometimes they get bored and leave.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. You go everywhere and nowhere. [laughter] You go back to your source, that's all. You go back to that which you were all the time, and didn't know. This is the whole thing.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Oh, you mean after you come back. I wouldn't know how to describe it, but ... it would be better if somebody else had observed my life and watched it. But, as I said, you don't react the same way because you don't have the same set of values. In other words, where it might be very important for you to take drastic action ... previously you would've taken drastic action against the situation. There's no point in getting excited, you know. In the old days they used to bring these stage operas to West Virginia and they had the villain with the girl on the railroad tracks, or whatever, and someone in the audience would shoot the villain. He got carried away, he forgot it was a play. [laughter] This actually happened, they had to watch the balconies, especially. Yeah, he'd stand up and say, "Nobody's come to your help, I will," bang! So this is what we're doing in everyday life today. This is basically a play that we're in and we think we have to stand up and shoot the villain every once in awhile, and there's no villain to shoot -- he's an actor.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, I think you go through a lot automatically ... I think you go through a tremendous lot of trauma automatically. It's not a question of ... you know, with every five dollar bill getting a little holier until all at once you explode into a sheer ball of light and you're there. No. I think it's a matter of peeling away. Again, it's backing away; it's a reverse mechanism, instead of an approach into holiness. It's basically losing, losing and losing until there's nothing left. And then when there's nothing left, that's everything -- everything is there, you're one with everything. But as far as using that ... it's almost impossible ... that has no utility value. In other words, a lot of people say, well, when you find the answer you can come back and tell people how to live. No, no, no. Because everybody's living exactly what will help them, you know, if they're not spinning their wheels too much.
And it doesn't matter which church you're in, if you're sincere, it may be the wrong church, but if you're stupid you can't help that. You just have to labor with that stupidity until one day you say, I'm tired of that church. Let's go to another church and try something else. For instance, no longer is anything good or bad in the final analysis. This is what has always baffled the theologians because they were trying to sell something on the market to back up the political empires of the time. They wanted people to believe they were doing wrong when they shot the king, so therefore shooting the king became a sin. Well, it's not a sin. It's nothing, no matter what you do.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, of course, it's possible too that there is neither. But that doesn't mean that you can go out and shoot people. You don't because there is no reason to. There's no reason for action. And of course that's the difficult part of living -- is that in order to live, once you've had the experience, you have to almost hunt for synthetic reasons for living. This is the one drawback -- that you have to hunt for synthetic reasons. You have to become ... encourage yourself to get in the rest of the picture show.
Q. [Would you describe the technique that Zen uses with the students, like the koan?]
R. Well, the koan is basically ... these are overplayed ... the koan is for you to ask yourself, who are you? You keep asking yourself, who are you? In other words, they have Kapleau's book, I think it is, you hear in the monasteries in Japan they wake up the countryside at night and it sounds like cows bellowing shouting Mu, you know, crying Mu, and there's a thousand of these fellows in there shouting Mu and groaning because they just lost a thousand bucks and so that's all they have left is Mu! That's a koan, but it really means who am I? and what is it? what's going on? If you put that into the computer often enough, persistently enough, your computer is going to come up with an answer, even though it blows up the computer in the process. You blow your mind, so to speak, in the process. You kill your mind.
But we mustn't get into that too deep because people will be imitating symptoms. And that's what they did, that's what the idea of imitating no-mind ... that was the wrong thing. But the koan is nothing more than getting a person in the habit of examining themselves. And it's a very simple procedure. That's all you have to do is examine yourself. But of course I say it simply, but at the same time you get into it, then you find that you may spend six months or a year kidding yourself.
We were talking about that the other night. I was talking to a group of people who were living down on the Farm, and they thought they were ... because they were right in where the action was, that they should be really moving. I said you're not moving at all, because you've relaxed ... and they got into the business of imitating or let's say, acting like whatever a Zen monk is, or a meditator or a person who confronts themselves periodically.
But the real things about their nature, they weren't confronting. They were leaving that go. They were bypassing that very carefully, because that was a nerve they'd touched. You don't touch the nerves, you bypass those. But those touchy spots are the things you want to examine. A person who likes to drink booze -- you don't say, oh I'm evil to be drinking booze. No, you examine it. Somebody asked one of the Zen masters, how do you cure epileptics? He said I cure them by ... I keep asking them questions about what they're doing. Incessant questions.
