1977-0915-Zen-and-Death-Washington-DC
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| Title | 1977-0915-Zen-and-Death-Washington-DC |
| Recorded date | September 15, 1977 |
| Location | Washington, DC |
| Number of tapes | 2 tapes, 3 sides: 46 min, 46 min, 28 min |
| Other recorders audible? | Yes |
| Alternate versions exist? | |
| Source | Paul Schmidt. Rob Ayers says he has a copy also. |
| No. of MP3 files | 4 mp3 files - SH converted Dec. 20, 2011 |
| Total time | 120 minutes = 2 hrs |
| Transcription status | Update Feb 3, 2014. Partially transcribed. SH had OCR of paper copy draft scanned to PDF, now convert to Doc format. |
| Link to distribution copy | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ (need password) |
| Link to PDF | http://distribution.direct-mind.org/ Or try http://selfdefinition.org/rose/ |
| Published in what book? | |
| Published on which website? | EXCERPTS at http://www.richardroseteachings.com/news_letter/The_Observers_Nook_Newletter_16th_Ed.pdf |
| Remarks | Formerly "Intuitional-Psychology" From Schmidt 2011. |
| Audio quality | |
| Identifiable voices | |
| URL at direct-mind.org | https://www.direct-mind.org/index.php/1977-0915-Zen-and-Death-Washington-DC |
| For access to this wiki or the audio files please send an email to: editors@direct-mind.org | |
| Revision timestamp | 20150103191026 |
Notes
Note - this is sold by Cecy, commercial recording.
Excerpts on this PDF http://www.richardroseteachings.com/news_letter/The_Observers_Nook_Newletter_16th_Ed.pdf
Tapes are in Paul Schmidt collection.
2 cassettes, 3 sides
Tape 1 (side 1 = 46 minutes; side 2 = 46 minutes)
Tape 2 (side 3 = 28 minutes; side 4 = blank)
Total 120 minutes
Other recorders? Yes. (beginning of side 3)
Mp3 files created – 3
Audio quality good.
Recognized voices: Art Mandel, Mike Casari.
OCR pages 1-10
I think I'll say something about that pyramid thing. He started off as a Zen study group, in Pittsburgh, and I then went over to lecture in Kent, Ohio. I never intended to have a name for it - it was basically a group, the individuals in it, trying to find their self-definition. To try to find the highest spiritual value. And of course, Zen is one of the more direct ways to go about it.
But yet when we went into a university, they wanted to know if there was an organization. And I was pretty much opposed to farming one because as soon as you form an organization you get all of the ills that come with organizations. But there's no escape from it - if you want a room in a university you have to have a name. So we gave ourselves a name in Pittsburgh, which was the Zen Study Group. When we went over to Kent the boys took the name the Pyramid Zen Group.
The reason for it was that when I wrote the book [Albigen Papers] I put a picture of a triangle - it wasn't a pyramid so much as a triangle) on the front of the book. And the triangle represented the Law of Three. Also, it does have a significance as a pyramid, in that all human effort is pyramidal in form.
The spiritual evolvement of peoples requires a large base of people who are not evolved. So that for every person who reaches the maximum spiritual experience, there are probably a million people who are in what we call the instinctive stages yet. For every millionaire there are a million people who never make it, down in the working class so to speak. Whenever human effort is involved, there's a pyramid, there's a triangular effect.
And this was to point it out, rather than to kid people and tell them that everybody was going to make it and all they had to do was to listen to me and the world is going to be better and we were going to make a little shiny spot on it.
So we picked up the name Pyramid Zen from the Kent group, and for the sake of printing materials we unified the name, to make it the same for all the universities.
Then along came the pyramids - the people who were sharpening razor blades and preserving bits of meat and this sort of thing, and people came to lectures thinking that we had a new form of Zen whereby you probably meditated and got satori in a pyramid. I don't know what they expected, but there were a lot of disappointed people.
I have been seriously thinking of advising all of the groups to drop the name, and just call it an Esoteric Study Group. Because Zen is not the only door to realization. Every man has his own door, if he can find it. Sometime he can be stimulated by a philosophy or an esoteric religion, but every man can find his God within him if he wants to really dig hard enough.
Ok, if Zen helps, that's alright, or if your parental religion helps. Generally it is in the parental religion as well. I have reasons, of course, for following the Zen line, because i think it's more direct and it pushes aside a lot of dogma.
The talk tonight is on Zen and its relation to death and the after-death experiences. Of course, the first thing we should get off with is the idea of what is Zen. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what Zen really was. When you get to digging into some of the old writings of some of the old masters, you'll find an entirely different picture than what we get today from some of the assembly-line productions in some of our American Zen centers.
I don't think it was ever intended to be something with a formula that you could get out of a book, and that all you had to do was ring little bells or practice koans. I think there has been a lot of emphasis put upon setting something up that is easy and yet impossible. Anybody can get a koan and play with it for years, and in that respect it's impossible to find a solution to it - unless the solution is saying, "Hell, I'm through with it, it's just nonsense," and then the master says, "Now you've got it."
Or as one book says, he punched the master in the nose and the master says, "You're right." He didn't want to get punched a second time. So you can get Enlightenment that way. First I want to step over into this business of death; I wonder if we understand death. I wonder if we all have the same conception of what death is. I think some people believe that there's nothing but a cellular death. This is the materialistic medical viewpoint, that that's all there is, and it's also the materialistic psychological definition. That when the cell dies you're dead - three flat readings on the EEG.
And is there an existence beyond this? This is the big question that every entity human or animal, wants to know. Even the animals are afraid of dying - they seem to show by their actions that what's happening to them that could kill them is not good, so they must be a little apprehensive about it.
And yet we have a lot of either folklore or literature that signifies that something does happen to us after death.
Now what are the systems of finding this? When you read the literature of Zen you'll find very little mention of the word death. In fact, I don't think there's too much mention of it in my book except in the evaluations of religious movements. That most movements and esoteric sects are aimed at taking you someplace after you die.
I remember I was initiated into a yoga group one time - some of you have heard of Kirpal Singh - this was the group from which Kirpal Singh was a schismatic. Also Eckankar was a schismatic from the same group, and that is the Radha Soami sect, from the Punjab area of India, the Kashmir section.
Basically the belief of these people was - they called it Darshan - you concentrated here [in the middle of the forehead on the picture of your guru. They also had another thing which they called Shabd - it was a kriya yoga practice, kriya yoga was concentration upon the third eye. so to speak -but darshan was now putting the guru in the third eye. Besides that you listen to the sound current in the right ear. The right ear was where the right music came from, and if it came from the left ear you had to he careful.
What was it all aimed at? - it was aimed at immortality. That by that darshan with the guru you established something like a silver cord, and when the guru died he went ahead and prepared a place for you. You kept in touch with him with this sound current and this cord, that I call the guru-chain.
The sects in India don't come out and say this, but they're tied together by a guru-chain the same way a person in some instances is tied to a love of their relatives. They look for their relatives after death, and a lot of people when they're dying will call out to their relatives. No matter how old they are, incidentally; I've seen some call for their mother and I know one case where they saw both their parents.
Now Zen doesn't start out to get into the business of death, whereas many other movements do. This was just one method of immortality - if after death there was a tremendous sea of oblivion out there and you had to take some drastic measure to build some astral cord or some sound by which you'll be identified so you'd be able to find each other in this vast ocean.
The accent was really put on what I consider the basic fear, where Zen doesn't take into account the fear. True Zen thinking discounts fear; it has to do away with fear because that is a thought-deterrent. You have to rid yourself of it before you can find any real truth. So whenever you're engaged in a religious movement in which the fear of death is the cause of your search you have to give that up, because it's going to color your thinking.
So in Zen, when you read most of the writings of conversations with Zen masters, the subject of death isn't discovered. So how do we bring about a rationalization, then, that Zen does something for the after-death experience? It does so in the regard that if you find out the answer, then the after-death experience is part of the answer, that's all. But Zen is basically self-definition. Because with the knowledge of the self you will also understand the origin and the limits of the self; the destiny, that is, of the self. Now you say, "How do you know?" Well - the testimony of anyone who has reached this point in Zen indicates that they know the score, and their worries are over as far as what is going to happen to them.
Their manner of talking about it might be a little confusing, because of the simple fact that they're talking about an absolute dimension.
We generally look at heaven as a relative dimension, and when people talk about life after death they conceive a relative heaven. Although they know that the relative experience that they're embodied in is going to perish, and all relative modes of communication are going to fail.
We don't get any communication from the millions and millions of people who have passed on. In fact, there's been so little communication that they consider valid, that the scientific world just discounts it all and says that there is none. That it's all wishful thinking created by desire.
So - if we're finding out - there are different ways that people go about finding the answer. I think everybody wants to know the truth. Whether a man goes to church, or whether he's a gangster or works in a steel mill or he's a farmer, he's motivated by a desire to know the truth.
