Psychology-of-the-Observer-book-text

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Notes

This is the text from the HTML page by Vikas.

1. Need to compare with the actual book.

2. Need to compare with the talks it was taken from.

Needs to insert diagrams.

Text

PSYCHOLOGICAL DIRECTIONS

Psychology, as we know it in this century, is the observation of the behavior and responses of man. It would like to be a science, but in its analyses it ignores some of the factors. It is in itself, not pure, but is part business and part politics. It is not rooted upon the firm earth of materialistic proof, and yet it hovers close to that earth, afraid to explore the higher, or more subjective fields of enquiry. It hangs in mid-air like a space-platform, -- massive as to its paradigm, but very weak as to direction and substance.

Such a psychology is only pretensively scientific. I have elsewhere made the remark that the pursuit of psychology along behaviorist lines is similar to that of a geologist taking soil samples in order to determine the essence at the core of the earth.

Most modern psychology, (as taught in universities), does no more than try to anticipate herd desires or instincts. Man is being treated as though he should not act like an individual, but he may well be one. And his essence, his purpose, and his mind can be better known by looking into that most individualized function,-- which is thought.

The psychological writers sensed that they were doing this... skirting the fringe... or else they would not have redefined psychology away from its meaning of "science of the psyche" to an interpretation emphasizing the mind as being somatic, and one that responds to mechanical or material tests. They hold the conviction that materialistic and tangible proofs will appear, or at least there will appear laws that will bear formulae similar to the formulae in the material sciences.

Psychology's only claim to scientific grandeur, is its feeble effort to be predictable. It pricks the surface of the body and predicts to some degree of accuracy how most people will react... but that is how most people's bodies will react.

If you plant a certain seed in the soil, you can anticipate a standard reaction. But this tells us nothing about the center of the earth... or the ultimate destiny of this planet. Likewise reflexes tell us little about the psyche of man or about his source, intended purpose, and all of the unknown factors that work toward those designs.

Current psychology is nothing more than a paradigm. A few people such as Kuhn and Chilton Pearce have made note of this. Quite a few psychologists, beginning with Jung, have admitted that the behavior of the mind cannot all be discovered, catalogued and categorized by studying the body alone. And it will take years of effort to repair the damage done by the behaviorists, and get back to the study of thought instead of reflexes.

We must ignore professional survival. We criticized the witch doctor for spreading an unproven dogma for the purpose of arousing faith in his medicine, and we revert to the same "primitive" sin.

We must not get into ecumenical reciprocity with the other witch doctors, -- mutual back scratching, that is, with special allowances for union brothers. Everyone is not correct just because they went through the apprenticeship and are steady dues-payers.

Unless modern psychological trends are reversed, psychology and psychiatry will not only be useless, they will become diseases. The pose of possessing expertise in interpreting and controlling behavior is a fraudulent pose for the sake of funding and acceptance as a social regulator.

They will only contribute to the increasing sickness of society. The Skinnerian approach is one of over-simplification. The sins of the behaviorists are legion. They pick out only that which they wish to see, label the prescriptions of anyone outside their guild as being "bad medicine."

Regardless of the efforts by many behaviorists to skirt the vast, unknown psychological territory, which should be familiar territory to them, they can never escape the constant challenge to their inadequate understanding of the mind, and by mind I do not mean the somatic mind, alone.

There are many phenomena of a mental nature that they blithely brush aside, because there is no explanation for those phenomena within the limited domain of their paradigm. What do they have to say about ESP, established cases of telepathy, psycho-kinetic performances, materializations, or deja-vu experiences, not to mention many other phenomena which seem to infer that we have a mind-element beyond the reflex system and the brain?

While some psychologists admit the phenomena as being valid experiences, many deny their authenticity, and some go as far as to attack the sincerity of those who testify or submit to scrutiny. To the combative behaviorist, telepathy may be the reading of facial muscles or plain connivance by the two parties involved, psychokinetic demonstrations and materializations come under the heading of simple fraud and manipulation, and deja-vu experiences to them are really cases where something happens to a person and later that person imagines that he had a prior dream or hunch that it was going to happen.

The behaviorist is inclined to remind us that his province is that of mental illness which to him is synonymous with physical illness because he treats it with physical drugs. He brags that he has a drug for every complaint. Yet privately he must realize that he is curing nothing. He is removing the symptom, only. So will a tourniquet around the neck, or a sledgehammer. There seems to be no concern for the long range effects of drugs, the concern is for society, and the patient must be converted to something congruous to the current social passions.

The behaviorist hides behind a facade of objectiveness and practicality. That which he does not see, does not exist. Certain factors in behavior are beyond his comprehension, so they are labeled as being "subjective". Of course subjective things do not exist. Morality is a subjective matter, and virtue has become an odious disease... . To the behaviorist, love is subjective, but a valid observer noted that baby monkeys and human babies often died when deprived of affection, or something to which they could affectionately relate. So the paradigm rejects the word love, and replaces it with the word "stroke". They admit that people need to be "stroked", -- and the depths and nuances associated with the word "stroked" may be deeper than we suppose at first glance into this protoplasmic therapy for plastic humans.

According to the modern behaviorist, morality is subjective, being an idea that must be sacrificed for the peace of the herd. Rape can be abolished by training children to submit. With this frontal assault upon morality by the brain trust, we wonder about their private thoughts about religion, which they are not strong enough to attack, as yet.

Behaviorism is a disease. The subtle symptoms in the beginning stages are the processes of creation of new definitions for old words, with a tacit demand that we drop words from our dictionaries that do not conform to their paradigm.

The layman (and all are laymen when it comes to psychology) has no other means of defining terms than the dictionary. No study is doing more to confuse that basic system of human understanding than psychology. The words objective and subjective should be avoided wherever possible. There are so many definitions for the two that they approach being synonyms rather than antonyms, in a few cases. Each author has to designate that which he means by his use of the word. The object of our study in psychology may be subjective determinations. So we then have an objective, which is subjective. As a definition for "objective" we find in Webster "existing only in relation to a knowing subject." I appears that any subjective matter, once it is found to be scrutinizable, is immediately objective.

The word "normal" is another. In psychological use it generally is intended to mean "average", or "average behavior as determined by a normal curve." However, there is another definition and that is "Sane". The average reader is acquainted only with the sanity connotation, but the student of psychology will be influenced by the knowledge of the process of finding averages by using the normal curve, and may forget that "typical" does not mean "sane", being subliminally influenced by the word "normal" to automatically interpret all such findings as infallible indications of sanity.

It was quite typical of many races to eat human flesh. Instances of such cannibalism are not considered "sane" by us, nor was it considered sane by us (our forefathers) when it must surely have been considered sane and proper by those who were cannibals.

If we accept as being "sane" that which is occurring now, or within a particular society, then we are certainly not being scientific, or searching for a true answer. That which is typical is ever changing over the years. Sanity should be a constant which is not encouraged by whim, collective caprice, or the "typical".

A science should have a defined language, and it should begin with a point of reference. Chemistry has to do with material-analysis, so its point of reference is the atomic table. Physics has to do with the substance of matter, with the properties and mechanics of forms of matter, so its scope includes the atomic tables, but also any and all systems of measurements of matter. The point of reference for physics is matter and energy, and their measurements.

The point of enquiry for psychology is the mind. There are two possible points of reference. For non-conspiratorial psychology, it is the knowledge of the mind from a mental viewpoint, which I admit is a next-to-impossible objective. For the behaviorists, the point of reference is the body.

In neither school, are these bases, or points of reference properly defined. Most books of psychology are commentaries which carefully neglect to tie their feelings or findings to an established foundation of psychological knowledge... .perhaps because there is no foundation or real agreement as to terms.

However, some awesome terms are thrown out for the benefit of the customers. We have not yet distinguished whether schizophrenia is a disease of the brain, one of the toenails, or is some degree of possession. Paranoia is normal. All animals and humans have it, and had better have it in order to survive. Yet, the behaviorist argues that we do not have these fears every hour, and every day of our lives... so paranoia is the exception rather than the rule; and they want it included in the abnormal category of attitudes.

It is the policy of the behaviorists largely, to ignore that which they do not see. In dealing with thoughts, they bring all study of thought to an abrupt halt by ignoring the total subjective process, and admitting as evidence only things which in reality may only be the result of thought, namely reflexes.

They do not wish to properly analyze this thing called seeing. Who is seeing? And, what is the quality of this seeing? Can we gather dependable scientific evidence as a result of this seeing? What sees?

Modern psychology leaves a large gap in the very beginning of its paradigm structure. I think that there is a pretence that we should all understand that we are the body. I do not agree that I am only a body, so I require a definition, in greater depth.

I am convinced that there is more than that which is seen. Viruses are not seen, yet we admit their presence. But the doctor tells us that we admit the existence of viruses by their effects. By the same token, can we not admit thoughts as being something more than reflexes, by virtue of their effects... .such as psychokinetic events?

The basic words or tools of psychology are undefined. What is thought? What is sanity?... is it something else than the rate of incidence as indicated on the so-called, normal curve?

It is becoming increasingly evident that man is not a body alone. We are more than that which we see. In the study of the physical self, one of the first things that we learn is that our senses are inadequate. This dimension is not properly viewed by us, so that if there are other dimensions or planes of experience, their intangibility makes them more inaccessible and unmeasurable. But this does not justify our pretence that they do not exist.

There is a mountain of evidence available that would endorse for us the premise that man is more of a reactor than a doer. If we look at our daily actions, we see them to be the results of previous actions, or of reactions by us to events or stimuli from the environment. And such reactions, in themselves, appear to be programmed.

But it never occurs to most of us to ask, "Who is being programmed?" Nor do we seem perturbed to note that we fail to deny that we are automata, even though each of us feels profoundly separate and unique from our fellow man, so that we view ourselves with the full force of intuition and conviction as being something beyond the body and despite the reflexive limitations.

I maintain that it is equally valid to presume that we are never that which is seen. If we refer to the group of cel-colonies that make up the body, and wish to define ourselves as being only a physical body, we immediately wind up with little to stand on, and little that is definite as far as definition goes. Life is apt to prove that our definition rapidly diminishes to zero, as the body ages and vanishes.

The hand which we think is an integral part of us, and a very evidential part of this materialistic self, can be lost, and we would then presume that a part of our self is forever gone. The legs can be amputated, and we still are self-aware. Kidneys and heart can be replaced and life goes on, as well as consciousness. The brain is manifestly not expendable, but some who survive severe cerebral injuries and unconsciousness attest that they maintained a condition of awareness in regard to their environment.

And strangely enough many cases, where severe cerebral impairment has occurred, manifest an awareness of another dimension. In other words we have testimony from people who were pronounced clinically dead, to the effect that they were aware of other planes or dimensions, as well as the people in or from this dimension. (See Moody's Life After Life.)

Truly, if we are that which sees, it is not the hands, legs, heart, kidneys, flesh, intestines, eyeballs, ears, or any specific master switch in the brain. We are not that which is seen. We are basically the observer.

In matters of self-observation the view must never be construed as the viewer. When a fellow insists that he be identified as that which we see, he is correct, in that as far as we are concerned he is only a view. But from his point, or true perspective, it is doubtful if he accepts himself as being merely that which I see. Even the psychologist who bravely defines himself in these terms, does not really believe that he is a robot. If he did he would be compelled to lose interest in the game of life, and in his role as a helpless pawn.

We say repeatedly, that the body is all that we have. And by saying this we imply that something has the body. We also imply that this body constitutes our only contact with reality as we see reality from that body, and through that body.

So that in relation to the reality that is witnessed by our body, the body is very real, and may be the only self we will know with the mundane viewing apparatus. It is only when we become aware of another dimension, that we are able to give a just evaluation of this dimension -- from a detached point of observation.

This is where all psychologists miss the point in the business of evaluating the mind. Even if they admit that there is a separateness, or entity called mind, their view of that mind is with the mind. Through many ages only the mystic was able to come up with the answer as to the real nature of the mind. We might even say that the untutored LSD addict may have a clearer view of the nature of the mind which we ordinarily believe, or accept as being our thinking process,-- because he gets a glimpse from beyond our conventional thinking processes and limited sensory input.

Candy cannot be described in terms of candy. All definition requires a description or reference to things that a thing is not. The mind must be viewed from outside the mind.

DELUSION

At this point it would appear that we have given up on studying the mind, -- that I am conceding that the materialistic approach is the only correct one, and that we have come full circle back to the original point of error futility.

Our science cannot help but start with a materialistic, or radical discipline. However, if it is truly objective, we will discover little agreement with the behaviorists in the long run, and our realizations will inevitably become subjective.

To explain this, I feel that we should be methodical in our approach and not rely on wishful-thinking as regards our real nature. If we begin our examination of the self without preconceptions we will be less likely to produce or discover only an echo to our desires. On the other hand, I believe because of my own personal experience, that such an orderly, and scientific approach to self-observation will nevertheless lead to subjective realizations, that truly will be extraneous to and ulterior to, that which we would now call our somatic or mundane.

In any laboratory of chemistry or physics, the analysis is not much better than the precision of the measuring instruments. In the business of analyzing our self, our findings will be conditional to the accuracy of our tools which are our senses.

So the self-analyst must run a check on his senses before he records too much sensory data, and begins to interpret it as law. It is also a good idea to read the works of colleagues who have done some testing and have recorded their observations. As far back as Plato (Plato's Republic) we find that some men were aware that things were not as they appeared to the senses. Here we find Plato describing man as a being chained in a cave of shadows, reading the shadows as his only reality, when the true reality was the light outside the cave which created the shadows. Some of the most dynamic contributions to psychology were not made by psychologists. (the latter were to busy packaging their questionable commodity.) Ouspensky has some worthy comments in the first chapter of his book The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. Bertalanffy, was a biologist, but he contributed more to psychological understanding than Freud. Of my readings, Jung stands alone as the sole psychologist with concern for the truth about the nature of man, -- more than for the success of his practice.

Van der Leeuw, depicts with greater dexterity than any other writer, the predicament of man in relation to his senses. Chilton Pearce has the courage to attack the universal paradigm. Paul Brunton writes of the encouragement by man of a realm of illusion. (Wisdom of the Overself.)

It is not difficult to see, first that our senses are inadequate, and secondly that we fall into the trap of collective acceptance of a belief status for things rather than a relentless personal investigation of measurements and checking systems for the senses.

We need only to look at a hologram to realize that we cannot be sure of that which we think we see. Because of the concave surface of the retina, and the convex surface of the iris of the eye, all incoming sights are inverted. However, somewhere inside the mind, or brain, the picture is adjusted once more and we relate properly to the things which we encounter in the environment.

Once we are aware of this ability of the mind to readjust images, we become aware of a process that occurs continually within the mind. And once we become aware of the processes of the mind involved in this instance, we have begun to examine the mind by observing processes brought to our attention by the scientific knowledge of lenses and the consequent human adaptation to the inversion.

While science may help us in some mental realizations, science is not infallible in itself. A few years back science announced with an absolute and infallible air, that the universe had been completely reduced to an exact and unchangeable number of elements, which was a figure less than one hundred. Chemistry has made many concessions since then, and has added about twenty elements to its table.

An item to take note of is that science does not explain all that it sees, nor does the scientist see all that he explains. Many explanations in the scientific fields are only concept structures. Kuhn, as quoted by Ornstein, (Psychology of Consciousness), testifies that science is only a paradigm, created by agreement. In each century the "authorities" of science and medicine had to reluctantly admit that the claims of their predecessors were false or insufficient. Yet the same authorities never hesitated to demand that we treat their hypotheses as law. With the discovery of oxygen, the phlogistic theory had to be renounced. Some mistakes are not renounced, they are just neglected, and gradually forgotten.

Science often makes a half-hearted attempt to explain many phenomena which appear to be beyond the pale of present scientific explanations. I am thinking particularly of instances such as levitation, psychokinesis, and unidentified celestial objects. Scientists would prefer to write all of these off as eigher hallucinations or deliberate trickery.

Yet science would ask that we accept its subliminal explanations, and only its version, of things that pertain to a particular concept structure which it entertains. Science talks of viruses which it does not see, and conceives an anti-matter which would place in jeopardy its own previous concepts of the indestructibility of matter. It reduces the electron down to component force fields and with this it boldly, if not unwittingly, places chemistry in the realm of metaphysics. And all of this is done without seeing this anti-matter, or this force field, even with the most modern microscope.

My point is that if the material-scientist can prove himself to be inadequate, or inaccurate, and not the possessor of a total knowledge of all things, then the infant science of psychology, and its methodology which pretends to be a science, is more inexcusable when it legislates with shamanistic fear, -- a fear of an exposure of its inadequacy to explain phenomena in its field.

So that, if you wish to be scientific about the examination of the self or mind of man, you must bear in mind that not all authoritative pronouncements on the matter are honest or radical. You have to check the source, and if the source is human, we must perhaps check his personal motivation for his findings. It may be profitable for him to ignore a problem if the solution will lessen his importance or prove him to have been previously in error.

We are deluded by those in authority, and by this I mean that certain groups, or professions are legally recognized as authorities on subjects, and these people bear the responsibility for maintaining tradition despite its ignorance or inadequacy. However, the law in itself is not scientific, -- it operates largely by precedence. And it endows titles and authority in a similar manner or sort of precedence. Only an "authorized" psychologist can teach psychology. If the authorized teacher is a fool, or belongs to a particular fanatical school, then the scientific or truthful element in psychology may be lost.

We are particularly deluded by the psychological scientist when he makes pronouncements about the mind without ever properly defining the mind and the nature of thought. We are further deluded by him in his failure to properly define the self, and for improperly implying the opposite, a non-self that must take testimony from another non-self (the Reflex-Robot.)

SELF DELUSION

Many people wish to be deluded. Some wish to believe that they are a unique and eternal creature of limitless rights and individual "potentials," while they are in church. However, in a post-orgiastic funk, they will embrace any behaviorist doctrine that asserts that the body is all that is important.

If a person cannot free himself from self-delusion there is no use trying to buck the "system" of authoritative ignorance.

We delude ourselves about the identity of the self, and while we all admit being able to see, we know little about the process. By observing the process of seeing, we will learn more about "he who is seeing," and will inevitably get into the machinery of self-delusion, and perhaps learn how to circumvent the machinery.

Even before we know the true self properly, we can realize that we are deluded by our environment, and that we are capable of deluding our self. We talk ourselves into things which later we repudiate. We become victims of excesses and later denounce the convictions that led us into addiction. We project qualities upon people only to learn that we were grossly wrong in our projection. We adopt entire philosophies, not because of an orientation toward Truth, but because of rationalization and the same motives manifested by animals, or by men who will ultimately try to justify behavior similar to animals.

When we talk of self-delusion, we cannot help notice that we have admitted a personal dichotomy, in that one part of us is doing something (deluding) to another part. If you admit that you delude yourself, you immediately recognize that there is a part of self that is true, or truth-oriented, and another part that can deliberately or unwittingly delude the other part. We should note at this time, that it is the truth-oriented part of the self that has the erroneous judgment. The errors are imposed upon it by a lesser or mundane self, or by desires which may be only a fragmentary part of the mundane self... or parts that may only be voices or appetites. Yet they may be determining factors of lethal proportions.

It is the Observer that is the victim of the delusion. Delusions often have an adverse effect upon the body, as well as upon the mind. So that we have a self, self-particles or appetites that establish themselves as being extraneous to the Observer. So that it is apparent that at times the inner self, or anterior observer is incapable of infallible apprehension... and even more it is capable of distorted creations.

DEFINING THE SELF

For the purpose of consistency I would like to begin by defining the self as the observer. We must separate the view from the viewer. The view is not the viewer, unless we wish to speculate on the two merging somewhere in an absolute state of awareness.

It is my belief that behaviorist psychologists failed to take note of this mental duality. Man's behavior is observable, but the behavior is not him. Man is not that which does, but that which observes the action. Yet man can be deluded, and one form of that delusion is conditioning, whether the conditioning be traditional or intentional.

I prefer to define the self, (small-s) as being the observable part of us, and the capital-S Self as being the Observer. The latter is the real Self, the former is our most immediate environment, (body with its reactions). Consequently I will capitalize certain words such as Observe, to denote a special significance for that word.

Let us start with the body. Earlier I pointed out the absurdity of identifying the body as the only self. The body-self diminishes but the quality of the observing Self does not diminish when the limb is amputated. The eyeballs themselves can be removed, but the Observer still "sees".

The eyeball does not see. However, without the eyeball, the mind does not see either. Upon studying the process of sight, we come to the conclusion that seeing comes about only when the eyeball, connecting nerves, readjusting brain-mind, and still another factor visualization, interact simultaneously.

In other words, the senses inaccurately apprehend, so that the recipient mind translates the incoming data from the inadequate senses and then projects a picture back upon the source of the percept to suit the purpose of adaptation. This projection is called visualization.

This faculty of visualization is the lever by which the mind is able to direct the hand to reach for things accurately in an upside-down world. All seeing (or incoming sensory data- involves visualization. We live in a projected world.

If lower-form animals do not have the ability to perceive the same colors, which we see, then they live in a different or incomplete projection. If certain animals possess superior, or wider range as to hearing and smelling, or homing instincts, then we live in a limited projection.