Now of course when you're talking about a teacher there is such a thing as transmission, where transmission does not have anything to do with a koan. Transmission occurs when two minds are in communication. That is direct-mind experience, when two people are having a direct-mind experience. This happens to the teacher and a student at the same time, simultaneously that person will receive a realization of enlightenment, but it will not be a full enlightenment, but he will receive a realization of it that will be so complete that he'll never have any doubts in the future about what he's wasting his time at.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. No, when I went through the experience, my mind was incapable of talking to anything because I was completely crazy. I was so far that I didn't think I'd return, in fact. And again this is difficult to explain because of the simple fact that if you witness ... first you witness the totality of things. This is the equivalent of ... you see it in cosmic consciousness, the accounts of cosmic consciousness. Then you realize that this totality is nothing more than yourself.
And of course anyone can say, well we've used words and isn't it possible that that was in itself a delusion? But when you talk to them, and it's only when you talk to people, it's only when I talk to other people, that I was heartened enough to even talk about it in public, because of the simple fact that I didn't think it could be discussed. You can't express this -- that when you go over the top, there's nothing relative has any significance or any meaning at all. There's no existence. You know that if you return, you're returning to possibly relatives that are shadows. If you have parents, or brothers and sisters, these people are now no longer real, they're shadows.
And when Timothy Leary made the headlines and was advocating the beauties of LSD, I went out and got some. I thought if enlightenment can be produced by chemicals, or even if it can be repeated, if this is a little trigger that's not going to cost too much, okay, why not -- let's see what he's got in this LSD. So I took LSD, and I went through the death experience on LSD. Now I've talked to a lot of people who have taken LSD and they haven't gone through the death experience. But I actually died, knew I was dying, and didn't care.
But there was absolutely no revelation after that. There was no revelation at all. There was just like a black hole -- one posy came up out of a black hole and I tried to get past the posy, but it was all I could see. I lost my identity. I also had this lack of association when I came back. That is I was coming back from it. I was in it and had a memory of relatives ... by this time I'm married and I've got children. And I had this strong realization that my family, my children, all these, were just shadows -- that I would never be able to communicate with them. So it was, I'd say, days before I could ... I mean, that knowledge was still with me. But this is not enlightenment; this is not any spiritual revelation. This is strictly a death experience, that's all.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. No, no, as far as I was concerned, when I came back out of this, this life to me was insanity. I couldn't find any good reason for living, in fact, because I realized that meant getting involved. You either have to get involved or leave. And the temptation sometimes is to leave. I wonder how many people do. I think quite a few people do. I mean there's quite a few people who have this experience, but there's very few people who talk about it because they've given up on trying to communicate. I gave up on it for years. I was, as I said ... I was talking about a Presbyterian minister's wife up in Steubenville, and she was probably the instigator of having me go out and speak of this in public. She handed me a book, gave it to me as a present. It was Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness and I was utterly amazed that somebody had done this research to find the experiences of certain people. Some of them were historical, like Jesus Christ and Buddha and John of the Cross. He said Bacon, I think, was one of them, and Mohammed.
These people had all gone through this experience, and of course he had descriptions he'd written down. For instance, St. Paul was another one and he was struck down on the road to Emmaus. I thought that if this man has the means, and he had done a lot of, let's say, work on categorizing the people -- it said one in a million. He gave the mathematical percentages of people so that it looked like all of nature was building up to a point where a person could receive the maximum knowledge, or the maximum return. The Indian yogis call it the returning to the father, you know, in plain words. But they also use the word Samadhi -- Nirvikalpa Samadhi.
But when it happens to you, you're not going to be sure that you're going to live through it, that's one thing. Because you die, you give up hope and die. You come apart. And if you didn't come apart it wouldn't be valid. It wouldn't be a valid death experience. I had no hope of living through that day. The days ... I have no recollection of whether it was one day, two days, a week, or what. I was in Seattle and I wasn't around anyone that I knew. I was alone.
My conclusion was at the time, well first off I was having a stroke. I was pretty young to be having a stroke, but I had a pain in my head and right before it I found out this was one of the symptoms that you find with some of these experiences -- preceded by a pain in the center of the head. Of course, I thought I'm either going to have a stroke or I'm going crazy -- I can't stand this pain, and the next thing I was out a window. I was going out a window. My body was still on the bed, and I was going out a window, and a series of ... witnessing the Cascade Mountains. And of course, then I was looking at humanity. I was looking at the people -- all the people that had ever lived. And I realized then that I was getting a true view of something and, ... yes?