And regardless of where you meet him - in a beer joint or a battlefield, you'll hear him asking the other fellows questions: "What do you think is going to happen to us? What do you think happens after you die?" Maybe that's the only comment they'll make and they'll go back to drinking their beer. But everybody wants to know what's going to happen.
The majority of people don't believe that it's possible to know. And they're encouraged in this - it is part of our cultural tradition to hand to the children this idea that "It's not for you to know." So this becomes an easy rationale when the struggling to know becomes arduous. They just say, "Well, we're not supposed to know."
One of the outstanding pillars in Christian theology was Thomas Aquinas. And he said, "The finite mind will never perceive the infinite." When you think that over you get the idea, well, maybe he's right. We're very limited, we're very microscopic in relation to the planet and in relation to the galaxies, and out there someplace behind all this is a God, and we're very finite, and what hope do we have, what ego do we have, that would inspire us to claim immortality? That the creator, engineer, or whoever made this whole scene considers us important enough to bestow upon us some form of eternal life?
We go back again to the ability of these systems to find for us. And I'm more or less technically running through my own life experiences for you. Because everyone goes to church, and sooner or later most people get disillusioned: it becomes a social institution, they accept it at that. And the theological part of most of the religions and isms somehow does not answer, and most of us just give up.
Now I've got a little system, and you may be interested in taking a note of it, on the province of religion or religious philosophy: how you can check the different movements for their ability to successfully answer the questions of man. Meaning, that if they can answer the questions, they must have done some successful research, they must know something, before they started preaching. The reason I'm doing this is not to rap somebody else. Because everything is in it's proper place. Every religion is necessary or it wouldn't be there - I'm not rapping that. I just presume there's a percentage of people who are always interested in maybe one other step. And for the people on certain steps I hold all respect; that step is necessary and it's there.
But let's evaluate a little bit: What do the different religions do for us? What do we want? In this business of answering questions we want to know:
1. Who are we? I.e., the nature of man. 2. Some sort of definition of life before birth.
Everyone's talking about life after death, but what about life before we were born? If we consider ourselves a highly complex organism - the engineering in our bodies is very complex and it seems like a tremendous lot of intricate purpose there ... and it just started? Sixty or fifty or forty years ago - it just started out of nothing? The mentality was just created out of nothing? We just popped? Two chemicals came together, a sperm and an ovum, and created a unique sentient being? We overlook it. Why? It's easy - we're here, why worry about it? But in the process of looking at our definition we are going to have to take that into account. We're going to have to be concerned with that end of the string. What were we before? Nothing starts from nothing.
3. Life after death - This is the another one.
4. The relation of man to nature and the visible universe.
This permeates all religions: What is our relation to each other? What is the relation to the planet, the soil, the animal kingdom? Why are we stuck in this aquarium, so to speak?
5. The relation of man to the Absolute.
This is where the theologian comes along and says. "You're here to please God." or "God's here to please you." The Universe was created to make you happy. Regardless of whether you want to call it God or the Absolute, it's this relation.
But basically the whole problem of theology boils down to three major points: Who are you? Where did you come from? And where are you going?
Now - check them out. Go back through your religions and your isms. And by "isms" I mean any esoteric movement that pretends to do something. And this is what I do in the book incidentally. I went through some of them rather carefully and said, "Here's what we're doing".
For instance, people will subscribe to a certain cult - and I've talked to them after their being in it forty years and said, "What was this supposed to do for you?"
And this one lady said, "Well, I was supposed to meet my astral Master while living in this body." Now that's a long shot. Because she presumed when she met him that he'd tell her the score. Forty years to get to talk to a ghost is a long shot, because you're going to lose the best years of your life for research, and you're not concentrating on the problem at hand. The problem at hand is not to meet a spirit, it's to find out who you are.
Now presuming the spirit knows everything, then of course you can find out who you are: He'll tell you who you are, perhaps. I've known two people who were into this - I'm not going to name it because I'm not here to tear things apart - but finally one lady said this fellow appeared at the foot of her bed. And she asked him a question and he shook his head "No" and left. That was the end of it.
So what I'm getting at is that some movements - and this is a very powerful movement today, the one I just spoke about, they have a tremendous membership - when you run down through the list do they give us anything on the Nature of Man? Oh yeah, they have a concept structure: he's an aura or he's got this or that chakra.
It's a concept structure. Prove it. We want proof, not just what somebody dreams up, or what somebody says somebody else said that somebody else said.
On the item of Life After Death it depends entirely on whether you're able to make contact with this astral Master before you die. Otherwise back to the drawing board.
On Life Before Birth - of course the concept that generally goes with these is that you were reincarnated. No proof - just everybody believes.
Relation of Man to Nature - there's no mention of it, or very little mention of it.
Relation of Man to the Absolute - there's no mention of the word Absolute.
Now - there's another method of finding out who you are outside of religion, esoteric religion or philosophy, and that's psychology. The purpose of psychology is to find out about our thinking processes. And this is hitting pretty close to who you are; when you know who is thinking, you know what the mind is. Now I'm not saying that modern psychology will teach that which the mind is. Nevertheless, that's supposed to be their direction.
And the Nature of Man consequently becomes the province of psychology. Because it's not biology; it shouldn't be the body. It's the nature of man - call it behavior patterns if you wish - but regardless, it's his nature. Which is the same thing that religion is after. The nature of mental attributes as well. In other words, he has certain little peculiarities: anger, affection, emotion, hate, ESP, and there's an attempt to get into those.
Now you go back to any of these movements mentioned, or any of them that you know of. We get definitions. "Sure," they'll say, "we've got definitions."
Like I said one time - I was starting to give a lecture and I said, "People do not know who they are." And a fellow in the audience said, "Nonsense. I know who I am." I said, "Ok, who are you?" He said, "I'm the guy who's sitting in front of you." Of course that was a little hit of sophistry. It was a joke. But still, that doesn't say that that man knew who he was. He had never bothered to think. He had just accepted the common human projection of what people are. In himself he did not know who he was.
And the reason we find out we don't know who we are is we get surprises. You think you're one thing and your wife will prove to you that you're something else. You'll get married or something like that, or have a traumatic experience and say, "Geeze, am I like that? Is that who I am?" We have a certain fixed idea of ourselves until somebody, society changes us - proves to us that we're casting a projection that people just don't accept. So then we realize we must be somebody else.
But after you examine a tremendous lot of these definitions you say, "No one knows who God is." And somebody will say, "Oh, yes... " I've had them tell me that: "Oh, yes, I know Him - I'm on friendly terms with Him."
But there's a difference between a definition and an explanation, and there's a difference between what you know and what you'd like to believe. And if you want to be factual - we're getting down now to facts - and I maintain that Zen is a factual thing. That's the reason not too much is said. There's a lot of seeming nonsense in the writings about Zen. But you'll not hear a logical build-up, That this is that, and therefore something else can be added to it, and pretty soon you come out with a proof. In Zen, the proof is an experience.
If you examine a tremendous lot of the attempts -both in psychology and religion, we find that they are what I call concept structures. This is like the old phlogiston theory in chemistry before they knew about oxidation. They knew something was going on, so they said, "Something is going on, and we found this element called phlogiston, and that's what is causing all the trouble." And for maybe how long? - fifty years or maybe longer, all the chemists in Europe accepted the concept structure about phlogiston, which was later proved to be oxidation.
So this is what we get into, in a tremendous lot of the deeper lines of thinking, especially in abstract lines of thinking like philosophy. That instead of going in and finding out for ourselves, we build a concept structure we build a rack candy mountain for ourselves, we build a Paradise to suit our wishes. We do not look for that which is.
If we run into something that says, "Hey - after death it might be oblivion" - the reaction is, "I don't want to hear that." Many of the systems imply that man is a robot, and I've heard people say, "I don't want to hear that. I am no robot." How do you know you're not a robot? Do you control your actions?
When we get into this business, regardless - if we follow the thing from the spiritual viewpoint, following some let's say either religious or esoteric movement - and we follow this business of checking things, and checking for the human weakness in the experiment - it's like the margin of error in a chemical analysis, or the margin of friction in a physics experiment - we immediately have to qualify the results, or the belief or faith that is produced out of that type of thing, unless we're able to set up a whole set of machinery to check ourselves. For fatigue, wishful thinking, appetites - wrap them all in - if you like to hunt then there'll be a happy hunting ground - and then out of this comes a philosophy or a religion.
To be a good spiritual seeker you have to be - whether you want to or not - a psychologist. You have to be a self-psychologist, a self-analyst, to watch yourself. So that you don't conceive something, create something, rather than explore and find. And to be a good psychologist you have to be intuitive, because it's not all logic.
There's a sort of combination that we can't separate from: the basis of our religion is largely intuitive; the basis of our psychology has to be likewise intuitive. The basis of our religion has to be psychological. In other words, it has to start with the self, because any external pursuit of an abstract nature is going to be approached not with our body hut with our mind. And unless you know something of that mind, the mind will play tricks on you. And everybody here knows that - that the mind plays tricks.