The average person thinks that he sees, or takes in, the same image that he projects. However, we are all aware of the fact that we have optical hallucinations, which the eye of a neighbor does not see. What causes us to see the image in a hologram as being real? Remove the visualization process, or affect it, and the person's world changes. In delirium, perceptions magnify and monsters may appear. Under hypnosis, s subject may be induced to treat a doll as a baby, and a person as a sack of potatoes. Under hypnosis some subjects become immune to pain and to the blistering effects of heat. Does this not indicate that the world of pain is a world of belief in pain? If the pain is projected, and the blister is projected, then perhaps the feet of the firewalker, and the finger of hypnotized subjects are likewise projected.

If you are interested in parallel readings along this line you can read J.J. Van der Leeuw's book, Conquest of Illusion.

The word visualize means "to create." My mind often goes back to the first pages of Genesis. I have always felt that there was a deeper allegory than that which appears literally. Paradise, (in my interpretation), represents direct-mind communication, perhaps among all creatures of all dimensions. Each human has the power to create and to project such visualizations. Visualization was the apple, which the pristine man should have avoided. He opened a new eye, one of his own doing, and closed forever the direct mind's eye. Not even God could find him, and God had to shout to find him.

There are a few experiments, which will demonstrate man's ability to project besides hypnosis. If we color a card black and leave the line white which forms the outline of a face, and then stare at the image for a while, we will be able to see the image upon the wall when we take our eyes from the card. I am not attempting to establish or explain all the biochemical processes involved, but simply point out that man can project, and seemingly witness objects where they do not exist.

We can look at an apple, then close our eyes and still see the apple. We can go a step further and picture a string of yellow diamonds around the middle of the apple. We can visualize the apple as being made of marble with dark veins running through it, and then superimpose upon it the same string of diamonds.

In this manner we create a picture of a new type of apple. And in this manner we may design a new type of body for an automobile, or we may invent an airplane by visualizing the aluminized wings of a bird, supporting a cargo-cabin.

It is important to take note that we are talking about the process called thought, as we know it before having observed it analytically. We are victims of a mental process, visualization, which constantly fools us, and we often identify our self as being our thoughts.

Visualization occurs with every perception, at the time of perception. It must of necessity occur immediately with the arrival of the incoming percept, because the person often is required to act in harmony with and in response to the projection.

We are inclined to think that visualization is something that occurs only in daydreaming. When we hear someone speak of a horse we immediately picture a horse. We may see a black horse. If we do, does it remove our image of the horse to know that according to color-analysis, that the horse is colorless? But we cannot visualize any thing as being colorless unless it is transparent.

Not only do we visualize colors and sounds, but we also visualize personality, which we project upon living creatures.

We come now to a new understanding of our "self," if we admit that our body is not us. We realize that much of the visible world, including our body, may be erroneously projected or visualized.

Are we then the sorting mechanism? Are we the creative force that converts transparent or colorless forms into beings possessing a personality... and perhaps a soul?

Or is the self now a more cognizant element within us, which has the power to view our own inept creativity, and erroneous projection-ability, and which is also able to choose with impeccable intuition the beneficial creations, and beneficial projections of our mental apparatus?

We can now begin to answer these questions by pursuing the role of Observer. This brings us to the admission that we can observe our own behavior, and we can observe not only our own thoughts, but we can observe thought-processes such as visualization and introspection. In discriminating between that which is the Observer, and that which is the observation, we simultaneously define the many observable mental characteristics as being "not us."

This means that the true Self, is always the anterior Observer. And the observation of the anterior observer brings us to the ultimate or Absolute Observer. This sounds at first like a simple verbal manipulation or optimistic formula, but it is in reality, the true method of reaching the realization of the Absolute state of mind pointed to by writers on enlightenment.

All knowledge falls into two categories, outside and inside knowledge. Outside knowledge is the world of the senses, and is anything from celestial constellations to the amoeba in our bloodstream. Most of us wish to know that which is "out there" first. The external world attracts us from the moment of birth. And together with humanity we build an orderly explanation of that which we, humanity, collectively see. Our external world is largely one of agreement, and the material science is really just a system of getting along.

If we decide to check the checker before we get too far into the physical sciences, we may decide that we will never understand the external world properly until we know more about ourselves.

And studying the inside of ourselves is a very simple process. We need not hold a doctorate in psychology to know about our thinking processes. All that is needed is some honest introspection. The findings that result can be stated in very simple terms.

A good beginning would be mirror-staring. We look at the mirror, and at first the image smiles back reassuringly. It implies that we are that which we thought we were.

After a while we will be able to pick up in the reflection, certain moods and appetites. We may see the disastrous effects of some of our vanities, written in our features as time goes on. And sooner or later we will recognize that we are no longer the perfection that we once identified as being ourselves. We begin to realize that we are not a doer as much as a victim. We do not possess things as much as we are possessed by them. The facade of youth, with all of its projection of nobility, begins to fade, we have difficulty creating new forms of nobility to match the phases of decadence that never fail to surprise us as we march through our world of experience.

In early youth we identify with our thoughts and our desires as though they were possessions. People protest that they think and imagine that they are in control of the process. But man can neither stop thinking, nor start thinking. He can rarely choose the subject material for his thought, or the direction that his thoughts will take.

He also thinks that his desires are an expression of his real self, and often announces that he would rather be dead than be freed from his desires. However, if his desires are observable, then desires are objective and "outside." When any subjective considerations are viewed, they immediately become knowable considerations and are then objective. By the use of the word objective, I do not infer that they are material, but I use it in the sense that any writer might in describing a comprehensive study of mental capacities. Freud, would, in other words, consider his observations to be objective, and to constitute a science that he called psychoanalysis.

Whether desires are recognized by us as gestalts or entities, they are external afflictions or assets. They are not us.

It is not difficult to determine that they are "not us." When we take the different desires into consideration, they do not work for the somatic self to any great advantage in some instances, let alone be faultless facets of our real self. We get our clearest pictures of the remoteness of the understanding of the true self by watching the interplay of the desires.

For instance we have the hedonistic desires with their obsessing fetishes. We also have the desire for food, for youthful permanence, for immortality, for power, for security and even for offensive action toward others. We also have an array of fears that result from some of these desires.

If we become obese from the responses to our desire for food, then a fear may set in. The desire has become conflicting with the other desires for youthful permanence and for survival. Hedonistic practices may cause ill health, and once more we realize that these things cannot be "us" because they are about to kill us.

Our conscious hours may become battlefields of these desires, and after a while strange desires, hitherto unknown to us may make their appearances. We may desire peace of mind. Or oblivion.

When we first witness our desires, we begin to detach ourselves from some of them, and deny that they are "us". If we possess a particular sexual fetish that meets with public disapproval, we will begin to deny the affliction publicly while perhaps indulging the fetish privately. If we are caught, then we can blame it on the devil, and lay claim to a desire for immortality.

First we witness the desires, and their interaction, and then we notice that they collectively form a process, which an anterior self is monitoring. Most of us are to some degree, aware of our desires, but few of us are aware of the monitoring procedure. The early Theo psychological authorities referred to this monitor as the Conscience. I prefer to call it the Umpire.

The desires are all beneficial forces for the entity involved. But they can get out of hand. Our desires for immortality can result in inquisitions or holy wars against any unbelievers. Our desire for youthful permanence may lead us to fetal regression. Our desire for the sensuality that results from using drugs may impair our mentality.

The little voice that tries to warn us of these trends, is all that is left of the real self, which is still only a mundane self, and which is the Umpire.

The Umpire might be called the somatic mind. The Umpire, and all of the desires and fears with which it deals are programmed into the body. The Umpire is an observer, planned for the robot, to keep the robot from destroying itself before harvest time.

The sensual drives in man, together with his craving for food are primitive goads to keep him going, and to maintain in him a belief that he is doing something of importance. The desire for immortality, which is really the fear of extinction, may form part of his rationale for reproduction.

Man is programmed to have a strong desire for food and security, and these desires often conflict with the desire for endless sensuality, and if these former desires are not strong enough, the species will deteriorate and lose its health and perhaps become runted down from laziness and inbreeding.

And when man becomes conscious of these things about his nature, and seems to take steps individually and collectively (in the form of moral codes) then his Umpire has become vocal and functional.

It might be a good idea to try, at this point, to define the Umpire in greater detail. I do not think it is necessary to try to relate to all of the concepts that have been given out in regard to mental reaction and mental reasoning.

I maintain that reason is nothing more than a reaction process which goes on in all of us, and is monitored by a built in observer. We all admit to reasoning, but few of us wish to take note that we are able to observe the process. In other words, we lay claim to being the reaction process, instead of that which watches and perhaps, -- decides.

The Umpire is chiefly a somatic mind, the bridge between the material, external world and the anterior mind, meaning the observer of the Umpire. It is the rational mind. In the animal it decides which food to eat, when to rest and when to flee. In the human it makes those same decisions, and perhaps many more....

All actions involve three possible courses to take. The positive, the negative and the neutral. We can take the right road, the left road or remain at the forks.

The word Umpire was chosen because it is simple and descriptive. The word Conscience has the connotation of superstition. Man's moral and spiritual promptings are Umpire-decisions stemming from man's desire to live forever. There is simultaneously within man a sense of essence, a deep feeling that he may be a soul instead of just a body, but the experts (theologians) have given him no more than food for superstitious guessing.

Man cannot see that soul with his body,-with the body senses,-and modern psychology seems to indicate that our most scientific psychologists cannot see the mind even. Man sees the body as well as the physical world with his mind however, despite the inaccurate sensory abilities. This is demonstrated in the comments about visualization.

The mind is still not the Essence. The mind is a cloudy dimension that serves as a bridge between physical projections of the mind and the Essence itself. Since all that we see is projected by the mind to some degree, it is impossible to know much about the material world, except to know that it is not that which it seems, and may be only a mental exudation, and less solid or real than the mind. This projection-world or exudation may not be anything permanent, but may only be a flux of projections, ebbing and waning to the force of whatever projectors are involved.

Only the Essence is real, but to us it is nebulous. It is we who are nebulous, struggling from one shadowy dimension to another. This theme is portrayed vividly in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I do not attempt to prove the Tibetan Book of the Dead. You can consider it to be a very intuitive writing, or just science-fiction.

First, before adopting any books, this exercise should be tried,-this process of pursuing the Observer. We first must admit that if our rational mind can be deluded, then the only remaining point of hoped-for immortality may rest with our evidence of awareness, self-awareness. And the Observer is that which is self-aware, and with this process the Observer can become Self-aware. Then when that latter person reads books like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, he will marvel at the wisdom of a group of people who, thousands of years ago, may well have had the answer -- as well as an accurate psychological system.

The Umpire is not perfect, because it has inadequate senses to feed to it data about the body and the world. We can witness the workings of the Umpire, and this apparency makes the Umpire an observable manifestation. Our evaluation of the Umpire is scientific, because it functions pretty much the same in all people, and consequently its functioning is predictable. Based upon this predictability, contemporary psychology presumes that it can expound a faultless science, -- of psychology.

There is a limit to the predictability of the Umpire, because the Umpire gets some data from a mind dimension which is not immediate or related to the person under scrutiny.

The individual mind is in close contact with the body but it is also in contact with a mind-dimension in which many individual minds participate. This is demonstrated by telepathy, and ESP.

To give an example of this Umpire functioning, one of the reasons that the Umpire is capable of making mistakes, lies in the fact that it does not "see" accurately. The messages coming into it are limited to the color-range of the eyes, the sound-range of the ear, and the taste-range of the taste-buds. The smell-sense and the touch-sense are likewise limited.

Yet all children have the same reaction to the external world. The mind is not infallibly interpreting things, because large groups of people may be fooled by a mirage, having seen the same thing, and later realize that they have no explanation for that which they thought they saw. How many mirages are seen that are believed as being reality and are incorporated into that which is considered to be our material world?

We can always say that adults have been conditioned. But a newly born child or a young animal, in showing a ready acceptance of and agreement with the illusory parts of our world-view, demonstrates that if there was any conditioning of that child or animal, it occurred before the child was born.

And more importantly, how many diaphanous creatures and objects occupy the same space which we do, forever unseen because of some simple difference like a variation in molecular speed, or particle-speed, the particles being the equivalent of electrons in size.

A baby, born untutored in the knowledge that his lenses read things upside-down, does not have to be told how to adjust. It does not have to be told how to cry, the crying is spontaneous, and it is not learned. It occurs before the infant has time to experiment with its voice as it does with its hands.

What is it that teaches a bird or insect to produce a unique noise needed to summon the mate for breeding? We can say that there is a program imbedded in a DNA molecule, but what causes that individual Umpire to allow and encourage a process which has meaning to the individual only after the particular note, or series of notes has been produced?

We can go a step further, and take into account that the world is a partial illusion, at least, in that we only partially experience it, (limited senses can determine a limited experience only). Yet why do all of us see the same things? Even the animals manifest by their behavior that the world that they see is accepted by them, as it is accepted by us, as being real. We find no animals deviating from the belief-plan of world-acceptance, even though their eyes may not have the same color-range, nor their ears have the same hearing-range.

Manifestly all creatures whose bodies are constituted of similar molecular patterns, witness the same type of substance. Some domestic animals seem to be able to see things which are invisible to us, but which are real enough to them so as to fill them with fear. Most of the owners of these animals do not have any doubt that the animal is seeing a "spirit". Yet this ability to witness another dimension by such an animal does not change the animal's acceptance of this dimension as being real also... if such witnessing is real.

It boils down to this: whatever the nature really is, regarding the material world, all creatures are in agreement about it, and they are in touch with it as soon as they are born, if not before, even though that world-view is seriously altered by our imperfect sensory apparatus.

The human mind seems less in touch with the minds of other people than it is with the Universal Projection. By Universal Projection I mean the universal tacit agreement about the nature of our physical world, and the unquestioning acceptance of a destiny that involves a fear of injury and death, which is part of that destiny. We accept, as a part of this life, a fear, of death, which we accept as destiny, even though the destiny is inevitable.

This fear of death may be programmed into us, but the acceptance of it (the fear) is incongruous, especially the acceptance of the fear as being normal and any plotting to outwit death as being psychotic.

Getting back to the capability of the human mind, it seems that we are often out of touch with each other, as to states of mind, to a point where murder results from the inadequate sensing of the motives, or state of mind of the other person. Nevertheless people, all over the world, have no arguments with one another when it comes to general codes of living among their species and between other species. In other words the wolves do not hold world-wide elections and decide that they are going to mate in a marriage type of relationship, and that they will no eat their own species.

The Umpire, besides depending upon the senses for its date, must also be aware of the evidence that it is individually programmed. It is mundane in aspect therefore, and is not aware that it is programmed, nor that it is being moved by the master plan.

The master-plan is contained in the mind dimension from which we, and the physical universe emanate. The mind dimension is like a universal agreement of pre-incarnate man. It is the Universal Mind of Mary Baker Eddy, and the Oversoul of Paul Brunton. I prefer to call it the Manifesting or Manifested Mind. The Manifested Mind emanates from the Unmanifested Mind. The Unmanifested Mind might be likened to the Logos, and the Absolute to the Parabrahm, from which the Logos and the Unmanifested Mind emanates. I do not imply that these comparisons are exactly synonymous, -- I am merely borrowing terms from Theosophy -- because no other comparisons are available.

It is like the cradle of the creation, this cradle being a transformer of an awareness even more powerful, but undifferentiated and more of a universal type of awareness. This latter parent vehicle of awareness I call, Unmanifested Mind. And by Unmanifested, I mean, not witnessable except in the understanding of the phenomena which emanate from it. The major emanating phenomenon which we may experience is the Manifested Mind. It is not entirely unwitnessable. Mystics claim to know of it by entering it.

To get back to the Manifested Mind, we find that it is the prop-room of the creation, a creation which in relation to the Unmanifested Mind from which it emanates is less than real, and is described as being illusory.

The Manifested Mind is that place where the idea or conception of the non-manifesting mind is made flesh. So that all creatures with their complex biological structures, and their even more complex mental structures are Projections of the Manifested Mind.

Within the microcosm of the individual mind, we copy our divine parent and likewise make projections, even more illusory and nightmarish than our inherited nature, or projected existence.

The Manifesting Mind is the Manifested Mind in Action. In other words, the source of man's life can be traced back fairly easily to this dimension. It is witnessable. People on drugs or in deep spiritual states have witnessed it. Thus the name Manifested Mind. It is a living place, a concourse of all souls because all of us can witness it.

Yet when we witness the projections executed by it (the creation) we must call it the Manifesting Mind. They are one and the same, but the two words describe or indicate the incoming life or light from the Unmanifested Mind, which is projected along with a system, upon the collective and individual consciousness of living people.

The Umpire is like the Janus-deity that guarded the doors of old Rome. It looks both ways, toward the physical world, and toward the Manifested Mind. However, it sees both inadequately. Without some cognizance of the master plan of the Manifested Mind, it might make decisions for the benefit of the individual only, totally ignoring the projection and protection of the young. On the other hand it sees the master plan inadequately, because, the Umpire (rational mind) sees little reason for living, and keeps on living. If it could fully see the blueprint for the creation, its identification with all mundane things might lessen, and the individual would be inclined to stop its actions, or to become extremely indifferent to its experiences.

Some of this may be brought out in an explanation of the different types of visualizations that man has, and how they relate to his mental faculties.

Man has three principle mental faculties. He receives, (sees, smells, hears, feels and tastes), records, and reacts. We can call the first a percept, the second, memory, and the third would be reaction, reason or, visualization (which is the mental projection of that which we believe we see when a percept is received). Visualization is the projection literally beamed out of us into our world-view and only then witnessed vainly as reality. This thing seen when so projected may not truly represent the original percept.

Man seems to have little control over these faculties. Even his reasoning is colored by his desires, and his desires seem more related to the overall human blueprint than to the individual welfare or understanding. The purpose of sex to the individual seems to be pleasure, but the Umpire gives us another reading. We are smitten with love, and while smitten we feel that we have transcended even the animal passions which aroused our curiosity. The Umpire makes decisions for love, and for possession or mutual fidelity, as though it had itself transcended this dimension and is making a decision based upon some tremendous insight into the Unmanifested Mind. The Umpire's decision in this matter is often regretted, and reversed, and the Umpire momentarily is dismayed that it could have erred so drastically. Especially if someone gets killed over the love affair.

However, the Umpire is programmed to keep on, individual after individual, and generation after generation, making the same mistake and accepting the ability to err as part of its destiny.

Getting back to the three main functions of man, I would like to break down the three faculties of Perception, Memory and Reaction. Perception is of two types, the Percept or sensory type, and mental perception. Memory is the material record of the senses, and another input type of memory is that which represents the phenomena listed as DNA, Archetypal, or prenatal. Reaction involves the physical response to stimuli, and attitudinal responses to the environment, but it also represents the function, which I called projection, which is essentially visualization. Projection is the result of a translation, which occurs upon the receipt of a simple percept, which was a sensory percept.

So that we have sensory perception, mental perception, sensory memory, and ultra-sensory memory, reflexive reaction, and projection.

We must deal first with perception. Most people think that we just pick up things with our senses, that the eye sees, and the ear hears, and that these organs relay the seeing and hearing to the brain, -- and then somewhere inside the brain, the brain thinks about it.

Then a few people who have noticed the deceptive nature of the senses, come to the conclusion that the eye does not see, but just relays impulses to the brain, and this is followed by an adjustment inside the brain. However, this latter category of observers fails to tell us what really goes on inside the brain, and more importantly, why the organism feels compelled to adjust or translate world-pictures (in common agreement with other humans), to that which must be a prearranged and acceptable mental image. In other words our mental image, is subject to delusion. We picture (have a mental image of) a person who later confirms that we projected upon that person more or less than they really were. Or we view a hologram and are unaware of the real object under scrutiny.

Very few people are aware that much of our seeing is visualization. The same is true of the other senses. Visualization is largely limited to sensory perception. There are other methods of seeing, or perceiving.

I would like to list six different forms of perceiving:

1. Normal Sensory Perception. This is ordinary seeing or perceiving. As the result of a sensory stimulus, the mind coordinates the stimulus with previous stimuli, and projects back upon the physical environment, that which it wants to see. Only this projection is seen by the individual's awareness. To say the same thing more precisely, man visualizes everything that he perceives (thinks he perceives) through the physical senses. It is a "normal" percept followed by a "normal" projection.

2. Abnormal Sensory Perception. This is illusory or non-validated phenomena. These are visions which apparently are seen by the eyes, (or percepts connected with the other senses) which later will be found to be invalid or illusory in nature. Included in this category are ghosts that cannot be checked out, hallucinations, holograms, mirages, and hypnotic phenomena that involve the imposition of illusions on the mind of the subject.

The next four categories have to do with Mental Perception. A while back I discussed the ability of the mind to see or perceive. The examples given showed clearly that such perceiving resulted from initial sensory stimuli. There are, however instances where the mind "sees" independently of the senses. I call this ability Visualization-projection not warranted by percepts.

3. Mental Visions. Here the mind watches synthetic projections from its memory bank. (We conjure up an apple with diamonds imbedded in the sides). This is memory revisited and rearranged. This is commonly called imagination.

