1983-0610-First-Know-Thyself-Denver
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Data
| Title | 1983-0610-Denver-Colorado |
| Recorded date | June 10, 1983 |
| Location | Denver, Colorado |
| No. tapes | Two 60 minute tapes |
| Other recorders audible? | Yes |
| DVD number | 2 |
| Source | N |
| No. of MP3 files | 4 files: 31 min, 32 min; 32 min; 24 min |
| Total time | 119 minutes |
| Transcription status | Stub |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | Fair to good |
| Identifiable voices | Casari |
Transcription
File 1
31 minutes.
Note: At start, sound very muddy. Corrected at 4 min, 30 sec with microphone adjustment
One of the themes of this talk is knowing yourself. The other is of accomplishment. On every level. And I would like to start with this business of knowing yourself. People take it for granted that the projection they have of themselves is themselves. We do not know ourselves and the people who are in charge of helping us to know ourselves …
e.g., at lecture in Pittsburgh, man in audience said, “I know who I am; I’m the fellow sitting in front of you.”
If you don’t know yourself you might succeed in one area of life and fail in another; and the failure in the other could be fatal.
When I studied psychology in college it was all behaviorism, Skinner.
You begin to observe yourself, and this observation takes a definite course.
Psychology of the Observer: Observer. Umpire.
Relative thinking, black and white, morals, good and evil, etc. Benoit, conciliatory point.
Minute 15 Intuition. Have to sort innumerable factors. Instantaneous decision. Develop a sense. Efficient. If you correct a your intuition enough you can tell what a person is thinking. Start by guessing.
The next stage is you stand behind yourself and watch these patterns of thinking taking place. You realize now, that you’re no longer an individual with deliberate, purposeful direction.
States of mind.
Moods.
Ninety percent of our troubles start in our own head, not in the enemy, not in the other person.
A third step is taken, and this is the last step, and this is when the process observer, when you pretty much exhausted [the egos] you automatically become – you’ve cleared out all the cobwebs and you don’t know where else to look. You don’t know yourself totally, you just know what to expect under certain conditions. A strange combination. You become aware not of a composite being, but of an observer on one side and an awareness on the other. The investigation of the life inside the human being, thinking objectively, boiling it down just awareness. Etc.
The concentration on the two points of the awareness and the process observer brings you to a state of realization.
You get an overview of exactly who you are and what your purpose is, and all this mechanism below seems to be some fog that’s put between you so that you’ll be a good fertilizer.
A book, a silver dollar and a whiskey bottle. They claimed that whatever that child picked it did with its life. The reason I mention this is that it shows that people are aware that there’s a destiny to a man.
File 2
32 minutes.
There’s a desire, even in that baby, a desire to what his destiny is.
Napoleon Hill is an esoteric philosopher. He says you put your whole being into it.
Betweenness. It’s a formula that involves a magic in human behavior, and it’s very simple: you take yourself out of it.
… projecting all that I was going to do with this person who had absolutely no chance of any compatibility. This is a tremendous gain when this happens to you; you never do it again. Because you can’t kid yourself. The first person you lie to is yourself. If you lie to yourself and swallow it, God help you.
Discussion of relationships in the business world.
You’re dealing, not with money that you can recoup, but in a subjective value, which is your life, your essence, your wisdom.
Priorities.
Driving 30 miles up to RR’s old group in Steubenville. The purpose of the meetings of course is just to keep it on your mind. If people didn’t get together once a week they would forget.
I wrote this book from a ladder, working as a contractor. I was raising a family and I didn’t have time except when I got home in the evening. These things would all come into my head.
Contractor’s Law.
Why does an evangelist go out and insist on preaching to people? There’s something in a human being that knows he only exists in relation to other people. If you were to die tomorrow and go to a beautiful place but nobody was there, from our memory viewpoint you would be very miserable.
And then you go back and see when did this trauma start. You go back to when you were a very small child. And when you do you clear the road. Once you realize what caused your present foolishness you clear the road, and the likelihood of future foolishness is less.
Christ said this is the life. You live the life. Twelve apostles and around seventy other brothers.
The truth is recognized by very few people. Bucke one in a million. But the world is run by 51%.
I call it the engineer. The engineering here is manifest. I was just reading in the paper, the trees talk to each other. When insects attack one tree the other trees prepare a poison that is an antidote, puts a stop to the bugs eating them.
Clams.
Sex life of insects.
Right before you have your final experience, the biggest thing you have to face is your own immortality.
