1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh
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Data
| Title | 1974-1017-Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh |
| Recorded date | 10/17/1974 |
| Location | Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh |
| No. tapes | One 90 minute. |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| DVD number | None - need a copy of this recording. Ed has, but he sent the wrong one << now have, sh collection |
| Source | |
| No. of MP3 files | |
| Total time | presume 90 min |
| Transcription status | |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices |
Notes
IMPORTANT – SH has the only copy. Blue Printed possibly TAT case: 1 x 90 min cassette Side 2 lecture is to min 27, then there is 20 min of chit-chat after that.
File 1
sh1-00:00
Well, I’d like for this to be more or less of an informal meeting; I think we get more done that way. I don’t talk very loud and I get hoarse quickly, so if you can’t hear me you’re all welcome to come up front. There in the back, can you hear me Mike? Okay. It took a few minutes for the tone to get back there though.
I want to say maybe something about Zen first. Because everyone who comes to these meetings, well, let’s say some come who have never heard of Zen before; they’re interested in kindred subjects. Others have heard of Zen, and there are many books being written about Zen, and each book gives you a different slant, or leads you down a different alley.
Well, to give you an example, we have D.T. Suzuki [who] was the foremost American author on Zen before such notables as Alan Watts came. Suzuki was basically a historian and there’s not much you can get out of his books except the history. I mentioned this over at Duquesne when I was talking over there. 1974-1010-Duquesne-University-Pittsburgh There’s a book he put called The Handbook of Zen. I picked it up and I was rather dismayed by the fact that, for a handbook of something that leads you into the awareness of a state of being which includes everything and nothingness, he would bother to put in a third or a fourth of the book full of pictures, and another third or fourth of the book full of Zen poetry, which is an objective and relative-oriented exercise.
01:57
So that I can better tell you what Zen is not, naturally, because Zen doesn’t have much of a definition, except if you say it aims in a certain direction, it even aims at nothing, you’re wrong: it aims at everything and nothing. And when you say it aims at everything and nothing, you automatically bring in what I call the science of betweenness. Because we cannot conceive of absolute measures with a relative mind. As the old Catholic theologians used to say, quoting Thomas Aquinas I think, “The finite mind can never perceive the infinite.” The catch is of course that the finite mind can become less finite, or more infinite. And this in the path.
02:40
Now over on the board there I took advantage of their chalk [so it’s a classroom] and wrote something of the automatic – I say there’s no place to go but up. And you heard Lee [Gerstenberger] speak of the reverse from untruth. And I’ve got it labeled “search.” But the arrow – it’s an engineering symbol for vector, and we speak of the law of the vector in the Albigen book [Papers] : that you are not necessarily a human with a name of Jack Jones, you are vector that is either going up or down. You have no choice except to go up or down. And once you start up, you have very little comfort in going anyplace but up.
03:21
It’s very difficult once you reach that, where I’ve got “C” labeled? level? to ever go back to “A” level. And it’s very difficult to, I have another set of categories there, and that is along the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky line, in his terminology. Down at this corner here you’d have instinctive man, emotional man, intellectual man, philosophic man. And once you graduate from the instinctive man into the emotional man, you very seldom go back with any great enthusiasm back into the instinctive man. And this is the way it is in any spiritual search. Of course it seems, lots of times along the way, you despair: you think it’s really a hopeless mess, and you’re not getting anyplace. We find that in our group all the time. People say, “I feel like I’m not getting anywhere.” But I always refer them to the other people in the group and I say, “Ask them. You can’t see it yourself.”
04:12
But anyhow, what we have, what we generally pride ourselves in – people who generally consider themselves intellectual – either have an extreme faith or an extreme sense of logic, in which they’re going to demand [that] everything be proven. And basically we know that, even in science, that there’s very little that can be proven if anything. As far as proof is concerned. Again, in the Albigen book we have a law, we call it the law of relativity. The law of relativity has nothing to do with Einstein’s law, it has to do with the fact that all things that have meaning to us are relative in their meaning. That the only meaning or proof that we have is in relation to other things that are unproven. So that the whole structure of everything, even scientific things, such as force fields, which are composed of molecules or electrons – these things are postulated; they’re theoretical. There’s no real proof yet as to what matter is, and this is the attempt of logic to prove everything in material terms.
05:11
So we have a little plus there between that, and that’s this “betweenness” – that you don’t abandon logic and you don’t abandon faith. Faith is fanaticism unless it’s somewhat guided by common sense or tempered by logic. And you have to, at all stages of the game, you have to have faith in yourself. You’ve got to at least postulate yourself. You’ve got to have faith that you’re here and you can do something about it, in finding out who you are. And you go with that combination of the two. In other words, you’re a relative creature and we look, we see everything with two eyes. And our thinking is both subjective and objective, or it i both intuitional and logical.
