THE DIRECT-MIND EXPERIENCE

Lectures and Notes by

Richard Rose

0.952-10

This book is published by the TAT Book Service, under the auspices of the TAT Foundation.

Copyright © 1985 by Richard Rose. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the TAT Book Service, 1686 Marshall Street, Benwood, West Virginia 26031.

Contents

THE DIRECT-MIND EXPERIENCE

Richard Rose

Contents

Acknowledgment

Preamble

Introduction

Interview—WKSU Radio

Kent State University Kent, Ohio, 1974

Lecture on Moods Columbus 1979

From the Original Notes

Lecture at Boston College

November 19, 1975

INTRODUCTION

YARDSTICKS

CHANGE OF BEING

WORK WITH A GROUP

THE EXPERIENCE

THE GROUP/THE BOOK

ILLUSIONS

STATES OF MIND

AWARENESS

LOOKING INSIDE

REVERSAL

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES

PROGRESSIVE STAGES

FREUD AND FOLLOWERS

THE RELATIVE DIMENSION

GOD, BUDDHISM, CHRISTIANITY

OTHER SYSTEMS

AUGUST CHAUTAUQUA

West Virginia August 6, 1983

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MIRACLES

Akron, Ohio February 15, 1981

TYPES OF ENERGY

FIGURE 1. ENERGY TRANSMUTATION

TYPES OF MAGICIANS AND MAGIC

EXAMPLES OF MAGIC

MENTAL FORMS OF MAGIC

THE MECHANICS OF MAGIC

THE PATH TO MAGIC

MAGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY

CLASSIFICATION OF FORMS

ABSTRACT STUDY OF THE MIND

FIGURE 2. TRIANGULATION

THE MIND AND CREATION

JACOB'S LADDER—THE PATH TO REALIZATION

FIGURE 3. JACOB'S LADDER

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

LECTURE ON BETWEEN-NESS

Columbus, Ohio, 1980

FIGURE 4. BETWEEN-NESS

NOTES ON BETWEEN-NESS

BETWEEN-NESS AND ULTIMATE REALITY

INCIDENTS

ULTIMATE BETWEEN-NESS

BETWEEN-NESS, THE POWER STAGE

SYNCHRONICITY AND BETWEEN-NESS

BETWEEN-NESS

BETWEEN-NESS IN HEALTH

MOVING A POWER VECTOR

FAITH HEALING

FIGURE 5. HEALING TRIANGLE

BETWEEN-NESS FACTORS

POINTS OF REFERENCE

TAT Meeting at the Farm, Nov. 1982

THE MOVING POINT OF REFERENCE

POINTS OF REFERENCE, AND HOW THEY ARE USED

POINT OF REFERENCE: PREDICTION OF MENTAL OR SPIRITUAL GROWTH BASED ON SOME MANNER OF RESULTS

POINT OF REFERENCE: APPARENT LAWS OR EVIDENCE

The Path is Simple

Back Cover

Acknowledgment

To Cecy Rose for her years of typing and typesetting.

To the TAT members whose decade of work enabled my books to reach the public.

Preamble

There are two types of fish. Those with two eyes that swim in balance, and those that have only one eye because they lie on the other eye.

There are two other types of fish condemned to the black depths: those who developed a lantern above their heads and those who were permanently sightless because they refused to believe that light was possible.

Introduction

Richard Rose began his career as a speaker and teacher of spiritual direction when he gave a talk at the Theosophical Society of Pittsburgh in 1972, fully twenty-five years after the Experience that culminated his own search and that remains the inexhaustible source of the help that he extends to others. Since then, he has spoken hundreds of times, at colleges, churches, bookstores and philosophical societies, from coast to coast, not for the sake of honoraria but because of his selfless compulsion to hold out a lifeline to people who are seeking as he once sought, to offer guidance where it is wanted, to express the inexpressible to those with ears to hear.

His first book, The Albigen Papers, began with a self-described "corrosive analysis" of society, as a prelude to a system of psychological health and a spiritual path, set out in practical terms. In Psychology of the Observer, he set out simply, yet in ample detail, a description of the human mind that serves as an indispensable guidebook to the inner path. Rose's straightforward presentation causes the most profound concepts to strike his readers as self-evident truths; he would surely merit the title of "original thinker" were it not for his own insistence that man cannot create, but can only discover that which is.

Thousands of sincere seekers have had, and will have, the good fortune to read Richard Rose's writings and thereby spare themselves precious time and energy upon discovering his common-sense approach to the study of the mind. But even more fortunate are those who have met him personally, who have heard him speak, who have come to know him as a friend, because they have had the opportunity to see a man who lives philosophy, and to be moved by his presence, his humor and his ability to know another person's mind and touch it.

This long-overdue volume captures some of the dynamism and spontaneity of Richard Rose in lecture, interview and dialogue. While it includes many of the ideas found in his writings, they are here expanded on and discussed, often in response to audience questions. This book also includes material never reduced to writing, in particular the lecture on Moods. Because of its informal manner of presentation, a talk can serve as a better introduction than a book to a new philosophy. Certainly, Richard Rose's talks have inspired thousands to look deeper into themselves, whether for an hour, a week or a lifetime. It is a measure of his greatness that many who have heard him have realized the need to look, and to continue to look, until there is no longer a looker.

INTERVIEW, WKSU RADIO, KENT, OHIO, 1974

This unrehearsed interview contains an explanation of Rose's personal motives for taking his message to other people, and especially to young people. He describes the nature of spiritual development, as compared to the structure of traditional religions, pointing out that ultimate realization is for the few, and not for humanity. He also points out his differences with most systems of meditation.

"We are not desirous of bringing anyone peace of mind. We want to stir you, to shake you. Because protoplasm tends to inertia."

LECTURE, BOSTON COLLEGE, BOSTON, MASS., 1975

Given during Rose's first speaking tour of the East Coast, this talk presents a full outline of his spiritual system, including the concepts of illusions, the need for a group, states of mind, change of being and retreat from untruth. Intuition must be developed along with reason in order to discriminate truth from untruth.

"There is nothing proven. We know nothing for sure—we don't even know that we exist. But we more or less have to postulate or accept as a fact that we exist and that we can do something, at least tentatively, until we can prove that we can do something."

LECTURE ON MOODS, COLUMBUS, OHIO, 1979

Three major moods, found in the dream-state, are identified as the three great motivations programmed into all people: Fear, Seduction and Nostalgia. This is an unremittingly honest view of human endeavor and folly, driven by these moods. But the understanding of moods can help to free one from their control: "The nostalgic mood becomes the language of the soul. It is the inner man trying to get through the earth-man's paradigm, to communicate with him."

"The dreamland experiences, even though they are nightmares, are not as dangerous to us as the moods of daytime . . . Moods are easy to enter, but difficult to get rid of."

TAT CHAUTAUQUA, WEST VIRGINIA, 1983

During every August at the TAT Farm Chautauqua, Richard Rose gives an "Intensive" program, designed to expose the participants to a concentrated form of his teaching method. This is a transcription of a one-day session that displays his truly Socratic method, challenging the students to formulate an answer to the question, "What is thought?" As it becomes clear that no one knows what thought is, he guides the discussion to the necessity—and means—of going within.

"No one will willingly move out of his or her paradigm without some trauma or traumatic revelation . . . Most mental maturity and spiritual evolution comes about by the lessons of life itself."

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MIRACLES, AKRON, OHIO, 1981

Rose carefully outlined this talk in an effort to set out a comprehensive explanation for the inexplicable. The modern, "scientific" world-view has steadfastly refused to incorporate concepts that can account for the phenomena of miracles and magic, and so dismisses them as superstition. Such an attitude flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that such phenomena occur, and is thus anything but rational. The approach here is to accept the reality of verifiable phenomena, and then to seek an explanation. The answer is found in an understanding of energy, and its transmutation to higher forms in biological systems. We can easily see the transformation of plant and animal life forms into physical energy for the human. What we miss is the further development and projection of that energy into neural and spiritual forms, with which real miracles can be performed.

"Everybody wants to be a magician. Most of the religions on the face of the earth would not have begun and been perpetuated without the use of magic. Nobody wanted to hear polite philosophy alone. They had to have something that healed the sick, or possibly repaired them when they spent too much of their energy in the wrong direction."

LECTURE ON BETWEEN-NESS, COLUMBUS, OHIO, 1980

Rose introduced the idea of Between-ness in his pamphlet, Between-ness, Energy Transmutation and Transmission. It is a term that defies definition, and fully deserves the explanation given in this talk. It is the magical mechanism employed by so-called primitive peoples like the Hunas (the native priesthood of the Hawaiian Islands) and the aborigines of Australia, who performed astounding feats of mental manipulation of physical reality. Between-ness is the missing link between mind and matter, but it is also the key to the development of the intuition and to spiritual growth.

"The psychology of the aborigine works. It works, he proves it. Our psychology doesn't work."

DISCUSSION ON POINTS OF REFERENCE, WEST VIRGINIA, 1982

All religious, philosophical and psychological systems must be recognized as fundamentally inadequate when it is seen that they lack a valid and provable point of reference. While Christianity has postulated the truths of the Bible, modern society has become satisfied with creature-comfort, social compatibility and collective opinion. The search for Truth must also be a search for the real Self, the only true point of reference.

"All of the physical sciences are unfinished as long as life is undefined. Science tries to prolong life, but not to define it. The definition might put a new light on the importance of any need for avoiding death. Or it might be the threshold for the perpetuation of indefinite terrestrial, individual existence."

—Louis Khourey

Interview—WKSU Radio

Kent State University Kent, Ohio, 1974

Q: First off Mr. Rose, how did your group develop, and could you give us a little of your background?

Rose: It developed actually as a result of a whole life's work. This is a result of spiritual diggings I had done over a lifetime, but had failed to record or describe in writing. Since the number of people that you can contact personally is limited I decided finally to put it down in writing. Prior to that I had no idea of coming to the public with it, but after I wrote The Albigen Papers the group formed.

Q: Could we have a definition of what the Zen group is?

Rose: Well, it is a brotherhood, an esoteric group that is aimed at enlightenment. Of course, you'll have to define the word enlightenment. But I want to point out in the beginning that the group is not necessarily closed to any esoteric or religious system that would bring about that same result. A lot of people will think when they hear the word Zen used in the group that we are strictly of Asiatic origin and maybe addicted totally to oriental procedures or oriental Zen procedures.

It isn't that. The word Zen was involved because it indicates a direct system that is more explainable than any of the literature that we have about the same result, in any other major religion. So we use the word Zen, and of course, Zen techniques are used. But this does not rule out the fact that we do look into and even use certain mechanisms from other esoteric systems.

Q: Through your interest in spiritual development, I'm sure you have probably studied the major religions—and found them deficient?

Rose: In my lifetime I have had my nose in nearly every religion that I could either visit personally or read about. And I found that Zen indicates a method of approaching the mind directly with the mind—rather than approaching spiritual values through emotional reading or emotional living. Emotional or devotional, we might say the two are tied together. Most religions encourage an emotional-devotional thing to find a spiritual value.

Whereas I maintain that this same end can be reached by a very pragmatic common-sense approach to truth. Through self-definition. And if I didn't believe that this method is more propitious, I wouldn't use it in the group.

Q: Do you consider the Catholic and Protestant religions to be of the devotional type of religion?

Rose: Well, yes, I would say at least for the layman. There have been Christian mystics, but they were not even always encouraged by their own church. They were treated similarly to the way Galileo was, although I'm not saying that I think Galileo was an enlightened man.

For instance, St. John of the Cross was a Christian mystic whom the church put in jail, because they thought he was stepping outside of the things they wanted the public to hear. He went outside the pale of the teachings that were prescribed for the layman, and he was put in prison for it.

The general teachings of all the Christian faiths are appealing, let's say to the emotional part of the person. They prescribe faith. I have a note in my book on the inadequacy of Christian teachings. It was designed for medieval Christian peasantry whose minds at that time were both uneducated and uncomplicated. So faith was the natural answer.

Since people have emerged from the uneducated class in the last couple hundred years, they have naturally become dissatisfied with just accepting things because somebody tells them, "You have to believe this." And this is the reason in my estimation that a tremendous percentage of European and American people, particularly the youth, are turning in other directions. Listening with an ear to some other country or some other religion, to find something that has more of a tone of common sense to it.

Now unfortunately, some of these new directions that they turn to are also emotional and devotional movements.

Q: So religion becomes an evolutionary process—the old religion is too uncomplicated for modern man?

Rose: No, I don't quite agree with that because I think that in those days there were people who thought more deeply, whose minds were more complicated. But they manifestly held no hope for the masses of the peasantry. There was an exoteric teaching to more or less keep the masses from doing damage. To keep them socially compatible, while placating them or soothing their fears about life after death or whatever the question was.

But there was also an esoteric teaching—this is where the word esoteric comes from. We find by some of the literature that is manifest down through the ages, from men like Pythagoras even before Christianity, that there was deep thinking. There were minds who had evolved.

And we still have minds today that will only, no matter which religion they go to, gravitate toward an emotional type of religion, rather than to what we might call the attempt at logical thinking, or the common-sense approach to definitions.

Q: So is it okay then, for these individuals who perhaps haven't developed their minds to a great extent—is it satisfactory for their state—to stick with the emotional kind of religion?

Rose: They have no choice. There is a categorization that we read in Gurdjieff, of the different types of people. He mentions four different levels or categories. The first is instinctive, the second emotional, the third intellectual and the fourth philosophic.

For example, the people who are on the instinctive level doubt and very seldom pick up or understand the emotional motivations of those people who are so to speak a step above them. And the people on each of these levels have a religion that suits their level. So there is a purpose for every sincere religion—it answers the demand of quite a few people on a certain level.

We say that the spiritual evolution of man has a broad base of people on the instinctive and emotional levels, narrowing down then to the intellectual level. When it sorts down to the philosophic level, where a person uses direct experience to find his answers, there are very few people left. And this is the top of the pyramid.

So, our group would not be too distressed if it did not have a large number of members, because we're appealing to these few people. We are trying to find things through direct experience—mind to mind investigation—rather than through reading, believing, or employing what I call gimmicks. We don't use physical gimmicks, prayer wheels, beads, or whatever, in attempting to arrive at a spiritual or transcendental end.

Q: In order for someone to even pick up your philosophy, he has to be willing to question some very long-held traditional thoughts or myths concerning religion?

Rose: Well, we don't get into that very much, because this could go on forever. This would be a theological or a dogmatic quibble. We basically bypass that, and I think that all genuine Zen does also. It just bypasses all individual concepts and goes right back to the thinker—and asks of him, "Why do you believe this? Do you ever examine yourself to see why you believe a particular thing?"

And from this you begin to understand that perhaps you were motivated by something organic or by a particular type of inherited character or nature. And if a person sees this, maybe there's a chance for him to progress from that point.

So we generally just ask the person to question himself, or we will question if he can't think of the questions. "Why are you hung up on whatever it is that you're doing?" Or, "Why do you cleave to this thing that you believe in?" And it's not only religious things, it's also social convictions. These social convictions tie us to what we consider to be inhibitory complexes, which keep us from thinking clearly.

See, I maintain that this is all a matter of thinking clearly. That you do not have to be a holy, ascetic-looking person—you can work in a steel mill. You can live a life like anyone else. You don't have to be a theologian—in fact, you can doubt all the theology that is ever written and still find the truth.

Because as soon as you start putting limitations on it, like saying that you have to have a prayerful attitude, you are doing just that—you're building a door with that limitation that you can't go beyond.

I believe that it is something any man can do. Any layman, with just plain determination and common sense, who can sit down and face himself. But he has to follow it up. Not just say, "Well yes, I agree that I have kind of tricked myself here or my head has outwitted me here." But face himself consistently over a period of let's say meditative sessions or confrontation sessions, in which he attacks and holds these up to view.

He realizes that maybe he has been into twenty-five years of self-delusion, that he's been kidding himself. He puts forth a certain posture to society—first he puts it over on society—he convinces them that he fits in, that he's a nice type of fellow and all that sort of thing. Then he convinces himself that all of his thinking is correct.

Then something happens of course to all of us someday—when we doubt everything that we have ever thought. The day comes when all of us come to doubt. But it's generally too late to do anything about it.

So the majority of people sort of slide along on a kind of egotistical conviction that because the public doesn't complain about their social behavior they must be on the right track on all levels. They pay their taxes, they get along with the fellow next door and they're able to perform their job—this seems to be to them the sign of a good theology. But of course, that to me would be the ultimate sign of a successful utilitarian theology.

Q: Do you feel that existing structures which have developed in the religious/political scheme have been done so by those who wanted to control and mold other people?

Rose: This is what I contend has been the downfall of Christianity. I was born and raised in the Christian faith, precisely a Catholic, and I began even as a child to see where I thought they were refusing to answer my questions. That they were refusing to allow the layman to get into deeper levels of thinking, while at the same time trying to control the thinking—by just saying, "You're going to hell if you doubt."

And this is what I say is a common-sense reaction—not just myself alone but many thousands of people have said, "Well, I have had enough of that. I'm surely entitled to think. I'm surely entitled to doubt."

The thing was that because of this attitude of control there was a slump in the dynamism of the Christian church. They had become powerful. They were no longer persecuted, they were left alone, they could build massive cathedrals. And it became a social institution—it became rather sleepy.

They no longer exhorted. The very backbone of any religion is the continuing search for truth—not just collecting funds and building buildings or amassing a big social structure.

Then when these Christian structures were threatened by the rebellion of large segments of the young people, who said many things including that God was dead to them, the church reacted by trying to placate or play politics with humanity. Posing now as a great social institution, wanting to be politically funded, indulging in things that were strictly social problems that had nothing to do with the church or with theology—much less a search for man's definition. (And when I say theology—this doesn't come close to what we are talking about.)

And this is what in my belief every sentient being searches for—his cause. If that is a Creator or if it's an accident, he wants to know it. He certainly doesn't want to be silenced or placated or converted into just a politically or socially-oriented group.

Q: So this marriage or mutual relationship between religion and the state became its downfall?

Rose: It seems to me like that. Now I could be wrong on the intentions of all good men—there may be lots of people who are trying to salvage some of this. I read recently of a priest at a meeting down in Florida who had talked quite openly of cosmic consciousness and enlightenment. And from the way he talked about it, he evidently knew what it was about.

But I've never heard of any campaign on his part to bring this to the people. To show them that there is something to look for besides the old concept of a personal god who protrudes from the heavens with an ancient bewhiskered head and looks after his little ones—or damns them forever for not being able to guess what he wants them to do.

When we talk about enlightenment we are talking about the knowledge of ultimates—the knowledge of the absolute state of being. This involves nearly everything in the line of knowledge, and yet it doesn't really involve knowledge. Because when you get to the absolute state of being you are dealing with absolutes, not relative things which we define as knowledge.

So we have to try to bear in mind when we hear this, that we are looking for absolutes with the full knowledge that when we reach that absolute state of knowledge it may not be describable. And consequently, all the time that I have been talking to these various groups about enlightenment, I have dodged the word. Because it is undefinable.

Incidentally, of the men I have met who were enlightened, only one was enlightened by virtue of the Zen practice. I have met at least two who were enlightened by the Christian process.

One of the most amazing cases was a man who was enlightened from Christian meditation. And he was not a Catholic monk—he was a hell-raising drunk before he reached this. But he was sincere. Part of his drinking was almost a furious dissatisfaction with himself, coupled with a desire to find something out. And all through his despair and struggling and everything he continued to pray and read the Bible. And eventually something cracked.

The obstructions gave way, and he reached a state in which he was aware of the true state of everything. I talked to this man right close to here, in Akron in fact—he had come up from Texas to visit a friend of mine, and I was quite convinced that this experience was genuine. So it convinced me that the Christian procedures do have something to offer—if they want to take care of this fractional element of people who want to go this far in mysticism.

The average layman doesn't want to go this far. The average layman wants to go to church, he wants to be in a social institution, he wants utilitarian religion—something that will improve his business, that will keep his kids in line so they don't go to jail, and that will keep his wife at home. And he doesn't look for too much beyond that.

Then besides this he humanizes heaven, as the Christian faith does a good bit. As if God is a personal being and heaven a physical place. And he just thinks, "Well, by virtue of democracy we're all going to the same place. By virtue of human concepts of divine justice God is going to take us all there. He has to. He would be embarrassed if he didn't take us all there. So I'll just sit back and ride in to my capital ‘S' Self-realization on the tide of humanity."

This is the majority. This is the base of the pyramid. And so this is what the churches cater to. Nearly all of your religions cater to these people. Richard Bucke wrote a book on cosmic consciousness—he was a Christian mystic, incidentally—and he states that only one in a million are able to reach this. This is the top of the pyramid.

The rest have no desire to even comprehend that there is an ultimate state, a state beyond the relative, that a person can experience. Not know, but experience. And of course, he arrives at this not by a state of education so much, but a process of non-education. Dis-education. Plus becoming.

Q: Of the million people who don't make it—in this universal order it seems that they should have more than one chance. Does the concept of reincarnation fit in with the Zen philosophy?

Rose: Of the two Zen teachers that I knew, I have never heard them discuss the question of reincarnation. The question would be put to them, but they would refuse to answer it. They would say, "If we told you that you had another chance, you wouldn't even try this time." This is one reason. The other thing is that you should answer your own questions. As soon as I would tell you that there is such a thing as reincarnation, I institute a dogma.

You will probably notice that I more or less say that things should be retreated from. For instance, that we should get away from this emotionalism in religion if we're wanting to become philosophers, or philosophic esotericists. But I will very seldom say, "We believe in this concept."

We believe that man is largely helpless, that he must become strengthened. These are things which we believe. But when you get into the business of reincarnation and so forth, these are strictly speculative. And—I believe that every man should answer for himself.

I will say this—that as an explanation of the inequities that you see in society and in human suffering, the idea of reincarnation would be a more easily digestible system to the human intellect than would this thing of one chance and then down to hell forever. But regardless, just because it is more easily digestible means that it could also more easily have been created out of the wishful mind of mankind.

Q: Are you familiar with Edgar Cayce?

Rose: Yes.

Q: He speaks of reaching the book of universal knowledge. Is this an allusion to what perfection might be, or enlightenment?

Rose: I think so. You run into this reference in many of the books that you find today. Even in Carlos Castaneda's books there is a vague reference to total knowledge. Knowledge that is beyond the world, that is. The knowledge that appears when the world disappears, or something of that sort. Of course, those are vague references.

I did quite a bit of study and research into Edgar Cayce when I was in my twenties. I visited his place, in fact. Of course, I consider that Edgar Cayce was primarily a healer and secondly a prophet. A man of talents that he could not explain himself. I failed to see a real dogma that he ever expounded, although I understand from later writings that he did believe in reincarnation and some of these concepts of lost continents and so on. But I never quite placed him in the category of esoteric philosopher.

Q: What about Atlantis—supposedly a well-developed race or society, dispersing and becoming like gods to the people on other continents.

Rose: This is what I was referring to. I have never tinkered with the idea too much because I could never see any great significance to it. Basically I am not a historian, although I do look for and compare a lot of common denominators. But it never occurred to me that this would be significant.

However, I have heard that concept, not only in regard to Atlantis but also in a story in India which Blavatsky refers to. The Hindus believe that they were once a race of rather primitive people that were invaded from the skies by a race of blue people, who were super, so to speak. This was the descent of people like Krishna—these were the avatars.

Now—I wonder how much of this is just a bit of nice thinking. It makes . . .

Q: Good fiction.

Rose: Yes. It's like we hear now of the study of flying saucers and the marvelous things that might have resulted from their coming into Mexico, leaving artifacts.

I believe this about all these phenomena—I've got quite a little scrapbook of clippings of these things—but I don't get into it except to just look for common denominators. Because we only have so many years in our life. And after you're on the path a little while you realize that it's impossible to sift all of the phenomenal data that has cropped up.

For instance, there are several volumes published by a man by the name of Charles Fort. (I don't know if he's still living or not.) Lo!, and Wild Talents, and The Book of the Damned are the names of them. These are compilations of things like flying saucers, flying horses, all sorts of sea phenomena, monsters at sea, and this sort of thing. Things which defy our scientific writings or our scientific beliefs.

So we can study those, and sometimes they will give you an idea. But we couldn't begin to catalog them—an individual couldn't at least—and try to deduce some great truth from them as to our relation. Because when you get down to it, for instance if you want to get to the core of Zen teaching, or the culmination of the Zen training which would be an experience—you have a certain conviction that this entire physical world is a projection, not a reality.

And immediately when this becomes apparent to you, you sort of lose interest in the mundane phenomena like levitations or haunted houses. These seem to be just strictly more of the same phenomenal world. They are a little bit more tenuous or gossamer, but they're still just parts of a phenomenal world which in itself is not too real.

Now I had a very difficult time even delivering a lecture, because I had to deliver it to people who thought in objective terms. And I think I still have trouble with that. In trying to get to people who are thinking in terms of very objective things—like tomorrow's paycheck, or pleasure, or compatibility, or conventional philosophic attitudes, conventional psychological attitudes, this sort of thing.

I have a lot of trouble communicating with that because when you find out that the whole thing is a projection, it makes you more or less lose enthusiasm about the significance or glamour of this projection.

Q: I'm sure you can't break down twenty-five or thirty years of conditioning to society's ways and tell them, "Look—this is the way you should think about it."

Rose: Right, and this is the difficulty that we run into all the time. For instance, a person will come into a lecture and ask a question, and you are torn between trying to reply to that person in his language, or being as truthful with him as you would be in approaching total truthfulness. If you give him a totally truthful answer, he may be insulted or think that you're making fun of him.

So we're continually faced with that—trying to still talk to that man in an objective manner, to reply to him or pick up his head where it's at. The terminology in the Albigen system, as we call it, is continually difficult to translate, because people are asking such questions as, "Is it good to do this?" And of course, your immediate reaction would be to say, "Why do you say ‘good'? What do you mean by ‘good'?"

But yet you don't like to do that because then they look at you rather amazed: "What's he doing, evading me? Playing with my head? I asked him a simple question, why doesn't he give me a simple answer?" So in some cases I'll try to come at them from their viewpoint, and lead them back to perhaps more clear thinking.

Q: What about those individuals at the base of the pyramid, who seem to have been locked into a religious belief which says, "You will believe or else you will go to hell." Are these people inhibited from breaking out of those frames of thought, or can they be lifted to a higher stage?

Rose: It isn't "inhibited." I call it trying to put three pounds of, let's say, material into a two-pound bag. A person on the instinctive level cannot comprehend the person on the step above him. And we find this in all levels of spiritual work. If you encounter a teacher who is what I call two rungs on the ladder above you—you'll reject him.

We find this all the time. Where people come into the group and their intuition picks up that we are people outside of this appreciation of the glamorous and the bizarre part of life. And people on other rungs—if they have been imbued with the game, the dance of life, and they find it all wonderful and joyous and all that, and they make the mistake of coming in and thinking that we're a bunch of joyous people who are going to enhance their joys even more with some new gimmick that will titillate their mentality—when they get the picture that we are very sober—they disappear as quickly as they can.

Because their instinct tells them, "Either you're going to get out of that place, or these bizarre pleasures that you think you have been enjoying are going to disappear—and are you ready for it?" And I'd say that ninety percent of them will leave when they become aware of this.

The instinctive level is basically just what the word implies—that there is a certain segment of people who move from the cradle to the grave in reaction only. They just react—their DNA molecule or genetic plan, their inheritance characteristics, plus their environment, cause them to function in what is a maze or groove. Which they think that they are functioning in very deliberately, that they are doing it themselves.

And they are the people who think that they are really the most alive. They more or less look down their noses at people who are devotional even and say, "That's a fool. I'm living. I'm having my fun, I'm reproducing. And I'm having my fifth of whiskey on Saturdays." These are the instinctive people.

And they have no exaltation, to use one of Huxley's words, until they get tired of that (the instinctual life-style). And this may take years of their life. If you look at people over a span of forty years you'll witness some of your friends who were instinctive, very down to earth with just you might call an animal existence. And then one day they said, "Hey, there's more to life than this—there has to be. I've been an idiot."

So they go down to church and they beat their head on the floor and they get salvation. And then they have an experience, an exaltation. They lose themselves. The give up this ego of being a big proud animal. And they change to devotion to someone who has sacrificed himself, or to a noble movement. They do it for a person, like Jesus or Buddha or any major head of a religion, or they may do it just for the religion itself.

In whichever case, they lose themselves. All exaltations are accompanied by the giving up of part of your foolishness, which we call egos. So then this person becomes, you might say, a real fanatic. He gets into this emotional religion, and he will tell you that he's right in there talking personally to this personal god, communicating personally with him. And they go along on this track maybe the rest of their life.

Or maybe you'll find a person born into this particular category. He seems to be emotional or devotional right from the start. He goes to church—and some day he'll tire of it. And his intellect will reason (we're talking about the intellectual level now): "Well, according to history and the scriptures and all this, there's not too much evidence of this personal God."

It will become apparent to him that for instance the armies who supposedly thought that they were doing God's work were destroyed. Individuals who lived good lives according to what someone else told them was good were destroyed. That the people who seemed to live by no rules seemed to, prosper. And he begins to wonder then, "What is this? What's going wrong?" And this doubt brings him into a search—a mechanistic sort of search such as logic and reading and so on. And this is when he in turn moves out of the emotional level.

But these are people who cannot even hear you if you're a step above them—until they get hungry for it. They get tired. Their computer more or less gets overwhelmed by its own sluggishness and decides to kick out a whole gob of material and reevaluate the thing. That's my estimation of the method or procedure that goes on inside them. But it's very difficult for a person from the outside to come in to them, unless you're getting there at just the time that, for instance, the instinctive person is ready to break loose from his instinctive stage and join an emotional stage.

I believe that the only thing that anybody does, anyone who has a genuine spiritual message for any segment of mankind—the only thing that he can do—is to be there when someone is ready. I think that one of the most foolish things to do is to proselyte too much. I think that it's all right to put a little article or an ad in the paper or something like this to say, "I'm here, and I'm talking." But when you feel that you have to go out and convert people—I think that this is an ego in itself.

Q: That's when you start forcing something on people or forcing them to make a decision.

Rose: Yes, trying to force by virtue of intense emotion, by a charismatic appeal, or by a pretensive logic—that is nothing more than sophistry. Trying to get people to go along with you. And it becomes an ego trip for the preacher.

But I do believe at the same time that you are obligated, if you have something. Now this is paradoxical. If you have something to offer which you think could help somebody transcend one of these levels, then you have to make yourself known. Because of the simple fact that this man is blind to this level he is entering and he can't find you. But if he bumps into you at the right moment you can help him out of it.

And I believe that there is an esoteric law involved in this. That we have to help someone. That it's not just, let's say, a game or a profession. But I believe that the whole spiritual evolution of man depends upon people going out of their way to be available. To help somebody through a difficult problem or analyzation, or to reassure them that they are not the only fellow to come to a certain conviction.

Q: This communication is interesting to me because—I can see how there are different levels of communication—I can say a word or a phrase to you which would trigger a response, whereas somebody else possibly wouldn't even catch what I said.

Rose: Absolutely.

Q: And this then is what you're saying about people bypassing or just not picking up what the other person is saying because they haven't developed themselves, or haven't attuned their attention to that type of thought level.

Rose: Yes. You may have the same vocabulary but not the same meanings for the words.

Q: Very interesting. Now another thing—with this dissatisfaction with contemporary religion, young people are turning to other sources such as transcendental meditation, or anything like this where you get a temporary sort of therapeutic relief. How does this differ from the techniques used by your group?

Rose: Well, we state quite bluntly that we are not desirous of bringing anyone peace of mind. We want to bring you trouble. We want to stir you, to shake you. Because protoplasm tends to inertia. You have to keep irritating it, to keep it alive so to speak. It has to be continually stimulated. So complacency for a person who wants to progress in his mental capacities, is negative.

Now again, let me give you the other side of the paradox. There are people for whom reaching this (complacency by way of soothing chants or visualizations) does a world of good. These are people who are burnt out, or wore out, or who have fought a tremendous battle, a psychic battle, and they are tired. They have to recoup—and this is ideal for them.

But the mistake that we make is in thinking that any one of these systems is in itself unique magic. For instance, TM is no different from say the chanting of the Krishna people, which will bring peace of mind and contentment. It is no different from the saying of certain prayers by the various Christian religions. Repeating certain prayers can bring peace of mind.

The thing is, I'd say, that we got disgusted with our Christian religion, so we're going to buy the same article with a foreign stamp, that's all. We're still going in for an emotional answer.

Now there is a big complaint that I have about this in regard to people who are deeply esoteric. If it's peace of mind that a person wants, I'd say that TM is as good a thing as any. I think it's a very efficient system; it does the job. But if you are interested in finding your self-definition then you want to abandon any system that quiets you down. You want to become turbulent. You want to continue to waken yourself, to arouse yourself mentally, to attack your systems of thinking. Because you want an answer.

In other words, invention is parented or fathered by adversity. If you don't have trouble, you're not going to think.

Of course, there are many religions and many approaches to religion that just give you an answer. This is what I call a concept structure. They say, "Look, this is the way it is. Heaven is such a category. And this is what happens to you when you die. But of course, it depends on how faithful you were to the church or how many sins you committed. Naturally, all are not going to go to the same place exactly. In heaven there are different pigeonholes, limbos or purgatories or whatnot, for different categories of people."

And this is all a concept structure without any basis in proof. We have no data—and people never stop to think about this—we have no knowledge of anyone returning from purgatory with his wing feathers burnt. We have no data on any of this, but it's all accepted as faith. And some people are content with this. Others are content with the religion if it is a utilitarian thing, as I said before.

Now there are a few movements today that are more or less encounter groups, and some people will join these movements just to get a better understanding of what I call the small ‘s’ self. These are a lot of people realizing that as society becomes more complex the individual human becomes more mad, especially if he starts off by kidding himself.

So we are entering an era of truth, there's no doubt about it. These numerous encounter groups that you have over the country are aimed in this direction. The people are going to go in there and sit down and say, "Let's re-examine our values. Our definitions."

Now I go a step further than this. If it's possible to tell something about our group, I'd say that we talk about capital ‘S' Self-definition. We realize that you have to start with small ‘s' self-definition, that is, just the mundane self. But then after you look a while—follow a process of looking directly within yourself—you then begin to understand that there is a more total self, a more real self. And this we have to define.

And when you define this, you are answering the old directive that has come down through the ages, which very few people paid any attention to. That is, "First know thyself." And that's what they meant—not just to know your shoes or your hands or your ears—but, to know actually your essence. But this is all brought about by starting with the mundane self.

Q: So if we are in an era of enlightenment, as evidenced by these numerous groups and the interest in Eastern religions today—which is bound to bring about some change in the intellect of the populace—what happens when the masses cannot handle the new values, the new questions that the small minority are starting to ask? Will this minority become persecuted? Does history reveal things like this happening?

Rose: I don't know how much of that will happen in our lifetime, in our era. But this was a threat in the middle ages and maybe in ancient times. Even Pythagoras was supposedly attacked. Socrates was executed. But the hint has always gone out among the esoteric groups that you should never instruct openly. You should never go out and try to let the masses hear this knowledge, because it has an effect of irritating them, and they will attack you.

Some people blame that for the killing of Christ. That he was basically lynched by people who had heard him talk and who somehow just turned against him. Because this was something which just might destroy their entire pleasure patterns, or their political patterns.

There is an esoteric maxim that you'll come across if you get into esoteric reading: "To know, to dare, to do, and to be silent." And we wonder about that.

And of course, I was silent for many years. But I believed that the percentage of ears was increasing. Partly because more people were getting educated—plus the fact that some people's ears had been opened by perhaps a fractional drug experience. (I'm talking about intellectual ears, not physical ears.) This has an effect of giving a person the perspective of having a new state of mind. You see that it's possible to have more than one state of mind, more than one way of looking at things—a new perspective.

So if they didn't get really destroyed by the drugs (LSD), some of the people who had a slight taste began looking for spiritual values. And I ascribe the biggest part of this spiritual drive that we have today to half a million or a million people who picked up a little sentience of it under some experimental drug routine. It just cracked the door for them.

Now unfortunately, this doesn't open the door. But these people are the ones who flock to a lot of these movements, especially if the leaders are charismatic or if the thing is emotional. And again, a microscopic few of them will gravitate toward something serious, once they become disgruntled with what they finally find out to be not the final answer.

Q: Mr. Rose, would you mind in our final few minutes to maybe recap your development, let's say your achievements, and then the disappointments, that kind of thing? Maybe give us a background where you started—would you be interested in that?

Rose: Yes, all right. I considered myself to be a very devout Catholic when I was younger, and I was looking as a child for an objective God. I studied to be a priest, in fact. And I left that institution because . . . I began to be uneasy about my convictions, in relation to the people in the seminary.

I left the seminary when I was in my teens yet, and I went to college. I joined or went to different churches because I still had this direction or vector in my system. This was my business—I wanted to find out who God was. And I accepted a priori that God was a person—it was somebody I was going to meet.

So I looked high and low. I joined all sorts of cults. I got initiated into any one of these Asian groups that would initiate me. I went to Spiritualist churches, and I thought that this was a very good approach—because here I might be able to talk with people who were dead and who were now themselves talking to God.

Well needless to say, I didn't find the answer there. Every place I went I was disillusioned that much more. I found fraud and trickery at every turn, and I found that the people who were telling us that they had God in their hip pocket really had money in their hip pocket. And I became very discouraged.

But as a result of this intense effort—I think as a result of this intense effort—when I was around thirty years of age I had an experience. And this experience answered my questions for me. And it has not diminished. I have not outgrown it—I don't think you could ever outgrow it when you have that type of experience.

But I was unable to communicate it. And with what few people I did try to communicate, I realized that they had no cognizance of what I was talking about. So in most cases I gave up. And it wasn't until I met one man, Paul Wood, and read a book called Cosmic Consciousness that I realized that other people did have these experiences, and they did talk about them.

Q: Prior to this you had a feeling like you were a little bit odd or you didn't fit into society?

Rose: I felt that there was no use talking about it, that's all. No—I fit into society very well. I had learned when I was among a certain group of people to talk their language. And I could hold a job. I've raised a family. I've been a contractor, I have worked at many things such as a chemist, a metallurgist, an engineer of sorts, and I've held all sorts of jobs.

But one thing I'd say as far as its effects upon me—I never had any desire to own the world, or to really make history.

My big desire was the hope that I would find somebody. And I would curse the darkness when I was a kid about 21 years of age and say, "Boy, every place I look I find these phonies, these hucksters. And I'm wasting the valuable years of my life when I could possibly be out raising a bunch of kids, or getting drunk and enjoying myself if such is enjoying yourself."

The temptation was always there naturally, and I was putting it aside saying, "Wait—maybe you'll find this thing someday." But everyplace I went I ran into hucksters. And not only hucksters but people of really bad intentions.

So I came to the conclusion as I was cursing the darkness that if I ever found anything, my next step would be—if I ever found anybody that wanted help, I'd try to help them. That was my obligation.

Consequently, I try to balance my efforts today. Not to be too evangelistic but nevertheless to go out and say, "If there's anybody out there who's got this problem and a little bit shaky about it, a little bit lacking in conviction that he's on the right track—why maybe I can give you a few hints. I've been down the old trail and I know a few hazards and so forth. And maybe we can accelerate your search a bit—this is advisable if it's possible."

Have I covered what you wanted?

Q: Yes, I think that sort of sums everything up. And I really appreciate having you here today.

END

Lecture on Moods Columbus 1979

From the Original Notes

I am going to talk about moods. But first I would like to talk a little about a book I wrote, that has to do with a new or different approach to psychology. In it I pointed out mental conditions which I called states of mind. One of the things which contributes strongly to a state of mind is the mood. A state of mind carries conviction and may result from a long period of accumulation of various convictions and those convictions may have been inspired by totally non-logical moods. And of course, when we hear the term "non-logical" we are inclined to react negatively, presuming that anything non-logical should be negated.

I am continually recommending a new approach to psychology, and when I do this, I have to identify the objectionable psychology as "modern psychology" which is predominately behaviorism. Psychology should be a study of the mind, not the body. Psychologists since the turn of the century, found it easier to study the body than the mind, so they decreed that the mind was protoplasmic or somatic. In so doing they became anatomists.

On the other hand, I must admit that the recommended "new psychology" is not new. We find its roots in older systems, but we have also evolved new understandings from the method of introspection combined with the study of long-term observations of mental states and their origins rather than their effects upon society. And from this study we are amazed to find parallels in the older systems which perhaps laid no claim to being scientific or psychological.

Zen, for instance is one of the older systems. It employed the direct mind technique for communicating (transmission) with others and for viewing the inner self directly. I do not maintain that all current systems purporting to be Zen, follow the four identification tenets of ancient Zen. Modern or American Zen, at last has become dogmatic, ritualistic and in some places—money-conscious.

I would like to mention homeopathy and Gestalt Psychology here. Homeopathy is identified as a system of healing which treats the person by observing all the symptoms together, a "totality of symptoms" according to Hahnemann. This "umbrella-view" would certainly apply to psychology. I will not go into details, but I found that Hahnemann came up with some psychological wisdom, by finding a common denominator in a majority of healers . . . not necessarily homeopathic healers. They were celibate or sexually conserving.

Gestalt Psychology favors placing or fixing the diagnostic attention on patterns of thinking, or gestalten, rather than on individual reflexes. This is the umbrella-view . . . being applied to psychology.

Now, in The Albigen Papers, I indicated the importance of knowing the influence of a state of mind. A state of mind is a gestalt. And if you want to understand states of mind, you must observe moods. Moods are important. They can lift us to the highest human mental experiences or reduce us to murder and suicide.

In my years of meditation, I discovered that possibly, the greatest enemy that man has, is his own mind. I came to this conclusion long before I studied Zen. And when I studied Zen, I found corroboration for my previous intuitive discovery. This discovery is common knowledge to anyone who has studied Zen. They talk about killing the mind. And that is a frightening statement.

But in direct mind introspection, the mind stares at itself, and eliminates the mind-functions that would prematurely destroy the body, or would distort the ability to recognize the true states of mind. Only the true states of mind will lead us to the True Scientific Realization.

Now I said that moods can lift us to pleasant heights or drag us down to mental states that lead to murder or suicide. Yet at the same time I maintain that even the darker moods which lead to despair and death will turn into good for us if we view them from a detached or superior position, or we might say from the umbrella-viewpoint. Pleasant moods indicate correct direction, that is, direction toward ultimate realization or peace of mind. Unpleasant moods are signals to review our aims. Even unpleasant moods may be the result of tremendously pleasant experiences, wherein the depression results from an intuitive recognition that the sensuosity is a sliding board that sweeps us irrevocably into a mental trap in which the sensuosity is blunted or jaded, and in which the vision of simple serenity is never attainable.

In order to evaluate moods from a superior position, we have to study them after they have passed. Moods do not let us go, just because they made us unhappy or suicidal. Yet after the mood has passed, and has been studied, the analysis has to involve some picture of its origin, and some determination of the means to avoid its re-occurrence in the future. Booze will not lift us from a depressed mood. Nor should booze or dope be used to celebrate the arrival of a mood of peace, serenity or selfless joy.

Moods do not cause suicide. They cause or re-trigger states of mind. The state of mind then facilitates an easy return of the mood. Suicide results from a state of mind, fed by recurrent moods.

States of mind are not caused by moods alone. Murders can occur as a result of a state of mind which has no origin in a single mood. Such as murders for a calculated profit, or in the case of mercy-killings.

In the search for sources of states of mind, I think that there are factors that transcend mere environment and heredity . . . unless we wish to—redefine environment as regions far beyond the planet earth or other-dimensions—and to redefine heredity to include prenatal planes and dimensions. There is a temptation to take such ideas as astrology, reincarnation and predestination a little more seriously—in the search for such sources.

I often think of my own family. I was one of four boys, who had the same environment, but had entirely different states of mind. Different philosophic goals, moral values—opposite ethical postures and totally different relationships with society . . . or reactions to society. I could not explain these differences better than by saying that one of us had a curse on him, the other had a lucky star or blessing, and another had inherited a lot of his father's traits and weaknesses. And the fourth was cast in a fatalistic mold. As a child he wore a perpetual look of apprehension . . . and his features seemed old. In his teens he became a fatalist. It was part of him, or it was him. I do not ever remember seeing him laugh or cry. He had absolutely no sense of fear. He lived as though he waited for death. He died when he was twenty-five.

Psychology has not yet given us a system by which we can understand our neighbor . . . or our relatives. Behavior is not yet predictable. We constantly read of incidents where psychiatrists, or whole groups of psychiatrists and psychologists, such as in mental institutions, have pronounced a patient cured and safe for society—only to learn that their patient went out, and in a matter of weeks, killed someone for little or no reason. Behavior is more predictable among members of a family, because they are in constant contact with each other, and because of this, they are prepared for or accustomed to—changes of states of mind. Also, members of a family generally share the same state of mind about the nature of people outside of their immediate family. Closely knit communities have a state of mind in common, which outsiders might identify as regional prejudice. Residents in institutions reach a common state of mind which often manifests itself in a unique moral code, and a language unintelligible to outsiders.

You cannot analyze people by asking them questions. You are likely to get tangential answers, excuses and lies. And you will get answers that the person was unaware of giving, or unaware of his reasons for giving. Or he may give you an answer that he thinks you might like to hear.

If you really want to know a person, you have to step inside his head. You cannot do it mechanically. Every man has his own separate mold. The factors that make up his personality are so numerous that only an intuitive mind can come up with a composite reading or diagnosis. There is growing agreement among psychologists that IQ tests fail to calibrate intelligence. Too many people who could not adjust to our educational standards in their youth, later became geniuses, business tycoons or great spiritual leaders.

When we talk about stepping inside someone's head, we are talking about rapport. When this happens, you join with his mood. Moods are like colored glass through which we view the world, and because of which we build states of mind. You have to peep into the other fellow's head and look out through his glasses. And when you do this, you are liable to join his team.

*******

I would like to go directly now to the study of moods. I found that the study of dreams led me to a better understanding of moods. And naturally the only dreams that you can study, are your own. The subject-matter of a dream is not as important as the "feel" of a dream. You may feel as though a message is being conveyed to you through feeling which has nothing to do with the grotesque or fantasy-like events in the dream.

Now I should qualify that statement about being unable to study only your own dreams. You can study dream-records of others, for statistics and comparisons. Some dreams bring us memories from the past. Some may be prophetic. Some may involve conversations with living or deceased people. There may be some value in keeping a record of the events or messages of these dreams, especially those which appear to be prophetic.

The type of study which I am talking about, when it comes to your own dreams—especially the feeling content of them—cannot ever become recorded statistics. So in one sense, this study cannot be called a scientific study. It is difficult to record feelings. Feelings must be felt.

It will, however become a new language for you. And while the study of this aspect of dreams is extremely subjective, we will still pick up patterns of dreams, and categories of moods which are like costumes in which the dreams are clothed.

In regard to categories of dreams, I have found that there are three major moods in dreamland. Dreamland is a separate place, a stage or a state. One of the moods is Fear. Another is Seduction or acquisition. And the third is Nostalgia. And I wonder how many of you have encountered that word Nostalgia before, in any analysis of human thinking.

The above three moods represent three great motivations that for some reason have been engrained or programmed into all people. I think that the understanding of the effects of moods, and combinations of moods will bring us closer to an understanding of the non-somatic mind, and how it affects . . . seriously . . . the life of the body.

Psychology has existed (in its formal form) for a century, and it survived and flourished without a definition for sanity. Its achievements in biochemistry have preserved a form for it . . . a sort of body without a soul.

I think it might be a good idea to look for our understanding of the mind in the mind itself. We cannot choke it out of the body.

Let us take a condition called delirium. I do not think that any of us will say that delirium is a sane or desirable condition. Delirium is a deep mood . . . a fear-mood. It is a mood that comes upon the mind when the body is very sick or asleep. The nightmare is a projected fear-mood. Guilt is a mood. Guilt is a combination of Fear and Nostalgia.

Let's take a look at the seduction-mood as it manifests itself in dreams. Or the acquisition form of Seduction as it manifests itself. Something in the unconscious mind reaches out and seizes things which may never have been physically attained. I would like to hear some of your dreams . . . if you have any of this type. I can remember acquisitive dreams that stuck in my memory. Some were people . . . girls . . . most of whom I never met. Some were of property, and some were of objects . . . cars, friendly pets, personal possessions, and valuables.

Sometimes the moods became mixed in a single dream. For instance, not too long ago I dreamed that I was in Baltimore. I found a field that had once been part of the city. Nothing was left but bricks and rubble and an abandoned railroad track, and here and there—a part of a building. The acquisitive instinct was strong. I saw an opportunity to start a building project. I had an idea—standing there along the tracks—that I could buy the land, and use one of the building fragments as a place to live, while I built new houses, one at a time.

But then suddenly a wave of sadness came over me. I suddenly felt very tired, and I realized that I was not the young man who arrived in Baltimore more than forty-five years ago. Then the desire to leave the place, started me toward home. I found that the rubble extended farther and farther. I sensed that I was in a corner of Southwest Baltimore, and kept looking for the Montgomery Ward building and for a bus station. It seemed that I would never get out.

This was a combination of an acquisitive and a nostalgic mood-combination. The acquisitive part was the land, and the opportunity for wealth in the future. But then, even in my dream-state, I realized that there was no future like that possible. Then the Nostalgia came in. The Baltimore location in the dream came from Nostalgia, it was the town where the dreams of my youth started to unfold. But when I realized that I was an old man, my Nostalgia shifted to West Virginia, and I became desperate in trying to get home.

Now behind all this traumatic dream was a message. What do you think it was? I have a feeling about it. My feeling of the dream may be right or wrong, in regard to its message, but the message is "act your age." Or "All that is built is now rubble." Or, "The days of your physical service are over."

I maintain that the nostalgic mood becomes the language of the soul. It is the inner man trying to get through the earth-man's paradigm, to communicate with him.

Many people take dreams lightly. They demand sensory confirmation for all phenomena. But I have a view from another angle. We might call it an esoteric angle, and it might contribute to an esoteric psychology.

Now modern psychology is based upon what you see . . . and God help us if we only saw what the senses delivered to us. We would be very confused in our actions. For instance, we know that the retina picks up an inverted image. There is an adjustment that goes on that turns the world right-side-up, that rectifies hallucinations that we see, and enables us to survive mirages.

Also, under hypnosis the subject apparently sees things, which in reality are only suggestions of the hypnotist. Now we have done a lot of experiments in this department . . . where you give a person a drink of water, telling him that it is alcohol, and then watch him take on all the symptoms of drunkenness.

Or, you can tell a hypnotized man that a sack of potatoes nearby is really a man . . . and he will treat it as though it is a man and try to talk to it. At one of our Chautauquas, a young hypnotized girl was given a broom, and told that it was a guitar. I asked her to play something on it. She was now in a post-hypnotic state at the time, incidentally. She replied that she never learned to play a stringed instrument. I assured her that the guitar would be very easy to play, and that her attempts to play would bring with it the magic of perfect knowledge of the procedure. And so she proceeded to strum the broom and sing.

She indulged in a vision of the mind. These hypnotic antics are nearly all the result of a vision of the mind. We perceive with the mind not the senses . . . and I think that a little thinking will make this clear to you.

What happens is this: First we apprehend something either by sight or other senses. We see stuff for instance. But the mind readjusts the incoming neural message or impingement of light on the optical apparatus. It adjusts such things as an inverted retinal image, and any contrariness in the way we pick up a scene with our limited color range of perception.

Next the mind projects a mental image back out to our environment, which makes up that which all consider to be a true scene—a true environment. It is only when we have watched a hologram, or survived a mirage, that we are able to understand the inaccuracy of the perception process, and understand that the mind is capable of projecting a false image before our physical eyes.

If you are looking for books on the subject of true inner vision as opposed to erratic sensory vision there are two which you should read: J.J. van der Leeuw's Conquest of Illusion, and the story of the man in the cave in Plato's Republic. Plato saw two worlds with man being caught in the unreal one.

Our sensory organs are not all that is erratic. Even though the somatic mind (brain-mind) adjusts things despite improper or incomplete sensory ability—that somatic mind in turn can be fooled. This is demonstrated by the hypnosis described.

The key to understanding this is the understanding of moods. The hypnotist creates a mood, and amplifies it until the subject acts. The hypnotist is a wielder of moods, fear, nostalgia and acquisitiveness. He can cause a panic by treacherous conditioning.

While we are on the subject let us identify the hypnotic conditioners. They are rarely the stage hypnotists. The stage hypnotist generally points out that he is inducing a false state of mind for entertainment purposes. His conditioning is momentary.

There are people and organizations, whose main purpose is to condition people on a massive scale, simply to expand their field of power. These are the clergy, the politicians, vested interests such as unions, and the field of behavior-psychologists, chemo-therapists (psychiatrists), and a sea of bumbling counselors, some with degrees in psychology, and many with no accreditation beyond a role previously played in some encounter-group, ministerial function, or as a comforter for hospital patients.

Everyone is trying to become a conditioner of the public. Just turn on the television if you do not believe this. Watch for the process of first creating a mood . . . or all the three at once, Nostalgia, Fear and Acquisitiveness. Grandpa drinks lemonade, or the honest-looking farmer leans on the fence and sells you tobacco. This is Nostalgic-appeal. Then Fear is applied—beware of the competitor, he is out to rob you. Acquisitiveness is now the clincher. The ten-thousand-dollar car comes with a beautiful semi-naked girl on every fender. Come down to the bank and get rich on your savings . . . an underpaid clerk on a TV commercial—will tell you with the studied sincerity of a high-paid actress. And so on.

To recapitulate a bit here on this process of illusion which I have just described, I mentioned three stages of perception. First we have a sensory impingement (or percept), which is picked up by one of the sensory organs. Second, there is an adjustment which occurs in the somatic mind. I use the word somatic mind to identify with the "reflexive" mind of the behaviorists at its best. But there is a faculty or Mind beyond and more accurate than the somatic mind. Hence the emphasis on definition. Thirdly, the somatic mind projects upon the physical scenery before us, a vision of its readjusted world.

But . . . we would never know this third trick (projection) if we did not possess an anterior faculty—anterior and superior to the somatic mind. This faculty or Mind, I call the Process-Observer. Brunton called it the Overself.