4. Visions Without Projection by the Perceiver. Non-physical visions, valid according to some means of corroboration, or laws of reference. Their general corroboration lies in the fact that they often are found later to have been revelations of some sort. They are ghosts that substantiate their presence by warnings or prophecies. They are dreams, articulate voices from non-visible sources, and instances of deja-vu which are found to be more than a hallucination. It may be that some of these visions are contacts with the Manifested Mind, or with emanations from the Manifested Mind.

Also in this category are direct mind communications which we pick up accurately from another person, such as in mind-reading. In the past many phenomena which we now describe under the heading of ESP or Psi phenomena, were previously described for the recipient as being an ability called the sixth sense.

This sense can be discovered and developed. It amounts to a sort of sensitive feeler which the mind extends to the mind of another, using in the beginning all manner of clues from the countenance of the other person and even items of posture and tone of voice, to guess, (at first) that which the other person may be thinking. But after a while, success will breed accuracy, and later still, we will be able to possess a feeling of knowing instead of uncertainty. This feeling of knowing results from persistent checking over a long period of time with the person that we are reading. Group sessions for the purpose of attempting to have rapport and picking up information are good.

5. Visions of Mental Processes without sensory percepts. This is not the same as the third category which is reverie or imagination. This is that which we shall later call the Process-Observer. This is the mind which is anterior to the Umpire and its phenomena. It is a part of us that sees. It sees the mind, the somatic or umpire mind. It is, in turn unable to watch itself, or any processes peculiar to itself. This is a genuine mental awareness by the Real Self, or Ultimate Self.

6. Deliberate Mental Projections. This last category of visions is that which is caused by someone's mind (projection by them), which has an impact upon other minds, to a point where the recipient may have the conviction that he physically sees the projections.

These are visions projected upon the world scene, or upon our consciousness by another. Under this heading we have tulpas, (Tibetan materialized humanoids), and the Indian rope trick. Other instances are cases of bi-location, healing at a distance, psycho kinesis, transubstantiation (water into wine, etc.), and possession. I would like to devote an entire book to this subject, and to the methods of attaining expertise in this type of projection.

These are manipulations which are unreal even to the laws of the relative plane, or are illusions which are projected into our mind and which we then visualize or project upon the world-view.

There is a dynamism here, in this category, which makes man into a momentary creator, with limits, he never dreamed were possible. There is a mark of the sensational and the miraculous here, truly, for man with his relative and deluded mind, to be able to train itself to create within the microcosm a change or variation which may be contrary to the strict beliefs of mankind about the scientific limitations of the physical world, and contrary to the knowledge that those massive beliefs actually may be the formative substance of this physical world which one individual may be able to affect.

Also included in this category is the phenomenon known in esoteric philosophy as transmission... the direct conveyance of a deep spiritual realization.

The foregoing vision-phenomena demonstrate that in all cases that the average person witnesses something, he is only partially aware of his apprehension-apparatus.

Only the first two involve the senses. The first category seems to be an accepted phenomenon, so it is labeled Normal Sensory Perception.

In the second category we are still influenced by the senses. However, there is some defect in our visualization that results from the percepts.

The second category (above) indicates that our senses are not infallible. The third category, Mental Visions, shows that we can produce visualizations from the memory-bank, with possibly an initial stimulus for the whole daydream from somewhere in the present environment. It shows that we do not need the senses to conceptualize or create visions. They are projections, visualizations limited to our private audience.

The next category (fourth), does not involve projections...Visions Without Projections. These instances demonstrate that the mind is capable of direct mental reception without the senses, from intelligences of other people, or from unidentified intelligences, which are accepted as being other than something, which we might project. This faculty would be the passive or receiving side of the projections and the projection-ability listed in the sixth category below.

These last four categories, relate to behavior-motivation. Yet, unfortunately they seem to be deliberately overlooked by the behaviorists. So that only a few really listen to the wealth of testimony that comes from patients whose sensory perceptive mechanisms have been inhibited, and whose minds may be supplying genuine date.

We choose to ignore thousands of cases where people report dreams that have evidence in them that the information received did not come from the dreamer. Perhaps a person dreams of someone deceased who tells the dreamer where the will, or family heirloom is concealed. Psychics such as Peter Hurkos are continually in the news, but there is no comment or explanation of their talent, by the mind-experts. The determinations of J.B. Rhine in his psycho-kinetic experiments, are ignored. Yet psycho kinetics, like telepathy indicates that the mind is extrudable, and able to affect the environment and mind of others.

If the mind-dimension is of greater reality than the somatic and material dimension, we are inviting failure when we insist that mental phenomena all be defined with qualitative, chemical analysis, and with electrical measurements. Psychologists, for instance like to play with the electroencephalograph, and to pronounce life as being electrical energy, and death as being three flat readings on the meter. Voltage may be one of the symptoms of life, but so far it has failed to measure consciousness.

If there is a greater Reality than the Mind-dimension, then those who are in search of it cannot ignore the need to thoroughly understand the Mind, from the somatic mind to the most intricate functionings of the higher mind in its direct mind experiences. We cannot play the desire games of life, and expect that procedure to lead us to the Truth. Humanity is not God. Nor is democratic agreement among psychologists the final Truth.

THE UMPIRE

There might be an inclination to minimize the Umpire, by saying that it is simply an automatic adjustment of the somatic self by the date received from the senses.

In rebuttal I would not try to isolate it, to fix it in some cerebral convolution, or by stating it to be a locus of intelligence of a particular and limited kind, to follow up and summon that intelligence forth as one would a ghost so that we might be able to study its periphery and limitations.

We cannot see the significance of the Umpire until we see the significance of other voices or egos which are the main movers of ourselves. Man does not move as much as he is moved. There is one aspect of man, the body combined with the somatic mind of man, that is nothing but programming waiting upon environmental circumstances to bring out predictable reactions. Incidentally it is this aspect of man that is the total vision and range of study for the behavioristic, utilitarian psychologist.

The somatic mind includes the genes, and the DNA molecules through which much may be transmitted. It also includes all percepts, all sensory data, memory, and reactions which are largely automatic.

So that we have three major qualities of the human mind:

1. Reception Perception 2. Retention OR Memory 3. Reaction Reaction (stimulus response)

Perception is largely sensory, (with some perceptions being hallucinatory or incorrect). Memory is accumulated percept-data. Memory is the automatic recording of percepts. Memories are in turn perceived, thus furnishing material for more percepts, visualization is a form of perception, using memories in new combinations. Imagination is the reaction of memories, stimulating visualization and an orderly creation of new memory patterns.

Reaction is of various kinds. There is the automatic or programmed type of reaction which is somatic and largely reflexive. Then there is the mental reaction, which is unconscious, which is an Umpire function, which is the projection or perception to suit the universal-mind-paradigm. This is an Umpire-adjustment.

There is still another type of reaction which is a category of its own. Some call it Will, and some writers have decided that Will is a mental attribute of its own, but I maintain that Will is nothing more than a reaction to react in a fixed, planned reaction.

In the business of defining the Umpire, we can approach an understanding of the Umpire by observing its functions: Adjustment of data received by the somatic mind. There is an endless process of mental interpretation of percepts received through limited or inadequate senses. Physical survival adjustment; balancing the output of energy for the sake of health; inhibition of personality factors that may lead to social rejection; drive for tribal (or family) survival, or reproduction. Mind Plane Functioning: It weighs rational evidence to make conscious determinations; it accepts intuitional revelations into decision-making; it is influenced by evidence from the anterior or Process-Observer mind. However, the Umpire is not in contact with any part of the Self above or beyond the Manifesting Mind.

ON MEANING

Psychology in its present direction, is impossible. We are fooled by its pose of objectivity. I am speaking primarily of materialistic psychology, one that would either pretend that the body is all that there is, or that the mind is merely a reflexive system alone.

Man wants to make everything valid according to material standards, and then wants immortality for that person which he wants himself to be. Man's immortality must not be something expected, -- as wished, -- but something admittedly unknown until discovered.

Man seeks a point of validity from which to launch a scientific investigation of psychology, -- meaning, -- a study of the mind. He chooses a concrete dimension, pretensively, and then mimics the type of investigation which would be called scientific by the students of physics and chemistry.

However, he neglects to see, that in laboratory analysis of matter, man is looking at matter from a mental viewpoint, even though he is using material tools such as test tubes, spectroscopes or electronic microscopes. The worm cannot study the worm as well as man with his analytical instruments can study the worm. The body is a poor witness about the body.

A worm may be more knowledgeable about clay than the clay is about itself. That which we are talking about is a valid reference point for study. We cannot use objective (materially-scientific) procedures for all human observation. Such objective attitudes are good only in the study of phenomena on a lower scale.

In other words, the worm has more intelligence than a rock, and he may study the rock better than the rock can study him. Man employs material methods to study matter, but his main tool is his intelligence, from which superior vantage point he is able to compare. In the search for definition, as in all scientific procedure, the method is either a simple or complex comparison.

We want to know what one chemical is in relation to other chemicals and to our physical self. We have never bothered to try to find out that which a rock means to itself. Nor do we seem inclined to find out more about the real nature of man, -- the essence of man. We are content to investigate the behavior of molecules in relation to other matter, and to the behavior of one human to another. So that we still have not reached an understanding of matter or people, in relation to their intrinsic realities.

The point is simply this: The present study of behavior, of minds interpreting reason for action by making observation of physical reactions is not even a level of the mind studying the mind, but a step lower of the mind denying the mind and pretending to study the body with material calipers -- or the rock studying the worm -- an impossible undertaking.

This is miles away from the correct method of study, which is to study the mind from a superior (not an inferior) position.

True observation must be carried on from a superior dimension. The mind cannot be studied with the mind. It must be observed from some point, outside of, and yet superior to the mind. This process might be likened to the triangulations made in surveying, when the height of a mountain needs to be known without dragging chain every step of the way to the top. Two sightings can be made from a common base line to the top of the mountain, giving two different angles as the inside angles of the triangle. With this the two sighting-distances will be known, from which a perpendicular line, -- from the apex of the mountain to its center within the mountain along the same base line, or plane, -- will give the height.

That base line is the point of reference, and point from which all validity emanates. It begins as a short line, entirely separate from the mountain. It is outside the mountain. From it an imaginary string is drawn or dropped to the center of the mountain on the same level as the plain. The only other way to measure the height of the mountain with the same accuracy would be the drilling and measuring of a hole from the top, meeting a similar horizontal hole drilled on the level of the plain.

In chemistry, our point of reference is an agreement on certain bases of valence, bonding and element-nature. However, our triangulation really began with a concept of valence. We could not describe or predict without the idea-agreement or concept and its terminology.

Even the systems of triangulation or speculation in scientific pursuits are not infallible. At one time the basis for the whole concept of oxidation rested upon an erroneous concept or agreement called the phlogiston theory.

So the new theory as a basis from which to work should not be rejected merely because we cannot relate to it easily, or because (in psychology) we need to triangulate to find the conciliatory point, before we can work from that point of reference to properly evaluate the then inferior dimension, which we call the mind.

Actually the above described system of mind-evaluation is not a concept, except to those who have not been beyond the mind. And those who do not wish to go to the bother to try advised procedures to find such a point of reference, prefer to simply claim that it does not exist.

We need to explore at this point that which is meant by "triangulation to find that superior point of reference." Triangulation is the geometric pattern of all human thinking. We know that we function from a relative way of observing. Our eyes triangulate or we could not be aware of differences in distance. The position of our ears picks up the direction of sounds coming in. Our understanding of gray is arrived at by our consideration of two opposites, black and white. Benoit (The Supreme Doctrine) speaks of a triangle of understanding in which the polarity of opposites form the two ends of the base-line, with the apex being the "superior conciliatory principle".

We can see by these observations, that not only does a thing need to be known in relation to its opposite, but it must be known from a third, impartially detached viewpoint.

If we take good and bad as the two polar extremes, by observing those two factors alone, we will never get beyond the knowledge that good is not bad, and bad is not good. However, when viewed from a superior, detached viewpoint, we can get the new definition that good and bad constitute a spectrum of consideration, which when viewed as a whole give us an entirely new concept of the processes of life and their relation to justice, to a space-time consideration, -- or in regard to meanings of some evolutionary blueprint.

To find the superior point of observation we must admit that we must find a conciliatory apex-point whose nature and location is unknown to us. We know the two points at the base. They are consciousness and unconsciousness, seeming existence and seeming non-existence.

As the surveyor sighting for an unknown measurement, we must try to find that apex. If another surveyor has found the method of getting it, it would be a good idea to consult him. If there is no one to consult, we must educate ourselves as to ways and means. We must indulge in tentative concepts perhaps, and make some unnecessary sightings.

The process outlined as the "psychology of the Observer", shows the beginning processes of early triangulations. In examining our consciousness, or thought processes we find the Umpire aptly called a conciliating principle. However, upon scrutiny we find that it is in turn being observed, and when it is properly scrutinized, it will be found to be a somatic monitor, being concerned with body-consciousness. We strike another line behind the Umpire and find ourselves observing the processes of the Umpire, and then the processes of the mind itself. And by this seemingly accidental discovery of mental processes we have placed ourselves automatically in a point of awareness that watches (occupies the conciliatory apex) the polar point of the Umpire and the polar point of the Higher Intuition. These two points are the dual functioning of the mind, which are the somatic Umpire and the extremely subjective mind, which are somewhat parallel in expression to the rational mind (and its lobe) and the dream mind (and its lobe) as discussed by Ornstein.

We do not become aware of the Higher Intuition at the same time that we discover the Umpire. Many people revel in the discovery of the Umpire. This exultation is described elsewhere as the Eureka experience. The mathematician discovers the harmony in a set of symbols. Suddenly the universe becomes a tightly wrapped sphere of laws, encompassing all action.

The Umpire is mundane, and the Eureka-man reacts in truly mundane style whenhe discovers it. He belabors himself with the study of symbols and laws, hoping to master the whole plan and subordinate the universe to his button-pushing intentions. If you even suggest a higher-intuitive method of looking at things, he will turn his back in derision.

But the Umpire is only one point on a plane of reference. There is another voice in us which hints that the Umpire may indeed be a charlatan that pretends to have everything under control for the individual. This higher intuition is less vocal than the Umpire, but it challenges the mind of man by pointing out such things which the Umpire can explain with its pretence of logic. The mirage and the miraculous defy the objectivity of the Umpire. The sixth sense causes uncertainty in the previous five.

And so the Higher Intuition becomes the other point of reference, or point D on the ladder of Jacob. And when we become aware of the existence of both Higher Intuition and the Umpire, and their opposition, we become possibly aware of the Process Observer.

As has been said before these mental workings are similar to intense meditation, or the result of intense meditation. I am continually running across references in Buddhistic and Brahmanistic writings which indicate that the sages of the Himalayas and the Ganges knew about these mental stages, for perhaps a thousand years.

An accompanying diagram, (Plate I) will give some idea of direction of our search for higher Reality, which simultaneously means the finding of the True Self.

Diagram - Jacob's Ladder

Plate 1 goes here

We have discussed the workings of the Umpire. I pointed out that the Umpire does not observe itself. People who are unaware of the Umpire, think that the umpirical decisions are theirs, and they will make all sorts of excuses, for incidents when things apparently go wrong. They may even get a hint, or subliminal reading from the higher mind apparatus, which in turn may be getting messages from other dimensions (mind) that might give some inkling about the destiny of the individual and even means of capitalizing on the knowledge, yet it may never occur to them that they should consider higher factors and sources of influence upon the mind.

In most cases the desires are so strong that the subliminal message is shunted aside as mere superstition. The individual who is convinced that he is responsible for everything that happens to him will either get angrier with the situation, or slump into defeat and inertia. His alienator, (therapist), will help him to deny the subliminal warnings, and will reassure him that he is capable of doing almost anything, and then remind him that society will not like him if he descends into inertia.

He must first become aware of the Umpire, and then take note of the possibility that he may be influenced by factors not immediately apparent and not taken into account by the Umpire, and that he is not wise enough to be almighty. From a shaky but superior position to a few other people who have become obsessed, possessed, defeated and destroyed, he may look into their case-histories and catch a glimpse of himself moving in their direction.

Not yet above the Umpire, he may begin to question it from evidences picked up from other mental processes. He may feel a need for decisions contrary to somatic survival alone, or seemingly contrary -- he may become meditative, but still remain in turmoil. He may study psychologies and transcendental phenomena, but will be aware of helpless vacillation between the polar points of the Rational Umpire and the Intuitive perceptive mechanism of the mind.

This is demonstrated by the line C-D. The line A-B is a line of unending struggle until the individual is conscious of the Umpire. He no more than becomes conscious of the Umpire than line C-D becomes the new point of reference. He wants to trust his rational mind and he may follow a physical and mental discipline that will insure for him (supposedly) the greatest safety in society, the best health, plus the conviction that he is reproducing properly. However, his (or her) relationship with the spouse may flounder from factors unknown to all experts, his health may slip seriously, and society may turn its back upon him abruptly. It is then that he becomes aware that there are factors beyond the control of the Umpire.

When he begins to study the Umpire and the phenomena of higher intuition as well, he automatically rises to a position of Anterior Observer to both, or that which I have named the Process Observer, or point E.

The Process Observer for a while imagines that it is the true consciousness. It observes the frailties of the Umpire, and the subliminal, unclear nature of readings from the data that comes directly to the mind without the senses, via intuition.

Nearly all psychologists are crippled Process Observers. They cannot help notice the limitations of the somatic balances or Umpire, but their reluctance to admit the vast ocean of probably mental experiences and other dimensional relationships brings them to deliberately deny an important faculty. They cannot proceed, and admit that their awareness is centered anywhere but in reflexive nerves.

The Process Observer (E) cannot study itself. We may become aware of observing processes, and the polar point F becomes awareness. It is for this reason that the observation position does not go on indefinitely in regard to the mind's observing itself. The Process Observer is the mind in its maximum ability to observe the individual and its complexities. It constitutes the all of the mind, with all of the abilities of that mind in all dimensions.

But something is watching it. The mind (Process Observer) felt that there was nothing beyond or superior to it. It conceived itself to be the all of consciousness. However the fact that we are aware of this, and can look backward at the Umpire and see that previously it too thought that it was the maximum conscious aspect of man, leaves us forever uncertain that anything conceived by the mind can be the final point of observation.

But mind has a polarity which is non-mind, but which is simultaneously awareness.

At this point, we become aware of the mind as being external to our awareness. "We" are now observing all from a point of undifferentiated awareness. The mind still does not stand still but continues its labor of sorting and studying the processes of the mind. It simultaneously becomes aware of its own potential for awareness.

The final throes of the mind are like the intense but hopeless motions of a beheaded chicken, struggling to be eternally aware of the awareness that it witnesses.

It is for this reason that those who go through the experience of transcending the mind, recognize in it and describe it as being the experience of death. The mind does not die easily, and when the personality is gone, we find that we are still aware. Not only are we aware, but we are infinitely more aware than ever before.

This outline has been wordy perhaps, but at the same time very brief. There is a storehouse of information about the mind represented by the points C, D, and E, that is unplumbed. There is a world of potential there also for the individual to explore once he has reached the limits of the Absolute and returned back down the projected Ray of Life.

The student may halfheartedly go into the study of projections on the relative lane and discover the new laws of change, and immunity to change, while in the world of illusions.

There is immunity to change within certain limits. The limits are commensurate with our state of spiritual maturity. All things are possible, after the knowledge of all things. But when things are known, we do not have the same promptings as we did when we possessed vain wishes without maturity, -without the knowledge of the mechanism of the Ultimate blueprints, or at least the relative mundane blueprint.

To give an example, we may discipline ourselves throughout a lifetime, to attain a single objective which might be a million dollars, to decide at the end of the lifetime, that it was not worth it in the light of later appraisals of life.

Confucius is said to have remarked when he was in his later years, that if he had the time ahead for him, he would be willing to spend a lifetime studying the Y-Ching, I am sure that he would have regretted not having moved on to something else. Cromwell achieves a kingdom, and realizes (after he fell from power), that he should have spent his time looking for God.

The more a man knows, the less he lusts. And knowledge of the workings of the world lessens our desire to manipulate because our knowledge also lets us know that there are always superior factors not yet reached by the continuous process of evaluation and triangulation which we know will continually change our values, -- by changing our points of reference.

The changes that can be effected by us, are generally limited, once we know about our own insignificance, but we are able to create shields if the environment becomes too burdensome, or we may be able to deflect negative attacks by other humans who are not conscious of their irresponsible behavior.

Man tries to eat everything that catches his fancy. But later he realizes that while he is eating other organisms, he is being eaten. And while he lusts, and carries out his lust, he thinks that he is possessing someone, but later realizes that in that act, too, he is being eaten. He yearns for possessions, and finds that the compulsion puts him in slavery to his desires, and the possessions enslave him. The fish catches the fisherman. Man studies for wisdom, and finds that his mind plays tricks upon him in the first steps to wisdom, and in the later steps to wisdom he finds that all relative wisdom is relative and circular to a point that his mind remains encapsulate in a previously created paradigm.