Q&A.
I consider Gurdjieff to be the top psychologist of the western world. Astute understanding of the human mind and different types of people. His was a psychological-spiritual philosophy. As physical beings we’re nothing but fertilizer. Unless we have something beyond that it doesn’t matter what we do.
Gurdjieff divided men basically into four classes, and above these five, six and seven were beyond ordinary men. Instinctive man, emotional man, the intellectual man, the philosophical man. The fifth may be enlightened.
Anyhow, we have a transition between, which Gurdjieff didn’t talk about too much.
Instinctive man falls in love, this is his gets into the devotional center, he respects somebody more than he respects himself. He forgets about all these other games. This is the graduation. The salvationistic experience. He falls in love with Jesus, or Buddha, or someone he can’t see.
File 3
32 minutes.
[continuing on salvation experience] It’s no great contact with heaven. He loses the worshiping of himself and his body. This is the key to this struggle. And from this comes a marvelous release. And now they say, “I’m saved.” This is the first step in spiritual growth. But why do people leave churches? It’s because these convictions come and go. The computer is saying maybe you’ve snowed yourself. Maybe six months after getting married you realize that you’re no longer worshipping this person; that you’re working because you have to.
My father in law was a Pentecostal minister, they used to call them holy-rollers. He was like the man in Tobacco Road or God’s Little Acre, or one of those little books. He would go out, if he got his hands on too much money, he would go out and get drunk, or he’d get one of the girls from the church and take them out to the irrigation ditch. And he was married and had a family. And he would go back and repent, confess his sins and start all over again. He was a sincere person but he just wobbled.
After you become disgruntled, you realize that you’re emotional and consequently unstable, you don’t have proof. …
I maintain that this idea of the pursuit of truth, should be started off with a scientific procedure with the same strictness with which you would examine the element oxygen or hydrogen in a quantitative or qualitative analysis in or chemistry. It’s that strict. It isn’t fiction. And you can test. There’s a system. Although it’s different from the science of chemistry.
In chemistry you can reach for a certain test. In the process of finding the truth there is only one path to go because truth is not anyplace where you can put your finger on it. You don’t know what the truth is. You’ve got millions of books perhaps to study but don’t know which one to start with. You don’t know what the word truth means. You talk about looking for god; you don’t know what the word God means. In West Virginia they think his last name is Damn. So everybody has their own theology.
Now this third stage, the person who is intellectually inclined will free himself in this lifetime - some people die in the emotional phase – others will free themselves from it. I did this. I got into astrology, numerology, the kabala, and I thought that maybe by some confusion of the brain or exercise of the brain I will get something out of this. Because there’s evidently some very wise men in it. When you read the books, they are very astute. And then you get a graduation, which I call the Wow experience.
O you go out and you keep looking. You read books, and meet people. This is what I call the contractors law. This is where other people come in handy. Because it’s a reflection of yourself. You can go down a blind alley as a philosopher and your good friend can come along and say, “Hey Rose, you know what you’re doing? You’re playing a game inside your own head.” And you’ll realize it when the person points it out to you. Also, the so-called association with those people (sangha) is apt to provide a certain amount of protection for you. I think that in anything that you do, any group of scientists, have to have some sort of coordination between their findings. And this is true for your esoteric scientists as well.
In Hindu terminology it’s called kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. The word enlightenment is highly misused. Some people think that just being wised-up is enlightenment. No . It’s a decided change and an understanding of your being.
You’re programmed. There is no evil, because you’re programmed to respond to the things you do. Maybe to learn. This is one of the errors. Everybody is attacking evil. Ayatollah Khomeini thinks that if he chops your head off he makes you holy. You can’t have a physical, frontal assault on a subjective matter. Especially when the subjective matter is only the polarity of another undefined thing called “good”.
Q&A
Consciousness is the awareness of the brain. We have a faculty of awareness. We can look at it, in consciousness. Some people think that trees are aware. But they can’t think, perhaps. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. Somehow they don’t have the same introspective qualities.
The keytone enzyme may be aware. The Amoeba has to be aware. It gropes, it speculates. That’s awareness. The extent of this consciousness is something else, from our viewpoint at least.
At the other end of the spectrum is this process observer. A thing that sees without the eyeballs. A thing that watches thoughts. This body watches decisions, like if I pick up an apple it’s a body-decision, the right apple. But the mind that watches thoughts is a higher form of awareness. This has a specific identity. And this identity continues after your mind and your body are gone.