Q. [Inaudible]
R. You could say that. I don't know if anybody would have seen me, if you could call it that, but it is very possible if this is what was happening. In other words, there was an abrupt change from ... it seems like a passage through dimensions because when I first went out the window I could recognize people on the street below. This was in broad daylight, too. But when I got over the Cascades, then there was a sudden change and the mountains were no longer there. There was only a pyramid of humanity in which it seemed that all I had to do was think of somebody and I could pick them up. I picked up myself, incidentally. When I picked myself out, this is when I began to realize that wasn't me.
This was the first time that I realized that I was the observer of this entire picture. Then of course, this realization comes on you, then, that life is eternal and death is eternal, simultaneously. There is no life independent of death, and there is no death independent of life. That it's basically an absolute experience of an absolute being. And you have to contact the absolute being in order to have that experience. The absolute being is your self.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, I had been digging for years. I was 32. See, I had gone away to be a priest when I was 12 years old. I had been disappointed, went into different things. I mean I was really living a crackpot life. I'd get into any cult that offered anything, then I'd go whole hog. If they said quit eating meat, I'd quit eating meat. I didn't need any meat. I said I can do without it, so what -- then go on to something else. I just became a walking laboratory or sorts. If they said meditate on a given subject -- okay. Cross your eyes, look at your belly button -- okay.
I did anything that they, you know ... when it no longer appealed to my intuition, I discarded it. That's how I went through different phases of Hatha yoga. And I got into Raja yoga. And I got into this business of looking at myself. When I was 28 years of age I got disgusted. I thought I'm kidding myself on a wholesale lot. I used to think I was a pretty smart character, and here I am kidding myself about maybe some con game that originated in India, or in Asia someplace. So I said I'm going to find a girl and get married and get away from this. I was on the celibate trip, too, for seven years. So I'm going to get myself a girl and get married, or I'll get drunk and forget about it -- and Christ, my stomach couldn't stand booze ... so nature protected me from myself, see. So, amazingly enough, none of the girls would have anything to do with me. [laughter] So it saved me. [laughter] Back to the drawing board. Nothing else to do, start reading books again, tuck your toes underneath of you and meditate, see.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Sure, you have to quit functioning out there. You don't have to make it a priority. You have to know who's doing it. Suppose you're making a hundred dollars a day. That's very tempting. But who's making the hundred dollars a day? This is what counts. I never could settle ... I presume a lot of people can ... I said to a fellow, people don't know who they are, or something, and the fellow said, "I know who I am, I'm me." But that's just a clever way of passing it off because he doesn't know who he is. In other words, he's even got an erroneous attitude of himself which his wife may someday wise him up to, that he is not who he thought he was.
So we go through life learning. You often hear it from the guy who gets to be about fifty years of age: if I knew what I know now, when I was twenty, I wouldn't have made a fool out of myself at thirty. He would have planned it differently. But I do believe that there's nothing wrong with making a hundred dollars a day ... there's nothing wrong ... I think it's the proper thing to do to raise half a dozen kids, but always to keep the perspective in mind, to keep the priority in mind, and I think it'll happen, that's all.
I don't think you have to ... this is a problem that's always come up in the group, is a person will say to me, hey, I'm pretty good at this, do I have to give this up. I don't say you have to give anything up. It's the idea that you do have to be prepared to give anything up, including your life. In other words, if that determination ... now you only find in proportion to that which you are able to do. In other words, if you say, if you go down to the store and you say I got a nickel, give me a nickel's worth of candy, that's all you're going to get -- a nickel's worth of candy. But if you get a hundred dollars, you may be able to buy everything he's got.
The same thing applies in making a million dollars. If you want to be a millionaire, and you put a nickel's worth of energy into it, you'll come up with a nickel, and you put all energy into it and you may become a millionaire. This you read in Napoleon Hill, and some of these people who write on how to become a millionaire, and that sort of thing -- there was an application of total energy. The results are proportional to energy applied. That's the law of physics and it applies to economics and spiritual things as well. You throw enough mud at the ceiling; some of it will stick. If you want to cover the ceiling, keep on throwing mud, see, and eventually you'll cover the ceiling.
So we apply that simple law of physics to an abstract science, which is discovering the self. Now that doesn't mean that you're going to be 24 hours a day doing spiritual work. That means that you can put in eight hours. In fact, meditating alone becomes self destructive if it goes over a half an hour or an hour. It's just a waste of time. You just go to sleep, or you have to quit, that's all. It doesn't become productive any longer. So that means you've got 24 hours. You've got eight hours to work and nine chances out of ten, if you pick the right job, you can meditate on the job. And then when you get rich, you build a house, and you have one room that you can lock, with your books. [laughter]
Q. [Inaudible]
R. No, no, you're locking yourself away from ... away from, not with them, but away from them. That's so when you want to read a newspaper, somebody doesn't knock it out of your hand, and say, "hey, listen to me."
