1972-Fall-First-meeting-in-Kent-missing-tape

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From All's book Sex Connection - move to Discussion page

I first met Richard Rose in the fall of 1972 while attending Kent State University at Kent, Ohio, two years after the tragic shootings of four students by National Guardsmen. An advertisement in the campus newspaper announcing an upcoming lecture caught my eye, and so I went to hear Rose speak on "Zen and the American Mind."

....

It was precisely at this time that I went to hear Rose talk on Zen in the hopes that he might shed some light on an American approach to this inscrutable philosophy, and provide a short-cut to understanding it without having to go to Japan and learn the language.

All that I had studied and learned up to that point had not prepared me for what I was about to hear and whom I was going to meet. Richard Rose did not fit the Zen mold, or any mold for that matter of fact, that I could recognize. He spoke plainly and directly, comparing Zen to a psychological system of looking within oneself for answers. He was not intellectual, nor did he fit the role of a teacher. He didn't have a PhD, didn't wear robes like a Zen master, didn't sit in a prayerful posture like a monk,or spout platitudes on Zen and flatter his audience with reassurances. In fact, Rose seemed to speak without the pretense of convincing anyone of anything he had to say—he told people he wasn't there to sell anyone a "bill of goods" and anyone who was really interested in what he was talking about should doubt him anyway, and go prove the Zen experience for themselves.

The bulk of what Rose said was an analysis of people's real nature and the way people think, talk, react and behave. He was talking about the psychology of people,the practical psychology that can't be found in textbooks. Strangely, this man spoke with an air of authority about knowing people. I couldn't chalk it up to presuming,guessing or calculated predicting. He just seemed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was more, too, than just astute street savvy. For example, I remember Rose said that if you're going to know yourself and the secrets of the universe, you have to start by knowing your fellow man—the way his head works. Really knowing, he emphasized, from stepping inside his shoes, so to speak. "Walk a mile in another man's moccasins," Rose said, and then you'll know for sure how his mind works,which will tell you how your own mind works. This, Rose said, was real Zen, the art of stepping into another person's mind, by "getting inside their head," an intuitive psychology that a person needed to develop along the way—a trip that was going to back into Truth by a subtractive psychological method of taking away what is found to be false. He called this the "path of negation" which could be applied to psychology as well as philosophy.

Rose talked about why, what, and how a person thinks, and what forces are at work that cause a person to come to believe what they do and carry out a lifetime of action from the mental prodding that goes on behind the scenes of the personality—

that ever so subtle, smoky, ethereal and elusive field of the inner mind—a place, Rose said coincidentally, that most people rarely get a glimpse of, yet, in robot fashion,claim to be the proud owners of everything that comes "into their head." Here, Rose was saying that some thoughts are not our own.

I was dumbfounded. He was talking about people, their personality, their mind,their convictions, their thinking, and their destiny in a way I had never heard anyone talk about psychology before. Everything he said had a ring of truth to it, yet how did he know? Was he hood-winking me somehow? It was like he had his own ringside seat inside the mind of a person, and somehow he got there, by some undisclosed method. Everything Rose said about psychology made sense to me, except for one thing. He didn't make sense. Who was this guy, and what had happened to him to give him this ability, if that was what it was, to be able to see into people, to see into their minds? Rose the man was more of an enigma than a psychologist, a philosopher, or a Zen teacher—he had the appearance of an ordinary man, but he was anything but ordinary. Much later I would come to understand at last that with Rose, there was an X-factor about him. That factor made him, the whole picture called Richard Rose,greater than the sum of the individual parts. And that X-factor had everything to do with the experience, what some call the Zen experience or an experience of Absolute consciousness, which had happened to him twenty-five years earlier.