The collective efforts of man are no better, in fact they are efforts that lead to mass hypnosis, mass slavery, mass dedication to vain effort to recreate a blueprint which encourages and directs the vain acts of the mass-efforts. As an individual, man makes mistakes. When man undertakes to build social systems, he makes cataclysmic mistakes, as in the case of the "tower of Babel" syndrome.

So that when viewing all this, as we progress in knowledge or understanding, how can such maturity lead to any vanity of action?

If we go back to the base line of our diagram (called Jacob's ladder), we find that A is the negative pole, and B is the positive pole. This is demonstrative of the relative view that man has, the relative creature that man is, -- having been created or evolved, exhalted or frustrated, by means of, or with a nature of, opposites. His world, and all that is in it, is likewise polarized.

He comes into this world amid the confusion of two individual who thought they were combining the two alternate principles, only to find that they were merely creating limitless varieties of newly polarized and frustrated units which they called children.

The outer spaces are polarized and their activities remain eternally ambiguous to us, and the microscopic molecules and atoms evince patterns similar to the mingling of planets. The suns cool and it looks for a while that things are all going in one direction, -- ultimate coolness and death. But the cosmos surprises us, and new suns burst forth to radiate what seems to be an ever-expanding universe. But later scientists find evidence, that while the universe is expanding it may at another point, be collapsing.

All that man can be sure of is change. A young Englishman wrote "All is change" on a rock at the foot of Niagara falls before committing suicide. There was nothing more for him to say.

Man is not an individual as much as he is a changing mass. He is on the other hand, an unchanging unit of life, or absolute light that the changing, relative man is unaware of. He cannot realize that he is this unit of the Absolute, and in fact these very words are meaningless (in the previous sentence) to the mundane, relative, changing man.

He initially believes himself to be an indestructible unit, and his wishful thinking and the projection of the ghost of hope that he will survive death forever, and that he will even reunite with an immortal fun-body, is embraced by him as an alternative to the seemingly hopeless task of proving that postulate or hope.

Man is line A-B. He is part conscious, and part unconscious. Partly asleep, and partly awake. Not only man, but his universe is relative. Both are ruled by events such as life and death. There is no witnessing of eternal life, but only life as known by its opposite, death. Planets are defined, not from their source, but by their age.

Man who hungers for permanency, lives in a welter of polarity. Hot and cold, high and low, hate and love, desire and dread, matter and anti-matter, and thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness. He leans on science which depends on definition which involves limitless associating with similarly undefined symbols or words.

POLARITY AND BALANCE

I placed the Negative pole upon the left side of the base line A-B. Negativity is always the first consideration for man. A man is not born into paradise, but into a medium, which we call nature, which is inimical to every individual that appears on the scene.

This is not heaven, this trip on earth. As soon as a creature is born, it is attacked. Some like the humans and the larger animal forms get down to fighting to protect their young as soon as the young are born, while simultaneously attacking other organisms for food, and fighting their peers at the same time in competition for the food.

I maintain that no organism would continue that fight unless it was previously programmed (before birth via genes and DNA memory) to fear death, and to desire strongly the fractional rewards for those desires. By the same token, no organism would program itself to a losing proposition. If the organism is programmed to desire to live, and to be afraid of death (which means that it is programmed to treat death as a negative experience), such an organism, if it had any prenatal choice would certainly not enter into an adventure or contract in which it had to force itself to believe beforehand that death could be overcome, and that all desires could be attained, -- unless the objective of such a contract or adventure held some spiritual gain.

The Umpire is a balancer for the survival of mundane man, not spiritual man, and perhaps not even for the intuitive man. The Umpire is like a voice, which notes the seemingly positive impulse to answer to our curiosity and explore, but it also inhibits the individual from exploring into areas where previously, the individual was injured or frightened.

The umpire encourages the desire for sex, but it also inhibits excessive sex which might weaken the species. It inhibits the sex in animals by simply shutting down their sexual activity except in periods where impregnation is possible. Some animals only breed at a certain time of the year, such as goats and deer, to insure the arrival of the young in warmer weather. They do not personally plan this. Their sexual instinct and their physical apparatus do not operate at the wrong time.

Man has either scrambled his programming as to seasonal breeding, (since he breeds all the time), or he has been programmed with an Umpire that protects him by encouraging a sense of caution and restraint. This sense of caution results in man's general acceptance of life-styles, religions or philosophies that advise sexual caution.

We get back to that which is happening on line A-B. The individual begins to weigh his desires against his fears, and the percentages of rewards in respect to his payment in effort for any given objective of mundane nature. Desires, which he previously put on the B side, or the positive side, begin to lose their positive value and begin to shift to the negative (A) side. Even while he is in his youth this will happen, but it happens generally with maturity.

While he is young, his values shift rapidly back and forth, and the positive side is constantly being reinforced by the conviction of most young animals that the future holds infinite promise. He is encouraged to go to school, when small. He likes the idea. His gregarious instincts are aroused, and school also holds the promise of sharing higher forms of communication with the older (envied) people.

However, no sooner does he get into school, than he becomes harassed and punished, -- which is synonymous with training. He soon learns to hate school and the school, or learning system. It just does not seem to be worth the suffering and restriction. The teachers have intuitively developed a psychology for inducing the child to hang on to his greedy little dream of power and popularity. They graduate him to the second grade, and exalt him above the now-inferior first-graders. They condition him slowly to blows. They reward him with recognition or paper-laurels if he shows signs of getting interested in robotdom.

And when we watch, from old age, (or from a point of maturity), this endless seduction of our loved ones into a life of apparent meaninglessness, we cannot help but get the idea that the most negative people on earth are those who are trying to get into the act by playing God. This includes all teachers, lawyers, judges and dictatorial politicians and policemen who feel that humanity needs to be hammered and punished for not bending to their infallibility-poses. The public suffers from their absolute, if momentary, power. Those who do not even know that the Umpire exists, feel that they must weave a code for humanity based strictly upon mundane balance and survival in this fish-bowl, or already balanced aquarium which we call life.

When the individual realizes that he lives in such a balanced aquarium, he discovers for the first time the existence or identity of the Umpire. And sooner or later he must realize that the domain of the Umpire is limited to the balanced aquarium of nature, and to the balancing of the aquarium which is the vast cellular colonies of the human body.

The stomach must not kill off the liver. So excessive drinking is inhibited. The feet are needed for pursuing and fleeing, so we do not leap from high places. Every animal seems to have the fear of falling planted in it. The mouth must inhibit itself from saying things which will get the whole organism in trouble. And so the Umpire becomes a sort of somatic conscience.

As I have said before, too often we treat the Umpire as our only conscience. Its dicta become the conscience of humanity for many people who are willing to obey the voice of anything which they interpret to be a Zeitgeist. The legal system, the churches who have degenerated into social institutions, and certain socialistic, political, causes which would take us back to worshipping the corn-gods, together with their millions of police, prelates and pawns, -are doing nothing more than trying to help nature maintain a balance in nature, -- which does not need any help. The blueprint has been made, and all dies cast. The program for each robot is cast also, even to his having a predilection for being a busybody. All than man can attain is a knowledge of his true nature, and some restricted ability to affect things which are not really real, -- meaning mental projections in which we believe. This ability, or method of exposing, or changing by exposing, is the means of genuine, true-psychological teaching.

We usually, upon locating the Umpire, think that we have really found our inner self, thinking it to be the conscience or real self. But the Umpire has been discovered to be relative in nature. As I noted earlier, the view is not the viewer. The Umpire has become observable. While it is not an entity with fingers and toes, it nevertheless is a functioning entity, and separate from us, in that it was (until discovered) a force or agency which somehow affected or ruled our life, and was not the self (small s) which we, at that time, considered or identified as our total self.

To give a plainer explanation of this last sentence, perhaps we can remember thinking that the self which we once identified with pleasure was the real self, denying that our suffering self should be tolerated. I have heard men say, on many occasions, that when they could no longer indulge in sex, they hoped to be dead. We must presume that they identified as their "self" that which enjoyed, and gave no thought to the possibility that pleasure was no more than a bait to inspire tenacity in the individual toward a goal of nature.

Such a man becomes aware of the Umpire to a degree. He gets warnings about sexual infections, and sexual excesses, but he writes it off as a matter of having lacked chemical knowledge about the body. In other words he treats the fear of sexual infection lightly, because medical chemistry has produced counter-chemicals to neutralize the poisons or germs which constitute an infection. He may reinforce his sexual excesses by trying to find chemicals to rebuild the fun-machine as rapidly as he tears it down. But he naturally loses the battle, and approaches death, and mutters blandly that some day they will have a cure for his deterioration. Such a man has only an idea of a mundane self, and he dies somewhat serenely in that he does not know that he never really enjoyed anything, but was used... possibly for enjoyment by another force or entity.

The enthusiastic discoverer of the Umpire does not at first see that since the umpire is something observable, something within the view of his awareness (and yet separate from that awareness), that automatically there must be a polar opposite. The Umpire is an entity of the relative world, in that its function is upon the relative body of the individual.

The Umpire exercises reason, and the individual listens to that reason. It is reasonable to keep the body alive, or it seems reasonable because we are still programmed to deify life and fear death.

The polar opposite of Reason, or the Umpire, which we might call the somatic mind, is the non-somatic mind. Is it possible for us to comprehend anything that is not physical? Is it valid for us to postulate that such an opposite exists?

In regard to the latter question the non-somatic mind does not exist -- just because we need a polar opposite for the somatic mind. It can be witnessed. In regard to the first question, we witness many things, or accept many things which do not have any impact upon our senses. Most of the knowledge of electronics is achieved by inference, not by sensory recognition. The important observation to take into account here, is that we are not looking for a physical object as the polar opposite for the Umpire, because when the Umpire was discovered, and accepted by us, it was accepted as existing by virtue of a very evident function, -- accepted by inference.

Likewise the non-somatic mind is never accepted as valid until it is conceived by inference, and accepted after a prolonged, life-long study of the working of the mind.

How does this come about? It actually begins on the first level of human experience, line A-B. On line A-B man has traces of both the inclination for reason, and for emotion. Man recognizes that polarity early in life, but does not bring the two to any compromise. Necessity requires methodical living, and he even tries to reason some logic to the business of dying. However, his emotion, or feelings, tell him that there is no logical method to help that individual perpetuate the phenomena known as beauty. Intuition is nothing more than developed feeling.

Man can logically say that we must die because all men die, but deep within ourselves we know that logic has never told us the reason for death, and its necessity, if it is necessary. The baby, and the child is beautiful to us, but as time passes, those individuals lose their beauty. Dying and decay are ugly. We recognize that the parent is inspired to take care of the young, by virtue of being programmed to feel a sense of beauty in regard to them... but once that beauty is experienced we cannot logically get rid of the experience. We are not programmed to find a beauty in death. And our sense of beauty brings us great pain. And the pain brands upon our mind the blatant inconsistencies of life, or the limitation of our knowledge of the real purpose of life... in the event that there is a spiritual reason for life.

The thinking indulged in, in the last paragraph brings us to a persistent Higher Intuition. This looking for a cause for life behind the apparent rationalization which we give ourselves for a squirrel-cage hell is logical in its inception, though the manner of looking is not always along lines which logicians quickly endorse.

Putting it another way, it is logical to presume that death itself is not a reason for living. We realize that the apparent reason for the existence of certain species is that they serve, by dying, as food for other species. The human too serves as food for external and internal parasites. No animal evinces any beauty, or feeling of glory in the knowledge that its sole purpose is food and fertilizer.

The human not only sees the beauty of the child and the youth wasted in processes of again and being slaughtered, but it also notices the beauty of the provinces of thinking, of the mental treasures and accomplishments of the human mind which are lost in senility or cut short needlessly uupon the battlefields, or in industrial and traffic accidents.

We witness the unfolding of a child's mind through the arduous years of school, and are later forced to endure the sight of this highly complex entity destroyed before it reaches maturity, and often before it in turn is able to witness the beauty in children of its own.

And so logically, we can say to ourselves that life, with the present excuses given for it, makes no sense. Unless there is a hidden motive, and a hidden or spiritual reward, it is logically preferable to avoid this life.

And so we embark upon an intuitional trip. And this trip is no trip of idle dreaming and fairy-tale conjecturing alone. It embodies techniques for developing mental apprehensiveness, and perfecting it. It involves the study of all new approaches to the business of defining life. So that we try to digest books on theology, magic, philosophy, and esotericism, and many more, to try to pick up any clues that previous students may have discovered.

We look not only within ourselves to learn about the Umpire only, but we look for the reason for the existence of the Umpire. We look at all life forms, and the complexity of the cosmos, to find new feeling, new intuition, that we may translate in verbal form back to our somatic mind.

And as we proceed, we are comforted, if we are able, by prediction, to justify the newer feelings about the nature of matter, or the purpose of life on earth. We are also encouraged by the miracles performed by men of admitted intuitional guidance, which miracles indicate the existence of an alternative paradigm or language of living.

While noting that we are now operating from a new baseline as a point of reference, which is C-D, I would like to refer to Plate I, once more. We have two triangles, one poised above the other. Points B, D, and F seem to be hanging out in space.

Points A, C, and E constitute an unbroken, strong line. Points A, C, and E seem to be more objective. Points B, D, and E, are more subjective, less easy to even conceptualize.

The motivating forces of our life, when viewed from the higher planes of reference, C-D, and E-F, show us that there seems to be a predominance of negative aspects to our line A-B, or our plane of experience. At first we see that life is opposed by death. Death being negative, and life being positive. But without some meaning, life too becomes negative. Death seems to have more permanence than life. Life is three score years, death is manifestly for eternity. Pleasure leads to pain, and payment. The payment becomes a ninety percent experience, and the pleasure becomes a ten percent (or less) experience. Ugliness wipes out all beauty ultimately, and beauty seems to be only a bait for enduring a meaningless existence which soon puts beauty in the ugly category, because we are misled by it. It too becomes negative.

The only salvation for A-B is the feeling quality of B. This is a primitive form of intuition, which cannot come through the rational mind. It can only be an emanation from the higher intuition, which in turn can only be an emanation from the unmanifested mind.

This may all be an elaborate way of saying something that has been told through almost every religion. By his logic man can do nothing. By himself he can do nothing. Unless. Unless man can, through some faculty for feeling, pick up a downward emanation from man's Real Self, or from God, or the Absolute, or from that which you wish to call It, -- he would not be inspired to resist the massive onslaught of negativity and hopelessness which he experiences on the plane of life, A-B. Check Plate II.

Diagram - The Invisible Current

Plate 2 goes here

The line B-D is dotted to signify that it is not known as a certainty.

We go on to the line C-E. C is the stronger point. All evidence shows that the Umpire, or somatic mind, being the apex of a body-realm, or world-view, becomes the dominant side of our new plane of reference, C-D. Of the small group of people who recognize the existence of an Umpire, fewer still are able to see that it exists in polarity on another plane of reference.

Likewise the Process Observer, can only view that which is in the mind realm, the negative side of which is manifestly the Umpire (C), so that once more the effects of D (Higher Intuition) do not carry much weight, but the interaction between the two mental faculties, brings about the awareness of the Process Observer. Point C is the last outpost of negativity, the last point in dual observation, and dual existence.

Entering into awareness automatically transcends relativity or dualism.

Note: The foregoing outline in relation to Plate I, was considered necessary for those wishing to retain a relationship between the symbols, words coined in this writing, and the meaning intended. I feel that writing things for unseen readers, requires more careful explaining (and perhaps some diagrams) than would be necessary if we were talking together.

The preceding chapter says in effect that man can discover here a method of going within that leads to the Absolute, but drawing a diagram does not do the trick, nor does the application of symbols and excessive reasoning.

The shortest way to a man's head is through his heart. The next chapter will be a copy of an attempt to reach the intuitions of the listeners at a lecture on the subject.

And finally, in the final section of this paper, I will go into a personal type of struggle that might occur to anyone attempting to make the effort to really find himself.

University Lectures

LECTURES GIVEN AT UNIVERSITIES DURING 1977 AND 1978

This talk has to do with knowing, we presume that we know what knowing is. After you give some thought to the business of knowing, you may come to realize that you have had an incomplete idea of that which knowing is.

There are two forms of knowing, inside and outside knowing. We have an outside system of knowing, and an internal system of knowing. The outside knowing involves the physical universe, the earth, our body, and the observable functions of the body. Some of the observable functions of the body, include thought, thought patterns and dreams.

With this statement, I have to get into some line of designation between inside and outside experience. The designation depends upon the word "observer." This designation must not be an arbitrary designation, used just to expedite some explanation or argument which I wish to use. We must be reasonable and methodical in our handling of any complex problem. Yet these things should be expressed simply. We should be able to express them simply.

You will notice that I have not yet defined "inside" knowing. Inside knowing must be defined as that knowing which results from things coming to us other than through the senses, or through visualization or projection of that which was witness at some time through the senses. Inside knowing does not include that which comes to us through word-symbols, or from associations with memories, which at one time were received through the senses.

Maybe you would think at this point that inside knowing could be identified as awareness only. But this is not so. Inside knowing may involve the reception of an understanding or revelation, apparently not dependent upon any previous memory, such as the seeing of a place in our mind several days before we visited it for the first time. However, such a vision, once received, becomes from that time on, an outside knowing or experience, in that we have a memory of it now.

The most remote and basic part of inside knowing is awareness. The most basic type of outside knowing is sensory apprehension. The line of designation, depends upon the word observer. That which observes is the basis for inside knowledge. That which is observed, whether the things observed are planets, thoughts or memories, is outside of us.

All expansion of consciousness (an expression of wide misuse) depends upon the stretch of the realm of the observer. The observer is the "us", or the "we". Current psychological writing does not properly tell us who the "we" is. It says in effect that the body is all that we have. But it does not tell us who the "we" is that is having the body.

We get a picture from modern psychology that all human experience is nothing more than body-behavior emanating from body-stimuli. It fails to take into account the thinking processes which have an influence on our action, long after the original stimuli that launched the action have been forgotten. It also fails to take into account thinking-factors which do not come to us through our senses.

Behaviorists actually maintain that we do not think, -- that is that we do not have little entities called thoughts, but that we react reflexively, and are somewhat conscious of these reactions. To them that which reacts is the observer.

The behaviorist science is based upon the giving of experimental stimuli, to a limited number of individuals, most of who already know that they are expected to react a certain way, or according to a paradigm which has become a human habit.

There is too large a gap, for instance between experiments of a simple reflexive expectation, and experiments with people who do not accept the paradigm, such as autistic children. Experiments of a complicated nature, which might involve something besides conditioned behavior, or expected behavior, would involve a multitude of factors which the psychological experimenter does not dare to recognize.

To cite an example of that which is meant, some behavior might result from seeing a ghost, hearing a convincing warning from some private interior voice, or possession. Now any of these things, or all of them might occur regardless of the inherited characteristics, the conditioning, or the external sensory stimuli received by the person being studied. Of course the ponderous diagnoses of such happenings, or behavior causes, are taken care of with a simple word, hallucination.

Socio-psychologists, are uttering advice on all levels of society, and social workers or social authorities are implementing the decisions of the socio-psychologists. And what is the result? Our society is becoming increasingly muddled, our morality is declining under the pretense that morality is only a subjective attitude, and in a wholesale acceptance of B.F. Skinner, we have decided to make a morality a sacrifice which is necessary for the peace of the herd.

But the herd is becoming daily more hateful because it is rankled by the idea of shotgun-love. When confronted with the hate-trends in society, the socio-psychological professions, reinforced by especially vested groups, (which may be minorities of especial interest), or by lone individuals who may think that they may become famous or funded by trying to represent that which they take to be the zeitgeist, or trend.

This modern approach is failing, because the wants of the individual cannot be guaranteed for that individual, until we know more about the nature of that individual. A man who pretends to know that which is best for humanity, or for the formation of a socio-psychological dynasty, and those groups that think they know what is best for humanity, and know how to force upon humanity (like we force castor-oil upon a constipated child) -- the spiritual leeching of masturbation in order to make everyone placid, helpless and harmless -- do not take enough into account.

They do not take into account the total nature of the individual, let alone That which drew the blueprint for humanity. They used to think that man was an evolutionary accident with an evolving blueprint after the fact. Now they think that man is making man.

In other words, even discounting the force which we ordinarily call God, there is an order in the universe, not just among the inhabitants of this terrestrial, natural aquarium. This natural plan must be known, and not guessed at, -- and it may go deeper than we think. It may go beyond the fertility of the soil.

Now I am making these remarks for a point. I am talking about exterior psychological efforts as opposed to interior work. The material scientist would like to ignore all that is not seen with the eye. However, you can take one eye out and look at it with the other one, and realize that the one you detached from the optic nerve, sees nothing. We can, in the same manner, study the optic nerve all the way to the brain, but we cannot decide "that which sees."

In another experience, we can look at an apple on the table, close our eyes and see the apple in our mind. Where is the second picture? Call it imagination. We might say that we imagine. But we see an apple, and we do not see it with the physical eyeball. The average psychologist may call this process "recall" without ever going into the mechanics of that which goes on in recalling.

A better term for it is visualization. We do not visualize anything that has not been seen. So that we see things with the whole sense, which is eyeball, nerve, brain and visualization.