All moods and states of mind are not induced by other people. There is an archetypal source for some moods. We were talking about this in the kitchen the other day. There are basic moods for all mankind. And it is possible that even animals manifest moods under or in response to experiences in a consistent uniform manner. Nearly all small animals frolic like children, and they manifest a pleasant mood when doing so. Cattle mourn the death of a member of the herd. Horses tease each other and tease humans.

We have many moods in common with animals. It seems that animals are programmed to instinctively fear predators for their species. The question came up about the human fear of snakes, as well as unreasonable pleasant reaction by people to certain dreams. Dreams are visions, and sometimes we have to search for the vision which casts us into a dream.

Can we apply a Freudian interpretation (sex) when we dream of a snake? Or do we have a nightmare about snakes because of a religious association of the snake with Satan?

What is the proportional occurrence of light, bright light in our dreams? How many of you have dreamed of a bright sun? Or of just a blinding light that is occasionally described as being seen by people who have been pronounced dead, and later revived? I find very few people who have dreamed of a bright light, but many dream of darkness, abysses. It would be interesting to compare the statistical representation or occurrence of black dreams and bright light dreams.

Darkly colored dreams are foreboding and depressing. All life responds to light. A beautiful day puts us into a happy mood. So it seems that the mood that results from the beautiful day is common to all life forms capable of showing expression. We dread the darkness of oblivion and the smothering blackness of the grave.

When we realize with Plato that this pageant of life is an illusion, we can somehow understand that the higher mind of man—call it a soul or whatever you wish—is trying to convey to us that our daylight hours are really drab and miserable and not conducive to genuine light or genuine happiness.

Dreamland is a place, where faulty computations are aired, and often where profound revelations come from something deep inside of us . . . which can only come out when the feverish activity of the day is paralyzed in sleep.

The dreamland experiences, even though they are nightmares, are not as dangerous to us as the moods of daytime. Nature or some mechanism or programming of the mind causes us to forget our dreams more quickly than our daytime mental experiences.

The moods that result from being thrown into jail, from being rejected by a close relative or lover, or from being overwhelmed by a series of devastating financial or social losses, can in turn result in death for the body, meaning suicide.

I know of cases of at least five young people who recently hanged themselves in jail, after being arrested a few days before for misdemeanors. They were killed by moods—in each the mood resulted from being faced with a new and powerful reality. For a couple it may have been the change from a drug mood for a mood that threw the drug mood into jeopardy. While in the drug mood, the moods of the outer world seemed like corruption. When deprived of the drug (marijuana or amphetamines at the worst), they were forced to deal with the state of mind of people equally bewildered but simply doggedly following the rules of another paradigm. Suicide followed when illumination presented both states of mind as being corrupt, farcical and inescapable. And for those who had not been jailed for drugs the trauma had similar form—suicide was the only escape from two intolerable alternatives, represented by strong states of mind.

Moods are easy to enter, but difficult to get rid of. You cannot talk yourself out of a deep depression which is the same as a state of mind.

Sometimes people try to drink themselves out of it, or knock it out with pills, but when the alcohol or drug wears off, they return to a still deeper depression. You cannot divest yourself of the mood while you are in it, nor when you are drunk or doped. To fight the mood, you must catch the moment of sanity somewhere between sobering up and the return of the depression. At that point you must manage to make up your mind as to the future use of alcohol or drugs as a sedative, and at that same time you have to get a plan of action going for relief from the mood that depressed you. Sometimes a change of environment will help.

Once you are caught in a mood that persists, it is like being abandoned in the middle of the ocean and knowing that you have to swim. The realization of hopelessness magnifies the mood. It becomes a disease . . . a delirium.

*******

Let us examine the Nostalgic Mood. It can be a very pleasant mood, or somewhat lethal when it is found in combination with a black mood of fear. Playing nostalgic tunes from childhood days, may bring out violence in a deeply depressed person.

I have read quotations from several authors who have said that the most painful thing to have, is an intensely pleasant memory. The memory takes us back to better days to which there is no return. We have drifted away, forgotten it, and upon being reminded we hunger for the days of seeming perfection.

There are people who can consciously or unconsciously manipulate the moods of men to a degree that they drive the subjects out to the marketplace, where they give up their money.

What are the ingredients in the formula for seduction through Nostalgia? Colors impel the moods. Lavender, gold or yellow, violet and gray, and light green. Green represents hope, and the green fields of youth. Violet and gray are painted into pictures of benign old people. Pink and gold depict the eternality of youth and childhood.

Now we get the smell of lilacs, the sachet odors of infancy, the smell of a field of newly mowed hay, the smell of cool water, or the smell of wood from a campfire.

Seduction and sales can be facilitated with organ music, with violins or even banjos, with the lute and the harp, or with the hunting horn if you liked to hunt, or with the bugle if your heart has a fondness for military memories. Bagpipes have a damning seduction all of their own.

As for music we are all familiar with sentimental music. Red Sails in the Sunset. The Old Pine Tree. Mother Macree. The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Put My Little Shoes Away. In the Gloaming.

What are some of the stage-props, and the scenes used by television advertisers? The rocking chair, the handmade cradle, the upright piano, satin and velvet, the spinning wheel. The scenes are repeated thousands of times, but they never fail to kindle that unreasonable nostalgia. The barefoot boy and his dog. The wild stallion on the horizon. The young girl waving a farewell from the porch of the old farmhouse. The old sailor leaning on his cane, looking out on a shrinking ship on the sea. The gazebo. The old mill. The talking brook. Currier and Ives prints.

The Nostalgic Mood is unreal, and yet it grips us relentlessly. Whether it is a dream or a moving picture that instigates it. We see nostalgic dramas, and say to ourselves, "Why cannot we live that way?"

But life is never that way because the drama only shows one fractional side of life. The crude elements of life are left out of the drama. Our childhood as viewed thirty years later, seems to have been idyllic. But after a while miserable memories associated with that same period of childhood will resurrect themselves, and then we may realize that we long for a chance to turn back the clock more than anything else.

When this happens . . . when the disenchanting realities return to us, we cannot help but stamp all nostalgic experiences as being unreal. On the other hand this mood had to have an origin besides the longing for eternal childhood. We are only momentarily fooled by the nostalgia, because down through the years we are acutely aware of the erosions of time, and the irrevocable daily steps of aging.

However, let us not be in a hurry to denounce Nostalgia, because it later appears unreal, or because some merchant uses it upon us to sell his goods. Through our nostalgic mood it is possible that something in our inner mind is trying to communicate something to us . . . to the extent that that inner mind has a sympathetic sorrow for our confused states of mind, and a deeper memory of a time when we were free from anguish and sorrow. Our first reaction to the awareness or existence of the faculty for Nostalgia, is one of pleasantness. When we learn that it is being used against us by merchants, politicians, governmental departments and social workers—it becomes offensive and negative.

Yet the intuition persists . . . that something inside of us is trying to open our head to a whole new dimension with a whole new language. Nostalgia in the final analysis may not be an element of illusion, alone.

Let us take the books by Eleanor Porter, such as Pollyanna. Some of her characters are little girls who are seemingly sad and restrained, modest, wisely observing life like an adult but filled with inhibition in the face of any urges which anyone at all might not like.

These quaint little girls are loved by everyone because they are harmless, sweet or wholesome. They are so perfect that they could only inspire negative feelings in a pedophile.

Let us take a look at a book and drama called Jane Eyre. Here we are likewise thrown into a nostalgic mood. Why? The theme of the story is inhibited, almost fearful seduction. The girl is so modest that she smothers her passion for years rather than admit any hormonal activity. The male is a noble, stallion type who wears a shield of petulance and propriety to preserve the impeccable British posture. Or hypocrisy.

Why are we addicted to movies that find a glory for their characters, because the characters are noble, self-sacrificing even in love, and loyal to their mates, even if both mates have to die as virgins. Now we can analyze this reaction on our part by claiming that we become infatuated with the heroine if we are male, and with the hero if we are female. Being selfish, we identify with the characters so much that we weep in the theater when the heroine dies unrequited, we die a little when the hero falls on his sword. But in our identification we claim them in death as perfect or ideal lovers for ourselves.

Even though we go home that night to Mrs. Mudd.

But what is this thing in us—though we are lechers—that refuses to glorify that lechery, and causes us to turn to fables—to dream of eternality. Even if we know that we cannot escape our lechery and hypocrisy. Down deep inside ourselves we yearn for permanent peace, inviolable virginity, and love without lust or penalty.

Nostalgia is subtle and seldom identified by its victims or participants, but I am sure that it is responsible for ninety-five percent of all human behavior. The other five percent is split up between reactions to fear and seduction. We are able to send millions of young men out to die in foolish, or indecisive wars because those millions of young men are willing to perpetuate the image of selflessness, unrequited sex (in death) and nobility, to bring about a transcendent state of peace (which will never be fully realized). And they joined the armies because of the nostalgic ads, the blaring bugles and bagpipes, the dramas that made the terror, carnage and death on the battlefield appear surmounted and obliterated in the eternal glow of selfless camaraderie.

Of course, it took only a small percentage of the population (motivated by seduction and acquisitiveness) to organize torch-light parades, to hire actors and singers to pour forth an endless appeal to the millions of altruists, with nostalgic dramas and songs. I say that the manipulators are a small percentage, because of recent governmental reports that twenty-eight percent of the country's wealth is owned by two percent of the population.

The sad part of this civilization is that the majority of the people are trying to live like Pollyanna, but it does not work. To preserve mom and apple pie, we vote laws into being that protect the two percent, who in turn care little about the perpetuation of altruism. The two percent are above the law.

Nostalgia basically reflects that which people really want. To get that which they think that they want, they vote tax burdens upon themselves in the hope of having a paradise on earth. They readily approve levies to make expensive highways and public buildings, to create restricted parks (federal, state, county and city parks), and to hire more bureaucratic public servants who become our masters. In this socialistic paradise we employ thousands of PhD's to spoon feed an equal number of "exceptional" citizens. There is nothing wrong with dreaming about Utopia if the dreams are realistic, and they are not preyed upon by hucksters and the dead-weight of bureaucrats that have selfish interests.

What do people really want? Everyone wants to be free to acquire without conflict. Don't let them tell you that they do not want anything or that they are going to live for humanity.

They want peace because they are worn out from ten thousand years of struggle in the jungle. The whole archetypal memory of man is strained with centuries of slaughter. He wants permanency and peace. But he wants freedom to acquire. But conflict comes with the acquisition process.

Nostalgia for eternal peace makes man long for peace and unchanging status. But the same element of Nostalgia is used against him to march to destruction to the tune of ballads and bagpipes, or to ruin him and his family with the taxes and legislation that he imposed upon himself in a mood of idle fancy about Utopia.

The more man is seduced, the more Nostalgia becomes painful. The continuance of this pain leads him to reject the dreams of childhood—the dreams of eternal paradise, or perpetual Christmas. The things which Nostalgia hints as being real, or really desirable are scorned as idle fancy. These things which Nostalgia promises are states of inoffensiveness, kindness, love, peace, beauty and eternality. But these are the spiritual objectives that are written into every religion.

*******

For more clues along this line, let us go back to dreams. I have had a strange common denominator in most of my dreams of people who are living or dead.

I found that the person in the dream often was tremendously different than the person whom I previously knew—in regard to personality and appearance. This happens more often with people who are deceased.

In the dream there is invariably, a direct-mind communication, but on occasion very distinct words have been spoken that bore out the change of personality or reactions of the person. I have dreamed of people whom I disliked, only to be surprised by a personality that was definitely friendly and acceptable. When I wakened I realized or remembered that I was surprised in or during the dream. When I awakened, I realized that my entire previous assessment of the person's personality was inaccurate.

The key to this was evident in a short sentence spoken by a man, now dead, who in life had given me some bad moments, to say the least. He stood erect and his face was youthful and radiant.

When he said, "You will never know how glad I am to be rid of that body," I knew that the body had been the catalyst in his negative personality. Ever since then I have had a compassion for the man, and a conviction that he taught me something, and that he knew ahead of time that my reaction would be acceptable to him. He was teaching me something.

Of course, you can say that this is nothing but an emotional dream . . . in which nothing can ever be offered as evidence. But the message remains for me, (realized not in that dream alone), that if we can look beyond the body-personality, we can without dreams, learn the same things about people, because people have personalities that result from the drives and demands of the body. Most of us are helpless to do anything better than we are now doing it.

There is another possible revelation in this type of dream, which points beyond being an intuitional clarity—about human personality. It is the possibility that nostalgic dreams are a vehicle wherein we apprehend spiritual or absolute verities.

Somewhere out there, there may be a place which we once knew, or visited, where the stage-play was not as violent, hopeless or unfathomable. And this place or state cannot be witnessed by the frantic, relative mind. It would only be witnessed in a channel between the infinite and the finite . . . a unique mental faculty. It could occur in a passive meditation . . . or in a particular mood. But never by means of the faculty of logic. Anymore than this message can be conveyed to you by logical proof.

*******

We can come up with certain conclusions. Man longs for peace and permanence, freedom from change. But these conclusions or any moods that speak for them are blown away by the daily exigencies of the nightmare of life. The ideal is wonderful, but we had better be pragmatic . . . it may never materialize.

The electorate nostalgically picks candidates that prattle about peace. Some of these candidates were so simpering, pious and affable that they were irresolute and helpless, or they were sly actors. And if they were just actors, they were still obliged to play out the farce of humility and harmlessness in the face of attacks by pragmatic savages.

How far do we carry this search for the humble, if not feminine man? I remember a television series about a teacher named Kotter. He was a sort of nut. (I should say this was his role.) He was no threat to the underprivileged or to predatory dead-end kids.

Also on television we have social ambiguity and hypocrisy in the police shows. We have cops who are as affable as bishops, or as common as bad smelling mud (The Dukes of Hazzard). We must avoid one-upmanship so in other serials he must be a black-Chinese-Spanish-Indian who is illiterate but lovable. The cop must love children, spend time with the Little League, and romp occasionally with the motorcycle gang . . . to show that he is a nice guy.

But in reality, the police of this country commit more murders that the Mafia. They are famous for coining the term "drop-gun." Many police carry a second gun to leave on the body of the unarmed victim. A recent case was a victim in a southern state whose mother was a policewoman in the same area. I would estimate that every day in this country someone is killed by a policeman. I keep a clipping-file on police-shootings.

It is not always an innocent person. Sometimes it is another policeman . . . or the mayor's protege.

And all of this goes on because we put our nostalgic heads in the sand.

A man spends a lifetime building up a business. He goes by the book. He studies mathematics, law, and psychological dexterity to manipulate his business or the stock market. Then one night after a period of exhaustion, he has a dream and blows his brains out. This is a fear-dream that produces a fear-mood, which ends in a fatal state of mind.

When it becomes evident that moods can cause suicide, that they can kill us, then what follows is the immediate need to do something about it besides the administering of anti-depressants or happy pills. We may be dealing with something that has little or nothing to do with body-chemistry.

A perfectly healthy and happy man or woman may become a victim to a mood and a resulting state of mind which in turn is fatal. In fact, it may be the happy people who are plunged the most deeply into depression, because they have not become accustomed to living an unhappy life.

If we are going to study the cases of suicide, it may be good to note that many people commit suicide who are never listed as suicides. For instance, Gary Gilmore committed suicide. From a prolonged jail-state of mind, he chose to die, but not by his own hand. The killing of others, seemingly for no justifiable reason, was his protest against the environment which smothered him.

We get into more detail about the mechanics of apparently illogical life and death. But then there may be little that is logical in living in something that becomes a snake-pit. To begin with, he was thrown into jail when he was young. In jail he was confronted with fear, and perhaps terror at times. How does a person overcome this under prison conditions? If you were at home, you might run out and get away from it, or take steps to protect yourself from the people who cause the fear.

In jail, the refuge from terror is anger or submission to the whims of brutal guards or perverts. When you choose anger, you have to arm yourself. A state of mind is established. The caged animal must develop a reflex to kill—hoping that his conviction will deter people with less important motivations.

Finally he gets out of prison. He meets a girl upon whom he projects every quality that Nostalgia can conjure up. He enters now a seductive mood, but the hopelessness of a permanent relationship with her, returns him to the nostalgic mood. This is evidenced by his appeal for her to join him in death. He longed for permanence more than for a short life of connubial struggling. For him there was only one resolution . . . the world was not a fit place to live in. He wanted to be with her (or with love) forever. But not on earth.

So he taunted the judges for a death sentence.

To get back to the mechanics of the Fear-mood, we have to look for a less than lethal solution. First, we have to become an Observer of our self. This will enable us to get something besides a "selfish" or self-sympathetic view of reactions. When we really view the depression or Fear-mood from this perspective, we will realize that it is alien, and as corrosive as our human enemies.

The step to take now, is to summon a degree of anger against Fear (which most prisoners direct against other people). By facing the fear angrily—but all the while knowing that the anger is your message to the Fear-mood that threatens to become an entity more deadly than a virus—you can conserve your sanity, and be on the alert for other moods which in combination with Fear may be suicidal.

This does not mean that we should try to get into a state of mind that requires surrender of moral principles . . . or that we should hesitate to choose death over a hopeless and meaningless existence. It means that the decision to die should come about without the agony of delirious mental torment.

The same method of introspection should be applied to the Seduction-moods. And when we become the Observer instead of the actor, we will be less likely to generate a Seduction state of mind which in time may kill us.

To monitor the Seductive-Acquisitive moods we should study the daytime reveries, and the dreams of sleep. Being an Observer of seductive reveries does not mean that we have to indulge in them while studying them. It means that the Observer should be as detached as a third party. It means that the Observer should be as critical of our mental and physical reactions, as a man of seventy would be upon reviewing the absurd behavior of his adolescent years.

Studying the moods, even from the point of the Observer, will not always result in an accurate cataloging of the moods observed, or even a correct identification of the mood. Since we do not know all of the factors and dimensions which affect our minds and cause moods, we will, in many cases only be able to observe the mood as a unique phenomenon which visits us, without immediately knowing its cause or source—or even knowing exactly which type of mood it is.

For instance, there is a Seduction mood which comes from glandular activity and which manifests itself in the form of reverie. But there is also an Acquisition mood (seduction is the acquisition of another person) which involves money and luxury . . . or just particular objects, toys or property. Then there is an Acquisition mood which visits us with a particular person only, and which is accompanied by strong mental projection upon that person that just does not answer to good common sense when analyzed a few years later.

We are now talking about infatuation, with all of its unfathomable convictions, and the bizarre state of mind and reactions. Some people emerge from this mood by means of transferring their sexual focus and indulging their sexual energy, while others merge with despair. The former are able to laugh about the experience while lowering their caliber of sexual preferences. The latter choose death rather than abandon the idea of an ideal imago-type.

I think that the diagnosis of a projection of an imago-type is not the only cause for suicide in matters of moods. The imago-type is one associated with ideals of perfection. The vision of the victim is generally one of a perfect union (non-sexual in intent) of two perfect people. But the extremely moral victim generally chooses a flashy whore or whoremaster. So there is an element of confused narcissism involved here, where the object of enchantment is basically a mirror, or serves as a mirror.

But there may be still other factors which cause this disease called projection. There may be archetypal memories involved. Or the infatuation may result from some intuitional recognition of a compatible type of body-chemistry. Not all infatuations result in suicide. There are infatuated people who actually manage to marry their dream-mate. And some of these people live together for the rest of their lives. I found what I consider to be one factor in the society of the story-book marriage-group. This factor was heritage or nationality. Some sense an attraction to mates of their own nationality, and a rapport develops between them, to a point where they feel the Geist of that nationality blessing them. Others are drawn hypnotically to opposite nationalities, and the roles of worshiper and worshipee.

We might summarize here and try to list some of the functions of moods. Moods are subtle mental patterns which lead to states of mind. Moods are also a form of language for communicating about experiences, wisdom or feelings. They are the language of two people in deep rapport. They are also the language for communicating un-verbalizable psychic experiences. And for these categories they may be the only means which we have to communicate the information desired, because the spoken languages have no suitable rhetorical art to transmit it.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. The picture will do the job only if the artist who painted the picture is skilled in conveying a mood with his brush. The artist must first be a sensitive person who copies a landscape to transmit the mood which the landscape imposed upon him. If the portrait is inspired by a person (meaning it is not a portrait which he is paid to paint by another admirer), then his genius will struggle to convey every virtue of the subject—so that everyone who sees the portrait will have the same admiration for the subjective facets of the subject which enhance the features and immortalize the portrait.

Painting, sculpturing and poetry are forms which are used to convey and immortalize moods. The artist or creator never becomes involved in psychological analysis. He goes directly to your mind with his magic. The moods created by art and music are generally nostalgic moods.

We can see the mood-language expertly used by merchants who employ any and all moods to put us into a susceptible state of mind, but nearly all of the incidents described by me have been one-way mood projections. The artist conveys a mood to the viewer, and the merchant manipulates his customers with scientific precision.

This one-way projection of moods leaves us in the position of recipient if not victim . . . of this magical language. So we move to examine the factor which makes it possible for a two-way communication, or at least a better way of getting answers from intelligences so far unanswered across the thoughtless dimensions reached only by the accidental seeping of moods into our dreams or visions of mystics.

This factor or implement is rapport. It is not too mysterious. It is the same rapport that makes possible the accurate understandings between lovers. It is also the same rapport which enables total strangers in a college "thuse" to find genuine friendships, or enables participants in an encounter-group to find revelations for themselves and fraternal tolerance in a matter of hours.

The same rapport—which comes otherwise only in flashes or in fragmentary dreams, may bring us brief insights about dead relatives—but still comes to us without any explanation as to the reason for such dreams being so fragmentary. We must find a way of asking.

And to do this we must study the nature of moods more deeply. We have only scratched the surface. I have a feeling that we will know more about other dimensions, when we have become proficient at finding a union or rapport with the intelligences of other dimensions, and this may in turn require that we learn to alter our state of being—which means we must become less body-oriented, and function more from impersonal intelligence.

Unfortunately, as we are now, our personality-oriented manner of communicating not only with others, but even with ourselves inhibits communication on this dimension, and precludes any self-knowledge here.

To change our state of being is advisable even on the mundane dimension. And something is definitely preventing us from having a two-way communication with departed human intelligences. Presuming that we receive messages from them, it is very rare that we get a direct message. We have to either be visited by dream-moods, or have indirect, cryptic dreams, or dream scenarios which are difficult to interpret. We must be Realistic if we wish to find the Real. Our earth-language may well be the pit talk of vipers. And by earth-language I mean all of our theological and social understandings.

Q: You mentioned a couple of things, you said first of all that you cannot remove a mood and then you said later on that you have to survive a mood and become a better person. How come you say that you cannot remove the mood? Can't you change the environment and change the mood?

Rose: Not while you are in it, because it is basically, it is just like a fellow that drops acid into his stomach, so he gets into a mood, and he says, hey I want out, and he doesn't get out. It plays itself out, and a mood is pretty much the same thing. I believe that what I am saying is self-evident. You have to view extremes if you want to understand anything. We can argue about moods for a long time, but you take a man, let's say that is awaiting death in the electric chair. You can't remove that man's mood by any type of argument, he will have to run through it.

Q: He can't change his environment.

Rose: He can change it after he wakes up, or if he ever gets out of jail, or if he engages in some philosophic watching of that mood. It will become less and less influential, that's the point.

Q: If the man was going to be electrocuted and suddenly he got released from jail, his mood would obviously change because he was removed from the mood, circumstances, that's why I don't understand what you are saying that you can't remove yourself from the mood because I think that if you change the circumstance . . .

Rose: Sure, but I am saying that you can't change it while it is on you, sure you can change it . . . you know what happened to you after the mood passes and you can say that I am not going to get myself into that situation again, that's what everyone tries to do.

Q: So from the experience you learn . . .

Rose: Right. Now you take some people, they don't. Take the alcoholic, I don't know too much about drug addiction but I came up in an alcoholic age, long before the pill. What does the alcoholic do, he gets into a mood, a depressive mood, and instead of him coming out of that he deepens and deepens until it kills him, until he can't get out of it. This is an old story, he just gets into a deeper . . . and what is it? It is a combination, again I say that it is a combination of a wrong reading of a nostalgic urge. He remembers the time when his mother admired him, his wife loved him, his children respected him. That's Nostalgia. He sees a beautiful picture that he can't get back into, and he degrades himself with the regret—so he can't pull himself out of it. A majority of the people who get themselves into deep moods, require somebody else to pull them out. Now I say sometimes they get out, but what happens is that there is a strange egotistical repetitious circle to an alcoholic, most alcoholics that is. They get free of it, momentarily, and they are profoundly convinced that they are free of it forever—but maybe they are just dry one day—and they say, oh, I've got it licked—now I can take a little drink. He takes a little drink and two or three and then the depression is worse than it ever was before, because he has slipped again. Yet I believe that it is possible, but it is very difficult, to get out of a mood. But the main thing . . . and there has been a lot of data thrown out here today—I think that it is very important for you to be aware of and that is first of all that the states of mind are the most profound influences on man.

You can go down the street and a billboard can throw you into a mood, but you will not be aware of it, and in that mood you may pick up a brick and throw it through a plate glass window or punch a policeman and wind up in jail. And when the people in jail ask, "What did you do . . . what happened . . . what went wrong?" you will probably reply that you did not really know what brought on your anger.

You are not going to say, "I was in a mood." Very few people are aware of the fact that everything that they do is caused by moods. What is a mood? A mood is a profound feeling with conviction. This is the definition. It is not just a fanciful thought. There is the difference between a perception and a mood. The perception is the billboard. The mood is a whole state of mind that is awakened by the billboard.

To give you another example, the seduction thing is very strong, but it passes. It is not quite so addictive because nature has put in a factor so that eventually you get tired. But you get into a contradictory situation. I have heard guys say, "Boy, I wouldn't associate with that woman for any amount of money." And the next thing you see them going down there with a dazed look on their faces, arm in arm. The mood is on them, and they don't know what happened. Don't say anything to them or you will get in trouble, see . . .

Q: At the peak of each person's childhood he had a certain intuition and the maximum at that time. I was wondering if you could give some time when that would be in?

Rose: Intuition is present in the very young, but it is lost to seduction. There are certain mental characteristics of childhood that reach their peak at different times with different children. For instance, I think that this demonstrates that a child loses his value because of seduction because his intuition diminishes with seduction. This is one of the reasons why I make a loud noise for morality, especially in regard to little children. I don't believe in allowing anyone who has had the temerity to have kids to allow those children to be thrown into improper moods, or to be destroyed. What some consider education may even be destruction. Now I am going to say something that I can't prove, but for what it's worth, I believe that a child when it is born is not totally present, not as aware of us as we are of it. Some of you who have had children may have picked this up about your children. I didn't pick it up until my grandchildren were born. I knew of it but I didn't really have time to look at my own children. I had time to look at my grandchildren a little closer. The child is angelic, and the child, when it is first born, and for a period of time (provided it hasn't been born into too rude an atmosphere) lives in a different plane—has a direct mind perceptibility, and as the child gets older it drops this by virtue of seduction. We seduce the child. How do parents seduce the child? You sing lullabies, you scream at it, you shout at it. You make crazy noises and motions to attract its attention. And I've watched children through these different stages. I've mentioned this before and there have been quite a few women who have been mothers who sensed this. But I have been fortunate enough to get inside my granddaughter's head, and I could see that she was an adult mind in a dream state. Peeping out occasionally and saying what is that nightmare? What is that old character with the whiskers doing here tormenting me? Or something like that.

There is a vague reaction of irritation at first, but after a while, the child comes out of its shell.

And then the teacher gets ahold of it. And the parent laboriously says apple, food, eat, and repeats and repeats. And the kid says to itself "Damn it, if I am going to eat I am going to have to learn those words."

So he becomes seduced into this business of living with relative language, when he had a direct mind before.

There is no alternative to this method of raising infants, unfortunately, Although I think that some primitive peoples don't care so much about whether the kid becomes a genius or not or that they show a tremendous rate of adjustment. I was out West and saw those little Navajo kids playing out in the desert and they seemed to be tremendously aware of a lot of things . . . right on the edge of the Grand Canyon. And the parents weren't a bit concerned about them falling off. (They were within three feet of a tremendous drop of a thousand feet.) Those children struck me as having a wisdom, a basic direct mind capacity that we have somehow lost for our children. It seems that the name of the game is, get your kid brutalized as quick as possible because that will help him withstand the brutality of life, and you know the strain that he has to go through in competition.

Q: You talked about moods and moods in a dream. You really have two moods going on, one in your present state, your conscious state, the other in the dreams. How do they relate to each other?

Rose: That's the reason when I talked that I didn't separate them too much because they carry over. In other words when you are in the waking state the man that sits in jail gets into a mood and he is awake, but he is in touch with the same type of fear mood that he would have in a nightmare. And sometimes he awakens and he doesn't know whether he is still asleep or not, because he doesn't know which side of the fence he is on. But these have the same symptoms and the same destructiveness and the same benefit whether you are awake or asleep. Yet what I maintain is that there is more conducted through the sleep. There is more conducted. The mood is subject to the influences of the setting and the physical position. When a man is walking, he is more logical, he becomes pragmatic. When he is sitting down, he becomes receptive, and when he is in the yogi posture he may even have visions, he may even have great mental revelations. But it is when he is horizontal that the ordinary layman has the contact with the direct mind. That's my belief.

Q: Could you go through something like kleptomania . . . as compared to a mood?

Rose: Well you see, the kleptomaniac is carried away with the conviction, the predator-conviction, which is the seductive conviction. He is in a seductive mood. And some kleptomaniacs combine sexuality or fetishism with their criminal act—this is a combination of different moods. His actions appear to him as being logical if not heroic . . . in that he sees a simultaneous conquest of two fears at once—the fear of jail and the fear or guilt associated with sex.

So he builds up a logic and he justifies himself. But again as I said, that mood is subject to the nostalgic mood, and when that hits him, it will wipe out some of his self-justification.

Q: The nostalgic mood will wipe out the kleptomania? Yes?

Rose: Right. I maintain that you don't have to have any ethical or moral background at all to pick this up. The aborigines of Africa don't have any libraries, but they have an extremely accurate moral code. And they have no penitentiaries. I think that we confuse ourselves a lot of time by trying to verbalize, justify and then by giving the judge a thousand or ten thousand dollars on appeal, rather than just have a way of living that is true to our constant intuitions.

Q: You said that the mood was highly dependent on the embodiment or the characters of the . . . Where does this . . . cannot there not be enough background . . . ?

Rose: That is what I am getting at, for instance, why does a man who lays down to sleep dream of something that happened forty years ago when nothing seems to be the cause . . . Hell, the psychologists will say that something kicked it in, the past, the memory bank. See, I maintain that when the person consciously leans too far, something in the soul brings it back, and the only language that the soul can do it through is through a mood.

Q: Where is this thing installed?

Rose: Sure, it is bad for me to use something that I don't define. Let's say that if we had all of the computations that went through the computer—an open computer and took in all of the knowledge that could possibly be—and I am talking about knowledge about the blueprint of the creation—why the animals are, why the cat eats the mouse, why we are here and all of this sort of thing—this total computation and the rendition of that answer would be the voice of your soul. Now I am using the word soul because . . . only because of my own personal discovery.

Q: . . . talking about only the knowledgeable?

Rose: Right, it is a language known to all. Of course, I have—if we get into the description of God—I have a different description, I have a different understanding. I believe that the soul of man is God.

I don't believe it. (response to something said in audience)

That's my experience.

Q: Where did the soul of man come from?

Rose: Does it have to come from something? Or couldn't it just be. It is.

Q: If the soul of man can just be, why can't we just be?

Rose: Because we are not the soul of man. We are not the soul of man. We are the shadows in the cave of Plato.

My perspective has a certain simplicity that doesn't care to argue. I know that I haven't argued or played games with myself. Very reluctantly—I do not use the word God because I am afraid that my definition will lead people to believe a certain thing, or a traditional concept, dictionary definition. Also about when I talk about the soul of man. Now you can't create anything, except temporarily. For instance, when a person heals somebody . . . (comment from audience) Yeah I follow you, sure, absolutely, see that is what I am saying, I say that through this, through touching these moods, you touch an eternal something, this is the only door.

As I told you, I met this man from Texas that had this experience that we listened to about him in a garage. The experience that he had was altogether different from mine, but yet I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even though we didn't even talk, that our minds were one. I knew that his experience and mine were one. And you can do this with every human being. I don't believe that it should be forced though, if you want to have the patience you can come face to face with people.

We have a little exercise that we do in the esoteric group, to facilitate this. It is called a rapport session, in which you sit down and read the mind of the other person, or let yourself, don't force, let yourself read the mind of the other person. And the more that you do this, the more of a brotherhood that you attain, because there are no arguments, you understand. This is the whole thing.

And yet when you get on this mundane lifestyle, we are filled with prejudice, and then we have to be, this is part of the jungle, the cat has to be prejudiced about the mouse, we have to be prejudiced about the rabbit if we are going to eat him, see, we can't accept him as a brother. But the Indian did, he ate his brother, but apologized, and then ate him. We cannot control that which is part of the plan. That struck me as being very sensible, the Indian's method of saying, "I am going to kill the neighboring tribesman because there isn't enough buffalo for the both of us, so one of us has to go, so let us do it with ritual."

But I maintain that this is what I am getting—maybe I should have said from the beginning—that there is no realization of God by verbal, logical analysis—that the only way that you are going to realize it is through the mind itself. As Jung said, "back through the center."

In the book that I have written I talk of the camera analogy. Don't look at the pictures on the wall. Try to turn around and go back through the projector. There is where the creation came from. What you see on the wall are the shadows that were seen on the wall by Plato. In other words . . . everything that is in front of us . . . are shadows in the cave of Plato. But when you go back through yourself and find this common language then you also find that there is nobody out there but you.

You can't describe absolute factors. That is the reason why I had trouble writing, because you are talking about the totality of things which are. In other words, I have said that it is the knowledge or the experience of nothingness and everything-ness simultaneously, and that doesn't tell you too much. Now I could go on and say something else and bring you maybe a little closer, but these things were written. I wrote the book in this fashion, that basically you would realize . . . one of the first things that you would realize is that you don't exist, especially as you think you are.

You go take a look in the mirror and you are very happy with what you see there. "Oh! Look at what God piled on this earth to grace it and make other people jealous." But after a while you realize that you are a blob and that you are waiting for them to dig a hole to put it in so that it won't smell the place up, and that is you as far as your logical proof is concerned. That's you, that is all there is to you, logically, just what you see. Now, if there is something else, how do you find it, and if you find it, how do you define it? In terms of the body which doesn't exist?

Q: Is it a temporary condition or an eternal . . . ?

Rose: No, it is permanent. Let's put it this way, you don't, you are not living it now. You have to eat, that's relative. The relative world is necessary or else you have to abandon it totally. So you came back on the stage.

Q: How do you . . . in the first part of your talk you were talking about the brightness of dreams, and the percentage of the brightness of dreams, and you didn't expand on that. What, if a person had color dreams, and light and bright all of the time, what then?

Rose: Then I would say that you would have to set a whole new scale for judging the nostalgic element, which ones have it. But see, what I was trying to determine was a dream-mode. I am quite sure that everyone sitting here has had dreams . . . but I have heard some people say that they don't dream. Others claim that everyone dreams but forgets it rapidly. But I maintain that a majority of people have gray dreams, I mean that the majority of their dreams are somber, you know dull, no voice, no music, no perfume, so what is it that has this tremendous impact or emotion upon the person? Now as I said in the movies they have the violins, and colors, smells, touches and all of this sort of thing. They are not there in dreams but yet this mood is impelled. But the only way that it can be impelled is through memories that were nostalgic and with it comes this feeling that this is it, this is mankind's voice of rectitude, this is the evenness, the even voice of man.

And I don't mean conscience either, some people confuse it with conscience, conscience is sometimes a disease or a sickness, it is not always accurate.

Q: Then you are saying then that the nostalgia that a person dreams is dependent upon his personality?

Rose: No, no. I would say that if a person didn't have it, very possibly they are minus a faculty of communication, that's all, maybe everyone doesn't have it. The only way that we can tell is probably to go through and ask . . . Let's do it here. How many here have never had any nostalgic dreams? Nobody, see. How many here have had gray dreams? There are only very few hands that are not up. So now I am supposing that very possibly we have some people that Nostalgia doesn't come to in a gray dream, or doesn't come in a horizontal position. But maybe it is a purple dream, or maybe it is when the sun is shining, but nevertheless I maintain that this spirit of Nostalgia is a language. It is what I maintain the psychologists are missing, if they are wanting to talk to people—talk possibly about a direction to get into a person's mood for the sake of therapy.

I think that moods are classified. And as I said we are programmed by nature to have short Seduction moods like the hunter kills his prey and eats it and then he forgets about killing. A person has dreams and a Seduction mood of sex, but the whole thing culminates and then he forgets it. Even the result of sex moods will somehow be negated by this nostalgic mood. In the nostalgic mood you may regret that, for instance the little cabin back in the rose bushes was destroyed by a seduction of the lady next door, you see everybody has to leave the flower covered cottage-syndrome. So then in the nostalgic mood the person is saying "Oh boy, if I had to do it all over again I would have my children, my wife with me and things would be, eternally."

Because why? Why? How many people have not felt that actions are eternal, in other words what happens, we go through school and when we graduate from high school Nostalgia settles on us, because we can no longer go through this competitive achievement, fraternity thing, by fraternity I don't mean fraternities. I mean fraternization—this camaraderie—the spirit that pervades—that we would like to see go on forever.

No. No. We know that we have to leave it. We have to go on to more experiences. The same thing occurs when a kid drops out of class. A tremendous Nostalgia, that the ship is going off without him. As though he will never catch it again. And then we go on into marriage, we go out and get a job and get married, and we are very much in love, and it is like a drink of wine. You get a unique taste of wine—and you spend the rest of your life trying to get that same damned taste back, and that is what marriage is. The nostalgia of once more getting that rare experience. And yet there is a beauty there, there is an eternality to that beauty, you've got it—you don't go back and try to recapture, for all eternity, the beauty that existed between any two people—you can't have it twenty-four hours a day, but at the same time unselfish union with a beautiful friend is there forever. Even though you follow it up by bad memories, or destruction of the relationship.

Q: Do you agree with Paul Brunton when he talks about the state of dreamless sleep, when there are no dreams, when it's a deeper state when we are actually in contact with what he calls the Overself?

Rose: No, I think that Paul Brunton wrote a tremendous lot after talking with Hindu gurus. I think that you possibly go through . . . there is a mood that you go through that occurs shortly before you reach your realization . . . and that mood is of course . . . I think that it is imposed upon you, by a combination of something deep in your own nature with possibly some outside help.

Outside help—what is that? Take a guess. Some people call it spiritual help, people from the other side or God . . . meaning the universal spirit of man . . . trying to come through the mud and clay. And then there is an internal urge and this outside help helps to bring about this realization and it occurs through a mood, the mood is one of hopelessness and death, despair. This is logic—logic says that you are nothing but mud, and you face that, you face it with your whole being, you know that this is it, and then you go through the death experience. You die. And so consequently, I don't know that there is any . . . this is almost ambiguous, that there would be a dreamless sleep, how could there be a dreamless sleep, how could there be any value, any realization. As soon as there is a realization there is a dream, or a consciousness, now, if you are talking about a person getting into a place where there are no thoughts, no dreams but intense awareness . . . this only occurs after the death experience. Brunton may be pointing to Sahaja Samadhi—if that is what he means by dreamless sleep. But to be sure you would have to refer to what guru or teaching he referred to at the time, and what level they were talking about.

Q: Let's go back to Nostalgia again, since it occupies such a large part of our life. It seems like you are almost saying that it is dangerous, in other words, stay away from the mass media, television, movies, etcetera, because they kind of drag you into it. Is that the implication that you are trying to give?

Rose: Well, the thing that irritates me about the media is, of course I don't mind the nostalgia-element, but I don't want them to use it selling cigarettes and other things. Lemonade has to be grandpa in the rocking chair selling it, and this I resist because it is not the universal language, it is an imitation of the universal language. It appeals and hits you there and you say, "Oh, this must be the truth about lemonade."

We think like a child. We talk about the seduction of the child at Christmas time. A child becomes seduced, but they get the feeling after a while, and they revolt against the idea of Santa Claus when they find out that he does not exist. But when they pick up the spirit of Christmas later on, they unconsciously fall back into the mood, and they want to perpetrate this forever. Confused, for the rest of their lives they survive by guessing. Most young people—until they are clear out of college, spend the better part of their time guessing what to do to be in conformity with the rest of society because the moods of society change so rapidly. So if you watch peoples' actions you will see them going through this, especially young people pretending. I watch girls practice gossiping, or they get in a group and try to cluck like the old grandmother, and they think that is what they should do. The boy pretends that he is a rooster, and he is supposed to be the protector of the weak or something. So he takes karate lessons and goes strutting around trying to impress everybody. Everybody is trying to be heroic, in their earlier days . . . until they get tired of playing the game and then they don't give a damn. And then you can relax. But most young people that I find are trying to guess the language, and they are always guessing the pollyannic thing that is imposed upon them by the people that don't want their stores crashed into. They help build up Christmas spirit and all of these utility companies are saying work together. And all of these songs that are written are telling us that we should work together. But we are never going to get interested enough to work together. See, why work together . . . why work for somebody who is stealing you blind. But it is so sweet to think that everybody is working together—this comes from that nostalgic sense that maybe these thieves will get harmonious, if everybody is kind. And I am always reminded of the flower children that would come with their heads all bandaged up while bringing flowers to the police department. It just doesn't work.

Q: You mentioned that dreams that we have during the night and the dreams that we have during the day . . . that the events that happen during the day go in the dreams that we have at night?

Rose: Yes, I think that this accounts for a percentage. Remember that I said that we took one form of dream only. A lot of dreams are prophetic dreams or reactionary dreams. Prophetic dreams are neither fearful nor seductive, they just seem to be . . . maybe an intelligence is trying to communicate with us. Or for some reason we can see into the future. But I don't think that the daytime influences Nostalgia-dreams unless the factor is a custom, a family event or, an embedded cultural thing. And I don't think that it becomes an embedded cultural thing unless it conforms to Nostalgia.

Q: Dreams shut off when you wake up or I got a feeling . . . like whenever the sun comes up you are still there dreaming?

Rose: Well, maybe a lot of things go on inside your head but the way we gauge them is by what I call the shutter of consciousness. There is only one I, we basically can only have one thought at a time. It is like a camera shutter, we only open and close upon one thought, and now you may have some in rapid succession . . . so it looks like it is flipping back and forth, rapidly to the point where you might think that you are doing two things, but you only think one thing at a time, so you are watching a dream, sure, you are watching that type of experience you will continue to watch until maybe after you wake up. If you do you are going to see the vision in the room.

Q: What I was getting at was the actual under-structure, I feel like when I wake up that the pictures are . . .

Rose: That is what I am talking about. This is what I maintain that if you have a strong nostalgic dream or even a fearful dream, nightmare, you will lay there in bed and puzzle. I have just been kind of frozen and said to myself—why get up, let's analyze this while it is still fresh in my mind. Where is this coming from? This is a real world which we visited in sleep. It is like entering a dimension with LSD or something. This is as real as the daytime. And then later you realize, after a bit of introspection, that the biggest part of what happens to you during the day is unreal. It is created, it is colored, to a point where our little reality is endangered. There is a limited number of factors that can be used on a dream, to make it impressive. There is a tremendous lot more factors that can impress us in our daytime experience. I am inclined to believe that when you meet a person in a dream, the thing that attracts you about that person is that person's Self, that is their real Self, despite their external personality. You go right to the heart of that person. Whereas the person that you meet in daytime, you have perfume, you have music, and the words are musical. The putty and lacquer and the dresses and this sort of thing—they add to it. But in a dream you are going directly to a person, and there has to be an intense thing there, as I said that carries over, and this is what we long to meet. This is what Nostalgia is, it is a longing for the permanence of that experience, and it has to be a profound experience because it is limited to the senses, to the number of sensory registers, that are within the mind.

Q: About the nostalgic mood that we slip into or slide into . . .

Rose: I think that you have them during the day, I think that there are certain things that will cause them, traumas, traumas may cause them. It depends again on the way your head works, I think that there are certain things as I said that—I named the different things that are conducive to Nostalgia, certain colors, certain musical instruments, words, certain pictures. Jung talks about the giant trees and boulders in his dreams. I think that that's the archetypal memory coming out, that may even be nostalgic, it seemed to have been nostalgic with him in fact. And the mind goes on in a kind of a scramble to piece this together, when it wakes up. Why the trees? And the thought will come to the waking person—was this what I was two thousand years ago? So I think that nostalgia is provoked but it more or less visits people who have a poetic sense. The old theaters, some of the old plays contributed to Nostalgia. You don't get them anymore, there is a new theme out, it is Seduction, and this isn't a good sign for civilization. But maybe it will pass. The old theme was Nostalgia. And now it is Seduction, and Acquisition—you can't go to one of these porno movies and be carried back in time.

Q: Would you say that someone who's experienced a realization or enlightenment or found the Truth would then be an enlightened man . . . would one person remember more of this total knowledge than another, isn't there a way for that person to expand consciousness?

Rose: No. First of all there is no knowledge, there is no knowledge. The second thing is when you are everything there is nowhere to go, there is no expansion. See this is one of the misnomers of course. The theory of mind-expansion is valid up to this point—up to the point of final death or final realization.

END

Lecture at Boston College

November 19, 1975

INTRODUCTION

. . . I'm appearing here not just as the writer of a book. The Albigen Papers was written by me after many years of experience and research in philosophic, religious, and psychological systems. At the time of writing it I had no idea of even having a group. I thought it would be a good idea to put something down in case somebody stumbled across it later, and the group appeared while I was writing the book.

Our society is strung over the northeastern part of the country. We have several groups in cities near universities, and a rural ashram. The ashram is in West Virginia, and we have centers in Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, and Akron, Ohio and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Where the groups exist people can work more actively. They have weekly meetings for discussion and study of ways and means: how they can help each other to keep their heads on what they are doing, on the path, so to speak.

We have a loose-leaf folder here with photographs of the ashram and that sort of thing that you can look at if you're interested after the talk.

Next, I'd like to tell you something about myself. The reason for this is not to bore you with somebody's biography, but that I think that it is very important in dealing with abstract matters to be able to judge the person who is speaking.

We're talking about a subject that can't be discussed—Zen is something that you can't draw pictures of, with language. At the same time, we must communicate some way—that's what we're here for. It has been said that people who know about Zen don't try to communicate with the general public, but I don't think that there is really a good excuse for not talking.

There is another saying, of course, that those who know don't talk, and those who talk don't know. To me, there would be no knowledge at all if things weren't said. So I think that this expression serves as a clever cover-up for those who don't know. By virtue of keeping silent, of not answering questions, they hide the fact that they're running a racket and really don't know anything about the human mind. Down through the ages someone had to say something, or you wouldn't even know that these people and systems existed.

I have been at this thing all my life, and most of the things that have happened came by accident. I didn't go out with a definite plan to form a group.

And I never have believed in forming a group for the purpose of supporting me—the groups that exist do not support me. There are no fees. If you buy a book you pay for printing costs only. If you take a room at the ashram you pay a minimal fee—so minimal in fact that we get a lot of dharma bums who try to get in, so we screen them a bit.

YARDSTICKS

I don't believe that the truth has a price on it. When I was quite young I realized that I had a lot of cults and isms to look into, and I made up my mind that I would set up some yardsticks, or I would be spending two hundred years looking through the cults for the truth. Knowing that I had only a limited period of time before my head started to harden up, I figured that I would have to stick pretty close to these yardsticks. You can find some of these scattered in the books that are available, and I have compiled a list of them in The Albigen Papers.

First of all, there is no price on truth. If you're holding meetings you may have to chip in to pay the light bill, or something of that sort, but I don't believe that any man should be supported by any other man. And there are a lot of excuses used for being supported.

Another yardstick is that I don't believe that truth has a geographic region. I don't believe that you have to go halfway around the world to find the truth. I believe that the truth exists within. It may exist in Asia, but going there can be an outward form of laziness which is a substitute for going within. The truth may exist in the Kabbalah, but it takes a long time to learn the symbolism of the Kabbalah and I don't think it's necessary even to get into that.

I believe that certain cults and isms have too much regimentation—too much rank, ritual, and that sort of thing. Too much secrecy is another one—this can be avoided. You hear things like, "We can't let you into the inner temple because you haven't learned the secrets. You have to go through so many degrees and get the secret handshake before you're allowed into the inner sanctum." To me this is absurd, and I have all my life rejected these before I even approached any closer.

And in this manner I rejected almost everything I met, especially in my youth. I started out at this quite young; at the age of twelve I went away to be a priest in the Franciscan order. (They took them that young—I don't know if they still do or not.) I decided to do this because I thought as a child that God communicated with the priests and the nuns. I thought that if anybody is going to know about this thing then these people should know—they've been in this all their life.

So I went away, and I lasted about five years or so. And I came to the conclusion that they didn't have any more knowledge of the thing than I did.

From that time until about twenty-one years of age I just floundered around looking into everything I could get my hands on with the limited amount of cash that I had, because that was back during the depression.

One of the things I looked into was Spiritualism. The thought occurred to me that if you want to know what happens to you at death, talk to the dead. Go find a dead man and talk with him. There were a lot of phonies, but I had heard that there were genuine materializations. So I went around the country and sorted through the phonies until I found a genuine materialization and I talked to some spirits.

And like Omar Khayyam I came out that same door wherein I went. The dead didn't know too much more than the living person and sometimes knew less. I'll go into that later tonight if you wish. If you're curious about these phenomena it might save you some steps.

There are such things as entities that will materialize, and there are different ways of getting them to materialize. Incidentally, one of the ways is by getting too much dope in you or by playing games while you're on dope—you can get all sorts of entities to materialize.

After investigating Spiritualism I went into yoga and psychology. The idea was starting to grow in my mind that I should know something about thought. Like in breaking the atom: I said, "Let's analyze thought. If I can find out what the essence of thought is, perhaps I'll know what the mind is. And if I know what the mind is—I may know what my essence is."

So again—the books on psychology didn't have the answer. And they still don't—there's no book yet on psychology that defines the mind. Instead, they very cleverly avoid the mind. Modern psychology is apt to identify the mind with the body. In other words, "What you see is what you get."

CHANGE OF BEING

At the age of twenty-one an old saying came back to me from my early theological training, that "the finite mind does not perceive the infinite." And this is what I call a "stopper." When you realize that very possibly you may never perceive the infinite, that you may never find out anything beyond what you see—the visible physical universe—it's inclined to stop you. It will seem that the study of its ramifications is infinite and therefore impossible to cover in a lifetime—impossible to know everything about the physical universe, much less to know what happens to the person's mind at death.

But then it also occurred to me that other people claimed to have breached this obstacle, this wall. And if they had breached it, the only way that they could have done it was by a method of becoming less infinite.

This was the secret. We still say, "Yes, the finite mind will not perceive the infinite," but there is a chance that this finite mind can change, can gather to itself tools, a new vehicle. And I realized that a person has to become—you do not learn.

Oh, you can learn things—you can read umpteen books on bardos and purgatories. Swedenborg has quite a shelf full of books on what goes on in heaven and hell. You can read all sorts of things, but in the final analysis, when you're reaching to go beyond the relative bardos or universal-mind concepts, you have to change. You have to become, not learn.

Now I know that this might provoke argument, but it's not something that we can argue about. It's something that came to me by virtue of intuition, it didn't come logically. Just that my intuition told me that this is what these people did. I had read accounts of yogis and other people who had made enormous strides, and I realized that they must have had to find some method of changing.

So I set about looking for it. In those days all that I had, and all that was available, were books. (It wasn't until fifteen years later that I met a Zen teacher.) The books on yoga then had pretty much what you're getting today. What we have today is the old stuff warmed over with a little variation—they throw in a little bit of this or that. Like with our prescription drugs—add another drop of water, a hydrogen radical or something, change the name, and you can charge a new price.

This is what happens to our cults—as soon as the people become aware of a certain gimmick there is a slight variation given, a new name, and you get more of the same. For example, we had something similar to TM. It was the Pronunciation of the Holy Name. This is supposed to bring you in touch with a certain intelligence. In yoga it was "OM." Now OM means little more than "I am." But yet by the concentration on this you are brought into a state of quiescence, serenity, and peace with the world. And I languished in that peace for seven years, thinking that any day now there would be a more beautiful theme breaking and I would be in the middle of a revelation. And—nothing happened.

WORK WITH A GROUP

I then sort of awoke to certain things and came to some conclusions. One thing was that I had been working alone. Because of having run into so many disappointments in looking into cults and certain isms, I did not believe that there were very many other people looking. There are many more people today by far looking into esoteric things than there were when I was younger.

I realized that the majority of people who went around these groups were forty years old, except for a very few. Most of them had raised their families and then sort of had a feeling that the game wasn't the way they thought it was, and that they would like to look into other things. By this time their families were raised, but they still had a job to hold onto until they retired perhaps, and they could only read about things or get together once a week or a month to talk about things.

I was pretty much disgusted with that too. I wanted action—I wanted to get into something heavier. And I came to the conclusion that there was no one around who wanted to work at the level where I wanted to. So for those seven years the only teacher that I had was a bunch of books out of the library.

But then I came to another conclusion: that this is too great a task for one man. An individual working alone tends to forget about it. He can get all fired up and do his mantra, say his prayers, or whatever trip he is on. But after a while he will get interested in something else and he'll forget all about his original aim, although he may come back to it and play with it again later.

But by associating with a group of people, as they do in Alcoholics Anonymous, you remind each other if nothing else. This gives you a reservoir of communal power. I'm talking about quantum energy now, that exists in any group. Christ said, "When any two or more are gathered together in my name, I am in their midst." Whenever two or more people are gathered together for a positive—let's say, rather than for a negative purpose, there is power in their midst.

This was something that I had been overlooking. I had been disdainful of my fellow man, thinking "there's no use." There still was no one to talk to though—there was no one to help, so to speak. There was no one to help me. I had met gurus and other people who claimed to know and I found, as I said, that most of them were phonies. That is, they were interested either in money or in some strange form of sex. And that was enough reason to reject them.

