1975-Akron-to-resolve
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| Title | 1975-Akron-to-resolve |
| Recorded date | 1975 |
| Location | Akron |
| Number of tapes | |
| Other recorders audible? | |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | |
| No. of MP3 files | |
| Total time | |
| Transcription status | notes only - started Nov 21, 2014 |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | |
| Remarks | |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1975-Akron-to-resolve |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150103012404 |
Notes
1975 unknown Akron Akron 1 x 90 11/20/2014 Yellow tape, unknown source. only 30 to side Side 1, 2 at -2 dB, 79% This is a powerful talk, must do noisy, do over, other machine Tapes bad, slipping
Side A – possibly side 3 – Q&A
00:00
R. [answering a question] ?? within? yourself. You must be able to search for the truth and not kid yourself. And if you can do that, and dynamically keep it up, you will find the truth. It doesn’t matter what religion you’re in. Because if you get into it, you’ll more or less see less and less value to the religion you’re in. Or you’ll see more and more meaning to certain things that are said. Like Christian’s admonition, “Seek and you shall find,” mean something to you now. “Unless ye become as a little child you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” has meaning to you now.
Some of the other things you look upon maybe as political. But, some of the things that are said didn’t have any meaning before, but when you start on the path they start to have meaning. The same way with the words of Buddha; you find out that Buddha is saying the same thing as Christ said. But you don’t become addicted any longer. You’re not necessarily addicted. You push out the misconceptions. That there are millions of people who are following conceptions say of Christ that are not necessarily valid. So that part’s right. Did I answer anything?
01:00
Q. Yes.
Q. ?? it’s over with?
R. Yes.
Q. What do you ??
R. Oh. I thought you were talking about me.
Q. No.
R. For you it’s over, it’s over when you know who you are. When you know who you are you will know everything. I’m not trying to be enigmatic. I mean, but it’s a very simple thing. It’s a very simple formula of knowing thyself, and when you know yourself, really know yourself. And if I go further, why of course, I start to say things that are not provable. But I can say that you are also everything. Now to prove that – maybe you’ll pick it up – when you know yourself, you’ll know everything because you’ll be everything.
01:56
Q. Where do your ??
R. Well, again that’s something I can’t give you in just a few words. I’ll try to, but we have a paper. I’ve written a paper on it. And the reason is because I do not agree with the meditations of placidity or peacefulness. And I think that they intend to put you to sleep. As I said at the lecture I gave ?? evening at the Theosophical Society, protoplasm tends to become lethargic, and inertia sets in. And we have to be continually arousing our protoplasm and our minds from that lethargy. And it’s not good to indulge in a form of meditation or contemplation that will put you to sleep. You have to indulge in a form of meditation that will keep you awake, and keep prodding you and irritation you, and looking into traumas of the past and wondering why you had those traumas, solving those problems as you go. And when those things become clearer to you, you become freer, you got more energy; you’re not putting your energy then into feeding traumatic memories.
03:06
Q. Then, do you have any concept of ?? desires, the physical nervous system? If the ?? to project ?? spiritual life living that immaterial
R. Well, you cannot live a spiritual life until you know what it is. So that any form of discipline, anything of that sort that you embark upon without fully understanding it is meaningless. Now as far as accepting the fact that you have a body, this is valid. You hear in Zen of course that the material world is illusion, and you’ll find out someday that this is true. But until you fully realize that, you have to go along the road that you believe you have a body. You have to accept that body. And in the process of accepting it and understanding what goes on, you will find that you can raise energy with the body. Now we don’t need necessarily to call it spiritual; this is somatic, megudation, that, which is, well, for instance, I have a paper written ?? it’s called The Transmutation of Energy, and it’s similar to kundalini yoga but it’s more specific; it’s more of an engineering paper than one using Hindu terms that have no meaning in this language, such as chakras., Which is basically a method of tracing your energy from the food you eat to the residual or glandular storage, stored in glands or stored in fat, stored in the muscle.
And this transmutes, some of it automatically, into brain or neural, what I call neural energy, cerebral energy, which in turn can be transmuted into spiritual quantum. Now that might sound enigmatic, but this is all demonstrable. That they talk about auras, but only healthy people have auras, supposedly; only healthy people seem to exude, spiritual, can heal people and have that type of energy. So you trace that stuff in and say, “Sure, it’s good to have a healthy body. It’s good to be able to train yourself to raise your kundalini – and of course there’s no English word to, correlation in English so I use the word there. But it’s not the mysterious oriental method, it’s just plain, sensible living and inhibition: inhibition of the channels through which that energy is wasted.
05:51
Q. ?? based on the idea that ?? with your system ??
R. How do you know it’s perfect?
Q. Well, as perfect as I ??
R. Well, I think a hog would grow fatter and would be much more tender pork to eat if he had no stresses and strains. But Jesus Christ supposedly when they nailed him up, he was kind of a horrible mess to look at. But he had proved his point; he had made his goal. The hog doesn’t find a goal except the slaughterhouse.
Q. I don’t necessarily mean on a gross level ??
R. Yeah, what’s your point there I mean? Where are we going? Where are you going with your point?
Q. That if you can purify your body to a certain degree ...
R. Yes, how do you purify it?
Q. Well, I practice ??
R. We’re not interested in what you practice; I mean we’re interested in proving whether that will purify your body
Q. But I’m getting ?? by allowing the body to ??
R. How do you know it does that, though? How do you know you’re not kidding yourself with an auto-suggestive technique you’re using? When you chant ang or something like that, that you’re just hypnotizing yourself.