Now it is important to catch this, if you are thinking about thinking. Or thinking about perception. Visualization does not occur only in recall, or in dreams, but with every perception at the time of perception. Do a little thinking on this. You see something and immediately visualize that which you saw, or you visualize the source of the stimulus.

We can also call this visualization, projection. People are said to project wrong understandings. People, for instance are said to project danger into a situation where danger and fear are unwarranted. Or a man sees the shadow of a tree and projects a ghost upon the scene. In a similar manner, our percepts are not accurately visualized, because the perceptive mechanisms, the senses, are limited in their range of perception. Some people may be color-blind for instance, or whole species may be unable to pick up certain colors. It is evident that the pictures which those people or species see, are inaccurate. And it follows that we all may be getting an inaccurate message from our limited senses.

Somewhere behind the brain-impulse, there is a realization of our environment in the form of visualization. The mind has the ability to create, better than the ability to accurately witness. With the ability to create, comes the ability to delude the self. Visualize means create. The ability to visualize the apple when it is no longer there, is an ability to create. If we are able to create a picture of an apple, we can create a picture of most anything.

We come now to an important finding. We have all experienced this self-delusion, but failed to note that in doing so, we have dichotomized our self. We find that one part of our self is doing something to another part of our self. If you delude yourself, that means that there is recognized as true, one self, and there is recognized as being untrue, certain faculties which are part of an erroneous self, or certain faculties of an outside self, which lacks the ability to react properly to environmental thoughts, reactions, and all primary stimuli. Thoughts and reactions, might be called stimuli also, but of a secondary nature. In other words we are all getting the same stimuli, but people are capable of having different reactions, and people are capable of deluding themselves. This also means that the mind is aware of its own delusion-capacity. This means that the mind which is being deluded is the true mind, because it understands that it is being influenced by a somatic, brain type process, which identifies itself as being the true mind, or true and accurate consciousness.

Of course we can say this differently and say that there is an outside self, which is capable of incomplete apprehension of the environment, and it in turn conveys to an inside self inaccurate understanding or convictions of that which assumes to be reality.

This creative ability is projection. Were it not for the intuitive ability of man, I doubt if we would ever be aware of this pervasive fooling of the inner self, and the spontaneous acceptance of a limited sensory message, which the outer self in turn modifies to some degree and projects back into the external world-view as being real.

This is a hopeless trap for the inner mind, and for inner knowing, until the process is observed. And once it is observed, then the outer mind becomes a mechanical, somatic process, and the projection is reinterpreted as a creation, extrusion, or projection of a crude, somatic mind... and is no longer an observer at all. The observer is now the master of the whole new scene.

We can say the alst sentence in another way... we have just taken the first major step inside of ourselves.

Not only have we taken the first step toward the final Self, but we know the mundane mind better. We realize that we are going to have to check out the outside mind's messages better, and also find some new system to check out the somatic mind's creations or projections. So that we realize the presence of a latent faculty which we must not only identify, butt attempt to develop.

Inasmuch as the development of the intuition involves a change in our way of life, a separate book on that alone would have to be written.

We can turn now to a very important point. If behavioral sciences involve behavior observed, then those sciences cannot flippantly ignore these internal observations, which may well correct for us many external reactions once we know a few basic things.

We must determine first of all, who or what is observing. Is it the eyeball, nerve and sensory self, or an entirely separate creative self, which up until the present mention of it, may never have occurred to us at all as being in existence. The point to note is that if something is being observed, there must be an observer. This brings us to the admission first of all that we can observe our own behavior. And we can observe, not only our own thoughts, but thought processes, as well, such as visualization and introspection. It brings us to the admission also that either the observer and observed are one and the same thing, or the "we" which we think of then we think or behave a certain way, is separate from that which is observed.

We go back to our simple search for inside and outside knowledge. We usually want to know that which is out there first. The external world attracts us from the moment of our birth. We build an orderly explanation of that which we, mankind, collectively see. Our material world-view is one of agreement, and material science is really just a system of getting along, of attempted justification for the paradigm.

I picked up a book just yesterday by Ornstein. Ornstein writes about the two sides of the brain, and the dual, logical-emotional, faculties of the brain. He quotes Kuhn, saying that each science has its own assumptions, and he includes psychology in this, using the term paradigm. And he concludes that this is exactly what we have to live with in regard to each of these sciences. Each of them has its own self-defined and limited vocabulary, which is supposed to mean something to all of us jointly... but which does not mean that there is any proof to any of the science behind the vocabulary.

Different sciences go to great lengths to build an orderly paradigm, by laboriously developing systems of cataloguing according to genus and species, according to valence or bond, and according to measurement. We discover later on that these sciences fail in this pretense of exact measurement. Forty years ago we agreed that there were an exact, limited number of chemical elements, a number which was less than one hundred. Now we have admitted that far more than a hundred exists. New species are constantly being discovered. Measurement becomes relative, and weight as defined by gravity, has to be abandoned when levitation occurs and the phenomenon defies the law of gravity.

This habit of agreeing upon things not fully understood, has not caused any great mishap to humanity as long as the paradigms were restricted to the natural or physical sciences. Many of us believed that penicillin would cure everybody of certain viruses, but it proved fatal to a few people who were allergic to it. When these deaths resulted from penicillin-reaction, there were no great lamentations, because the findings that brought about the discovery of penicillin were done in an orderly manner, which we all readily admit were as scientific as possible. The cures worked for the average person.

However, when psychological determinations are declared to be scientifically proven, these determinations are not arrived at by an orderly examination, of the field of phenomena involved, but are determined rather by a propaganda campaign upon the public's mind by a fragment of humanity, which is always interested in perpetuating its individual ambitions, or the ambitions of its church or trade.

Now we have this tendency from Freud on. Freud tried to start a chain-store of Freudian goods, or Freudian language which he labeled psychoanalysis.

There is an understandable fault that causes our reliance on agreement rather than upon exact knowledge, and upon tentative agreement when we feel the need to act before the total knowledge on a subject is available. To begin with, exact knowledge is the same as absolute knowledge. WE would like to say that we have exact knowledge.

We cannot delay the preparation of all the medicines until each allergy is known. The allergies are generally known by preparing and administering the medicine to the masses to find those who are allergic. If we delayed all scientific advance until all is proven absolutely, nothing much would get done.

This is where the word reasonable comes in. And we use the euphemism instead of the word "orderly." We hang a man when he is guilty by virtue of circumstantial evidence that leaves no reasonable doubt as to his guilt. It is true that we are going to be hanging or gassing a certain percentage of the population, and the lethal lottery must bear with it, some explanations for the sake of conscience, to try to make our actions seem rational.

What we are getting into here is this business of inside knowledge. Psychology is the province of inside knowledge. So consequently we have to talk a bit about the direction of psychology and see if it is possible to add to the present substance of modern psychology, to see if there is anything that might add to, or lead us closer to a better understanding of the inside self.

While exact knowledge is apparently impossible, there are methods which can be used which might eliminate some of the bungling, trepanning and hanging. We soon learn that our inadequate understanding of the outside world is a result of our defective observation-mechanisms. This points us not only in the direction of understanding our senses, but also our mental habits of dreaming, creating and projecting, as well.

In other words, we may not understand the external world properly, until we understand our self.

This is especially true in the psycho-therapy departments and with attempts by individuals to get along with their fellow-man. The analyst who can no longer prescribe for the patient with analysis or medicine, turns the patient over to group-therapy, in the hopes that an accident will do for the patient that which his paradigm, or theory-agreement failed to do.

The other people in the therapy-group serve as a mirror for the individual. He begins to see himself in a new light and realizes that he may be taking an erratic or selfish pose that alienates him from the mainstream of human agreement. Now he goes back inside himself, and realizes that he was well on his way to becoming a social misfit. When he recognizes this, instead of becoming a misfit, he may well become a budding psychologist. When one part of a man fools the other part, then the part that has been fooled is the essential or anterior self.

The exterior self, having been extolled as that which deals with tangibles and proofs, and having earned the respect from the whole human as being that which is logical and orderly, always has the ability to inspire the anterior or inner self to accept as valid, all of the creations of the somatic mind.

I might dramatize this ability of the outside mind, and the weakness of the inside mind by talking about a tulpa. The word tulpa is a Tibetan term for a humanoid, which some Tibetan priests are able to create by the intense and skillful projection of a mental image of a person upon the world-vies, until it actually appears, visible to all, not just to the person who does the projecting.

This tulpa supposedly results from the will and the imagination of the priest. This tulpa becomes his companion, and often his master. One Tibetan priest commented that it took him six years to create his tulpa, and six years to get rid of her.

The tulpa was created from strong promptings of the sex-appetite of the priest. "Creating," in this instance demonstrates itself to be outside the self, and even outside the body, because it is seen by others. I think there is an account of such a tulpa in the book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, by Alexandra David-Neel. This is an instance in which projection is visible. This is also an instance that demonstrates the powerful effect of the mundane mind or somatic mind, and its effect upon the real self. In time the priest determined that there was a part of himself, an observing and deciding self, which did no longer wish to abide by the previous part of himself or by the worn-out truths of that previous self.

Evidently the social structure of the lamasery allowed for the toying with tulpas, even as our Western society considers many other sexual pastimes as being "normal." But these Western practices are also projections, and impositions upon the inner awareness of man. We project importance, -- the importance of pleasure, upon the person or form of another person, or upon alcohol, or upon narcotics. And even though these projections are considered to be normal by our spiritual and psychological pilots, we still live to regret the effects of the habits induced by the acceptance of such projections. We find that our peace of mind has been devastated. And we later discover that hardly anyone escapes from mental suffering once they have allowed a simple projection to grow into a monster-habit.

There is a strange excuse that many people make for allowing themselves to get into the habits mentioned. Many people think that they have to get into "interaction," which included sex, or drinking or taking drugs. They tacitly admit that they have to drop some of their individual value or virtue in order to get along with the herd.

Let us get back to the business of studying the inside of ourselves. It is not as easy as it sounds. Most people think that they know themselves. Once, when I was giving a lecture in Pittsburgh, a fellow became indignant when I mentioned that people did not really know themselves. He told me that he knew who he was. When I asked him to define himself he replied, "I am the fellow who is sitting in front of you."

I think that he would have given a more sophisticated answer if he had quoted Descartes' "I think therefore I am." But, while the first man still had not defined the person which he called himself, except in a physical relation to myself, those who might quote Descartes, also are undefined until they know which self is doing the thinking.

If a man states that he thinks, he should immediately try to find out who is doing the thinking. Is it the body that is thinking or is something causing the body to think? Is there a dualistic nature to man, so that there may be a real self which is the embodiment of our thought-processes, and an exterior, body-self which can only exist as a dimmer shadow of an inner awareness?

We come now to the desires or appetites. Meaning the desire sex, drugs, alcohol, or possessions. The instance of the tulpa gives us a representation of desire which has, for all practical purposes, become flesh. This tulpa is objective. It is not a subjective idea anymore. Likewise a sexual fetish, such as a mechanical instrument that simulates sexual organs, is in itself a desire projected, created and made into material by the will and imagination of the obsessed person. It is western technology applied to the tulpa-trade.

When subjective considerations become known, they must, first, have been observed. When things are observed, they are objective and outside. When subjective considerations become viewed, they become knowable considerations, and are objective. Whether desires become recognized by us as gestalts, manias or entitles, they are external afflictions or assets. They are not us.

Desires may seem to be a true expression of that which we presume to be our real self. WE may identify with them. But when desires take us to jail or to the hospital, we will quickly become identified with another set of desires, among which will be the desire for health, for freedom, or for equanimity. When this happens then we do not hesitate to disclaim ownership of the previous desires, and we momentarily, if not permanently, deny the former desires as being negative, or not us, and we identify as being us, the newly found desires.

Man has certain weaknesses, and he is not honest enough to admit his weakness, or desires, but instead tries to glorify himself for having those desires. For instance he tries to deify himself, by announcing that he is a loving creature. He slyly knows and projects this "loving" attitude, because he knows that no one will oppose him in his praise for desire. Then he goes a step further and tries to identify himself with God and the cosmos by announcing that God is love, that God loves him and that he loves God. It is possible that the entire love protestation emanated simply from a desire to justify his appetite for another body.

Man's so called love, and the protestations of it, are really born out of a desire for love, not to love. Man paints himself as a harmless, poetic lover, masking his lust or acquisitive nature which might be offensive to other people. Man not only desires to be loved, he indicates that he would like to order it, showing exactly how he or she would like to be loved. Each individual, while marching proudly under the commonly accepted banner of love, wrangles endlessly with everyone else under the banner about his own private understanding of love. And the only way he can define it honestly is in its relation, or response to his desires.

A person rarely sees his desires. They become apparent when his desires have a fight among themselves. The desire to get drunk will be countered by the desire to be free from drunkenness, or to be free from the consequences. The fear of death will temper our desire for body-pleasures, and will promote a desire for life and immortality.

We watch this contest for human energy, and we begin to take steps to protect our life and the things which we desire. We witness this step taking as a process, which is going on within us all the time. We agree that we are taking the steps, we are the process. We have at this realization, come upon our first awareness of an anterior self. I would like to call this anterior self, the Umpire.

THE UMPIRE

The Umpire has a motive, and this motive is the preservation of the body, and the self, -- the small `s' self. I will get into the reasons for calling this the small `s' self, and for distinguishing it from a capital `S' self. The Umpire is the mundane self.

The Umpire will be found to be extremely intricate in its workings. In the contests between desires it is necessary to study the thought processes and forestall any destructive trends before they get too strong. In other words we cannot protect the body without knowing a lot about the working of the thought processes.

It might be worth noting here that we are doing two things. We are discovering the Umpire, and simultaneously we are beginning a process of observing the Umpire. While we begin by recognizing the Umpire as an anterior self, we notice that another self, or awareness is watching it and its processes. And when we witness the Umpire, we will become aware that that which is witnessed, is not us.

Of course we do not see the Umpire with the physical eye, nor does it have an image that can be visualized. We witness a process and this process is scientifically explainable, because we define science as a process that is orderly and that carries with it predictability. We observe our own reactions for instance, and our fears and desires. We observe these things not directly as though they were objects, but as forces which impinge upon the body itself. And when they impinge upon the body, the effects are observable, with the senses. I am not saying that all actions are perfect, or bring ideal results, and consequently admit that the Umpire is not infallible. But the Umpire's actions are predictable.

We find a place here for behavioristic psychology. Behavioristic psychology begins with the Umpire and goes no further than domain of the Umpire. Behaviorism lays claim to being scientific, and since the umpire's actions are for the most part predictable, if all the factors and related thought processes were known, it might be said that the Umpire would be one hundred percent predictable.

The mistake made by the behaviorist is the attempt to standardize all reactions from specified stimuli as being similar, and reflexive. Each Umpire is different, because each manifests different capacities for prolonging life, and bettering the life of its host, (the body).

For instance the Umpire of one drunk may create a reaction that will lead to sobriety, while in another the Umpire will not cause a strong enough reaction, and the drunk will get worse.

Everyone goes through changes in his lifetime as a result of the Umpire, and they will never deny these processed are logical for the new or more mature self. However, the individual rarely watches the complexity of the inner struggle. Nor does he see all the factors involved. Nor does he name these factors the same as others name them in similar experiences.

We have a wide category of psychological terms as the result of trying to name these factors, and try to classify Umpire-reactions. For instance some will be delivered from alcohol, and say that God delivered them. Another will say that he just made up his mind. Others will say that they received help from a special group of people such as the Alcoholics Anonymous. However, each had to make a decision, and come around to some action, to search out their God, their self-determination, or their nearest AA group. And the Umpire was behind that decision, and a lot of thinking and reasoning went on that is never talked about.

THE PROCESS OBSERVER

We get a picture now of the Umpire being observed. We are now, by so observing, in an anterior position to the Umpire. This second observer is different from the Umpire, and unique, in that it is totally a process observer.

The Umpire watches over the body or the small `s' self, and while planning for the body, cannot help but get into the field of planning for ultimate survival. The aim of the survival urge, dare not have any limits or allowances for death, but must hope or plan for eternal survival.

Because the Umpire chiefly is occupied with the problems of daily survival, it cannot get into all the possible means for ultimate survival as much as it would like to. It identifies with physical survival and takes op all of its time.

The Process Observer retreats from material observations and contemplates patterns of thinking. And this, I think, somehow parallels Ornstein's description of the brain as having a compartment that is concerned with subjective considerations only, such as I describe as being the province of the Process Observer. The Umpire would occupy the other side of the brain, being more logically functional. Of course, I am only drawing a parallel, and cannot offer any proof of that which goes on in different parts of the brain.

When you begin to think about higher mental processes, you are indulging in that which many people call meditation. We have an observer now that is watching the mind, and which comes up with results, that are not objective, mathematical-type formulae or observations, but with observations that are more like functional curves. In the process-observer there are infinitely more factors than the Umpire has to deal with, and the results consequently di not appear on our screen as hard facts or discoveries, or hard, straight lines for future arguement.

In other words the Process Observer does not give demonstrable answers. It also takes a different point of observation than the Umpire does. The point of observation of the Umpire is the somatic or the mundane self. The Process Observer, while being extremely addicted to subjective material, takes on a solitary sense of logic in that it now looks for an answer for the sake of the answer, not for the comfort of the mundane self.

For instance the Process Observer may see that the universe may exist, and yet at the same time, it may not exist. At the same time it may see that the universe is an illusion only for people with special abilities of observation.

Likewise it takes the value of "good" into consideration, and it realizes that the definition of this abstraction rests upon the position of the observer who takes the value of "good" into consideration. A man may think that "good" is God, and the final destiny of all things. Or again, he may see "good" as the polar point of evil. But a man viewing the topic "good" from the position of the Process Observer, may determine from observing the provious process of thinking, that "good" is defined from the position of the observer, and that it has no meaning as a thing by itself.

The amazing thing about this is that all of the various conclusions about "good" are valid, in relation to the point from which they are observed. Each observer has a different set of validity-standards.

For instance according to material standardsm material exists. If we identify ourselves as being material bodies in a material universe, we are valid, and are being consistent. But this is like saying that material defines material in such a stance.

On this hinges a very important point for the rest of this talk. Definition not only requires comparison, but comparison with something different.

Until absolute knowledge arrives simultaneously with direct-mind communication, we will have to describe things with words. And words require definitions. Now we can get along with the definition of material things by comparisons which indirectly show the defined thing to possess a uniqueness, or separateness.

However, when we get into the definition of planes of existence, comparison demands that we define that plane of existence from another plane of existence.

We can define the Umpire only from the point or plane of mind which is the Process Observer. Nor could we define from an inferior point of awareness, the Process Observer by the Umpire on the somatic mind plane.

We cannot define a dimension except from another dimension. Thought cannot be defined in terms of thought. It can be defined in terms of superior awareness.

We cannot define the Process Observer from the point of the Process Observer. We may be watching the working of the Umpire for many years, and we may be functioning as a Process Observer, but at most, we will only be aware of watching the Umpire. The Umpire became aware of itself, when it noticed its own processes.

This did not automatically make the Umpire into a Process Observer, of the individual self to be centered completely in the Process Observer.

The Process Observer really came int self-conciousness of itself, only after the observations of processes was trancended, and Process Observer was witnessed from another mental plane.

The Process Observer does not leap into that next plane and abide there. The working of the Process Observer continues, but with more certaintym even as the Umpire continues to work with more of a settled purpose behind it.

Until the Process Observer is defined from another plane of reference, it continues to make a major mistake. It works incessantly at trying to define the mind with the mind. The Umpire before it had the body as a point of reference, and tried to define all things in relation to matter similar to the body-matter. Only by that which seemed to be an accident, did it allow feelings to become factors in decisions, and intuitions were admitted as possible factors for deciding action.

So the Process Observer proudly watches the mind from and with the mind and gets nowhere until an accident occurs, and the individual concieves new variables to be considered as to the cause and nature of the mind itself.

This new observance of the mind with the mind, and with what might seem to be infinite variables for factors and explainations, leads to a resounding disaster for the mind which we failed to fully recognize when we were going through the processes of mental observation.

Of course, it is necessary to note here, that the disaster which the mind encounters is the threshold of man's final form of existence, -- his final illumination... from which he looks back and correctly defines all that he previously experienced.

Let us take for example, of how a simple experience or process can lead to various definitions. Let us take the words life and death. Life is good, and death is bad. However, for a man about to eat a pig, the death of the pig is bad for the pig, but good for the man. He sees nothing wrong with eating the pig.

As an observer of the process, we can say that the definition of life and death are valid, for the pig and the man, from the point of each one's validity-standards.

But having trancended even the Process Observer, neither the pig nor the man is witnessed, as much as a drama or process within the Self. Then we can harmonize with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita when he says, "I am the bowman, the arrow and the victim." Or with Christ when he says, "I am the way, the Truth, and the life."

Most of us are reluctant to admit that there is any other point of validity for oserving [CORRECTION: observing] the universe, other than the one we posses. Most of us want the universe, and life itself, defined from a material standard of validity. Ninety percent of the people talk of heaven, admitting that it is another dimension, but they like to retain the pose of proving things by material standards. Religion to them is a concession toward hope, and materialism is a concession toward intellectual ego ans [CORRECTION: and] a pretense of human, mental omnipotence.