But I still believe that you have to help somebody, and that you have to begin wherever you are. You don't have to run to India. You'll run into somebody who is interested and you can give them a pointer here and there that will save them some time.

THE EXPERIENCE

The next step in my life occurred when I was about thirty years of age. For seemingly no reason at all I had an experience. I presume that if it hadn't come then, it wouldn't have come.

Of course, the first thing a person will say when they hear about this is, "Well, this fellow was so darn hungry that he created it." And this can happen—people build up a great thirst and then create the object. They create their own heaven, so to speak.

And I questioned the experience myself. I would be inclined to go along with this explanation but for the fact that the experience was spontaneous—I didn't know what was happening—and that the results were so astounding and so much opposite of what I expected.

I had anticipations of reaching some ecstatic beautiful field of flowers or Lord knows what. And because I found something utterly devastating and contrary to all my other preconceptions, I knew it could not be a creation of my desire. Because I didn't desire, as I entered it, I found what seemed like oblivion.

This was twenty-seven years ago. Of course, immediately after this happened I thought that it would be nice to talk to some people about it. So that if I ran into somebody who had the same tenacity, the same desire and direction, I could give them a few pointers. Especially on what to avoid, because I think that I made a lot of mistakes in my youth because I didn't have a teacher myself.

Well, I found out first of all, that I didn't have the necessary language. You can't just go out and talk to people about it, because they won't understand. I once met a man who had reached Enlightenment through meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I met him about fifteen years ago. This man had no language either. All he could say was, ‘‘Meditate on the Lord's Prayer—just do what I did." And no one ever took his advice, because everybody is too familiar with the Lord's Prayer.

But for this particular man this was his medicine, his focal point or koan. He focused on it so intently that something had to crack.

Now the same thing will not work for everyone. But he went about traveling from town to town trying to tell people. And I listened to his story, the account of his experience. It was one of the most profound and genuine experiences I had ever heard—he was in this experience for around ten days. He wanted to use up the rest of his life helping people. But he was getting nowhere—he wasn't helping anybody.

I realized the same thing about myself. Merely having an experience does not give you the ability to convey it or transmit it. So I associated myself with some Zen teachers to study their communication, their method of transmission. You do not communicate it with words—you don't just sit down and start reading out of some Oriental prayer book or out of some Oriental dogma.

There is a language, a mystical path, associated with Zen that is not clearly described in other groups. Because if it had been mentioned in the Christian religion I would have looked into it. After I came full circle, after I had gone through this experience, then I discovered that some of the things in the Christian faith pointed at this truth. Yet it isn't explained to the people.

One reason for this is that people have a certain level, and you can't talk to them except with what their ears can hear. The majority of the people are vegetating, so the leaders give them the blessings, pacify them as they're dying, and encourage them while they're living. They try to keep them from getting into trouble, from civil disobedience, and try to make their lives as placid as possible. That's basically what our organized religion does today, because the majority of the people don't want anything else. People want to lead the pleasure-game—they're attached to the pleasure trip.

So anyway, after I had this realization, I looked back then and saw certain accounts, such as the one of Saint John of the Cross. And I realized that John of the Cross had made the trip. And remembering my earlier training, I was rather irritated that my teachers in the church had not tried to bring this out to those who were sincerely looking. Especially to the theological students. This was in a seminary—why didn't they bring this out? But they only gave out indoctrination on faith. In other words, "Believe this."

I maintain that you should believe nothing, including what I say as well. You should doubt. To doubt is sacred—to believe is foolishness. Because believing is an easy way out—it's a cop-out.

It's easy to just say, "Yes, yes, I believe you, I believe what you're saying—what do I do? Say three prayers? Chant the mantra?" People want a gimmick—even ask to be slapped around. They do this in some Zen schools, you know. The student says, "Oh, do anything to me. I don't want to have to perform mental effort."

But tell that person to attack his mind with his mind, and he doesn't know what you're talking about. He wants definitions then, and that sort of thing. He's still trying to find a gimmick. Something tangible that he can play with, rather than just looking inside his own head.

THE GROUP/THE BOOK

After communicating with the Zen teachers I met, I still saw no chance of finding people who were interested. That was just a few years ago, in fact. I only found people who were interested in playing games. "Let's play the guru game."

There's a book by DeRopp that's very good, called The Master Game. It tells about some of the esoteric games people play, and the complexes within us that make us want to play these games. It brings you a new perspective, a new awareness of yourself and your motivation, to see that a lot of the reasons for following a spiritual path may just be a game inside yourself.

So—I sat down and started to write the book, The Albigen Papers. I thought, "Well, I'll write something and leave it lay someplace, and maybe someone will come across it. If somebody finds it, he may get something out of it. If not, at least I have done the best I could."

This is what I believe everybody should do—do the best you can and don't try to build an empire. Just leave some tracks someplace.

Strangely enough, when I started to write the book some people started to collect around the farm. Just local people, young people—some of them were dropping acid at the time. And they became fascinated because, first of all, some of them had entered another dimension by accident. And they were very much aware that they had entered another dimension. So they weren't agnostic.

Most young people are very quick to pick up that the older people are spoofing themselves. So usually they say, "Oh well, this religion thing is just part of the stuff that they teach kids to keep them in line." But when a person had a death experience as a result of taking acid, he may enter another dimension. Some of you may know what I'm talking about—if not, talk to somebody who has taken acid and maybe they can tell you what it is. Sometimes you go through the death experience, and you may enter another dimension.

And as soon as you enter that dimension you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is hope. That if there is another dimension, meaning that the mind is able to leave this body behind, to actually be obliviated to the earth and see another dimension—there is a possibility to live. Because generally up to that time the mind says that maybe you're kidding yourself, maybe there's nothing out there. So eat, drink, and be merry.

A few people who have had this experience have been able to get interested and to start looking. Some of them didn't. Some of them just went deeper into drugs and over the hill.

And strangely enough again, I believe that if it hadn't been for this, we wouldn't have much of a spiritual movement among the young people of today. And if you don't have it among the young people you might as well forget about it. Because people who are past forty years of age, if they start on a spiritual path having never done anything before—if they have just been eating, drinking, and making merry—I doubt seriously whether they are going to do too much. By this time they've got themselves into too many traps—they're too busy. And their heads are starting to harden up.

And I felt that these young people were listening. They said, "Let's meet," and the next thing you know they were meeting out at the farm on Saturdays, sitting in meditation, and even helping me to type the book. I started talking, and then got an invitation to talk in the colleges. I went ahead and the rest of it seemed to fall into place. And everything that has happened has only been circumstances which fell into place—there was never any decided effort to go out and sell this on the highway.

At this point the problem of communication still existed—how could I communicate? Well, I had to use the medium of words. The book is composed of words. And words are not the best medium for communication. In matters of Zen the best communication is direct. In this business of becoming, you also learn to have a direct mind-to-mind communication if you want to be successful in bypassing years of argument.

The book by itself isn't quite enough. But if you sit for a while in groups until you develop what we call "rapport," you can develop an ability to go inside another person's head. Almost anyone can do this with enough practice in sitting.

ILLUSIONS

Now I'm just going to go through some of my notes to give us subject material for talking. The general theme I would like to bring out is this idea of the number of illusions we are subject to. And if possible, I would like to get to this business of direct communication with you. If by some method I can lead your mind into the realization that things are not what they seem to be, it may give you some impetus to look further.

When I'm through, if you're curious, we'll open it up for questions. I don't want to argue, but I do want to respond to curiosity.

Invariably, when I give a talk in a public meeting, there are a few people who are delegates from some particular cult, who are offended because I do not foster what they believe. And I can't help that. I believe that everybody who is fastened to a certain system or cult is there because that is his level, and that is what is necessary for him. So if they're offended, maybe they are in the wrong place here tonight.

I usually get a bit of an argument from a person trying to get me to assert by virtue of their arguments, that their system is very valid and that their system is going in the same direction. So I always say ahead of time that I will not respond to this type of questioning. I will not respond to loaded questions because it will take us away from the direct communication. It only builds tension and argument, and it will take us away from the possibility of intuitively picking up something here tonight, if you think that there is anything worth picking up.

For instance, we have certain conceptions that this world exists in a certain way. That the seats in this room are blue, that this chalkboard is black—this kind of thing. And I bring this up because in this final experience which we were talking about—and you have to be more or less prepared that such a thing is possible—the entire world disappears, as far as we know it today. And that you're not going to hang onto all your dogma, to the belief that you have to take the wife with you when you go to heaven, or that there is such a thing as heaven until you experience it.

We have these conceptions, and the mind rebels when you get into a system of thinking that says that you can't take the dog and the wife with you—that they're not going to have the same meaning—or that you can't take all this body's plumbing with you, because there's not going to be anything to eat there.

And in this rebellion the mind says, "I don't want any parts of anything that doesn't give me my type of immortality. Because this is all I know." But this is not necessarily true—it is possible that you might know something else as you go along.

We have illusory ideas about ourselves as well. In Zen, and also in the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky system, is this pointed finger that says, "You are a robot—you are mechanical." And you don't like to hear that either.

I was giving a lecture once at the Theosophical Society in Pittsburgh—there were quite a few older people there. I mentioned the fact that people were robots, and several old ladies informed me rather quickly that they didn't believe that they were robots and they didn't like to hear it.

But this is a possibility that you have to face. Because even in this life, as you get older and you look back upon your past, you realize that you're not the person you thought you were.

Most of you are pretty young, but you can look back to when you were five or six years old. You had a concept of yourself, that you were a certain type of creature. You had certain states of mind that carried you in life. And as you got a year or two older you had to change these states of mind, you had to change your perspective. After a while, the changing of the perspective changes the individual so much that he forgets who he was when he was five years old. He forgets completely a possibly truer or more pure type of mentality. He adjusts and adjusts until he's just another piece of society.

Another thing happens: we believe that somebody loves us, and we live long enough to discover that the person really loves that which we can give. Now again, everybody wants to believe in love, because we're lonely. Somebody asked me at the talk last night about Zen koans. I was strongly tempted to tell them that the greatest koan I ever had was my wife. And I got that after I went through the experience. My children also were koans.

So these realizations prompt us to reappraise our concepts and definitions. We believe that we are doing something, for instance that we are Joe College, or Joe City or Joe Club, that we're the most popular man in the college or in the club because our thinking is commonly accepted there as being perfect. And one day we get into the wrong environment and find that we're getting clubbed on the head with a blackjack or something and thrown into jail and we say, "How can they treat Joe College this way—this perfect creature?"

We go further and say that we have security in our faith. We believe that if you just hold onto faith that everything will happen well. But we find before we die that we're very insecure, very alone, and somewhat doubting of all this faith that we have. And I have seen many people in my lifetime who had faith all their lives—but when they died their last half-hour was spent in screaming.

STATES OF MIND

Any system, religion, or philosophy that does not in its very beginning find for man relief from the confusion of uncertain and changing mind states has no real foundation. In other words, just because some ism appeals to you in a certain state of mind, this doesn't mean that it is valid.

You may or may not be aware of this, but we are strongly subject to states of mind. If you take dope, you will have a state of mind that is entirely different from the one previous. The same if you get drunk or if you are passionate. And the way you'll know this is that when your passions are surfeited you will see that your state of mind changes abruptly because of chemical change, the burning-up of the endocrines in the blood stream or whatever happens.

You will notice in that instant that there are two states of mind in your head, in a very short period of time, that are contradictory. One says "go" and the other says "stop." One says, "This creature (the sex partner) is perfect," and the other says, "Get away." A complete change in convictions—and yet we like to think that we have a constant and continuous state of mind.

We must first know the self and find transcendence from confusion. It is not enough to read philosophy and Zen—we must find ourselves. We must find out who is talking, who is reading and studying, who is looking for survival. And we've got to find some safety from vacillating convictions.

We were talking about this business of sanity. Everyone likes to think that he is right, especially as concerning sanity. But we find psychiatrists running into another psychiatrist's couch, plopping themselves down and saying, "Oh my God get your pencil and take this down before I forget it—I think I'm losing my mind."

And he doubts. He is supposed to be an expert on sanity, but he doubts his own sanity.

In our religious faith, if you take instances of people who believe that God will heal themselves or their children, when it comes a time that the children are in trouble, in danger of dying, we say, "Well—I could go along with my concept of Christian Science, or just plain belief, whatever it is, but I can't play that game with my child. I have to give my child the benefit of the doctor." And immediately our state of mind changes. Our convictions change.

AWARENESS

We get into another thing: what is experience? When we get into spiritual matters we are talking about experiencing something. Are all instances of experience nerve sensation? Modern psychology seems to imply that the body is what is picking this up. If so, what about death experiences, when seemingly all the nerves are inactive? Or the feeling of peace? Are these merely forms of surrender or neural activity? Or is there not an awareness of the whole happening, whether the experience is neural or not?

In other words, do we have a faculty of awareness that is not neural or somatic? Are only the nerves aware of the nerves? Or is there something behind the whole neural system that is aware? Is there an experience that experiences—an endless experience—watching ourselves experiencing? Is there a final observer, which you might call an essence?

Another thing is knowledge. I thought when I was young that I would arrive at knowledge by studying psychology and that sort of thing. Everyone has a conception of what is meant by the word, but really—what is knowledge? What type of experience is knowing?

For instance, what do you experience in a musical note? Or a mood? What is the experience of "green-ness"? Are we thrilled by the color green because we depend upon vegetation for our survival, or is there something special about the color itself? Does it just bring back some primitive memory of survival in green areas? Or does green have an esoteric meaning? Does it awaken archetypal memories, or does it awaken something beyond the DNA memory—something in our very essence or being?

It is now said that the color green is therapeutic—why would this be? Some time ago, incidentally, a Hindu came over to this country and was using colors to heal people. The authorities thought that he was a real quack so they threw him in jail. This was an old man. But now the hospitals are painting some of their rooms green. They report that certain colors will make people peaceful, while other colors make them turbulent.

Is the reaction to the color green possibly a memory from another dimension? We are talking here basically about experience. We experience a certain color and then we have a certain mood. I can remember a mood reaction I had when I was a kid—there were certain jelly beans I didn't want to eat because of their color.

Green is supposed to be a color which is developed from light of a given quality or wavelength striking the retina and inspiring a response from specialized nerve-rods. But how do we account for the green that is seen on an LSD trip when the eyes may be closed? The argument is brought up that you are just reawakening an old memory. But the geometric patterns seen in such a trip would rule out this as a possibility because these patterns never seem to have been witnessed before—they can be entirely new. Or there is a possibility that the dimension you step into may have come about by virtue of going through some color picture.

We can explain it away partially by saying that the vision comes from inside the head. And if we say this, it gives a whole new meaning to experience. It means that colors and experiences come from within rather than from without. So we are not just reactors to an external world, or to a physical world alone.

This indicates that something in our essence responds to a sensory picture—but how much of all our experiences are limited here by our sensory inadequacy? Science has proven that we have a limited capacity for picking up color. We don't see as well or hear as well as some of the animals. It's very possible that there are wavelengths that we don't pick up at all. So, with this inadequate seeing and hearing ability, what is the effect upon us and our world-picture?

We conceive certain ideas about the world, such as by looking out in the sky we say that evidently space goes on forever. And then we read that Einstein or some other mathematician has come up with the concept of the space-time continuum, or the concept that space is curved—if you went out in a straight line you would end up by coming in behind yourself, or something like this. That space is not out there infinitely, but rather the whole universe may be contained.

The space-time concept indicates the possibility that space does not exist independently of time, nor time of space. That which exists is space-time. And if this is true or even possible then our whole concept of passing days and years may be erratic.

Our whole concept of experience may be inadequate. Now maybe you'll say that I don't have all the scientific facts on these arguments. But I'm just throwing this out, because I do know that we only see partially—we only witness and experience partially. And the reason I know this is because my experience went beyond this. When it went beyond, I could look back and see that there was no such thing as time.

And yet that was yesterday—twenty-seven years ago—so there was time. And this takes us into the paradox of the language in talking about these matters. People will say, "Well, either there is time or there isn't—that either was twenty-seven years ago or it was right now." Well—I say it is both. Because we're using a relative language to describe a non-relative experience we have to include seeming opposites to try to give a more complete picture.

This analysis of our illusory ideas about the physical world can be extended to our psychological self-analysis. As you get older you may find yourself continually discovering that you're not whom you thought you were. For example, people try to project a certain image—they try their darnedest to project something that will get them by in their social relationships. They fall in love with somebody and think, "Why, this person can't reject me because I'm projecting a certain image and they have to pick it up." They may not come right out and say this, but everyone acts this way.

But they encounter someone who isn't interested, and who tells them off: "Here's what's wrong with you—you're a fathead." So there's a letdown.

This psychological letdown happens because we haven't had the proper view of ourself. This is called losing an ego. As we go through this, as soon as one ego is eliminated—we go back and build a better one. A little bit better this time, a little more cunning, if we're just ordinary people. But if we are philosophically inclined we may drop it. We say, "What's the use of building up this false front? Let's just try to be honest and act naturally, and see if we can't get by that way. But this reaction is not common.

You can't just go to an authority for help either. We have a new type of priestcraft coming up in our midst, the hierarchy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology.

We can't go to these people and say, "What is the mind? What is thought?" As I said, I find no books on psychology that define the subjective matter. None of them define either the mind or thought—they bypass it. They describe the mind as "the total being," whatever that is. And that's about the way it is said in the books—"the total being, the total experience, whatever that is."

But yet we have to read something. We have to start somewhere on this self-analysis, this business of peeling-off.

Now why do we want to peel-off or divest ourselves of egos? Because basically we're after the truth, including the truth about ourselves. And after we find the truth about ourselves we may be able to find out the truth about other people as well.

This is what most people seem to be doing today—finding lots of inequities in other people. It's a great picnic, finding inequities in politicians, leaders, authors, and so forth and saying, "Boy, here's one devil worse than me. Let's hang him and take the attention off me."

Instead of finding the truth in themselves, people criticize others for lying to the public. And all the time we are lying to ourselves about who we are, not collectively but individually.

LOOKING INSIDE

So this is not just a head game. This whole system of spiritual realization depends upon us finding out who we are.

And now you say "Why? Isn't there some other way? Can't I find some chemical, some formula, and let it go at that?" This is what everybody is looking for—a gimmick. That all you have to do is follow a certain diet, do certain exercises, be good according to certain human principles, and you will go right straight to the good place—you'll be complete.

We find that when you do start looking into yourself that instead of a greater criticism of your fellow man you may have more compassion for him. You would think that a person who finds himself might say, "I'm better than the rest of these people now." But this isn't true. As you go along you have a greater compassion immediately because you realize that very few people have any degree of control.

This is the amazing thing, incidentally. People think that they are pulling strings, but the majority of people are just responding, just reacting. And everyone is trying to be a manipulator. About half of the people whom I have talked to who went into college to study psychology did it because their heads were mixed-up. The other half wanted to become manipulators.

In other words, factories and institutions will hire professional people who are able to write up tests or whatever in order to sort out which people they want to hire. The type that will be amenable and placid, are sorted out to be used in the factories.

So psychology is being used. And the sad part about it is that the people who are doing it know nothing about this thing we are talking about tonight. All they know is, as with Pavlov's dogs, that if you hold the bone in a certain way people will sit up and beg, people will respond. But this is not knowledge of the Self.

Now as we go through this process of peeling away this error we get into the first step of genuine self-realization. But we do not postulate and say, "Here is a system by which you can annihilate your ego." Because your ego may be the only thing you have—why should you want to annihilate it? This process is just something that happens when you start searching. You gradually shed certain egos. And after you shed them you're glad you got rid of them. You're glad that you don't have to live with that nonsense. But it is not a matter of going out deliberately trying to annihilate your ego, trying to be forcefully humble, to make yourself a community blob that is inoffensive to the rest of the mob.

REVERSAL

One of the reasons why I came out of the woodwork and started to talk was that I found many little cults or isms that pretended to take people into spiritual enlightenment, but that gave no sensible method. Most of them prescribed a certain form of action such as a mantra, a prayer, or a physical exercise—a physical attack.

But in the particular system that we employ in our group we use the phrase "a reverse vector." There is no way to approach truth, because to approach truth would mean to aim in a certain direction which is unproven. That you must know truth before you can aim at it—you must know what you're aiming at and also know who is aiming.

Now this may seem like a tremendous task, to aim away from everything that is untrue. This might sound unnecessarily stern. But it is not impossible that we can aim away from untruth.

Of course, the question comes up, "What is untrue? If we don't know what ‘true' is, how can we know what ‘untrue' is?" But we do know that which is ridiculous, or absurd, and we can go back to common sense.

And I cannot in this instance prescribe for you or label what is absurd. What is absurd for you may not be absurd for me, or for the fellow next to you. You have no alternative except to determine what is absurd for you and to get away from it.

A little while ago I said that we should set up certain yardsticks. To me it is absurd to think that money can buy truth. And I immediately turn my back on that type of practice.

So I narrow it down to the groups who don't charge, and I search among them. And I find one that says, "You have to put the guru up in the middle of your forehead and concentrate on him." Well, that may be meaningful, or that may be absurd in relation to another discipline that may seem to be sensible. So we decide to at least tentatively put the thing that is seemingly more absurd in the background, and to concentrate our attention on what seems to be more sensible.

Now this is the total formula that you follow. And before you get into too much of this business of a reverse vector you have to develop an intuition, or you will not know how to decide that which is absurd. Some things we reject accurately because they are absurd, but sometimes we reject things only because they don't include things which we want to do. In other words, we are good at refusing to accept any philosophy that doesn't approve of all our vices or of all the directions that we would like to take.

Basically we have to develop our intuition and our reason. Now I didn't say "logic"—logic is often a form of vanity. Intellectual thinking can be a vanity trip. But we have only two things with which to evaluate this problem. Two eyes, so to speak—we're relative creatures. One of these is our intuition and the other one is our logic, or rather, our reasoning powers.

And we must try as we go along to develop these a little better, so that we will not be kidding ourselves or doing wishful thinking. Now there are ways of developing your intuition. One of them, of course, is by checking it. For instance, by using ESP cards—trying to pick up things directly with your mind and then watching to see if you're getting a greater degree of accuracy.

There are certain mental exercises, such as using mathematics, that can be used. We give an "intensive" of largely mental math exercises, prepared for the purpose of exercising logic, to try to get you to try to think in an orderly manner, rather than in a random, desire manner.

There is a certain lifestyle, a certain way of living that develops your intuition. And the more you have your intuition developed the better able you will be to cut time shorter and to bypass a lot of useless movements and useless books. To go right to the heart of the thing.

If you do pick up a book and read it, you will have to know if the author was on the level or if he was just writing a book to sell it. If you don't have an intuition developed it is not going to do you any good to sort, because you may make the wrong decision—from lack of discrimination.

The next thing to concentrate on of course is, basically, work. You have to get into the place where the material is, with people who know something. You have to join some sort of human relationship, to work with some group if possible, so that you will be reminded to go back when you slip and forget. Reminded to keep digging, keep meditating, or keep some sort of action going that will keep your head on the problem.

Because this process is basically the sharpening-up of a computer. Giving the computer two important faculties, developing these faculties, and then keeping a problem in that computer incessantly. Keep feeding that problem into the computer until the computer solves it.

This process is equated in some Zen schools by the use of a koan. Now I don't like to put the entire value of Zen into the koan, to say that all you have to do is to get a koan—this seems to be the feeling that is received by some Western students of Zen.

I believe that the koan is pretty much a system of finding sense by the intense application of non-sense. There are not enough symbols existing to adequately describe the truth—and the more symbols you use the more confused you may become. Whereas, in the Zen technique you take just one set of symbols, one word or so, and you use this as a koan. By concentrating upon it, although it seems to have no meaning, you'll arrive at sense. That's the idea.

Well, this maybe. But I would recommend that you take a word or an idea that may have some meaning, and concentrate on it until you know more about it. Of course, you can use then an English koan to a much better advantage. Such as the words, "Who am I?" or "What am I'?" or "What am I doing?" This type of koan is much more effective. And there are variations of it as you go along such as, "What is intuition?" In other words, "What is this thing and how does it help me?"

Now this outline is about as much as can be given out as the generally advised path. The detailed path for the person who is interested in finding self-realization—that is, total self-realization—is almost an individual case. You can't just write a general blueprint and say, "Here it is—follow this." Because you're going to run into many instances of roadblocks that are not in the books. Each personality is different, and each set of egos is rooted differently.

Here again the group is of value. Whether there is a teacher or not, some people may be able to help you recognize an ego that you may not be aware of. And it is not always a group confrontation—the cure for a lot of this is an individual one-to-one thing.

And the business of transmission is generally a one-to-one thing. Transmission is the finding of the ability for direct contact of mind with mind, to communicate energy from one head to another, for the purpose of expediting some mental realization.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

And now we will turn this into a more informal talk. I think we will get further by getting into your personal inquiries.

Q: After your experience, what is your present state in relation to your previous state, and what is your present perception?

Rose: Well, again I wonder how it's best to describe what you're asking me. One thing is that I don't take the physical world to be as significant as I used to. When you are in an experience you are out of this dimension. And when you come back you have to be in this dimension—you can't do it halfway. Nevertheless, you always carry with you the memories that this dimension is not real. The other is more real, now.

Paradoxically, while you're here this dimension is real—it's all you've got. Once again you have to accept it as being totally real—and yet you have the memory that it is not totally real. That it is not the only dimension.

Q: What do you mean when you talk about dropping certain egos?

Rose: This isn't just idle talk about dropping some little fault or habit. There are tremendous things that are built into us—they come with the package when we are born. And children have them, although not to the same degree that older people do. For instance, we have a power ego. We like to be impressive with people. But after a while we may philosophically sort of drop it and say, "Well, I'm not that important." This is an example of an ego and it can be a real hindrance.

But there is another ego, and that is the survival ego . . . that we don't want to give up this life. If somebody throws a hatchet at us we duck—we can't just stand there and take it, because we don't have the conviction yet where we're going. So we hang onto this ego.

Then there is the spiritual survival ego, in which we think that we're important enough to live forever. When you are young you look into the mirror and say, "I don't know about the rest of those suckers out there, but I am really a special creature." This is an ego. "Those other people out there are just vegetables, but I am going to find immortality." Well—before you find it you will give that up. You give up the ego of .physical survival and you give up all hope of spiritual attainment.

But you can't give them up for long, because those are the things that keep body and mind together. That's the reason that this experience is a very brief experience. You die—you actually die—and you can't stay dead for a long time. And when you come back you've got to get back into the game again.

Q: I was wondering about faith. Don't you have to have faith in your own path?

Rose: You have to have a certain kind of faith. I always say, "Doubt everything except your ability to doubt." You have to have faith in your ability to accomplish, your ability to sort.

There is nothing proven. We know nothing for sure—we don't even know that we exist. But we more or less have to postulate or accept as a fact that we exist and that we can do something, at least tentatively, until we prove that we can do something. Or—prove that something can happen to us.

Q: Would you relate something about your experience to us?

Rose: Yes, if you're curious I can tell you. It occurred in Seattle, Washington—I was thirty years of age at the time and I had been fed-up several times with what I was doing. I had been into yoga and other things, and several times between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty I had given it up and wished I could go out, get drunk, and forget about it. In fact, I had gone to Seattle to get married and I was going to chuck the whole thing. I said, "If I get married, I'll throw it out—forget about it."

But while I was there I picked up a job, and again I gravitated down toward the library. I'm back down there reading books on yoga, and doing my yoga exercises—trying to marry the two, the mundane world and this mental drive that I had. I think that this was the catalytic factor that caused the experience—trying to bring these two together. I could be wrong.

I had a room in an apartment hotel of sorts, and I would come home every day, sit up on the bed with my feet tucked up under me, meditate and think. So this particular day I sat there, —and I started to get a pain in the top of my head, right in the center of the top. The pain got worse—in fact it got so bad that I started weeping.

Tears started to come out of my eyes. I couldn't stand it, and I thought, "Oh boy, three thousand miles from home and I've got to blow my stack. That's what is happening." I thought that I would have a stroke or possibly go crazy. Because I didn't think that it would just stop on its own.

But I was aware at the peak of this pain of going out the hotel window. I was aware of actually seeing people who were on the street at the time, except that I was above them. This was in daylight, incidentally, it wasn't at night. My window looked out toward the Cascade Range of snow-capped mountains. And I watched this just as if I were in an airplane, passing underneath me.

And then there was sort of a time flip-over, in which I was no longer over the Cascade Range—now I could see all of humanity. I knew that all I had to do was look wherever I wanted, and I could see any man who ever lived or would live. There was no such thing as time. These people were all living now—all I had to do was to check them out, if I wished.

So I looked and I saw myself. I could see myself struggling down there—Richard Rose—I could see his whole life pattern. I'm still in a sort of astral projection form, I'm still much attached to the body, to these people, and I feel a tremendous amount of grief. A tremendous amount of sadness for this seemingly senseless struggle.

Because when this happens you've got in the back of your head the question of why people have to struggle, and if there is a Creator who could just say, "You're all smart—all I have to do is to make you smart—why should I make you stupid?" So why is all this travail going on?

Then I realized that I was both humanity and my individual self, and that I was everything. And in an instant I realized that humanity didn't exist and that I didn't exist. But that I did exist in nothingness and everythingness, infinitely. And how long this lasted I had no way of checking, because I was alone and when I came back it was rather traumatic. And I stayed that way for several days, because it is as difficult to come back as it is to go into it.

This experience is almost synonymous with the one that Paul Wood had, the fellow we were talking about earlier—in relation to the Lord's Prayer formula.

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES

So never get the idea that a spiritual experience of this sort is pleasant or blissful. Now that doesn't mean that all spiritual experiences are not blissful. People often think that all spiritual experiences are the same—this isn't true.

Ramana Maharshi was a teacher whom Paul Brunton supposedly discovered in India some years ago. And his book The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi was the first one that I saw that describes the differences in what are called spiritual exaltations.

He describes the differences between what we call cosmic consciousness (Kevala Nirvikalpa Samadhi) and enlightenment (Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi). He describes them very accurately in plain and simple terms.

He said that Kevala Samadhi is a situation in which the mind is like a bucket attached to the end of a rope and lying in the bottom of a well. The mind is dropped down in meditation but at anytime it can pull itself back out. It is no great travail to go down into the bottom of the well, rest a while, and it's no great travail to come back up. This is the cosmic consciousness experience.

Whereas Sahaja Samadhi, the enlightenment experience, is equivalent to a river flowing into the ocean. And once it flows there we don't recognize the river, it disappears. Its identity is lost, its individuality is lost, and it never returns. This is the basic difference.

Now there are other "exaltations," and this is where the confusion comes in—the confusion is in Zen as well. Every word that describes spiritual experience is not synonymous with the others that describe spiritual experiences. We have words like nirvana, moksha, samadhi, and satori, which are not all the same, if you go by the descriptions of the experience in the different accounts.

Satori is an experience anterior to, prior to cosmic consciousness, not beyond it or superior to it. Because it is described as a relative experience. Cosmic consciousness is a relative experience—enlightenment is an absolute experience.

There is a book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke which gives several accounts: Christ, St. Paul, Buddha, St. John of the Cross, Pascal, Mohammed. They all have a common denominator in that the person experienced ecstasy, witnessed color, light, beauty, and found peace within his heart. This is a relative experience.

The enlightenment experience is the experience of nothingness and everythingness—and it is said this way because neither of them is the experience. It is paradoxical or untrue to call it just nothingness, because it's not oblivion. But it is the knowledge, or rather the being, or entry into nothingness and everythingness. And that is the total experience.

Now we go back and we hear a person talking about salvation. He says, "I have reached the paramount experience. I'm saved." And I realized a long time ago that the person describing this experience did not have the same thing as cosmic consciousness.

Or you pick up a book on Zen and you read about satori, which is the "wow" experience. A fellow says, "I went to such-and-such ashram, I stayed there so many months or years, and one day—Wow, I knew it! And I had a beer with the headmaster and we went away laughing together—we got it." This is not enlightenment. Because if this man had enlightenment they would have carried him out on a stretcher—it's that drastic. You don't die and then laugh and say "Wow!" Death is more final than that.

PROGRESSIVE STAGES

Gurdjieff talks about man numbers one, two, three and four. Man number one is instinctive, number two is emotional, number three is intellectual, and man number four is philosophic. These are the steps that we take in the natural evolution of a person, regardless of whether the person is spiritual or not.

When we start off we just function instinctively—we eat, we reproduce, we hunt a place to hide when it's raining—that sort of thing. And if we can get more of the same, we get more of the same. More eating, more reproducing, more pleasure, more luxury, leisure, security.

But a time comes when a person feels that this is inadequate, that he has a greater meaning than say, just being an animal. And he then attaches himself to a personal figure—this is one of the symptoms. This personal figure may be Jesus Christ, it may be a guru, it may be some spiritual teacher who is dead. But it's always a personal figure, a male god—that is, a man-god or a human god type.

And by intense concentration on this he forgets himself, he loses himself in this other person. And he reaches a rapture or an exaltation, as the psychologists call it. And this has distinguishable characteristics: he loses himself, he is less instinctive, he can forget his vices, he can be free of them in fact, by focusing upon this other being.

But again, sometimes a person gets disgusted with this type of experience. After so many years go by he may say, "Hey, —that was my emotion. I projected perhaps, onto another person. Does that person really exist, outside of a book?"

So he goes about applying his intellect to this. Maybe he gets into translating the Bible to find out if this fellow did exist. Then he gets into the Kabbalah and starts into the shaking of the head with numerological symbols, or into mathematics, which is pretty much the same as the Kabbalah; math may be the substitution of symbols for concepts.

After this is done for so long the mind awakens to the meaning for mathematics—like a light bulb turning on. There is a realization of exactly what is meant by "x plus y equals z." And you say, "Wow! Now I know." The whole algebraic system—the whole thing—pops. Now if you have had this experience, you will know what satori is like—but instead of algebraic symbols you'll have artificial symbols of philosophy or some esoteric system. And this experience in turn is followed by a transition.

These transitions or elations are let's say the sharps or flats between the high points of the instinctive, emotional, and intellectual man. You go through an exaltation to take a rest, and you relax or stay a while in each one of these.

And the next step, of course, is when you realize that your intellect is a vanity. You know that you can work these math problems fast, you're good at remembering these things, you can play chess and beat so many other people, because you've got a good mathematical head. But then you realize that this is all a vanity trip and that you don't know anything yet. That it didn't bring you the real realization about what your thoughts are and what your interior self is.

I say that there are three things that have to be answered: Whom you were before you were born, whom you are after death, and what your relation is to the Ultimate.

And any movement that does not answer all three of them doesn't answer any of them. You'll notice in some of the movements that they will tell you what is going to happen to you, but they never say where you came from. Some of them will say that you just spontaneously arrived here. Some will tell you where you came from, but they have no knowledge of your relation to the Ultimate—provable, that is. They may give you a concept structure, but they don't give you something that is really substantial and answers to common sense.

So we get back to the idea of saying, "Hey, this intellect thing isn't going to take me anyplace. I've got to get into a general appraisal of all the data that I can pick up." This is philosophy—going out and bringing all sorts of systems of thinking together and trying to find something just maybe by luck, by throwing a whole lot of garbage into the computer, a mass of erudite writings.

And as a result of this, strangely enough, we even lose the philosophic ego—if we're able to do this. This is where cosmic consciousness (Kevala Samadhi) comes in—this is where we experience ecstasy. But ecstasy is not enlightenment—it is or may be one of the landmarks toward enlightenment.

Q: Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Rose: No—I have only heard about it. This is what we're beset with today—I prefer not to get into Zen writings at all. I don't know what the book is about. It's possible that his concentration of motorcycle maintenance may have been his koan, if he focused his head on it.

Q: You said that enlightenment was dying?

Rose: Yes.

Q: It doesn't seem that this would be a very pleasant experience.

Rose: I didn't say that it would be.

Q: One wonders why people would look for it.

Rose: Yes. Maybe I shouldn't tell you—maybe I should let you think that it's nice. Again, you're at a disadvantage when you hear this. The only advantage of telling you this, is that when it happens you won't jump out the window. You'll say, "I expected that it might be rough." That's all.

Q: Can't you see it as a rebirth instead of dying? You can't see things freshly if you don't let go of your previous conceptions.

Rose: Why do you have to see things freshly?

Q: Seeing things for what they are without . . .

Rose: Hanging onto the fence, do you mean? Well, you have to let go of what you think things are. Now as far as the idea that there's no birth unless there is dying—it's possible that "you" may not experience birth. That the only reason why people do experience birth is that they never realized that they could stay dead. They maybe feel compelled to play the game, to go back on the stage—this is one of the concepts.

The Buddhistic concept of reincarnation was claimed by some to be a misinterpretation—that Buddha was supposed to have meant re-occurrence. That the same life reoccurred. He said, "When you light the candle again, is it the same flame, or is it another flame?" Some people think that it's another candle—no. It's the same candle, you just witness the same drama over and over and over.

Q: Would you say that you witnessed Nirvana at the time of your experience? If so, what about your worldly attachment then? You mentioned that you were about to get married.

Rose: Well, I didn't marry then. The only thing that I did was to get out of town and go back to where it was a little safer. You know, closer to the cemetery in case something happened. But I had no more ideas about getting married for a while. I did get married the next year to somebody entirely different.

The idea about Nirvana now—I presume that what is written about Buddha's experience was written not by Buddha but by somebody else, the same as with the experiences of Christ. But I understand that his "Nirvanam" was identical with the word enlightenment (Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi). If you take the word Nirvana in that sense it's not synonymous with satori.

Q: Were you able to function after having this experience?

Rose: For about a week very poorly. Very poorly. You're pretty helpless for quite a while. And of course, the main thing is that there's no reason to function, and the difficulty is in getting yourself to either function or commit suicide. This seems to be the alternative. That either one is equally valid, and it seems like quite a burden to go through the motions.

I came back a little closer to home, to Cleveland for a while. I didn't go all the way back to West Virginia. And what I experienced then was that I began to see people more as robots—they were almost transparent. They weren't actually solid, and they stayed that way for quite a while.

Not only that but I could see their motivations—their motivations seemed to be very transparent. And everything became so absurd.

I would get shocked. I remember I came out of the hotel in Cleveland and the sidewalks were full of people—marching. They had no thoughts, their faces were almost blank. And I thought, "Oh boy, some terrible thing has happened. They're all in a state of shock." And I went up to them—they didn't seem to be saying much—and I said, "What happened?"

And one of them said, "What do you mean, ‘What happened?'" I said, "Where are you going?" And he said, "To the ball game." They were going down to the stadium. All I picked up was that these people had no great purpose in life. They were just going as zombies, speechless. If they were talking, if they were even saying anything, it wasn't apparent to me.

So this was the transition. Trying to get back into this thing of saying, "Oh yes, I'm in rapport with your little head game." This is basically what social rapport is. We have to get out there and try to feel this fellow's personality, so to speak, and get along with it.

Q: So one might say you were quite mad?

Rose: You might say that, yes. Oh—according to definitions, I would have hated for a modern psychologist to have gotten ahold of me.

We have a friend right now, from Brown University, who was just committed to Butler. He's going through a spiritual experience—there's absolutely nothing wrong with him. But he was starting to weep and to break down, and that's where he ended up. I went down and talked to him and I could stop him, I stopped him two or three times. But I couldn't stay there day and night. The thing is, he should go through the experience and get it over with. But the psychiatrist was pumping him full of dope. So it was unfortunate that he had to stagger into there.

Q: There is a fear there with me. Occasionally I feel as if I am on the verge of breaking into that, and I pull back.

Rose: Right. That's the reason why I felt that I should talk about it. Because some of you people may at some time or another go into an experience of this sort.

I said to the boy when I first went in, "What were the symptoms?" And he said, "I thought I was dying." And I said, "Good—this is one of the signs, there's nothing wrong with you. Because if you were dying the doctors would have found it with stethoscope, blood pressure gauge, and so forth. So it's manifest that you're not dying, or you would be dead by this time." That this is a psychic experience, not a physical death.

Q: What about a person going through this who might find himself committed?

Rose: There's no answer. You just hope that these buzzards don't do too much to you, that's all.

A.T.: Well, that's the purpose of having a group. People who can isolate you.

Rose: That's right. That's what I tried to do with this fellow. I went down and talked with the therapist—and I found the therapist giving me the once-over.

I said, "Hey—don't pump this guy full of dope. He's got to go through this either now or later. If you think that he's going to hurt somebody, put him in a room where he can't. But I guarantee you he'll not hurt anybody."

There is a tendency for sociologists to think that they are going to be the future planners for the robot enterprise. That the government will somehow fund them and put them in charge of the behavioral patterns in the country, so that people won't cause any ripples. When you start rioting in the streets you'll be herded into someplace, given a shot in the posterior, and come out loving humanity. This kind of idea.

And that's what this doctor told me at the hospital two nights ago. He said, "We have a drug for almost every thought." That if they find that your thoughts travel in a certain direction, "We have a drug that will turn you around."

"This guy shows paranoid inclinations, so give him so many milligrams of such-and-such a drug. Well, what do you know? Now he doesn't act like a paranoid, he acts like a schizophrenic. So we give him a counter-shot for that and he'll be back to work, back to paying taxes, and the government will give that money to fund me and my institution."

Q: Does your philosophy work together with psychology?

Rose: Yes. I think that Zen is the greatest psychoanalytic system in the world—it goes directly inside. But what modern psychology and psychiatry are doing is dealing with symptoms, and a conjured-up set of symptoms at that. It used to be inkblots.

Q: Well, that's a tangible thing. That's what they're trying to work with.

Rose: Right, that's my criticism. They should enter the mind directly. If you want to be a psychologist, you should learn to enter a person's mind and know what he's thinking. And you'll know why he is thinking it. Walk one mile in his moccasins and you won't have any trouble diagnosing his case.

First of all, I don't believe that all these things which are called insanity are insanity; and I think that a lot of the writers are coming into this broader scope. I believe that insanity should be defined as breakdown of brain tissue or something else in the body, that would cause erratic reactions or behavior.

Now there is something else. A person can become possessed—and don't think that this is fiction. These are real cases. You can become possessed, and modern psychology refuses to accept it. They may use the word schizophrenia for possession. And consequently, any cure or therapy is going to be in the wrong direction.

Instead of getting rid of this double occupant they go about telling this fellow that he is messed-up. Attacking him for it, or maybe giving him a drug that knocks him out so completely that this other thing doesn't manifest. They used to have a cure in Bedlam a century or so ago—they beat the hell out of the patients. Harass the body enough and things will leave; not even a devil would stay inside them. Turn the water hose on them—this was also done.

FREUD AND FOLLOWERS

Q: What do you think of Sigmund Freud?

Rose: Well, I don't criticize Freud entirely. The only thing I criticize him for was that he was more intent upon packaging. The more I read about Freud the more I realized that what he was doing was running around Europe trying to set up a whole string of chain-store institutes or places for therapy.

And he was surrounding himself with a group of less able men than himself. People who were glad to latch onto the bandwagon if it showed signs of making money.

But as for his basic concepts, I think that each one of these people has discovered something that is worth listening to. The sexual concept of Freud's had not come up before, and it was good to look at things from that viewpoint for a change—that some of our problems could be caused by sex.

Sometimes most of our motivation is sex. If you want to analyze yourself and your motivations today you will come around to sex: Why do you want a job? Why do you want an education? Male or female now. The guy wants an education, he goes to college, for what? A better job? Because if he doesn't get a better job he is not going to be able to reproduce in the same fashion—he may have to settle for quite a bit less. Consequently, he is going out to get a job by which he can support the best woman he can find.

The girl goes to college, sometimes, to find one of these able-bodied people who can support her. I'm not saying that this is always the case but nevertheless, we are basically motivated by sex in a lot of our directions. I don't say that we are motivated by sex in our spiritual directions or philosophic directions, but in the mundane directions the motivations are mostly sexual.

Then we get to the will to power. Nietzsche was pretty much going along these lines, and the idea of the will to power in some of the psychologists who followed him went more or less in the same direction.

And then Victor Frankl came up with the idea of the will to meaning. I was really amazed when I first saw his book. I thought, "Here is a psychiatrist for a change who is on the right path." That basically this is what everybody wants—they want to know who they are.

Some of them get tired, that's all. The majority are mostly sunk into something like, "Oh, the factors are too great, the studies are too much for me to encompass in a lifetime. I'm going to let the preacher do it; I'll take his word for it. I'm just too tired to go through all this study, this thinking, or whatever it is that has to be done."

But everybody wants to know who they are. Everybody realizes that the game is fixed and that they should find out what the puzzle is. But they don't do it.

Frankl discovered this—I thought, when I read the first few pages of his book. But after I got into the book I found out that what he was talking about was, "Assume a meaning; if you don't have one, pretend you have one. Go grab a meaning—survive." In other words, let your wife die in the concentration camp, but hang onto that manuscript until you get out. That was his meaning for living.

Q: This sounds like Meister Eckhart—he wrote a poem about being both God and a creature. Is it possible to be in a place where you can see the Absolute and yet still hang onto this world?

Rose: I'm stuck here for a while—don't have much choice. Maybe I do.

Q: What about the other side of the coin, seeing the Absolute?

Rose: I'm still a little unsure about what you are driving at, but let me try to anticipate it, or feel what you're saying:

The question that, possibly the person who has seen the Absolute would be concerned or give a damn about whether Freud was packaging his stuff, or would be concerned with the behavior of people, whether they got along or didn't, or whether they understood or didn't.

Again, I definitely, sincerely do not worry too much about what goes on. But if I am talking to people who are about to embark on a spiritual path—then I say, "Hey, there are certain things in this rat race that you want to watch out for."

If you are going to read books on psychology, try to learn how to sort with your intuition, to be able to tell what these people are up to. Did they make a tremendous discovery that can help you, that you can hang onto as you go down your spiritual path? Or are they playing some head game just to package and sell books or some therapy system? This is what is important.

And all of this in my estimation is important. In other words, this is. What you see here in these various stage acts, this act of mankind on the stage, is part of the Absolute. So there is no dichotomy.

THE RELATIVE DIMENSION

Q: Why are we caught up in this relative world? Is there any value to it?

Rose: This is the catch. When I was about twenty-one years of age I tried to write a poem about this. The theme was, "Why am I on this path?" This too is implanted. It had to be. I am not an individual who says suddenly, "I'm going to get rid of these hangups and barnacles and be a free individual." I had to be almost programmed to look for the truth.

Now what does this mean? In esoteric or spiritual writings you hear words like, "We have lost our way from the father." That each particle wants to go back to the Father. This is what I meant when I said that everybody is looking for the truth.

I don't like to say it in such a religious sounding way that would have a listener think, "Well, this is just a belief, this is the foundation that you have." But this is the feeling that you get when you go back there—that you went back to the Father. That you had lost your way, so to speak, because your consciousness had become fascinated.

I was talking earlier today about one of my grandchildren, a baby. The baby isn't totally in this dimension, at this age. It will only come into this dimension for a time. And I realized that what you have to do to keep a baby in this dimension is to keep its attention. You neglect that baby and it will die.

This applies to some animals also. It is said that if you let a monkey lay and don't give him something that is like a mother or a friend, he will close in on himself and die. He just retreats into the other dimension.

So what do we do with our babies? We make crazy noises at them, we talk baby-talk to them, and try to attract that baby's attention. We singsongs to it and keep dangling toys in front of it. Finally the baby starts watching what is in front of it and becomes enchanted by it. The next thing you know he is exploring the whole room, and pretty soon he is hooked.

Q: What are your views on reincarnation?

Rose: First of all, if I knew for sure that you were going to reincarnate, I wouldn't tell you. Because I believe that it becomes a form of procrastination.

There may be cases where people have realized that they have lived before, or that they have been on the stage before, something of this sort. But this idea of reincarnation can be used for several purposes. It can be used by the powers of that particular area to tell the person, "Don't feel bad because I'm stealing all your money—the next time around you will be in charge and you will be stealing my money." Or, "The reason that you are here is that you stole my money last time." This is one rationalization connected with the theory of reincarnation.

And the other rationalization is of course, "You've got all the time in the world. This cosmos turns slowly—and in time you'll get there."

Q: You talked about the different levels of our being. Are these like stages of development?

Rose: Yes. It seems pretty hard to make a jump, although there seem to be people who have possibly been born with a certain faculty that other people were not born with—they seem to jump a bit faster.

The saying is that these people seem to be "old souls" when they are born. So we do see such cases where people move rather rapidly, in comparison to others for whom it took years or possibly a lifetime to break through. Sometimes it happens after a long life of spiritual work, and you will notice it happening to them on their deathbeds.

Q: Do you see these states of being as able to coexist at the same time and be constant?

Rose: They do. For example, if you reach the salvationistic experience you never completely lose it. And you don't have to lose it as you go along. You don't deny it, even if you find that it isn't the final experience.

In other words, when a person has a salvationistic experience, that to him is the maximum experience and everybody else is crazy. Only when they transcend the instinctive level can they still be an instinctive person, recognizing the values of instinctive living, the energy that comes from instinctive living, and be now, on an emotional level. And then—still be an intellectual person, recognizing that it is a vanity while becoming a philosophic person, and still go on from there.

Part of the system that I advise in The Albigen Papers is that we make milk from thorns. These very things which are negative can be turned, the energy taken from them, and this energy used in progression—in finding goals faster.

Q: When you reach the point where the physical world and time become unreal in a way, when practical life loses its value and doesn't matter—it can become pretty difficult.

Rose: I know. I know that. The only thing I can say is to try to keep yourself chemically balanced, that's all. You can handle it, if you don't become unbalanced chemically.

GOD, BUDDHISM, CHRISTIANITY

Q: Do you believe that there is a God?

Rose: I don't believe that the God that people talk about exists.

Q: Where does Jesus Christ fit in? Was he somebody who attained enlightenment?

Rose: Well, I don't really know that. I believe that there were people who lived on Earth who had a great potential. And I think that sometimes their writings are misread. And I don't pretend to know what they knew.

Buddha wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing—but we find say three gospels written almost identically at a time when printing was expensive. And I'm somewhat dubious about this idea of wasting the time in the writing of three almost identical gospels.

And yet, this book gives us the formula. As I said, you will find formulas in sacred writings. In my particular case I got disgusted with the whole Christian movement for a while, and ignored the formulas therein—and then came back and rediscovered them. For instance "the way, the truth, and the life," is a good biblical formula for any seeker.

The paths to the truth are three-fold in both Buddhism and Christianity. The formula is the way, the truth, and the life. You don't just work on one thing—you have to work on three levels at once. In Buddhism it's the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Both formulas are pretty much synonymous—dharma means way, and the sangha is the brotherhood.

You have to become the truth, you must apply the discipline, and you must be associated with a brotherhood—that's the life in the Christian context. The truth, of course, is the central thing. Christ said, "I am the truth." He also said, "I am the way and the life."

This implies that he too became. He had to become, he didn't learn. He may have studied with somebody, such as the Essenes, but basically his admonition was to become. He didn't say, "I learned the truth," he said, "I am the truth." This was the distinction.

Now exactly whether he did say this or not, whether or not somebody just wrote it down, I don't know. That "somebody" might have said, "Well, we liked that fellow, he was in our club, let's make him a Messiah." This argument had been presented. And I don't like to rule on it.

I say to find out for yourself, basically. Or to try to find somebody who is living and has gone through some experience, and talk to them. It may do you more good than trying to live according to the code of someone whom somebody else has written about.

Q: I take it that you don't believe in God.

Rose: That's not correct. Don't get me wrong—I believe that the enlightenment experience is the same as the God experience. But I like to qualify this because the term God is generally used with certain implications.

Q: God is thought of as being a mind, a perfect divine mind.

Rose: Well, yes—but there is a concept that reaches beyond that. There is an intermediary state that you enter after death, and that is mind, the mind dimension. Mary Baker Eddy discovered that this existed, possibly by studying some Eastern philosophy, and she calls it Universal Mind.

In other words, in your individual mind you have your own private thoughts, but nevertheless, your mind functions at its best when it is in contact with the mind dimension. Some sects in India call this the Buddhic mind. Paul Brunton calls it the Overself, of which we are all a part—like the Brahman, so to speak.

The basic concept of the Atman and the Brahman would be closest, if you're talking about the God concept. The Atman being the individual ray that emanates from the central light that is the Brahman. The ray of light, that plays upon the void, seems to be an individual and identifies itself with a certain name. But it is really attached at the other end to the Brahman, the Absolute.

So this is an entirely different concept of God than the guy with the big whiskers that sits up there and says, "Hey, you're getting out of line down there. You broke a rule."

Q: Are you saying that God is Universal Mind?

Rose: No. I don't say that God is even Universal Mind. I think that the Absolute is a stage beyond mind. The mind is a dimension.

And you discover that the mind is a dimension by losing the mundane mind. The individual mind, the mundane mind, gives way and you realize—that you don't have an individual mind—that it is mostly just contact with mind-stuff, so to speak.

OTHER SYSTEMS

Q: Is this material included in your book?

Rose: There are other books that give this out about as plainly as it can be given. When I wrote The Albigen Papers I tried to avoid repeating as much as possible, but I listed certain books which I consider to be helpful or accurate. And these the group tries to make available, if they're hard to find.

Ramana Maharshi's book gives very accurate descriptions, although this one is not listed in my book. I do mention Conquest of Illusion by J.J. van der Leeuw—you can get this one through us or through Theosophical bookstores, if not in the general bookstores. Paul Brunton's books are very good, such as The Wisdom of the Overself and Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga.

Q: What is your opinion of Krishnamurti?

Rose: Well, I really can't say definitely. Incidentally, this book by Van der Leeuw was dedicated to Krishnamurti. I have never met Krishnamurti, never heard him talk, but I have watched his life over the years—he's a bit older than I.

It's very possible that Krishnamurti is an enlightened man. Although I wonder sometimes at some of the material in his books and lectures. I have read some of these, and wondered why he gets into such things as remaking society, or making society a better place to live. I have no desire to play with the factors, the numberless factors, that go into making society any different. I have seen men like Stalin and Hitler try, and if those fellows couldn't do it there's no sense in my trying, there's no sense in Krishnamurti trying. In other words, this world is like a Juggernaut that is rolling along, and there's no sense in throwing yourself under the wheels.