Q. Well, there are, I’m not trying to ??
R. That doesn’t matter. I mean, if it’s valid, it should be put up against it.
Q. There are scientific results ?? activity
R. No, no, I don’t agree with you. I don’t know of any scientific results except that it brings you peace of mind and helps your business and keeps you more tranquil. But so are hogs in the hog pen. Do they know, doe TM bring you to a realization of who you are?
Q. ?
R. Do you know who you are?
Q. No.
R. Then you don’t know that TM will bring you there. Now you’re talking about something with no knowledge of where it will take you then, except tranquility. You’re talking about purification of the body: how do you know what “pure” is? Are fishing worms impure?
Q. I’m not saying I do, I’m just, I find the direction of ?? psychology ...
R. Who? Who? Who? What? be careful.
Q. ??? find out how it is ??
R. I could hypnotize you and you’d feel much better than that yet. It can be done in five minutes instead of waiting for two years to make you feel good. I could hypnotize you and you would feel wonderful. I could even get you drunk on water.
08:51
Q. I’m not ?? that I want to have knowledge of myself. But I ?? if necessary purifying your system ...
R. How do you purify that? That’s what I asked you and you didn’t answer me. How do you purify your system?
Q. Through deep breaths.
R. Deep breaths? Deep rest?
Q. Yes.
R. Rest r-e-s-t?
Q. Yes.
R. Sure, I know some people in the cemetery who are into that.
Q. I don’t mean it’s? all? rest?. ??
R. I know. They’ve lined up a few yogis too, who weren’t into TM, and they find out they had to get a condition, whatever it is, alpha, beta ... But see, when you talk about, you use words, this is what I’m getting at, this is my challenge: What do you mean by “purify”? Putting yourself to sleep – we’re not talking about purification, we’re talking about putting yourself to sleep. You’re talking about getting rest, but how do you know that purifies you? Taking dope will make you tranquil too. But there’s an aftershock that comes after it. The organism is not meant for rest; the organism is meant for action.
Q. The balance.
R. Who knows the balance? What is the balance? A physical balance in which you’re able to work and feel better while you’re working, without trauma? Or where you would have trauma, and that type of thing would balance the pleasure principle to a point where your mind did something for you? What type of balance do you speak of?
Q. To ?? a more enlivened life on all levels.
R. What good is it. Who wants to lead a more enlivened life? Is that all you’re living for, so that you can be more enlivened?
Q. ?? more happiness.
R. What good is happiness? What is happiness?
Q. That’s what makes us feel good.
R. Yeah, it’s a state of mind. It’s a state of mind. This is what we’re talking about in Zen, is that people live and die in certain states of mind. That’s where they get hooked.
Q. Well, happiness ??
R. It can be, but do you know? Do you know?
Q. I don’t know, but ...
R. No, no. Let me tell you something right now: you cannot equate happiness with absolute states of mind. Because happiness is a relative term, and can only be related to a relative experience. Whenever you talk of bliss, this is one of the ways of defining these systems: the systems that will take you to an absolute state versus the systems that will keep you in a relative condition. That whenever they talk about bliss in a spiritual experience, they’re talking about a relative state of mind. The absolute condition of the mind does not experience relative experiences.
Sure, it’s by virtue of the definition of the words: absolute means absolute, not relative. Absolute doesn’t mean pleasure and pain. If you could talk of pleasure, you’d indentify it and you’d find it in the dictionary in terms of pain. It’s the opposite of pain. The absolute condition doesn’t talk of pleasure versus pain, it talks of absoluteness. Both or neither; or both and neither.
12:14
Q. I had a question about your use of the word faith. Are you saying that there’s an obstacle to you as long as you’re putting faith in relative concepts and ?? Well, at first I have a feeling that any spiritual path you go on, you know somehow, maybe some way beforehand that it’s going to take you somewhere, or you probably wouldn’t be there, or that maybe you’ve been brought there for some reason. Is ? about perfect faith and to conduct something that maybe you have to have? If I’m going to work in this group, don’t I have to know somewhat that it’s going to take me somewhere?
R. I don’t think we ever know anything until we know the final answer. And for anybody to tell you – this is the reason that I more ask questions about these various things that people have to accept on faith. I don’t think you should accept this on faith. I don’t think there’s anything to accept. basically all we say is, “Don’t accept.” If somebody tells you you’re going to have peace of mind from doing it, I immediately say, “Well, where’s peace of mind going to take me?” you can get drunk and have maybe five seconds or five minutes or five hours of peace of mind, but you’ll have no peace later.
And if you waste your youth in an auto-hypnotic process that goes on for ten years maybe – and believe me, I’m talking from first-hand experience – I was into this chanting business when I was 21 to 28. I went the whole trip and I had peace of mind, tranquility, and I cursed it later because this was, I was hung up. I was like in a shell. I didn’t get the proper irritation to encourage y thinking processes. And I thought that I was going to heaven because of the, I equated heaven somehow with peace of mind.