05:56
So we go up then to the mental class, of subjective and mental objective pursuits. And we find that there’s an extreme there; that some people try to do it all by introspection. They think that they can do everything just by sitting and meditating. And I myself spent eight years at it, so I know where it takes you. And I know a lot of people who have been to TM and are now members of this group, because they realized that they were stagnating. yet this is a higher part of the ladder than the mentally objective where they’re only interested in phenomenal studies and wisdom schools, or mind-expansion schools, where you’re going to study to become a genius by taking a certain course or something of that sort.
But they go from there then, with this combination of again, applying the – not neglecting to be observant of data. We were talking about data here a little while ago, spiritualistic data. It’s good to keep your eyes open and watch for phenomena, because these give you new insight into yourself.
And you take that and you go up to another classification, in which, where you come to in some time in your life, in which you realize that mind is not going to survive death: the mind as we know it. That if you’re going to do anything, you’re going to have to get a little bit beyond the mind as we know it. Whether you want to call it synaptic or DNA molecules or whatever they are, these things are going to disintegrate when you die. So the result is of course to experiment again with an objective type of mind experimentation, which is mind expansion. They call it mind expansion, which is – raja yoga is a good example, and under the heading of raja yoga come a tremendous number of things: kriya yoga and listening to sound currents, and physical reactions inside the body as the result of meditation or something of that sort. Or drugs. Some people some people have “expanded” their head with the use of drugs. They thought they expanded it at least. But that was their experiment.
08:01
We go above that again to the subjective side of that: what I call change of being systems, where you realize that this, the being as it is, is not going anyplace. So you undertake to change your being. And this seems like a foolhardy expedition, because you don’t know what to change to. You realize you have to change to be cognizant of a new dimension, but you don’t know how to change. And you struggle in the dark.
And again, from these two splits off, or you go on up to the schools of Hindu mysticism, Zen mysticism and Christian mysticism. Now I put them all in one bucket, as you see. And we are a Zen group, but I recognize the value of Christian mystics, and I’ve read their lives and their accounts. And their experiences are very similar to Hindu mystics and their consciousness of an absolute state of affairs is similar to the final experience of Zen.
Satori
Now again, there’s a mistaken thing that permeates all the Zen writing, and that is the word satori. The word satori I don’t use. Now Lee mentioned the gamut that I had gone through. He did not mention my experiences in Zen. Because I don’t care to refer to lineage too much. The teacher I had – and I didn’t receive enlightenment from a Zen teacher. I looked up Zen teachers for the purpose of learning transmission. , Because – nowhere in Christian mysticism or in Hindu mysticism do you find any method of transmitting, or helping another person achieve enlightenment. It’s only in the Zen system. Now there may be others – I’m not saying that that’s all – but this all I could find when I was around 30-33 years of age. So I found Zen to be a wonderful language, by which you could communicate to other people meanings without words, so to speak.
10:15
Again, the word satori, as described in
the mind in kevala samadhi is no longer discernible but it’s there.
21:43
Number four: the mind in Kevala samadhi can be drawn out by the other end of the rope. In other words, you come back and write a book about it. You can come back and be conscious of it [?] again. In sahaja samadhi, the river cannot be redirected from the ocean. All that remains after a sahaja samadhi experience is the memory of the experience, and the fact that the body is still living. But you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re part of the ocean.
22:19
Now, taking this, going back to these charts again, you can, if you take the time, you can go back and you can categorize – I don’t like to become specific – but you can categorize any of the religious, or pseudo-religious, or philosophical movements, isms or whatever you call them – you can very quickly categorize them by their objectivity. That you’ll find that most of the movements that abound today are on the mental-objective level., labeled C-A there. That they’re trying to use a physical gimmick in fact: some physical manipulation to bring about a change of mind or a change of being.
And this permeates clear up to the mind-expansion systems. Drugs are a physical gimmick, in order to try to change something. Now the main point here remains though, that unless you are aware, already aware of this, it has no meaning to you. In other words, if you are on a particular level, that you’ve just found peace of mind by some prayerful attitude or some contemplative attitude, then this what I’m saying to you will have very little meaning. It only will have meaning to people who are hungry, or irritated, by a deficit of returns on their energy expended.