When we refuse the testimony of mystics, or illuminated men, we are really demanding that a non-material universe make itself manifest, or material so that we can measure it with material standards.

Getting back to the Process Observer, when we become heavily engaged in observing thought processes, we have just begun to observe the mind (somatic mind).

When we talk of the Umpire as being an anterior observer to our initial self-conciousness, and then mention that there is another anterior observer behind the Umpire which is the Process Observer, -- it looks like we are creating an endless chain of anterior observers, and that I am preparing you for a speculations of observers being observed, ad infinitum.

What I am really pointing out, or attempting, is a purification of the definition of that which is the Ultimate Observer, as the real observer unfolds and is aware of itself.

I think it is appropriate to compare our points of observation here, the point of the audience, and the point of the speaker, and make some effort to establish some platform of common validity.

There are manifestly two points of reference evident, in all instruction. One is from the party who does not know, and the second is from the informed party, or the party who poses as being informed. Of course the one who poses has no validity.

Those who approach this process of observation as a student or as an experimenter, can have nothing proven for them about Process Observers, or ultimate awareness, much less proof that there is a position above and beyond the Process Observer that justifies all the work of the process observer.

To put it simply there is no use really, in talking about the Process Observer, until the student has met and understood the self which is the Umpire. It is enough of a gamble for the seeker to take, to dedicate and direct some energy inward according to this prescription, just to validate the concept of the Umpire. I use the term concept, here, because for those who have not been convinced, the Umpire can only be a concept.

There are people however, who intuitively know that there is such a thing as an Umpire, and they would like to know where the introspection will take them if it is continued. And it seems that they should be entitiled to some sort of sensible explaination about the long term gains of any investment in the direction of total knowledge, if they are going to dedicate to the cause any long term commitments of energy.

Icould say that the seeker should make an effort to find the Umpire, and that automatically he will find incentive to look further. But a lot of people will not even bother to look for the Umpire if they do not think that there might be important discoveries beyond the reaching of the Umpire. And since a system is involved that lays claim to more distant goals, anyone looking into this matter should be free to substantiate to the best of his ability, wothout making the whole trip, the ends of the system.

However, this is not a system which manufactures perfect scientists with mundane proofs. Those who have reached the realization beyond the process observer, do not write books of detailed method filled with step-by-step proofs.

We have writings from or about mystics who have manifestly made the complete trip to Reality. Such are Ramana Maharishi, Richard M Bucke, and St. John of the Cross. There are many others which have been reported by others, such as Jesus. But all writings along this line, whether personal accounts, or writings done by disciples, are unconcerned about proving any point to the reader. The reader can pick up the attitude by the writer, that the reader is expected to believe beforehand that the enlightened person has been proven to be enlightened beforehand by reliable people.

When a mystic of this sort is approached personally, he is not going to be able to prove to the person who interviews him, in that person's paradigm, or framework of experience, that which the mystic has learned. And mystics, and enlightened men, are constantly under attack for their lack of "logical" proof of their teachings.

We should take a look at this problem from the viewpoint of the mystic, if that is possible. We are possessors of a relative mind, a mind that wants definitions that compare to his previous experiences. The point that is missed, is that we cannot hope to know, by relative mentation, that which another has come to know or realize by a direct-mind experience.

It is possible for a person who has similar direct mind experience, to understand another person who has had a similar (direct-mind) experience. Still, neither can prove anything to the layman. Much is written, and the writings are attempts to inspire, by one means or another, the mind of the reader to develop a deeper interest.

I am avoiding up until now the mention of the possibility that many writings, and accounts may depict a mystic as a teacher if authenticity, when in fact they are not authentic. These charlatans, and their disciples, complicate the picture further for those who are searching for reality.

The motives of most mystical teachers can be interpreted from their life-style. Insincere representatives of Realization, usually sooner or later, betray an interest in material things, in power and ritual. Or they manifest, mental instability, if they are nothing more than fanatical concept-projectors.

One thing that the exposing of charlatans does for us is, teach us not to accept things too quickly. We must learn to doubt. We must learn to doubt, not only the verbal testimony of others, but the persuations of our own beliefs, and keep looking for symptoms of self delusion, which may have been overlooked because we were too tired to tackle the more intricate ramifications of self-study.

The mind is mundane, which means that it is fickle. No matter how profoundly we view the ramifications of thinking, we are doing it with the mundane mind, and we are subject to the rationalizations and fatigues of that mind. It is the fickle, mundane mind that demands proof of the absolute mind, and the experience of the Absolute. However, when the Absolute awareness is reached, it is in a position to witness and validate both Itself, and the mundane mind with its different levels. We rarely stop to think that we cannot prove the nature of our own somatic mind, and it is ironic to find that it is validated by an extremely subjective study, a subjective study which involves us in its point of culmination in a bewildering confusion and despair about the mind's ability to understand anything.

The thinking which is going on now, when we think of the mind's intricacies, is still mundane. The conception or visualization of an Umpire, and a Process Observer are not realizations until a person goes through the experience necessary to fully bring about the awareness of the Umpire and the Process Observer, distinctly, and in that order.

Once the person reaches the point of being a Process Observer, he is still using the relative mind (mundane mind). He is different in that he has trancended the pitfalls and shortcomings of the Umpire, even though he is concious of the Umpire part of his nature as being still in operation.

The Process Observer, in its seemingly infinite problems, comparisons and ramifications, finds, accidentaly a means to explore the mind on all levels. It can be said another way. By accident our awareness transcends the mind.

METHOD

I would like to say something here about method. We have talked about a system of meditation that is like holding a mirror up to the mind, which leads to a state of being in which there seems to be no mind or mirror, no separateness and no comparison.

And perhaps for some this will seem like a workable system, and some will try to save themselves the trip involved in the system by announcing that they believe everything that I have said. They may go about quoting me, and other authors on subjects of enlightenment and Zen. They may make a religion out of it, and try to live as though they had no mind, by imagining how a person would act if he had no mind.

I think Alan Watts tried to perform this type of mental acrobatics, for the purpose of being an accepted author. He visited some Zen monasteries in Japan, and decided after interviewing D.T. Suzuki and Sokei Yan that he perfectly understood the nature of enlightenment. He may have simply found a delight in being able to translate some complex ideas into simple explanations. It did not occur to him that Zen is not a doctrine or a philosophy, but a way of life aimed at finding an explanation for that life, and should never be anything that is offered as an explanation of life alone. Our purpose is to find, and then explain.

My purpose here is not even to tempt you with ideas of that which you may find. I outline the trip because I feel that the individual is entitled to some type of roadmap of the "Way," from someone who has made the trip and then decides to open his mouth up widely and announce that the trip has a golden objective.

My purpose is not to extol Zen or any special system. My purpose is to outline a system which will prove itself as it goes along, and which will reward us at any point along the line, by finding for us a more disciplined and skillful mind. And a mind that is more aware of itself.

So the different levels of the mind, or the anterior observers, should be discovered, not accepted from testimonial evidence from me. The student should begin from a point of no-conviction.

To find a perfect, or at least more perfect, psychology, we must go back to this base-point of no-conviction. The average psychologist or the person so ordained by educational authority, does not bother to go back and simply do some basic self-observation. He is tied up with trying to force into his own head, the definition, theories and convictions of all of the preceding authorities on psychology, so that he can use their coat-tails for an excuse to establish his own authority or practice. The old paradigm is never challenged, until the paradigm leads to a point of blatant absurdity.

Very few psychologists go back to the roots of their profession and define the terms that come to be used without definition. This tendency has crept over even into the physical sciences. Few chemists when told that an element had a certain valence when in combination with another chemical, bothered to ask "why?" They just copied down the information on the atomic chart, and memorized the results of the experimentation of previous chemists and took the latters' word and proceeded to work their equations from the reference point of another person's word.

We can begin any science from a tentative point, provided we keep in mind, throughout all the following study, that our study is real only in reference to that tentative, beginning point or postulation.

When we view the material universe, we can take any one of three attitudes as being true. First, the universe can be considered to be the most durable matter of our experience, and material of all sorts is likewise taken as being the basis for all proof. Secondly, we can postulate that the universe may be an illusion in that it may be improperly perceived by our consciousness by imperfect senses. And thirdly, we may postulate that the universe is defined only in relation to the observer, or that meaning is an individual and varied reaction or result of observation.

In other words, to an ant, the universe might be an acre of ground. To an insane person, the universe may be contained in the core of an apple.

To properly appraise this system, it is one that tries to locate the real Self. Since we begin by identifying our selves wrongly, and, throughout the years of reevaluating our Self, we continue to come up with different ideas of the Self, even though such ideas are closer to. truth, or progressively better. We cannot therefore pretend to start from a distinct point of reference, except from that variable point which we tentatively identify as the Self in order to get started, in the very beginning.

Ultimately we will find that to really find the Self, we will have to get outside of the mind and its measurement systems. We do not know now even who is looking, or that which we really see, especially after we have hallucinated, or have seen a mirage or a hologram. So we have to start with nothing, or as close to it as we can get, by constantly recognizing that any early conclusions must be only tentative assumptions. We know nothing for sure.

We do not think because we are free agents. Our thinking is forced upon us. We cannot help or stop thinking. We cannot start thinking. Descartes uttered a meaningless platitude, when he said, "I think, therefore I am.

We have little justification for claiming a thought as our property, especially when the thought was caused by previous thoughts, previous determination, and previous events that were forced upon us. There are also in the present, environmental influences which will cause thoughts before we can prevent them.

Many of these external or environmental influences affect us in or through the body. The body itself could be considered to be part of the environment. Now it will do us no good to deny the body as being part of us, but it is good to deny that it is the all of us. Even though the body does things which seem alien to the welfare of the central self, or self-consciousness, our consciousness is linked to the body, and dependent upon the condition of the body. Only when we have learned to become aware when the body is unconscious, will we be able to look upon the body-type of consciousness as being inferior and illusory.

Such super-consciousness occurs when man transcends the Process Observer. And it is only from that new point of observation that the body-type of consciousness can be qualified.

So we cannot start with a personal negation. However, we must begin with some concept about our self. So we take this initial concept of our self and compare it with other concepts of our Self. And we retain, as a postulation still, those concepts which are the least absurd, and the least unreasonable.

This whole process is a retreat from error, not a planting of a postulation and then massing all of our forces to prove that postulation. It is taking zero, and building from zero.

When we ask ourself, "Who am I?", we are taking an initial step. We do not begin by saying I am this or that. We then explore the field of possibility. We may be only a body. We may be a spirit which is housed in a body. We may be part body, part mind, and part spirit, with each part separate from the other. Or we may concede that we cannot identify ourself properly, and feel that we are basically an awareness, with a body and mind somehow functioning and in contact with that awareness. We are aware of our mind, in other words as well as being aware of the body.

We begin as a child begins life by examining its fingers and toes. At first the toes and fingers seem to be alien objects. After a while the baby identifies with the toes and fingers. When the baby gets older, it may once again decide that body-appendages are alien to the central self from which it identifies things.

But we must begin as a child, and ask as a child, "Who am I?", "What is this toe in relation to me?" and then, "What is all this about?" and finally, "What is thinking?"

We find that our thoughts are not us, as I stated earlier. Thoughts are obsessions. And to find out the nature of thoughts, we must make an obsession of studying thoughts, and trying to understand them.

Determination must be summoned, and continually reinforced by remembering the need for determination and attention, that is needed to find ways and means to reach the goals which may be the reward of that obsession.

When we are attracted by things about us, too many hours of the day, we should retreat and deliberately look at ourselves by looking at our previous actions. We must interrogate ourself to find out why we produced those actions.

We must observe our thoughts likewise and ask ourselves, "Why did I think that?" Or, "Where did this thought originate?" Or, "What is thought?"

However, the most important thing to ask ourself about thought would have to do with the source and direction of thought. Thought is not something that is born, and which later terminates within the individual mind alone.

There are two directions of thought, and both are projections. Thoughts are projected into our minds by others, or other entities, and we are capable of projecting thoughts into the minds of others.

Now this is not too complex. You will get thoughts which did not originate inside yourself, and everyone who has done experiments with ESP knows that you can project thoughts.

I might add that people, especially religious people, and mystical individuals, have testified that they received direct thoughts from God, so clearly that the message appeared to be spoken. If such thoughts, or internal messages are prophetic in nature, the realization of the prophecy later, gives credence to the fact that the information emanated from some source other than the person's memory-bank.

Not all things come to us by way of the senses, even though the only way we can know anything about the physical universe, is to determine it through the senses. The senses are neither infallible nor exact. Our eyes, as I have mentioned previously, have a limited color range. The ears have a limited audio-range. We can demonstrate this by observing the operation of a radio. The radio can pick up messages in our room, which are there all the time, but which we cannot hear. With such a limited sensory range, it is easy to see that there is, just within this physical dimension, many things going on of which we know little or nothing. Our room is filled at all time with sounds coming in from places a hundred miles away. Our skies are filled with lights, refracting and bouncing around which are invisible to us, and which may have originated in outer space a thousand years ago.

For an example of the inexact, or erratic nature of the senses, we need only to look at a mirage or hologram. We witness a mirage or hologram, and give it the same credence that we would our child standing beside us. However, upon careful checking, we find that nothing is really in the place where these illusions appeared.

I mention these shortcomings, because there is too much emphasis put upon the senses as the only point of reference for the study of the people and the world.

The apparent witnessing of the mirage or hologram is incidental to a simultaneous projection by the mind, of a vision upon the world-view. This happens when we validate objects seen. So that when we see our hand, we first pick up impulses of refracted light, and project an image or vision of the mind's interpretation of the percept. The difference between the hand and the hologram, is that we never find any argument with the vision of the hand when we examine it with the other senses. Every thought is a projection.

The senses hammer something into the brain, and into the central mind, and the mind has to interpret those messages. The perception mechanism involves a very subtle chemistry. The light coming into the eye manifestly relates to, and affects the different rods in the retina. Like the keys on a piano, there are wires, or nerves which convert the impression into some gentle form of electricity to carry impulses to the brain. (It is possible in the case of ghosts or spirit-manifestation, that the incoming projection by the mind of an unidentifiable entity, may cause a reverse chemistry from the mind, so that the impulse originates in the mind, and activates rods in the eyes according to forms projected upon the mind. When the ghost is photographable, it can only be construed that the individuals present project the substance of the vision, as they do in a cabinet materialization.)

What I have just described are not the only forms of projections which influence us. There is a projection of the world-view projected upon our minds, seemingly coincidental to birth or early childhood. This is the pervasive, common interpretation of things that causes our percepts. It is evident that the world is more than that which is seen, and it is evident that the world is something other than the interpreted or adjusted images which we later help to project. There is no way of knowing where this agreement starts, nor why there is such a pervasive state of agreement among creatures whose mind-states disagree on so many things of major importance.

The individual states of mind do a bit of projecting on their own. And such projections, instead of adding credence to the world-view, cause barriers to be erected between people. While we are projecting a personality which is false, the other fellow is simultaneously projecting a false personality. Each tries to create his image of himself, and his blueprint firmly in the minds of the others. Each person that does this is still not sure of himself, so he keeps testing people to see if they are buying his merchandise. He is trying to use them as a mirror, to check out, not that which he really might be, but to reinforce his own preconceptions of himself. If they do not flatter him immediately, or if their projection of themselves conflicts with his projection, then we have social incompatibility.

And a major shortcoming of psychology (current) can be found in this business of not properly identifying the bewildering conflicts between people that are never solved by talking, or by taking notes and inventing terms that only classify actions. When we quit projecting idealistic images on our neighbor, we will come closer to knowing him. When we quit trying to project a false image of ourself upon the neighbor, we will come closer still.

Only then can we successfully use our neighbor as a mirror. And probably then, there would be no use in so doing, except to honestly check ourselves out, to see if the neighbor picks up some fault about our conduct of which we are unconscious, and of which we would not desire for ourselves.

However, to get along with the neighbor, we must learn to walk a mile in his moccasins. This is another way of saying that we must know the abilities and handicaps of that neighbor, and some of the factors that influence his attitudes. We must also try to go directly to the mind of that person, for this practice will abridge efforts to try to identify and weigh every factor that qualifies his thinking and reacting.

Listening to the projections of modern psychologists, without noting their direction for social expediency instead of scientific evolvement of better healing techniques, is like going to the zoo as a child and having your arm torn off by an animal which had been depicted by Walt Disney "authorities" or EPA "authorities" who were interested only in their singularly selfish projections.

Our society is milling about in anger and confusion, having been constantly bombarded with massive projections from first one "authority" and then another. The projections of the new psychology are not the same as those put out by psychologists thirty years ago. And none of them can harmonize with the previous massive projections of church dogma.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Q. Could the Umpire make a mistake and that would throw me out of the ball-game?

R. Sure. The Umpire is not infallible. You either have to transcend the Umpire, or he might destroy you, by allowing one of his constituent voices to take over. The Umpire has to do with a balance of the fears and the appetites. They are hardly ever in perfect balance. And if the Umpire is not able to forestall an urge, which may really be imposed by outside interests, or helped along by the pressure from others, the Umpire may make a decision which will enslave the host for twenty years. That is, pregnancy may occur as the result of overwhelming desire, and we will be tied up for twenty years... or longer if the child is an idiot.

Of course I believe that as soon as we start studying the Umpire we will become better balanced. We may be lucky to learn from the enslavement of an infatuation, that we must avoid infatuations and their results.

And this brings us to something which I have noticed about many people on the spiritual path... and this is true in relation to many people in our group... they overlook the need for physical adjustment. They want to jump into what they think is the heavy stuff, this pipe dream idea of enlightenment, and by studying the symptoms of enlightenment as described by charismatic teachers, say, pop, there I am. Or just act like they have no mind.

Q. Don't you minimize the body. If the Umpire is in charge of the body shouldn't our vector ignore the Umpire?

R. You can't ignore the body or the Umpire. Both will go on working. Is that what you mean... or hope for?

Q. It just seems that the body speaks sharply and clearly to me. The postulations which you speak of concerning regulation and control are not so strong. They are easier to ignore.

R. These are not postulations. If you get gonorrhea, you will know that you made a mistake, regardless as to how sharply you were urged to take the chance for it. And once you get in trouble you will see a need to reverse your vector.

We naturally have to start with the body, but we cannot start by either deifying the body, or postulating a divine soul that cannot be affected by debilitating physical experiences. The divine soul might not be affected, but our ability to be conscious of even our body might be affected by listening to body-urges without an attempt to encourage a balance.

I say, prove that you have a soul. And you have to start with manifest things like a body and its actions. This does not mean that we have to say that we are the body. It is better to observe that the body affects us, and affects our understanding of the anterior mind.

Q. I am not clear on this Umpire. Do you mean that once we see the Umpire that all this personal schism ends?

R. No, not exactly. You become more aware of the dichotomy. Previously a man thinks that he eats or drinks, and he sees no reason for inhibiting an action that feels good to him. But when he sees that it is not him, when he sees that there is another part that is hurt by the excessive appetites, he may wrongly identify the other part of him.

He may think that a spiritual force is the part that is warning him against the excess of the appetites. He may go clear over to another extreme, and attain religious salvation, which is the state of liberation from slavery to the appetites really.

But when he manages to get behind the Umpire and see real functioning of the Umpire, he will not be torn by traumatic reversals. He may eat and drink, but will not care one way or the other about it, and consequently will not care enough about the appetites to over-indulge in them. But you will still have urges, and periods of imbalance. There is no straight line possible for body energy.

Q. Should I be afraid of this venture into the mind?

R. Well, it depends on whether you want to gamble or not. When I started out in this thing, I realized that I perhaps had something to lose. I could lose my mind, or lose my life, or have it cut short prematurely by some ascetic practice.

I decided to take the gamble, myself. I decided that it is better to take some risks, if the alternative was an ignorant vegetative existence.

And strangely enough I was protected. And I want to say this very sincerely. I believe that once the commitment is made to find your Truth at all costs, some interior or anterior self sets up protection. It may even set up the whole path.

You can call it God, or the guardian angel, or a spiritual alliance, if you wish. Something sets up protection. Now I do not want you to feel too secure, because uncertainty and despair are part of the formula, it seems, for finding the final door or breakthrough. The despair is necessary to pop the head, after the long ordeal of running between the raindrops.

Q. I am afraid of losing my inhibitions. I am afraid of plunging in...

R. You know what you are afraid of. You think you are afraid of losing some part of yourself, but you are really afraid of losing a coward. Let him die. He is not worth the attention. There may be something magical found in the losing of that coward.

See, this is what I thought. I valued myself. You know everybody cherishes themselves. Especially when you are young. I got into this thing when I was twenty years of age. You can look into the mirror at that age and say, "Hey, this guy could cause a lot of trouble. Why get into an ascetic path. He could trade his looks for money, or his wit and wisdom for money or for Cadillacs or whatever. Why fool around with this junk.

But you realize, if you have ever done any introspection, that this is a rationalization, talking yourself out of real action. And when you realize that you are afraid, you have no other course except to face that fear.

Q. Isn't there a state of preparation for this path? Maybe some people would get blasted.

R. Well. . .about preparation. . .I think that everyone who sat through this is prepared. I noticed that a few got up and left. That leaving may have been protective. I think you are protected by nature. If you are a paper bag incapable of holding too much junk, you will burst and drop the contents.