And it’s evident; that you look around you that the whole process, this is like an aquarium, where everything is eating and fighting and devouring each other. And what is the purpose of that? Why does the tree in the woods fight the tree next to it to get to the sun? And if he gets up there, he lives and the other one dies. And this is the same thing, Gurdjieff mentioned this, Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness mentions this. Only a few. Christ said it. Only a few are chosen.
14:14
So consequently, this is a battle, this is not where you’re going to drift in and say, “Hey, I don’t want the sun. I’m going to sit here and meditate. I’m not going to grow. I’m not going to fight for my oxygen. I’m just going to sit here and meditate.”
Now I say this is good [for some]. I’m not arguing with a system of meditation, TM or anything else. I’m saying this may be very necessary for people. But it won’t be any good to mix it with this system. Because we’re in for cracking stain glass windows. We’re in for analyzing these things and saying, “Why do people do this? Why do people have to be,” – they take dope and the dope gets them down. They have peace of mind, and not only that, they have a lot of happy visions. But some time this, if their undercurrent, this subconscious mind starts telling them, in a voice that isn’t even audible yet, “Disquietude, disquietude. You’re not right.” So they run and they get Jesus or something.
Well, this is necessary. Good. Good. But I don’t want those people to tell me that they have found the tantamount now. All they have found is a pill – to cure another pill. You’re turbulent? Okay, do your TM and you won’t be turbulent. Then you get your head straight so you can think. But don’t go to sleep and start thinking? then? now that you’ve got your TM. [?] Start questioning why you’re doing things. Then you’ll move. But if it puts you to sleep for ten years you’re done, that’s all. And you’ll remember my? these? words ten years from now.
14:45
But I didn’t answer your question, did I?
Q. Not really.
R. No. What was it again?
Q. Um, okay ...
R. Oh, the faith.
Q. Yes.
R. This is true. In this book I have laws, I mention laws. One of these is the law of the paradox. Now I say things flatly, because there is a meaning, there’s an import to that flat statement. I say you should never have faith in anything but your own ability. We must accept that we are able to do something. If we give up and say it’s futile, there’s no motion. So we can’t – it may be a false premise: maybe we’re not able to do anything. But we must have the faith. No I don’t say that you should have the faith to – in this group you should have the faith in yourself. But if your computer says, “Hey, maybe something’s here,” then it’s reasonable to stick around a few days, ask questions and come to some conclusion as to whether it’s valid.
Then if it appeals to your intuition, that’s all you have to go by. Now if your intuition makes too many mistakes for you, and you look back over five years of making mistakes, then the thing is to go take steps to check your intuition. And this is part of the system also. I don’t believe that any spiritual system is valid unless there’s a way of checking the computer as you go. They? use? computers generally tell you what you want to hear. So you have to, all the time you’re on a spiritual path you have to have some system of checking the computer.
But nevertheless, you must have the faith in yourself that you are not beyond ability to find or to move ahead. And now I say that this can be in turn reassured by steps along the path. In other words, you can move along – I know the person who gets into chanting or meditation or anything of this sort, when they first get into it they are reassured, and this is valid to them. Their intuition has been reassured. Now if their intuition is erroneous, they may interpret this as a total, the summum bonum, there’s nothing above it. But if their intuition is valid, really valid, they will accept exactly what it is for that moment; that it is valid now. They’ll keep saying this to themself: “It is evidently valid to me now, it is evidently filling a need.” And if it’s filling a need be careful. Do we need it? Should we just settle for things that fill a need? Or should we settle for that which is definition?
18:13
In other words, do we get along better – that’s what I say – people join churches, and you ask them. I stopped at a church one time – I was waiting for a minister to come out and wanted to talk to him – I said, “Why do you go to church?” And the fellow said, “Oh, I take my children. I don’t care myself, this is all garbage. But I take my kids.” Because why? If you think it’s garbage, why are you taking your kids? “To keep them out of the penitentiary.” It’s a utility then. Another guy says, “I joined Unity.” “Why?” “Better business. My business doubled when I joined Unity.” Positive thinking: “My business doubled.”
18:48
And of course to me, I am curious about these values, and of somebody who is concerned about their Creator, if there is such – we don’t know it until we prove it – concerned about their definition, if there is such, can stop and trade it for fifty bucks or an advantage on the stock market. That’s where I question. Or a relief from the battle.
Now see I maintain that when you go through spiritual work you have, you go through on levels. You coast on a level and you rest. And then in time something will bring you out of it, and you’ll fight again, you’ll go for another level. And when you reach that level you rest, and these rests are called exaltations, spiritual experiences. But this continues until you reach the final one.
19:41
Q. Does it always go up?
R. Always up. You can’t go down. You can stay where you’re at, but you can’t go down.
Q. How long can you stay where you’re at? Can you stay there indefinitely?
R. I stayed there seven years, on the level you’re speaking of. We didn’t have “ang” in those days. We didn’t have to pay for Om, so we used Om. And I did the yogi bit, and I got it, I didn’t have a teacher, I’d get it out of books. But I remained celibate for seven years, I didn’t eat any meat. There was no such thing as macrobiotics in those days, you would eat whatever garbage they had leftover in the kitchen from the salads. [laughter] But I was a vegetarian for seven years and I meditated every day, and I isolated myself from influences. And I as very happy, very peaceful, except on a few rare occasions when somebody despised my peacefulness and put a gun to the side of my head. I had that happen twice. It was something that irritated them, because I looked too smooth.