Well, when we get into psychology - of course, that was one reason when I first went to college I decided I would look into it - I started off majoring in chemistry, and I thought I'd become a biochemist and analyze matter and find that little kernel in there that would be the life-force or the secret of life. And I gave it up because I realized that I would get into tangential sciences ad infinitum, and I would never be able to complete in one lifetime or in many lifetimes a successful analysis of protoplasm for the discovery of what causes protoplasm to live.
So I went over into psychology, and I found I got immediately into behaviouristic psychology - this is what was being taught at the time. And I found out that it wasn't investigative. Modern psychology as taught in the universities and schools today is not investigative - well, in some places it might be - I'm not saying there isn't some pioneering being done - but it's basically a struggle to find ways and means of predicting behavior so that the people can be controlled. Or - kept happy.
When you go to a psychiatrist what does he try to do? Does he say, "Here, let's sit down and discover the truth together, and then we'll know why all this nonsense is going on in your life, maybe it's bad karma or something." I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek, because i don't presume that we're afflicted with bad karma. But Lord knows there might be a hundred reasons for things happening to us that the psychiatrist doesn't bother to get into. In fact, he's inhibited from getting into a lot of the moral aspects of our nature - things that we do in moral content that might affect our thinking.
Like a medical doctor (and of course, a psychiatrist is also a doctor) - they're supposed to put patches on and not get into morality, So how can you heal some things, perhaps, unless you get into some of the habits that people do? If a guy's burning his liver out with booze - if you weren't allowed to say, "The booze is killing you," he'd continue to burn his liver out. Which of course most of them do anyway.
Now there are other things that will afflict you. And the idea has basically gotten back to patch the character up and put him back into the harness. This is social compatibility. If he can't get along with his wife... Well, I could tell you some of the results of people who went to psychiatrists because they were having trouble with their wives. One psychiatrist up in Cleveland, Ohio told the fellow to go to the swingers club and see if he couldn't find a couple other women, and try them.
So it doesn't matter what you do, in their book, as long as you go back and start paying taxes again. Or - be able to afford the psychiatric fee also - that helps. But you're no good to anyone if you're down in the dumps and moping around and not producing. So the point is not to understand the human mind, but to find whatever little twists and torques and gimmicks are necessary to get that guy back in harness, into social compatibility.
Consequently, everything that comes under the banner of psychology is not necessarily designed for the understanding of the mind. I know they're working on that, but they're working on more or less reflexes, like Pavlov's dogs, to find some means of predicting some way that we can get these people to do what we want them to do.
And of course B.F. Skinner is an outstanding example of this. He presumes that someone should program the whole human race that will keep 'em all out of trouble.
We must avoid seizing a postulation that comes easy and putting it out as scientifically discovered truth. This is what we run into a lot in psychology as well. And of course we also come into this concept that mind is somatic. Meaning that there is no mind except what is seen in the body. This is a recurrent theme.
For instance, there are a lot of phenomena that occur that evidently seem to come from outside the body. You can write them off as being hallucinations. We had a case in the movies not too long ago that was very valid, which was case of The Exorcist. little fourteen year boy in real life. Right here in this area, incidentally, is where it started. I had a friend here in DC who sent me the newspaper clippings in 1949 when it firt happened.
This boy was in extreme need of psychiatric care - but he was never treated by a psychiatrist. I don't know of any... well, the diagnosis would have been schizophrenia. And what do you do for a schizophrenic? Maybe pump him full of pills to a point where he can't jerk, if he's being inhabited.
But the prediction was made by let's say layman, a psychiatric layman, and he was cured by him. The prediction was based upon a possible external invasion of a mentality - a complete mentality invading that person's body. Now incidentally, there are case histories of this down through history. They're trying in the last twenty or thirty years to laugh them off, because they don't have them in the textbooks, but for the last ten thousand years, as long as there have been records, there have been records of possession and records of curing it.
Oesterreich puts out a good book on this. I just got my hands on it recently, and he tells of the different cases of possession and the cures of them down through the ages. It's not limited to just one class of people.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that there's another thing that's invading all our thinking. And we have to be careful of this. Now the reason I'm bringing this up is that if you want to get down to scientific thinking about your self-definition, you've got to be prepared for these things that have been enforced upon humanity, and know that they're going to get in your road, and you'll have to step around them.
We have a disease, called democracy, that permeates all of our thinking, that people are able to vote on stuff. The normal curve: Sanity is that which most people are. And the way it's going, fifty-two percent will soon be murderers, and you won't dare oppose them, or anything that fifty-two percent are. There is no such thing of anything being good in itself; everything is defined as that which the most people are - that is sanity. So in regards to this, we have the idea also that "people have decided". They say, "People have decided that God is dead."
Well, you know... I've often said that it's possible that we don't get as much action as we read about - we read books where God was very active. He appeared to one fellow in a burning bush and He sent a legion of angels down to intercede with Gideon. That was in the Old Testament. Then right away He disappeared. He had a son that was being lynched and He didn't send one angel. He let them lynch him.
So - you could take this type of argument and run it down and say, "Well, there is no God basically, this was all fiction." But actually, what it amounts to is that people are drifting. They are drifting away. And if ninety-nine percent of the population maintained a belief that God did not exist, that would not mean that God did not exist. Now, I'm saying His stock market would be weak, because somehow there's a relationship between the architect and his creations. So His influence might be rather weak. But that would not mean that you can vote, and decide.
Now in psychology we're getting into the same thing. We're getting into all human attributes - what is normal, what the majority of people want to believe is normal, or what you can educate.
Another thing that's going on is "education". We're hearing a lot about the Panama Canal, and one of the politicians got up and said, "The trouble is that we haven't had time to educate the public." Do we want the truth or do we want to be educated? I'm not saying one way or the other which is right. But the thing is that there's a tendency of people in control, whether they're in control of universities or governments, to educate. Not for the truth
OCR pages 11-15
but for the convenience of the moment, thinking that they are spirits of the Zeitgeist, prophets of the Zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they'll bring people around to the right direction.
So that as a result of this, we've taken a vote on what the human mind consists of. Now I think that this is the reason, this confusion about the actual attributes of the human mind, that there are fewer and fewer people able to understand themselves.
I got a cup of coffee this morning across the street from where the boy's have their house, and I heard some people arguing about what was wrong with the President and the ex-President, and one was a crook and the other was now a crook also. One man was black and the other man was white, and they were arguing that point also - that one was being deprived and he was hoping for a system in which he wouldn't be deprived.
And the thought kept going through my head that these people are missing the point. The real point is that the young people of today have no hope. We have hypnosis, but no hope. "We" - I'm gone - but the young people - they know it. They're more intuitive than the old people. A baby has a better mind than a thirty year-old man. And a five year-old kid has a better mind than a ten year-old kid. This is not fiction.
As a child grows up they see the picture; they know they're thrown into a certain pattern and they evaluate it. And the reason there's no hope is not because the bus is taking the kids to school or not taking the kids to school. It's because society has become like a den of snakes in which there's no way to untangle and find a way - to either become prosperous, if that's all you wish, just a material life - or to have a spiritual life.
Everything has to be chartered by the state, like I said a minute ago. Can you come together and think about Zen or talk about Zen, or anything, unless you're chartered? Unless you sign a paper that you are now an organization? You're an entity which can be attacked.
Whether it's just a result of sardine-can living i don't know; whether we're just getting too populous or what. But the thing is, something - whether it's the manifest crookedness, the manifest controlling of all phases of the individual's life, the ebb and flow of power in which people are caught up, and some get by without getting caught and others get caught and ground up into pieces - just discourages anyone from trying to get ahead, that's all.
This is the difficulty. And I believe that the young people - I'm talking about children that are ten years of age - are able to see this. Every kid knows that the cop on the corner is crooked. Everyone who can read a paper knows that the judge is crooked; everyone knows that politicians are crooked. And how can this kid come up with a belief that he can hold his head up and live according to Pollyanna, as he's expected to?
He doesn't know which way to turn. I'll give you an example in today's paper. They were fining some chicken growers twenty-some million dollars -they were going to give it back to the people for fixing the prices of chickens - they were trying to hold the price up against the public. This was in today's paper. On the opposite page was a notice that the government is talking to Pan Am - Pan Am was wanting to drop their prices, and the head of CAB says, "They can go to hell."
They're going to stop them from dropping their prices. Here's one fellow that they're going to put in jail for raising his prices. Then they're shouting about inflation. So this guy says, "Ok, let's drop our prices so that people can travel more cheaply." Which might cause a chain reaction and maybe a lot of competition would set in and a lot of things would get cheaper. So how does a child look at this when be reads that in the paper? He's not going into the chicken business, that's for sure.
Then who do we trust? We have to trust our adults: we have to trust our teachers, we have to trust our parents. And our parents have been reduced to dishrags. Frustration has just reduced most people to dishrags, of just giving up, saying there's nothing there.