23:55
I want to give you a brief rundown on myself of course. Why I’m doing what I’m doing. [aside to somebody: That’s alright, I don’t particularly want a ??] I started out of course pretty much on this faith category. Instead of logic I started my career out as a believer. In fact I studied to be a priest. And I took everything for granted, because it came, directives came from people who I loved, and I trusted them, and it took me a little while to shake it off. But from there I reverted to the logical thing. I went in for such things as Spiritualism, as I mentioned to Randy here a little while ago. I thought, “Well, if I want to find out what happens to you after death, I’ll just go talk to somebody who has died, that’s all.” It never occurred that you’d have to make the trip yourself; I always thought I’d get it by second-hand information. So I looked into everything I could in the line of scientific line [sentence] – this included psychology.
I find of course that the psychology then – that was 30 years ago – isn’t too much better than the psychology today – today’s psychology, I mean, isn’t any better. [fix sentence] It’s still extremely objective; it is a pretensive science on a subjective matter. In other words, you can’t be absolutely or totally scientific or objective about a subjective matter. Or – well, the way they get around it is just by denying that there is any subjective matter there; they just say there’s nothing there but a body.
25:40
But this doesn’t answer all the problems, as I’ve explained before, because the simple fact that – let’s presume there is nothing here but a body – did we, men, create these bodies? Did we create, did we form the place where we stand and where we breathe, and that sort of thing? We’d like to think, through our psycho-sociological vanity that we’re going to breed a race of people who will create ne people [a] new environment, heaven on earth and all this talk, without any knowledge at all of the factors involved in human essence. They just ignore human essence. They just ignore that there’s such a thing as a force field for instance behind an electron. And if there is such a thing as a force field this force field could very well be the result of an intellectually-directed force.
26:41
Or as they say in the thaumaturgical law, with [that] the will plus the imagination plus the fiat equals creation; that something did will and project all this illusion that we see all around us. But regardless, whether it’s an illusion or whether it’s the only reality we’ll ever know, the factors are not known by the scientists. We have no knowledge of whether we came from a divine light and we’re going to wind up in a black hole in the universe, or where this is merely a thought iin the mind of another entity. So until those factors are known, it’s absolute vanity to think that a group of people who are human are going to prescribe the brainwashing for humans to come, as though they would know that that fits into the plan of this creation.
27:32
So consequently, I think it’s intelligent to look a little further if you’re curious about you’re destiny or your origin. and I found, as I said before, about logic, I found it to be a vanity. I gave up for awhile the study of psychology, and that’s how I came yto be a chemist: I majored in chemistry when I went to college and I thought, “Oh, boy, I’m going o find what matter is by looking at matter.” And I was in school about two hears and I came to the conclusion that this is not going anyplace, except into complexity. Complexity breeds complexity, and out of that will come complex confusion. So I earned a few dollars as a chemist but I never took it seriously.
28:18
I immediately launched into other steps: yoga. I got ino yoga mainly because it appealed to my intuition. And most of the things that exist today – the country is running flush with all sorts of cults and eastern gimmicks – and we had them in those days too. They were just a little bit rarer and a little bit more expensive, and they were mostly followed by people over forty years of age, instead of people under forty.
But after a tremendous amount of this digestion of material, I came to the conclusion – I was around 21 years of age – that man would never learn anything. This idea of learning at all is vanity. You will never learn anything. There’s only one path, there’s only one method, and that is becoming. The finite mind, the finite being, will not perceive the infinite. The finite being can become the infinite.
Now that’s a statement, that’s an unproven statement. Of course, I don’t prove too much. I think that you have to make the trip yourself. And I maintain of course that you don’t believe me. I don’t think that you get any place by believing. That’s what I started off with, believing somebody. I think that you have to search, you have to question every step of the way.
29:38
Of course I do believe, but this is also paradoxical. That you have to work with other people. I found that I tried to work alone, and all the time I thought I was working alone, I was reading somebody else’s book. I’d pick up a book of esoteric philosophy or religion or something, and I thought I was doing it all alone. I wasn’t. I had a teacher; it was a book. So what’s the difference whether you take a book, and struggle with a book you can’t talk to, when you can go talk to somebody who’s alive. So that consequently, the mere fact that you associate with people, even though they have no “value” or knowledge, but re interested in the same thing you’re interested in – even if it’s alcoholism – you can form a group of Alcoholics Anonymous and help each other. Or you can form a group of ignoramuses anonymous and become philosophers. But taking it from that viewpoint – there’s hope. But taking it individually there’s no hope.
30:33
But I went through – let’s put it this way, I went through quite a bit, as he mentioned. I joined groups. I never stayed with them, I never pledged myself to them, but I stayed with them long enough to learn their gimmick, their trick, whatever it was. And I came back of course with certain ideas or convictions. I discovered for myself I think certain laws. And at the time I had no audience. I wanted to help somebody, I wanted to do something – and of course saying “help somebody” is a ... 31:31 [break in tape]
SPLICE GOES HERE
File 2
sh2-00:00