This business must find a response in your intuition. If a person listens to some philosophy and announces that they want to make a move it generally comes in response to their intuition.

Of course some people hear a voice from their Umpire which says, "Do not listen to that nut any longer. You are liable to start doing these things which he talks about. You can get involved in this introspection."

Q. Do you think that there is no value to watching your dreams?

R. No, there is a lot to be learned from the dreams. Persistent dreams, that is dreams that are random and varied, are prompted by anxieties. There is something from the inner mind, that keeps wanting to attract the attention of the conscious mind, despite the Umpire which always keeps this voice squelched. There is something trying to get in, with a complaint that may do the dreamer some good.

I knew a yogi years ago that made a deep study of his dreams. In fact he used to say that it was the first step in studying the mind. It may well be a good direction. You can catch the mind when it is not battered by the torrential perception influx that occurs during the waking hours.

From this study we find that some dreams are accurately precognitive. Which means that the mind seems to be peeping into another dimension.

Q. I am a Catholic, and I have somehow fitted this into the Catholic philosophy that we are searching for God, for the Ultimate Reality which is the same thing.

R. Right. You see, I think that the Asiatic was a thousand years ahead of us. You see he had a direct-mind system. He called it Zen. I talk a lot about Zen. But I did not reach my realization through Zen. I have repeated this in almost every talk I give.

I reached it as a result of a tremendous amount of determination, -- regardless of the odds, to find the Truth... about myself... whatever I could about myself about my source and... who I was and where I was going. These are the three main questions that are the province of religion as well as of psychology.

But we live in a generation where people are reluctant to accept anything from religion... and that's a good idea... because religion has been too full of politics, and greed and empire building. It has lost its purity of purpose.

But we have cases in Christian history where people have reached this. But the sad thing is that the church itself... the Christian church, does not advise the finding of God. It advises a belief in the pastor. If you go to church you will find this out. There is no one there to place you in this direction.

John of the Cross was a mystic, who was looking for enlightenment. And they put him in jail. In fact it was for looking for it that they put him in jail.. .and it was in jail that he found it.

Early Christian mystics had to be very careful... had to conceal it. And the result was that the early Christian civilization, never heard of the values that could be obtained from mysticism. It was more important to keep the herd peaceful than it was to free people, -- from illusion.

Q. Is it important now for America?

R. No... no, it is not important for America. I do not know what is important for America. This does not relate to the good of the world. It would be a mistake to play God in that direction.

THE PRACTICAL APPROACH

How does a person begin to think? How does a person realize that he or she is not really thinking?

It may surprise us to realize that there is a limited time in which the individual may investigate the self, in search of his awareness, or his real self or his Ultimate Observer. It has to be somewhere between the excitement and involvement-stages of youth, and the indifference and resignation of old age.

An infant enters into this life reluctantly, but after a few weeks begins to identify with his relatives and with his own body. Then he finds life to be an enormous adventure, and regards with awe each fly and leaf, each smile and frown, and each shade of color or sound of music or discord.

And so this child plunges into life, and identifies with the paradigms of his family and species, exulting in a mood of romance and make-believe that will stay with him for over twenty years.

I have often remarked that the little child has the greatest sensitivity, and hence the greatest ability for intuition. I believe that the infant is, for a while shortly after birth, in touch with a dimension of such a nature, that for a while, he is reluctant to take interest in this one. He has in the very early months and years an ability for direct mind-communication with people and even animals. This ability for direct mind-communication is also conducive to having a better intuition.

Every child is seduced into taking part in our game of life. He is called out continually, and reassured that he is very important. Everything that he does is applauded. He is only discouraged if he approaches something that will hurt him. He enters into a game of imitation, to encourage the kisses, smiles and chortling noises of his seducers. He even gets into the sly game of testing his family despite his helpless condition. He does this by noting their reactions to his own various noises and screams.

The child begins to lose his direct-mind abilities about the same time that he identifies with the language of his parental dimension, and when he becomes involved in trying to manipulate the paradigm and its people for his own petulant form of counter-seduction.

So that by the time a child enters grade school his intuition has drastically been reduced. He does not bother to analyze or even sense the nature of the life that he has entered, -- he is too busy throwing himself into participation and identification with it.

He also identifies with his body more and more, and this belief in his body, and body-mind reaches an egotistical culmination in his late teens. He reaches a point where death is ignored and life is his oyster. He makes plans to use people in every manner possible. And he does some very foolish things even by the standards of the society which encourages vain struggling and competition.

So that, from the viewpoint of maturity, meaning older age, the scramblings and writings of youth seem to be a sorry result or outcome to the earlier stage of innocence and dependence.

It generally takes a catastrophe, or a long stretch of prosaic living to bring the youth to a philosophic attitude on life. Drugs, of the psychedelic type, have inspired some youths to reevaluate our paradigm in relation to reality. The drug-experience in some instances poses a new slant on things, a look at life with another state of perception, and possibly a look at that which seems to be another dimension which throws our belief in this dimension in jeopardy, hinting that this is not all there is to mortal existence.

Those who become interested in psychic matters as a result of drugs, rarely do anything serious, even though the drug-generation is responsible for furnishing the membership for nearly all of the new religious cults that have sprung up recently. The reason for widespread interest and yet marginal accomplishment for those inspired by drugs, stems from the fact that only a small percentage of people take drugs from other than a hedonistic viewpoint, or from habit. So that while many are amazed at the possibilities for the mind in psychedelic experiences, most immerse themselves into the habit of harder drugs, or if they remain with the hallucinogenic drugs they become involved with hedonistic experiments with sex, and they become more materialistic than the previous generation which they pretend to abhor.

I have seen many young people (who had taken drugs), at my lectures become very excited about the work of learning more about the self. Some of them make fanatical pledges for participation, and others weep at the dual vision of mental freedom and mental damnation, and the knowledge that choosing for either will be nearly impossible.

Still, everyone becomes a philosopher for a few moments or days of his life. It seems that it is part of the plan of Nature to allow each man to undergo disaster or suffering, even as it formerly allowed him to perform with conviction his hedonistic dance of life. When death approaches, the mind has already been prepared for it, by tempering the individual a little at a time with disappointment, failure, illness and tragedy, until the individual then almost welcomes death. So that if a person waits until this programming for death takes place, -- (activation of the death-gene), -- there is no hope of reaching any illumination about life after death through any strenuous discipline that might be needed to simulate the natural death approach, and the final despair.

And so for those who are somewhere in between the folly of youthful hedonism and the indifference of old age, some system needs to be salvaged from the experiences of those who managed to make a grand assault upon definition, and who admittedly found an answer.

Thinking of the self-investigative type generally does not emanate from a life of contentment. We think as a result of shocks, -- about things of importance. Zen, the psychoanalysis of ancient Asia, knew and applied shocks. Gurdjieff the master-psychologist of this century taught of the value of deliberately induced shocks. In the investigation of death, it does little good to talk about it, or to quote obituary statistics. To know death properly the person must die. But a dead man cannot speak, and if he is drifting about us in some spirit-form, even though his experience is one of bliss, it will do us no good, -- if he cannot tell us about it. So we take the testimony of those who have died and have returned.

There are two ways of returning. One is to be medically revived, after having been medically written off as dead. We are getting an increasing amount of revival-type reports, and books with some case-histories are available on this type of evidence. The other evidence is an artificially induced death experience after which there is a return to that which seems to the observer as normal consciousness. This death experience is only artificially induced, and is used as a long gamble for a testimonial return. It is not just an exercise in imagination, for the purpose of intuiting that which death might be. The results evidently satisfy the searcher for the rest of his life, and enable him to meet death with equanimity.

When a person learns of these techniques for finding the ultimate answer, he often wants to leap immediately into the experiment, take the gamble, (if it is a gamble) and hurry back with a "maximum" experience, so that he can continue to brag about his achievement while pursuing the hedonistic game and its playmates.

Of course, such a person will not succeed in such a gamble. Part of the gamble is the abandoning of all priorities for the individual's energy, except for the intense focusing of the computer upon the problem, which is the study of the self, not its indulgence.

Several impatient researchers, have tried crude improvisations to leap into the death experience and leap back out, thinking that they would salvage a genuine knowledge of the type of existence that a person might encounter after death. One such adventurer used nitrous oxide, arranging the equipment that held the gas, so that the gas would be shut off with the collapse of the hand or the body. When he recovered from the effects of the gas he remembered nothing. But strangely enough, some form of consciousness had manifested itself while he was unconscious. On a paper that had been placed within arm's reach, he found written, in his own handwriting, the following bit of wisdom, and the only benefit of his dangerous experiment:

Higamus hogamus, woman is monogamous. Hogamus higamus, man is polygamous.

The gamble or experiment has to begin with a self-questioning. We cannot objectively study the phenomena of death alone and succeed in getting the ultimate answer. It is much simpler than that. We must find out who is searching. We must know the self. The small `s' self has to be discovered first before we can hope to find that lesser or greater Self which may lie beyond it.

And this brings us to the business of observing the small `s' self first, and the system of this observation once more. To do this properly the student should abandon all opinions, or dogmatic systems, unless they appeal strongly to his intuition as being sensible. That includes all systems of Zen, and all esoteric schools. I am implying that this system itself is no better, and should be approached and used only after the intuition has checked it out, and even then, -- since it is not proven except in the final experience, -- it should only be accepted as an experiment, or a tentatively accepted discipline.

In other words we cannot begin by accepting some system that sounds good, unless we have checked ourselves to see if we are encouraged to make the selection from desires that have somatic promptings, or from rationalizations that might deliver us from the strain of the search.

We hear a lot about meditation lately. People are paying large sums of money to learn a form of meditation that will free them from the task of thinking, or facing themselves. That which we need is a system of meditation that will allow the student to really think, -- perhaps for the first time, -- to be self-conscious.

It does not matter which posture you choose for thinking, nor whether you have a prayer or chant. I sometimes feel that it is better to think on your feet, and while walking. However, whichever posture or place is chosen, it is good to be alone, -- to spend a prescribed time alone each day in some manner.

As for diet, the only thing to remember, is that we should avoid getting overloaded. A distended paunch takes all the blood from the head, and negates most thoughts except the thought of sleep.

Of course there may not be any need to mention these things because if a person sets his head to the task, he will gradually learn to avoid eating or drinking too much before he starts thinking.

In fact, real self-analysis begins with something like excessive indulgence of the appetites, and the observance of their effect upon the body and mind. It is not good to limit the observations to the self alone. It is good to study the attitudes and opinions of others in regard to ourselves, and to observe others and take note of the effects of their appetites upon their health and peace of mind.

A good place to study the psychology of others is in the mortuary. Of course it is too late for the subject, but the statistics that a person picks up there are a means of determining which lifestyles were sensible and rewarding for the payments made whether those payments were pleasures, sickness, or conservative industriousness.

We look at the man in the casket, and we cannot help but identify with him. And we find that the cemeteries are filled with people who have made mistakes, and sometimes made those mistakes so consistently that the mistakes contributed to the misery and death of the person. And when we view the corpse, we can hypocritically, and perhaps mercifully make a remark about the corpse appearing to be asleep, and really looking healthy, or we can listen to the cause of death and decide perhaps to redefine old concepts of morality, or new concepts of morality, and reappraise the course of our own energy and purpose.

If life is meaningless, it does not matter how quickly one dies. But most people pretend that life is full of meaning, and endorse all political pollyanna, all current sociological and psychological interpretations, and the general togetherness that constitutes religion today, and this endorsement gives a strong indication that the people so subscribing, believe in the game of life fully. Yet most of them cast their lives away almost wantonly.

I am reminded of a young girl I knew, from the time she was a baby until she became a corpse at the age of seventeen. She was a healthy and pretty girl who had a scorn for all adult ideas despite the fact that her father was permissive and encouraged her to "have fun." At fifteen she began having fun and developed an ulcerated colon from some naive method of pregnancy-prevention. She had a baby at sixteen, and a colostomy before she was seventeen. She committed suicide by removing the connection between her intestine and an external container.

One other time I happened to be in a funeral home and noticed that the bodies of several women, all under forty, were on display. I commented on this to the undertaker, wondering aloud at the cause of so many deaths among younger women.

He leaned over and whispered, "Birth-control pills. That woman lying in the room ahead had a heart attack supposedly caused by a clot, caused by taking birth-control pills. But of course there is no way of proving... "

I have known several people who kept eating until the fat affected their hearts, and caused their deaths. Many people cannot control their alcoholic intake and drink themselves to death.

I previously talked about an Umpire. Where is the Umpire when this happens? The Umpire, which is the somatic monitor, failed in so many cases that it became recognized centuries ago, that we had to develop a moral or religious code to protect the health and life of the individual.

The Umpire failed in these cases because of inherited genetic characteristics, of archetypal determinations whose blueprints carried only rough or general programming for basic survival of the species. It appears that the pre-alcoholic or primitive man's Umpire did not need to weigh the effects of alcohol.

People with the energy of youth, and with the awareness of the iniquities and inequities of organized religion develop a scorn for all traditional morality and advice. And a majority of the young men under twenty seem to possess a disdain for danger and death that would cause us to have second thoughts about the existence of a functional Umpire of any worth, because in each generation we lose a segment of our youths either in reckless or suicidal exhibitionism, or in warfare.

In viewing these instances when the Umpire seems to be asleep, I can only surmise that the individual is designed or programmed for racial and family survival as well as, and before, individual survival. It may likewise be programmed to allow incidents of natural selection, incidents in which the exhibitionistic and egotistic would have, in more primitive times, guaranteed the selection of the braver and stronger among the young males as the conquering survivors.

There is no doubt that racial and family survival are programmed into the behavior of every animal, to some degree. It is just not as evident in animals as well as it is in humans.

And in the human being it seems that the intense appreciation of the self, as being unique and of extreme importance to the world, would overshadow and negate the urge to rush out and throw oneself upon a hand grenade to save the species. But it happens.

Almost every young man thinks that he is an outstanding creature, that is destined to do mighty things. And from the egotism of this conviction he has been known repeatedly to treat his family as being secondary or implementive to his career. So that there seems to be a lack of consistency in the general attitude of such an individual, and there also seems to be Nature-programming over which the individual has no control, and even more is rarely aware of his robot-like slavery to genetic or other implants.

There are many incidents in life, which if examined patiently by us, will show us that we are not the select and important creatures that we thought ourselves to be. However, the vanity of man does not let go easily, and it may be well that it does not, because as soon as we witness our robot-nature, -- we frantically search for facts, discoveries or rationalizations that will return to us some hope that we are not fertilizer alone.

Let us take an instance of some rude awakening that might lead us to a dynamic search for the permanent center of ourselves. Let us take the instance of a young man who has been rebuffed to a point that it seriously affects his respect for his omnipotence, and sends him back to the drawing board, looking for the flaw in his blueprint of his own potentials and prospects.

Every young person tries to test the environment to see how much he can get away with. As a child he endures many rebuffs, but after his pride heals, he realizes that he cannot have his way when having his way is absurdly selfish. So he develops a personality that masks the conviction of great destiny, and other egos. He pretends to function for others, and after having retrenched to this point of "altruism," he resumes his empire-building.

He gets a job by telling the employer that he will be an asset to the employer. He enhances his security and society's belief in his dependability by making a down payment on a house and car, and by getting married. He has decided to use his wife to further his respectability, and to bear him a perfect child which will be an exact replica of himself.

He does not realize that his wife's mind has been working along similar lines, in that she too thinks that the mate is only a means to an end. And now the time has come for her to cash in on her investment. She divorces him and sues him for half of all his possessions.

We need not go into everything that befalls the young man. There is no doubt that he is going to do some thinking that he never previously planned to do.

And he may wind up talking to himself, and giving himself frantic answers.

What went wrong? Did he not love her? Did she not say that she loved him? She has betrayed him, and consequently she must be evil. But if she is evil, his whole psychology is in a shambles. How will he ever know other people well enough to trust them? Are there any people who are honorable in their human relationships, -- who keep their commitments. Is she not a fool for giving up the opportunity for a good life, for ideal companionship and for ideal children?

However, on her way out of his house she used a few words that are extremely disquieting, especially when they come from a person that has been loved and trusted. (By whom you have been hypnotized.) The words may have been, fathead, dictator, primitive, ass, or any of a thousand other.

Those words are catalytic. It is true that she needs a few choice words to make her go back to the mirror for reaffirmation, but chances are that she will not receive that kindness.

He begins to see himself again as being wrong. He wants her because she spurned him. A renewal of the affection will reestablish his previous faith in his blueprint of potential. She does not want his affection. He represents only so much money.

He realizes that he has truly been an ass, a fathead, and above all a pretender to dictatorial ambitions without the necessary power to bring his first vassal into line.

Consequently he may arrive at some of the following conclusions: that there are more factors for empire-achievement than he had planned; that something is working against him that may well be strategically superior to him; that love exists only as a projection of his own desires and that his desires are not his desires because they work against his major purpose (self-aggrandizement); and that friendship is another projection of quality upon another person, and it should be avoided unless something of mutual interest is to be gained from the nurturing of the idea of friendship.

He will realize now that the desires which he previously had were in conflict with one another, and he gets his first glimpse of the Umpire although he does not go so far as to name it yet. He realizes that he wanted security for himself, but also for his unborn children, and he gives himself a note of approval for the latter ambition. But he never dreamed that his wife would want to have her own private empire of security.

His basic bond with his wife was sex. He wanted her sexually and he also wanted to use her to bear his heir to the empire. Yet it must be presumed that she wanted those things too.

He becomes aware of lone-ness. He can trust no one. No one will dream his dream with him. His dream is not important. The world can get along without him, his children and his dreams.

What then is his purpose? Are all the rebuffs merely tests or hazards to make the game more difficult, so that he, as the progenitor of the super-species may evolve and populate the earth, and attain greater glory for the conquest, or are all things nonsense as far as his individuality is concerned, but very pertinent as far as the ends of nature as a whole are concerned?

Is not this drive to reproduce instinctual, -- the same as it is in the animal? If this is so, then is not the survival of the race something toward which he was unwittingly programmed? And if this is so, how much of his drive and efforts are really his, but are rather things programmed into him for the purpose of replenishing the race? Is it not possible that as far as his purpose is concerned, he is of no more importance than a tree or protozoan?

Yet is he not different than the animals, and even different from other humans? Behind this apparent external difference, may there not be an internal uniqueness, a part that is separate from all, yet which is not alone or lonely in the face of infinity?

How can man find out if he is a monistic creature? It looks as though it is not safe to presume that he is a singular entity. He manifestly did not choose to be born, and he has no memory prior to birth. Is he just something that awoke from a state of nothingness back there at the time of his birth? Logically there is nothing to even present as an argument for being or having a soul that has existed before, and will exist after death. Perhaps the stories about pre-existence and immortality are little comforting gestures which one man tells other men to amuse or seduce them.

How will man go about proving or disproving the existence of a soul? Shall he begin by believing in the existence of a soul for himself or shall he merely look at the soul-possibility as being merely a momentary postulation. Can he accept as evidence an occasional story about people who talked to dead relatives, or who have witnessed a haunted house... or who have remembered past lives? Or should he accept these stories as being possibilities only, and yet find some hope for at least continuing the search for that evasive essence?

Should he get into a study of life itself, hoping by solving the riddle of life to solve the riddle of death simultaneously, and plunge into the study of biology and bio-psychology to find the spot in the body where consciousness is centered, and where a soul might cling to some bit of subtle protoplasm, perhaps in line with a gland, ganglion or chakra? Is consciousness in the synapses, in the genes, or in a DNA molecule? How will he find it? How many centuries will it take to run it down?

Or is there a shorter way, a more direct way, -- that of examining consciousness with consciousness? We hear that there is. Books have been written about such discoveries, but can we trust anyone but ourself? Most books are written to make money.

And so he goes back to the only place that he knows, in order to start trying to find out his definition and the limits of his powers as an individual. All men hunger for individuality so man's computer is either trying to tell him something, or else his computer is merely echoing the prompting of another agency, some entity or Zeitgeist that is promoting its own survival.

It seems that he cannot trust his own computer, yet he still has no choice except to keep on looking for the proof that will bring to him a proven individual existence. It means that the task is magnifying. He must struggle to prove himself, and he must find some way of checking his thinking processes for errors brought on by nature-thinking, or by sensory weakness, and mental weariness.

He starts with looking at he who is desiring. Does he desire a wife, or is he programmed to desire a wife? Does he desire immortality or is he just programmed to have a fear of death? Is it not possible then to put that fear to some good use, and encourage a fear of death to remind himself that he wants a prolonged study of death and life, until he gets a true answer.

Is life really worth living? If he does not know who is doing the living, -- who or what is taking the most profit from his pleasure-experiences? Is he really the thing that enjoys, or is he programmed into believing that he enjoys? Would he have sex if he did not enjoy, or would he even survive if he did not enjoy eating or feel hunger pains when he delayed eating?

He takes note that he also enjoys power. He may enjoy hurting other people, or in killing animals. All seemingly sensible acts seem to be traceable to previous, prenatal programming. Does individuality then find something solid in the individual's ability to do senseless things? Or are such senseless acts of sadism, also rooted in necessity, being necessary instincts for the preservation of the race against another race, or the family against another family?