I was talking before this started, to Mrs. Marsh here, about a boy that I saw that death was approaching. And I told his father; his father was a doctor. I said, "Your son's going to die." It was strictly an intuitional hunch; the boy was in perfect health. And of course they looked at me like I was a nut - and I felt like a nut for telling him, but I told them anyhow out of compulsion.
He was dead within two weeks. A tractor-trailer ran over him. He was smoking pot and his girlfriend got hurt and he staggered out in traffic to try to get help for her and he got run over by a tractor-trailer. But when I said this to his father, the father's reaction first of all was one of indignation that this nut would dare to comment on his son's life. And then what he said was, "Well, what have they got to look forward to anyhow?"
We are animals, basically. If we can't be anything else we ran be good animals, and fight for the kids. Try to keep them alive, try to do something for them.
Basically, there is nowhere for these people to turn, in my estimation. So we're in a hopeless, sick condition. And who are the people who are going to pull us out of this? Our psychologists and our psychiatrists - who have the highest suicide rate in the country, of any profession.
Well - I look upon Zen as a psychoanalytic system. I don't know how many suicides are in there, but they go about it from that angle. Of course - we have the testimony of people. When you get into the evidence of life after death - who knows? We've had case histories for ten thousand years. They were written down in little books in Asia and spiritualistic literature.
[Break in tape.]
...So now the American people may become exuberant - there may be something to live for, and that's death. [Laughter]
I notice when Kübler-Ross and Moody wrote about this they gave quite a few instances of accounts of life after death, but they didn't bother to catalogue. And a good scientist when he runs through an experiment catalogues the thing a bit.
All of the experiences that we run into by reading accounts, or by our own personal experience, or by talking to people - you'll meet people sometimes that say they were pronounced dead and such and such happened -you'll find they're not all the same. I was in one of the boy's books today and I found a piece of paper in there where he was complaining that there was no hope for the researcher into life after death because of the fact that all these people had different stories; so consequently you might throw the whole bunch out, there's no sense in trying to find out anything.
But yet there's a certain definite pattern, and this is what's missed; it was missed completely by Moody and Kübler-Ross, but of course they haven't been in it that long. We can examine these cases and you will get an idea of the pattern, and if you've done any reading in this line you'll find that they correspond to this.
I've talked to people, incidentally - a very close friend who had a heart attack - he was pronounced dead and he came back. He came up to me and asked me what I thought would happen after death. And i didn't answer him. I said, "What happened to you? You were out." He said, "Nothing." Oblivion. "I remembered absolutely nothing." That is the first category: oblivion.
The second is what I call earth-bound. In this book by Oesterreich you'll find a lot of cases [of possession] are earth-bound. The boy from DC that was possessed in the case of the Exorcist was supposedly an aunt who bothered him. An aunt that the boy knew while she was living, and she died and came back - that was the whole thing in a nutshell. But evidently, according to some of the cases, you'll find people wandering around. Some of them are in haunted houses; you hear stories of where they go into haunted houses and talk to the spirit. And the spirit says, "I can't leave," you know, "my money' in the cellar." Anyhow, we have the earth-bound category; people who don't seem to sense any Heaven. They don't talk of being in Heaven when you talk to them. They are hanging around and this seems to be very real and very important - trying to get energy perhaps from a living person like in the case of the Exorcist, tapping the kid.
The next category is people who see scenery only. They will talk about seeing beautiful vistas and beautiful meadows and fields of flowers, but no people. They will very rarely talk about seeing people in this category.
The fourth category is the ones who see people - only people. When they talk they don't mention about where they were sitting or where they were standing, and they see mostly relatives. The mother comes to pick them up, an uncle. If they've been orphans it is somebody they knew, a next door neighbor or somebody that died and seemed to be looking after them.
The fifth category is people who see celestial beings. They think that they are men from higher levels of spiritual life, angels if you want to call it that, gods, saviors, etc. But very rarely do the people who claim to see these angels or these shining men ever claim that the beings are God.
For instance, Moody or Koebler-Ross brought it out that for Christians some of the cases talked about seeing Jesus, but the people of Jewish faith didn't see Jesus, they saw an angel. They said they saw a spirit but they just identified it as an angel. That was the predominance of the cases examined by Moody.
The sixth category is the people who witness all of humanity. Now this is peculiar to people who have what I call the cosmic-consciousness experience, in which they will see the tremendous, whole panorama of life.
And the seventh category is where they see nothing and everything. Those two have to be spoken together: nothing and everything.
Now where do we get this evidence that we're talking about? Of course, a lot of it as I said is from word of mouth, but a lot of it is from medical records; people as far back as Paracelcus. Paracelcus is supposed to have been the father of medicine; he writes books on spirits and incubi and succubi and encounters he had with entities of that sort.
Another source is from doing things yourself, like astral projection. Monroe writes a book on astral projection in which he talks of encountering spirits. Preferably the lady upstairs. [laughter]
Another method is Spiritualism. The Spiritualists claim that by materialization they can come in contact with and produce spirits. And I have seen these, incidentally. I qualify my opinion as to what they find; but I was in a room one time where about eighteen were materialized, and they were recognizable by people there as being dead relatives. I don't want to get into it now, maybe we can talk about it later, but I came to the conclusion that they were not relatives.
Visions. A lot of holy people, so-called holy people, see visions of previously holy people.
The last category on the sources is direct experience. There was a sage in India a while back who said there was only one way to Find out the secrets of life after death and that was to go there. To die. And - it's not as difficult as it seems. [laughter]
There was a fellow who wrote a book - I forget the name of it - on his experiences with hashish, years ago. He was well known. And he had a little quatrain in the front of it. He was trying to see what would happen to him after death. He took nitrous oxide. He had it fixed so that when he passed cut he would fall away from the thing that held the handkerchief over his face; as he passed out he would fall and then be revived by breathing. He was by himself.
So he put a piece of paper there to write, if he could write anything while he was unconscious, about the dynamic findings of this type of experiment. Of course, he fell over and he woke up and he looked on the paper and it said:
Higamous, hogamous, Man is monogamous. Hogamous, higamous, Woman is polygamous.
So anyhow - he tried. We're getting into the field of direct experience now, or let's say religious experience. I find four major categories of religious experience. This is going to start to explain, I believe, the differences. I believe that the differences in after-death experiences depend on the differences in pre-death experiences,
I don't know whether you're acquainted with Gurdjieff or not, but he draws a pretty good lineup of the different types of people. He lists four major categories, below the Enlightened level, that is. The first is the instinctive, the second is the emotional, the third is the logical, and the fourth is the philosophical. [note]
Now I find four corresponding states, that some medical people call exaltations, [James] or spiritual experiences, and they sort of correspond to these different levels. The first is salvationism. The second is the eureka experience - the equivalent of satori, the "Wow". "Wow, I know it now. I know what: "X" means in algebra. The third is cosmic consciousness; the fourth is Enlightenment.
How if you're acquainted with Ramana Maharshi, he catalogues them a little differently. The last two, instead of cosmic consciousness and Enlightenment, he calls kivala nirvikalpa samadhi and sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. Bo we go back and we look at the instinctive man. The instinctive man is a man who lives to live. And the biggest part of his life is taken up just in what he can eat, his sexual experiences, how much he can drink, how much dope he can take, or whatever it is. And he thinks sometimes he's Enlightened by some of the experiences he has. I've had people walk up to me and tell me they were Enlightened. And I've said, "What made you Enlightened?" One said, "Acid." Before acid it was the hoodles. No man was Enlightened until he had the hoodles - that's where you see snakes and monkeys, from drinking.
When a man gets tired of his instinctive level, he may search around for religion. Or he may meet a girl - or the woman may meet a man and she decides that she should go to church or something. They decide to forget their body and concentrate on the love of Jesus, the love of somebody or some ideological God, some idea of God. And they drop their instinctive self and find a tremendous rapture. In the Pentecostal faith it's called "salvation". It's a loss of ego, and anytime there's a loss of ego there's an immediate soaring of the spiritual potential, because this is what holds us down on the fertilizer level.
Now after we live so long in the emotional level - some of you are old enough to have gone through it - where you've fallen in love with a certain religion or idea, and finally decide that you're kidding yourself. That this is an emotional trip; that you're really in love with something that you don't even know about. Maybe Jesus wasn't that handsome - he might he ugly.
So we decide we're going to look into something, maybe we should use our head now - we are not too old. A lot of people only get that far; I've known people eighty years of age and they were right on that salvationistic level yet. They believed they were saved and that was it.
So they start digging; they start digging with their intellect. They attack - as well as they can, because there's very little to use your intellect on - numerology, kabala, astrology - hoping that something will crack the door and a new truth will come in. That maybe there's a way of appraising God through the kabala, or sometimes it might become a fundamentalistic thing. Well, the kabala is really a type of fundamentalism, you might say. There are different levels - it's like a department store -you can buy almost anything you want there: numerological kabala and also the spoken and unspoken kabala. But it is an exercise - a mental exercise - it begins with that at least.