But Krishnamurti has a life history of a man who wanted to find the truth. You know his history, of course. He was Annie Besant's disciple, so to speak, and they tried to make a messiah out of him. The Theosophists or Blavatsky or somebody had predicted that a reincarnation of Christ was due, one of the Masters was going to reappear, and they had Krishnamurti groomed to be this new messiah. They had this all built up, and they were going to put him on the scene at the right time.

But Krishnamurti rebelled and spilled the can of beans. He said he didn't intend to do anything of the sort. In other words, he wanted to find the truth himself. He could lecture, but he was not going to sell any merchandise."

Then he disappeared from the scene and nothing much was heard about him for ten or fifteen years. And it was in that period of time I think, that he was going through the trauma that was necessary to bring his mind into realization.

When he emerged, his lectures had a different tone. Before, they were mostly devotional little things like At the Feet of the Master. But now he was coming out and saying, "I see a new world." (When he was looking out the window of a train.) And, "You should see a new world."

Q: If this was a spiritual experience that you had, why did it include marriage as a consequence?

Rose: I didn't get married as a consequence of that experience. I got married as a consequence of a body, which I inherited from my parents, that had a prostate gland in it.

Q: Well isn't sexuality an attachment? How did you resolve the idea of marriage after your experience?

Rose: I worded my answer to you in a decided manner. I have never been attached, even before the experience. The idea of getting married was not because of sexual attachment. The idea was just help.

It's like with anything else—it may be a lot of fun to eat food, but you can eat without having the fun. And I'm not saying that you should deny the fun if it's there. The idea is that you should not quit eating just to relinquish the ego for eating, let's say, or giving up the desire for food to such an extent that you would starve to death.

There is a difference. You should realize that there is such a thing as detachment. You can go through a garden and admire the flowers, but you don't have to pull them up by the roots. This is the mark. You don't have to cram everything into yourself physically and say, "That is mind—I want that." But also you do not have to say, "I'm going to castrate myself." If you castrate yourself you might lose some of the energy that is needed to arrive at something, or to raise your kundalini.

Q: My understanding is that any sensual pleasure feeds an addiction, and may keep you from spirituality.

Rose: Sure, absolutely. I had no addiction for anything and never did have.

Q: Well how can you indulge in a sensual pleasure . . . !?

Rose: Hey—you're putting a color on it that isn't there. How do you know that I indulge in a sensual pleasure? How do you know I don't just indulge in a physical act? Why do you use these terms when you don't know how I indulge?

And I'm not going to tell you any more because—you might start writing books about me. (laughter)

Q: What percentage of people ever attain the enlightenment experience?

Rose: Bucke says one in a million.

Q: I was also wondering where people like Einstein and others fit in.

Rose: Well—I don't know. Some of these people may have individual lives, but generally if you become too prominent a public figure, with too much attention placed on you, it's not too good. To have the obligations of a politician, a scientist, or something of that sort, and become occupied with such is detrimental to spiritual ideas and work.

One of the greatest detriments to spiritual work sometimes can be to have an ability as a scientist, working in a research lab or something, and to be using your head all day. When you go home after work and try to meditate you will be wanting to go out and chop wood or play golf to get some exercise. Your work pretty much takes all the quantum energy that has been accumulated.

The same in any business. If you get into a business and it takes up all your energy, you are not going to be able to do the proper thinking and inward looking, so to speak. So it is difficult to find a niche in life in which you can live and get philosophic things done.

So I don't know about these people. I used to think when I was younger that every smart man knew about the ultimate search. A person like Einstein, "certainly must be enlightened."

But as I gathered from the conversations of Einstein shortly before his death, he didn't believe that there was anything that happened after death. His concept was just oblivion.

Q: He said that if he had to do it over again he would be a cobbler.

Rose: He started out as something like that didn't he? A clerk or something?

Q: Weren't there a lot of enlightened Zen masters in China? Isn't transmission used in all the Zen schools?

Rose: Huang Po, I think it was, answered the same question with a, "No." Somebody asked that out of the several monasteries in China, each of which had two or three thousand students of Zen, "You mean there's no large number of those students becoming enlightened?"

And he said, "There is no Zen without transmission, and there isn't a single man in China who can transmit." Imagine—of all these thousands of people. So it is not something that you encounter very often.

But if you see it, if you're near it, you will know what is happening. It is done through direct rapport. Transmission is direct mind to mind.

There is a part of our system which I haven't mentioned too much tonight, and even if you attend the weekly group meetings it might be rather vague to you. When you first get into it you might think it looks somewhat like an encounter group. We believe in approaching the truth by a sort of challenging of each other's thoughts: "Why do you think along a certain way? Are you being honest with yourself in this or that?" This sort of thing.

But then we have another thing which we call rapport sessions, in which we are trying to develop the intuition, and to sort of get the head in a position where transmission can be effected; where direct mind-to-mind can be experienced. To where you can sit and look at another man and say, "You're thinking this . . . and be right. This comes about slowly but surely, and this is where your head is ready for transmission.

Q: So the transmission occurs only between the teacher and another person?

Rose: It can occur between any two people, the only difference is that you can only transmit what you have. So that one person may transmit say some great love secret, and another person may transmit an experience similar to satori or cosmic consciousness. But you can only transmit what is already in the experiential computer, so to speak.

Q: Do you experience this awareness of yourself now, or is it something that the person loses when he comes back?

Rose: Well, it dims and brightens, that's about the best way I can tell you. There are times when you are very much aware of your body. For instance, they say that the whole world is an illusion so pay no attention. But it's not an illusion when a truck hits you or breaks your leg. It's still an illusion, but it's very real. The illusion becomes a very real illusion.

So the person with the broken leg, whether he is enlightened or not, is going to be very much aware of the physical world, the play-act.

On the other hand, there will be times when his mind or awareness will drift back to the other experience. He will not go back into it completely—you can't, without going through the death experience again—but he will go back to the point where he remembers it very vividly.

Q: And this is between-ness?

Rose: No, no—that's not between-ness. Between-ness is a methodicity. This is another one of the laws that I was referring to. There is a certain way that you are able to hold your head just on perfect balance, not being to the left or to the right. This is something different.

What I'm talking about now is that when you come back, you are never completely in the world and you're never completely in an enlightenment experience. When you are completely in either one, then you're in it, that's all.

But at times you'll be aware of this other experience, and at unpredictable moments too, incidentally.

Q: Are you saying that transmission is very important in attaining the peak experience?

Rose: Well, I would say that it is a validation that a person who pursues a solitary path doesn't have. I think that it will give you a zest to go all the way through and experience it for yourself.

Q: So your group is oriented to creating this?

Rose: Preparing. So that they will be able to use what I call a direct mind communication.

Q: Have you run into any ways in which the "groupness" of your group interferes?

Rose: You get group states of mind, sure. You're always battling a group state of mind.

States of mind are the big thing. This occupies one whole chapter in The Albigen Papers—including the ability to pick up states of mind. Because as long as you are in a state of mind you will not have direct mind communication. It's like with an animal in heat—you're not going to be aware, except of the object of your heat. This is an extreme example, but there are other states of mind that can strongly affect you. I know that when I was a kid I used to go into a picture show and come out like a Horatio Alger character—I wanted to change the world. That was because I got into a state of mind.

But the true state of mind is neither this nor even the state of mind that rejects it. It is very difficult to keep and hold a true state of mind. We continually flop from one state of mind to another. But to hold a true state of mind is—to have the experience, which is basically a true state of no-mind.

Q: Do you feel like your life had ended with the experience and now you're just trying to pass it on?

Rose: I think that this is the only excuse I've got. (laughter) I have often wondered. A lot of people say, "Well, what are you hanging around here for?" And I don't know why I'm hanging around here.

Q: Is it possible to achieve transmission in a group?

Rose: We have many times experienced more than one person in a group having a certain rapport. But I don't think that the transmission is attainable by more than a one-to-one. I have never heard of any cases of the experience being picked up by more than two people at once.

Because basically it calls for me, if I'm the one who is acting, to lock your head with mine. Now I'm not much capable of locking my head with multiple heads. In other words, you fasten yourself to the other person's mind, and move them with your head while you are so fastened.

Q: You say that your system has to do with preparing someone for this experience—what is this preparation about? Rose: Outside of what I have already told you, there are two things that are practiced. One is the arrival at a knowledge of let's say the mundane self, or personality—the elimination of the discrepancies in the personality, false beliefs, and that sort of thing.

The second is the practice that aims at direct mind communication. There's nothing complicated about this—we call it a confrontation. It's like an encounter, where people actually try to be honest. And then there's the rapport.

Now in a rapport exercise, of course, only certain people will have rapport with each other easily. Sometimes you can select groups of four or five people to experiment, and if they find out that they can have rapport you isolate these from the main body. And then the remainder will try to find four or five who can have rapport, and so on.

So other than these things there is not too much that you can set down. From there on it's an individual thing—there is a lot of feeling as you go, so to speak. You will watch and then somebody will come to you and say, "Hey, I don't feel like I'm making any progress," and then you try to look into it.

I have heard this repeatedly. I remember a case of one fellow who had been in the group for a year. Right before he had come to our place he had tried to kill himself—it was a combination of disease, drugs, and depression. He had saved up his money to go up and be amazed by one Janov—you know, Primal Scream. He wanted to scream with Janov, and was saving up his dough for this. So the boys in the group tried to discourage him from going—a month at a time: "Stick around and see if you don't quiet down while you're here."

He complained after about a year that he didn't feel that he was making progress. So I just said to him, "O.K., well—ask some of the others." They were sitting around and they started telling him, "When you came here, here's what you were, here's what you were doing—and now look."

He had to be reminded of it. Because nobody feels like there has been any change. Right now everybody feels as if they have been this way all their life, but they haven't. You are not the same person you were a week ago perhaps.

So in answer to your question, there are individual steps. And every person is different because everyone encounters different traumas and everyone reacts differently to those traumas.

Q: Is pleasure-seeking harmful?

Rose: Your comprehension of it will change gradually from year to year—to where you will later laugh at your present idea of pleasure.

I was pointing out a little analogy in regard to personality changes. The man who puts the cup of booze to his lips is not the same man who sets it down. You immediately develop another personality, and you're critical of the personality of a half-hour ago. You say, "That wasn't me, that was a fool. I'm the smart guy now." But after this person gets good and drunk and then comes out of it he says, "That was a fool. Now I've got to start to find my sanity again."

Q: If your experience can't be described in relative terms, what is the value of your description in the back of the book?

Rose: I think that people pick it up.

Q: I get feelings, but it's nothing at all in the words.

Rose: Well, I warned you of that in the book—I said not to go by the words.

I could have left the poem out of the book, but I wanted to make sure that it got printed, so that if something had happened to me, it would have been available. I'll tell you something—I use this. When someone approaches an experience I'll read this to them and they will know its meaning. The meaning of it comes through to them.

Q: How did this ("The Three Books of the Absolute") come to you—did you have to sit down and think about it?

Rose: No, no. It was all written within an hour.

I didn't know any other way to communicate it. First of all, when I came back, I tried to talk to people about it and . . .

Q: How long did the experience last?

Rose: It seemed to me only three or four hours, I guess. I don't think that it was longer than that. Of course, I was unconscious as far as time was concerned. I was pretty far from home and I wasn't able to . . . it was a draining experience.

Q: Why would that be?

Rose: Well, it's hell—it's hell going in and it's hell coming out. It is hell to die unexpectedly, and you think you are dying.

And of course, when you come back then, you realize that you're perfectly healthy. And then you realize that you have to leave reality. And you have a choice now, either to sweat it out in the experience you had before, or to commit suicide.

And you think, "Well, this is what I wanted." I started out at this thing pretty seriously when I was about twenty-one years of age. I tell you, the reason why I do what I'm doing is that when I was in my twenties, about your age, I ran into so many phonies. So many guys who had something to sell or something to gain.

Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was sex. There were a lot of guys who were trying to trap young people sexually by saying, "Hey—I've got the answer, listen to me."

And I would get infuriated. I would get to the point where I was ready to kill people to eliminate some of this. This is man's definition, his search for God—and here are these creeps trying to . . .

Q: Prostitute it?

Rose: Right. So I pledged that if I ever found anything I would make it available—without charge, if I were able. And of course, there is a limit to what you can do for people without charge. But I believe that with the people who are ready to experience this that it doesn't take too much.

I believe a lot in destiny. For instance, there are people standing around here tonight—I don't believe that this is an accident. Certain people were supposed to come here.

This area has a population of a million or half a million—and how many people gravitate here on a certain evening? Of the people who gravitate here, how many stay because they want to look a little deeper? So I believe that if people have a desire, they will gravitate to some place where, if they're sincere and honest with themselves, they will be able to progress.

The thing is that first of all, you think that this requires a terrible sacrifice—but it doesn't. Life doesn't mean a thing anyway, if you don't know—you're going to live like a goat and just vegetate, reproduce, and die—that has no meaning. It is just undefined action.

But I made up my mind that I didn't care if I went crazy, if I lost my life in the process, made myself sick, or whatever happened. It was more important for me to find the truth—if I found the truth—or to kick the bucket trying, than to live without my being defined. And it was because I ran into all this flack that I decided that I would try to make available what I found.

Well, as soon as I had the experience I came back and ran into an old friend of mine—we had been on the "path" together—and he was rather overjoyed. I read "The Three Books of the Absolute" to him and he started weeping. But very few people who read it had that same reaction. Occasionally he and I would get a little group of people together. But these people were too busy making a nickel for Kroger's. They had ' games in life that they had to play and they couldn't get out of the house, except for once in a great while.

And I would get sort of despondent and say, "Well, maybe this is just my ego. Maybe I'm not supposed to be preaching this stuff. Maybe their time hasn't come, or my time hasn't come."

And I actually quit—from the time I was 32 until I was 50. I got married, I raised a family, until my youngest kid was old enough to take care of himself.

Then the Theosophical Society sent word down from Pittsburgh—they wanted to know if I would speak on Zen. So I went up and talked. Then a couple of the fellows here tonight, who were going to the University of Pittsburgh at the time, came to one of my talks and invited me to speak at the University.

The next thing you know a group formed. The book at that time was in an 8 1/2 by 11 form which was stapled and bound with carpet tape. That's how I put it together the first time. I had printed a hundred copies, because I thought that this would be the most people I would run into.

The thing just seemed to grow by gravity or something. I ran into a lot of young people and amazingly they seemed to pick up what I was saying. Each step of the way I was amazed. So—I had a 300-acre piece of ground in West Virginia and I said, "Well, we'll use that for an ashram." And some of these guys are still there. I found out that everything will happen, if you don't try to make it happen.

Q: Do you know of any women who have experienced enlightenment?

Rose: Yes.

Q: What is the ratio of women to men who have experienced it—is it 50/50?

Rose: Well, I would say that in the written accounts there are more men than women by far.

Q: Why is that—do you have an explanation?

Rose: Yes—I can tell you why. You've got to prepare yourself that women are not equal to men.

Q: Oh—I have to prepare myself for that?

Rose: Most people refuse to accept it.

Q: In what way—are we inferior?

Rose: I didn't say that women are inferior. They're not equal—they're not the same. The woman can pick it up much more quickly than the man. But their action is not consistent.

Q: Why is that?

Rose: Because women are programmed by nature to forget.

Q: Hormonally?

Rose: We are basically animals that are programmed in a certain way. Men are roosters and goats; women are hens and nanny-goats.

Q: Their processes are different?

Rose: Right. We criticize a woman if say her husband gets ground up and she doesn't weep. But she's got three children. Her computer is such that if she's got three children, two of them can be killed and she will survive to take care of the third one. A man might not. I have known men who dropped dead when they lost a child—because they are programmed differently.

But women are programmed to forget, in order to keep going, to carry the species. If women are honest with themselves they will know much more about themselves. But this idea that they can do anything a man can do is just as foolish as saying that a man can get pregnant.

Q: Are you able to heal?

Rose: It has happened, although I don't try to heal. Somebody that I knew would have a headache and I would get the urge to take their headache away, and it worked.

Q: Why did you experience an LSD trip at the age of fifty, when you had experienced enlightenment at thirty?

Rose: I thought that it might be possible that the chemical would create the death experience, and that the enlightenment experience would be renewed. It did create the death experience, which is necessary to go through enlightenment, but it didn't produce the enlightenment. Just the physical part was there, but not the awareness.

Q: Do you know what you will experience when you die?

Rose: Yes.

Q: Do you know what will happen to your state of being—will your consciousness continue?

Rose: Yes. If it did not, I wouldn't talk to you. If oblivion were what is waiting for you, I would keep my mouth shut. It would be better for your peace of mind. It's better to have peace of mind if you're going noplace. If I had discovered that oblivion was the answer, I wouldn't talk.

Q: There would be nothing to talk about.

Rose: Right. It would just make people turbulent for nothing.

Getting back to this earlier question—I want to explain something to you so that you don't misinterpret it. The female is able to pick this up very quickly, much more quickly than the man. It's like an intuition. A girl or a woman can come and hear me talk and they will know. They will know me.

Q: But the man will have to work at it?

Rose: Right. He may doubt—he is supposed to. He may say, "I've got to analyze this a bit—let's put the slide-rule to it." And this is proper.

The intuitional ability of a woman is part of her computer in that she has to make very quick decisions in protecting the young. They had to develop this sense. It's genetic. They had to be able to sense, better than the male is able. The survival of the race depended upon it.

But also, this unfortunate ability to forget makes them subject to more states of mind. I'm talking about a twenty-eight-day cycle, that the man doesn't go through. He may go through a yearly cycle, a solar cycle.

[End of lecture. Personal conversation follows.]

AUGUST CHAUTAUQUA

West Virginia August 6, 1983

I got a call from Pittsburgh, and I was so impressed by this call and the man that made it—the man didn't impress me but what impressed me was the possibilities that I had been overlooking. You are inclined to talk along a certain line and you talk to a certain group of people, and you develop a little paradigm, if you aren't careful, or if you are careful—maybe it is necessary to have a paradigm, or at least an understanding, but that in turn becomes an alien language to people coming in off of the street. Most of the people who are here for this August Chautauqua are people who have heard about the system. We must differentiate between myself and the TAT enterprise. In other words, the main TAT function is to bring people together, not to bring them to hear Richard Rose.

A lot of people in the group have philosophic problems, and you can solve a philosophic problem, and as soon as it is solved you embark upon another problem which was waiting in the wings, which you couldn't approach until you had solved the first problem. My idea of wisdom is a corrosion of ignorance. And you don't see the mountain that you have to corrode or eat away, you only see it by nibbling a chunk out of it, by solving a question or a problem, then you see that there are still other things that have to be transcended.

Anyhow, this fellow called me—his name was Sharp, from Pittsburgh—and he called me about an interview for the paper. And it was a good thing that it happened to me because I saw a chance, of meeting different people's approach to life and religion—he was a religion editor for the Pittsburgh Press. And he threw some questions at me and I realized that these aren't answered by me, I don't approach them here, I don't explain because to explain all of the things that I feel, that I have discovered, would take up a lot of time, and if I don't explain them, then you are going to see a hint of discrepancy with your own previous thinking, your own previous convictions—and you will be at a loss to blend the two together.

And occasionally we get somebody who gets real upset until they find out that we are in basic agreement, but verbally we haven't used the same words. One of the first things that he asked me . . . he had got ahold of The Albigen Papers and in the back of it, a fellow, Mike Treanor, wrote an article about an experience that I had had . . . and he wanted me to explain it in 25 words or less. So I said, "forget it." I said that it would take 2500 just to get you confused, and then even more to try to approach the explanation of that confusion.

Because . . . I said that I would state terms that would take explanations and definitions. And we had the word Enlightenment in front of us, and I said that is not the proper word—I think that maybe Mike had referred to this in the article that I had had an enlightenment-experience. I said that is a poor choice of words but that is the best that we can do with the language that we have. The word that I come closest to after years of reading other literature was the word samadhi. And they have two samadhi's. Well, these are Hindu terms, and I don't like foreign words and phrases—I think that we can say it in English, which I have done throughout my life and in the book—I've dodged Hindu words.

Yet there are words that we get that we misuse—one of them is God. He said of course everybody knows that there is a God, but I say stop where you are, I said nobody knows anything and everybody believes, or everybody hopes that there is a God. Or everybody repeats it to themselves hoping that that will make it real. If, they reaffirm enough times in their own head they hope to create one.

But he wanted to know if I could identify, he said when you had this experience did you find the equivalent of a Christian God. I said, "No, I didn't." And consequently, I don't talk from the position of . . . I said I am sick of hearing people get up on a pulpit and say, "God told me to tell you this." I have been in churches where somebody would get up and say "God told me to tell you that you were supposed to do this." I said, "These people are phony."

You know, he is getting ready to print something in the paper, well I could care less. If he wants to go for definitions—then let's go for real definitions. What do people really know about anything? How much of it did they borrow from their parents? Or how much of it did they read from a book that agreed with their desires? This is the catch, in other words—I did it myself for years. I would get ahold of a movement, I would read of a movement, and I would think: this fellow is speaking from the heart. It wasn't just a question of it being logically true, I intuitively picked up that the fellow was speaking from the heart. But the thing that I didn't realize was that very possibly this fellow didn't know either. He had read a book from a man who spoke from the heart. So this becomes very complex after a while. And when you start to go back and say: where am I going when I die? . . . or where did I come from? . . . we conduct a whole lifetime of very frenzied activity in the process of trying to do all things at once, meaning make money, get wise or raise some super children, and we basically find out that we don't do any of them too well because we don't bother to define our basic original premises, our original reasons for being—and reasons for living—and we hope . . .

One of the great diseases of all time is religious democracy. We are going where everybody else is going, and he dropped this too. He said everybody has an experience, has the same type of experience—I said that is not true. All you have to do is read enough of their accounts, it is not my opinion that counts—you get the necessary amount of books or data, and you read enough accounts, you will find out the description of them . . . for instance the Zen satori—a good account of a Zen satori—a good account of a salvation experience (somebody found Jesus)—also the cosmic consciousness experience like Bucke—or like the experience of John of the Cross. I have dug up some of those books and have copies of them, and keep them around in case people want them. Because, if you want to do research—if people don't believe—they should go to the bother to do the research and get the accounts of people who have had the experiences and find out what they found.

And at no place in John of the Cross—he may speak devotedly of God—does he speak of speaking to Him; whereas people who have a salvation experience often say they spoke to Jesus, or that Jesus spoke to them. What I am getting at is the basic difference. To analyze those differences and find out where they sit on a ladder, especially when an experience happens after a previous, lesser experience, meaning when one supersedes the experience that they thought was the only one on earth—and then later in life they go through this altogether new experience.

So, if you get the data on this you begin to realize that the hardest people to deal with are those that have had some type of religious experience, because they have the conviction that they are the only ones. I know that I was down in Charleston, West Virginia a while back and I met a group of Rosicrucians—and we weren't talking about anything in particular but they finally got around to reincarnation, and some of the things that they believed in.

And I think that it is bad to believe. To give you an example, and I quote the Bible on this, a lot of good Christians say: "You've got to have faith." But Christ also said, "seek and you shall find, knock and it will be opened to you." When he said knock, he meant put your head against the door and rap with your head. Not just knock with your knuckles. If a person searches, he has to doubt. There has to be an element of doubt, in his searching, or he wouldn't search, he would accept. Which brings us back to the Rosicrucians. I started to tell you about them. They sat around and kind of listened to me very patiently and then said: "Well Mr. Rose, someday in some future incarnation, you will join us."

So I thought that there is no use for me to try to communicate here, they have cemented themselves in. Not only the Rosicrucians, but almost any religious or philosophic group of people. You'll run into little esoteric groups throughout the cities, where they will get together, because the group basically answers to a desire. Don't get me wrong, I am not negating reincarnation, I just kind of hope that it doesn't happen. Once in this hog pen is enough. Reincarnation came out of Asia primarily, because (I think) of overpopulation. You had almost a billion people on a continent in which there was no hope for more than four or five percent. There wasn't enough money to go around, so those nine hundred million people embraced a religion that gave them hope of someday being the head raja in some future incarnation. And I think that that desire may have motivated their belief in it. Again, don't get me wrong, I maintain that of all of the theological projections—of stuff that has been projected upon humanity—reincarnation is the most just theory.

It is just a concept. And because it is just a concept, I don't think that a person should say we are going to go for that, because this is the kind of religion that we want, or that is the kind of a God that we want. We will pick a God that is human in form. God didn't make man in his own image and likeness as much as man is making God in his own image and desire. And if we don't like him we will cancel him out.

We have got to search for this thing as it is—and for whatever it is. As a scientist. In making these statements, lots of times I'll use a word, or words in which it will seem that I am being nebulous, or that I am speaking from a personal experience that I can't prove. I say no. I generally speak from a basis of my own life which was scientific all of file way through. I rejected things because they were garbage in comparison to something else that was less garbage. When you start out you know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing about what is true. You know nothing about where you came from or where you are going after you die or who is up in the sky. So you get the data to date. You get the good books. And you compare them. I rejected some when I was quite young, I got fed up with the Bible—I think in looking backward it was not so much the Bible that I got fed up with but rather it was the hypocrites who were expounding it. So I just put it aside, I went and looked into oriental philosophy and yoga and whatnot and studied under masters—different ones in fact—to get their opinion. And when these little revelations came to me, I invariably found a correlation or corroboration in the Bible. It would pop up. It was maybe in a different translation. Of course, I don't like to get into fundamentalism because, incidentally, the Bible is a translation, and I found that a lot of the errors that people are subjected to are in the translations. When you get some of the real translations of some of the words, you realize that this God creature is not as severe as He sounds.

But getting back to this interview with the reporter, a thing that he threw at me was "what benefit is this system of yours going to have for humanity?" And I said, "Oh you want to know whether I am going to heal somebody, or whether this will give you greater potential in your sex escapades. Or maybe if you are really tortured, it might give you peace of mind. I am not interested in being a utility. You are talking about a utility. I am interested once and forever in solving a problem which will solve all other problems."

He said, "You have some people that are good people and some people that are bad people, you know, that don't help humanity, like Gary Gilmore—they hurt humanity."

And I said, "Gary Gilmore is a chessman on the board, we are all chessmen on the board until we find out that you can get the chessmen to think. We are basically pawns that are moved about by an engineer. Life is like one of these machines, these electronic games that kids play. You have a man that creates a machine and rigs it so that an idiot can fight battles on it. And this is pretty much what the earth is. The earth is engineered so that different idiots can wage wars or kill people or do things all according to mechanisms programmed inside of that whole composite machine, that whole machine called earth. And humanity. So it is not for us to criticize somebody who does something that offends us. He is the left hand of God. That's all. I am now using the word God as synonymous with the word engineer. I think that if a person makes an evaluation as to utility-value—it is putting a nickel and dollar value on truth. It's saying, ‘we will espouse your cause if it can be defined in terms of dollar value—we will put in the newspaper what a wonderful group you are.'"

I told him that I was sick and tired of every time I read a newspaper or turn on a television, hearing about the new organization that is set up for the carrying of meals for old people, or for helping old ladies across the street, or counseling weeping women—who have tempted people and got too close to being raped. Now they have a place to call and complain about being nearly raped. Or an organization for husbands that have been abused.

Now parents are going to form an organization. Abused parents. And we have got all of these sick things springing up to cover up—possibly—a sicker political government. If they can get us all chewing away at each other, we will not notice what goes on behind the big scene. So it occurred to me, what I am talking about, in regard to the remarks that I made to this fellow, was that some psychiatrists could have picked up that same statement he had made about me and he could have had somebody waiting for me outside with a wagon.

Because, what is sanity? Being basically harmless, as the fellow—who claimed that he was Jesus Christ—told me years ago. He had been in an insane asylum, and he always insisted that he was Jesus Christ. Well, I thought that he was joking, and I thought that it was a harmless joke, but people took him seriously and they locked him up. But he said to be sane, one must be harmless. And convince the populace that you are harmless, and industrious. In other words, if you are working everyday, you won't be worrying about how to tunnel into the bank. Get a steady job and you won't worry about getting the money out of the bank or cashing credit cards that don't belong to you. So, in regard to the stuff that I have—in my particular paradigm . . . I think this stuff, I live it, and I talk it. And when I get before a group of people, I find people that are coming in from a very pragmatic daily life—of bucking heads with the wife or husband—of bucking heads with the employer—and maybe even of trying to play some of these games to survive or to get along—which I refuse to do.

So I am a bit freer. So I can speak freer because nobody can fire me. They can shoot me, but they can't fire me. I realize though that people—everybody in the world is looking for the truth. And my job is basically to find people who are looking for the truth. I have to find their language, in order to talk to them. Then, with their language, you come into a meeting like this, and you re-translate all of these foreign languages and get common denominators, common representations for terms.

For instance, when we got through talking, the reporter said, "you know, you and I are pretty much in agreement." For instance, he said "do you hope to convert a lot of people by this intense type of life that you are leading you know, trying to talk to people and going around giving lectures at different cities and universities?"

I said "No. I will be lucky if I meet a handful of people in my entire life."

I said that I am not out to save the masses. It is impossible for me to do it and I am smart enough to know it. If I get a handful of people that have reached a few plateaus above their own state of confusion, I'll be lucky. And in that respect, I don't pretend to be an evangelist. I am not disappointed if I don't have thousands of people beneath a tent while I am exhorting them to change their lifestyle."

And he said, "I think that you and I have a good bit in common, in the final analysis." He said, "I believe too." He said, "I use the word ‘God,' where you don't."

I use the word Absolute because the word God has been misused so much. As I said, if we accept everybody's word—if you go into church they immediately start talking about God.

I don't believe that they know anything about God, I believe that all that they know is what they have read. I studied to be a priest back up here above Pittsburgh quite a few years back, and I talked to the elders, the older men, and I thought that if anybody would know anything—these old fellows would. I was just a kid at the time, I went in there when I was 12 years of age. They got you when you were young because you were plastic . . . you were more plastic at that age. And I came to the conclusion that they were captured. First of all they got into something because they believed that the older people knew something, that there was something in the books and that there was a promise that there would be a revelation if you hung around long enough. Then after you hung around long enough, you were not fit for the lay society any longer, so you just tried to learn and repeat, lets say—explain better, the things that you were supposed to preach, as a priest or a minister.

So of course, naturally, that is the reason that I left. Because I thought that that was the end of the road because I was not going to get into this endless and undefined effort—and as I said I went into Indian philosophy, and Asian philosophy. I pretty much found that nearly all of the stuff that is taught that comes out of Asia is stuff that even the Asians have reread—it can all be traced back to certain sacred writings that were written by people a thousand years ago or more. For instance, the whole system of yoga, mental yoga, is traceable back to a fellow by the name of Patanjali. His descriptions of experiences and that sort of thing were very profound and very accurate.

And there are other ancient authors besides him. They are well known in India and very authoritative. So you get people who write a little book or booklet, and they describe an experience that they have had, and it will correspond very closely to the descriptions that you pick up in these books that are a thousand years old. So you never know, unless you meet the person, face to face, and talk to them, and have some ability to pick their knowledge up intuitively—since there is no way to logically analyze it. You have to be intuitive enough to pick up whether they have something on the ball. So that this business of an entire world population of people, people who have read books and they write books about books that they have read, they teach, and they teach what somebody else taught them, who in turn were taught by somebody else. But the people who had the genuine experiences aren't available, that's all. It is too easy to create one. It is too easy to create miracles. We thought that we were wise when we fooled the American Indian with our little miracles of gunpowder or glass beads.

We have been pretty much spoofed on a pretty large scale by some of the ancient tricks that came out of India. For instance, the concentration on nerve centers. And this practice has important results on the human mind. I mean that if you concentrate on a nerve center long enough you will build a feeling. It may be of well being. You repeat a resonant sound if you are troubled. That's TM. If you repeat that enough, you will become peaceful. If you sing to a baby, the baby will go to sleep, if the song is resonant and peaceful. If you sing to an adult, or to yourself, you will get peaceful and go to sleep. And if you wish, you can associate that mantra with a so-called "representative of God,"—and it gives you more of an excuse for paying out a couple hundred dollars. This is what I am opposed to. And I do not, in the final analysis, mince words. I am opposed to selling counterfeit merchandise.

But for this exercise that we are going to work here today, I will step aside from all of that and go directly to questioning your heads. Because, again, I don't know if you believe it or not but it is the only way I have of demonstrating that anything that you wish to find is in yourself. Now, unfortunately, you can't all get it out. You can't all get in there. So we struggle to try to find ways to get the person to get inside themselves.

I wrote a book, the formula is in this little book over there, it is called The Psychology of the Observer. And this is the way in. You don't find any truth by believing. You find it by doubting everything. Including myself. Now you can work with me, but I don't say take anything that I say as truth and make a religion out of it. Don't come here because you think that I am capable of putting in a good word to the man upstairs. Believe me, I have no standing. Anymore than you have. And I have no more God inside of me than anyone of you have—if you want to look for It. Of course, there is no way of making that statement until you find out. But this is the whole thing. We are externalizing that which is inside and that is where people are misled. We build external tabernacles when we have one. We go into all sorts of noise-making, incense burning, and sensory nonsense, to distract, to take our mind into dream-world. Rather than to get into the basic secret that is not that much of a secret. The secret has been expressed in the words Atman and Brahman. It's the one expression and concept that I think is a very good product of Asian philosophy, this concept of the Atman and the Brahman. The Christian concept is basically that we are a creature separate from an external outside God. And the Brahman concept leaps over this and says that we are the extension of a divinity. We are the finger of God drawn back in at death.

Let me qualify this a little bit. I find that we are both. In regard to the description of sahaja samadhi, or the finding of sahaja samadhi—sahaja they say—it is a very simple thing. The Indian words sound complex—we have to determine between kevala samadhi and sahaja samadhi and I'll translate that into English. We have to determine the difference between cosmic consciousness and enlightenment. When you get into talking about enlightenment, you get into talking about the final realization of the absolute. That is the only definition in English that comes near it. Cosmic consciousness is pretty much defined by Richard Bucke, in his book called Cosmic Consciousness.

Now you have another experience before that. Nearly everyone who goes through to the higher experience will always relate having been through these other lower experiences. One of them is the equivalent of the salvation experience or the finding of the miracles of the emotional self. The magic behind it is where it takes man from an instinctive man and makes him a selfless man. And he falls in love. He falls in love with Jesus, or he falls in love with his guru, or he falls in love with a woman. This is a transcendence of the instinctive self, the animal man. And after languishing in that for twenty years, he realizes that he is still fooling around on a relative dimension with a relative emotion, a relative feeling. And a relative being. His god is a relative being. Whether it is his wife, a guru or Jesus. So he begins to doubt it and if he looks further his tendency is to adopt nothing but scientific methods of finding. So he goes into the Kabbala for instance, which is mathematical—he gets into astrology which seems to be scientific, he gets into numerology or he may get into anything—there must be other systems that are methodical and employ the mind—but you can do it with simple algebra. You can have a wow experience studying algebra.

This happened to me one time. When I was in college, I labored with algebra for six months or so until the light popped on in my head and, I was able to continue and catch up with the class. Previously there was no sense to it. A plus B equals C means nothing to me. But yet the mathematician can give it meaning. And eventually the meaning will dawn on you, and when it dawns the light comes on and you say, "wow, I know what this is and I know where it can take us in the making of airplanes and battleships."

Before that it had no value at all except as a mental exercise—or something to keep the kids occupied in math class.

So there are stages which you seem to go through. And not all go through all the stages that were outlined by Gurdjieff. I find it necessary to talk about these things, first because they are so seldom talked about, and secondly there is a chance that a person can accelerate his transitions from one state to another. We witness that people take years on one level or state. It seems that some people never get out of the instinctive state. Most people who transcend the instinctive state, spend the rest of their lives in the emotional level. I believe that trying to expedite this mental growth is really being scientific. Man must develop a vector of urgency in order to achieve anything in a short lifetime. But unfortunately, the science of esotericism has not developed a method of increasing the number of people who could see the existence of a state of being higher than their own. And religion seems to be designed to keep its people on the emotional level.

Mr. Sharp, in his interview with me, was concerned about the extent to which I had carried my ideas to a large audience.

He said, "How many people do you think would be interested in your system?"

And I had to reply, "Very few."

I realized that no one wants to write up an article for a newspaper that will appeal to only a few. I reminded him that I was aware of this. He works for a newspaper that has a circulation of five hundred thousand, perhaps. Less than one tenth of one percent will be interested in states of mind or levels of mental capacity. Most people are satisfied with themselves and with that which they have.

And so I am using his newspaper, and my honesty with him on the matter should not be the only reason for publishing information about my convictions—or Gurdjieff's. But I believe no effort is wasted and I believe that putting a little weight on the wheel, will add to its momentum.

I believe that all human effort is pyramid in form. There is a large gap, in numbers, between the amount of people who have no money and those who have a hundred thousand dollars. There is another large gap in the number of people who have a hundred thousand dollars and the number who are millionaires. This is the financial pyramid, which gets narrower as we take note of superior and more superior amounts of wealth. So that above the billionaire we are up in thin air.

And so with mental potential. There is a broad base of average mentalities. At one time very few went on from grade school or "grammar school." We can presume that they didn't see any hope, or felt inadequate mentally to tackle higher education. And I am sure that the increase in per capita percentages on education have increased because of the efforts of a persistent group of better educated people, reaching down reminding the uneducated masses that mental progress is not hopeless.

Throughout history, rarely were great milestones of progress brought about by actions which originated in the masses . . . that is to say spontaneous recognition of things by the masses. We have bloody wars fought by the masses, but they were manipulated by a few people. If the great mass of humanity cannot get the facts straight . . . and cannot retain their individual integrity while taking collective action . . . what chance do they have to sift the philosophies and theologies wisely—things of a subjective nature now—and find a way to act with maximum intuition?

Most people just roll with the herd. They play the field, they eat, drink, conceive certain things as fun, and develop a detachment from the public and the public's welfare.

So getting the attention of the public is an uphill fight. And it seems almost impossible for a sincere student to find a teacher, meaning a teacher in his particular field of search, and at the same time be certain that the teacher is sincere, and that there will be a possibility of communication.

So we put a note in the paper, or a blurb on a poster, and hope that the right searcher will see it, and take a chance on hearing something that will answer some questions for him.

And when the people, such as yourselves, do read the short blurb, and come, I recognize that each of you is possibly very sincere. And sometimes I am afraid of blowing you out the door with an expression that might seem less than gentle—due to some ineptness in my choice of words.

All people respond to the language of their paradigm . . . their social and spiritual paradigm. It does me no good to remind them that there is a possibility that they might evolve from their paradigm, and move to another level. No one will willingly move out of his or her paradigm without some trauma or traumatic revelation. Part of their paradigm must be eroded away, or blasted away before they realize it.

This does not mean that a teacher will blast it away. Most mental maturity and spiritual evolution comes about by the lessons of life itself. These changes often are the result of shocks such as the death of a friend, or the rejection by a friend or lover, or the loss of position or wealth.

A teacher can blast unnecessary complacency . . . and he may chip away misconceptions . . . or incomplete conceptions. But as for myself I do not like to offend anyone with a sincere belief. For instance, I might drop a remark that we have no proof that Jesus was divine. This might deeply offend someone who has graduated from the instinctive level, and has found deep peace and certitude in losing their lower self in the love Jesus. Of course, it might have been just as well if they had lost their lower self in the love of their children or spouse . . . but that is another remark which might offend someone who is sincere.

For this reason, I do not get involved too deeply in the June Chautauquas. The June meetings have to do with scientific progress in psychology and health, and while true spiritual growth leads to wisdom and health also, the attendees may not appreciate being splashed with a koan.

And it is good for us to remember that the pursuit of health is adducive to spiritual progress and discovery. We have to be healthy to live long enough to crack the cosmic egg. We cannot have a realization in five minutes, and even if you could, you would need to take care of your health to survive the shock of realization, and to readjust to the rat-race.

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Q: Some of what you are talking about—different levels, functional, intellectual—are those really . . . could those be considered just different doors that this information is coming through to this person?

Rose: I would say that they are different doors, but it is like one is at the head of the steps and another one is up another flight of steps. When you talk of levels you talk of vertical effort or vertical achievement, and it isn't all on the same level. In other words I don't think that a person is going to go clear through to the fifth level from an instinctive level just by falling in love. If he falls in love with Jesus, see what I mean, or a guru. Now, again, don't get me wrong, I hope that I am not offending anybody here that is presently in love with Jesus because I am one hundred percent in favor of that . . . for that person.

The thing is that they are not thinking, they are not in the thinking department yet and they might be offended. And I don't like to offend anybody. So consequently, they would be wasting their time here. That's the whole thing. Because my path, the path that I am laying out is one of doubting and thinking, not accepting and loving. And so consequently, I think that these are very necessary steps or levels for the people who are in it.

Now I am going to give you an example of where I saw a tremendous value in it. When you transcend something, you are apt to be somewhat scornful of those on a lower level. It's like saying I am out of the second grade and now I am in the third grade—and I don't want to talk to those people any longer. And this is no good because these are friends. Everybody who has the capacity for friendship deserves a fair shake. And I will try to give it. I don't criticize, I calibrate. It isn't the idea that I want to criticize anybody. In fact, I think that if a person who loved Jesus only and was trying to get everybody to love Jesus came here it would be disruptive. Now it sounds like I am working for the devil—that's what I would be accused of, because of the simple fact that we are hammering away at this thing with a system of doubting to try to find something inside us.

We are trying to find, through a hole in the paradigm, that which will open the head up to Reality—capital "R" Reality. But these people have achieved something too. And we need not separate them from ourselves, or criticize them. I am saying that we might hurt their feelings but at the same time we have to go on with what we are doing.

I think of the case of my sister-in-law. She was into dope, into booze, into cigarettes, and she was a real hell raiser, carried a gun, was afraid of nonbelievers. They were down in Texas—but one day—I don't know if somebody confronted her or what happened—don't know the details, but she said to my brother, I am going to church, and see if I can't change this life of mine. And she put her cigarette out, ground it out on the steps of the church, and went in and begged an objective God—not an internal God necessarily. But at the same time an internal God awoke a fragment, the door cracked and the God inside of her answered. I always say that if you pray loud enough, You may hear yourself, You may answer and inquire. Capital "Y," Yourself. But she never drank after that, I'd say for about ten years, she became an unbearable Nazarene but that is wonderful. She was a wonderful person, a wonderful wife, for ten years at least. But she dropped the dope and the cigarettes and the booze all at one sweep. By going into church and humiliating herself you might say, before her God. So I don't ever want you to sell anybody like that short. They have transcended. They have transcended the instinctive person.

And yet you will run into thousands of men who will say "Hey this salvation experience is all malarkey. Don't tell me, everything is baloney, and a con game, and these are basically instinctive people pleading for the right to remain instinctive, that's all."

But in time they may fall in love, or they may take a step so we have to leave the door open to them. We should never criticize them.

Q: Do you think that some people are born as emotional or intellectual people without having to pass through the instinctive stage of their lives.

Rose: No, I think that everybody goes through it and they pass through it rather quickly. Some pass through it very quickly, in childhood. Yes, I think that there are a few people, I think that there are people that are wise to the nonsense of life when they are very young, and they are called autistic children. They are the unusual. Some children are far wiser than adults. But like I said—we seduce them and stupefy them with our robot-like civilization.

Incidentally, I pick these words up, these categories of mental evolvement, they are not necessarily mine. There is a writer by the name of Gurdjieff, that laid out the different types or levels of mankind, or their mentality, and I thought that he was very accurate. I think that he was the greatest psychologist that ever came out of the western world. And he laid those four categories out. He said that there were seven levels of man. But I never found where he identified properly man five and six. Because man number seven was the Absolute man, the man that had reached an absolute nature, but the first level was the instinctive man, that is the animal man, the second level was the emotional man, and the third level was the intellectual man, and of course, the intellectual man is delivered from that when he recognizes the vanity of logic. He doesn't prove anything with logic, and he begins searching again and then he becomes the philosopher. And man number four is the philosophic man, the man that is trying to take bits and shreds of everything imaginable to try to find common denominators, correspondences or something to get a new pattern of thinking because all of the other—as Chilton Pearce says—all of the other paradigms have failed or are confused. Have confused us.

Now if anybody is unhappy with the idea of questioning, I suggest that they locate in a certain place, maybe on one side or the other. Let's put it this way—is there anybody here now that does not care to be questioned. The idea behind this is that you are supposed to answer if you are asked a question. And if you don't answer, the whole procedure is a flop. In other words, try not to hedge. Nobody is going to ask you how many wives that you have had or anything like that. For instance, the first question that I would like you to answer is "What is thought?" What you think thought is. See, this is the type of questioning, I am trying to get you down to self-observation, this is not going to get personal. But if you think that any of these questions might kind of go against your grain, you could put your hand up now and I could leave you alone. I can probably remember you. But if not, I will try to get around to everybody here, with a question or two. And by the same token, if you want to volunteer, that is much better if I don't have to direct a question to somebody. If each one of you wish to volunteer your reaction to this, it will run much smoother that way. So, I am going to start with this question of what is thought? Before I start picking on somebody—how many of you have a concept of thought—belief in it, understanding of it?

Steve H.: It's like a—something inside of you which I can't put a chemical definition on—any of my definitions would also be thought, so I have no idea what it is, but—it is a very, almost impressive thing—having a straight-jacket on me and I can't—normally I am accustomed to it so I don't feel the pain of it because I am not conscious but when I become aware of it, it is almost disturbing. It is the process that goes on inside me all of the time. But that's because I can't define thought. But it is something that has to do with my awareness. I would say more or less. At the times when, I think that it is most helpful of my awareness, yet is sometimes the most blinding of my awareness.

Rose: You are more or less describing what thought causes in you rather than what it is. See, I am trying to get to a non-personal evaluation of it.

Steve H.: Well then I would say that it is more like a reaction to or an interpretation to things that happen outside of me—cause a certain, almost a chemical change in me.

Rose: Are you leaning at this point to this current concept that it is a reflex? That you are just reflexive?

Steve H.: Well, I wouldn't say that so much but I notice that when I am in a different environment I have different thoughts. Or I feel differently inside. But I don't consider it to be part of myself.

Rose: Well, let's go to Richard.

Richard B.: It seems like a—it seems like it is a function of a part of you. in other words, it seems like what you are is a big thing, okay, and you are living out of a small part of that and one aspect of the way that small part functions is thought. I mean I could say . . . it's raw, there is a rawness to it. That is about the best that I can do.

Rose: But again, you gave me a personal reaction to it, like Steve did. I was trying to get an anatomical definition of it.

Bob C.: This might sound glib, to put it this way. I think that thought is memories reacting upon other memories because if suppose, there is some point in time where the first thought occurs, like in a baby, the baby is born, and they are simply aware, but they are existing in this perpetual machine. So if something happens to them, something impinges on them, and then that experience is recorded, and then the next time another experience is recorded, then there can be an interaction between those two memories, and that is what happens to us—when you walk through the woods, all of these sense-perceptions are coming in your mind, and they are evoking reactions of an enormous body of memories that you have in your mind.

Rose: But again, it is along the reflexive, reaction, it is pretty much of a reflex.

X: It seems to be pretty much a phenomenon that is observed that doesn't include the senses.

Rose: Richard came in pretty close there, on this that—you say that—it is a phenomenon that cannot be observed by the senses.

X: I say that it is a phenomenon that is observed, but not with the senses.

Rose: Yes, I begin to get a picture of the tail of the animal. You know, for the first time, see. But, what he brought out was very interesting. It was that—it seemed to sound the same—there is a time when you are part of the world and then there is a time when you are locked in a particular narrow thing called a thought. This isn't really us but we are taken away from the whole picture and isolated or narrowed down to a single experience.

Richard B.: And there are zones though, like I mean if you—I mean if you want to gear into, say a professional thought zone, like in my work, and I will do that with my head. I will sit down and I will use these stimuli, like desks and stuff, to do that, and I will get into those words and those things and then they will start. It doesn't seem like reflexes but it seems like there is this zone that is a small part of the larger thing and it is like ping pong balls going back and forth. I mean like this comes over here and—I don't know how to say it, it is like going back and forth, a little part of you over here and something is going back and forth and that is thought, it is reflexive, but it is not reflecting anything, except that it thinks it is.

Rose: It is self-aware of accomplishment on that small . . . Were you finished, did I interrupt you? Okay, how about the lady with you?

K: Well, when, what I am aware of thought tends to be the more what I experience as thoughts inside my head. As thought with a capital "T." Part of my mental content, so to speak.

Rose: We will go on to the next one, but I want you to give a little thought to the possibility that this doesn't occur inside your head.

Y: That's where it seems to occur.

Rod: Seems to be one of the functions of the machine. Like the other functions, the emotional function, the instinctive function, the moving function. It's varying degrees of energy, though under some circumstances, can be very . . . Most thought is just the computer churning around the information that it already has from the past, trying to make sense out of that.

Dan M.: If it were up to me, I think that you would have to go for a mechanical definition, I would say this, thought is that storage of our sensory, our sensory memories or receptors, you know the brain or the mind calling them back out of storage. That is about the closest that I can come to using a computer type analogy.

Rose: The word that you used there had a slight inference that you might be doing this. How much of this thought do you do? See you say calling back out of . . . and Richard said something about employing symbols or desks or pens and pencils in order to get yourself to think. It seems as though, that implies that there is an ability to cause thinking in a certain direction but how much of it do you think a person actually does when he goes back in his memory of such . . . ?

Dan M.: Probably ten percent. It might have already been said but I see a sort of a pivotal point between experience—between perception and reaction—sort of like a center or a . . . I think that it has already been said before—I see it as something that can be very restricting and also something that can be very open.

Rose: Between what and action?

Dan M.: Between perception and action. It's like it is almost a filtering system within the human . . .

Rose: Yes, but can't we do a lot of thinking without moving a muscle? For hours, see.

Dan M.: I guess that I am thinking in a limited sense.

Paul M.: I guess that we would have to make a distinction, between the awareness and the process of thought. As far as the process of thought is concerned, I would consider that to be something like the, remember the state of before, from the earliest impressions and the earliest experiences, when a problem of some kind comes up or a decision has to be made, the computer-like operation where different criteria and items are sifted forth, in order to come up with an answer, for it. But again, I think that we run into the problem of . . . this is a description, of the process of thought. But thought, a priori, I guess I can't define . . .

Z: It is an objective focus and is the evaluation of the subject trader consideration.

Rose: Yes, but what you are saying is—an amoeba might have a piece of food that is its object of consideration, witnesses it and we would ascribe thought to the process. See, what we are really getting into is a picture that possibly there is a faculty that . . . may witness this focusing and evaluation. You are describing a mechanistic view of the whole individual as opposed to the thing that he does while he is observing. If he is observing. In other words, there is a . . . it is an instrument with which he does that, it is like the chicken looking at the worm. But how much thinking does he do and how much muscular or protoplasmic reaction can we cancel out? I mean, genetic reaction. See, and this is the thing in all thought. How much of all of our thought is genetic reaction even from putting in four years of college so that we can get a job with a slide rule. See, the whole thing may be nothing but genetic reaction. And all of those thoughts that went into working those problems would be a product of complicated and more complicated genetic reaction. What I am getting at is that there is a certain process in there which we may own or not own, and I am trying to get to the—what basically is this? In other words, there are some oversimplified answers, I am glad that we haven't got some of the really oversimplified ones so far, which is just a man's reaction to the environment, which is what the behavioristic psychologist may throw at you real quick and say that it is just man's reaction to the environment, and refuse to classify it as an element of an inner being. In other words, let's take this, is it possible that thought is an entity in itself? We sort of have this little concept that we have thoughts, meaning pluralities, meaning there is more than one of them, that they are identifiable singular type things. Or, another definition implies that there is possibly a creative faculty—well you hear that people claim that we can create with our thoughts. Now I am going to stretch that into occultism there a little bit on the idea that thoughts create entities. Paracelsus, for instance, used to say—be careful of your thoughts, they will create entities. And so, we are trying to get into something else here. Sure, the first glance at it seems just a little bit more than a reaction, but then we find that an airplane is a consolidated or solidified thought or thoughts. See, a battleship is a solidified thought. So just what is this creature?

W: Thought is energy. It is an ongoing thing. You can't really turn it off. You can't even quiet yourself, you are still thinking when you are sleeping or dreaming, you are still thinking.

Rose: But when you say energy now, we have kinetic energy, too, and I think that very possibly we may have mental energy besides thought. Do you figure that is possible? So we would distinguish, there is no doubt that energy is involved in it, there is no doubt about that, I mean biochemically, it is almost proven. But see, but I was just wondering, about the possible forms of energy in thought.

W: A question that occurs is does thought exist outside of us. You know, it's like if the tree falls in the forest and no-one is there, would there be any sound? If there were no people in the world or no essential beings, would there be thought?

Rose: If a deaf dog barked in the woods, yes. But you are right, see. The question that you pose is accurate. We must examine to see if that does or does not occur. This all goes into the examination of it.

Jackie: I just consider it to be a collection of various impressions of the senses that are gathered together—ah—into coherent ideas.

Fitz: It seems that thinking is sort of some sort of continuum which all of these different definitions fit on. Between just the constant rambling or the chatter and the most controlled type of thinking where you create something by taking all of that information and putting it together in a new way and coming up with a faster airplane or something. Maybe there is at some point, if you really, if you're accurate enough, you can get to the verge of making something really new, or getting somewhere different.

Rose: New combinations of old memories. I think that is pretty much what new invention is. New combinations of old memories, of old experiences.

Sue: That is what I was thinking along the same lines, because when you look at an object and you think about it, all you are doing is recalling your past experiences, and relating them to the new object.

Frank M.: I am getting more confused as we go along. That is part of the training. The thing that always strikes me about it is that I am having a hard time about the definition, but I always come up with the other definition, I am not trying to change it. Let me know—but is it whether I really control my thoughts, whether I have a direction to thinking. Because it just seems like that the thinking process is almost continuous. Somebody already said, I almost feel that when I get up in the morning there has been a process of these memories or feelings or reactions going on in my mind all night but at the same time, I wonder whether it is possibly to direct them to it—to direct this process for discovery. But as far as for a technical definition of it, I can't really come up with one right now, I am not sure what the process actually is. Then responses and reactions . . . Are we a part of the mind, is the process, like a computer? I always think that it is more of a mechanical thing—that real information doesn't come into thinking—but on the other hand something else, awareness, or something I sense does also occur—there is a difference between the two. That thinking is more of a mechanical process in the brain—and secondly that it is a form of awareness.