20:38
So eventually I got tired. I looked in the mirror one day and my hair was falling out; I had a big bald spot on top at the age of 28. My teeth were falling out. I had looked into these yogi books, that you lived to be 200 years old and I thought, “Well, I’m going to look like hell by the time I’m 200, at the rate I’m going. So I’d better chuck this stuff and go in for some common sense. Common sense tells me I’m not going anyplace.” So I didn’t even know where to start. I started all over again, is what I did. But I never stopped, that was the thing. From that time on I never stopped looking, and I had never stopped before that. But there was a time when I coasted, and I coasted too long I really believe I coasted too long.
But in this period I developed my intuition. There’s no better way to develop your intuition han to shut the doors that confuse you. So I think if you follow TM you will probably develop intuition if you follow it with, by inhibiting a chief energy outlet. Now a lot of people get into TM – we were talking at the ashram before I came over here. A boy from Pittsburgh came down, and he was into multi-sexual activities, I mean by, he had homosexuality and heterosexuality and was taking dope. He was leading a very disciplined life: he meditated at exaactly a certain time in the morning, no matter where he was he meditated, and at exactly another time of the day, I don’t know. But he had intercourse at an exact time of the night, one day for boys and one day for girls. And he ate macrobiotics and he was just waiting, waiting for the trumpets to blow in his ear and beautiful things to happen. [who was this, Renny Echies?] I don’t know whathappened to him, he disappeared after awhile.
22:25
He was so happy with TM he thought that when you reached satori that it was the ultimate in hilariousness. He says, “Does it get funnier as we go along?” Did you ever see him again?
Q. I just saw him a little while ago, about a month ago.
Q. I don’t understand how you’re – you ?? for the time you did it, but aren’t you – I guess it’s part of ...
R. The only thing I really believe you have to fight for, you have to fight to keep awake. Where you tend to go to sleep. And that’s what I’m saying. I want to leave this thought in the back of your head. If TM quiets you down or finds peace of mind for you, in view of the fact that you had to have peace of mind – if you’ve been through a living hell, or if you’ve been on the battlefield – I think TM is good for somebody on the battlefield, to bring them down. I’m not arguing with that. But I don’t believe in a peaceful drifting. You’re not going to drift into spirituality. There’s no quibble with me about that. [?] You may drift into peace of mind, but you will not drift into spirituality. Nature is opposed to spirituality. Nature will tolerate you [your freedom] if you don’t indulge too much. but nature is only interested in reproduction and fertility in its various forms.
23:42
Q. Do you think the laws of nature are all guided to more evolution, and that more evolution is more spirituality?
R. Well, signs don’t show that. I think that evolution – there is a spiritual evolution – but we, for, it seems as like there’s never been a generation of more intelligent – there are many more intelligent young people produced as there has been in say the last 30 years. And what do we have? the most degenerate race of people that has hit the earth. They’re into everything: dope, sex, and everything else. They’re not conserving their energy, not really going for spirituality. So if you call that evolution, why, ...
Q. That’s intelligence ...
R. That’s intelligence flowing back down the opposite way the kundalini goes. That’s what’s happening. They’re using their heads to design new methods of pleasure, rather than using their pleasure to define more potency in the head.
Q. Well, okay, is it, a meditation technique that – I don’t see what – spirituality seems immaterial to me. It seems like you’re trying to go for something, but I don’t understand what you’re going for.
R. Definition. Definition. It’s not the immaterial. It is the whole objective: find out who you are. You find out who is meditating. That’s what I want to know: who’s meditating? It’s alright to meditate, but who’s meditating? Why? Why, basically.
Q. So how do you find that?
R. You’ve got to ask a lot more questions. You’d have to read, and, in other words, there are, this, there are many other systems that will ...
Q. I’ve done a lot of reading, but I’m trying to understand your meditational technique. How do you understand who you are?
R. By looking at yourself. By really looking at yourself. Now that helps. But I’m talking about looking within. It’s an auto-psychoanalytic method, there’s no doubt about that.
Q. Exploring your relationships with others?
R. That helps. But that isn’t the thing. You can look within yourself. If you were able to just look within yourself directly and hold that, hold that study, you would find yourself within a short period of time. But unfortunately we’re confused, by things around us, people next to us. So then you have to start, take them into the picture. That’s part of the picture then, and you have to study them too. Your relationship to them, that is. And you find sometimes through inequities in your relationships with other people, you find inequities or inconsistencies within yourself, where you’re kidding yourself.
26:17
Q. How can you know your absolute self if you study relative?
R. You can’t know your absolute self. You cannot know your absolute self. That’s the paradox. It’s the only way ?? trip. the only way to go to? it? Is what tools you have. When you reach there your mind will be dead. But you have to use your mind to get there until the point where the mind is dead.
Q. But the self, ?? where the self knows the self.
R. Well, the Self knows the Self. Capital-s Self will know the Self, yes. But the mundane self that’s logical, the argumentative self, never knows the capital-s Self.
Q. Right. But I don’t see how, you seem to be saying small-s self, ?? the small-s self in its relationship with other ...
R. That’s all we’ve got to work with. It’s unfortunate, but that’s all we’ve got to work with. And there’s no use kidding yourself that you’ve got an absolute self until you get there. But by this tremendous struggle to probe and find yourself, miraculously it happens. You become closer and closer and closer. And you know it as you’re going along, that you’re getting a clearer and clearer picture of yourself as you go.