Your whole thinking mechanism disappears. I talk about fattening up the head before you chop it off. You can’t be a dummy, you can’t say I’m going to relax and take one day at a time. This is nonsense. This is the philosophy of earthworms or rocks. They’re going to be here now; they haven’t begun to be here, much less now. You have to come out fighting. A man fights. He fights before he learns to surrender. A woman has the ability to surrender more quickly.
The brain seems like a blob of flesh, but I believe the brain has contact with the mind, and the point of contact is the synapse. It’s like a spark plug, there’s a gap there. And a small voltage crosses. And it has to have a purpose in crossing that gap, otherwise it would be continuous wiring.
And every psychiatrist or psychologist I run into I ask what is thought. But they can’t tell you. Except that it’s a reaction.
When a person is floating, say over Atlanta, and he thinks he should get back inside his body, then he’s thinking outside his head. My brother had an automobile accident and watched his own operation. [recounts story].
I went out the window; this was in broad daylight; Ii went out over the Olympic Mountains, I think it is called. Snow-covered at the time. What struck me most that I was aware, and the fellow back in the hotel room wasn’t. He was out. I was just fascinated. I could only think what’s next? So this thinking process doesn’t depend on being inside the body.
File 4
24 minutes.
In the study of your own essence there are mileposts. These are the mileposts I’m describing. You’ll notice when you change from an instinctive to an emotional man, you’ll notice when you have a more clear understanding of the human mind. And you can look backwards. For many years it’s very discouraging. You think you’re going nowhere.
more Q&A
I didn’t have too much choice. My return, back to the hotel return. Maybe it was supposed to be. When I was young I had a tremendous anger to the phonies. And with that anger came a tremendous determination.
The people who are able to pick it up are the young people. You have to have an open mind; if you’re crystallized, forget it.
The process of doing this is called creating a vector. You are what you do. The process of becoming doesn’t come from reading; you become a reader.
The amazing thing is what I found was contrary [to my expectations]. Which validated it. When I was going in I thought I’m dying. I’m going out on a limb too far.
When I came back my first thought was I didn’t want to live on this earth.
I felt that if I chose to live I should use that life to the best advantage, so that someone else would know what’s up ahead.
Sometime I’m asked, “Why don’t you do something more useful?” There’s nothing useful. “Why don’t you become a healer?” What for? So people can go out and get drunk again and get sick again? That’s just a spinning wheel.
T was a very personal and possibly selfish motive. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish.
When I walked the streets of Seattle, and it happens today even, people become transparent. I can see their motivations, I can see things they’ve done, I can see pains in their body. This can be tremendously annoying.
At that particular time the human race was nothing more than automatons. When I get into a big city I see the massive robot movement, pounding the pavement with angry determination, going nowhere.
You can’t catch anybody who isn’t already somewhat knowledgeable. I have the impression that some of you are getting ready to get up and leave because it isn’t registering.
If your intuition matches what I’m talking about you’ll be curious the rest of your life.
Long question, mostly inaudible.
Well, I’ll give you an example. I studied with a Zen master. Q – Training? RR – There’s no point in training. This training is to keep people occupied. Especially if you have a group of them in a monastery; you have to do something or they get out of hand. Q – inaudible – starts to get belligerent. RR - Believe me, I’m going to speak to you from my heart. I don’t know if I have offended you. But a tremendous lot of Zen is useless. The Zen movements in this country are mostly useless. I don’t know if you have heard of Suzuki-Roshi over here in California. He had a little colony there, and shortly before he died he was interviewed, his wife was present, and they said, “Are you an enlightened man?” And his wife said, “Of course he’s not an enlightened man.” And he told her, “You could have kept your mouth shut.” There’s no in a teacher … Huang Po [story related in Garma Chang’s book?] in China, thousands of years ago, was taking to a group of monks, and he said, “There is no Ch’an in China.” Q – inaudible. RR – In essence he said that there was no one capable, there was no one being enlightened in China. They had thousands of people in the monastery and no one was enlightened. Q – continues with belligerent question. RR – See what you’re doing? You’re no more than a fundamentalist arguing the Bible. The truth is not in words, the truth is in actions and being and becoming. And if you haven’t become, those books aren’t going to do you any good. Keisaku and wearing robes and being dressed like this is not going to do you any good.
[Continued arguing, RR eventually dismisses him.]
RR reads a few questions from the lecture of questions, to be used in seminar the following day. Goes on about 10 minutes.
Mike announces seminar next day.