Alan: I don't know about the definition, but it seems that, at least in my experience that it seems that it just happens, sometimes it is a reaction to the environment, like sometimes I get a thought that it seems like it just comes out of the thin air. Where did I come up with that from? I don't know whether that comes from inside the computer or what.

Rose: There is a message behind what you just said. In other words, I think we all know that there is a brain, that the brain carries voltage, and carries the messages with the voltage, but what you just said is very true. There are thoughts that are not caused by the action or thought before them. Most thoughts come like on a string . . . related to or caused by the thought before it. There is no doubt about that—we can observe our thoughts and see that.

For instance, you may think of an automobile. The color blue will come to your mind because you saw a blue car recently. The blue car brought up from memory was owned by a friend . . . you will now think of the friend, etc.

But there are thoughts or mental visions which have no immediate mental correlation. One instance would be the people that you meet in your dreams that have no counterpart in daylight consciousness. The strange thing about some dreams is their lack of connection with the concerns of the previous day, or with relationship to current problems or conversations.

For instance, just about all the events that have been mentioned here, including the stuff that seems to come out of the blue, can be traced to a previous memory. But some of the stuff that "comes out of the blue" cannot be traced to previous memories.

I am going to reach away out to give you an example. You are sitting in the dark thinking, and a voice speaks to you. At first you think that it is in your head meaning in the imagination. But then a form appears in front of you, and this form or person is totally new to you. Psychiatric history is full of instances of this type of encounter. Religious history is full of such. Veteran truck drivers tell about nearly wrecking their trucks because of such encounters. Swerving a truck is accompanied by thinking.

Katie King was seen by William Crookes. And photographed. It is unlikely that William Crookes formulated her as a composite of previous memories of women he had known. What about the visions of prophets who were able to predict events actually, because they saw them ahead of time? What do these things imply? Does anybody pick up what this implies about the human mind?

Tom G.: That it is not contained? (In the skull alone.)

Rose: Yes. It implies that. But there is something else.

Tom G.: You mean that it is like a receiver?

Rose: Yes, that part too.

Larry J.: There is no central location?

Rose: You can be with your mind, thinking, fifty feet away (from your body) or a thousand miles away. For instance, to give you an example, we have the experiments or accounts of telepathy, where people have communicated from more than a thousand miles away. At a precise moment. We have a lot of these cases if we wish to accept them as data. And I know I have cases close at hand where I would be thinking of something and somebody else would speak it. Or you have cases where you have a person under certain conditions who will suddenly exclaim that Joe has died. Joe just died. Well, how do you know. Well, I just felt it. And in an hour or so the telephone rings, and somebody calls you and tells you that your friend Joe just died. Well, the only way that could have come in with a person maybe a thousand miles away was through a mental faculty. As for phenomena—when a sufficient number of them occur it becomes almost of legislative value. There are laws that form when data piles up.

A: Well, I guess that the implication would be that it really is not ours personally except for the types of thought that behavioral psychologists talk about, you know the memory-reaction type, but there are other types of thought that really don't belong to the individual they may belong to a race or a nation or whatever.

Vince L.: Well, all I can say is that thought is the organized sense of images, they could be reactions, they could be projections, or they could come out from beyond.

Rose: Well, he has brought up something that nobody has mentioned before, did you catch it? He ran through it rather rapidly. Receptions are projections! in other words, this is very important. It shows that—I don't know how much he knows but he is implying that we are capable of projecting—that which we believe we see, or what we want to see. In other words, like a man on a desert island with an ugly woman, she becomes more and more beautiful. That is projection, that's what I am talking about. And we project in our philosophy. We project idyllic heavens and terrible hells for the other guy. But that is what it implies. But this is something, a new addition to the general definitions of thought. It is the ability, not only to perceive, but the ability to project even to the point where you see it, you know, the thirsty man and the mirage.

Keith M.: I was just curious at this point as to whether you are defining the contents of thought or the actual process behind thought.

Rose: Well, you can take your choice, we would be glad to have some content.

Keith M.: If thoughts are projected, like we were talking about, would that make any difference as towards a thought itself?

Rose: A thought itself? Do you mean to define a thought as to its qualitative essence?

Keith M.: The definition that I was going to say is that thoughts are a parade of information that seem to be built from the most part from sensory information. And I am aware of it but it seems to organize itself in patterns that I make sense of but that are not necessarily correct. Like my thoughts may make sense to you but they may not make sense to somebody else. Each person seems to have their own belief in their own particular thoughts.

Dana C.: Well, I think that thoughts at times are things that we do not create ourselves.

Lou K.: Thoughts are mental images that can either be verbal or pictorial. It seems that when I think about it, those are the only two types of thoughts that I can have, either I can visualize something as if I am seeing it, or I think in words. It seems like it could be either one. I can't really think of any other way to think.

Eric: Well, it is something that is observable, but I was thinking of now, that it is a force, it can move, it can move you one way or another, if you are not aware of it, it can move you one way or another, but it can be observable. There is some kind of a choice.

Doron E: Well, I pretty much think that thought is a projection, I agree with that pretty strongly and that maybe it is on two levels, that there is possibly a universal or absolute projection which is thought in its purest form but our individual interpretation of that is our own relative thoughts.

Rose: Of course, you say "our own."

Rich: I think that when I think about thought it seems to be a movement of thoughts. I don't know where they come from or come to but they pass by you and you take temporary ownership of these thoughts and you can either play with them, think about them, you can apply them to your environment or you can let them go. And then they are gone.

Rose: in other words, you are more or less defining them as property.

Rich: Oh, they come by and you take temporary ownership and you either use it, observe it or do something with it, and then let it go, something with movement, it is not static.

Rose: Oh yes, I see where you are coming from, I see what you are saying that is like the idea, it is like the inability if you are concentrating to hold on to the thought, it is like an eel, it slips out of your . . . You keep trying to bring it back and it slips out, that sort of thing, from intentional thought. But then you have thoughts that you cannot shake, addictive thoughts, and they are just the opposite.

Dave G.: I was just listening to different definitions and I missed the front part of it but the one common denominator that everybody is talking about is that thoughts and thought processes are something separate, that is a process going on that is something that can be observed, which is easy to do when you are sitting here and putting thought out, but I am sure that every one of us when we walk out of here, even while we were thinking about what we were going to say about thought we're totally identified with them. So you almost need a contrived situation or some type of shock to recognize that or maybe we all go through with the knowledge that our thoughts are separate, but living with it 24 hours a day, we don't live that knowledge.

Gary H.: Well, my definition is that thought is coexistent with just everyday living. It's something that can't be separated from observations of the senses.

Rose: But isn't it possible that there are times when you do not observe with the senses as with a case of a mirage? What sense sees the observation of things in the memory?

Gary H.: I think that what I am trying to say is that possibly everything exists as thought at one point or another and you can't separate the two.

Rose: Oh, I see what you mean, of course, I would like you to prove that if you could, that would be really good. Not that I disbelieve you or conflict. This is a new angle or new approach, but I would say that it is as valid as any other definition. Because it is coming in from another perspective.

Pat S.: Yes, I was thinking about when we were talking about ideas, sometimes to young people, I think of thought sometimes as a way of hooking into ideas, or they hooking into us, because a lot of times kids will say where do I get my ideas, if I tell anybody my ideas then I won't have any ideas, they will be gone. And we talk of ideas like there are millions of ideas circling the earth, and that is how people invent things simultaneously, and then you follow in or hook in wherever you want, or it hooks you, I am not sure, anyhow, the ideas are endless.

Rose: You talk of them as though they are separate entities.

Pat S.: Well, that could be, then thought would be some kind of vehicle or tool to hook onto.

Rose: I heard another explanation of that one time, and I am not saying that it could really be validated as well as yours or any better than yours. And that was this business of oxygen being discovered simultaneously in two different places in the world, at the same time. And some of the spiritualists claim that that was . . . the whole thing was planned by spirits and that they chose the moment, more than the location, they chose the moment for that to be delivered to the earth. All of these advancements in science and stuff are, chosen, the spiritualists claim that they are ordained on the other side of the fence, and then they find the right person to be the mouthpiece for it. That's just a thought that went by.

John T.: It seems to me that it is some sort of language or conversation or mental language or mental conversation that I have with myself, I have heard of people talk about it being projected and stuff like that. But I tend to agree with Dave. I know that I identify with my thoughts, I don't think that I can deny that I identify with my thoughts, and I believe that I can cause things, and in that sense I believe that I can cause thoughts, and in turn I think that the thoughts can cause things to happen. And in the same hand, I think that there are effects too, I believe that you react to certain circumstances, and I imagine it would be a result of a cause or an effect.

Bill K.: Yes, I guess it is similar in that it is an—the language—an abbreviated order, but it seems to be enforced upon us at times, it is being forced upon the mind.

Rose: We can't help thinking.

Bill K.: It is not done by you, but all of the activities. It seems to be some abbreviated language.

John K.: I find thinking to be a perversion of crippled consciousness . . .

Rose: I like this new angle.

John K.: In other words, I think that if a person's experience and perception and awareness are direct and complete and up to the moment, then there would not be very much thinking-Thinking is a reaction to not experiencing life directly, and fully, so thinking is a shadow or unnecessary excretion of the inner experience. I take Krishnamurti's idea that once you are fully here you can slow down the thinking process, you don't have the chatter and all of the concept juggling and all of the rest of it, but thinking is more of a mechanical thing, whether to make a right turn or a left turn.

Rose: I believe that you are right.

John K: The sicker a person is, the more confusion . . .

Rose: That's the reason you saw the vacuum, I can blame it on that, if you quit thinking the world goes on anyhow.

Larry L.: Well, I don't think that I have anything totally new to add, it seems to me that it is a function that is totally automatic. At times I can be aware of most of the time that I am not. People talk of identification, most of the time. I think that I am totally identified with my thoughts until I am able to step back and realize that there is a flow that goes past the screen that maybe I can be aware of somewhat, and the fact that I react to them, and there is something that generally controls the direction of my life. I just emphasize the automatic nature of it.

Suzanne J.: It seems like it is some form of energy but it has a life of its own. There are properties about its direction and motion but it also seems that there is some sort of location, however that's not right but, as though we tap into . . . I mean that it's not just something that is going on here, and our head taps into one level of it, and there are different levels of thought, whatever it is, that maybe we can get into, but it seems to be all pervasive.

Linda K.: Well, I think, like you said, that thoughts are individual entities, and I don't think that any . . . maybe sometimes you have a thought that is yours, but I don't think that any of it is really you, I think that you are being used by I don't know what, entities or whatever it is.

Rose: Now, what I wanted to point out was, does anybody have a comment on what happened here now. We may all be able to learn something at once, it started with Alan's answer or comment, it was a little bit different than the ones previous. But did you notice the trend of the people that answered the questions, there was something common in all of it, what was it?

X: Well, what I noticed was that when you first asked the question of what was a thought, I had a certain thought about what it was and as it went around it was altered and adjusted, using a little bit of everything as I saw it applied to my thought, until by the time that it got to me it was . . .

Rose: If you could get people to write them down, and not see each other's writing, you would be able to get a purer result. In that regard, this is true. Because not only that tangent . . . what I saw was a tangent that just varied a little bit too, what was the principle thing? . . . It was everything exists as a thought. What was he implying?

Bob C.: That physical reality is a thought.

Rose: Okay, but what does that imply?

Bob C.: Nothing is real.

Rose: Possibly, but it does imply that there is a dimension. It implies a dimension, In other words, if the things that he sees are unreal, or, directed from someplace else . . . now there were a few people that mentioned flowing past, well Pat said something flowing past and you reach out and grab a hold on it, and you mentioned something external to the self, and this is a phase that none of us got into here, none of us, none of the definitions really came out as clearly as Suzanne's, but she was way towards the end so she was able to maybe get some words from perhaps others as she went. But her original feelings were there, and when you ask for a definition for something, not for the purpose of being clever with each other, but for the purpose of better understanding, we go down sincerely to the source, let's say for the first time. I will find out what thought is. Well, there are two approaches, maybe there are three or four, I don't know. But I conceived immediately of two approaches that we would have to take. One of them is our reaction to the process. In other words, there is a process happening called thinking. And so we react to that.

One person said that it is not me or that it is outside of me. But the reaction is the thing. Nearly all of the definitions given were reactions to the process. There is another one of course, and that is the definition of the thing itself, starting from the chemical occurrence which is simultaneous with thought, I am not saying that the chemical occurrence is thought, I am saying the chemical at the time of thought. Going back to the synaptic function, going back to the neural transmitters, etc., and how does this tie in. Strangely enough all of this ties in with things mentioned here. They didn't say it, because not everybody reads on neural transmitters, but everybody had a feeling, and that feeling is what you have to go by, if you want to give the thing some evaluation without biochemical training, does anybody pick that up?

Steve H.: If you are talking about a dimension of thought, we don't have a chemistry or physics that deals with mental dimensions.

Rose: Yes we do. Right here. That is what we are trying to do. Right here. See, the idea is that we are not going to have new terms or new words or anything, but we can explore it. And if you want to know yourself, you are going to have to explore it. Everything possible that you can throw into your computer to solve that problem of who's thinking, and what's the essence or the nature of the product thought. Or is it a product, or is it caused?

Steve H.: To me, it's like you can't . . . it's like when you first start looking at it you don't know where it is coming from. You can't really put your finger out and touch it because that in itself would be thought.

Rose: Well, I don't know whether that in itself would be thought or that in itself would be hunger. People get hungry to define themselves. People get eager to learn who is thinking. In other words, you can observe yourself thinking, this is what I maintain. This is what we have been doing. Everybody here has been observing themselves thinking, and I could even get little pictures of themselves watching themselves thinking while they were talking to me, and they would say . . . or they would do it with their hands. And what are they doing? This is the thing going by. That is the thought process to them being observed. And this is the process of the observer. This is what I talk about in the book. So we have all been doing it. We have all been watching thought. Now I maintain that we can carry this a little further, and see the possibilities, even if we are not going to get any proof.

Steve H.: One thing about that though, is that you can ask a question which would cause me to think, and I could give, say, an immediate answer, or somebody else might say that one of the words that I said might be inaccurate. So they can look at my thought and refine a word or two or something like that. So in other words, there is a faculty of awareness or ability to compare the thought that is seen or is spoken to a truth which is not talked about. In other words, if you recognize the thought to be untrue, then you must be able to compare it to something else that is more true.

Rose: What you are hitting upon there is something that—of course again—that we must be aware of, and that is awareness. In other words, awareness is not thought. We have to distinguish whether we think awareness is thought or not. We are aware of thoughts. We are also aware of when we don't have thoughts. There are circumstances when you can be aware and not think and not know. So you understand me?

Steve H.: Sure. It is just like this thought is like a film that covers your awareness.

Rose: Right, it films it, it's like the camera analogy. You know, the picture taking camera. The stuff going by the lens. But I remember one time I went unconscious, my back came apart and I fell over. And when I woke up, I looked up—I remember looking up at the sky—and I could see just so much vision out of the periphery. And I saw the green hills beside me, which was my own farm that I didn't recognize, and the only thing that I thought of at the time was what a wonderful . . . it was wonderful, really amazing. I didn't put it into words, but I just thought what a beautiful place—you know—something like that. The next thought that I had was, I wonder where I am at, and the third one was I wonder who I am? I had forgotten who I was. None of those were decided. I tell you, I described them in words, as word thoughts, but they weren't. I was enchanted by the beauty . . . maybe I was glad to be alive. It wasn't words, but I saw, I remember seeing and even having this perception of amazement. But I didn't know who I was. That thought, that door had to be opened later. The first thing was basically awareness, awareness of myself and the environment, but no definitions, no definitions of myself. I had even forgotten the name. So I think that when little things like that happen, you can realize the difference between being engrossed or trapped in thought and being totally free from it. With this, we are now approaching the definition of what some of the Raja Yogis call samadhi which isn't really samadhi, it is the liberation from thought, in which they don't think.

Richard B.: It seemed like as the definitions went along that we were confusing the process with the product, the end product.

Rose: Right, this is what I was saying. I said that right at the beginning, that you were describing the process. Or you were describing your reaction to the process. The cause of it, the cause of it very few people touched on except for the ones that said it is something that nails you from outer space or something that you grab as it goes by. Now those implications are strong and I wonder if you can pick up, actually, if it is only a concept, what the concept is, what the mental state is, the person and the thought, the awareness and the thought. And I think, and I don't think I heard anybody name it any closer than Gary or Suzanne, or any more plainly. But I think that in the implication, the next thing is a dimension. Now there are certain writers that are pretty certain. It is still a concept, of course nothing like that is proven. It is the concept that there is a higher dimension that impinges upon our dimension here and our lower mind. We have a lower mind which is the domain of the behavioristic psychologists. Meaning we have a reactive mechanism which is what I call the mundane type mind, the protoplasmic mind.

Mike F.: It almost seems like thoughts are a distraction on your awareness by forcing you to focus your attention on the thought as it is going by.

Rose: They are a distraction, but without them you wouldn't have any growth. The whole idea I think is to filter . . . I wanted to continue on this other thing. It is the possibility that thought is a dimension. I think that the more that you meditate on this the more that you get the . . . I get the picture that, in other words . . . I look upon thought itself and mind, as a tangible solid mass and dimension, much more solid than this. This is the impression that I get.

Q: Is this what Buddha meant when he said, all is one?

Rose: Yes. Now somebody said something along this line here. And I deliberately passed it by. Somebody said . . . the implication was that it was greater than the receiver. In other words, it was something acting upon this dimension. This is a concept of course, of Mary Baker Eddy. This is the concept of the Oversoul of Brunton. What did Mary Baker Eddy call it? The universal mind. Well, when I first heard those theories I thought—Oh that is another concept that somebody has dreamed up to fill up some pages. But I really believe that it comes from a profound inspiration. There is a reason behind it. And so if this is true, what does this imply as far as our domain is concerned. Where does our domain, in this physical brain-domain, you might say, human consciousness domain, and the human awareness—where is our fence or our perimeter, and where does this other dimension touch us if this is true. In other words I am saying now, when we are talking about something flowing by, either we are flowing by it or it is flowing by us, but let's presume that that might be possible. But where do we pick it up at?

Gary H.: Just in our awareness of the thoughts coming through.

Rose: I don't know. When you use the word or term awareness, this is one faculty that I have no organ for. See what I mean. Where are we aware?

Gary H.: I think awareness, or if you are aware of your thoughts, it adds more power to them, they become more powerful or convincing. And the thoughts are where you are, you identify with them. But I understand what you are saying as far as a definition for awareness. I think that it is more of a result of certain convictions put together, that yes, this dimension is real, and I think . . .

Rose: I think that you might develop a conviction that awareness is there, but I don't think that it is a product of convictions or structure. I think that awareness is basically something behind the mind. Because of the simple fact—now I am giving my beliefs and I don't particularly want to give them at this time—but I would rather have you evolve them or went into this thing yourself. In other words, if you are aware of thought, then thought is secondary to awareness. If thought is a subtle essence, then awareness is a subtler essence or a more real essence, a much more real essence. But it is subtle to us. It is invisible like thought. But it is more real in the final analysis and superior to thought because it watches thought, it is aware of thought as well as thinking, aware of the body processes. The thing that I noticed, there were two things that it would be good to think about. One of them that we didn't touch on is the relation to body processes. I think that it is very important that we pay some attention to the function of the synapses. Much needed data has never come out of the psychology books yet because the present psychology is interested only in somatic reactions, in other words, how to make taxpayers out of the loafing robots, or robots pretending to be sick, or whatever, and it doesn't get into the essence of thinking. Or the nature of thought. But I think that an answer lies in the structure of the synapse, and I liken it to the gap in a spark plug. Like a gap in a spark plug in an automobile, there is a metaphysical experience that occurs. Which couldn't occur inside the cast-iron, or inside the copper wire, there would have to be a place where a subtle essence, electricity reacts upon a denser essence which is gas. From which there is an explosion that drives the pistons and makes the car run. Okay. We have an analogy in the function of the synapses in the head. And we also have perpetual voltage, voltage until we fall asleep, leaping across there. And I believe that it would be good to do some thinking about the relationship between that spot and our contact with the mind dimension. I don't think that that is only a spot that we take perceptions in and have them recorded in the gray matter. There is evidence that most of the things that we see and remember with the brain—are also seen and remembered with the post-mortem awareness.*

* NOTE: This also refers to the phenomena of resuscitated people who witnessed details in an operating room although their eyes were closed—also the correct data given by incidents of astral projection—wherein the physical eyes could not have seen events miles from the body, as well as the testimony given by resuscitated people who were pronounced clinically dead.

So this has to be recorded elsewhere than the protoplasm of the brain. I see that some of you don't understand what I am saying, so I will expand on it a little further. People who have researched like Dr. Moody did, on out of the body travel, found that when people do this out of the body thing, or after death experiences—the evidence is pretty much the same. They experience people familiar to their daytime experience. Or lifetime experience. They are there, they see them, with eyes, that are lying in a morgue, perhaps, or in a doctor's office. They come back and describe the person, and say I just saw John, and John was crossing the street at 12th and Market. Somebody checks and sure enough John was crossing the street at 12th and Market. How did he see him from his bed in the hospital or someplace of that sort? I think Moody traveled from Atlanta all the way up through the southern states and saw people on the street that he recognized. This means that this consciousness and memory is no longer limited . . . we are no longer just this ball of soap that these impressions and sensory perceptions just make marks in. It is recorded also elsewhere. It is recorded so it can be transferred elsewhere.

To learn of these phenomena . . . you have to get out sometimes and read a few books and get human and varying mental experiences that are not in the newspaper, or that are not in your own self-meditations or observations, and it will provide some more questions at least. Some more questions to answer. But I am eager to see a little examination of this business of chemical thinking. I think that it is very good. I think that the chemical biology, biological chemistry is going to prove a lot of old church concepts. They are proving it, not disproving it. They are very close now to proving the existence of an inner man, which is a soul. I am going to run through some questions here in order for you to have something to think about.

I started off here with—what is a thought? And I have a few other questions, and I am not going to discuss them one by one—I just want you to hear them. Do you think, or are you a thought? When we go into studying terms, we take a word and study it. We contact a few angles here. We came at it from a different angle, and I got a personal observation angle, or whatever. If you are a thought, who is thinking it? In other words, there is a concept that the entire universe as we see it is only a projected thought. This is called Maya.

If thought travels beyond the head, such as we have witnessed almost scientifically in ESP, what is the vehicle for this travel? See, electricity doesn't travel without a medium, without a copper wire or something. But, it has been determined, scientifically, as far as the value of our science, our scientific methods are concerned, by J.B. Rhine with his dice, and other people experimenting individually, that ESP is a valid human capability.

Now again, does the body manufacture subtle essences called thought? I think that the body manufactures subtle essences capable of transmitting them over the wiring (nerves), or through the ether or however they go. That chemistry exists. The body does manufacture that and enables it to have a unique mobility.

Do chemicals such as serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter, create thought? Or do they merely facilitate the penetration into our consciousness of particular sensory data? The latter is what I think is generally agreed upon. Can sanity be gauged by logic? Of course, we are getting into what thought is permissible and what is not permissible. Whose thoughts are erratic and whose thoughts are correct? Now, if we look into erratic thinking, we may very well get a better insight into the thing that we think is sane thinking. I think sometimes the people with the erratic thinking may inspire us to go nuts. Because, as I said, I have seen autistic children, I have been around autistic children and have read some articles by people who have been around them and worked with them, and I am convinced that autistic children are superior. And we have to somehow learn, we have to educate ourselves to deal with a people that are not hooked on to the same set of values as we are hooked on.

Is behavior considered normal by virtue of percentages of incidence? The normal curve in other words. This was the beginning of behavioristic psychology. This has also been the way that we have measured our psychological advances—by voting. Legislating what the most people like to hear.

What is the relation between sanity and reality? In other words, human-defined sanity and reality. And of course, we could get into this business of questioning what is reality and how do we find it? How do we determine it? For instance, let's say the sanity of a deep depression. Are we sane when we have a deep depression? Or are we really just starting to think? Maybe the house of cards is collapsing and it should collapse because it is erratic, erroneous. Yet we think that we are going crazy because of the deep depression. This in turn we have to replace by something that will cause us to appreciate the silly games of life.

Should we question the games of life? You know, the values of so called . . . We were talking about projections here a little while ago, and I think that what has happened recently, and it is good to think about it or good to comment on it, and of course to find out what you think about it yourself, this business of society as a whole making a projection. A group of people, for instance, presumably, society goes along and develops according to nature, in other words, we become a more intelligent animal, as the generations go by, and we put on clothes, we come out of the woods and put on clothes, and then, at a certain stage of this game we decide that we are divine, that the human being can do anything that he wishes with the human being, and this is a projection. Again, this is not observing something.

This is saying that a person is going to . . . change nature, it's like the young man modifying his car. It comes from the factory looking a certain way and he says that he has the power to put five wheels on that thing or three wheels, whichever I want, or higher springs, or bigger tires. But it can be modified. So by projecting, we become creators, and that becomes a very infectious idea that we can change the whole plight of the human race by projecting and reinforcing. And the word projecting may not be insisted upon as much as reinforcing, we are supposed to continue to reinforce each other. And I am wondering if that is wise? The idea of reinforcing a person in their life-game. Even creating games for them to play and reinforcing them. And if a person is out of tune with the rest of society or maybe can't make their grades in school or a simple thing like that, and instead of saying, "Hey you had better get on the ball, the train is going by and you are going to miss the train," instead of that you say, "Oh you are doing very well, doing much better than you did yesterday . . . "

I presume that talk is caused from different perspectives. In other words, you have different perspectives and conversation is necessary to, again, compare our words and definitions with the other people's so that we will have some understanding. And these different perspectives emanate from what I call different states of mind. And a state of mind is something that you hatch out over the process of a lifetime, part of which you inherit from your parents—your family state of mind—and part of which you inherit from maybe a trade or a profession, or an institution, and each institution, if it has residents that live there very long, develops a state of mind.

So consequently, the media is able to convey conversations and ideas back and forth through TV., the newspaper and radio . . . where we still have a tremendous lot of trouble with states of mind. One of the reasons is that a lot of the communication is deliberately falsifying. I mean that it is somebody trying to sell you something. So in going back to the fellow in the newspaper that was interviewing me, the fellow said, "Well, we do have unimpeachable authorities, don't we?"

And I said I don't know where they are. I said that all of your professional people are crooked. Including the minister . . . he is up there telling you that he has a hotline to God, you know, all you have to do is put the money in his hand and he will put in the phone call for you and forgive your sins and get you on the road to everlasting pleasures. And you go to the doctor and he will give you an operation that you don't need, because there is a couple of thousand bucks in it. I am talking from personal experience. I know that this goes on all of the time—you have crooked politicians from the ward-leader all the way up to the president of the United States that are spoofing the people for private selfish reasons. So I don't see this idea of authority.

This fellow, he was a religion editor, editor for the religious articles that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press, and so he liked to consider himself an authority—that was what he was getting at—and he felt that as an authority, he should know something about religion. And he should have some authority, which consequently put him in with the theologians. Well, of course, I maintain that the theologians were massive excuse makers. They were people who read other people's books, and in turn, the books were written by people who had read other people's books, on infinitum. There was nothing really discovered.

There has been nothing really discovered for ages. They just take some old concepts, throw them together, make them attractive and maybe the public will buy them. Out on the west coast there is a thing going on there about the spiral staircase. The spiral staircase is the most recent metaphysical scam that is being perpetrated. On the spiral staircase there is a whole assembly of ascended masters in different states of ascension. Well, it is amazing that adults can be so much like children that they love these metaphorical stories, but this is what you get. But why, why do people fall for this? It goes back to their state of mind. I think that a tremendous lot of people love the fairy tale. "Can you make the fairy tale come true?—It's a carryover from childhood. Is there a rock candy mountain? Can we dream one up?" And, if we wish long enough—we hear songs written about this—if you wish long enough, strong enough, things that you wish will come true. And this is a popular theme, and adults sing these songs, not just children. So you dream up the big spiral staircase, or the ascended masters, or some avatar that is supposed to reincarnate every time Halley's comet comes over—every eighty years you get a good look at him if you are out in Tibet—on a lonely mountain. What I am approaching is the idea of states of mind. Why are people dissembled. Why are people so hard to find? Every human being in the world is a searcher. Everybody is a seeker. Some get tired quicker than others. Some settle for fairy tales. Some settle for brave manifestations of futilism. "Ahh there is nothing out there so why waste your time looking for it" and as the reporter said you might drive yourself crazy.

And a lot of people evidently go crazy or become so fanatical that they appear crazy. From mixing things, but not from pure study. Anymore than you would go crazy from studying psychology although they say that a lot of psychologists make the suicide trip. But I don't think that there is any need for a person going crazy studying psychology any more than it would be studying chemistry or anything else.

What is a state of mind? Have you ever conceived of the possible consequences of states of mind? If you don't, I maintain that when I speak of a state of mind, I am talking about an attitude that develops as a result of an experience in life, maybe suffering, maybe pleasure, in which that state of mind begins to dominate all of your decisions in the future. Colors your decisions. For instance, when I was in Denver years ago, I heard a fellow tell me that, he came there to get treated for his tuberculosis, which infected his lung after he was shot down over Afghanistan . . . when the English were invading Afghanistan.

And I said, "How did you get here in Denver from Afghanistan?" He said the English could not treat it. And I said, "How did you get into the British army in the first place?"

And he said, "The blasted bagpipes." He said that they came down the street with the bagpipes and he fell in right behind them and walked right down to the recruiting office. "A shilling a day, that is what I got for listening to the bagpipes." The thing is that the bagpipes create a state of mind. This whole incident was intended to convey something to you. That there is something about some forms of music that will put you in a mood. But there has to be a conviction that goes along with it or else you wouldn't go and sign up for your life.

So we find this in all walks of life where people have developed states of mind in which they believe certain things. And if you read in the paper where a man goes out and kills four or five people or kills his wife and kids, or something of that sort, this is because of a state of mind. It isn't a momentary impulse, this is a result of a conviction that has built up in him for years, and he made up his mind that if this ever happened to him again, he would have to act accordingly. Because this was his philosophy. I don't believe that very many of these cases of violence occur from spontaneity, I believe that they are basically results of states of mind. And you can get a picture from this that this is a state of conviction . . . it is a state of conviction. It permeates the biggest part of the population so that . . . and lots of times it is brought on by years of work by the media. For instance, right before World War II, I was a young fellow, every picture show that I went to . . . I had to quit going to the shows because they began and ended and were interrupted by patriotic songs and the US flag waving across the screen. And all of the shows were tear-jerkers about somebody losing all of their kids to the Nazis, and we were being rapidly manipulated into thinking that something terrible was going on and that we were such pure people that we had to right the wrong. And the young fellows eagerly went out—when the Japanese sunk some ships over in Pearl Harbor—they went by the hundreds of thousands and signed up. That is a state of mind. That is a state of mind backed by conviction, it may have been a childish conviction, but it was a conviction. So I am wondering how much, how strong this is, how much part this plays in everyone's life.

Now before, we were talking about the mind, about what a thought was, and the definition was linked, like I said from anything from a chemical definition of how thought occurs, what the chemical operation of it is, down to the possibility of thought being from another dimension. Of it being our contact with another dimension called a mind dimension. That the thoughts that we have are possibly the little fringes that we pick up with whatever our antennae are able to pick up of this other dimension. Now I am saying that this is a possibility. You can prove it for yourself. Or disprove it. Now we go back to this thing that no longer deals with brain chemistry or anything, it is a state of mind. Because we don't have to know brain chemistry to understand the self. All that you have to do is watch the actions, watch the conduct or the happenings of the mind. I say brain chemistry helps you and corroborates the findings or your conclusions, but one of the real keys of understanding yourself is understanding states of mind. And I am wondering what your individual reactions are?

Have you witnessed in yourself any states of mind or anything that seemed to you to be profoundly influencing your life? Some people have the state of mind that they are doomed, that they are victims of bad luck, that they will never have any good luck. I have seen people live their life that way and die rather young, as a result of it. And other people have the conviction that they are born for greatness, wealth and great destiny. Now these are states of mind and are caused. There is something that leads up to a state of mind—in my estimation. There is a conviction that leads up to that. So would you mind commenting? What is your concept of a state of mind?

M.W.: I understand now what a state of mind is. When I was sixteen, I left home because I got mad at my mother, I left my husband and I am now about to leave a job, you know because that must just be my state of mind, just solve my problems that way just by leaving. So that is my state of mind.

Rose: Would you say that your state of mind was one of independence or one of just curing an ill?

M.W.: Curing an ill.

Rose: Yes—well let's go to somebody else, we can go back over these if you want to.

Paul M.: Well, I think that a state of mind is just like a pair of glasses, it just distorts one way or another all of the information coming into you so that you see it differently than perhaps somebody else. The same experiences have different meaning for you than they do for somebody else. Because you have different glasses on.

Steve H.: It seems to me that they are made up of their composite factors that are well, let's say if you leave high school and enter college, right about at that time your whole way of looking at yourself, your whole spirit, I mean not your spirit but your motive, your attitudes change, but I think that it is a number of composite factors that could cause that due to your environment, your expectations, you know, in your period of transition.

Rose: Yes. Here is another thing for those that are maybe having a little trouble trying to pick up where we are at here. If you can ever remember when you were young and single, and the opposite sex had no meaning at all to you, and you had a state of mind then, which could have been anything from a belief in Santa Claus to the Horatio Alger belief that you were going to tear the world apart with your bare hands. Then you fell in love. And that is the first time that you are able to witness your state of mind—the one that went by, the one that you lost. And of course, you should be able to realize it at the time, but now your state of mind has changed, to the point where the entire world and every aspect of it is different—you follow me?

Okay, this is what I am trying to illustrate. This state of mind that I am talking about is something that is very solid, very real and psychologically most important. You are not going to find this in psychology books, I don't think . . . they just go by . . . I think that if Gestalt psychology had kept on going the way that it was supposed to, we would have approached this understanding of a state of mind. But it went from a pattern thinking (which is what Gestalt psychology should be) to a do-as-you-please sexualism. Under Fritz Perls. But anyhow, this is the clearest example that I can give at the moment. You must remember . . . you don't know that you have a state of mind. We are all in a state of mind right now, you are all in a state of tentative conviction, which can lead to violent action; right now it is tentative, but given the proper stimulus it can lead to violent action.

For instance, I don't think that anyone is more susceptible to changes of states of mind than people who have tremendous convictions without proper introspection. You get the example that there are a lot of people that are very violent, they get jobs where they are allowed to carry guns or heavy equipment and they wind up killing somebody. I read in the paper every so often where a policeman shoots another policeman in a beer-joint. They get drunk and shoot each other because of their egos, they have gotten into a state of mind where nobody had better ever speak loudly to them. Police don't like to be spoken loudly to, so this makes them a rather deified sort of creature. Well, they get a little half drunk and if another off duty policeman happens to talk loudly, the latter may get shot. Now this has happened several times in the last couple of months. What happens after the fellow shoots the other fellow? Regardless of whether he is a policeman or who he is. In other words, suddenly his state of mind becomes blatantly clear to him, as to what it was and what a mistake he made. His state of mind was wrong, and he knows it is wrong now. He knows it is wrong because it is going to interfere with his liberty. Even if he doesn't mind killing people. It is going to interfere with his liberty. So the thing that I am getting at here is the ability to check the state of mind and know that the state of mind exists by virtue of the tremendous letdown that comes when the state of mind is challenged, or when it leaves.

So now, there is a reason for all of this. What value is there to it?

A.T.: It seems to me, and somebody said this earlier, that there is a constant problem of identifying thought, and you are the thought, and I think your state of mind is even more personal than that, it is like the collection of all of your conditions and experiences that has caused you to form all of these opinions which is your outlook on the world and is how you interpret these events through this outlook. And that is even more personal, because you can think a thought, and it might come and go, but this is things that stay with you, and so when something occurs, or some sort of paradox occurs where your state of mind is . . . no longer . . . it causes you to act and the act creates a conflict which is resolved in a way that points out too that your state of mind was wrong. It's like an attack . . . because you identify with this or don't see clearly the distinction, it is like a personal attack, it's like it is very devastating.

Keith M.: I was going to raise a question about states of mind. In the example that you gave of the policeman that shoots somebody else and then realizes that he was wrong—or his state of mind was wrong—is it possible to recognize the facets of a state of mind, or an overall state of mind without feedback, or can it be recognized through introspection?

Rose: Yes, but you see the problem, we are going through a little exercise here in which you are supposed to word that differently. You are not supposed to ask questions. In other words, we are supposed to try to give answers, we want to hold it to a format because I don't want it to become just a loose discussion, I want to produce thought, I want to produce thinking on an understanding on what a state of mind is, and what you think the value of it is, or how you can profit from it or lose from it. Or avoid the loss from it and that sort of thing.

Frank M.: I just wanted to say that in retrospect I think that a state of mind, you were asking for personal examples, when I first got into philosophy, I got in through yoga, and I had a background in sports—an impressive type of thing—and when I got into yoga it was the extreme opposite, reading the philosophy I got into vegetarianism, I think that as I look back, I think that it affected my whole physical body because I went from 175 pounds to 143 pounds, and that affected my attitude towards people, and I thought that that was the way to go, the way, it was like I developed the conviction that I had to become peaceful, not just peaceful but serene, remove stress, that this was my path to finding God. I was interested in philosophy, there had to be no stress, all of the meditation that I did was not conflictive, I didn't want to get into arguments. And as I look back on it, I was really caught up in that perspective. Like a state of mind, that this was the way to be. I sort of let myself change into that state of mind. And of course, it was things that happened that changed my perspective that I was barking up the wrong tree. That I wasn't beautiful, that I wasn't going to get the answer that way, I changed, I saw it as more of a battle.

Rose: I watched a neighbor that has this optimistic, positive thinking obsession, or state of mind, which as I said, some people identify with doing good works for celestial gain. In other words you be kind to your neighbor, you feed the little kitty next door, or you help somebody across the street, or you give somebody five dollars once in a while, and that all adds up on your score. And this lady was one of the sweetest. And everybody would have said, "Yeah, she is a very sweet lady." But she acted it out very perfectly, and behind it was the conviction that she would be rewarded. I had two people give me this, one was a man running a lumber yard in Wheeling, and the other was this lady. And she worked in . . . and they owned a hotel there. But I should tell you ahead of time, but when you went into the hotel you noticed that with everyone that she waited on she had a smile for them. She was friendly, she never said anything bad about anyone, and she was just perfect in other words. Cheerful, always, she never had a bad day. She was never crabby and she knew it, she knew that she was perfect.

But when she was about forty-five, she went to the doctor and he told her that she had cancer and that she would probably live a year. And she started screaming, and she screamed until she died. She didn't live a year, she only lived a couple of weeks, because her state of mind, what you were talking about, she had developed this state of mind that was not equipped for surprises. She thought it would work, and she had attuned her whole being to that. She had put up with a tremendous lot of abuse and had worked herself twice as hard as she needed to, to make herself look good when perhaps she didn't feel good.

And the other fellow was a fellow that got cancer and he was about sixty years of age, and he had gone to church all of his life, and he was taking cobalt treatment . . . He had cancer of the throat and his neck looked like they had cooked him in a pot.

And he said, "Rosie, what went wrong? I never did anything wrong. I never let a kid go past my place if he needed a haircut," and he said, "now this happens to me."

And I said, "This has nothing to do with giving kids money to go to the barber." In other words, he thought that there was somebody up there keeping tabs on him and that he would have an easy exit. Funny thing was . . . that his partner, he was in a partnership and his partner took the whole business after he died, and I think that he sensed that that was going to come too. So here is the importance. I think that it is very important in our psychological analysis of ourselves and other people, to study this thing which we call a state of mind, and how you get locked into it. It is not just a reflex now. Now we are dealing with conviction and things that trap us into ten years or twenty years of a lifestyle, then it lets us hit the pavement.

Sue: This is like a couple of days ago. For some reason I just got really frustrated. My state of mind was really frustrated, and I was just really . . . I was watching myself . . . but being frustrated I couldn't get anything done anyway, like there was nothing that I could do about it, and I tried not to be frustrated. I think that the only way to get out of that state is to try to forget about it and say I am not going to get frustrated, because the more I try the more I get frustrated.

Rose: Did you ever try having a baby? This is another example of a state of mind. Nietzsche is a good psychologist in this regard. If you ever get time to read him. One of the things that settle upon a tremendous lot of women, especially younger women, is a state of mind that they are not aware of, and it is a dissatisfaction with not being pregnant. And it comes and goes. It comes and goes. But when it settles, you will blame everyone around you but that is not what . . .

Sue: I wasn't blaming myself. I wasn't getting my work done, things were not working out right.

Rose: But this is true. This is the most prevalent thing with a young man, his state of mind is, well, he is dissatisfied until he can become a perfect rooster, see, he wants to be the perfect rooster, and as soon as he becomes a rooster, it changes abruptly, you know, he becomes a sick chicken then.

Frank: There was one time where there was something read where a girl, where I don't exactly remember but you said what do you think her problem is, she was describing not only a frustration but also an emptiness like nothing means anything to me anymore. It was funny because it happened to my wife. What she described at twenty-nine with no kids and a job was she felt that nothing meant anything to her anymore. Her job was boring, her life was boring, our relationship was boring, everything, it was like an emptiness. And I remember reading, we were all sitting around and somebody read a description, and somebody in the room said what is wrong with this person, she was going to a psychologist and describing to the psychologist, you know she didn't have cancer, she had a good job, you couldn't put your finger on . . . but she was just so frustrated, it wasn't so much frustration but it was more emptiness, like and this emptiness was . . . and somebody brought up the idea that she wasn't complete, she didn't really know it but the incompletion was that nature hadn't been served yet. That she hadn't had a baby yet, and really, after she had had a baby, that feeling of course was gone.

Rose: Yes, I remember a question like that coming up once over in Columbus, I was talking and we, I asked a lot of people what they thought the diagnosis of the case was, and finally some young girl said, "I think that she wants to be pregnant and don't know it."

That was the whole thing. The funny thing is that there is a difference in the . . . I will get in conflict here with those political psychologists who claim that the female mind is the same as the man's. It isn't. The female mind does not admit its moods, and states of mind. And it is so constructed, because I think that if it knew what was happening to it, it would, or might go, for a sex change or suicide. Because it is a rough life to live. You know. The prospects. Unless you think that it is really a wonderful experience to raise kids and put up with them for twenty years, because that is what you have to nail yourself down to. Just because you have a compulsion or a state of mind—that does not mean that you cooked it up yourself. You didn't cook it up yourself. It is imposed on you. And of course, the male is likewise a victim. But I think that the male—the male is a little bit more aware. We had, one time, when the group first started, we had about five women that stayed in the house. When I lived in Benwood. And they were always fighting, but they fought in a different way. Men once in a blue moon will punch each other and that is the end of it but women have a way of fighting with attrition. They just grind on each other's nerves. So there was always a bit of hell going on in the house, and so I would get the party that I thought was responsible and get them aside and say, "Hey, what happened?"

And invariably, they would say to me, "I forgot to look at the calendar."

Because this stuff is imposed on them like clockwork. You could predict it. I used to tell them, the 31-day calendar is no good for women. Get a 28-day calendar. And of course, some people don't work by that (by a 28-day cycle); they have longer calendars and shorter ones. But get yourself a proper calendar and the symptoms will repeat themselves. The moods will repeat themselves, the frustration, the anger, and everything that comes. And if it comes on the twelfth day of the cycle, it will come on the next twelfth day of the cycle. And the thing with the female also is that the moods change. The man's mood can last for a year. But a woman's mood may change every twenty-eight days. And it will repeat itself.

And you can sit down and reason this thing out, and notice that there is no basis for depression or frustration.

And they will say yes, I wonder how I came up with it. How did I come to get into this bottleneck so to speak, this emotional frustration. But if you check it out once in a while, you will find that something has happened periodically before that. And one other amazing thing about just ordinary life—we marry people and don't know who or what we are marrying. In other words, there are people that live for 50 years with each other and don't realize the difference in male and female psychology. And I have talked to a lot of men for instance, and they say—oh, you just have to learn to put up with certain things, that's all. And you talk to women about men and they say—oh you just have to put up with them, they are crazy. They raise hell over this and that and it doesn't mean a thing.

And after 50 years of living together they don't understand each other. The only thing is, the graceful part of it is, when you get old and weak, you quit fighting because you are tired, not because you are wise, you just get too tired to fight. That's all. So hurry up and get old.

What is your observations on the state of mind, have you picked up any in yourself, or do you understand what they are?

John K.: Looking at it, it is a, maybe a whole philosophy of life, is just the way that you see everything, in terms of, not just a day or a couple of hours, it is harder, maybe impossible to live not knowing—just admit that I don't know what the hell this is all about, and that just living is a question mark—so I think that all of us at some point just develop a set of assumptions or probabilities of what this is or what the likely rules are, and I think that life just teaches that. I think people suffer a lot if they get raped or beaten or live in poverty and I think that after a while of that is going to create a certain philosophy of life, that colors everything, and when somebody comes up and says that Jesus loves you—that will be alien to them. Because I think all of us start out fairly neutral, or as neutral as you can be, when you are five years old, and then bit by bit, your viewpoint solidifies and then maybe you adopt a probable idea of what life is and how you are supposed to do this thing. Unless a big shock happens, that will be your state of mind for life.

Frank: Wouldn't that go that if one guy gets bit by a bee, then all of the reactions . . . do you want us to say that bee stings create your state of mind? In other words, you are saying that life creates your state of mind, wherever you were at in a certain situation, is that correct?

John K.: Well, maybe in a bigger sense, but I was thinking of my father's example of when he was in a concentration camp and that fixed his state of mind for the rest of his life.

Rose: Sure, that would.

John K.: He just has an idea of what God is, of what God isn't, and what this is all about, of what people are and how he sees everything, that one experience affected the next fifty years. And I think that everybody has something equivalent to that.

Rose: Do you think it changed, do you think that there was any great change from before he was arrested or locked up. Were you aware of any other type of state of mind that he had before?

John: Well, I am sure that he had lesser ones when he was a younger man he probably had a much greater sense of optimism, or pollyanna that you always talk about, or beliefs of what life could possibly be, or God might be if you ever find him, you know, his philosophy changed after a short period of time. Or just the same using the example of the woman, a person that gets raped at the age of fifteen, or something, that is going to color everything after that, it has to. I think that everybody has something, maybe on a lesser scale, it doesn't have to be that traumatic.

Frank: How about the individual reaction. Do you think that everybody that was in prison camp . . . do you think that they have the same reaction or state of mind, right after that or . . .

John: There are a million factors that everybody has. It can't be predicted that clearly.

Rose: You brought up a point there though, about the state of mind of the child, where do you think it comes from.

John: The initial one?

Rose: Yes, why would a child have a state of mind that when they got raped that they would be so traumatically changed. Does anybody have an answer to that?

Madeline: It must be because they were taught everything is real nice and sweet and then the first bad thing that happens they think, then they don't know what to think anymore, they can't believe what their mother told them.

Ron: States of mind seem to be part of our insufficient knowledge based on our program and part of our personality, our false personality. The gentleman said earlier that when we are born we are mostly an essence . . . we don't have these comparative stimuli—intellectual stimuli—troubling us. We can learn through experiences. And as we continue we are told this, we are told this when we are very young, and when that does not correspond with what we experience, it is hard to alter states of mind, still, on very insufficient knowledge, that is all that we have to compare with.

Rose: What if this state of mind . . . say that which the little child has is insufficient knowledge, what is wisdom? In other words, how would that child behave if it was wise. In other words, we say that the child's reaction to rape is that she goes berserk. And you say that this is from insufficient knowledge. You say that it was a state of mind, and a state of mind is born from insufficient knowledge. If she had sufficient knowledge, how would she react?

Ron: Well, she might have been able to avoid the situation, but glandular processes take place too, the adrenal excretes the material for fear long before the computer can rationalize it in logical thoughts. They were told not to walk through the woods and things like that, but there are other attractions that make them walk through the woods. We are all under the strain of circumstances.

Rose: Yes, but what I am curious about is the . . . if these things are erroneous, what is the correct way, what is the correct way to live? What is the correct way to suffer or let's say tolerate things that people go bananas over when they happen?

Ron: Well society does not embrace such ways that are more correct. They panic and emit revenge and hate. The correct way that would happen would be to accept it. And try to go from that point on and try to . . .

Rose: I get what you are talking about now. But basically, let's go back to this thing on the root of the state of mind though. Where does the thing come from, when a child has a fear of rape? Does that come strictly from what its parents teach it?

Ron: No, there is violence connected with it.

Rose: No, no. I mean just the child now (after the rape). Why does the child have that reaction?

Ron: Because of the violence that accompanies it probably. Mostly. If it were just a sexual act, the child if not conditioned to think that it was wrong, maybe it wouldn't be as traumatic.

Rose: See, I am wondering if there is another opinion on this.

Bob: Well, I think this relates to John's definition of thought before. I think that it was something like . . . it was a perversion of consciousness, perversion of crippled consciousness. Along, the same line, maybe there is a pure state of mind, a correct state of mind that maybe becomes crippled because it is immersed in this brew of ideas, and that corrupts it. That there might be a correct state of mind.

Rose: This is what I am trying to get at is that. Is it possible for a child, because it has not had a lot of garbage thrown into its head, to have a clear perspective? And sense that up ahead there is a hell of a lot of trouble once you get into this thing. Let's stay away from it.

Ron: The child might even enjoy . . .

Rose: Now we are talking now about a child that goes berserk. I think that maybe a child that was raised in a whorehouse would enjoy it. You know, bad atmosphere. But let's just stick to the premise that the child didn't appreciate the fact, that it was raped. And then why did it have this let's say prudish state of mind?

Ron: Well, it probably didn't appreciate it more from the physical discomforts than any type of prudish thing.

Rose: Now you see what you are talking about is a state of mind in which you appreciate. Why should you appreciate sex?

Ron: I am not saying . . . could the child appreciate . . .

Rose: No, no. I am asking you why should a person appreciate sex. You see, you inferred that the child could, maybe should appreciate it. See, as possibly a favorable characteristic for the child.

Ron: If it did not have all of the pre-programming in, yes.

Rose: Now you are saying that it is bad if it is not programmed to appreciate sex.

Ron: I am saying that all pre-programming is less than your full information . . .

Rose: Well, let's presume that a person had full information about sex, they might not want to partake in it at all. Now let's suppose that that is the child. Let's supposing that the child . . . what we are going at is a factor. In other words, it is all right for all of us to give an opinion. Let's have those opinions. But then let's also say let's have some other opinions and see if it is possible that there is a factor that we have not touched on. That's what I am after. That possible factor that we haven't touched on. What do you think?

Doron: . . . and surroundings because you haven't gone through all of this programming and conditioning, and I know-that there were times, when it seemed like I really, it seemed like a really strong question in me, and it happened more frequently than it does now, what is this all about, what is this world about, why do people die . . . what . . . my father died when I was young and it really shocked me, and these kind of questions were very prevalent and I think that there is an intuition about this thing but we haven't really refined it to a . . .

Rose: We haven't decided what is behind it. We haven't got the factors.

Doron: Yeah, I think that that intuition is a very valuable thing and I think that what we are talking about with the traumatic experiences negative to the child like rape or something like that—I think it would have a negative effect in the sense that it would impair the advance of intuition. If you can retain that intuition from childhood or develop it in adulthood, somehow and can get back into that intuition—I think that you are ahead of the game if you can.

Rose: Yes, I am always reminded of the thing that is in the Bible. Like I said before, I more or less pushed the Bible aside when I was a young fellow. The more I studied the more I found little corroborations coming from the Bible to things that I had discovered. And what had happened was that if I could have had the intuition to have read them in the Bible, maybe, and didn't have a prejudice that it was just an instrument for somebody to use to take up a collection—I might have saved a lot of time. But there is a statement in the Bible about that little incident there, that indicates very little about the old Jewish laws. They don't mention very much about the laws that occurred or existed in the time of Christ. The methods of execution, the reasons for executions and that sort of thing. But the Bible does say that if anybody does bother a child they should be drowned with a stone around their neck, and it is a rather emphatic thing.

So I am just saying, let's take that line for a minute. Do we suppose that the guy was off his nut that wrote this or inspired this writing, or was there a message? Is there a message behind that? I don't take the message lightly. If I had taken it lightly, I would not have remembered it, let's put it that way. I think that it is an important thing too. There is something behind it. And of course, I could tell you what I think it is but I don't want to. I want the answers to come from you, if possible what you think it is.

Bob: When I look at a baby or an infant, I get the feeling that they are not entirely here. It seems like they are in touch with . . . you know, we live in a physical world, and it seems like they are only partly in this physical world. They are also in touch with something else. Children have such a capacity for imagination and make believe, and sex on the other hand is such a physically intense experience, it just roots the attention in the physical world. It may be that this child has this intuition that even after it happens, gone through this experience they realize that they have lost something, their awareness has become incredibly tied to a physical realm, they weren't so exclusively chained here before.

Rose: There is another little saying that they have. That unless you become like a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Does that include little children that are raped? Do you have to become raped as a little child to get into the kingdom of heaven? Does that exclude little children that are raped?

Larry: If little kids are more in touch with who they are, in something like rape, it doesn't fit in at all with the previous totally non-traumatic form. Same thing with things that should be traumatic with us, but we always push it down under until all of that stuff just builds up. But with a little kid you have to, he has to react traumatically because it just doesn't fit.

Dave G.: You were talking about states of mind before.

Rose: Even a child has states of mind. Even the little child. And they play with them. In other words, they go into little games of imagination. And they integrate their whole room, like if they are playing with dolls or something of that sort, they realistically believe that the dolls are living, the way that they talk to them, and that sort of thing, that is a real deep state of mind. But this is the whole thing. It is that they know. Underneath, underneath their real self knows what that is. Unless they decide to use that as a game. If they want to use that as a game against adults or something.