Well, sometimes we belabor ourselves with this - like Swedenborg - he has a system, too, of interpretation of the Bible. And nothing comes of it for a long time. And then another ego drops; we completely drop the emotional ego and we have a realization that now we've solved it, now we've found "X". And for a minute everything seems in order. We don't know why, we don't have words to express it, hut we think that everything is in order and everything will be taken care of. And this is very short.
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I like to distinguish, when we're talking about Zen, the difference between satori and Enlightenment. And I'm distinguishing by virtue of the testimony of people who have described these experiences, not as it's defined in some book.
For instance, in Kapleau's book [Three Pillars of Zen] we run into people who supposedly experience satori where it was "Wow! I got it." It is not "Wow" when you die. You don't come hack after a death experience for hours, sometimes days. The shock, the trauma of dying is so great. And also the trauma of coming from an Absolute condition of mentality back into a relative picture-show, a stage. We're not happy to get back here, and it's trauma. So consequently a tremendous shift has to take place.
And I think this is true about a lot of people. If you're ever around a person who thinks they're dying and they pass out and wake up, one of the first things they do is weep. Because of the tremendous emotional upset. They had resigned themselves to dying. I know one doctor when he was dying they brought him to - they thumped on his chest and got him back - and he cursed them. Because - he didn't have any hopes of immortality, he wasn't a religious man. He just said, "I've got to do it all over again now. Why didn't you leave me alone?"
Consequently, the same thing applies to a deep spiritual experience. You've got to come back and do it all over again. You've got to come back and get your feet down in the mud again and grub like you did before.
So what we've got in this person who takes the logical approach to analyzing things - he's working with a vanity. The logic is vanity. Nothing is ever done by logic in esoteric matters. It's strictly a vanity thing where we can pile little words together and little sentences and say, "Look how clever I am. You can't outwit me." Where we've got a concept structure built that's impregnable: "You can't destroy this concept structure.
So after awhile, as again I say, if we live long enough, we come to the conclusion that the Wow experience is not the final experience. And we go back to the drawing board and we start plugging away, in Lord knows what directions. And the ego - the ego of being logically capable - drops. This self-delight in our own thinking processes drops, and we enter a thing which we call cosmic consciousness.
[sentence fragment removed] Incidentally in all three of these first three things we have what I call relative experience, which is bliss. In other words - in some of them there are figures that appear, where people actually think they're inspired or they see Jesus. Or they have happiness: they are very happy and they feel refreshed that they've reached this plateau.
In cosmic consciousness - if you want to read about it there are cases written rather extensively by Richard M. Bucke in his book called Cosmic Consciousness - you can get it in the library, I imagine anyplace. His own experience is a typical one; his description is very similar to the one that Saint John of the Cross had, in which lights appear. The scene is lit up. Bucke was in Montreal [incorrect, see note ] and the horizon became rose-colored. This thing permeated his whole being and he realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world was perfect; that there was nothing wrong with anything that happened in the world. We were talking earlier about things that were evil and some that were good - and he realized there was nothing
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evil, everything was good. And carried him serenely to the end of his life. But that's a relative experience.
Lights, bliss - you tell people that there's no bliss in after-death experiences and they don't want any parts But they're going to die anyhow. The facts are facts. We want facts - not the candy store choice. We're not in a candy store where we can choose bliss. But a lot of people say, "I don't believe that, if you tell me there's no bliss, waiting." Like as if - we've had a lot of fun here and now we're supposed to go up there and get a reward for it.
But regardless, the thing that distinguishes kivala samadhi (cosmic consciousness) from sahaja samadhi (Enlightenment) is the fact that in sahaja samadhi there is no bliss. Because you're dealing with an absolute condition. In the cosmic consciousness you're still dealing with a relative condition. You're wide awake, there is no trauma - in fact, it's blissful. Whereas in preceding Enlightenment and coming out of Enlightenment - the cases that I have looked into - they are very traumatic. It's very painful. Because it's death; it's real death it's not just a vision.
Getting bark to the business of psychology, or the investigation in this manner of our after-death experiences, and a lot of things that are just phenomena! experiences, not after-death experiences, like ESP, we have what I will call "possible conclusions" - because you can believe what you wish - that man is dual.
We are not somatic alone; man is dual. We have two parts; or we are two parts. We are material and we are also something else more subtle, whatever it is. You can call it ectoplasm, spirit, smoke - but we're not all material.
And the proof of this duality - if this is the end result, if this is the reward at the end of the labor, to seek for Enlightenment - if we prove this duality we open the door for immortality. Because it's manifest. Now I'm not saying that we should accept it so that we will hope to be immortal -but it's evident that we're not going to gather up our bones on judgment day, because we'd have to share them with a lot of people. And if we're getting scientific about anything it would he to reject the idea that someday the molecules are going to be re-gathered and the memory will come back and the sentience will come back and we'll walk away immortal.
Immortality has to lie in duality. It has to lie in consciousness outside the body.
Also, the different levels, the different states that people have, indicate, as I said before - it's going to bear a parallel - when a person dies, that his heaven is different. This is the reason for categorizing. That a person who only goes as far as the instinctive level may not, when he dies, have a greater experience than that.
Now, I think that this permeates nearly all of the Asian thinking. That people are not all the same. There is no great democracy in heaven. We're not all happy cherubs that all look alike and have access to the popcorn machine up there or whatever refreshments there are. We're still basically different, and this is the reason why the belief in reincarnation was encouraged, or received, let's say, the life that it did from the minds of the people in India and Asia.
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It was because of that difference there was the hope that perhaps you would come back and get into a better rut. That was the idea. There would he no point in reincarnation if everybody was immediately equal and all-wise just by dying.
Now I know a lot of people say that. I went to a funeral home with a fellow one time and he looked in the casket and said, "That man knows everything." I wasn't too sure. The fellow wasn't talking, for one reason.
Now what are the possibilities, from the result of this [study]? Besides what we might say are good possibilities - there are some that are lesser possibilities For example, thee possibility that all human intelligence and life is aimed at oblivion. This is one possibility. We don't know where it's headed.
There's a possibility of infinite progression. This seems to be very tiresome, we have the feeling. When reading this case in Oesterreich, it was about a rabbi who had fouled up with his people and he died and they wouldn't talk to him. He was shunned. So he tried to get into a pig and somebody killed the pig, so he got into a horse and finally he got into a girl. And they exorcised him when he got in the girl, but they talked to him. It was another rabbi who was exorcising him. Manifestly, he wasn't too happy where he was. It seems that if he's going to work his way up - starting off with a pig and a horse - he's going to have a tremendous, long series of experiences.
We get into certain Indian philosophy, brought out by people like Blavatsky, where a person becomes a good chela and then becomes an adept and then master and Bodhisattva and a dhyan chohan - and the first thing you know we run out of categories - they're still going. So this seems to me like a tremendous ...
If there is a single mentality behind it that creates it - it seems like if we knew of it - and of course, I have the feeling that's why we can't remember who we were before we were born - if we knew how many people we were before we were born, or what we were, we are liable to hunt a loaded gun. And get it over with. Because the knowledge of say a million years of experience, which we are attributed with by some of the people who believe in reincarnation - a million years of what? It would get very tiresome. So maybe the end result would he that eventually they would get hungry for oblivion. To just go to sleep.
Well, we've deviated maybe; it seems like we have. Because where does Zen fit into this? I maintain that by the same token, as the experiences that we've had from the people on these different levels who have died and been resuscitated and made little testimonials, we also have the testimonies of people who have received Enlightenment. People who have gone the whole trip. And the evidence is that these people know the; and this involves the knowledge - the total knowledge of yourself and the total knowledge of where you're going.
Now I say that and immediately I've got to explain it, because there's no such thing as knowledge, where you go. But that's the only way we have of expressing it. You are. When you reach there - you [italics] are. And of course as soon as you say what you are you confuse people. Because the feeling that you have is that you are God. Beyond a shadow of a doubt you are God.
Another thing I wanted to mention about Zen is the batting averages. Zen has a poor batting average. And I never hide this. Most people say -they build a big cathedral and they say, "This is the door to IT. The Truth. Everyone come here and you'll get the Truth.
The batting averages of people in Zen go back to something maybe one in ten thousand that enter, that make application or look into it. Maybe not. Maybe they're a little higher than that, but I know the odds are tremendous. So it's rather discouraging if you get into Zen literature.
I maintain that what happens. is that once you get into it, regardless, you may not go the whole trip but there's something about it: you'll be a better psychologist when you get through, no matter - all the way along the line you're going to be able to look at yourself and understand yourself and develop a tremendous lot more compassion for your fellowman. Because you're going to understand why he's doing things. And you'll understand the fact that he's [italics] not doing things. So this gives you more compassion for your fellowman.
But as far as the ability to find Reality, regardless of the batting averages, I don't believe that there is another way. There are individual systems, don't get me wrong. I met a man [Paul Wood , ] one time - he had never read anything on Zen or anything esoteric - he had been raised a devout Christian, a Protestant of some sort, some faith.