27:32
Q. I have a question, um, you talk in terms of enlightenment as opposed to progressively lending? loose? when you realize who’s – I mean if you’re talking about enlightenment experience, it hit me, like. I was wondering how you can be ?? ?? how you can be that relativeness, and then all of a sudden hit a point where everything is ??
R. Right, right. This is what happens. Because it isn’t a gradual, just a gradual changing or refinement. A lot of people think a spiritual path is a gradual refinement. It’s a transcendence of foolishness – that you see you’re kidding yourself. And you go into, maybe for awhile you’ll adopt more complicated forms of kidding yourself. You’ll get into disciplines. And in the final analysis, just like we talk about a book her, this book‘s [break in tape] This file ends at 28: something Check to see if this was the whole tape (30 mi or 45 min to side?)
Side B – possibly side 4
This tape was slipping – started and stopped in a couple places. May be some overlap, may be some missing. Need to do over
00:00
Q. ??
R. Who is ?? Who is
Q. Personal God?
R. Now you see, if the final experience is one in which you are nothing but a river which has emptied into an ocean and lost its identity, ?? described as ?? ?? dumped into the ocean, this individual that knows nothing except the ocean. Is the ocean God?
Q. Impersonal God. ?? ??
R. See, what I’m saying is rather metaphorical. But what I’m saying, when I say you ?? the only way you can pray is to yourself, and I mean big-s Self, not little-s.
Q. Oh, I see. Yeah, because
R. Because you don’t know what the big Self is, but you can continually challenge yourself. And you can say, “Hey, I want to know who you are.”
Q. ?? ??
R. Ah, ah, ah – that’s kidding yourself, that’s putting the blinders on, immediately qualifying, postulating before you prove. I know that Maharshi, as I said, I didn’t say that I endorsed everything he said, he’s talking a language for particular people. But if you examine – he talked about Krishna. Okay, Krishna he identify in the final analysis Krishna with the absolute. But regardless, when he reached his point of enlightenment, he recognizes himself as a non-identifiable river enters into an ocean. He has lost his identity. Now whether he wants to call that ocean Krishna, or the absolute, why, I’d have to examine the writings and see if he’s really consistent.
But there’s no, when you talk about yourself and a God, a personal God, and when you’re a river that empties into an ocean and losing your identity, it doesn’t do you any good. If God’s there, you’re gone, unless God is the ocean. and then it doesn’t matter what the name of it is. I mean it does matter if the name gives you a false conclusion, of being something personal. Of course it’s just the idea of God and Krishna as too often taken as something outside of us; they call it duality, as opposed to monism. I’m a monist. In other words, I cannot conceive the God as standing there watching a man become the absolute. Then you’ve got two people: the absolute and God.
02:29
Q. Couldn’t there be a personal God ?? ?? through the cloud? through that personal relative
R. Yeah, so is the guy next to you. He’s the manifestation of the impersonal God. That’s ?? that’s ??. You are a manifestation of your impersonal God; everyone here is a manifestation of an impersonal God. Why pick one? Why build a church to one man then? Why build a temple? We’re all manifestations; just one guy gets up and says – just like me: I’m getting up and saying, “Here, look.” But this is not Rose-ology. I don’t matter. This carcass doesn’t matter.
03:22
Q. ??
[tape going bad here]
R. You have to pray to yourself. But when you start to create an icon, whether it’s a mental icon or say something that is “living” – the living, this one guy is the living incarnation of God – first of all, don’t pay? anything until you define it as God. [?] This is the idea. It’s too easy to use the euphemisms. That everybody goes down and trying? to say? God – I challenge them and say, “What are you talking about?” this is a mistake. This is why people don’t work. Well, somebody says “God” and then somebody says, “I read the Bible and the Lord told me to tell you ...” And you say, “Oh, yes, I’d better do that.” And somebody else comes along and starts a war because the Lord told him to tell somebody else, something else. [because the Lord told him something else]
04:20
Q. So what about ...
R. [ignoring] You can ?? carnation, see? These Mohammedans, now the Mohammedans chopped the hell out of the Krishnites. And if the people would realize that each one of them is an incarnation of God, they wouldn’t have been fighting. No, but they objectify one name and put it up.
Q. Would you say that the ??
R. No. You’ve got the ...
Q. What about the ?? ??
R. They’re good to read, but you have to go by what you feel, by what’s your experience. They’re good to read, especially after you’ve had an experience, they validate it. You realize somebody else has had one. But they’re no good to you until you have your experience. You’re just dreaming, that’s all, hoping, wishful thinking, postulating again. ?? ??
Q. What would you say about Christian mysticism, in reference to a Godhead? ?? in Christ.
R. Well, when you hear the accounts of Christian mystics, they have reached the same thing. Absolutely. This is what I discovered: I was born and raised a Christian. And I went all over into Asia [figuratively] for my exotic trip. But when I came back I realized that there were Christian mystics who had found it, but I didn’t pay any attention to them because all I knew were hucksters. I mean, the Christian churches I found were full of hucksters, or liars, who were just eating off of the public and that sort of thing, and giving you double talk, ?? fundamentalistic interpretations of a book. That when “I translated it, I found out that they didn’t know what they were talking about, literally. The literal translation was wrong. And they’re taking this book and beating you on the head with it for ten percent of your wages
06:17
But there are Christians, there are Christians, St. John of the Cross, there are Christians who reached the goal – the truth is in you, ?? St. John of the Cross and you. The truth is in the Confucianist, if he wants to find the truth. The only thing is, he can’t prove? and say it’s only in Confucianism, it’s only in Christianity, it’s only in Zen. That’s what I’m trying to get away from. If anybody tells you it’s only in something, watch out.