He takes the postulation that man is he that thinks. He thinks therefore he is. Yet he finds that his thoughts are not his own. And when he undertakes to think of something that is very important to him, like this study of the self to find the self, his whole system gets weary and his head longs for sleep. Yet he is spurred on by small realizations. He realizes that he appears to be a separate individual. His thoughts are not the same thoughts as his neighbor's, even though he may not have consciously brought all his thoughts into being. Something in his consciousness is aware of his struggle. This means that there is an awareness that is focused in, or is expressive of a definite locus which is his body. Something is aware, and he is aware that something is aware.

He is aware that he desires. But does he desire, or is he caused to desire? Does he select things as objects of his desire, such as picking a type of person for a wife, or is all that selection determined by computerizations more intricate than his conscious mind is capable of having, in that they take in thousands of factors which go to make up his compatibility, factors which he consciously knows little or nothing about?

Something within him urges and inhibits. Something within him encourages bravery and fear. Something causes him to be adventurous, but at other times fills him with a search for security and safety. Something in him causes him to enter joyously into the game of life, and something in him at times makes him long for death.

And yet all of these things seem to form a pattern which makes for some sort of destiny. Something within him, if he allows it to, will make decisions for him, take care of his children and condition him for dying when the time comes.

And yet this destiny is such that it makes all things secondary to it. It is the plan of nature, and the blueprint for the balanced aquarium of life. It has no consideration for the spiritual hopes of man. It is the plan of life which encourages all religions which encourage nature, and it draws the blinds of drowsiness over the minds that speculate too long on immortality and the disciplines for guaranteeing spiritual survival.

The Umpire shows little sympathy for the individual in the long run. Each young man is encouraged by his programming for recklessness, to waste himself, or to get himself crippled or killed. And it takes a bit of looking to find this quality about the Umpire. It appears to be only a somatic Umpire, deciding for the body, that which will prolong the life of the individual. It does this too, but it also makes judgments and instills motivation that can only have roots in archetypal patterns of behavior, -- and tribal survival.

And so the young man looks at the Umpire more clearly. And he learns that the Umpire is not infallible, and should be viewed with some apprehension.

He notices now, that he is not that which he previously thought himself to be. He used to think that when he got hungry that he, his only self, was hungry. He used to think that when he had the urge for sex, or for alcohol, or even for travel, -- that it was he, the only self, the consciousness which he identified as his real self, -- had the urge. But when he sits and thinks (or meditates) upon the trouble he had with his wife, he realizes that it was only some part of him that had the urge. The feeling that his whole destiny was wrapped up in her was manifestly a faulty intuition, because she is gone and his destiny does not involve her. And if he gets too much to drink, he will get a hint or intuition from somewhere inside his head, that he is approaching danger. And if he wrecks his car as a result of being drunk, he will realize the urge to drink, or the voice that prompted him to drink, and the intuition or conscience that warned him and tried to stop him from drinking were two opposite parts of his self. So that for one thing, he cannot be a singular essence, if he is a multiplicity of conflicting voices, urges or convictions.

He now begins to realize that there is some duality about his nature as he presently sees it. It is evident that part of him is programmed, and part of him involves itself in making decisions for him which are not always in line with the direction of the programming. For instance, he is programmed to reproduce. He is programmed to have heavy states of mind, fantasy trips, poetic delusions, and surges of ambition. All of this is to encourage reproduction and to provide for the children, not to really serve as experience for the self, -- an experience that might be called a possession or addition to that self. He will only be a door for children to enter into their separate trips of egotism and sorrow, -- and possible education. They will not be his children, nor his family.

There is another part of him that does not seem to affect him as programming affects him. This he recognizes first as conscience, if he had religious training. It is the warning voice which makes decision of the hour or of the moment. The genetic programming makes decisions for the individual which tend to push him toward maintaining the species, and for protecting his own life. The Umpire may be programmed to be part of the whole person, but it is not a programming agent.

At this point the person doing this thinking will realize that he is watching the parts of his own reaction system, or thought processes. And if for a moment he becomes aware that he is aware of processes within his decision-making, that are not his, he will realize that perhaps he does not make many decisions, but that many of his decisions may have been programmed into his genes before he was born.

But the most important realization here is that "he" becomes a detached awareness of these processes.

Some things start to make sense to him that previously seemed to be incongruous. The Umpire is not unreasonably two-faced, it is really working with the best interest of the individual, but with the interest of the individual's body-life predominately. It must work despite strong genetic programming that at times besets the person with what might seem to him at the time to be a divine inspiration, when it is in reality the dawning of hormone-dominated thinking.

But with each realization that bears hope, it seems that another realization occurs that makes things look hopeless. It is good to hear that man has some automatic faculties that work for the survival of his race, and for the survival of his body. But what is working for his immortality? It seems that the only time the Umpire works for some guarantee of life after death is when it and the individual have been conditioned by directed training toward the idea of a precise means to immortality.

It is apparent that something radical is missing. It seems that we are operating partially according to an archetypal blueprint, but we know of no purpose for that blueprint that might benefit man on any long term basis. Also there is no evidence about the nature of the engineer who composed the archetypal blueprint... and there must have been some cause for the building of men that are self-aware yet painfully subject to a termination of that consciousness, for all future time, or for that which seems to be forever.

This knowledge adds another sorrow to the search. And this question must remain unanswered for the immediate hour because the energy and commitment of the observer can only handle one job at a time and that is the analysis of the self. Who is living? Who is faced with oblivion?

And once more the observer has to face a very important question besides these last two. Who is asking the question? Who is it that observes the glassy fragments of thought and self, which if sorted and properly arranged, will form some magic crystal ball that shall for all time answer our questions about our future.

Does the flesh ask these questions? Does desire for life ponder the desire for eternal flesh, and upon witnessing death of the flesh, generate a desire for any form of post-mortem consciousness? Describe such a future existence with only a shred of common sense, and we will endow it, pronounce upon it, anoint it divinely, and legislate it with sword and fire.

For this observer, this body has now become a battlefield. Do not drink too much you may wreck the liver, but what is more you may become impotent, unable to produce the next generation of bodies which are torn by conflict from birth until death. Do not overindulge in sex, or you will infect the womb, or weaken the host and debilitate the all-important foetus. Or you may pick up a disease and become impotent. Animals which are impotent are useless. The blueprint does not call for impotency, and nature has no room for vacuums.

So the body tries to sit and meditate about this limited self. But the feet wish to walk, the eyes wander to the window, the hands dawdle with anything within reach, hunger manifests itself, and even the bowels wish to move. What is happening? There must be something about the individual which does not wish to examine its potential for oblivion.

What is this adverse force? You would think that the curiosity and determination of the individual would be aroused to vitality and anticipation, so that there would be no end to the energy present in the individual to carry on the search for the self.

But there is an adverse force, and the mind must summon energy on its own conviction, and delay any discovery of the insidious enemy to spiritual discovery. Since the adversity cannot be identified completely, we have no choice but to defer any detective work and keep on working.

When we decide to ignore the adverse forces, we notice that an anger wells up within us. There is an inclination to root out the imps of adversity once and for all, before going any further.

However, at this point, a word of caution is in order. Keep to the business of observing. When observation turns into a course of action in regard to adversity, then a religion emerges. And when a religion is formed, dichotomy of the mind follows. In other words, observation is just looking until realization is reached. The only action that should be taken, is some form of self-discipline to keep the focus of observation from wandering, or some change in the immediate environment to make thinking easier.

When we undertake to change or root out forces of adversity, we are dealing with a subjective environment or mental state. And any attempts to set up a science to combat such a subjective environment, would have to attempt to be scientific, or methodical, and any such system would not only be a relative one, but one that would be built upon tentative postulations about the real nature of the enemy or enemies. Next would come postulations about the best or most propitious ways of dealing with those enemies, and after a while we would forget to remember that all these postulations were tentative, and we would run the risk of living with false conviction in an imaginary state. And even if we were able to keep in mind the many postulations which support still more postulations, and keep in mind all the time that they were tentative, we would still become obsessed with the game of variables, and the intellectual cunning in our ability to sort and categorize, and we would spend years in such an obsession before we realized that we had once more succumbed to the bait put out by the forces of adversity.

Do not ignore the forces of adversity. This could be as damaging as increasing their substance by giving them a distinct relative form. Be concerned chiefly with identifying their effects for the time being, and in circumventing such effects. After everything is learned, -- there may be plenty of time to write about them, or analyze them. If at that time, they are that important or seemingly sinister.

There is still one more turn to this bit of advice. The solution shall always remain paradoxical. We should ignore the elements of adversity, yet we should never ignore them.

In a way this is difficult to explain, -- when the paradox becomes part of the solution. However, if we take an objective item as the cause of adversity, and deal with it we may be able to get the picture more clearly.

For instance, if we are meditating and our shoe hurts us, we recognize the hurting as adverse to our purpose, and we remove the shoe. And there is no problem or science needed.

When we are meditating and a tick gets into our hair, we not only remove the tick, but we may have to quit meditating until we find a place that has no ticks. A little more of a science is developing, but when we finally make ourselves comfortable, we do not need to further our study of comfort or safety.

Now we take another instance. This deals with a human entity. A member of the family, or a neighbor persists in disturbing us when we try to meditate. The simple solution is to change places, or to create a situation in which we will not be disturbed, whether this involves moving to another neighborhood, or not answering the door. But there is another way to handle the situation. You can suffer from a conviction that people have a right to interfere with you, so you are constrained to try to change their minds rather than shut them out. So you decide that you have to deal with the person's mind, so you initiate a long, benevolent discussion with the person, and try to "share" ideas. Of course most people who pretend to share ideas, generally are just trying to sell themselves and want to set up a groundwork upon which the other person will be unable to resist their arguments which will come under the heading of shared emotions and experiences.

But such an attempt at compromise arrives nowhere, generally. By now the meditation is halted, perhaps for days or weeks, pending the once-and-for-all decision. The next step is the purchase of a stack of books on psychology, and the enrolling in a course on psychology, in order that you might win the second round in the battle for the mind of your opponent. It would have been much simpler to have just walked around that person. And this process is true for any other entities that you might encounter, which apparently interfere with peace of mind.

CONTROLLING THE MIND

Let us go back to the instance of an attempt at meditation. What really happens when you sit in meditation, and all parts of the body rebel. The feet become cramped, the eyes wander to the window, and the stomach growls for food. Perhaps we can write these somatic things off as body-tension, which becomes accentuated when the mind has nothing else to think about. But let us look at the thoughts that sooner or later enter the consciousness during meditation.

First of all, our meditation does not in one sitting bring us to the revelations described, in the previous chapters, nor in the beginning of this chapter. The beginnings of meditation take on the appearance of a mental and physical battle. First the body has to come under control. You can force it to sit, or you can outwit it for a short period of time by exposing it to tapes, wall-posters that are suggestive of the desired objectives of meditation, or you can encourage reading for an hour or two before going into meditation, the reading being along lines of the same direction such as esoteric works or even books on psychology. Then you can go for a walk, alone, and allow whatever thoughts happen to come to the front.

Secondly the mind has to come under control. When I first heard this forty years ago, I thought it to be the maximum nonsense ever expounded by esoteric writers who manifestly had no endowments in the field of psychology. Spirituality is not out of conformity with psychology when it utters such a directive. Psychology is simply incomplete and inadequate, in regard to that which should be its domain.

I know that in previous writings, I have made the remark that man cannot start thinking, nor stop thinking, therefore man has no control over his thoughts or his consciousness. Therefore man is not the possessor of thought, as much as they are the possessor of him. Again we run up against a paradox.

I expect that the majority of people who pick up my book, have no idea of controlling their thoughts, much less of stopping them. I know of no one who is able to start thinking. However, it is possible to exercise a limited control over the thoughts. And it is possible to stop the thoughts by the same technique that is used to control the thoughts. It is beneficial to learn to control the thoughts, but it may not be beneficial for many people who learned to stop their thoughts before developing some mental vector or philosophic (spiritual) direction.

We might liken the business of stopping the head to a venture with LSD. The person without any serious determination, is liable to have a "bad trip," and lose himself (even his identity) for a long time. A mature mind with the wisdom of death behind him, can take the LSD and laugh all the way to the colorful flower-garden and back.

There is a parallel here (using LSD) with willfully stopping the mind, because the subject, once mentally blank, is out of control. While stopping the head for a short time may be an exhilirating experience, and may afford us a stretch of peace of mind, the aim of all meditation should be control for the purpose of discovery, not a search for peace only. Nor for mental pleasure.

It is realized by now that our thoughts happen of their own, one thought paving the way for the next, causing the next. The first step in controlling the thoughts is to realize this.

The second step is the establishing of an objective which we wish to insert into this seemingly unbreakable chain of thought-caused thoughts. In this instance the thing which we wish to place into the computer, or before the mind, is the self. We wish to scrutinize the self. And of course it will seem at this point that the self is not something that can be imagined or visualized objectively like a gold nugget.

The third step is to avoid trying to view the self directly and objectively until the mind is placed under some control. Do not try to visualize an Umpire for instance. Wait until you know the mind well enough so that the workings which we label as the Umpire become overwhelmingly manifest, and the mind realizes that no other explanation of those working is possible than to view it as an Umpire.

The fourth step begins the work of controlling the thoughts. To begin with, the thoughts are not controlled, directly, but indirectly. We cannot force ourselves to think of a subject, but we can isolate the mind so that there is nothing else of importance to think about. Again this is done by surrounding yourself with pertinent books, tapes, self-reminders, etc.

Still this is only inducive, but not compulsive. If you wish to, you can literally put things out of your mind. Almost everyone is aware of this to some degree. Putting things out of your mind is practiced by many or most people, and it is generally the wrong thing to do at the time. People who wish to avoid facing something unpleasant, pretend it does not exist. And when it thrusts itself back upon them, they block it out. So that the problem is never solved for the person, and this means that the problem magnifies.

We use this blocking-out technique only after we have vocally or manifestly made our commitment which was the second step. So that we have given a silent order to the computer. And the order reads that we prefer to think of nothing rather than tolerate rambling thoughts.

To test this sit down immediately and make a determination to think only of thought. It seems impossible. You will think of the apparent impossibility, and perhaps it will appear to be foolish. You do not repeat the word thought, or related words in order to inspire thinking about it, -- although that might later have some influence on your objective, by increasing determination.

If you think of a foot that is itching, you mentally turn away from it. If the nose starts to itch, it does not matter if you scratch it or not, but immediately turn away from it. One at a time a hundred things will pop up, and the early exercises in such meditation will be an exercise in deflecting any and all thoughts except the ones which we agreed to tolerate, long before we sat down to think about it.

Something happens after this routine is practiced for a length of time. We begin to notice a motion within the head. The physical head does not move, but we become conscious of a mental head that literally turns away from a view. When you are able to turn this internal head, whenever you wish, without any inability to continue thinking, you are half way home.

Pretty soon the itches, and appetites will subside and a stream of pictures will be followed by a series of revelations about your mental mechanism. You will allow some of these thoughts or pseudo-revelations to linger a while, and you may watch the course of thought until it drifts toward sex or fantasy.

For instance, you will immediately notice that even though you are able to avert a thought, another one rushes up as though appearing upon a screen. Such a thought might be "where are all these thoughts coming from?" or "I did not wish for that thought, where did it come from?" It might be good to allow your mind to think along those lines for a while. Real concentration at its best is only a very artful way of allowing yourself to think along desired lines.

However, after a while the mind will seemingly lose interest in looking for the source of thoughts. We may witness for the first time the phenomenon of a mental weariness which is not an emanation or reflection of physical weariness.

Why does this happen? I can only guess that the computer is not programmed to take abstractions seriously. There are still many compulsions coming from body habits. Perhaps you are doing this when you would ordinarily be at work, or taking your daily walk. Habits set little alarms in the computer and they go off with regularity, if the habit had regularity. So in order to harvest milk from thorns in this instance, it is a good idea to set aside a certain time for meditation, for every day, and encourage the habit.

It is not enough just to sit down and think of anything. I do not doubt that if you have made the necessary prior commitment that your mind will eventually come around to the desired objective, but you may not wish to spend the years that it generally takes, for the mind to tire of adventures into fantasy, ambition and hedonism.

If we tire of thinking about the source of thought, we cannot force ourself to think about it. The mind will momentarily think of weariness. We will think that it is weary, and we may never know the real nature of that mental weariness. However, if we allow our mind to focus on something relative such as one of the several professional concepts about the origin of thought, the mind may once more pick up an interest in the subject.

I would like to make a few notes here on the four steps. I do not wish to leave the impression that there are an exact number of steps, but rather that things should be done with definite preparation and in proper sequence. There are no further steps, beyond reminding the self of the urgency of the study, and the setting up of ways and means to renew the interest of the mind, and the exercising of the imagination to find new avenues to approach the study. From the fourth step, all depends upon the increase of inspiration by the fruits of our labor into introspection.

I also wish to make another note on controlling the mind, before we go on to the examination of the march of thought processes toward inner awareness. Once we have found ourself able to turn the internal head away from distraction, (we never learn to consciously focus in a prescribed method upon a positive objective with a definite objective in mind -- that would immediately limit the mind to the field prescribed, if such were even possible), we will gradually discover that other mental powers occur to us. Many of these powers involve the use of the Law of Between-ness, and I would not wish to insert all the pertinent information of the Law of Between-ness here. Those who have done extensive meditation, know of the phenomena or powers that come to them. Some of the events may partly be the doing of the individual, and some are just doors which he allows to open, knowing that he can shut the door at any time by merely turning his internal head away. I have practiced hypnosis, off and on, (and only for mental research) over a period of years. I discovered that the techniques of dangling objects before the subject, and the utilization of mechnaical methods to soothe or tire the subject, did not lead to hypnosis as infallibly as did a system of distraction of the subject by me, followed immediately by locking my mind with his and by knowing that the subject would go to sleep because the subject would know he would go to sleep, because the subject would know the same thing which I knew, which was an overpowering conviction of impending sleep.

I held my head on a definite course all the time the subject seemed to be asleep, because he is always in touch with the mind of the operator through the voice in the mechanical technique, and through the mind itself in the direct-mind technique. I planned no secret harm for the subject, nor did I intend to allow anything to happen which would cause later regret or mistrust by the subject. If an urge came to me to embarrass the subject for the sake of audience-amusement, I turned my head away from it, and the serenity of the subject was not disturbed. We were always partners, one appearing to be blind in sleep, and the other appearing to lead the sleeper into joint adventures.

There is still another note. Which may not even belong here. When the day comes that you have something of importance to convey or transmit to another individual, which cannot be conveyed in words even though many words of wisdom are available, you may be able to transmit that state of awareness or being, by the singular process of direct mind contact, and a skillful control of your own mind so that nothing else but nothing will pervade your mind... and his. Men have travelled thousands of miles, and sat in monasteries for decades to learn this.

To get back to the exercise of meditation, I have tried to set up examples of the type of thinking that would lead us to recognition first of an Umpire, and secondly of a Process Observer. The Umpire is discovered by the recognition of polarity in all mundane things, including the mundane mind. Such a somatic Umpire rules our life until we can build, synthetically, a philosophic Umpire, focused by our desire upon the self for its survival and definition as opposed to the archetypal programming for species-survival.

Finding the Umpire is a two-step affair. We find ourselves in the confusion of polarity and of opposites, and we take a step back and ask "why?" Our answer is the apex-point of conciliation, the Umpire. And still with our mundane predilection for mundane interpretations, we view the Umpire from a point of Intuition (D). We step back once more, and ask "why?" once more as we appraise the two sources of information, which are two horns of alternative conviction. One seems to emanate from the body, and the other comes from the mind without all the objective references which the Umpire may throw at us. This latter is, of course the Higher Intuition.

At this point an almost accidental realization is necessary. This realization is not very profound, it is simply a realization in which we notice that we, or something within us, is watching this whole process. We take a step forward, and reach a level from which the mind will never be lost in forgetfulness. We have become a Process Observer.

From this point, as we look to the right, we notice that we can also look at awareness, and we can be aware of consciousness, and of looking at ourself looking indefinitely. We do not take a step forward, but are taken forward from here, by that which seems to be an accident, -- an accident which does not come unless we have struggled relentlessly to find that which was unknown to us, by a method which could not be charted because the end or goal was unknown. We must have first become a vector. We must first have spent a good period of time studying our own awareness and consciousnesss with our own consciousness until we accidently or by some unknown purpose, -- enter the source of our awareness.

Directions beyond the Process Observer depend upon a determination that sustains the seeker in the face of no methods and no blueprints. If you are interested in Psychology only, the realization of the self as a Process Observer is a satisfactory achievement. If you are interested in looking for Essence, from the point of Process Observer you can be stimulated only by writings of inspiration rather than reason and direction (read the Books of the Absolute).

Achieving a union with Essence is the equivalent of losing the mind. Such discoverers (of essence) may return to the world with seeming incoherence. However, be assured of one comfort should such befall you: all who have attained... who have lost their minds, or who are about to lose their minds will recognize you.

End

Footnotes

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