He was an aviator in the war, bombing Japan. And he found out he was killing people, and he got to questioning himself: "What goes on here?" Because in the Bible it said God observes the fall of the sparrow. So he said, "Where's God? Is He watching this? Is He encouraging this?" Somehow he couldn't accept that killing all these people was commensurate with his concept of a just God.
Of course we all create God in our own image and likeness - he made that mistake right off the bat. Because you can't tell what God wants. If there was a person capable of looking at World War II and making opinions, we wouldn't know what a creature of that vast nature would really think about us. But anyhow it shook him up, and they got him out of the army and sent him home.
So he came back to Dallas, Texas and he couldn't work. He was mumbling to himself trying to figure out the riddle, and he went back to church. And somewhere in the Bible it said that if you would get an answer from the Lord pray thusly. and what followed was the Lord's prayer. So he took the Lord's prayer and he studied it. Prayed, prayed, prayed and studied; took it apart a sentence at a time, concentrated on it.
And he said the more he did it the more trouble he had. His wife left him, his children despised him, they walked off and left. Lost every job he got ahold of. He finally got a job as a salesman in a car dealer's place, and in the middle of an interview with some customers he put his head down on the desk and asked God to kill him. He said he didn't have guts enough to kill himself, but he wanted out. He couldn't stand it any longer.
He woke up in the hospital. Now I ran into him in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. A friend of mine had brought him up to meet some people from Firestone, Goodyear, and those places - they were mostly engineers. My friend thought he'd impress these engineers, and they thought he was crazy. But because I had had a very similar experience I knew the man was telling the truth. And I'm watching them make fun of him.
He was just telling it casually what happened to him. I was amazed, and of course I'd have liked to communicate with him, out he didn't stay around long enough and I lost track of him.
His wife was there. His first wife had dumped him and he was married now to a very beautiful girl I'd say twenty years younger than he was. Of course, they're looking at her too. thinking, "What's this holy man," - well, he didn't pretend to be holy in the first place - "What's this holy man doing with this good-looking girl?"
We were out in the garage - we held our meeting out there to get away from the kids. He went to the toilet and they caught her alone and they said, "What do you thing of your husband? Do you think that he's all that lie's talking about?" She looked them in the face and she said, "My husband is my lord and savior," and turned around and walked out. And she meant it; she meant every word of it.
But to look at him - he looked like Jackie Gleason's sidekick - Crazy Guggenheim, I think they call him. His face was all slack and his eyelids hung down - he looked like he was boiled in booze. And I think he had his share, going through these traumas.
Regardless, this was a profound case. This man was in the hospital in an out-of-body experience that lasted for a week, in which he travelled through history. He could go anyplace he wished, and he would recount battles that occurred. If he would be in that particular scene - if he were there - he could tune into it. Which was a crazy talent in a way; I didn't see much point in it. But nonetheless, he said that it's there if you want to look at it. Once you get to that position you can just tune into anyplace in space and time. Because we're in a space/time continuum so to speak.
But this man never heard the word Zen. So what I'm getting at is that Zen is a good word, it describes a lot, but it's not the only path. But to me - it's the only thing that you get any literature on. You don't get any literature on these individuals, like John of the Cross or somebody who constrained by virtue of the fact that his life is threatened by the local church; or this fellow - who doesn't have any money and can't put his words down and people don't believe him when he talks. But there are some outstanding cases.
Again, when we talk of Zen, we're not talking about all Zen. Because I think there's a lot of chicanery in every movement; and I never thought it would get into Zen, but I think there's a lot of commercialism. For instance, the only thing Zen-ish about me is the fact that my head is bald. I don't believe that you have to dress a certain way - I think it's the way you think, not the way you dress. And you don't have to have koans; life is full of koans. All you have to do is apply the koans of everyday life. You'll get them by the bundle. Like him - this man got koans from the customers coming in the car dealership.
But we get into children's games with the most important of philosophic or spiritual movement; we start to play games and devise systems and exalt the history.
I had a teacher - his name was Pulyan - and he said, "I'll give you my genealogy if you wish." It doesn't mean a damn. Because how do I know my teacher's teacher wasn't phony? How do you know that I'm not phony? The proof is in the pudding, if I do yon some good.
But a tremendous lot is done with the "ankh", I think they call it - the stamp that you're supposed to have to make a bona fide teacher. A stamp does not make a thinker. Genealogy does not make a man able to transmit. When Huang Po was giving a talk in China I don't know when he lived, a thousand years ago perhaps - he said there was no Zen (Chan) left in China. And they said, "Why? There are three thousand people in this monastery and there are monasteries all over China." He said, "There's no transmission."
Now, Bodhidharma, who was the first Zen teacher to reach China from India, laid down the four signposts, of direction, to true Zen.
The first is: A separate transmission outside the scriptures. Now this is very important. Zen is a method of mind-to-mind contact. Transmission - that's what it means.
The second one is: No attention paid to words or letters. In other words, fundamentalism is out. You can't recite sutras and get anyplace. This is pastime, that's like saying your rosary heads - it might put you to sleep, it might keep you from doing nasty things, but it will not open your head.
The third one is: Looking into your nature. Again we're going back to - this is true psychology now - looking into your nature. Understanding yourself.
And of course, the last is: The attainment of Buddhahood.
If you apply these - now I've given you a whole lot of yardsticks tonight to work with - but if you apply these yardsticks to these movements...
First of all, there's no price on anything. People have to pay the rent, and if you live with somebody it's good to share pro-rated rent, electric bills, and that sort of tiling. But when it becomes a business - anything - I don't care what movement it is, whether it's Zen or anything else - get out of it, because that's all it is. And when people get too busy with the business, that's where their head is also. That's where their head is. They're not into psychology, they're into finance. And the majority of what I call systems of self-definition that we encounter are into pocket-expansion, not mind-expansion. So you can waste years with the wrong one.
Now I would like to do something that I generally do, and that is to turn the meeting over to questions and answers - communication that is. Because there are different levels of inquiry here, people with different degrees of reading, and that sort of thing. The only comment I have beforehand is that I'm not on the witness stand: No loaded questions. If anybody thinks I'm stupid - I'll admit it before we start.
Q. Do you say by these four principles that a truth can't be written down, or at least something relative to a truth, to help out a seeker?
R. No. You see, you have to distinguish between small-t truth and capital-T Truth. In Zen they're only referring to capital-T Truth. In other words, when we say that phlogiston was the correct concept four or five hundred years ago, that was small-t truth. Which may change in the years to come. It's relative truth, in other words.
Q: But isn't everyone on this plane dealing with small-t truth until you get to the large-T plane?
R: Plane? How do you know there's a plane?
Q: Well, Ok - for lack of a word - saying that there are two levels ...
R: This is true, what you say...
Q: ...and isn't there some merit in writing down or explaining certain things or certain events say in the past that might help a person organize his thinking to get closer to that truth?
R: Oh, I don't say there's anything wrong with it. In fact, I maintain that even the movements that are mercenary and phony have a place. If they inspire someone, if all a person is able to do is go through the mummery, then that's their bag.
The only thing I'm aiming at is I'm saying that your final goal, if somebody pretends to be able to take you to capital-T Truth, that you can judge them by those four precepts. In other words, when a person entered a monastery, he did not enter that monastery for social purposes; he entered in there to find the Absolute. And he had a pretty good idea that it was an absolute finding, and that he had to rise above the small-t truths of everyday life.
Now we get into psychology, for instance. You can't dodge small-t truths either. I'm not saying you can hedgehop, no. You have to go through that. For instance, the world may be an illusion; which you'll find out if you read Zen writings - that the world is manifestly an illusion. But you don't dare operate as though it's an illusion. You'll wind up run over by a Mack truck. An illusory Mack truck.
Q: When you speak of Zen do you think of a method, of a kind of meditation, of significant figures in Zen - what does Zen mean for you?
R: Zen means going within. Looking into one's nature. That's all you have to do. Now of course I say that there are things that help; there are different teachers that have different things that help, and whatever helps is alright.
For instance, one of the things that I think helps tremendously is commitment. Now that sounds rather vague, but this is a tremendous thing. I believe that unless you tell yourself you're going to do something you'll never get started. So I believe that if a person pledges themselves - you can call it the Absolute, or the Ultimate, or to God - and if a person says, "Hey, whoever is upstairs, whatever God is, bring me to the truth regardless of the cost."
And make this serious commitment. I don't care what religion you are, I believe you'll approach the Truth. And I believe traumas will help. It takes traumas to kick us loose from our preconceptions, our egos.
But I believe that it's commitment, and I tell the people who are studying with me to make a commitment - not to me. not to any teacher, not to any human being - but to their inner self, whatever that is. That their inner self deserves to know. And if there is a God in charge, if there is any architect, supreme engineer, whatever you want to call it - that has anything to do with us ... Now of course, my conclusions are, when you make this commitment, the God inside you answers, and helps. You help yourself, in other words.
Q: What are koans?