06:47
Q. I guess what I was trying to get around to was, I’ve met many people who ?? are trying to develop a personal relationship with that Godhead and with Christ ...
R. Right, there are gurus in India who are homosexuals falling? over their masters.
Q. ... do you think that’s acknowledge? knowledge? or do you think that you can go for a vehicle of say, one who, one Godhead? Do you think they’re a manifestation of Godhead?
R. You don’t, you don’t, I don’t want you to consider one Godhead. I don’t want you to consider anything.
Q. If you do that, do you think that you get stuck at a certain ...
R. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t want you to get hung up. I don’t say to accept anything until you validate it. This is what I’m opposed to, just accepting. But I maintain, that from my point of view, that, from what I discovered, and of course you can’t accept that either. You find out for yourself. I maintain that we’re all an emanation of this, same thing.
07:46
Q. You keep talking about truth – what do you consider truth? How do you know what truth is?
R. There’s no such thing as truth, except when you become. When you talk of truth, you talk of learning the answer, knowing the answer. There is no such thing as knowing. And yet you have to follow this. You have to read books, you have to know the books, you have to know certain answers, to ?? get through life. But in the final analysis there’s no truth, no knowing. The method is becoming. You will become the truth. And that’s the little thing in the Bible everybody misses: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” He didn’t say, “I know it.” But, “I am.” And then they read that, the preachers read it – and they never get it. They say, “No, you’ve got to pay. You’ve got to learn, you’ve got to study,” all this sort of thing. “You’ve got to go and study theology and be a minister before you can find the truth. You’ve got to read the Bible.”
These things may help; if you get a book in front of you, no matter what the book ?? it will stimulate meditation. But I’m not saying that that – if you’re ever going to learn the truth, that means that you’re never going to learn proof. [?] But you’re going to be proof? ?? find out ?? because we’re talking about retreating from the impossibility, improbable, and approaching that which is more sensible. Because this is what we’re stuck with right now. We’re in a relative dimension in which things are settled according to proof.
09:18
In other words, to give you an example, the preacher doesn’t believe in drinking booze. So we go down and catch him in the beer joint and he’s drunk. We have proof of his inconsistency. That’s all. See what I mean? That type of proof we have. Somebody says, “Well, I can raise the dead,” we can prove him wrong because he failed to raise the dead. These things are proof – in our search for validity among mundane teachers? or something of that sort. But in the final analysis, there’s no theological proof.
That’s the reason, if you can go directly, if you can bypass all the fundamentalistic readings, whether that’s the sutras – I include the sutras – same as the Bible, anything. It’s here. [tape garbled] we have theorized? that’s kind of the ?? from? looking? at? scripture?
And even this book – that’s the reason I condensed it – I tried to write as little as I could, because this is to? provoke thought. because the basic path is inside yourself. Sometimes you have to stop and go outside yourself and say, “Hey, Jack how do I go inside myself? How did you go inside yourself.” So ack tells you how. Then you get rid of Jack and go inside yourself.
[quiet period]
10:44
Q. Um, in that Ramana Maharshi book, he was talking about the guru, the guru as a way of helping you find the ?? ?? How important, okay, I just heard about this group, I apologize? – how is it changed from having a group of people who are coming to work together, to reflect each other? If you bring someone in who is enlightened – what is your role? I guess is what I’m asking.
R. Well the thing is, the people, I say it’s good, it’s better to labor with a group of people who are pretty much on the same level of enlightenment or awakening, because you help them? to? work? with yourself. Because you’ll progress. 11:40 You can get off the track, if you conduct a search, [?] for a year at a time. I know people who do it: a whole year of their life is shot. Forget about it, won’t pick up a book for a year, something to think about it. [?] Some take some time to ?? taking a rut. [?]
11:50
But the group has that value, if it will remind you. The group has voltage. We found this out too, that voltage is generated by a group of people. “When two or more are gathered together, I am in their midst.” That means, you want to know who says, I am”, that’s the absolute essence, that is in the foreground, so to speak.
And of course now if you bring in somebody who’s had, ?? , he’s a guide. He’s a guy who went down through the woods before you. He comes back and he says, “I know a shortcut. Now you could wander around if you want to for 10 or 20 years. But I know how to get through that jungle.” So, you try to validate that teacher if possible. because he could be leading you around too for 10 or 20 years.
But basically, that’s the reason I say that when you know the direction, you really don’t need a teacher. Unless just maybe for it [him] to help you over some of the hurdles or something like that. You say, “Well, I have a problem, what do you think about it?” Well that expedites. Or if the guy comes to you and says, “I’d like to join this movement. I can get anything I want just by chanting a certain mantra.” Some people based in Pittsburgh have this: “Oh, we’ve got this mantra and all we have to do is chant that and we can get anything we want.”