But still—with the fact that they have those states of mind—I think that there is an automatic objection. There is an objection. Of course, you can say that when a child is raped, the public has a resentment to it because the parents are angry because the parents are angry because they couldn't rape the child. That is one of the arguments—that somebody else moved in, and did it, and then the parents are angry. I don't buy this at all. I don't buy this argument at all. I think that there is something that we haven't touched on though. That gives us the answer to this.

I think that there is a basic factor, and it is from Nature. I think that rape bears upon or affects the spiritual potential of the person in the future, but the reason that the child is opposed to it are natural. I think that the child is programmed to protect itself. That's all. I don't think that it is natural for a child to endorse or tolerate rape, or to tolerate approach. Unless they are being tinkered with. Now if they are tinkered with on a gradual scale and get used to it by their family or somebody, babysitters, something of that sort, then they will not respond to rape in the same way that a child would that was protected by its parents.

I am just wondering if you have any idea what that factor is? What I am trying to get at is, there is evidence in the human family, that came down from biblical days, putting the accent on the innocence of children and protecting them. And there must be a reason for it. There must be a reason also for the opposition in the child. Now I maintain that most children will resent . . . now it could be that they resent the danger of the unknown. That could be one explanation.

Bob: You know when you hear about some of the incredibly detailed phenomena in nature, it is hard to believe other than that, that there is a set plan for the way things are supposed to be, that deviation from that causes reaction in nature. One example is that they recently proved that with trees, when one tree that is attacked by worms it gives off a chemical that a tree next to it picks up which then releases a chemical that offers a resistance to the worms, from getting on that tree. Things like that, and some of the new diseases that come up, like this AIDS thing, now it may sound like a fundamentalist's curse or something, but to me it is very possible that a certain lifestyle makes these people susceptible. Well it is obvious that it does. Like homosexuals are more susceptible to this disease. So obviously it is a result of their lifestyle. Without imposing any judgment on it, just the bare fact of it.

Rose: Well, I will tell you the thing that I go by, my greatest complaint with the behavior of human beings is that they flaunt a lot of stuff in the face of the public, you know, like the rapists, etc., such as rape being perfectly natural. And it isn't. This isn't natural. We can get a better psychology from watching the barnyard. You don't see the male bull bother a cow, if the cow shows her horns. Or if the female is a calf he walks away. I mean that he is intimidated. If nature didn't have that programmed that way, your species would become extinct. And this happens occasionally when farmers will start to breed heifers too young. They will wind up with a diminutive breed of cattle and they will have to get rid of them. Because they won't sell on the market. But that is generally because of the farmer allowing them to breed too soon, or encouraging them to breed too soon.

I found that if you watch animals, it is just like the males fighting. We have two bulls here and a steer, and we have a little bull, and he is a baby you might say but he weighs 500 pounds, but the other bull doesn't bother him, because he is a baby. But when he becomes mature and has the smell of a bull, he will get attacked, that is all there is to it, but see, these are little things that nature puts in to indicate that, you can do it under certain conditions, when a certain odor occurs, you know that that is the signal to charge, or whatever.

But we are ignoring nature, and this goes back to the business of saying that we can remake the human being. I am trying to get you to understand too the possible things that are programmed into the being, our being, for our own protection. in other words, if a thirteen-year-old girl gets raped, it sure isn't going to do the human race any good if she has a baby. And that baby gets raped at the age of thirteen, we got evidence of this in South America. And in a lot of the underdeveloped countries, they have four-foot people. Whole races of people that are only four feet tall live in the jungle because they breed early, and in South America, I remember years back one account of a girl five years of age, having a baby. Five years old and somebody gave her a baby. This didn't do her any good, her children or her grandchildren. The whole line is loused up because of somebody who was older and knew what they were doing—went ahead. And of course, I will say too, that in that environment too, you may have indiscriminate tinkering with kids, by adults, so that the child doesn't resist. What we were concerned with earlier was, the reason for this reaction from the innocent child, what causes it? And that the child that is raised under a protective type of environment and with parents that are considerate of their safety, their sexual safety and that sort of thing, the reason for that child going into trauma? Now, do you have any more comments on that?

Keith: Yeah, I was going to say in relation to the talk that we were having before, on what are our definitions of thoughts, I was thinking of Jung's term, the collective unconscious, that it may be, just like in a computer, there is an area in the computer where the program is put in, and you can't change that, you can't alter that, but you can go in and look at it and see what it is, and it may be, like the idea of the collective unconscious, is there, somewhere in the human mind, the same for all people, and perhaps a child, who is more in contact with it, and senses that area of the programming, and that is what would make them have that reaction. They just feel, they know that thought.

Rose: That is one thing that I agree with you on is that I think that the child is smarter than the adult. I have always believed that. I believe that . . . the psychologists know it . . . that the learning ability decreases with age. Of course, when you are first born, maybe you don't learn very much. We don't know, we can't calibrate it, because although their eyes are open and they are studying the universe—they can't tell us what they are seeing, so they may be very observant then. The child, when it is five years of age, reaches the peak of its intelligence, and then diminishes from then on out. In its ability to perceive and to coordinate all of this data that comes in. Because the data is coming in . . . it can see clearly now. It can hear good and is maybe able to get up and toddle around a little bit, so its perceptibility is at its greatest peak, so its intellect is functioning at its highest rate. And from then on it gets taken in by, influenced by, and I call seduced by the lights, the lullabies of the parents, the affection of the parents, and that sort of thing to try to get it to respond and become a nice functioning robot. The child becomes a trained robot, by virtue of the training of the parents. But I also think that some things are born in the child. Let me put it this way, I think that this fear, this programming that you talk about is right in the child, and I think that the intellect is something that perhaps brings the message out front so that the child is frightened visibly. This is the question.

Does anybody else have anything on that message?

Gary: I kind of feel that that is a protection of the child's mind. That that instinct is to protect the mind, from outside influences coming in, and when the child is raped, the state of mind is abruptly changed, and the close contact with that other person, that other person's state of mind is brought into the child now, and the child realizes that it will never be the same as it was.

Rose: I think that you are very close. I don't think that there are any great theological dissertations going on inside the child's head, but it basically operates from an intuition, and like I said, I was raised in a religious atmosphere, but I rejected nearly all of the religion but retained the superstition of moral integrity (if you want to call it a superstition). There was no real proof for it, there was more proof for some of the other tenets of the church law, church rulings, but I believe that there was a formula there.

I think that there is basically a formula there. If you want to follow it, this is one of the best places to pick up the formula of success for a spiritual level. And I believe that the reason that it was written into the books, or the book, was because the person that didn't have the formula failed to function spiritually, later in life. So you deprive the child not only of its physical characteristic of being a virgin, and its mental tranquility, but you also deprive the child of any spiritual pursuit in the future. Consequently, it was worth putting in the book. Then you go back to the other saying that says, that unless you become like a child you will not be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This is the other biblical corroboration. But it doesn't say just any child. Not to become as any child. They are talking about the child that they didn't have to throw the guy in the lake with a rope around his neck. It just doesn't mean just any child. First of all, to be a psychologist, you have to develop your intuition. The pseudo-science of the psychology books means nothing . . . unless you can sense . . .

We are trying to work a therapy today presuming that a man's chemistry is out of whack. Okay, so he shows a certain state of mind or a mood or something. So you give him a hypodermic to change his state of mind, and basically, a lot of your so-called insanity that they are treating today is nothing more than states of mind. I classify insanity as a brain lesion or a material deterioration, of the nerve sheath—or something of that sort—not just moods, complexes, or hangups, that develop into fanatical directions. Behavior directions. I don't consider that to be insanity at all. And I don't think that you need medicine or chemicals to cure that. And I think that that is another form of rape incidentally. Mental rape. In other words, you poison the guy with the cure. But I think that the true intuition belongs to the child and we have to copy it. Okay, I said a minute ago that I thought that the five-year-old child had probably reached its peak.

Okay, here is a ten-year-old girl that is getting raped, and she hasn't reached her peak? Of wisdom? I think that she has. I think that she knows. But she knows more than we do. She knows on an intuitive level and her view is not cluttered with words and phrases. She has a direct tap, she has a direct tap into more of the reason for her being, and the potentials mote for her continued being, than she will ever have again in her life, whether she gets into sex later or not. She does have a tremendous computerization there. But she can't verbalize it. All she can do is scream. She can't talk, she can't argue with the guy and say, "Hey, do you realize what you are doing to the human race?" No, she just screams.

Oh, here is that . . . we came very close to that and the word is pleasure. What is pleasure? And what is the necessity for it?

Madeline: Desire is the necessity for pleasure.

Rose: You are talking about the trigger, I am talking about the analysis of it and the reason for it. The reason for having it. The reason for indulging in it.

Ron: One angle is that it sustains life, what is pleasurable is usually good for the continuation of life and what is unpleasurable is not. In many cases.

Rose: How about the guy that likes to drink blood?

Ron: It sounds like somebody programmed him to a different state of mind.

Rose: That isn't the thing that I am trying to get at. I am trying to get at the basic . . . yeah, you are right, in this in that it takes us into pleasure. Pleasure is the cause of procreation. Now, is that necessarily good?

Ron: Not just procreation but just existing.

Rose: Yes, but is that good?

Ron: But we have to.

Rose: Okay, let's get some ideas on the importance of pleasure.

Dave A.: It is a reward by nature for reproducing, keeping your body by eating and so on . . . by reproduction.

Rose: But, see the thing is, now I think that we all agree on that, does anybody disagree on that? That pleasure is a bait. A bait basically for reproduction. Even eating, even the idea to eat, to eat you build up energy and that goes to producing the next generation.

Dave A.: I think that that is true to a large extent, but I think that it has almost gotten reversed, pleasure creating life. Life has become the pursuit of pleasure. Far more than we need to sustain life and we copulate far more than we need to have children, and our sort of co-existence . . .

Rose: I agree with you 100 percent. That there is a tremendous, and I don't think that anybody would deny that either, that there is a tremendous desire for the human race to perpetuate the pleasure in spite of nature. You know, to not pay the price. See what I mean. To get the pleasure and not pay for it. And of course, I wonder about this seemingly consciousness in nature that somehow gets even with people. He was talking about AIDS here a little while ago, there are a tremendous lot of people that die from birth control pills as well. I went in to see an old lady that died a few years back and there was a woman about thirty-five years of age lying there in a casket in the next room, and I said what happened there, and the undertaker said—birth control pills. That's what killed her. She took something that caused a clot in her heart or elsewhere but that is what happened. And I hear that there is a percentage of them that die—medical doctors for instance know—but they say, "Oh the fatality chance is one percent, two percent." But the ones that die are no percent. They can't speak. The ones that are going to die are only two percent. I agree with this, but the thing is that if we accept this risk, we must understand that pleasure is the bait. Of course, I don't say that all pleasure is. For instance, I liked to travel. I used to, but I get tired of riding now. When I was younger, really, the greatest pleasure on earth was to see what was around the next bend. I would get completely away from the home scene and the headaches that went with it.

I think that music is . . . I think that some music is non-sexual, I think that a lot of European music was orgastic, but it doesn't necessarily need to arouse you, I think that the nut that wrote it was orgastic, that was the only way that he knew how to express it. A lot of your oriental music I think is non-sexual. And it is very beautiful music. Okay, so this is a form of pleasure.

And so I differentiate. I say that on certain pleasures—there is no price. There are certain pleasures that have no penalty. I think that there are certain relationships that are very beautiful, there is no price on them. But once you take a certain step, it is like the woman that ate the apple in the garden, then of course, you are on the payroll. You are hooked in the business. But, what I am curious about is your reaction to this business of pleasure, and what our need for it is, or what our reaction to it should be? in other words, should we just say oh well, that is the only way out, or that is what we are supposed to do, or that is God's will, or whatever, I am curious about . . .

Rich: It seems to me that highly pleasurable situations tend to make you blinded. It puts you into a state of mind where the troubles, or something that you could be thinking about, or should be thinking about is temporarily erased. And sometimes it has a function that narrows your focus and blocks out other things.

Rose: I think that Reagan is a great spiritual philosopher. He decided that we were too happy. (laughter) So we are not going to think until we have misery. But this is true. You have, if a person is too fat, they will not go to war, if you are content, you do not function. Philosophy only comes out of adversity. And a lot of these yogis that sat, they didn't have anything to worry about, they were fairly peaceful, but they had to tie themselves up in the lotus position so that they would get cramps in their legs so that it would keep them awake. That is the only thing that I can see for the lotus position. But you have to keep irritating yourself in order to think, that part is true. And pleasure isn't conducive . . . it isn't even conducive to peace of mind. Pleasure seeks more pleasure, and more pleasure causes the opposite of peace of mind.

Bob: I guess that a lot of times pleasure is just a name on something that is just a release of tension. You can take two different people going through traumatic situations and one guy will indulge in some type of activity that is normally identified as pleasurable and the other guy won't. And generally the people that . . . say somebody gets to drinking, they are going through trauma, and they don't want to think about it, so they indulge in something, it releases the tension, so that they can forget about it.

Rose: This is the reason that we are doing just what we are doing here today. In other words, a person can give a lecture and fill it full of little wisecracks and humorous things and take up a few hours of a person's time and maybe get a certain point across. I think that in the long run . . . the only way that you can actually get a person to produce themselves is by challenging the mind. You have to challenge it continually. And I know that is the reason why we try to do a certain amount here in August, on this meeting. But I think that you can do this yourself. I always say that you can start up little groups in any town, and they don't have to be highly spiritual people. All they have to do is to be people that want to know the answers. And be tolerant of a little bit of confrontation. That's all, and get together and irritate each other a bit with the questions. That's all. You have to shake your heads up because you are like the cows with their noses in the grass. You get to ruminating, that's all, just eating and ruminating. And life goes by. Unless you take a certain amount of time out each week, to shake your head up and start asking yourself how or why this is happening. See, this thing of pleasure is a very important key in esoteric diggings. There is a tremendous lot of people that think that you can have all of the pleasures that you want and still pursue an esoteric path. This is nonsense. And some of them carry it, so far as to embody sexual pleasure in it and they call it witchcraft. See, they are going to get their goodies right there on the altar. And they are not going to learn anything. They are just going to deplete their energy and fog up their head with confused symbols and symbology and that sort of thing. So I believe that one of the keys, one of the keys lies there. I am not saying . . .

I told the reporter—the Pittsburgh Press man, when he was talking to me about sin, I said, "Hey, I don't believe in sin. I believe that there are certain things that are unwise, to do, that's all. I don't believe that there is a hell waiting for people, for instance, or for those who rape little children or kill people, like Gary Gilmore. That doesn't say that we have to hop on this guy's bandwagon. But, I don't believe in standing judgment over somebody. But at the same time, I think that there are correct things to do and highly incorrect things to do."

And these questions, they haven't been answered, a lot of the questions today, for instance the question on thought, I don't think that they should be answered here. I think that they should all be answered in your individual heads. I think that the worst thing that could happen is that if I gave you answers that I have discovered. That doesn't do you any good. And there is nothing that can be proven from one man to another, on this. You are getting into a realm somewhat beyond logic. You are getting into a realm where a person has an experience and the man with the proof comes along and meets a man with the desire for proof. And the latter asks, what happened to you? And you say, well this happened to me. And you describe it. How do you know that you didn't cook that up. You don't. Nobody does. But if it happens to you, you will know. So consequently, there is no point in endorsing something merely because somebody else told you to. But there is no point in not searching inside your own head. You can't go wrong there. You are your own judge there. You are the fellow that reaps the benefits too. But again, the thing is, we didn't answer this, is pleasure necessary?

Madeline: I wanted to give up pain and pleasure, I decided that I want to give both of those up, I have no pleasure, all I have left is pain . . .

Rose: So, you are halfway home. We will get you some pills and that will take care of the other half.

Dave G.: Early in January I went out for a couple of weeks and led a very spartan life. And there was nothing seemingly pleasurable that I would associate with pleasure. But still, you would eat, and I noticed that it would be the exact same mind, no matter how much you deprived yourself of it. It would still set up this same relative game where you would sacrifice and then you would get rewarded—no matter what it was that you were worried about. It might be a peanut. The whole program would still go in there and hold that out as the big prize that you should be entitled to. And I wondered if there was ever any way that you could condition yourself to less and less absurd things. But it seems like the body would always be putting out some type of gold in front of you, that you would interpret as being pleasurable.

Rose: Yeah, well, I think that this is true. I think, I believe that the whole secret of the path is the trading of the absurd for the less absurd. There is no way . . . I don't believe in expounding a system and saying this is a perfect system. It may have been perfect for me, but it may not be perfect for you. The thing is, that it is perfect in this regard, in that it doesn't postulate before proof. You have a hunch, and you work with that hunch, and if something happens that proves that you are right, then that is a real pleasure. And with that type of pleasure, there is nothing wrong. See what I mean . . . you trade the old barter system for a replacement system that works for no reward except the Truth. We compare it with a physical achievement, like if a guy can lift 50 lbs., then he can lift 100 lbs., there is a pleasure in that too, but that is an egotistic pleasure. The other is slightly higher, it is sort of a spiritual pleasure, which is also an ego. After so many of those hurdles you realize that none of those spiritual pleasures are important either except as a means to a very important end.

Richard B.: One form of pleasure seems to be there, if it is connected with ego, sort of like you said . . . It is the same problem as the problem of thought, it (achievement) keeps the sense of pleasure like thought—keeps giving you this illusion of separateness, of individuality. I don't know how you want to put it. You know, they seem to contribute to that somehow, to perpetuate that false state of consciousness.

Rose: This guy is gathering some honey for himself.

Richard B.: What he thinks of himself.

Rose: Yeah—something that I think that a lot of people should think about is the idea of possessing pleasure. Or possessing the object of pleasure. This is real crazy. In other words, the man says I got a wife. Of course, we do not have any better way of talking, but the inference, the inference is "I dated a real good-looking babe." "That's my girl." Of course, the female is also saying "My man." "Don't touch my man." There is a certain achievement role, which incidentally, occurs in the primitives as well, the idea that the chief of the tribe has ten women, the other guy, he only has a half of one. Which he shares with his neighbor.

Richard B.: Well, you were talking about those songs and so on that those adults sing, like those songs that "I own you, body and soul."

Rose: But, if you go on down the line, just like somebody mentioned . . . you will, on a spiritual path, you'll trade physical pleasures sometimes for mental pleasures or mental conceits. Which is the second disease, that you get. You have to get rid of that later on. But basically, I think again that we can pretty much agree that there is a pleasure that is a bait and then there is a pleasure that is not a bait. And I don't see anything wrong with a person enjoying certain pleasures. Certain things that are pleasures. As for me, I don't think that it is a good idea to get wrapped up in anything too much.

Richard B.: You know, one thing that sometimes is useful when you talk about pleasures, in animal studies they talk about . . . well this is jargon but, they call it concentric excitatory mechanisms, or CEM's. For example, a certain bird will be programmed to sit on a certain blue egg, it will sit on that egg rather than on a speckled egg. What will happen is that you can fake the bird out by getting an egg, even a phony egg, and make it even more blue, and the bird will sit on the wrong egg, I mean that it is something like that where we are programmed to like sit on the eggs, and then we will decorate, or somebody will do it, they will decorate the wrong egg and sit on that all of the time. See what I am trying to say—we will go the wrong way. And we keep doing that with pleasures, I think. Then we end up living for those—for the wrong things. It is naturally in us but we end up pursuing, not the natural pleasure, but the artificial pleasure.

Rose: I think that it goes along the lines with the thing that I wrote in front of the Psychology of the Observer book, the animals are ail pretty much programmed. You know, they live according to code, but the human somehow was able to change the transistors—or he flipped a switch—and he got himself loose to a degree. But since then of course, he doesn't have the protection. He doesn't have the protection that the animal has. And consequently, he is able ultimately, by virtue of his game playing, to destroy himself. On a large scale, or destroy his children or whatever. But I think that the trouble . . . what I am afraid of today, is that this obsession with pleasure just permeates everything, and I run into an increasing number of people who are hooked, that are not kids.

During the Sixties a lot of people got into witchcraft and they were into orgastic pleasures at the same time thinking that they were doing spiritual work. And this is the tremendous contrast with the unwritten or inter-linearly things that we get from sacred writings . . . or from the histories of all of the major religions. There is a warning in it. And I think that, I do not believe that people shouldn't get married. I believe that they should. You know, that is part of the natural programming which I don't believe in violating. Don't think that you are better than nature. But I also think that everybody has the right to solve the mystery of life too. The fact of who they are. I think that that is your prerogative. I think your sacred trust also.

As I said earlier, when we were sitting here talking, I thought that there were two programmings. There are two programmings that the individual goes through, one of them is natural programming. In other words, he is programmed to perceive and project. He perceives stuff and he projects in unison. The whole human race projects the color scheme. The whole human race projects and changes the inverted retina so to speak. The images that hit the retina, or eyeball. So we all carry out this projection together and it works seemingly as part of this world that we live in. It is our projected world. But there is another blueprint. There is another blueprint. And that says that inside this other very complex web, there is a blueprint whereby each and every man has a chance for ultimate survival. Ultimate definition. And he doesn't have to violate nature to do it. When I say this, I imply that a totally ascetic life or monastic life is not necessary. I think that sometimes we may get a lot of sages and saints out of monasteries, but we may also get a few who are mentally limited. Monks and ascetics are isolated to the point where they can't communicate to the human race, so that if there is anything good that comes from that life, they would have a hard time communicating it. They have to go according to the rules of the monastery, and there aren't very many laymen there . . . to hear what they found out.

Rose: What do you mean by dimension? Mind?

Steve: (Inaudible)

Rose: Oh, I think that this too, runs through almost every major religious system of thinking. There are different levels or dimensions that a person enters and transcends perhaps, and some of these are relative. This mind is also a relative dimension. If you remember, I used the word manifested mind. This stage play that we are here, with the stage, is a projection from another dimension. This is the only way that I can explain it. And there is a mind behind that that isn't manifested. Only some of it is manifested in this one . . . It is like in the cabalistic interpretation of God, in Genesis, the God is listed as plural, the Elohim. The word lonely. God became lonely is the interpretation of it, and he searched for a trough for his pleasure. It is rather a crude way to say it but they had rather crude words in those days.

But the explanation is that the Absolute becomes lonesome. And it is great and alone—singular but incorporates everything, that is the description of the Absolute. Everything emanates from it. Now I am not saying that that massive thing that projects this dream world that we live in might also be a creature in another dimension, I have no way of knowing all the capacities of the Absolute. But in order for the unmanifested mind to project this stuff to us, that dimension that it is in, must be a living thing. It is more alive than this. This existence is more of the movie projection on the wall.

So I think that we can tap it, and if you are persistent, you can enter it. I think that this is one of the steps that happens when you go through the formula of the observer—the process observer. You realize that everything except your individual awareness is a subjective dimension. I started to talk about this in the description of the drop of water and sahaja samadhi. We are the drop of water that falls into a river that enters the ocean. It joins a river of other drops and the river enters the ocean, then the drop of water and the river is lost in the ocean. And the immediate reaction that we have when we hear that is, to say, "Oh boy, there went me into nothing." No, that drop of water is still a unique individual awareness that is never lost. And it is of so great of magnitude that any time that it wants to locate itself back in our history, it does. If it so desires. If it desired to go back up the river, it could, because it has the ability to do so. To me, this ocean is almost a living . . . a dimension . . . a much more living dimension than this world. And I presume that in that dimension are creatures who are more vital than us.

Richard B.: Is that the same thing as "Lokas" that the Hindus talk about? . . . I mean dimensions.

Rose: No, there is no place, when they talk about "Lokas" they are talking about dimensions or planes . . . the first four they claim are planes of a relative nature. And one of those would be the manifested mind dimension or different levels of that dimension. There are parallel terms in Spiritualism. I sometimes think that the spiritualists copied from them, in their description of the astral realm, causal realm, the etheric realm, etc. The seven planes that the Radha Soami sect describes, and I think that they are the same throughout India. The first four of them are basically relative dimensions, from which the only escape is to go from one to another. You know—to progress through reincarnation. And they admit that you have to try to transcend those realms—one of them is listed as a desire realm—immediately after death. The astral body seems to have to be . . . more or less like a waiting room, where nothing great happens, and then a person enters into a desire realm, where they can wish to get things and they are immediately there. And they claim that it is an equivalence of a Christian hell. And they live in that sort of pleasure until they get fed up with it—until they come back. Now this is all unproven. The only significance is that you do know that you go through a mind dimension. That is definite. I was never ever conscious of going through a half a dozen of them, I was conscious of going through a mind dimension, and after that it was strictly an absolute totality, in which there was only Self-consciousness. In it there was only Self-consciousness, and each person that enters it is a total Self.

Frank: You think that when Jane Slater had the experience of seeing people in a room being non-existent, seeing the world as being nothing, is that sort of, did she sort of step into that dimension?

Rose: She was in the mind dimension, the Unmanifested Mind.

Frank: In other words, she expressed it as an individual but it was a conviction from the mind dimension rather than . . .

Rose: Yes, she saw the entire world in those hours that she was there. She had—I call it the mountain experience—but she saw it from the place that was the manufactory, where all of this stuff is manufactured or projected. And she looked across the room at her husband and said, I see too that you don't exist. Of course that disturbed him quite a bit because I was a little doubtful myself about how alive he was.

Frank: And then she said that nobody was there. I mean that none of us were there, or something like that. Was that a sensitivity on her part that permits, I mean a readiness or something on her part that permitted her, besides the influence of the room and your state of mind, that permitted her to get on to that perspective at that moment.

Rose: She had a high degree of sensitivity but she walked into a strong field of energy which, I consider to be very similar to what they used to talk about in the Bible. You know, the apostles meeting together and the Holy Ghost being in their presence. That sort of thing. Because I could see it in the room but it had no human form, but when it hit her and she went down, it settled right on her and she went right down on the floor, and of course, I knew where she was, and I was hoping that she could go on through, but she hadn't been prepared. It is better if you don't go through the experience and then make the trip back, if you are not prepared. So there is a . . . everybody has their little protector, I believe. I believe that everybody is protected that has good will—if they mean well—and nothing will happen to you. You'll think you are going to die forever. In a way that is good too, that they think that because that kills the ego.

In other words, the person starts to die and if they feel that they are dying, they will drop all of their egos immediately. It is necessary to drop all of the egos in order to have a realization that isn't colored by relative idealistic thinking. So I don't know if she thought that she was dying, but I do know that she had an experience. But what she got was . . . whatever that force was—it was right close to you—it would have hit you but the door opened and she came into the room. But I think that it was caused basically by her ability at that time. She was a very sensitive person, it was her ability to pick up my state of mind. That was the whole thing. Then there was a catalytical reaction.

Frank: That force that you were talking about in the room, I remember that when we used to sit in rapport, in the younger days of the group, even when you were not around, there were things that you describe in the Psychology of the Observer, you talk about a force, some type of energy, well, you talked about it before, that it just "happened," but it would affect people, into tears, into change—all types of things.

Rose: It is a very quick psychological transmission exercise, very quick. People change in half an hour and if they are wise enough to witness the change, it can be permanent. You know, if they don't just think that this is something that their mundane body is experiencing.

Frank: Is that a result of the energy that is in the room, the lifestyles of the people . . .

Rose: The energy in the room, I don't think it does anything but destroy the opposition in the egotist. I think that it takes a lot of energy sometimes to surmount the energy of the egos. And then once they are surmounted—the evidence of it being surmounted is that they break down and weep, for no reason at all. You just point at them and they would start weeping. Well, in that condition they are capable of taking in anything that is around. I mean any intelligence that is around, they may be capable of perceiving. They are capable of getting inside of your head. As I say, there are people that struggle all of their life, to achieve this—and this is an incident of a girl, a young wife, who cared less. She didn't want any parts of what we were doing, so she stayed out in the kitchen, as we were sitting in a rapport meeting. We would have these rapport sessions, and they were very fruitful, I mean things were happening to people, I could see changes in their personality, people were growing, coming out of shells and that sort of thing.

We had had it happen on an individual basis where there would be maybe only two or three people there, too—where somebody would come down and get hit—something would hit them. One case was with Frank, I think that it was with your wife, and Mike was sitting behind her . . . and she started crying and he looked around her head, you know, to see what she was crying about and he got in line and it hit him, and he described it, that it was just like electrical voltage.

But he was very sensitive—he is a very sensitive man, and that facilitated it. I always regretted that he later got tied up with psychiatrists. They got to pumping him full of drugs. I am sure that they were able to destroy his sensitivity, and I remember one time in Pittsburgh, we were sitting in there with a fellow by the name of Rich Hughes, and I pointed at B., and Rich leaned forward, into the line of fire, and shook uncontrollably for quite a while. Rich never came back, it frightened him. He thought that that was enough of that. But there is a tremendous amount of energy there, for people will follow rules and try to be harmonious. By harmonious I mean that you cannot come in off of the street drunk or full of dope and expect a good rapport sitting. That's all—it won't happen. You have to keep your nose clean.

But this particular case that Frank was talking about—she didn't care, she was not harmonious—she thought that I was a fathead—you know. Maybe I am. That may be one side of me. But she still wandered into the room where we were sitting and this energy had just collected and it hit her, and she was transformed in two hours time. She was just radiant, and she kept declaring what all that she was going to do. But unfortunately, that was the last that I saw of her for a year. If it isn't in the cards, you can have an accident, but that doesn't say that you can continue.

But some people, their physical mechanism is such that they can perceive or apprehend rather quickly. I blame it on nerve ends. I see people with sensitive nerve ends. Your learning power is in the nerve ends. And in some respects women are superior, in this respect women are superior to men, in that they have more sensitive nerve ends. And my excuse for it is that a woman has to be able to instantaneously pick up danger, and you know, apprehend what is going on quickly . . . you know, learn to run and jump without any logical debate within the self. But regardless of where it comes from, I find that the women have much more sensitive nerve ends and if they are around any forces, things will happen to them quicker.

Vince: Is that different from being nervous?

Rose: Yes. The path of the male is one of attacking the brain until it explodes, the mind, I shouldn't say the brain. You attack the mind until it explodes, you fatten up the head until you chop it off, and then you reach your ultimate wisdom, you reach the answer. But the female doesn't approach it in that manner. The male is geared more towards hard logic, if he can develop a sensitivity, an intuition, he is more capable mentally.

Because of their sensitive nerve ends, women are more intuitive in my book. You have to have common sense, but you have to also have intuition. Because we are running on a terrain where there are no railroad tracks, and we get into subjective matters. You get into philosophical matters and matters of self-improvement, you are out in space, there is no objective place to put your feet, so to speak, so you have to be able to think intuitively.

END

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MIRACLES

Akron, Ohio February 15, 1981

In this talk we are going to run through a lot of things that are unusual, and try to catalog them if possible, or to let you judge for yourselves what you think is the basis for all these phenomena.

There are many phenomena, and I was fascinated with them from the time I was quite young. I looked into everything available, and this included time spent in Spiritualism looking for materializations and that sort of thing.

TYPES OF ENERGY

I find that people are inclined to leap ahead into excessive mystery when explaining the material things that occur in life, where a lot of things can be explained by simple biological means.

The secret of miracles is based on the different energy transmutations that are diagrammed in Figure 1 (next page). As we come out of the earth (at point A), our first transmutation is food. Transformation of food into flesh occurs with physical exercise, and the food goes into every part of the body. If you are sick, even if you have heart trouble, the doctors will tell you to move—you can't heal yourself if you don't oxidize. You have to get out and move the muscles and keep the blood circulating.

The first horizontal line in Figure 1 represents the primitive individual, where food is the only transmutation.

Some of the food goes into a type of flesh called glands. The endocrines are one place where energy can be stored. Of course, energy can be stored in fat, but it is much more quickly released from glands than it is from fat and muscle tissue.

Above that second line, above the glands, we have a neural quantum—you can develop neural energy as an additional transmutation.

FIGURE 1. ENERGY TRANSMUTATION

Many of you may be acquainted with the recent discoveries in brain chemistry. There are chemicals, some produced by the pituitary gland, which affect the synaptic action in the brain. In the process of checking this synaptic action the scientists found that there are opposing forces at work in the nervous system. Two of the chemicals which they have discovered are dopamine, the exhilarator, and serotonin, the depressant. The body is balanced in this way.

Now a synapse is the end of a nerve, which feathers out like fingers on a hand. Two nerves are matched with each other, some distance apart, and at the moment of a thought or perception there is a spark which jumps across from one to the other. This goes on through all the nerves in the brain. Perhaps the message from the eye or the sensory nerves in the fingers won't have a spark jump until it reaches the brain.

If you stop and think about this for a while you will see why this is necessary. Nothing can be piped directly into the mind or the memory banks, so this intermediary process is used. There is a strong supposition that man lives right here in the spark gap, the same as an automobile lives in the gap of a spark plug. To operate properly the spark must be just right—not too strong, not too weak.

Now there is a chemical (with about twenty letters in it) that clears the path of every impulse that comes into the brain. This happens at almost the speed of light. Within a split second another message comes through, and its path must be prepared also. If you are studying, for example, and holding your body still in a chair at a desk, the mind continues to think—forcing this action. After a while the system rises to the occasion and starts to produce enough of these clearing chemicals. These chemicals result from transmutation. And when you run out of this force, the body goes to sleep.

Civilization, which depends upon human thought, is based on the development of the proper chemicals here. Perhaps with each generation there is a chance for the development of a greater sensitivity—and possibly a greater inclination for overburdening the brain with drugs and so forth.

From the neural quantum, and only from the neural quantum, is the spiritual quantum developed. This refers to people who are able to heal with their energy, such as Christ and some of the other famous healers (and rules out that class of people who maybe just believe and go to church). This quantum is developed at the cost of something else—of intense concentration in a direction.

In short then, if you stay at the first level you transmute food into flesh, you get fat, and you can become a hog—the energy follows (in Figure 1) across and back down to the earth. At the second level you can transmute it into the glands. If that is as far as you go, you become a goat and the energy also returns to the earth. Civilization rests on the ability to transmute the energy someplace above the glands.

TYPES OF MAGICIANS AND MAGIC

There are three different classes or types of magicians. One uses illusion. A second dispels delusion, i.e., takes the path of wisdom. A third, whom most of the books call a Magus, is the magician who creates. These forms start with the physical and go upward to the mental forms of magic.

Also I have categorized six types of magic. The first is what we call sleight-of-hand or legerdemain. This is deliberate delusion, playing tricks with a person's optics and so forth.

A second class of magic is practiced with physical energy. It doesn't require neural energy, but can be done with just simple somatic or protoplasmic energy. The Japanese had a way of developing energy they called hara (the Chinese used the word chih), using it in the ability to break bricks with the hands, do superhuman feats, lift enormous loads and so on.

The existence of these abilities are a validation of the different quantum energies I am referring to. I became convinced of the existence of neural quantum energy when I saw several feats where people were able to do enormous tasks with their hands, beyond the normal capacity of the body—verging upon the miraculous.

You hear a lot of stories about people lifting heavy loads in an emergency, such as women lifting automobiles when their children have been caught underneath. I have read several accounts of this, and I experienced this enormous energy myself when I was young. A two-ton truck had hit a taxicab and overturned. It was a junk truck full of bathtubs and that sort of thing—the truck was on its side, pinning a man and a pregnant woman to the street. Two of us had heard the noise and ran down the street to the scene of the accident.

I shouted to the fellow with me, "We've got to get the truck off them." We took ahold of it—and couldn't move it. I kept cursing and shouting, "Come on." Then—we picked it up—we pushed it over, putting it back on its dual wheels. I don't know of any weightlifter who could have picked up that load. And neither I nor the other fellow had ever lifted weights. I could not have done that under ordinary conditions. Afterward we were totally weakened, to the point of collapse from the strain.

From this experience I became convinced that we summoned energy from all parts of our body. That is the only way we could have done it. And I came to the conclusion that the energy comes through the nerves. It doesn't come through the bloodstream, because the bloodstream doesn't have time to get it to all the muscles, say, of the back and arms.

This event took place when I was quite a bit younger. It wasn't until about ten years ago that I came across the evolved scientific chemical analysis of what they call the neural transmitters, these things which clear the path and allow the transmission of the electrical messages through the nerves. But if this can work at lightning speed to clear the synapses, it can also work at lightning speed to transmit energy to any part of the body.

I'm not saying that you have to have neural quantum energy to do these things, but I'm saying that the nerves become transmitters of an enormous energy. What we have is what I call the potential in the nervous system to hold a quantum of energy.

Incidentally, this hara is what the Japanese used in their hand-to-hand combat. You hear stories coming out of places like Formosa about individuals trained to kill people with their hands. I think that they may have unconsciously projected through their nervous system into their hands the power that would have lifted a truck. Now the bad thing is of course, that it's all right to use this ability once in a while to help somebody who is injured, but I can't see the idea of downgrading what I consider to be a very sacred energy for the purpose of killing people.

Taking this energy a step further it becomes neural energy. It becomes the intelligence. The ability to maintain a certain level of neural energy will determine the reaction or the grades a person gets when he goes to college.

Going up another step of transmutation from there we come to healers (that's basically what we're here to talk about). This transmutation comes from neural energy—it can't come from anywhere else. And it occurs when energy is projected from the human body, sometimes at a distance and sometimes by laying on of hands. It doesn't come through the mind of a man so much as it does from the nerves. Of course, the mind has to have the intention or direction. This is a bit more complicated than just thinking about something and doing it—you may have to think about it for years before you become proficient at healing.

The third category of magic is the miracle of faith. This seems to have very little to do with quantum energy. There is a certain mental attitude that has to occur, but a lot of faith healings happen without any particular body condition of the healer. I assume that most healings take place in a group, so that energy is drawn from a dozen up to several hundred people perhaps.

Some of the mechanics of faith are known, but most things about it are unknown. Also in the faith category is witchcraft. People don't stop to think about this, but witchcraft doesn't work unless the user has faith in it. And they find that to place a spell on a subject effectively, requires having him believe in it.

About twenty or thirty years ago huna healing was quite the rage. They had deciphered the Hawaiian languages and decided that the huna-doctors had developed a unique system of healing that involved faith or belief. Even the huna-doctors believed it—so they in turn could be killed by another witchdoctor's reversal of it.

The fourth general category of magic includes the mental forms. This is above the physical and the faith categories, and the mechanics of it are known. The mental tricks or magic have to do with hypnosis, zapping, psychokinesis and so forth, and these are things which have been scientifically tested.

Psychokinesis (psycho, mind; kinetic, moving), the moving of objects with the mind, is manifestly an extrusion of the mind itself. Uri Geller has undergone a lot of testing with scientists in this country and in England, and they claim that he can affect matter in such ways as twisting objects and repairing watches. There is a Russian lady also who can move objects with her mind just by concentration.

Zapping is a form of hypnosis. While hypnosis generally depends upon mesmeric passes or something that fixes itself on the person's mind or traps his attention, zapping can be done without your knowing it. This is the root-value of most of the cults which come out of India and the East. There are people who train to go into a concentrative mood and remain that way for long periods of time. They will discipline themselves for ten or twenty years to learn how to "zap,"—I think they call this shakti. They are able to actually knock a person off his feet simply by looking at him, and sometimes without looking at him.

You may have heard of Meher Baba, who had this ability. He disciplined himself, even remaining silent up until the time he died. People would come into a room to see him, walk in front of him and collapse on the floor in front of him. Of course that was quite a sales feature. People really believed that this fellow had something—that he had the knowledge of the Cosmos or was in tune with a higher Spirit.

But he wasn't necessarily in tune with a higher spirit—this was just the product of India. I've always said that since they don't have a great steel production over there they had to find something else to export. And I'm not saying this out of a critical manner—I have studied this for a long time, have joined and been initiated into groups. I studied their techniques, and found that it has nothing to do with God.

The fifth category of magic has to do with the magic of entities. We won't discuss this very much here, although you can ask questions about it later if you're interested. You will find hints of this in old writings like The Tempest, where spirits create storms or do the bidding of some person.

The sixth and final category is what I call a supra-mental form of magic. This category is represented by the arrow pointing upward in Figure 1, to spiritual quantum energy, or creation. This is a method of effecting magical happenings, meaning something such as a cure that has no good explanation for the average person—a result which occurs without a prescription from a medical doctor.

EXAMPLES OF MAGIC

Now that we have identified the main categories of magic we can talk about some examples in greater detail. There are some other categories as well—I don't know exactly how all of these work, but I will identify them as we go along to the best of my ability.

In the Polynesian Islands there is a magic performed that brings the dinner in to the table—the people play music that brings the dolphins in. They chant a little mantra to the dolphins, even before they are visible, that the people are having a dinner and all the dolphins are invited. The dolphins don't realize of course, that they are the dinner. (This also is another instance where it seems strange that people would put magical energy into such a purpose.)

When you get to talking about magic, a lot of people will say that this is primitive or that this is pagan superstition and so forth. And to this I say, "Nonsense." These things have been scientifically investigated, and other things as well such as fire-walking. People have tested them and they are found to work. The whole field of alchemy is full of these things.

Every major religion on the face of the earth believes in magic and believes very strongly. The fundamentalistic Christians can go back to the Old Testament, which is full of instances of it—people being taken up alive into heaven, people healing the sick, men emerging from fiery furnaces. Unless we have to redefine the term magic, I say these things are synonymous with it. The same power is there.

We have cases of raising the dead, communicating with the dead, and supernatural help in removing obstacles to progress, as in Heaven sending a legion of angels to help Gideon. Other phenomena observed are walking on water, changing destinies, and stopping blood. Anyone here who is near my age will have heard of the stopping of blood, done with a formula supposedly from the Bible.

Within our own era were the experiments at Duke University, monitored by J.B. Rhine, which resulted in the use and legitimizing of the term ESP. By throwing dice with the right frame of mind you can win. This includes precognition and psychokinesis. They found a measurable increase in the frequency of the dice coming up on a certain number when concentrated on for a long period of time. With practice they could alter the roll of the dice.

I refer to the pursuit of this type of knowledge as Direct Mind Science. This covers generally all of the things I have mentioned so far, and there are many other examples of it in history—such as Kapila's Eye. This term comes from ancient Hindu philosophy about the origins of the Indian religions.

There were two men, Shankara and Kapila, the one supposedly the teacher of the other. Kapila was said to have stopped an attacking army—I don't know how large it was—but the group was supposedly destroyed by his glance. He gave them the evil eye. Now this may sound far-fetched, but of course, it happened a few thousand years ago so the recording of it may be twisted a bit.

Right here in Ohio we had the incident of Tecumseh, the Shawnee Indian magician. He was immune (or convinced a lot of people that he was immune) to bullets. He once told some people around him, "I'll stamp my foot and the earth will tremble." So he struck his foot on the ground and there was an earthquake. He had some tremendous power, and even predicted his own death—knowing that he had to die, and knew the time, and the cause of his death.

So how do these things come about? Somewhere underneath all of this is a common denominator, which I'm trying to indicate in this talk.

Within the miracles of faith are the institution at Lourdes, the healings of Christ, and incidentally the healings of Rasputin. Rasputin was supposed to have been an evil genius. He was what they called a starets in Russia, a traveling holy man. Their ideas of holiness differed a bit from ours—he could be quite a lecher when he took a notion to be. Yet he healed people. He was a friend of the last Czar in Russia, between the turn of the century and World War I. They brought Rasputin into the family because the only son of the Czar was a hemophiliac, and Rasputin was able to heal him.

I was fascinated when I read about his life. Rasputin would come into a town and retire into a cellar or cave or whatever they let him stay in. He would remain there a couple of weeks, fast and pray, and abstain from sexual contact, living like a penitent. They said that when he came out of the cellar he would be as pale as a ghost—but anyone who got in his road got healed. He would go through town healing people and of course create quite a stir. He could have anything he wanted. He didn't acquire a lot of money in his life, but he had a lot of prestige.

However, there was a negative side of Rasputin. Before leaving town, after healing all the people, he would take all the women out into the woods—and they would have a grand orgy. I don't know why he tied this into his life, why it would have been important to him. But it's amazing how well women could keep secrets—there wasn't a single man in Russia that ever found out what happened.

Notice that he developed or renewed his quantum energy while he was in the cellar. The power to zap, to transfer energy to someone else, was renewed. As I mentioned, this zapping is among the mental forms of magic.

MENTAL FORMS OF MAGIC

Also among the mental powers we have hypnosis. This business of changing water to alcohol, of which we have a case in the Bible, can be done quite easily with hypnosis. We can't go back and check what happened then, but you can check what happens today. This is quite commonly done. If we had the time today we could hypnotize someone and give them a drink of water, telling them it was alcohol, and they would get drunk. It makes a good show.

A new thing coming up is the effect of the mind upon plants, which in the past has been outside the realm of magic. I think Burbank pointed out years ago that plants responded to human emotions, but I don't think anybody paid any attention to him.

Now these things relate to the conscious mind. But there is another thing, another faculty of the mind, that enters into this magical dimension. I call this Direct Mind. The bigger things are done with direct mind influence, while the smaller things are done with hypnosis, zapping, and the like. Also, there were people alive not long ago, such as Meher Baba and Gurdjieff, who were able to zap skillfully by direct mind. By that I mean that they didn't have to dangle something in front of someone to put him to sleep. This could be done if someone just walked within range of them, and sometimes could be done at great distances.

These examples are not just idle chatter. They are all things that I have seen and done, and also have read about others doing. There is an instance in the Bible about Ananias and Sapphira, who were supposedly killed by Peter with mental power. And Blavatsky writes of being on a portico at a place out in the jungle when a tiger leaped over at the people. A yogi stood up and shouted at the tiger, which dies in mid-air. When it hit the ground it was dead. Again, these are some of those things in magic which a person who prided himself on having a logical mind would find hard to believe. But these things can be done.

A third mental power is creation, represented (Figure 1) by the arrow pointing upward. As an example of the use of the mind to create we have something called a tulpa. Alexandra David-Neal, who I consider to be a responsible and intelligent author, outlines in her Magic and Mystery in Tibet a method used by monks to create an image of a person with their will and imagination. These could be seen by other people—they weren't as thin as a ghost, but appeared to be very solid. Normally, or abnormally, the monks created women. The only trouble was that after a while the tulpa would take on a very feminine personality and become hard to live with. Then it took the monk possibly years to get rid of or melt the image.

There are other things that can be created. You may have heard of materializations, which are similar to a tulpa. I was at a materialization session once when a man walked out from behind a curtain and said, "Touch me, and let these people know that I am solid." This was in a room of a house, not a big auditorium. The man who responded was a professional man, a chemist, and he said, "You're as solid as I am, I'm quite sure." But when the thing left, it went right through the floor. Incidentally, I spent years tracking down phony mediums to find a genuine materialization. And most of them are phony.

Telepathy is another form of direct mind creation or projection. You can contact people sometimes at great distances. A lot of people are contacted automatically by urgency, such as when a relative becomes sick—the message gets conveyed with something in the communication that is very pressing. And I think telepathy can also be done by practice.

There are things, as I said, which we don't know the cause of. We don't have enough data on many of them, such as Kapila's eye. Nobody can go back six thousand years and check the data. The use of talismans is also somewhat mysterious—it implies ascribing a magical power to a stone, ring or other object. Of the mechanics of this I have no idea. Perhaps it functions on the level of belief, since they are often used within faith systems.

THE MECHANICS OF MAGIC

We don't know how many of these things work, because our knowledge of the world just scratches the surface. But there are things which we are capable of understanding, when we come to the idea of psychology.

The tie-in is that without psychology none of these things exist. The stage magician is one of the shrewdest psychologists you will ever come up against. He knows how to delude the people because he knows what the mind is not capable of resisting. From the very beginning magic deals with the mind. It is either deluding the mind or opening up the mind to the wisdom that is behind a lot of supposed delusions.

The mechanics of magic seem to be very complex. But by cataloging the forms and finding common denominators we can hope to greatly simplify them. Many of the magical things are done by very simple people who have no scholastic education. But, for example, in throwing dice, the mechanics of what causes them to roll a certain way must be quite complex—and it all has to happen within a short time, say two or three seconds, before the dice come to a stop. So there has to be an intelligence there which is superior to our ability to watch the faces on the dice as they roll and at the precise moment bring them to a stop.

There has to be something there which is beyond that, because these things are done. They can be made to happen. Science is basically a system of prediction. All things in chemistry, physics, and mathematics have to be based upon prediction and proof, meaning duplication of the experiment. Somebody says that he can put hydrogen and oxygen together and produce water. He is asked to prove it and he does it. Then a man comes up and says, "I can concentrate on those dice and bring up a certain average." And he does it. Once he can make predictions like this his work is scientific.

And all these other phenomena, for example healing, may likewise be subject to prediction and demonstration. Incidentally there are certain common denominators and even common limitations to these, such as Christ's inability to heal in a town in which no one believed in him. The people with whom you grew up, and talked with, and played ball with, don't believe that you can do anything except what you did in the home town—as a youth.

THE PATH TO MAGIC

Everybody wants to be a magician. I would say that most of the religions on the face of the earth would not have begun and been perpetuated without the use of magic. Nobody wanted to hear polite philosophy alone. They had to have something that healed the sick, or possibly repaired them when they spent too much of their energy in the wrong direction.

Every child wants to find out the mechanics of life, and then to control. And here is where the clashing of personalities occurs, because they run into someone else who also wants to control. Then the competition begins, to be stronger or more clever or whatever.

Generally the first thing a person tries is basic stage magic—it seems as if you have to start somewhere. When I was in my teens I looked into Spiritualism, going from one camp to another. Once in college I started working with hypnosis, and for a few months I was really pleased with myself—I thought it was a lot of fun leaving them lying in the hallways. But I never had the idea of becoming a stage hypnotist. It wasn't too long before I realized that I was only touching the edge of an enormous body of power, that I could sense that lay back there somewhere. And I came to the conclusion that it was somewhere inside me.

So I would occasionally use hypnosis for parlor entertainment or possibly to help someone, but never on a commercial basis. Some of us also experimented with regression. Some time ago there was the case of Bridey Murphy, who supposedly remembered who she was in a former lifetime in Ireland. This created quite a stir, and shook up all the Catholics in the world with this once-and-for-all "proof of reincarnation, and the destruction of the myth of one life-trip. Or the truth of it, whichever it is.

At the time, I was meeting regularly with a group of people who were interested in spiritualistic interpretations. We decided to try regression; since I was able I did the hypnosis. We didn't get too far with it, but I did discover this much—that you can't prove reincarnation with hypnosis. Because, a person can be hypnotized and put into almost any space and time dimension you want, and then respond and even come up with items of history. Before the meeting I would stop at the library and get someone's name out of a history book. Later we would hypnotize someone and tell them that they were this person. They would then play it out.

To give you an example, I once hypnotized a lady about thirty-two years of age. I stopped at the library in a hurry on the way to the Friday night meeting. I was careful to get the name of a person who had died before our subject was born, so I took the name of a British spy the Germans had executed in World War I.

The spy was a woman named Edith Cavell. I got the name, the date and place of execution, the fact that she was shot, and that she had a boyfriend who was a British Major. (It seems that they mated rather late over there. She wasn't a pretty young girl like Mata Hari—she was nearly fifty years of age when she was shot, and her boyfriend was older than she was.)

So at the meeting I hypnotized the girl and told her, "Your name is Edith Cavell, this is the year 1917, and you are standing in front of a German firing squad. Now tell me, why are you standing there? What did you do?" And she got hysterical, of course. At first she said, "I don't know what I did wrong." But after I repeated the question she recounted many of the details of the execution.

This was done in the home of a Presbyterian minister who was originally from Italy. His wife, although also Italian, had grown up in England and had gone to college there. I noticed that all the while I was getting answers from the hypnotized woman, the minister's wife was nodding her head in agreement. To the question, "How are you dressed?" the woman said, "I have my nurse's uniform on." The minister's wife would nod her head, "Yes, that's right."

When it was all over we awakened the girl. And the minister's wife said, "That's an amazing thing. How could she have known? That was exactly what happened—the description of the dress even down to the stripes."

And I said, "How do you know?"

She said, "I was raised in England, and at the time Edith Cavell was killed I was a little girl. I read about it in the newspapers." (It was like the hostages in Iran today—everyone idolized Edith Cavell.) "Every incident of that execution was branded in my mind as a child. This was an important, heroic figure to me and I never forgot the details all my life."

Now this was a coincidence, because I hadn't discussed beforehand with the group the name which I would use. I had just fished for a random name, only picking someone who had died before our subject was born.

This experience was amazing. I later corresponded with a hypnotist in New Jersey, and he told me some fantastic things similar to this. You can even go back in hypnosis into what Carl Jung calls the archetypal or racial memory, knowledge which is germane to a certain nationality.

Back to the idea of the upward progression of the magician, we come to the words on the chart, "Selfish Ego." In other words, this is the selfish person who is wanting to be powerful and wanting to show his power, In turn, after you look it over you change to a higher ego, in that you want wisdom rather than power.

To be frank, my conviction was that I was facing my eventual death, and I realized that the body would not survive. Perhaps if I were lucky though, something that I learned would survive. So you don't want to be selfish, except for your pursuit of survival. I wasn't interested anymore in making a big splash as much as I was in becoming something mentally. And I went into mental sciences then which would expand my own sphere.

(Kundalini, which is one of the factors in these sciences, is the basis of a lot of magic. The term refers to the means by which the glandular energy is transmuted upward. There is considerable literature about it. You don't have to use an Indian word for it, but there is no word in the English language which quite suits it.)

So we have the question of egos. You will find in the writings on Zen the message of attaining a tremendous awareness with the dropping of these egos. Of course, they have to be dropped in a certain order. And here we come to a new term, "Outer Energy." This is the self-less ego. It is the ego of the healer—but the healer is now making a sacrifice of himself and his own private energy.

Most of the healings which use energy and are found in church settings are brought about by the transfer of energy from the healer to the person healed. Some theologians attribute the use of this method to Christ, and say that had he lived beyond the age of thirty-three he would have died anyway, because he was so burnt from the transfer of his energy.

There was a fellow who went over to Tibet a while ago to study healing. He had been working as an undercover detective for the state of Kentucky, and had to leave the country because his life was in danger. So he went to Tibet and paid them to teach him to heal—he took the name of Norbu Chen.