R: The koan was a method used in China pretty much - I don't remember Buddha provoking too many koans, his we're mostly explanations - but in China the koan developed. It was seemingly a meaningless question asked of the student, such as, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?" Or, "When the world goes up in smoke, where will you be?" or something of that sort.
What it goes back to - supposedly, because we're translating stuff into English - basically the big koan is "Who am I?" And you apply this and apply it and apply it, and you keep your mind - the mind gets lazy and it wanders away - but by continually applying this question back to yourself - I think this is alright.
A nonsense koan I don't see. There are whole books you can get today of koans. Now this is foolish to think that you could just find a formula, a word formula that would bring you to Enlightenment, and you'd buy it for fifty cents on the bookstand. It's crazy.
Anything that provokes your thinking is good, if you're provoked and you think as a result. They were just little nonsense questions. But it was also the belief that by the intense study of nonsense, sense resulted. Because the only way to transcend the relative world is to hit the opposite. To study both. To study sense you've got to study non-sense. To study good you have to study bad. And by the marriage of the two an explosion results. And you find that somewhere in between is the answer. I'm not saying compromise; I'm saying that the mind becomes one. It suddenly becomes one.
[Break in tape]
R: ...it's possible that - you see, this happened quite a while back. I'm comparing it with the type of koans that were supposedly put out in Japan when Kapleau went over there, which was the repetition of the word "Wu". Everybody was moaning "Wu". It was an assembly-line production of Enlightenment. They had a room full of people moaning "Wu" - they wouldn't let them sleep, day after day, and they had hired men cracking them on the back with boards to keep them awake. And they all were hollering at once; the neighbors said it sounded like cows in a barn.
So he went through it. He didn't get Enlightened he [words missing] went through it [??] out two or three of them,
I hear stories of people taking one koan and hanging on to it for nine years. And I think they go to sleep with a koan. I've run into people in this country that have said, "Oh, my koan is this." It's like their pet dog is named Fritz, or something. And they forget about; they have abandoned the search. They just have a koan.
So I just wonder. I'm not saying it wasn't effective, in some cases. I think you get koans ...
Q: What do you think of mantra meditation?
R: Autosuggestion.
Q: No, I'm not saying in the mantra itself having meaning in the words, but sort of clearing the mind of thoughts.
R: Autosuggestion.
Q: If it's "Om" and "One", instead nf say "Hare Krishna", still autosuggestion?
R: Yes. I went through it. Seven years of it. It was Om; we didn't have ang, bang, or whatever they're doing now.
Q: You didn't think you benefitted from it at all?
R: Went to sleep. Very peaceful - everything looked nice.
Q: What is autosuggestion? I don't really know what that means.
R: Well, when you can't do something, you tell yourself you're already there.
There are little things that people will repeat to improve then health like, "I am getting better every day in every way," etc. - you will hear these things. I think the whole business of TM - now don't get me wrong, I say TM has it's purpose. For traumatic people TM is very good. But if you're looking for something that will take you beyond sleep - a traumatic person should sleep, they should rest. But if a person wants to fight his way through to his definition, he doesn't want to sleep. He can't afford it. The cemetery is full of sleep. So you want to make use of every moment.
Now I had something very similar to TM. I went into yoga when I was around twenty-one years of age, and they just used the word Om. Anything that is resonant. You breathed deeply - did you ever watch me hypnotize anybody? You tell them breathe deeply, breathe regularly - pretty soon they're asleep. They put themselves into a peaceful state. But you've got to come out. And everybody that's in it will have to come out; it's a long, long recuperation period. It was seven years for me.
Q: How do you advocate looking into one's self, then? It seems like most people's minds are wandering-type of things.
R: Right, right. You've got to form a Ways and Means Committee. That's true. Everybody's different. So you've got to look at yourself and you say, "Hey, under certain conditions I will act a certain way, and I've got to head this off at the pass. I'm going to have to find some way of looking into myself. Because if meditate I go to sleep - so I've got to keep myself awake." Now that's what I call the Ways and Means committee.
It becomes a scientific search. Because there is some element in your minds that doesn't want to know. The natural purpose of the animal is to reproduce and fertilize the earth. And somehow you've got to keep your eyelids open to do a little thinking while you're able to think. The mind wants to avoid it; the mind wants to go back to pleasure, or to rest. So you've got to have a Ways and Means Committee. Sometimes that's the idea for joining a group. I used to say we were Ignoramuses Anonymous - like Alcoholics Anonymous. In other words, sometimes a guy can shake you and wake you up and say, "Hey - you're slipping. You're getting back into your old syndrome. You're showing that old ego-pattern again." And the guy wakes up again.
"But this is true; the mind is full of tricks. We're talking about the somatic mind. I maintain that there's another mind beyond . Everything that you do is watched by you. Meaning that you observe yourself, you observe the mind thinking. This one back there isn't quite as stupid but he's blocked out a lot. We get carried away with thinking that we are the actor, but there's another fellow bark there watching the actor all the time. It's what I call the anterior observer.
Q: Could you say something about the relation between the consciousness and the subconscious, and what you said about there being no such thing as knowledge?
R: Well, in the final analysis. There is knowledge here, it's evident; we learn how to drive nails in a house, we learn how to count, to work calculus problems. That's knowledge. But I say in the final realization there's no knowledge. There is no knowledge. If you want to call it the knowledge of nothingness - then you get pretty close to it. Knowledge has to do with relative memory, body sensations and that sort of thing. But when you reach a final realization, it's an experience of joining, not a watching of something else. Because everything is you.
Now, I'm not trying to negate knowledge. Getting back to the subconscious mind - I do not think we have a subconscious mind, as understood by the compartmentalized psychological writings. That we have an id, ego, superego, and this sort of thing. I think that what we have is a perceptive ability and a memory hank, and an automatic coordination just like any computer. The thing is that there is only one thought that comes through the window at a time, but the memory bank has all that information in it, and we like to call that the subconscious mind.
Q: I read a couple of books by Krishnamurti, and he seems to advocate that you've got to get into a really intense observation of what you're doing all the time. But it seems like in the confusion of everyday world - the Vedic scriptures call it the Age of Kali - that there's so much intense stimuli occurring in such a rapid pace that I don't see how in just doing that, this quest towards truth, that one ran direct the activities of everyday life. It seems that there's just too much going on to get going in a positive direction, just by watching what you're doing.
R: Can't you get away from it for about an hour a day?
Q: To do what?
R: Well, you said too much is going on. You get away from what's going on.
Q: But what am I to do? You said that mantra meditation puts you to sleep ...
ROSE: Well, your point was that we can't do anything because we're too wrapped up in everyday life, and I'm saying to get away from everyday life. If you want to do something, that's up to you.
Q: But what about the harmony of society?
R: What about it? Who cares? Are we going to create peace in the pigpen, or are we looking for ultimates?
Q: I can see that point. But it seems that as a human being that there's not a commitment but a certain brotherhood you have with other human beings, that you shouldn't just totally negate yourself from society.
R: I don't think you do. But I don't think you should play God either. We've got a lot of people running around wild today playing God, they're all going to do something for society. But the blueprint is already made. Let me go to this lady back here...
Q: I was interested in your comment about the intuitive experience with the young man who was killed by a truck. I was wondering how you relate these intuitive experiences to your own Zen experience.
R: I believe that before you can go out and evaluate systems - I'm not saying go out and join a Zen movement - what I would like to say is look inside yourself, I don't care what you call it. I think it's a mistake to start to label things, because pretty soon people think that the only thing you can do has to be this Zen - you have to learn Japanese, Chinese, Indian or whatever, and read the sutras, and I think that's all nonsense.
The main thing is to go within yourself. But you've got to evaluate some of the data to date. It's a scientific investigation. If you go into the study of a new element or something, you're going to have to go down to the library and get books on all the chemists who worked on that element. And the same thing in applying to religion.
Before we start off we've got to do research, and there's a vast sea of people saying, "I've got the truth." Regardless of books, everyplace you go, every sky pilot has the truth. So how are you going to sort these people if you don't have an intuition? Somewhere along the line you have to develop that intuition. Now, there's a way to develop it. It's in the Bible. It's in all the books. Become as a little child.
Q: Could you elaborate some on the origins of Zen? R: It started with Buddha. That's where it started, in India. I never went into too much the history of Zen, because we know presumably where it started, it's so far back - he didn't write anything himself, like Christ, stuff was written about him. But what happens is the system is good. That's the way I look at it. It's a good thing to work with. So regardless of who started it, it's a good system. And I don't know how many of the things we attribute to Buddha or Christ either one, are true. It doesn't matter. But he is the man who was responsible for it.
Q: Did I understand you to say that human existence is dualistic?
R: Not existence. The human body, the human person is dualistic.
Q: Aren't the whole principles of Buddha and yoga - another term is "Union" or "Oneness" - how do you show the difference between one and two?
R: See, they're talking about the ultimate end result. Only by the recognition of what is evident will you reach the truth. Not by the denial of things that are manifest...
Q: Not as I understood it. I understood that all was one now, whether or not you and I realized that it was. It is now, and we are one.