13:09
Q. They call that ?? ?? ??
R. Yeah, but will they get? Will they get enlightenment? Now this is the question. Supposing you say, “Yes, I’ll stay and I want enlightenment.” Now that’s a bit of an argument there. Because I’m not, I have never encountered anybody who has received enlightenment that way, I can’t argue too much on it. But I do know, there’s one branch, they call them Amida Buddhists, who chant the name of Buddha, and they say there have been people who reached enlightenment from it. I can’t say they haven’t; I just don’t know if anybody has. I have met very few people in my lifetime who are enlightened. One was a Zen monk [ adept ] and the other was a Christian mystic, who used the Lord’s Prayer.
13:44
That’s the reason I don’t laugh at anything, at any group. But I do say you’ve got to be careful, because you can get hung up in some things. Like you could say, “I want to develop my aura.” I’ve heard guys say, “I want to develop my ESP,” and they’d fiddle around with cards and stuff for years, thinking that if they expanded their mind, their mental potential, that they would eventually expand that mind to include Russia, China and then Mars, the Moon and God knows what. All sorts of this kind of garbage.
14:14
Q. ?/
R. Krishnamurti? Yes, I have a lot of respect for Krishnamurti. I think he’s in the right ?? I think he gets off the beam a bit sometimes but he’s ?? man.
Q. ?
R. This is basically what we’re doing. This is what we’re doing. See, in the final analysis you don’t know anything, but you’re aware. This is what remains, awareness. And Ramana Maharshi mentions it: awareness, consciousness, bliss. [sat-chit-ananda] I take issue with the word “bliss” – I don’t know why he put that one in there, because that’s a relative term. But what it is I think is eternal contentment, what it means. See I take? those connotations from the word bliss. But the thing is awareness. You have to become aware of your awareness.
Q. ?? ?? organizing things to stop an energy drain ??
R. Yeah, yeah, right. Energy drains. If he does a lot of it, it has? meaning? Because I’m not going anyplace. I’m blowing out my last fuses. [laughter]
Q. How are you, how does ?? experience?
R. You can’t help yourself.
Q. Then why do you want it for eternity? Eternal contentment.
R. Well, you don’t say, I don’t say a man should want eternal contentment. You want the answer.
Q. I mean, what do you want the answer then to what?
R. Your definition. Who you are. Where you came from, where are you going?
Q. And what will that do, in the final analysis?
R. What will that do for you? It will do nothing for you., small-y you. It won’t do anything for you.
Q. ??
R. Well, you’ll be there. You’ll become.
16:06
Q. And what will ?? be different?
R. How can you juggle mundane ideas [tape slipping] and values against absolute values? Then you’re trying to get ?? talking in relative values: What’s the utility of the absolute? And in absolute terms you might be looking back and saying, “What the hell is a value in a nightmare or a dream, or wherever it came from?” And the guy down in the dream, he’s saying, “ [tape jamming]
Q. What would you say the nightmare is?
R. ??
Q. ?? the absolute ? ? eternal contentment. Do you agree with that?
16:52 R. Yes.
Q. ... that the awareness ... R. Let me point out – first of all, it’s impossible to evaluate or describe an absolute condition. But I would say this, that from where I sit today, I am content with what I found.
Q. ?? this awareness, this absolute awareness ? ? ?
R. Yes, that’s the psychological definition.
Q. Are you saying the awareness is always aware of its awareness?
R. No, no. You’re generally aware of what you’re projecting. The mundane world is a projection. We’re fascinated by our own projection – and don’t know who’s projecting.
Q. I’ve heard that ?? being aware ?? after they were asked about it – awareness was so? still? present, awareness of ? ?
R. ? ? talk? tell? otherwise. [a little laughter]
18:29
Q. To? show? that? big self is aware of the big self you have? ??
R. Yes. [otherwise] I wouldn’t waste your time. Because if you would be going to obvivion /? ? [tape jam] would be crazy if people just enter oblivion. The best thing would be to hide it from your children so they don’t know.
Q. Do you feel then ?? leave the earth? [tape jam] ?? ... that drop, as it merged, the ocean, comes down as a drop again?
R. That’s what Maharshi said, remember? That which enters the ocean can never be redirected.
[tape is rewound, restarted] You don’t redirect the river from the ocean. Your awareness might – the scope of that awareness is not predictable from this point. I wouldn’t undertake to predict what could happen. But there’s – from where we view it there’s no need to redirecting your energy or your consciousness, limiting it, for instance, from the totality down to a conviction that you’re one being, one little tiny ant or one dog or one human.
20:14
So I can’t conceive of why that would happen. I’m not saying it might not happen. There are stories told of this that after a death we return, but then we deliberately steep ourselves or dip ourselves back into unconsciousness, which is this life.
Q. As most people life it.
R. Yeah. Then the avatars are supposed to come down and somehow get the hunch that they are eternal, and they try to take a few people out of the nightmare. But what the purpose behind all this is, say, when you reach enlightenment you’ll know everything, but you’ll not know how many hairs are on the dog’s head. So the details and all of the possible – it’s impossible to, with our concept today of consciousness, which is focused on one thought at a time, it’s impossible for us to conceive of knowing all possible thoughts.