Supposedly they locked him up in a cave and told him to concentrate until he generated the quantum energy necessary to heal. Afterward he came back to Houston, Texas and was healing quite a few people. These were miraculous cures such as removing tumors and other conditions which were nearly fatal, or at least which would have become fatal after a few years. He said he was doing it by direct projection of energy, but that he couldn't project it indefinitely.

It's like a generator producing a high form of electricity, and you can't generate forever. He told the press when he was interviewed that he was only good for a couple of years. No one hears of Norbu Chen now, but he was very popular here fifteen or so years ago.

Now the last term on the chart is "Non-Ego." In this category there is no set technique, so I call it an art of between-ness. There is an art in doing this in which there is no loss of physical energy, so the person is not limited in the amount he can do. This is the ability to hold the mind on a dead standstill in order to effect certain changes.

Now are there any questions you would like to ask before we go further?

Q: You mentioned that Christ may have used hypnosis in changing the water into wine. But what about the guests who drank it having no idea about this change and commenting that this wine was the best?

Rose: Yes, I realize this. We're dealing basically with a book, and I can't prove anything one way or the other by just using a book. A lot of people believe that the Bible is something very valid—I used this as an example only. I am pointing out what could be. I wasn't there, and I don't say that this is exactly what happened. What I am saying is that to be scientific these things have to be duplicated.

Incidentally, you can hypnotize a large number of people more easily than you can hypnotize one person. Unfortunately, this is what has happened with most people today—television.

Q: Of the four types of egos that you mentioned, which are you operating from?

Rose: Well—that's a personal question. (laughter)

Q: Are you familiar with the work of the two men, one in the Philippines and the other in South America, who do psychic surgery? And how do they accomplish this?

Rose: Yes, I'm familiar with it, but I don't know how it works. I would have to get pretty close to them and watch them before coming to any conclusions about what they're doing. I place a lot of credence in the reports about the fellow from South America who supposedly operates with an old pen-knife. But I don't want to say about certain instances whether they are true or not, without examining all the details. I saw a film about the fellow from the Philippines. I also heard that some of the tumors they had taken out were analyzed and found to be chicken meat. But that statement could have come from someone who didn't like what they were doing—I don't know.

The thing about all these magical phenomena I say is that where there is a lot of smoke there might be a little fire. After we read about things back in history, we are inspired to find a parallel around us today. We can't prove things by history alone—some of it has to be by demonstration.

I know of cases where after X-rays of their condition people were ready for the operating room. Kathryn Kuhlman from Pittsburgh was involved in a case like this where a woman was about to have a tumor removed. The tumor burst, supposedly, and ran out through the intestine. They publicized it on the radio at the time. I even talked to the doctor who had handled the case. He said, "Well, that will happen sometimes. I won't deny that the tumor burst, but sometimes a tumor will burst like that when it is attached to the intestine in that way." But you do find a number of cases where it is seemed that surgery has been performed.

What I do believe beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that all of these things are possible—even if they have never really been carried out. The reason why I believe that these things can happen is there is a formula I ran across, by which you can accomplish nearly anything in relation to the human body. This formula is the last one I mentioned, called between-ness, the holding of the head on dead center. This is the way the bigger things are carried out—and I think that the great healers all learned it.

My private opinion (and I hope I don't offend anybody but we're trying to be as scientific as possible) is that in order to start a spiritual, religious, or political movement in days gone by, you had to be a magician. People such as the ones I mentioned who came out of India—the zappers, which are still very effective. They convinced a million people or more in this country that they possessed tremendous power, just by knocking people off their feet.

And they had power—the ability to drive entities out of a person who was possessed, for example. This is historical. I've seen these things done in our day. And they can be done on call.

Q: You talk about healing as generating a projecting of our own energy . . .

Rose: That's one form, but there are other forms.

Q: . . . but I have always heard it stressed that it's important to be a passive channel rather than an active one.

Rose: Well yes—but I would then ask, "As a channel for what? Where is the energy coming from?" I have heard that same advice quite a bit. But I don't buy it and don't want to confuse or beguile anyone with the term "divine energy."

It's a preposterous farce to presume that we are so important to the creature in charge of the entire universe, that we will have gumboils removed or have our girlfriend make up with us. That the effects of things which we consider by our own religious attitudes to be crimes and sins, and which cause degeneration of tissue, sickness, or whatever, will be removed. And that now all you have to do is to go to the divine source, and somebody will pump the energy down through the top of your head or elsewhere, and you will be renewed so that you can go back out and have some more fun. I just don't buy that at all.

So this is why I would ask the question, "Where is the energy coming from?" These people who have done healings have come from all religions and walks of life, so it isn't limited to a particular religion or deity.

Another form of magic comes under the heading of belief. A large number of these things are done by belief, although I don't say that you must necessarily have belief in order to have things happen. This is a category of magic, but there are other ways it can be done.

MAGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY

Here I want to make a note on the psychology of things. I think that our so-called modern psychology is taking a difficult turn. And I think that this is the reason why people are not properly examining the powers of the mind. Science seems generally to wait until something is discovered and fairly well believed or supported by thousands of people, before accepting it. Hypnosis is an example of this. At one time it was considered to be the work of demons. I think that the people who really opposed it were those who didn't understand it or who couldn't make it work effectively.

Psychology itself, in its pure meaning being the science of the mind, seems to be doomed to an unprovable outcome—because it deals with an abstraction, which is thought. And yet the present trend in psychology is that instead of defining thought and the true basis or cause or true powers of thought, we have entered a generation or two of manipulatory psychology, under the name of behaviorism and some others.

There is an attempt to make it a science so that it can be funded, so that it can be forced upon people. You'll have to take it. If you show yourself perhaps to be a little shaky, when some healer could possibly take care of you in a very short period of time—instead you may be subject to months and even years of drugs and counter-drugs which leave you a permanent wreck.

This all comes about by conditioning. We are conditioned to believe in authority. We are conditioned to believe that the people who have a shingle out know what they're talking about. The amazing thing about people in authority is they become almost stupefied by too many years in college, studying something as medicine, and when they get out it's like a rubber band is shooting them forward to get that first hundred thousand dollars. They put their patients through an assembly line production, and if they don't know what is wrong with a patient they give him a placebo until they guess correctly. The public on the other hand is supposed to accept these people's authority.

Now this may not be so bad when you get it from a medical doctor. But it is a different story when you have somebody tinkering with your mind—who knows nothing for instance about the phenomenon called possession, which they quickly label schizophrenia. Sure there are drugs which will hit you in the head and which will make you harmless—and these are what are applied to a person.

I believe that there is a different way of approaching them. But of course—if you say these things you are considered to be beyond the pale. There are no miracles according to behavioristic psychology. You follow their prescription and you will not create anything. These drugs momentarily alleviate symptoms, but to heal someone you have to find the cause of the disturbance.

I ran into something when I was reading up on Sufism. This was written in about the year 1200 by al-Ghazali. Every time you look into these old movements you find psychology.

One of the most striking peculiarities about contemporary man is that while he is abundantly scientific . . . he finds it extremely difficult to understand that his beliefs are by no means always linked either with his intelligence, his culture, or his values. He is therefore almost unreasonably prone to indoctrination.

In different language, when you want to take a step away from the delusion, from the big game that everyone else is into, you go to a doctor—and he gives you a name for it. For instance, I visited a young man in a mental institution when I was up in Rhode Island giving a lecture. I knew him pretty well, so I went in and said to the doctor, "What are you giving him?"

He told me the name of the drug—I think it was Stelazine. And I said, "How do you diagnose his condition?"

He said, "We don't have a diagnosis."

I said, "Then what are you giving him medicine for? A doctor is not supposed to prescribe without a diagnosis."

Well he said, "We have drugs that counter certain thoughts. He has certain thoughts, so we give him a counter-drug. So you don't have to understand the person, you just diagnose one thought—we have a drug for every thought."

CLASSIFICATION OF FORMS

Here I would like to present a list of systems, which we can talk about individually later if you like. These are the systems which approach to power—healing power or magical power.

BELIEF

PURIFICATION

SURRENDER OF EGOS

INVOCATION

MECHANICAL FORMULAE

KUNDALINI

PRAYER

BETWEEN-NESS

The first is belief. Another one is purification—this is an important factor. Third is the surrender of egos. Invocation—this is help from entities, if you want to go that trip. Then there are mechanical formulas such as spells, curses, and witchcraft—not that you're going to heal anyone with these, but they appear as part of systems like the huna religion. Kundalini—this is the outstanding one. Then there is prayer. And then finally, between-ness—this is a more scientific term.

These are the general categories of means which are used to produce miracles and mental phenomena.

ABSTRACT STUDY OF THE MIND

I want to start in with something which will give you a general idea on an approach to an abstract philosophy. The first place I encountered this was in a book on Zen by Hubert Benoit (The Supreme Doctrine), and it struck me as really something (Figure 2, next page).

FIGURE 2. TRIANGULATION

In this business of understanding the mind there has to be an approach to an abstract philosophy. I used to know a fellow in Pittsburgh who had trouble articulating—he couldn't talk very well. We'd be talking philosophy and if there was a pause he would motion with his finger on the table and say, "Well there's this (to the left), and there's this (to the right)." Then he'd put his finger to the middle and say, "And then there's this."

Now this sounded like chatter and everybody laughed. But I realized that this fellow knew something. It was just that he had a limited ability to demonstrate it.

But what we have in figure 2 is "this," and "this." Two lower corners of a triangle. One represents black and the other represents white. This is called relative thinking or linear thinking. To this way of thinking everything has to be either black or white. But everything is not black or white—in between we find gray. And we arrive at that only by the contemplation of black and white.

I call this a method of triangulation of thinking. It's similar to the method which might be used by a surveyor who wants to measure the height of a mountain, the perpendicular distance from its top down through its base. The line can't be measured directly because it is inside the mountain, and it would be too difficult to drag a surveyor's chain up to the top.

The measurement is done at a distance from the mountain, using a transit. You point the transit to the mountain top and measure out a certain distance from the apparatus toward the mountain, then determine the angle by measuring a triangle with one unknown side. The distance toward the base of the mountain is measurable—so you calculate the unknown side of the triangle—the height of the mountain.

The idea of an abstract philosophy is very much similar to this. By using it we can rise above the linear type of thinking. This saves years and years of contemplation on that line. An example of doing this is the concept of space-time (Figure 2b). The concept was brought about by triangulation. What we see is only that which our senses and our human mind allow us to see. But what exists in the final analysis is neither space nor time as such. Really there is space-time. There is no understanding of any dimension in space without an understanding on our part of time.

Now going over into our thinking, we have two faculties or tools so to speak. One of these is logic, but there are other things we perceive without logic at all—we sense them. Some of the greatest creations, and probably most of the inventions, would not have occurred without the faculty of intuition.

I remember years ago working at a Babcock &Wilcox subsidiary plant near Alliance, Ohio on the atomic submarine. We had a man there who was gifted with an unusual intuition besides his knowledge of physics. He discovered and devised ways of piping liquid molten metal through a motor, at a time when most everyone else had given up. He applied his intuition, not his logic. We had said that logically there was no way to pipe it through because it would burn up the motor.

Now you have to combine the two faculties (Figure 2c). An untrained intuition, in a person who just gets hunches, can get erratic and misleading. But a person who tempers his intuition with logic can arrive at wisdom. And the entire pattern is one of being, for the first time.

When you're approaching a problem there is a formula which can be used, which has to do with the exercise of a magical between-ness to produce, or rather to witness, a total reality. First there is thought (and of course, we're obsessed with thought and try to hang onto our thoughts to a great extent). But you take the mind first in thought, and then have the mind in no-thought, and you have an absolute realization (Figure 2d).

Here I keep having to refer to such things as Zen. Incidentally, I consider the Zen technique, developed thousands of years ago, to be a much higher type of psychology than what we have in the Western world today. This is because they used what I call direct mind. They didn't try to photograph thought or try to catalog certain types of behavior. They went directly to the mind itself.

The students of Zen in order to have a total realization had to rid the mind of thought. You'll find this in all the books written on the subject. This is the only way it could come about. Now this seems paradoxical, to think with the mind free of thought. It sounds a little frightening in fact. But all through these books you'll read that this fellow was looking for "no-mind." There is another term for it, if you can comprehend it. "Losing yourself in God." But if a person is offended by the word God, we can just say that you do not think—you have the mind without thought.

In the old Kabbalistic writings the formula was, "The imagination plus the will plus the fiat. And then forget." In the beginning the creation was dreamed up, this was the imagination. Then the will was spoken in the fiat, "Let there be." And then drop the whole matter. This is the formula for the creation of the world, or anything you wish to create.

So you put a thought in your mind and hold it there. Then forget it. Or—you bring yourself to the point of anxiety by Zen techniques, into where the mind actually goes blank from the tension. And when this happens you experience something superior to the knowledge you get by step-by-step processes, weighing one word against another.

The reason for using these diagrams is that this is about the only way to explain the mechanism by which this works, other than say quoting a sacred writing. It applies to this other method of healing also. You can pick up a lot of this information in some of the literature that is available. Each one of these books I mention contains a fragment of this information, which the author develops. Our group tries to make some of these available.

THE MIND AND CREATION

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book which he calls The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. He said that his wife was dying of cancer, and he decided that he might be able to heal her if he could destroy the present paradigm and substitute for it a paradigm of health, or of immortality perhaps.

The term paradigm refers to a fact which relates to language and our beliefs. If you work say in a machine shop, there is a language that develops which only the machinists know, composed of short terms and abbreviations. It's the same with chemical labs and engineering labs. Doctors use it in the practice of medicine—they call a hemostat a "stat," and so on.

A new language develops, and this is called a paradigm. But it's a paradigm within a paradigm, because the whole human language is a paradigm.

The paradigm is a language, one that has been concocted just for expedience—just to get by. For example, in primitive times, in Anglo-Saxon times or even before that, the word "good" as a quality was meant simply in terms of pro and con. But later the concept of good took on a meaning of its own.

By this same process we developed a language which believes in such concepts as sickness. Mary Baker Eddy for instance goes along with this same thought—Christian Scientists maintain that we create sickness, and that we have to change the paradigm by faith. So in dealing with a person who is sick, as defined by a certain paradigm, Chilton Pearce's concept of the way to cure the patient (his wife in this case) was the substitution of this paradigm for another one.

I do not entirely agree. And I don't know what his thoughts are about it now. His wife died later, incidentally.

But this is the magical triangulation again (Figure 2e). You first have the thought of a paradigm, then you have no thought of a paradigm (or thought of no-paradigm). You say, "Baloney—I don't accept it. I don't think about it." Of course what happens is that you create a super-paradigm. This is the way it is created. You might call it a system of magic. Or it might be just something that happens as a result of things which don't function according to the laws of chemistry and physics as we know them.

Figure 2f is the one which has to do with say the lifting of a truck in an emergency. You start with the thought of action, "This truck has to be lifted." Then—you don't convince yourself that your back is going to break if you lift it. You cancel that thought completely out. And the result is—herculean physical phenomena. It is somewhere between action and non-action that you have the capacity for total action. This is creation on the physical plane. I point out that here again we have the factor between-ness, which I earlier associated with the term non-ego, and the effortless method of healing.

Besides using this to alter physical circumstances, this method is also used very effectively in the mental and personal realms. It is spoken of very plainly in the prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: Give us the serenity to tolerate the things we can tolerate, the strength to change the things we should change, and the wisdom to know the difference. There is a magical formula in that prayer. People change as a result of it.

Why? Because a person surrenders his ego to a higher will. We don't have to name it—we're not smart enough necessarily to be able to identify that which is superior to us. It's like saying, "Yes, I believe this—I would like for it to happen. But I'm not going to try to make it happen, unless it's supposed to happen—then I will it to happen. Otherwise I'll forget about it." And the result is creation—if it's supposed to happen. You don't create anything that isn't supposed to be created.

JACOB'S LADDER—THE PATH TO REALIZATION

This thing I call Jacob's Ladder (Figure 3, next page) is from my book The Psychology of the Observer. This shows what I call Absolute Realization. You can take it however you wish—as a concept, or an established fact, or as nonsense. It is an example of three of the kinds of pyramids that I have been describing.

The first one has to do with the relative physical consciousness. It has again, the line (AB) at the bottom. Our relative world is a line running always between opposites—negative and positive, black and white, good and bad. We are in a constant struggle to define things within that line. And of course, this becomes ultimately impossible, because the line can be indefinite in some instances.

In the observation and study of that line we find what Benoit calls the compensatory point. This point is at neither extreme but is somewhere in between. Somewhere in between there is a governing force—this is what I call the Umpire in human consciousness. In devout Christian circles the Conscience—perhaps. But it is an inner decision-making apparatus.

Because we are always faced with the negative and the positive—what to do and what not to do—we get down to monumental decisions. Whether to kill or not to kill, to love or not to love. Whether to climb uphill or slide downhill. These decisions are made by the Umpire. The mistake that nearly everyone makes is in thinking that this Umpire is our infallible guide. But if you observe yourself in a meditative manner over a period of years, or even over a couple of months, you will discover that the Umpire is faulty.

It makes decisions occasionally that cause the person to get sick or sometimes even killed. Or, for example, allowing a person to fall in love with someone who has a bad disease. The Umpire collaborated in the decision—it said, "Yes, go ahead. That's true love."

FIGURE 3. JACOB'S LADDER

When we first encounter the fact that our individual judgment is faulty or can be faulty, we remember that perhaps we have abandoned some intuition we should have listened to. This brings us again to another relative line (CD). Because we are still in a relative dimension we can only think along relative lines. So we have then a correspondence or a contemplation between higher intuitions. This doesn't refer necessarily to hallucinations or simple intuitions—it is a higher intuition which maybe inspires us to join a church, or follow some moral path of life that the Umpire didn't necessarily take care of.

We are always then, when we get to that level, at war between Saturday and Sunday. The Umpire is good enough until Saturday, but Sunday the higher intuition—the Sunday of the mind so to speak—takes over and says, "You may not have been doing the right things the last seven days." Because what you have been doing may be leading you into psychic trouble.

Now I guarantee you these diagrams are not just marks on a paper. If you sit down and face yourself in some sort of meditative manner, this is exactly what you'll find. You are always going to be stuck with two polar points. If a person talks about the Absolute, then somebody else immediately says, "Well, what is there with the Absolute? What created the Absolute?" It seems as if it's impossible for a human mind to conceive that there aren't two things. He is so used to dealing with this confusion of opposites.

In a meditational process a person observes that this is happening, just like we are observing it here. He starts to watch the workings of the Umpire and the higher intuition. He watches his mind doing somersaults. He watches himself going through cycles of foolishness and wisdom, cycles of breakdown and repair. Because he can't yet, even with the higher intuition, completely control his life and stop the waves.

And this man at point (E), becomes a very real creature. This is where a man is no longer living a somatic life. He is watching his own mind—which seems to be an impossibility when you first think about it, the mind watching the mind. But if you remember, I mentioned that the aim of the Zen student is to reach a point of no-mind, and that he has to do that with the conscious mind. Now if this were impossible or idiotic, somewhere along the line of a few thousand years they would have thrown it out. But it must have worked for a few people.

This fellow (at E) has risen to the point where he is concerned not so much with the body as he is with consciousness and the workings of his mind. He becomes obsessed with this—this is the center from which he works. But he again discovers that there is another relative line. He is watching the mind, but he is also aware of awareness. He is aware that there is something behind the mind—something that is seemingly almost indestructible. So he doesn't look with intuition anymore, he looks simply with the direct mind at awareness itself.

Now from this contemplation, the dashing back and forth across this upper line (EF), man arrives at an Absolute realization. He arrives at a point in which his head is on dead-center. There's no place left for it to go.

What happens when the head is on dead-center? Almost anything. My reason for putting it in the book was not so much for healing as for realization. It is more important to realize who you are and what you are than it is to heal someone.

So the first profit that comes from having your head on dead-center is an Absolute realization of yourself. And then of course, if the experience doesn't kill you, you might be able to do something on a mundane level.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Q: You said that when you were young you realized that with hypnosis you were only touching into a body of wisdom or power. What type of wisdom is most important to have?

Rose: Definition. I think that people presume that they are. And this presumption isn't adequate. As a child you exist in a certain life form in which everybody is protecting you, flattering you and patting you on the head, making you believe that you're wonderful. You come to presume that you are something—that which you are projected to be by your parents, friends, and so on.

When you go to school with that mood, a kid punches your nose. And this goes on all through life. If you talk to someone who is 60 years of age, they will tell you these stages. When you are 25, you look at the kid who is 15 and say that he's green behind the ears—he's not mature. This means that all these people do not have a just judgment of themselves. You can get to be 50 or 60 years of age and say, "This could go on right up to the last moment! I could be fooling myself about who I think I am."

This process is what I realize is the basis of true psychology. True psychology is knowing who you are. It isn't the knowledge of what drug to take to bring you down when you're high, or to lift you up when you're low. It's basically a permanent understanding of yourself. And when you have that permanent understanding, possibly there's a little dividend—you might know what you're here for.

Q: How do you think Edgar Cayce functioned? Where was he coming from?

Rose: I don't really know—I sort of bypassed Cayce there. But he is one of the miraculous phenomena. I visited the Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach in 1954 or '55 and talked with Hugh Lynn Cayce. The place was almost inactive at the time—there was grass growing out of the roof-gutters. But I've heard that they have some new buildings there now.

I was amazed, of course, at some of the things he was doing. In The Albigen Papers I mentioned that what we need is an Edgar Cayce, not his readings. I think they're now trying to heal with his readings. As to where he got his information, I'm inclined to believe that in view of the fact that we can understand an item called space-time, Edgar Cayce was cutting in on things that had already happened. Discoveries that had happened in space-time but not in mortal time or sun-time.

I think he was able to go into a certain state of mind—taking a little liberty possibly a state of no-mind—where he reached that absolute pinnacle. But regardless, he allowed this information to come into his mind. In this respect he was a very unique person, a very miraculous type of magician, a very humble man. I don't think that there was any baloney about him at all. But the unfortunate part is that humanity can't duplicate him. What we should be trying to do is to duplicate him.

Q: Why do use the term magical instead of spiritual?

Rose: I avoid using the word spiritual in my lectures because basically the origin of even spiritual aspirations is the magical desire in every human being. And my second reason is that the word spiritual has a sort of, let's say, narcissistic association. It covers a multitude of rackets. I wouldn't want to wade through some of these spiritual movements with hip boots on, for fear of contamination.

Q: But there's only one Source.

Rose: We don't know that. This is something you have to prove. I use the phrase occasionally "surrender yourself to God," but not in a scientific sense. You'll notice that when I'm talking here I carefully avoid saying anything that I can't demonstrate. God is something that you can't prove by logic. In my estimation the only way to find God is by becoming, not by learning. Learning is the barrier between you and God.

Q: What are your books about? Do they cover a method of this meditative process?

Rose: Yes. My first book was written as a result of an experience I had. For quite a few years I didn't even conceive of trying to verbalize it—because it was an absolute type of experience, and how do you say that with words without confusing somebody and building another cult or code or set of words? So I dodged the issue for quite a few years. Then I just made notes, and finally compiled the notes and laid out a system.

Some of the analogies I use are quite simple. I say that you go about spiritual work or mind work in the same way you go about building a shed. If you want to build a shed you pick up a hammer and nails, and learn to drive the nails. You go down to the library if you wish and get books on carpentry. Of course when you get into what I call a higher form of mind work you've got the books, but you've got to wear hip boots because they are about ninety-nine percent phony.

These things are all based on primitive belief. The human being from the time of primitive man had to believe—belief sustained him. Belief sustains people today. A lecture like this shakes people—it comes through to their mind that maybe they're not what they think they are. Or that maybe they are irrevocably lost unless they get ahold of themselves. When I'm lecturing I can see it on their faces. My own daughter said, "Dad, let me go. I've got games to play—I don't want to read your book." So if you're frightened, don't read the book.

Q: Have you had a chance to examine the contemporary healer Olga Worral? How do you feel that she operates?

Rose: I don't know too much about her. I talked to her once on the phone, when we were getting speakers for a symposium down at the farm, but we didn't have her price. Her husband, Ambrose Worral, I think was a very reliable healer, and I think that Olga herself has also healed people.

As I said, there are three ways generally used to heal. The first two of them use projection of energy from the healer, and if she did this she would have been worn out years ago. She's an old lady, and her husband did this up until the time he died—he was quite an old fellow.

When I was talking to her on the phone I explained the system to her and she said it was exactly what she had discovered. But she said the healing wasn't done in that manner—they have meetings and church services—it was done primarily with the suggestion of healing, and allowing the will of God to work on it if that was to be. So I'm inclined to believe that she was of the third category. It's a formula, incidentally, that people can use without actually having to go clear through to an Absolute realization. They are following it pretty much through blind faith, or by trial and error—something happens to work so they repeat it.

Q: Are you able to do this?

Rose: At times it has happened.

Q: Would you do it now?

Rose: No. Because whenever you're ever doing anything of this sort there is something that you have to wait for. Some of the people here have been down to my place and we have had demonstrations of it. For instance, there are times when I can see sickness inside a human body. But I can't do it all the time. I don't profess to be a healer, or go out on the marketplace and say that I have something to sell. But occasionally if I sit down with somebody I can see illness—and this has been confirmed by X-ray.

Here today what we have is a different structure, basically a lecture. If I did happen to see something though, I might tell you later on. Right now we don't have a healing type of group set up. I think that there are people around who have been healed, but for one thing I don't like to take claim for it. When you get to bragging or talking about what you do you don't have the same effectiveness. So I prefer to do just the things that come in front of me. I don't go out to look for it or give demonstrations.

A lot of this stuff came to me through hypnotic demonstrations, such as that case of regression, because with hypnosis you can tap people's minds. I know enough about it, and I can see how things happen with myself and with people around me, to know that they can happen. Let me put it this way: I think everybody has a function on earth—my main function is talking. My main transmission is reserved for knowledge transmission rather than for energy transmission. I decided that I would try to do that which was my best function.

One time we had a chautauqua here in this same church, several years ago. There were a couple of ladies here who had come down from Cleveland. One of them later wrote me a letter and said, "Mr. Rose, I think you are cheapening yourself to a certain degree by doing this when you could be teaching something else." The Chautauqua was composed of things like astrology, Kirlian photography, and so on, and there wasn't much about mind science at all.

I don't know how she picked up that I had something else I was trying to do with my life. But I find out that more people are interested in astrology than in changing their nature or changing their state of being. If I were talking about astrology, I could get fifty dollars apiece out of you. (laughter)

Q: There is a phenomenon that has been documented about seventy-five times, reported on a science program lately, termed spontaneous combustion of the human body. How do you fit this in?

Rose: I really don't know. I've heard those accounts of people being totally incinerated in a room, where even the foot would be burned but the shoe wouldn't. Possibly the rug would be scorched a little. There was a man burnt up inside a cab of a truck out West. He was driving a gasoline truck, I think. Nothing but the man burnt, with a little bit of scorching on the roof. The only conclusion the so-called scientists could come to was that he was a heavy boozer, he had a high content of alcohol, lit a cigarette, the cigarette lit the alcohol and away he went.

As I said, we are only standing on the edge of this enormous body of knowledge. And the reason it's so hard to get into it is that we're dealing with a contrary paradigm that says, "It can't happen." There are many books, validated books, written on these extraordinary phenomena. There's a Fortean Society (Charles Fort) that studies nothing but these occurrences that don't correspond to science—flying horses, fish falling from the sky in some remote dry area, and levitation.

I have seen levitation. It happened among the same group that did the regression. They were all responsible people, professional people, there was no money involved, no charge made for attending. And they got into levitating tables. I had my hand on the table when it rose from the floor—a big heavy oak table. And some strange things occurred to the table—it became like water, like it was floating under your hand.

Whether that's some kind of illusion or not I don't know, but right before the thing left the floor it became almost like a living creature. You could ask it questions and it would kick one leg down violently on the floor according to a code, twice for "no," and so on, and rather accurately give you information. They (the tables) have been seen going all the way up to the ceiling where nothing would be left but fingertips on the bottom of the legs.

What do the physicists say about all this? "It's manipulation," they say. They've got a pat answer. For healings the medical men use the explanation "coincidence." The serious investigators are outnumbered tremendously. However, we are getting into a new era in psychiatry and psychology. Such as with Ornstein's book (The Psychology of Consciousness) on the two types of thinking which take place in the two hemispheres of the brain. It's a very good book, if you can get a copy of it.

There are many unusual phenomena that occur. (Some of which are reported in Fate magazine, which I've subscribed to for over twenty years.) For instance the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship of the sea. The reason I think that these do occur is that we are in a much more fluid universe than we think it is. My conclusion, of course, about the universe is that it is in the human mind. So there is a tremendous leeway for creation.

Q: Isn't the spiritual dimension a whole world of unexplored area? I was thinking that magic doesn't ask for a scientific explanation.

Rose: Well, I think that magic does ask for explanation. Maybe this would be the difference—the word spiritual has usually the connotation of faith and belief whereas magic, such as in the formulas for invocation, seems almost like chemistry. Two drops of A plus two drops of B result in X.

I would say that magic attempts to be very scientific. It's another language entirely, incidentally, but it seems to work. I use the word magic because it is the basis and the root. We can see where these other things such as religion and spirituality work in, somewhere in between—but down at the bottom it's the magical child, the child that's interested in magic, that first gets interested in these things.

At the other end, when you get into an Absolute situation where there is no possible way to manipulate things except under the will of something else, it is still magical. It is tremendously magical when it happens.

Q: Do you believe in angels and demons?

Rose: I do not disbelieve in them. This is another egotism of humanity—that we're the only fish in the sea, and what you can't see isn't there. I don't buy that. I think science has to deal with that which can't be seen. If it didn't you'd never have any information on viruses. You'd never be able to cure diseases, because we can't see viruses.

Some of these things can be seen and even photographed. Now I don't say whether they're angels or demons. I'm talking about William Crookes and his Titania. And Katie King—there were pictures taken of her at a materialization. If you can find a genuine materialization, I think that you can take pictures with infra-red cameras.

I have sure seen enough of them to know that they are separate intelligences and that they have form. I think that a lot of these things we consider to be demons are deceased people. Some of them I think were never people, because of their limited knowledge and the way that they acted. But there's no reason why the fauna and flora we see on this planet can't be represented by an equally mysterious type of fauna and flora in another dimension.

Q: If a person ever gets to a point where there's something higher—a higher principle—controlling him, does this remove his free will?

Rose: I don't think so. What ends is the belief, the illusion, that he can do as he pleases. But simultaneously with the arrival of that realization comes the knowledge that what he wishes isn't important. It's like with alchemy. You start out trying to make gold out of lead. Then you study, study, study every science on the face of the earth. Then you discover the truth about yourself, and the gold is no longer needed. The purpose of the study of magic in nearly every case is abandoned on down the road. The purpose at the start is always selfish—it was with me at least. I don't know how many unselfish people there are, but when I was young I had very selfish purposes. I wanted to be big.

Q: Do you believe that good and evil are real beings, fighting for supremacy?

Rose: No. There is no such thing as good and evil.

Q: Would you say positive and negative then?

Rose: In our relative thinking, yes. But you transcend that rather rapidly when you start to study the Umpire. You see that it is a human evaluation. For example, it's good not to attack your fellowman, because he may shorten your life span. But death in itself may not be evil, it may be liberation.

There's a book by Koestler (Darkness at Noon) which tells of his experiences in jail in Spain during the revolution. He told of the soldiers every day taking out ten prisoners to shoot them—because they didn't want to feed them, I think. A fifteen-year-old boy had been picked up with these revolutionaries. They were taking the boy out to shoot him, and he realized suddenly that his life was over. Koestler describes the priest as being somewhat greasy and drunken—maybe he had to be drunk to do his job. The boy shouted for his mother and the priest said, "Don't complain so much, you're being liberated. This is your freedom." He was being liberated from the relative dimension and the beliefs which run with it. So maybe the priest knew something.

Q: In the face of all the self-annihilation around us, what is the relevance or significance of this philosophical type of thinking?

Rose: Do you mean—do we think we have an answer to this seeming madness?

Q: I was hoping that somewhere in all of this, the people who are into it might think that over time it may make a qualitative difference in the way we live.

Rose: Richard Bucke wrote a book (Cosmic Consciousness) in which he did a survey of the people who had reached cosmic consciousness. His statistic is that one in a million will experience it. Now I give talks on cosmic consciousness, and my book is on cosmic consciousness. So out of the two hundred million people in the United States, I should have at most two hundred listeners. But I know that there have been five thousand copies of the book purchased, so perhaps there are far more people interested than we think.

Now a lot of people come at me very bluntly when I'm lecturing and say, "What are you doing for humanity?"

And my answer is, "Nothing." I have no time for humanity—I have time for only a small segment of humanity. I'm trying to specialize. I believe that it is going to take all of my strength and the rest of my life to contact those people whom I think I should contact in my lifetime. And that is all I can do.

As far as the workings of humanity—the wars, the strife, this wave of suicides we're having in the country—behind it all there is a chief engineer who has everything under control. The machinery is going according to blueprint, although from where we stand things don't look so hot.

The thing is—don't get into where the violence is, to where the explosions are. Don't associate with trying to change the world. I started lecturing back in 1968, and I ran into thousands of young people at different universities. They couldn't wipe their noses, and they were out to change the world. And by now very many of them are already dead, and the world is still going on its own mad course. So we have seen which way it will go.

I think that the best thing a person can do is take time out to find out who is "being had." Because the evidence is that we're "being had."

Q: Would you tell me something about your books? Are they instructional?

Rose: Yes. We have some flyers that give a pretty good description in two pages. If you have a specific question about direction I'll try to answer you, but to give you a synopsis of the book is difficult because of the subject material. It gets into how to engage in an abstract study, how to approach an abstract question, such as life, death, thought, identity, who you are.

But it can be done. The book demonstrates that it can be done. And this is the formula followed by Huang Po, or Buddha, or whoever arrives. We don't know much about Christ's early years, but he probably followed it as well.

Q: About that incident of lifting the truck, and the fact that weightlifters may go through years of training to get to that point, or maybe never arrive—I was wondering exactly what is the relation of effort to accomplishing things? Is the effort in overcoming the paradigm that says you can't do it?

Rose: I think there is a limit to what you can lift, and you can't go beyond that. If a locomotive had been lying on top of that young woman, I don't think we would have been able to pick it up. But I think that there is a tremendous plus factor that is not accountable to medical science.

Q: I wonder why there seems to be such a struggle to know oneself?

Rose: It has to do with the ascending and descending arrows in the diagram. The force that goes down is just as powerful if not more powerful than the one that goes up. You have to take care of what I call the upward vector, which is what a man becomes. He becomes a vector or a direction of energy.

The great vector in life is back toward the earth. Nearly everybody is fighting tooth and nail to go back into the earth, and at the same time trying to keep from going back into the earth. So between these two efforts there's not much left for going up into the creative realm.

Nature drags us down. We're like the grain in the field—you reach a certain age and the grain comes to a head, the leaves immediately get dry, and your purpose is arrived at. You realize what you are—you're a cornstalk that is produced and dies, that's all.

Q: Do you think that yoga is good preparation for forming this vector?

Rose: Yoga is one of the magical systems, yes. Raja yoga is very good. Of course, there are different schools. And there are a lot of pretensive raja yoga schools that use techniques of visualization that I don't approve of. I don't believe that you should imagine things. If you want to put something into your head, put something in that's real. Are you familiar with what they call darshan—producing a certain image up between the eyes, deifying the guru and that sort of thing? I think that these are detrimental.

But there are meditative forms which are useful. And you can't do just one thing, one little ritual—you have to use combinations.

I was into yoga for years—from the time I was twenty-one through twenty-eight years of age. And nothing was happening. I became almost angry—I thought it was absurd. I traveled all over the country looking at these various movements, and I began to think that if they're not out for sex they're out for money—there's no real truth to them. Then I realized that there was a grain of truth in each one of these movements. The intuitions of men will not follow a completely phony path for long. This is the difficult thing, to find the grain of truth. But you pick out the grain and throw the garbage away—this is the point.

For instance, if you simply sit in a certain posture the mind becomes at peace, and you can develop a certain ability. Now—what is happening inside the head? This neurotransmitter system that I was talking about begins running evenly. The graph of the energy is not bouncing up and down. Consequently, there's no trauma or restlessness connected with it, after you train yourself to do it.

While you're in that position you can do a tremendous lot of thinking. You can take in a lot of information in regard to the original direction. This is the time to ruminate, to chew over. Wisdom is inside ourselves. We've got billions of factors in those billions of cells. So all we have to do is to keep pushing this material through the computer.

The memory bank of the computer contains everything you have ever read or heard. So to get the answer from that, you continually attack the computer with one or two words: "Why? What? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Let's come up with an answer. Let's get away from all this fiction." This is the message you have for yourself. "Come on, we've been into this fiction before. We've discounted that once and for all. We've found out that it's absurd."

For instance—you don't pay a man for spirituality. This is one of the yardsticks. I don't believe that there should be any rackets run, because it's too important an undertaking. It's the highest relationship between one human being and another. Consequently, it's serious business, but people don't treat it that way.

Q: Have you investigated many of these New Age movements?

Rose: I think that there's a big mistake that people are making these days, in relation to this. (You ought to know how it's put forth, because everything isn't valid.) The big movement that is sweeping the spiritual and mental worlds today is something that is a cross between Fritz Perls and old-time religion meetings. Fritz Perls hugged everybody, and so did the old-time religions. Except Fritz Perls got into it sexually—that was his "method" of curing people.

The emphasis is on trying to make people feel good, rather than looking for honest answers. Consequently, there's a big direction taken today: "Don't criticize anybody." But you've got to realize that your future and your lifetime are too valuable for this. You've only got so many years in a lifetime. If you start off when you're five years of age, you've got only seventy years to solve a problem which as an intelligent human being you must solve. You have to find out who is suffering. So we don't have time for people who are going to thrust themselves on us because they too might have a good point.

So under the basis of the pretense of not criticizing this or not criticizing that—you won't be getting anything done. Or you will accept the mediocre when something real might be around the corner, or might be equally available. I think that there's a tremendous complacency today, and I think it's born out of the fear of violence. The pseudo-spiritual movement today is oriented toward man instead of toward wisdom. It's nice to be oriented toward man, but not his body, not to the economy, and so on.

Q: Why don't you use the terms "soul" and "enlightenment?"

Rose: There are certain words which are pretentious. If I use the word God, then I am immediately subject to another

Q: "How do you know?" So I avoid these words because one man's God is another man's Devil.

To me the term enlightenment refers to an Absolute realization, or the total realization that you can come to. Now about the word soul—I don't use it to mean something of a gossamer quality that floats around like a ghost. I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have something more real. The inner person or capital "S" Self is more real. The universe that we enter at death with that Self is far more real than this. What we have right now is a big long line of thinking—bouncing around on this thing of relativity. Whereas in a direct-mind experience of the Absolute, you only experience oneness, not multiplicity, not shades-of.

So I do believe in a soul, but I prefer to let people find it through their mind. The perfect psychology will find the soul. This is my reason for showing you these diagrams. The perfect psychology will take you to God. And I'm not making a pitch—I don't believe in making religious pitches. I believe in working from a fact basis.

Q: I still don't understand why you don't use the word God.

Rose: Well, I don't deny that there is a superior engineering. But when you use the word God you might be defining it according to somebody's pet theory. Everybody uses the word, but people can define it in very different ways. And some of them can seem to be pretty strange.

We could take a poll of the people in the room today to try to get their ideas on God. Of course, we would be getting only vocal answers and not their true meanings—we don't know what people really mean. But if we could ask people their definitions of God and get their meanings, and compare them with our own, we would find nearly all of them different.

Some of the people would be thinking of a very personal creature who actually has a telescope and is watching every sparrow that falls, and somehow being able—because someone said he was able—to watch all the sparrows. Now I think that all the sparrows are watched, but it's by virtue of the creating of machinery which takes care of everything. The Hindus saw the machinery and called it karma. Certain laws were put into effect and it all works like a big piece of machinery. Of course, we say, "God is watching this." Well . . . the blueprint which the engineer made may be working.

And then there is another line of science which says, "Hey—maybe we can sneak in something while he isn't watching. Maybe some of these things aren't being scrutinized very carefully." This is the school of magic. A lot of people think that they can, despite the plan, get in there and pull some tricks. But this doesn't really work. It's strictly ego.

Q: What does your kind of psychology say about insanity?

Rose: I don't believe in insanity. I believe insanity to exist in a physical breakdown of the brain only. If somebody splits you with an ax, you're not going to think as clearly—you may be a schizophrenic. I'm sure that a lot of you have had the experience of going directly into the mind of a person. If you have ever been with a person who is mentally sick and you pick up what they are thinking, you'll know that they are just as aware as you are. But their communication method is crippled.

Q: Why is that?

Rose: I don't know. Most of them were born that way, but sometimes it is caused by physical breakdown. I do not believe in mental insanity. We've got a few psychologists and psychiatrists who say the same thing, but they don't elaborate on it properly. Szasz is one—he thinks a lot of it is pretension.

I just say that people who can't help themselves can't help themselves. It's not insanity, it's just that the doors and the windows aren't open—they are inside of a closed structure. And it's only by direct mind that you can understand them. This is the reason why I maintain that until the psychologists and psychiatrists develop some kind of direct-mind intuitional approach, they're wasting their time and the sick person's time. You've got to walk a mile in their moccasins to know them. The scientific doctor or psychiatrist tries to be objective. He tries to observe and catalog exterior symptoms alone.

Q: Is there a tie-in between the spark gap you mentioned and the concept of the triangulation of things? Is the stretch between the negative and the positive like a spark gap?

Rose: No. The spark gap is just more or less a biological structure.

When we talk about the human mind we always wonder where the memory is. Some people say that the memory is in the DNA molecule, in the genes. Maybe so, but where is thought? What is happening? Where does thought occur? We are all thinking right now—what is going on electrically? And I maintain that all of that living (and thinking is living) which continues until you go to sleep, occurs right there in the synapse.

Q: After all your studies, what's your feeling of how Jesus Christ got his miracle and healing powers? Can you rely on the historical accounts?

Rose: The stories are useful as a point to refer to. The stories, as in the stories of other men such as Kapila who lived before him, show one of a holy man. By holy I mean that he went through the necessary disciplines in order to achieve his power. I have no answers on whether or not he was God. I don't know.

Incidentally, he said to his Apostles, "What I do you also can do." I think that this is synonymous with saying, "What I am you also are." I am quite convinced that each man is a finger of the sun. The celestial Sun, an Absolute Reality. The Atman and the Brahman—each person. That's the reason you find God by looking inside, not by looking in a book. Looking in the book is inspiration. Really finding yourself is finding where that Being touches you. And then when you find it—you find that it is you. I'm not saying that it is a part of you, I say that it is you.

Well, I want to thank all of you. It's been wonderful—I hope to see you again.

END

LECTURE ON BETWEEN-NESS

Columbus, Ohio, 1980

I would like to talk about Between-ness, but first I would like to make a few notes. Between-ness is an art, and it is also understood by some as being a high form of magic.

Since it is strictly a mental function or operation it is first necessary to know something about the mind and correct mental posture. We find that most people do not try to think straight. They are moved by emotions and beliefs rather than by selfless introspection and external observations on the results of the paradigms which mankind creates.

Paradigms, language patterns or philosophy patterns are not the result of a conspiracy. The professional conspiracy to misuse the paradigms, is the afterthought. The paradigm or pattern was for centuries, only a workable adaptation.

Regardless of the source of the paradigm—it has taken us a long way off course from the original intentions of simply—primitive language.

As civilization progressed, different paradigms appeared in different parts of the world, and these paradigms dealt with different religious, psychological and therapeutic approaches.

The paradigms in the past were so respected and trusted that wars were fought to protect ours and eliminate others. But down through the ages philosophers have gone back to those primitive life-styles, to rediscover the context of other paradigms which effected some cures more easily than did our highly "scientific" chemotherapy.

Our paradigm has even made these other paradigms illegal. We've made it illegal to heal people or cast spells by these methods without a doctor's education. Their paradigm may not affect us if we do not indulge in it, but then again it may be stronger than our own if they can think that strongly on it. Between the AMA and the barristers' association we put them out of business.

The more I look into this in the thirty or forty years since I've been in college, the more I realize that psychology is failing to discover or understand phenomena in the past that can be very practical and very useful. Recently someone sent to us some books on Sufism. I previously never had much of an interest in Sufism because, I suppose, I associated it with dervishes, and dervishes were not fully understood then. Idries Shah wrote a book on Sufism from which I copied this. In the first pages of it he mentions al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali refers to a book the al-Undinabi. The title of the book doesn't matter. The message is what matters.

"To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth." If I would have read that at another time I would have thought—So what! What does that mean? A sick man can hallucinate, or whatever. I wouldn't have normally drawn the conclusion that the real meaning was that the sick man is now in a different paradigm. When he's sick his whole paradigm becomes reversed, and he's very capable of now believing the opposite of what he believed when he was well.

Shah goes on to say that this could very well be taken as Ghazali's motto.

"Eight hundred years before Pavlov he pointed out and hammered home, often in engaging parables, and sometimes in startling modern words the problem of conditioning" (which we thought we had discovered and were going to execute on people to make a better world). "In spite of Pavlov and the dozens of books and studies on human behaviorism since the Korean War, the ordinary student of the mind is unaware of the power of indoctrination. One of the most striking peculiarities of contemporary man is that while he now has abundant scientific evidence to the contrary, he finds it extremely difficult to understand what his beliefs are. That his beliefs are by no means always linked with either his intelligence, his culture or his values. Therefore, he is almost unreasonably vulnerable to indoctrination."

We submit to an indoctrination that seems to go opposite to our intelligence and just doesn't make sense. We might go into the army. Why would you accept the indoctrination? It's because the guy says it's easier that way. If you want to do good in business, you go down and join the local church, but your intelligence tells you otherwise. I remember one time I was in San Antonio, Texas. I had gone down there to interview a witch doctor, to see what his paradigm was. I ran into Reverend Green from Ohio who had written a thesis on telepathy and ESP. He was a minister and had written his doctorate on it. He still had his church and his parish, and I talked to some of his people there. One fellow was very friendly and intelligent. He was a prominent businessman in San Antonio. I asked him, "Why do you go to church?" He said, "I go to church to take my kids to church." I said, "Well, why do you take your kids to church?" He said, "To keep them out of the penitentiary!" I don't know how many people have the same opinion, but this is a good way to keep the children out of the penitentiary.

How many people go to church to find the answer? I was amazed. At one time I thought that people who had very astute or complex thinking processes or computers, would not be able to rest until they applied that computer to the maximum problem, especially if they were in the business of theology. But they don't. They go to church and they submit to the indoctrination. There are hundreds of doctrines, hundreds of churches, hundreds of denominations and nearly everyone says they are all false except their own. They all follow the same path of indoctrination—a little singing, a little repetition, a bit of comfortable atmosphere with music or incense. The thing is to get people to function in "army fashion," so to speak.

Shah goes on,

"Indoctrination in totalitarian societies is something that is desirable provided it furthers the beliefs of such societies. In other groupings (now, we're talking about philosophy) its presence is scarcely even suspected."

This is what makes most everyone vulnerable to it. We don't suspect it. We just hope that everything goes smoothly.

"Ghazali's work not only predates but exceeds the contemporary knowledge of these matters. Since the time of his writing, informed opinion is split between (1) whether indoctrination, either overt or covert, is desirable or otherwise, and (2) whether it is inescapable or not."

We've got to the point where perhaps we can't escape it.

If you want a job selling insurance, you have to submit to so many weeks of conditioning in which they train you to say the right things. You go through so many possible situations and will be told what to say in each situation.

Ghazali also points out that what people call a state of belief may be an obsession. He points out in Sufi terms that it is not inescapable, but that it is essential for people to be able to identify it. Now, this is the sad situation we're in, and that psychology is not leading us out of, but it is leading us into. We can't identify when we are snowed.

Here's noble science that looks at religion and says, "You people are as unreasonable as hell, you're dreaming!" In turn, it's using that same tactic in creating a profession, a profession with its own paradigm and almost a wall of invulnerable protection. The paradigm becoming so complex you can't even discuss it unless you get a master's degree, and by the time you get your master's degree you think like the sergeant in the army in that you'd better believe it because you're going to have to eat from that table.

The reason I'm mentioning this is not so much to point out the present situation of psychology, as to point out the miracles such as the simple Aborigine performed. He did them because his psychology was pure. His paradigm was simple. There was no doubletalk. We make fun of the guy who builds totem poles. But that's all we have in our scientific world—paradigms, like totem poles. And we're not going to get anywhere with our thinking. It is only after we're able to—as Idries Shah says—to identify, that we free ourself, and we move on and we can find a conciliatory principle. And from that find some wisdom, and from that find these power mechanisms, that stop the clock . . . that heal people. I know this may be a little bit difficult for you to tie together.

I gave a similar lecture in Pittsburgh a week or so ago. The group arranged a radio interview to advertise the coming lecture. If you ever feel foolish, it's trying to explain a philosophic point to someone when you only have three minutes to go on the air to understand what "Between-ness" means. This lady came up to me and said, "We're supposed to ask you some questions on the air. What is this Between-ness? Should we ask you about that?" I said, "Sure, that's all right." She said "Well what is it?" I said, "Have you got two hours? Maybe longer?"

It dawned on me that maybe I could say something. I said, "Have you ever rolled dice?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Okay, then you know what Between-ness is." Any man who has rolled dice or played poker has always had it in the back of his head that if he held his head a certain way, he'd win.

This is the instinctive feeling that every child has, that nature is perverse. That if you hold your head the right way you will come out on top. Every human being has this peculiar thing. I was living in an orphanage as a child. I was amazed at the kids who would put their noses up against the window—it was this time of year—winter, and they would have visions of making a snowman and watching a few flakes come down through the air. So they were kind of agonized into coaxing it to snow.

One little fellow was chanting, "Snow, snow, go away. Come again another day."

I said to him, "What's the matter? Are you crazy?! We all want it to snow!" He said, "If you want it to snow, it won't snow." If "it" knows you're indifferent, it will snow.

So you get the point? Thought. No-thought. Creation. The child's mind has it. They don't know the laws. They don't know the manipulations, but they know intuitively something is there if they work it right. And this is right down the line—of Between-ness.

I mentioned that this occasionally gets into the minds of people who write plays. I saw a movie. I think it was Cameron Mitchell who played the part. That's the only fellow I can remember out of the play, it was on television. I was curious to know who the author was and how he came up with this—this knowledge of magic. This Cameron Mitchell was a drunk who staggered into a real plush casino in the Mediterranean.

He's got a dollar and he wants to bet it on the roll of the dice. There's an old man there who is a sort of a host. He says, "You can't bet a dollar here!" Most of the people just ignored him and brushed him aside. The old man says, "You can't bet a dollar here. One chip costs a thousand dollars."

The drunk says, "Oh, excuse me." He staggers away and goes over to a slot machine and comes back with a thousand-dollar chip.

He says, "Can I bet now?", and they said "Yes." So he puts his single chip down—but he recites a bit of doggerel. The doggerel is almost meaningless, but as the dice were rolled he would recite this doggerel and the dice would come up on a certain point. He rolls the dice again and he wins. I don't know how many times he rolled it, of course, we're dealing in fiction, but he would double his money each time and before he moved away from that table, he had a million dollars.

He's still drunk, and a sleek-looking lady there says, "I go with the winner." So he gets his glass full of champagne and they show him staggering off. The old fellow who advised him he couldn't bet a dollar is telling him now to take it easy, that he'd already drank a lot . . . So he's going into another room, supposedly to be alone with this lady—if that's the proper inference to use. But he goes in there and drops dead. That was the climax of the story.

The realization finally was—he was not a million-dollar man. These other people were gambling hundreds of thousands a day and they could do it and it fit into their paradigm. What happened to him was that he used a paradigm that a child might use to win a million dollars and he didn't have the capacity. I was so amazed by this piece of drama, this simple show. Whoever had written it knew that there was a law someplace, that there is a law. This drunk created a very complete paradigm and the only way he could do it was to be in no-thought. He was drunk. He was just in the right degree of drunkenness.

How many people do you know have told you "I won two thousand bucks, or three hundred bucks and I don't know how I did it, I was drunk!" or that they never expected to win or under some strange circumstances they would pick this up?

The purpose of bringing up this drama was that there is a method of doing things, of changing material events. Max Freedom Long in his book on Huna mentions that the Hunas believe that the human being possesses immense amounts of voltage. I often use the term "quantum energy," which I believe in. I use the word "voltage" occasionally for the want of a better word, but I never thought that it could be measured on the electroencephalograph, but this would be in "mini-volts." Long maintains the voltage is very high but the amperage is very low and ineffective. It doesn't hurt you.

I read an article about the discovery of the "so-called" three brains of man, the neo-cortex, and the other brain—the sympathetic part that has emotional aspects to it, and then the final properties of the cerebrum with its logical aspects. He claims that the Hunas believed this—centuries ago. The histories of these peoples, both Hunas and Aborigines, may go back 16,000 years. So this is a psychological system that is tremendously old. He just states flatly and drops it that the human being produces some two to three million volts and I'm wondering if he really means some sort of low-amperage current. He goes on to say that this is proven by science.

The whole thing is that the knowledge that these peoples had of the human mind is something that we really haven't caught up to yet. Freedom Long and Brigham before him spent two entire lifetimes just investigating the language, the Hawaiian language, to discover their secrets. The secrets weren't written down, they were only given out in initiation. In both the Aborigines and the Hunas. Another person taught them.

There are a lot of people today claiming that they have the Huna knowledge, but others claim it is lost. Long claims that when they did away with the practice of it by law, that the people then just neglected it. That it was totally lost.

What is necessary to arrive at this sort of power? . . . When you are facing an old paradigm that is negative or destructive, let's say one filled full of words such as "disease" or "cancer" and you're trying to supplant it with a paradigm without those terms . . . this is where your difficulty comes in. I think that any society that does such would have to almost do as the Hunas did. They would have to find themselves an island. They would have to find a place where they wouldn't be overrun and their whole belief-system endangered. The next thing would be to, possibly, only transmit this to a very few people. I don't think it would be written in books. This is the other thing. We like to put everything in textbooks, see, we like to say "Here's how you push the buttons."