Q. [Inaudible]
I go to Columbus tomorrow
R. I go to Columbus tomorrow. [laughter] Until I get tired. No, no, there is no knowledge. There's no knowledge to get. I shouldn't say that to you because you have to acquire knowledge. In other words, you have to fatten your head up before you can explode it. You have to fatten it up before you chop it off, so to speak. But there's no more ... the only thing [is] that I have to spend a good bit of time trying to find words, to learn words, that will inspire a person to look for themselves. But I have no where to go.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. I am, I am, but I have a lot of synthetic attractions, you know. In other words, I pretend to be interested in things. [laughter]
Q. [Inaudible]
R. I believe that. I believe that's very good advice. I don't know where this fellow comes from, this Castenada, because there seems like in many ways he's as full of holes as Swiss cheese, but in other ways there's some good advice hidden in there. You have to be a warrior. And of course, I say there are two paths, in that respect. There's a path for the female and there's a path for the male. But the male has to be a warrior. He has to store power, because that's his nature. He does battle.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, I think it's mostly to build up strength in order to make the trip back. I don't think you come back if you don't have that power.
Q. What about women...?
R. Who said that? [laughter] They don't do anything. [laughter] But they have a better chance than men, because they're more receptive. But the only thing is, is that they don't have the ability to pursue, with dynamic consistency, any type of path.
Q. Any path?
R. They don't. No. Keep that gun in your pocket. [laughter]
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Right, right. Again, these laws are the same as in business. In other words, if you want to be a successful businessman, start having success. Success breeds success. Failure breeds despondency, and a feeling of inability, and you go down to zero. It's momentum, and of course, it's quantum energy now, as well. We're talking not only the idea of success breeding success, but it's the idea of having the knowledge that you've got the energy to back it up. In other words, you've got to bridge this gap of death and return, if you wish to return, and this takes strength.
And you're very seldom able to make the crossing complete unless you're strong enough. That's the reason I say that there's always an intelligence -- maybe it's yourself. The magicians call it the HGA – the holy guardian angel that watches over your actions, and doesn't allow you to take the trip. For instance, I have, a couple of times, started to project people into the experience, and they couldn't go through it. I realized that it was better that they didn't go through it. They may not have come back in one piece.
Q. [Inaudible]
R. Well, you can project them to a certain extent. If their mind is in direct contact with yours, they will have the experience. In other words, if your head is there and their head is with yours, they will have the experience. But they can only go so far. There's like a safety valve that's related to their capacity. In other words, you can't put on too much pressure; you'll blow fuses. This has been seen. In other words, we've had this experience with people, who actually would be, by some accident, in the proper level of mind, by meditation or previous spiritual work, or something, then all at once they would go into the experience. But they only went so far. They didn't go clear in.
In other words, there's what I call a Mountain Experience which people can experience fairly readily. That's where you go to the top of the mountain and realize that the world is an illusion -- that you're one with God, but you don't realize it completely. You realize it only as you can pick it up from somebody else's head. You don't realize yourself as God. You just realize that mankind is an illusion.
Q. Are there signs when a person is ready for an experience?
R. Well, I have never been able to pick anything up. We have had some people witness this one thing that happened down at my place and I don't know if there were any visible signs prior to that, but I didn't see any. The only signs that I witnessed was that I knew exactly that my head was in contact with theirs. And I knew as soon as that happened, that something else was going to happen. But as for symptoms, I don't think ... in fact, it was a surprise. It was a surprise to everybody because this particular party wasn't interested in what we were doing. It just happened to be that the head was in the right ... it was pointed the right way, so to speak.
But of course, you see now that we're getting into something that it's not too good to talk about too much because, again, you get into the point of imitating symptoms and ... I believe it's good to follow a certain path to get your head able ... we have exercises in the group. We have other ... in other words there are meetings like this that are open to the public, and then there's meetings in which the people practice rapport, we call it. Rapport to get a person to the point where they're able to enter another person's head and tell what the person's thinking. When you get to that point, then you're pretty ripe for transmission.
In other words, you're able to pick up something, you might say telepathically, if you want to call it that. But it's really a little bit beyond telepathy. Telepathy is more or less what I call the relative mind. In other words, there's a mind that feels and touches and experiences, sensory experiences. In other words, it is a mind that is aware.
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