21:18
So we can’t, that’s the reason you can’t visualize the, what I call the “magnitude of the Unknowing”. Because the absolute condition is somehow tied, as well as to hidden? knowledge, it’s also tied to total un-knowledge. It’s the state of everythingness and nothingness. But always remember to add that second one too: the state of nothingness as well. As regards – when we talk about this [taps on lectern] as being something. This something still exists, but, tremendously different evaluation of it.
Q. Do you agree with what Maharshi says, this guy, Ramana Maharshi, talks about the relative world as if a dream. Do you agree with that too?
R. Yes.
Q. And what do you see as the value, or how could this dream ever come out ... ?
R. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. In other words, I don’t know why Cecil B. DeMille wrote a picture. All I know is I went to the show and paid to see it. Somebody projected it, maybe I was one of the actors, I’m standing in the picture show. You remember, he’s got the analogy of the picture show. I’m watching the show, that’s all. Then there’s a time when you say, “Hey, I could be out there sitting and watching this show, instead of being up here all fevered up and imagining that I’m running it.” So we retire and we go back into the audience and watch the show. 22:56
[long silence]
23:14
Q. So is the lever? of enlightenment, it is becoming the same as what’s thought of as God, the Godhead?
R. Well, I wouldn’t say, “What’s thought of as a God.” That’s the reason I use the word absolute, because God has gotten to be a bad word. But, you know, what I mean is there are so many connotation that are put on it. And every huckster comes up and says, “God told me to tell you.” And the result is, that as soon as anybody hears the word God – that’s the reason we have so many of our young people today going to some other continent for religious inspirations. Because they’re justifiably fed up with somebody abusing the most sacred thing on earth, which is our thinking.
24:12
I’m opposed to this abuse. I often say that we have pure food and drug laws: they can’t put filth in your candy, or filth in your food. But some huckster can pick up a Bible and fill your head full of crap just to get some money off of you. And they’ll admit it if you get intimate enough with them. If you get to them and get to talking to them they’ll say, “Well, yeah, we keep your women happy. But don’t interfere. These ladies come in here and they don’t scream when they die, or if they do, it’s just right before they die.” They keep them hypnotized or reassured or comforted. “This is a comfort, and we hold their hand when they’re dying, and this is a service, and we should be funded for our service.”
And it becomes a utility. I’m opposed to this sort of thing. And of course they’re employing the word God, and a whole generation of people are fed up with this abuse of the word. So immediately – not only that, but it has another connotation, of somebody that talks to a huckster. It isn’t somebody that talks to a huckster. The poor huckster is God. zhe doesn’t know it, or he’d take a different path. He’s basically the God.
That’s why I believe in saying, “Hey, look inside yourself. Don’t keep trying to buy it for five hundred dollars. Or you give somebody two hundred bucks for a syllable to repeat. You can get them out of a book, or you can create one yourself. You can find tranquility from repeating anything. Hocus-pocus, that will do.
25:49
Q. What do you think of, an everyday, like the existence of, that we’re being right now making decisions for, you know, we’re divineness-aware, something like that? [Rose says nothing, pause] I don’t understand what this enlightenment is.
R. I don’t either. I don’t understand how I can tell you. I don’t want to tell you. I want to confuse you. In other words, it’s not verbalizable. You shouldn’t be concerned with enlightenment. It came up in the conversation here, and I tried to talk to you, but basically this is not our objective here. If I said that the objective of this group is enlightenment, I would by lying to you. The objective of this group is to define yourself.
26:37
Now if, as the result of defining yourself you reach an experience which later you define as enlightenment, good. But don’t go at it, you’re postulating, whenever you start off with that word. You shouldn’t postulate it.
26:54
Q. I’ve? heard? that the path to enlightenment is awareness, optimism and discrimination. That that sums it up.
R. What was that again? Awareness ...
Q. The path to enlightenment is awareness, optimism and discrimination.
R. Yeah, that sounds good. Sounds good. Buddha laid down some good precepts on that; I mean, the Eightfold Path – those are all good advice. The threefold path of first knowing one thing, then first studying everything, then studying nothing. These are good, but they are not necessarily the last word. I mean, there are other little hints that you can get too that will help. But what I’m trying to get you away from is – I’m not advocating, I’m not saying that if you come here you’ll get enlightened. I know this pops up, and everybody has read about it. It’s like Alan Watts – he wrote a lot of books, and what was the gist of Watts books on Zen? That enlightenment was an orgasm.
28:03
But he’s trying to define something in relative terms – which throws the reader, perhaps. If he really did know, it’s going to throw the reader. And there’s nothing I can say about it that will not throw you. The only thing I can say is that, we basically, if we’re sincere human beings, want to know the truth. And that’s our self-definition.
28:22
Q. What do you call the truth? Or how do you define truth?
R. That which is not untrue.
Q. ?!
R. If I could define the truth for you, you’d be enlightened.
Q. How could something be untrue?
R. Well, by virtue of the fact that if something can be true, there has to be something untrue. Now we’re speaking in a relative sense again. It’s manifestly – in other words, if I point to a cat and tell you that’s a dog, can’t that be untrue? Okay, that’s a simple one.
29:04
Q. Um, we were talking about prayer before. Do you believe that one could pray to a personal God for direction, just as you ask a teacher for direction?
R. Well, I don’t approve of either one. I mean I don’t approve of using either one of those as a system.
Q. If you need help sometimes. Yu make your way when you can.
R. Yeah, but see you’re ...
Side B ends at 29:33
Footnotes
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