R: Well it may be. But you can't prove that, and neither can I ...
Q: You don't need to prove it, if it is one. And what we are arguing, or discussing, is whether or not existence, the Truth capital-T, is that we are all one now, or that I am a spirit and a material being. If all outside of what you would consider the spirit is illusory, as the Indian philosophies would believe, then the senses as well are illusory, and all of what is outside the spirit is actually a non-reality. It is only a relative term, so consequently there is actually nothing there. It may be as modern physics would point out it is present at one point in time and becomes only a probability at another point in space.
R: In space/time. The space/time concept, yes. But what you're giving is a postulation, because you don't know it. So I don't come out from that angle. Because I don't expect you to believe that I have reached a point in which I, not [italics] know - in which i [italics] I was everything. Am everything. So consequently we're trying to keep down to relative reasoning. And relative reasoning says that you are different from the person sitting next to you.
Q: But the point of yoga as I understood it is not to have relative things ...
R: No, no,,,,
Q: ...but to be experimental with oneself.
R: I don't think yoga ever loses its dualism until the final experience is reached - or do they pretend to -because they have hatha yoga, and they talk about a body, training the body, and they talk of raja yoga, which is training the mind.
Q: Only because you have to go through the process, the path.
R: Right, right. But don't jump ahead. What I'm trying to stop you from doing is jumping ahead and saying it's there. I'm saying ... don't believe me. Go there. But if you say that everything is one, then there's a tendency for everybody to relax and say, "Oh, everything's one, don't worry, we're all getting to the same place." Maybe. Ramana Maharshi says it's like the river entering the ocean - when you reach Enlightenment you enter the ocean - and it is seen no more. Identity is lost. But is it lost? How did I get back?
Q: The only thing I don't understand with that philosophy, though, at that point, is that if they believe in reincarnation, and we are only encased in the temple at the present time, and as the spirit goes into the next world, it too must mature. So certainly at the point which we would consider death - the man in the box - he is no where near Enlightened, he has gone to what another person called a plane. Because we can only describe things in planes.
R: I think a valid teacher of Zen would never talk about reincarnation. Most of them avoid it. Because this is another postulation. See, we're trying to keep down to just hare facts. And we start off basically with, "What do you know for sure?" Nothing. Then we take from there, possible expostulations, and choose the less ridiculous; that's the only way we can go. This is the whole thing.
So consequently - sure, reincarnation might sound good - there's no proof. The Christian idea of one long shot, one shot at the goal and if you miss you go to Hell forever and if you win you're in... This too is seemingly ridiculous. Because we can see the human element in all this thinking.
In other words, the person who's crippled, who doesn't have a good break in life - he's going to grab on this idea of reincarnation. And the guy who's got the millions, sitting up in the palace is saying, "Believe in reincarnation. Don't start any revolutions, because next time around you'll be in the palace and I'll be down there working for you."
So we've got to get down to what we really know for sure.
Q: Your statements such as to become like a child, and to go into oneself - things that have helped you, in a way - but they seem extremely vague. there any way you can talk more about that, or do you come to a point where you have to look for yourself?
R: No, I believe that there are rules you can lay down, but I don't like to get into them in the line of proof. For instance, when I'm talking to people about individual progress in this Zen path - whatever you want to call it - spiritual path, everybody's different.
I'll give you an example: possibly people can find it through throwing themselves away - i.e., by just the opposite. I'm not saying they can't. But as far as I know - my idea - is that a person has to find simplicity. And I believe the truth is very simple. We make it complex; because we've got the belief that anything that's worthwhile is a complex formula, a thousand elements. And then we think, "Oh, yeah, now as soon as we understand that we'll get the truth."
Things I think are very simple, but we don't see it. We want complexity.
I think also that the mind blinds itself, by certain things it does. For instance, we think in terms of past actions; and we've got to somehow purge ourselves of some of our past actions in order to think clearly again.
For example, an alcoholic's mind. I've had close relationships with alcoholics; I find they have a definite way of thinking. We stand on the outside and say, "That poor fellow. He's not going to give up the booze until he gets out of this state of mind he's in." So he doesn't know that. Because he's in that state on mind. And the only way he's going to know it is if he develops his intuition. And the only way hee is going to develop his intuition is to give up the booze.
So all we can do is look with sympathy upon most people. Because we're talking about a case you can see really clearly - but everybody's life has got themselves trapped into certain mental syndromes. In which they've got a rationale.
I grew up with a fellow, he was a year younger than myself - we started off on a spiritual search together when we were in our early twenties. This guy decided he was going to take a string of women with him. He said that Lahiri Mahashi was married, and so-and-so, so he was going to have fun. Because - he had a good rationalization - it's there. He was born with the fun-making parts, so why not use them? And I said, "Ok" ...
But of course, you can get spirochetes floating around inside your brain, and it impedes your thinking system from then on. He also decided that he should drink a little. Because Christ drank at the Last Supper - so tie was always carrying a gallon of wine around with him, in the name of Christ.
So the result was that this fellow could develop - and he did - he was one of the most outstanding authorities I've ever run into on Buddhism. On any esoteric philosophy. He's got a photographic mind - he's an engineer, mathematician. The mathematicians that worked with him said he never made a mistake - drunk or sober. But everything was rationalization. And he comes down to my place, he's an incurable alcoholic now, he comes down and he says, "Everything you said was true."
It's too late. All he needs now is a place to lay down, and get some rest before he dies.
What I tried to tell him when he was twenty years of age: "Develop your intuition. Inhibit yourself. Give yourself time to think. Don't be crowded with all sorts of parasitical ideas and compulsions."
In other words, what it amounts to - it's not superstition, it's a fact of clarifying your computer. You can't bombard your computer with four or five problems at once. You've got to clear it out for one problem. And work that one problem. And if a guy is sitting and meditating, and as soon as he starts meditating he thinks of his girlfriend, and Lord knows what he'll be doing next. Or - "I'm thirsty." He doesn't go get a cup of coffee, he gets a drink of wine. Pretty soon he goes back - he loves to meditate - you find him in a corner drunk.
Q: In our social structure - I'm working towards a particular career because I know I have to eat. Does such a thing as that interfere with aspiring towards Enlightenment?
R: I don't know - it depends on what job you have or how much trouble you have... I said a little while ago that one of the first steps that a person has to take is to make a commitment. Now Paul Wood, the fellow I was talking about in Dallas he had to eat; he had to keep his family. But the family dumped him.
When I talk a commitment, I don't talk about a fair-weather commitment. Because you may have trauma. You may lose you job. You may wind up digging ditches. I don't know what will be the result.
I know that myself - I worked as a chemist for a long while, a metallurgist - I never worked over a year anyplace. I got a tremendously bad reputation and after awhile no one wanted to hire me because I wasn't a slave. And they knew that I'd leave again if I took a notion.
But I found that I could set myself [in spiritual practice] with a job even better than if I were unemployed. Because I'd get a routine. I'd rent a room where no one knew where I was - I didn't want visitors. I would come home from work in the evening and I would either do so much reading, on associate subjects, or I'd tuck my toes underneath me and sit there in a yoga pose so I could meditate. (It's a good thing if you've got your back up against a wall - you won't fall over.)
So I'd sit there and think. It's not that difficult. But the thing is - all you have to do is think about the stuff that's hitting you during the day. It'll come. And sometimes read a book.
I'll tell you - I don't know whether you're acquainted with Blavatsky or not - Blavatsky is nothing in particular. She has a big volume called The Secret Doctrine, and also Isis Unveiled. They're mostly encyclopedias of esoteric knowledge. But there's no great system laid out - no system at all laid out - on how to find the truth or anything. But I would be reading these -they were fascinating things in them, of accounts.
But all of a sudden it would switch over to me. I don't know why. I'd go back to my childhood, and I'd realize where I'd made a mistake, where I had made a fool of myself. And I'd realize I could see my ego. Where a big fat head got in the road, and somebody punched me. And I was hating this person, because they punched me. And then I began - I could see myself, by detaching myself from the scene while the scene is cooled off now. (Of course while it's hot you still hate the guy. ) But I could see where I had caused it. I had been laying out a projected picture that was nauseous to people until finally somebody punched me.
So this is what happens, and this came from reading Blavatsky, not a book on psychology. Why it keyed in I don't know, but the intention was back there to basically know myself. So I think that anything that I had read ...
And it's just like in meditation a lot of people are scared to death to meditate on sex, I think you should meditate on sex - because I think it's
[End of OCR copy]
[Notes from rest of talk follow – to do]
24:57
A lot of people are scared to death to meditate on sex. I think you should meditate on sex. Because I think it’s one of the big factors – to understand why you’re being moved. But meditate on it properly – I don’t mean get morbid – I mean if you analyze it you’ll find out what a slave you are.
We’re here for the same reason as the pigs in the slaughterhouse.
Learn to transmute sexual energy.
When I got employment I could meditate.
Stood on head, etc.
You going anywhere for lunch?
[ File 3 ends 26:28 ]
Footnotes
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