In other words, the conditions with which you have success along these lines are first, you must have the confidence or belief of your audience. Christ couldn't perform miracles in his home town—no one would believe him. This is another thing people overlook in the Bible. The whole thing is looked at as "divine healing" but if it was divine healing it wouldn't matter if it was his home town or not.

It says, "He did not do many works in his town, and he left there." He went elsewhere. The form of belief depends on your success, because if the other paradigm is real strong, you're going to have an audience that pays no attention to you.

The second thing is the capacity of the students that are taught in accordance with their ability to understand. In other words, only the people with "ears" can hear. Not just students, but the people who are going to be "adepts," so to speak. The third thing is a small circle of people who will share the understanding and knowledge which is derived from direct inner experience. It goes back to the point where you are able to develop, or capture the "inside" for answers. In other words, just not specified answers, or not just any answers, which desires serve up.

When you start to look at these different movements with the new paradigms, you find that this is a common denominator in them. Christ and Buddha both came with a message. Both had to find the environment for belief. They had to leave their home town, so to speak. They had to find a larger mass of students than what they had in the inner circle. There were at least seventy disciples. There were only twelve apostles. The percentages of people who have ears still aren't the percentages of people who have the ability to act. In other words, he had seventy students who could hear but only twelve that could act, those that carried the load. This applies to anything. You can't have a single Huna-miracle man. I don't think it would be effective. You can't have a single Aborigine-shaman. They lived together in the same place in Australia, talked the same language, believed the same things, telepathically communicated, accurately, very accurately. They knew when their relatives were sick, they knew when their relatives had died, and they didn't have to go and see it. They didn't have to go through the mail. They knew it immediately. If you were around them they would show it. They would say that they had a death, a cousin had died or something.

I'm going to get back to psychology and then if you have some questions . . .

Belief is functional to cultural survival. We like to think that psychology is above belief, that psychology is only going to deal in proof. But belief is germane to our culture. Psychology deals with all the attributes of our behavior . . . Current psychology doesn't believe in the "science of the psyche." The 1930 definition of psychology in Merriam Webster dictionary was the "science of the psyche." "Psyche" and the word "logos" come from the Greek. The "logos" stands for science. In recent definitions of psychology, you only have "the science of the reactions of the mind taken together" or something of that sort. I've noticed occasionally a dictionary will add the other definition also, that it is a science of the mind and not just behaviorism, not just man's actions taken collectively.

I think again that this is an attempt to change the paradigm to suit the inability of the "witch doctor." The witch doctor can't cure and what he can't cure he leaves out of the dictionary. You don't have a psyche, so you don't have to cure it. I maintain that belief is the tremendous functional part of life, of everybody's life. You can't apply reason to everything. To give an example, the psychologists themselves are at war with each other. If you don't believe me then read Voth, who wrote The Castrated Family, and Gross, who wrote The Psychological Society. These people come right out and say we're miles off base. That we're destroying the American family with our present psychology. On the other hand, you have an author who destroyed his own daughter by putting her in a glass cage, and yet pretends to be the authority on who should monitor the behavior of everyone in the country and maybe the world.

I maintain the reason for this difficulty is the refusal to admit the subjective part of psychology, that's all. It is the refusal to accept the subjective part of man. It's possible inside your head you've got something besides spirochetes. There might be a radio set in there that picks up intuition, or messages, or something from another dimension even. Incidentally, the psychology of the Aborigine works. It works, he proves it. Our psychology doesn't work. What happens in psychology, inevitably, is that there is an attempt to blame society for an individual's erratic acts. Some individuals pick it up very avidly and say "Okay, I'm not to blame. Society is to blame." And he goes out and he commits a crime. Or maybe he just gets unemployed, fails to take interest in society. So then he gets hungry and someone tells him he better go down to the mental health depot so the people with canned answers or canned advice can tell you what to do, or get you into a mental institution and leave you stay there until you get yourself straightened out. So he goes down to the psychologist and the psychologist tells him, "You know what's wrong with you! You've got to take responsibility for your actions!" This is the first thing they will tell him. "You have to take responsibility for your actions." And this is just the opposite of what he's lead his life by. Which is that man isn't responsible for anything. Society is responsible for everything. If you feel like getting drunk, get drunk. Man shouldn't worry about anything. If you feel like being immoral, be immoral . . . see? Don't worry about it because it's just an experience and you'll "broaden." Of course, if you get broad enough you might terminate. If you take in too much experience, it could be fatal. The point is that there is conflict in authoritative (professional) advice.

The thing is that there are no real logical remedies in the field of psychology or psychiatry. Most of them will flatly admit it. Read William Seabrook's book Asylum. That was about Bellevue, a famous asylum in the East. Where the therapists candidly admitted that they just allow the patients to stay there until they cured themselves. They saw certain degrees of capability and they'd move them from one ward to another. They had "seven degrees of capability." You know. If they could wash their face, they'd put them in with the others who could wash their face. They'd get closer and closer to the exit door. Incidentally, William Seabrook was an author who was committed there for alcoholism, so he was able to make some pretty objective observations.

I believe by the same token that psychology has a tremendously stabilizing effect on religion, as well. For instance, somebody gave us systems like Zen where the whole spiritual search is not done by reading texts from the Bible. It's done by looking inside yourself. A system of self-analysis. And when you reach the end result of that self-analysis, you've got the same answer that the person had, who followed dogmatic beliefs and also had the conviction that there was a supreme being of which he was a part. I think the main difficulty is the polarity between true psychology and religion. In too many cases, they refuse to recognize each other.

I'm not going to burden you with too many of these quotations. I read one of the oldest authorities on yoga which is Patanjali. You go back and read this and it is pure psychology. It's about correct actions. You go back to Buddha. What does Buddha talk about? Discrimination. Correct action. This is psychology. Strangely enough, I don't believe you'll find a single lunatic among the Aborigines of Australia. [In their natural state. -Ed.] I don't think there's any of them that have an aberration. But we've fitted this insanity-item very neatly into our paradigm.

To get back to this word Between-ness. I use this word because, like I said—there is no other. This is the key-word for the use of a magical system. There's a waiting for the mind, a waiting for events. If you take a certain turn, this is part of it. When Christ was at the wedding feast this was brought up. His mother tried to get him to serve the guests some wine and I think she implied that he could produce some by magic. He turned her down momentarily. He said, "My time hasn't come yet." This kind of stuck in my head. Why did he do this? If he had this divine power it should have been available all the time. When you get into this business of observing how people function, the Aborigine doesn't just throw a boomerang. He waits until a certain time occurs, he calls it "dreamtime." In that dreamtime a certain thing has to occur. Of course, since he lays no claim to divine help he has a very simple explanation for it. This intuition of cognition, all of us have. There is stuff in each of our lives or in our neighbors that we hear about that shows that the human mind is in touch—the Aborigine calls it the "elder brother" or something of that sort. We call it the "guardian angel." My idea is that the human mind has to contact something else other than its own memory bank or computer. This happens accidentally enough that we can say with validity that under certain conditions the human mind can contact other dimensions. Or another space-time dimension, or a far region of this dimension. Another space-time episode.

In this we have deja vu experiences. There are a lot of experiences that are listed as deja vu. Where you see a wreck before it happens. You don't get on the airplane because you sense something's wrong. We were talking earlier about the bridge that collapsed in West Virginia. Certain people didn't go on—but others did because their time had come, so to speak. Intuitional knowledge of deaths in the family and dreams that are precognitive. These dreams that are precognitive seem to indicate that there is such a thing as space-time. Something that can be viewed in the present manifestly has to be happening then. For that person it is happening then.

There is a whole background of so-called healings and magic that has come down to us through the centuries that we have ignored. I think that when you look at these as a whole instead as isolated incidents you begin to get a picture of something.

Before I close, I want to give you three factors that true psychology can produce for us. When I talk about psychology I'm not talking about current conventional psychology, I'm talking about the true analysis of things. First of all psychology can give us a better look into our daily lives and we can see where we're not harmonizing. The second thing is that psychology is a validation for metaphysics, for intuition and for religion. The intuition predicts. The intuition postulates a certain psychic condition which science or psychology as a science later proves. I'm thinking now of ESP. ESP was pretty much frowned upon until the time J.B. Rhine did his experiments with psychokinetics. Here's a case where ESP became valid or scientifically acceptable as the result of science. That is—psyche became a science.

A third thing is the realization of tremendous psychological powers. It isn't just mind-reading. It isn't just the ability to predict the stock exchange or the lottery. There is an ability to change the condition of matter. It's a very simple method of the way you approach it with your mind. I maintain that the formula lies in this bit of triangulation. It is simply said but it's not simply done. Yet there is enough evidence to show we don't have the limit yet. It seems that you can't put a leg back on a person but yet, there have been tremendously larger enterprises that have been carried out.

Colin Wilson mentions this thing in his Mind Parasites. If you ever get a chance, read it. It is a book of fiction but, again, it is a tremendous message which the author puts down in the form of a fictional story of what he supposes might be—preferring not to try to put it down in scientific and mathematical form. The witnessing of the minor things that people do—if you want to call them "minor," such as the Hunas or miraculous cures—I think are only the tip of the iceberg. I think that the individual is able to affect a tremendously wider scope. I don't know how far it could go. Nobody knows until they go there. This is my angle for the psychology department, this direction of what we call psychology today. If it could just take a turn or amend the paradigm.

Well, if you've got any questions, I'd like to swing over to that . . .

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: You have to see it. I know that. There is a big gap here. We're talking about something that is entirely new to you. This started out for me, and for some other people—some of whom are present here . . . this started out in our philosophic group as a "rapport session" but often ended up as a healing. The healing was not intended. I don't intend to be a healer. I don't intend to get a reputation as a healer, because you can't do too many things at once. I have a message to deliver and if I can find the words for that I'll be doing my job well. I don't want to break out into many things. These things do happen. There is a way to do it which makes them effective.

Q: When is Frank going to speak?

Rose: When is Frank going to be here? Two weeks. The speaker who will be here two weeks from now. When I first began talking here in Pittsburgh, Frank and his wife would come down every weekend and we would have a sitting. They taught school and on weekends they would come down and have a sitting. We would call it a "rapport meeting." Waiting for mental realizations to occur. There is nothing "weird" about these sittings, they've been doing them for centuries. The early Pentecostal religion used to sit in this fashion for what they called "tarrying." Waiting for a message from God, if you want to call it that. The idea was sitting quietly so the "third party" would join you, which might be the spirit of the Holy Ghost or some "voltage."

When I heard the concept of voltage in the Huna doctrine it reminded me of what happened in these meetings in which there would actually be a voltage pass through the room, and everyone could feel it and know exactly where it was. They would all agree on its location, it was almost visible. We were sitting there one day, and I noticed that Frank's wife was "out of tune." I looked at her and I saw a headache in her head. Just because of the frame of mind we were in. We were in a neutral frame of mind, or I was at least. I don't know where everybody else was. I said to her, "You have a headache." She said, "Yes, I have a splitting headache!" I sat there a minute and the thought occurred to me, "Take it out. Take it out of her head!" I got up and walked across the floor, cupped my hand over her head and pulled the headache out of her head. There was nothing scientific or logical about that. I did that as a result of not desiring, not fearing, but doing.

FIGURE 4. BETWEEN-NESS

You need a triangulation to bring about Between-ness (Figure 4, prior page), you have to step out of the paradigm itself. In other words . . . I once studied under a Zen master and he said to me "We have to use words." You labor and attempt to bring something very subjective out in the best possible of physical terms. This is all you can do. Then somebody in the audience has an intuition and picks up what you are talking about. This is the only hope you have.

Q: (Inaudible) . . . Can you create a whole different life?

Rose: That would be a whole different paradigm. This is one thing I couldn't understand about Pearce, although I agree one hundred percent that it was the paradigm that killed his wife. Don't try to put something down there at the other end of the line. Put nothing down there. Don't try to replace it. Contemplate possible nothingness.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: There will always be paradoxes in a paradigm as soon as you start talking about them, this is the thing. We mentioned the Aborigines. They didn't allow anyone to witness when they transferred this knowledge to someone else. I think the purpose of this was that it shouldn't be written down. As soon as you write something down someone makes poems out of it, and then someone finds a philosophy in the poems and writes ten books on philosophy. Like Patanjali, he wrote ten pages and there have been hundreds of volumes written about him. He only wrote ten pages but that may have been too much because it keeps being interpreted and reinterpreted and a language developed around it.

What I hope to bring to you tonight, by words because we don't have conditions to demonstrate, is that there is a way of getting things done without recognizing every paradigm in the universe.

Q: Is your system the same as the concepts thesis, antithesis, and synthesis found in philosophy?

Rose: I am acquainted with those terms, and there is a degree of synthesis in many cases. All those concepts aren't necessary here. I said thought and no-thought brings about an Absolute realization. That is not a synthesis. You cannot add up thought and no-thought and come about with realization. You could add two colors and would get a synthesis of color, seeing the new color was a synthesis of the old colors. It is not the idea of adding the two things at the base of the triangle and getting all sorts of variables. That's not it. There is a certain thing that reacts, or results from the contemplation of both things at once. Not just examining them for qualities, but "holding them in your head," both variables at once. The gut realization comes from contemplating truth and nothingness, like the Zen koan, until your head stops—and then everything becomes apparent to you. And then you realize that the only reason everything became apparent to you is because you knew everything and nothing. Everything and nothing are on both sides of the line. If you know everything and nothing you become in union with the Absolute.

Q: (Inaudible reference to Alan Watts.)

Rose: That's very clever! (laughing) I'm not saying it's not the truth, or it is the truth, I don't know. It's one of those tricky little things like whether or not if you continually halve the distance between yourself and a wall—will you ever reach the wall? Will you ever really reach the wall, or will you always be "halfway" away from it?

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: It is a point of neutrality. Benoit states this. It's not like an algebraic equation I have here. Thought, no-thought results in Absolute realization. Now if it was an algebraic equation then my answer would be somewhere between thought and no-thought or "half-thought." No. What it is, must be found by trying it—you do it, you live it . . . and this is what happens! You reach an Absolute realization by looking between thoughts.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: You can hardly force it, what happens is that you are forced into it. No one really succeeds in following the blueprint for a spiritual awakening or an accumulation of power. What happens is that he just keeps driving. What we have is the pursuit of the truth, capital "T" Truth. The other thing is that we may be incapable of perceiving the Truth. So you have action opposed by conviction that you will be unsuccessful. You live this. A person on the spiritual path lives this every moment every day of their life, they push, and push, and push . . . and then nothing logical, mental or verbal can explain what happens—an explosion. Your being changes. Your being changes because we are adaptable. The thing is, that in the next dimension you discover our space and time don't work. Our time is dependent upon a visible sun. Our space is dependent upon an aspect of our consciousness, something far, something near. When the sun vanishes, you're timeless. That's the rationale behind the isolation tank experiments by Lilly. He put the person in a position in which he could no longer see a clock or the darkness and light of day and night, and the fact that he was floating in this tank gave him a feeling of space. This causes the computer to shift to that. Now, the computer cannot deal with "non-values," it has to have some system to go by.

Nevertheless, the problem is there and has to be solved and it can't be solved without a change of being. He can't change his being though, but his being is changed for him by a triggering by a little procedure, which is a neutral state—the humble, egoless state of continued energy-application with a desire to know.

The same thing applies to some people studying algebra for the first time. I know this happened to me. You get these problems X + Y = C, or 2X + 3Rc = Z. I said to myself, "What are they doing this for?! Do I have to go through this to study algebra?" But one day something "popped." I never learned algebra—I became algebra. That's the only way I can describe it. All of a sudden it all became reasonable. I couldn't see how I could apply it in my life but I could see it was fairly simple. (Incidentally, algebra is a paradigm in itself.) It all became meaningful. Before, it was absurdity.

We work with this. This form of inspiration is how we make battleships and airplanes. And they work. They work, so there must be something behind these inspirations (algebraic) that come to us, because there is no logical reason why X + Y should equal Z, they aren't numerical values. When you look for an abstract answer in the search for Truth (and you don't even know it will be an abstract answer)—you don't know what's coming up. When you look for the answer to the meaning of life and death and self-definition, you may well come up with an abstract answer such as oblivion, if you're a student of the truth. You have to accept what comes, not what you can create. This is what you have to keep in the back of your computer too—no phony answers.

That which is, is all you want. You never learn the answer, you can only become that answer. Then you can go back and say, "I read that in the Bible!" or whatever. Then you can say that someone who wrote that book knew something about true being. Christ, in the Bible, does not say "I know the Truth." He says "I am the Truth." That is when I realized that he knew he became, he didn't learn the Truth. He became the Truth and he found it through an amazingly twisted persistent, painful process.

Q: (Inaudible reference to illusion.)

Rose: You can't help but come up with this thing of what came first, the chicken or the egg. Who started this thing and what is the purpose of it? The purpose of it may be good, I don't know. I don't believe in condoning the blatant inconsistencies of the illusion. I believe the Truth begins with truth in living, not with a tricky mathematical formulation or with very hypothetical thinking. You have to become the Truth and becoming the Truth means you can't afford to be a damn fool! We can't afford to be snowed. We can't afford to be snowed on any level, whether the government is doing it or the guy who is selling you automobiles is doing it and I'm sure he's doing it.

Everywhere you turn it is open season on the consumer—or on the kid in school. He is led to believe he can make a living with this paradigm. The paradigm is getting so rotten it is helping to make more sick people.

We're getting more nut-houses as the result of the science of psychology. They're not curing people. They're not saying that there is a sane and good spirit inside this guy that is okay, and all we have to do is get inside his head. In other words—step inside his moccasins instead of treating him as a corpse. We treat him as a corpse, then, you know, in that he's expendable.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: I don't believe we're put here to be in a daydream, or a pipe-dream, or the Supreme Being's pipe-dream. I believe all science is aimed at the Truth. If you study chemistry, it is based on the hardest data they can get, the atomic chart. If you study physics it's based on materials that are weighed, categorized and cataloged. It's consistent, as consistent as they can get. If you deal with psychology or sociology, you are dealing with nebulous systems that have no foundations whatsoever.

At Brown University, I was up there giving a lecture, and one of our fellows flipped out. It wasn't from drugs, I don't know what caused it. I think sometimes he was thinking too much, but he went bananas and he fell over on the floor. He had committed himself to this mental institution.

I went to see him before I left Providence and he flopped down on the floor and the psychiatrist was summoned. Before he got there I reached down and got him by the wrist—I held onto his wrist and he changed immediately. He stood up and was perfectly sane. The psychiatrist saw what I did—and I said to him, "Can you do that?" He looked at me like he thought I was crazy. The patient was laughing, he was very happy and normal.

I started talking to the psychiatrist and said, "What are you treating this fellow for?" He said, "Well, we don't know. I said, "Well, what are you giving him?" He said "Stelazine" or "Storazine", or something like that. I said, "What the hell are you giving him medicine for when you haven't diagnosed his illness?!" In other words, he's a pin-cushion. If this doesn't work, try something else, and if that doesn't work, try something else—instead of getting inside the person's head and finding out what's wrong.

Of course, I can't enforce this on society, but I say we can question and question and question and ask "Where are you coming from?" What is a thought? Why don't the psychology textbooks define what a thought is? Why don't they define what mind is. They don't. That is their stock and trade—thought. They don't have any definition.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: It makes me more tolerant because I see that's part of the picture. In other words, identification is all you wind up with, you'll be able to identify phoniness, when you see it. It'll help you in your relations with other people. If your wife starts throwing a certain type of fit, you know it's just a certain time of the month, it's not time to haul her away and start shooting the dope into her. That's the unfortunate solution to everything today, chemotherapy.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: I'm aware that there is an abominable tragedy going on about me every day, which is nothing more than a drama. People unfortunately have to believe it. Then you have people in Hollywood creating another one inside of it. Like the kids in the other room playing house. It's not bad enough that he has to grow up and be a householder and suffer like a householder. No, he can't wait, he's going in the other room and act at playing house, or he might have tin soldiers on the floor and he's playing army. Make-believe. We seem to be prone to make-believe, and we love it.

I was talking to a man back there from the west coast and we were talking about all the make-believe religions on the west coast. I'm appalled at the stature of the people that go to hear Chilton Pearce talk, for instance.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: Energy is a substance, and it happens—boom! He is zapped and the change occurs. The fellow who is paralyzed gets up and walks or the crazy fellow has mental clarity, and it happens instantaneously. It is a transfer of what I call "quantum energy." Now, I have an explanation of where that comes from. It doesn't come from "upstairs," it comes from the way you live. The healer has to live a certain continent type of life. You cannot accumulate energy while spending it.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: You're thinking about thinking, and by thinking about thinking, you want more understanding. You're criticizing us for having understanding. We're going to think about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking, and that's understanding . . . infinite understanding! No, No. It's very simple. Knowing. Being. Boom! And then thought is superfluous.

Q: (Inaudible)

Rose: Convictional states. Maybe some of you have read Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff categorized four types of men: the instinctual, the emotional, the intellectual, and the philosophic. I maintain that this is a very good categorization. The man on the lowest state, the instinctual or "lizard-brain man" only lives for reproduction and pleasures and when he gets "religion," he gets the "salvation" experience. It is a paradigm they build up and they feel very comfortable in it. It's like the presidential debaters. When they're inside their own paradigm, they can give you a lot of fancy answers. It's the same way with these different levels.

I studied when I was a young boy to be a priest. I would try to talk reason to these monks who were teaching me and they would say, "Oh . . . we're above all that. We're above all that logic because you don't find anything out until you believe."

So you see, they said that after you believe for a while all this great Reality descends on you and you don't have to reason. Unfortunately, I couldn't accept that. These preachers have lost something through their belief, or, that is, they never really found it in the first place, and they certainly lost the ability to communicate. Man with his intellectual immanence has to talk dog-language if he's speaking to dogs. And men that are ignorant, and the only language they have is in objective terms, have to somehow be communicated with in objective terms.

You can't just say "Stick your head in the sand and chant this mantra until you believe it." Or "Say these prayers until you no longer resist." No. I believe that there is a method of digging and that is in observing everything, keeping your mind open to everything. You take what Benoit calls the "pure conciliatory position" in which you use two eyes and see both things at once. You widen your perspective. Right below conciliatory principle I have another word which is Between-ness. It is not the fanatical leaning towards any one view but the constant comparing it with its opposite. Is the opposite true? How much of a degree are you sure of yourself? To how much of a degree is it possible that the opposite is true?

We go on and we recognize that religion and psychology represent two faculties of the human mind, strangely enough. They are almost good metaphorical words for intuition and reason. The religionist is drawn to, and functions, or joins because of an intuition. He can't give you logical reasons why he believes that "Mr. X" or "so and so" is the savior. He just relies on it. This is another weakness, of course. We like to rely on democratic thinking. We like to have statistics and rely on statistics. If fifty-one percent of the people believe that green is composed of black and red, then green is composed of black and red. We change the truth to fit the system of democratic choice.

This isn't valid, of course. Things are as they are and have been since the beginning of time. We try to distort them a bit by trying to force them into our particular political or conceptual paradigm. I'll explain the word paradigm if you are not acquainted with it. It is a very appropriate word because it implies that we do not have truth at all. We have indulgence in paradigms. Every science has a paradigm. In other words, if you get out of a penitentiary, they will have a language there which cannot be understood anyplace else. In the army there is a certain language. In a research laboratory there is a certain language, abbreviated terms and the like. In a hospital they have a special language. For instance, they call a "hemostat" a "stat." A person unacquainted with this language will be lost.

Chilton Pearce brings out, incidentally, that he believes the paradigm is responsible for our belief in illness. Whatever fits into the language of the people will contribute to its own existence. Half the things that appear are the result of the belief that they will appear. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter, but what can be seen is that we do believe in paradigms. The army sergeant says, "You'd better believe it" in the army paradigm. He says it a hundred times. Why does he say it? He says it because it's easier to live in the paradigm than to keep saying "Why?"

Reason is identified with the psychological direction in man, in that man tries to objectify his thinking processes. He feels the tangible world is very important and he tries to make his thinking tangible. The intuitional thing seems miles away. The intuitional person can't talk to the person who is very logical or demands proof of everything. We take this bottom line again and see an intuition and reason which seem to never meet. But when they do, from a superior conciliatory point off the straight line, you have wisdom. Philosophers are people who observe both sides of the story. They will agree to, or will study anything that relates, and not just what agrees with them. This is the only way you can arrive at a more correct understanding.

Down below the word wisdom I have written something else—"being" and "Between-ness." The inner Self I capitalize, and the outer self is the fellow you smile at in the mirror. Your higher Self is synonymous with your Source. You don't learn this through reason, and you don't learn it always through crude intuition or superstition. It has to be perfected intuition and perfected reason. By this I mean the intuition has to be tempered with the reason. This causes through wisdom—a change of being. It may be gradual, so gradual he does not notice it. What has changed him is this word "Between-ness" because I have no other word for it even though it sounds like a very plain word. It is the conciliatory principle and the things that result from being between, never allowing yourself to flop fanatically to one polar opposite or the other.

We have the same thing in our scientific thinking regarding space and time. We have a line and on one end of it is space and on the other is time. No one sees any relationship. They are the two ways in which we like to describe what we call our life. We live so long, we occupy so much space. Observed from the conciliatory principle we have an item called "space-time." You might wonder why I am mentioning this. It is because this has to do with psychology and mystical experiences. In mystical experiences space and time are out of sync. Most of your great mystical experiences are space-time experiences. Most people who had them at first thought they were nuts until they realized that they occurred in a dimension not ruled by paradigm-concepts.

The reason that we are ruled by paradigm-thinking is because at first this is the only way we can see. I would like to explain "triangulation" and mention it in regard to surveying. If you want to find the very center of a hill, you can do this by standing away from that hill about a mile and sighting from a straight plane to the top of the hill. You can get a line from the top of the hill to the very center of the hill by this type by computing with trigonometry. Without an instrument (meaning a drill) you can measure the depth of the hill by measuring distances and using the three angles of the triangle. You will be able to find the center of that hill which the only other way would be to bore a hole into it. The same thing applies to Benoit's system of triangulation. It's very similar.

We can't see the center of the hill. We would have to do it very arduously and climb to the top of the hill, then bore a hole through the top and then bore a hole through the side to get that same triangle. The same thing applies in psychology. By the use of triangulation you will discover things.

Now we have a thing called "thought" and at the other end of the line we have a thing called "no-thought." In the Zen experience you start with a person who is a thinking creature, and he may come to a point where there is no thought. If a person comes to this place through the use of dope, and he strongly believes in the place he has left, then he will have consternation. It happens occasionally that the mind just ceases to think. Let us say, if the person's energy is "right," then from the point of triangulation he reaches what I call "Absolute realization,"—a combination of thought and no-thought, a combination of everything and nothing. This can only come about through thinking, thinking about things being everything or the polarity of nothing. When the computer goes to work on this problem, the result is Absolute realization.

We have a system of magic that results from this triangulation. On one side of this line, we have the thought of a paradigm, a system. The paradigm may be a paradigm of faith, or the belief in entities, like in Shakespeare's Tempest—that there might be entities that can "swing the deal" for you. The thought, whatever it is, will involve some paradigm, it might be some Kabbalistic ritual. That's a paradigm. "Paradigm X" I have (referring to a drawing on an easel). On the other side of the base of the triangle I have "no-thought of that paradigm." At the peak of the triangle we have the words—new paradigm generation, or magic.

I came across this not by talking to Ambrose Worral, but by reading strange accounts of things that people did. The TAT Society puts out a journal and occasionally we get a good article in it. A good article in our upcoming issue (#10) is on the Australian Aborigines, and has to do with what we would call miracles. These Aborigines live in places in Australia where many "civilized" men die just trying to explore them. The Aborigines survive there, and they survive there by knowing. For instance, what I mean by knowing, is that they can throw a boomerang and hit a rabbit on the other side of a hill that they cannot take a sight on with their eyes. They lapse into what they call "dreamtime" in order to do this. They become in contact with what they call the "Two Brothers." We in the western world would just think that he is "picking this skill up" somehow, but it can't be disputed regardless that he gets the rabbit every time with his boomerang. These abilities aren't accidents because their survival depends upon them. These people are even suspected of having rejected culture because they had everything "sewed up." They had control of this plane from another dimension. They were getting help, everything that was needed by them in the lines of food was provided just by going inside their own heads, getting into "dreamtime" and then throwing their spear or trotting over a hill to pick up a kangaroo's body. (Rose reads from Journal the story of Aborigine tracking perfectly the trail of a man who had crossed the plains a year previously.)

Do you get the point of what he did? He was back one year. He retreated one year and followed the other man across the desert alongside of him. That is what is meant by "contemporaneous." He put his mind in a situation in which he would be contemporaneous with the original act. If a murderer disappears over there, they can find them. They're almost one hundred percent accurate.

What did he do on the relative dimension? First of all he changes the paradigm. He doesn't live according to our paradigm because we don't believe these things can happen. The second thing is that he visualizes his system. He visualizes what he's supposed to do or accomplish, perhaps by reminding himself of the person's piece of clothing he has. He actually retreats in space-time. That's the reason of space and time on this line in triangle. Space and time no longer exist in his paradigm. He is free to travel in any segment of that now solidified space-time experience—or to describe it.

Consequently, these people whom we look upon as being "aboriginal" actually have the secret. We don't find it in our scientific books because scientists have to laboriously prove every step of the way before they can come up with a conclusion. There are other people who do them, just do them, and then leave it up to us to figure out how they did them.

END

NOTES ON BETWEEN-NESS

BETWEEN-NESS AND ULTIMATE REALITY

We wallow blindly in an illusory "World of the Relative," and our vision, our understandings, our philosophy, and theology are nightmares projected by us somewhere in our consciousness, even as the void upon which our physical world is projected, is also somewhere in our consciousness.

Reality is, but it is elsewhere. In the face of Reality or from the viewpoint of Absolute Reality our efforts to affect the nightmare are comic and pathetic except for one effort—a better understanding of the possibility of Between-ness.

This effort sees for man the possibility of surmounting the world of Illusion—consciously not just in a trance, where things may just be another form of illusion.

There have been formulae let out for the public, but each was limited to language and the attention span of an author who had lost his mundane "time-sense." Reality (Absolute) is the kingdom of heaven . . . which is a nebulous place to say the least. To enter heaven you must become as a little child. Now this formula has been said so simply, and so often, that it has not lately inspired any effort for people to become as children.

To detract a little from the vagueness of these words, let me add or change it to read—If you wish to enter Ultimate Reality, you must become as an autistic little child.

The Fakirs of India, and the Shamans among all of the less complicated peoples of the earth, had a toe-hold on the system, because they were able to change at will, the apparent unchangeable material construction of something, or to produce phenomena, such as levitation which apparently defied the iron-clad rules of science.

The adult, over-civilized mind of man, is one who stoutly believes that everything is impossible except that which scientists (as licensed by the state and properly endowed with infallible rectitude by virtue of previous associations with similar fools in college) endorse. Simple people try to drop that mass state of belief and conviction in the language of the Rinkidinks.

In the language of the Rinkidinks, we define an apple as being not a pear, not a plum, not a potato, and not a million other things. The world is like a magical tunnel which we enter as children, and as children are seduced into thinking that in this Alician tunnel, everything is here because you believe in it. By the time that the child is old enough it realizes, that with every item of beauty and wonder, it inherits a black duplicate of the same which is its opposite, and which follows it like a shadow.

In the language of the child an apple is an inexpressible experience, inexpressible with spoken words. But to another child of innocence and simplicity, the subjective experience is transmitted, one to the other. (That word, subjectivity, is incidentally blasphemy, because it pretends to describe God.)

We notice eventually that things are not as they seem. And things were as they seemed because everyone agreed at this "seeming." A scientific analysis of vision and color indicates that we can only perceive within the limits of our senses. We have a limited color range, a limited audibility, and limited olfactory ability because we depend on a limited number of sensory nerves in the respective sense organs, and the nerves themselves are limited in their ability for conveying accurately that which is only apparently seen.

The teacher informs the child in his earlier grades, that wisdom is calligraphy, social tolerance of human animals, respect for authorities ad absurdum, and friendly but frenetic competition for baubles or trophies. Wisdom according to the teacher is also class acceptance, and from there upward through a sort of guessing game that constantly draws and redraws the rules for social acceptance. The gods of religion draw a set of rules, and the gods of human law draw other rules, and the gods of nature have still another code. Another goddess is pollyanna, or that urge by mankind for Utopia simply through collective pretense that dreaming will make things come true. It is not enough that man is born into a science-fiction drama that shows promise of being a horror-show, but we are constantly tempted to believe that it has to be that way, not knowing that it could not be substantiated or real. It is only a stage drama.

I realize that I am writing this in a very critical manner. I am or have the appearance of being a very destructive or negative critic of many human habits, beliefs and disciplines. If I am supportive of collective pretenses, then I damn the reader and deny him the chance to reshuffle his programmed conditioning. I believe that my message must be as direct as possible, because my desired audience is one that through intuition will pick up the whole picture more quickly if he or she is not teased into changing direction by volumes of argument as to illogical aspects of democratic logic, or logic by popular acceptance. We have no time to change the world, in order to get the message across to a person of intuition.

INCIDENTS

There is a strange science, as yet not fully begun, that has to do with Between-ness.

We are aware of it instinctively, and instinctively try to verbalize it and find how it works exactly. That is, we look for its laws.

Magic is the attempt to examine and find usable formulations of Between-ness.

Children are more aware of this unutterable phenomenon than are adults. I have watched their games with amazement at their common belief in magic, and in the particular magic of holding the mind between certain pragmatic states which their elders accept and live in—like cement.

The cracks in the pavement disturb most children, and they try to avoid stepping on them, and they invent little rhymes that chant the evils of stepping on cracks. They do not have to study magic to avoid bad luck; they find magical talismans everywhere.

They find invisible playmates—but not everywhere—just in certain corners (if they are confined), or in certain glens or bowers (if they are able to play in the country).

I knew of one boy who could call the earthworms from the ground. I have an article on a boy who could see through the earth and locate oil or water.

I knew another boy—very intimately—who could see approaching death. He did not see the same face that others saw, when he looked at a person. He saw beyond the apparent now (he saw a corpse) and somehow picked facts from between, or from massive amounts of expressions, or else he saw between space and time.*

* Rose is speaking of himself. -Ed.

He did not know how it happened, and he was sometimes, although rarely, wrong. He did not know the laws.

Harry Houdini once stated that he was never sure of the success of a feat until he heard a reassuring voice. If the feats were extremely dangerous, he felt secure when he heard that voice.

ULTIMATE BETWEEN-NESS

Many people have sensed the possible implementation of a mental non-force which I call Between-ness. However most who wrote about it (and those who wrote about it are few and far between), wrote only of the successes with Between-ness as a manipulative agent on the material, or mundane level. In other words, they used it to get something that they wanted.

My first encounter with a writer who showed some insight into Between-ness was in a book by Santanelli. His field was hypnosis. He contended that hypnosis was a state of mind in which the mind was on dead-center. We visualize a wheel, capable of a lot of power, but the rod from the piston is straight out and straight up (or straight down so that there is no weight to the rod's arm). It cannot move either way. It is in a state of immobile awareness.

If it turns to the right, the mind will be awake. If it turns to the left, the mind will be asleep. It is neither, and both.

I think that Santanelli's diagram could have been more linear, except that a line does not symbolize the power of a wheel. The idea can be represented as a point on a line that is equidistant from both ends. The two ends are the essences: sleep, and awareness. One half of the line is sleep, and all shades from deep asleep to half-asleep, and one-fourth asleep, depending upon the nearness to the side which is awareness. Likewise, the half of the line that is awareness may contain all degrees of awareness. However, when both these states reach the point in the middle, there is both sleep and awareness but there is also neither. Everything comes to a stop, neither side will allow the other to live at the mid-point. So both exist in suspension.

Benoit, in his Supreme Doctrine, used a triangle analogy to describe an enlargement on the idea of the opposites in human understanding. He takes the base line which is, at one end joy, and at the other end suffering. Then he creates the triangle with two more sides, and calls the apex, metaphysical distress. This operation is he calls the conciliatory principle.

It seems very logical that we might find a measure of wisdom in many psychological and philosophic fields by using this conciliation-principle. Benoit sees the un-compromisable point in the center, which leads to a dead stop. So he creates the triangle to show the third force that is always created by opposites.

As I said in the Transmission Paper, there is no tension without polarity, and there is no real understanding or wisdom without tension.

The triangle becomes a symbol of power, resulting from the catalytic state of two opposite factors. It is like the galvanic action of two different metals. A vector forms at the exact mid-point.

The triangle becomes a symbol of power, resulting from the catalytic state of two opposite factors. It is like the galvanic action of two different metals. A vector forms at the exact midpoint.

To generate this power we need to insure the midpoint as unvarying. Like the two lovers, never let them touch, and yet allow them to be close enough to insure that both are equally aware of the other.

Thus, this triangle is really the creation of a third vector, by two vectors in static but opposite directions. The apex of the triangle will always be limited to the power of the two opposites. And the power of the opposites means, the importance or anxiety that these directions make in the minds of men.

In transmutation we have the upward evolution of physical energy toward mental power. In Between-ness, we have the utilization of mental concern and mental stress, to propel the mind into a solid, non-relative Reality, if we use opposite factors which deal with our questions on Being.

In other words, if two people wish to manipulate Between-ness for the purpose of sex, their initial propellants are weak. The two factors are sex on one hand, and no sex on the other. If a person is using Between-ness to arrive at sex, then it is impossible for him to consider the opposite (no sex) as being an equal factor. He manages some somatic gains by pretending that he does not wish for sex for a few hours.

To generate anything above the mental capacities, we must remove the ego. This can be interpreted to also mean that we cannot use the factors of Between-ness to validate or increase either of the initial opposites.

So that the consideration of any two opposites creates a third, middle force, which may have nothing in relation to either two. For instance the concentration upon the two opposites of sex and no sex, may result in uncontrollable misery. And the deliberate study of sex by itself may result only in controlled misery (marriage with an attempt at equity and love).

Likewise, the contemplation of life and death, may bring us quite a surprise.

BETWEEN-NESS, THE POWER STAGE

You must have material knowledge before you can deal in mind dimensions.

The autistic child repudiates the material world which repudiates the autistic child.

The search for material knowledge should not be an obsession, or a study that limits itself to the material sciences alone, because such a search will forget all other languages, and then will rationalize away all other avenues of power and many, many factors that should be taken into consideration, but which are not included in material sciences language.

The search for material relevancies should be the aim. We should not get bogged down in tangential or specialized sciences.

We should avoid getting carried away by details, but we should develop an intuition for inconsistencies in these material sciences that claim for infallibility, endless domain and religious rectitude.

We should look for principles and develop hunches from generalities.

Our attitude in this search should be one of open-hearted curiosity, which will be much the same attitude as a human sensing the attitude of a bird, or of a flower. The attitude should be light, and easy. No perspiration or anguished concentration. Deliberate, intense concentration holds the door shut.

However, some deliberate, intense concentration will be necessary to train the beginner's mind for vectoring energy. Deliberate, intense concentration, draws back the catapult in its springs, and does not release. But the problem is branded in the conscious mind, and it will allow in factors of relevancy little by little, and solutions to the problem will come at unpredictable moments.

The mind belabors itself with a problem, such as trying to develop a system for trisecting angles. He may work all day, or all week, playing with a compass, trying to enlarge upon the limited technique and the limited standards of measurement. But he may be rewarded for his effort while he sleeps. He may dream of a new technique. Or he may be walking down the street later, and a crack in the pavement may inspire the answer in him.

And of course, when he discovers the method of trisecting an angle, he will not be one whit wiser.

But he will have accomplishment and mental momentum.

Newton belabored himself with the phenomena of gravity. The problem was not solved in his laboratory, or at his desk, but in a moment of dalliance, while sitting beneath a tree. A falling acorn or apple is supposed to have inspired him to verbalize a law of gravity. His wisdom came from observing an acorn or apple, not debating previous scientific information alone. His wisdom was acorn-wisdom . . . the message was triggered by the acorn (or apple).

People are a greater challenge than the mysteries of material science.

The study of people is necessary. It is the study of ourself.

However, observations in the material world, scientific observations known as laws of science, and even objects like stones or acorns may aid or inspire us toward a better knowledge of the laws that govern people.

In The Albigen Papers, I describe the application of certain laws of physics to the human powers and liabilities. For instance, people, who were wise to the functioning of people long before the Physics-law of Proportional Returns was accepted into our textbooks, taught the law of Karma.

You cannot start to study people until you start to study yourself. To make of other people an objective study, will be to observe that which you project upon them. So you must find some method of seeing for the sake of seeing, not for the sake of wishing, or changing.

When you begin to study yourself, you must begin with the incomplete knowledge of yourself, which also involves the use of established and possibly erroneous definitions of the lower self and its mental qualities. So that while operating along conventional lines and definitions, you must be preparing all the while to slay the dragon of conventionality.

We need the intuition at this point. Things are only seen from an opposite vantage point, and that which pretends to be logical language may best be appraised from an outside observation point—which is intuition. I have written another paper on intuition, so I prefer to refer to it rather than repeat it here. In it there are techniques for developing the intuition.

Logic may lead us to space travel, but the intuition will lead us to inner space, from which all outer space emanates.

We can begin by experimenting with ESP cards to measure our intuition. (If a person is holding cards which we cannot see, and we guess them correctly, our faculty cannot be logically explained.)

After many hours of working with the cards we may build up to fifty-five or sixty percent accuracy. We will find however that results are generally inversely proportional to efforts to strain and produce answers.

In the beginning, the longer a person works with the cards, the more his rate of accuracy drops. The first reaction to this drop in efficiency will often be to discontinue until the operator feels fresh again. This is not always the best reaction.

We have encountered our first Adversary. It is body, or somatic mind resistance. The head starts to play games with us. The answers are being picked up correctly, or at least fifty to sixty percent correctly, but the mind is somehow rebelling at trying to improve the mind to seventy percent accuracy. (When it reaches ninety percent accuracy, you are a mind-reader.)

To build up your first mental muscles, you have to wrestle with this Adversary. As you wrestle, you become stronger, and your psychic ability unfolds. But it must be a type of wrestling that is not brute force alone . . . irritability will be reinforced with a feeling of absurdity, and it is then that we must continue. Each head will react differently from this point, but we must watch for that subliminal, uncertainly seen, factor that once more improves our percentages, even after we are tired.

To give an example, one person may get so fatigued that he will quit trying to read (guess) the cards. He may get diffident or angry and say the first thing that comes to his head, and after a while discover that these careless answers are more correct.

Then another person will have a hunch, but pass it up for a second, stronger second hunch. His monitor will later inform him of enough of his answers to convince him that he should have blurted out the first hunch. When he learns this, he may decide to blurt out his guesses very quickly, and then discover that his second hunches were more accurate. The Adversary is really playing tricks with him now, because the vehicle wants to rest, or think about things more hedonistic or fascinating.

At this time the person must try first one process, and then another to confuse the confusing element in himself. The best way to overcome it, would be to follow a system of immediately announcing the guess, no second-guessing. Second guessing can lead to third and fourth guessing. After some period of time, the mind will realize that no tricks will avail, the practice is going on until perfection is attained. If the student has this type of determination, he will be able to succeed on many more levels of endeavor . . . mental levels, specifically.

Success in card-guessing may depend a lot on the rhythm which the monitor uses in turning his cards. He should always set a definite period of time for guessing, and go on to the next card if the student does not respond. This card passing should be counted as a miss.

As the student gets more adept, the rhythm should increase by very limited degrees, just enough to keep ahead of the student's replies, so that the student will not have time to allow his perceptions to wander.

Reading the backs of cards has one negative effect as does gambling with cards for money. Possibly the worst thing that can befall the new student is to win in the beginning.

It is better that his skill shows an improving increment from a modest start.

Other variations of mental evasiveness will manifest themselves in card-guessing. Some guessers have managed to guess the card behind the one which they are supposed to be guessing. in other words, they guess the next card.

As soon as the monitor (or auditor if you wish to call him that) finds out that the student is guessing out of time, he should refer back to the card that has been passed, and call out "back card now." By repeating this, the student is unlikely to repeat the guess just given, since he knows that it is not the one being called.

Another alternative would be to simply accept the sequence, as being valid, so that the monitor can skip the first card, knowing it will be wrongly guessed, and judge the whole procedure by the percentages of buried or second cards that are accurately given for first cards.

Periodically the percentages will show a serious dip, and when this occurs the monitor may find it advantageous to return the student to an exhausting drill practice to a point of fatigue wherein the student's averages drop to far below mathematical averages in guessing.

*******

Now I have discussed the mechanics of card reading, and the discipline in developing ordinary skills. However, let us get to the point where the art of Between-ness enters the situation.

The whole burden lays upon the student. He must outwit the cards, the monitor and himself. So that if the monitor sees the cards, while showing only the backs to the student, the monitor will generally have a signal to notify that the time is up for the guess. He may only use the word "next." But if he uses only that word, or if he only gestures, a language may develop from his tone of voice or gesturing.

After the student associates a tone of voice with the type of card, or with some combination of reactions by the monitor, his accuracy will increase. Then it will be the job of the monitor to keep changing his tone of voice, or keep his gestures to a minimum.

The best method of developing ESP is to lay the cards face down upon a table. If they are shuffled and dealt without the monitor knowing the faces of the cards. Of course, the manner of presenting the cards should be determined by the aim of the discipline. If a person is interested in reading minds, then it will be better if the monitor sees the cards.

It may be of even more value to learn to "see" the cards, as this will require the exercise of another force besides telepathy. In the system of laying the cards face down, it is good to pass the palms over the card and watch for a feeling of warmth in certain cards.

Let us go back to the discipline for the development of telepathy. We use every aid at hand. We watch the face of the monitor, listen to every tone of voice, and observe every gesture. But we do not catalog, name and identify each of these things. The Between-ness comes in when we watch without watching and listen without listening deliberately. We may increase our accuracy in this manner, and then we are liable to get careless. However, we should never take our attention from his mind. We should not concentrate or strain with apprehension, because we expect that he will deliberately change his tone of voice. We simply know that we will know when he changes his tone of voice. We watch his eyes and instinctively are alerted to the change of tactic, and we intuit the meaning of the variation. Veteran poker players are experts at picking up the attempts by other players to throw them off.

We should never become egotistical. All through all forms of Between-ness, any momentary self-admiration will disrupt the success trend. It is for this reason that no healer wishes to exalt himself during the healing. He may give God credit for the healing, or he may give the system credit for it.

Now of course, we should know why the exertion of the ego, negates the magic of Between-ness. When a person tolerates surges of pride or ego, he is no longer in the "Swing Point," but has named the mechanics of manipulation incorrectly. There can be no definition of source unless that definition remains forever mysterious and unknowable. For once a man proclaims his power, he invites his powerlessness which surely must follow.

So that magic shall always be in the realm of magic.

But man may implement magic, as long as he does not willfully implement magic.

We must know that we can do things, but never get into infinite analyses of our methods of doing. Remember that the paradox exists, and know that it will pop up in front of you along the road of Between-ness, but do not even try to gauge or predict the time where the paradox appears.

We must discipline ourselves to concentrate in order to see without concentration. And as we "see" with extra-sensory ability, or heal with super-medical ability, we must not be trying to do it. We must not be willful. But we must know that it will happen.

*******

Let us go on from cards to other objects. There are many, many ways to do this. Gurdjieff said that his teacher took him and other disciples out into the desert to examine old ghost towns or ruins for the purpose of intuiting the builders of the ruins, and to learn psychometrically as much as possible by viewing and touching the ruins.

A young man came to my house once when the children were little, and stayed for a few days. He asked the children to make a request for a flower of a color of their choice. They asked for a brown flower. He returned in fifteen minutes with a brown flower. Previously, I had never realized that there were brown flowers. I think the blossom belonged to a ginger plant.

The family cat disappeared with its leash attached to its neck. The children were concerned about the safety of the cat, so he volunteered once more to bring the cat back. He returned in a short while with a dead cat. The cat had become tangled and had hanged itself. Now all of this occurred in a dense woodland uninterrupted by roads or dwellings over an area of two hundred acres. Our house sat at the base of this long, uninhabited mountain. Our guest had to go directly to both the flower, and to the cat. He did not have time to block off certain sections of the hill and search methodically.

We find hints of this technique in writings about Zen archery and general applications of Zen thinking to problems. Those who write the literature generally color the stories to reinforce a point, even as I am doing now. Consequently, it is good to know the motive for the story or the motive behind the writer. Some writers quote a Zen saying, "When hoeing corn, I hoe corn." By this is meant that a man forgets his philosophic arguments and hoes his corn with full attention. But this is not so, while being true in one explanation. For when a man really hoes corn with full attention, he is not watching himself hoe corn. And if he wishes to be conscious at all times he will not be hoeing corn, but will be watching himself hoeing corn.

In Zen archery, a man may allow his body to fully identify with the bow and arrow and target, but he will pay no attention to the whole scene. Thus he will be aware of himself and of the scene at the same time. This is true attention.

Getting back to objects, some gamblers find that they can control cards. They rarely tell you how it is done, because all gamblers are superstitious and pretending to be above superstition, or irrationality. Some think that some of them sell their soul to the devil, and it is possible that men will make desperate deals to stop a losing streak. About such devils, I know nothing.

But I have seen men win by holding their heads a certain way. I have done it myself. Gamblers are continuously looking for the magical rubrics. Some like Don Juan, seem to think that there are friendly seats or places to sit. Others think there are hot and cold seats. It may drive them crazy if a cross-eyed man stands behind them while they are betting. Others may find that eating the cards changes their luck.

No one should use Between-ness for gambling. It is too hard to shift from a position of not-caring, to a position of being owned by money. The shift is too traumatic if the winnings are large. A man enters the game as a philosopher and leaves it as a believer in power and manipulation.

Likewise, it is unwise to use Between-ness for amorous ends. Nature plays that role, and we are only amateurs, who will almost certainly come out the loser if we try to match wits with lower nature . . . unless we wish to go all the way.

In The Albigen Papers I spoke of "Milk from Thorns." I only wrote about it briefly because there are many thorns to nature, and many twists to the working for freedom, or just the wiggling for survival. However, "Milk from Thorns" means that we can use that which uses us. The theory of homeopathy is similar to the concept of "Milk from Thorns." Eat that which eats you.

Nature consumes us. There is no escape, everybody is going to die from some sort of natural consumption. This is outlined in the Transmission Paper—this limitless carnage, this endless killing and slow dying, to perpetuate a balanced natural aquarium that seemingly has no meaning. It is hard to submit to events that have no meaning.

If we knew that this ferment of, molecular, ionic, protozoic, and multizoic life led to a smile on some god's face, we might languish into death with some masochistic complacency. If we thought that growth and decay led to a static appreciable position, or if evolution and metamorphosis led to even an unbroken ring of adventures in transmigration, or inner space travels, then we might endure being slain and rendered oblivious.

To get the milk from this thorny situation, we must start to neutralize the factors that prevent us from studying the situation, and then look out for the reverse gears in the machinery which seems to be on a collision or death course.

We start off by noting that which keeps us under the maw of the tiger is our fear to run. The tiger might be God . . . and he might be offended if we attempted evasive action. In fact when we write about the despair of man, we still capitalize His name when speaking of the unknown behind that mock personification.

To get the best out of the implant fear, we should not fear some projected wrathful deity . . . even though quite a few people project that deity. We face our helplessness, and the omnipotence of any God that may have engineered these many forms of robotism. We should not accept every abuse under the name of law, nor should we meekly surrender our chances to retire from the Theater Madhouse long enough and with sufficient, enduring, peace of mind, to find something of the answer.

So we become honest and admit fear . . . even though we are the equivalent of any insect in the huge garden of nature, and even less mighty by more infinite standards. But . . . we turn our fear against death, not by fainting at the thought of it, but by intensifying our faculty for escaping from or surviving death.

We do not take a fool's posture and think that by incessant applications of medical magic and some delaying tactics of Between-ness that we are going to outwit nature and live forever.

That which we do is try to transfer our fear of death, to a fear of not surviving death long enough to have proof or ability of an extended post-mortem consciousness. We work diligently, always allowing our fear to surface, and then to be shunted into the mind as a problem-solving energy. We do this by reminding ourselves that all pleasure is but a pre-death diversion that prevents us from seeing our asinine and conceited indulgence in the bait that dangles before our attention, blocking out our ever-present intuition and conscious knowledge about the sled-ride that we are taking—often hurrying our physical death by the bait-taking.

We learn to fear sleep. We know that sleep is an ever-present reminder that we may be asleep while we think that we are awake. So we become afraid to slip into daydreams, and we become afraid that we will not detect the new forms of bait that nature dangles before our eyes with more and more dazzling splendors.

We fear that we will not detect and thwart the change in states of mind, and we carry on internal meditation and endless monitoring of the mental clockwork to be on the alert for new enslavements that we have not yet dreamed of.

And of course, we start all this off, and temper our initial search with a fear of fear. So that when we are no longer afraid of fear, we will, by that time, have built into our robot-nature the programming to perpetually search for a solution, and to employ the capacity for fear, and fear itself to drive us along the path.

We have to be afraid that we will not get this "automatic pilot" working in time—before death or lethargy, or rationalization sets in. Then once the automatic pilot becomes a guarantee of being a vector for us, we must once more employ Between-ness.

This is a way, in which the head is held with the conviction that it will never wish to stray from dynamic action . . . while at the same time knowing that you are beyond all fear. You know, in other words, that a process has been well established, that is one in which for you there is no wobble. You will be a vector. You will know it, but you will pay no attention to the accomplishment.

With the urgency of this drive by the rat to escape the labyrinth, we must view any idle use of Between-ness for lesser purposes, except for a momentary dalliance to flex mental abilities before proceeding diligently, or between stress-periods where the seemingly lesser purpose is needed to bring about the necessary dual conditions for a more exalted form of Between-ness (for ultimate survival).

And of course, I am referring to the use of Between-ness for the purpose of making money, or for amorous purposes. The law of Between-ness reads that you should undertake to use Between-ness for these ends, only after you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have transcended the trap of money or sex, and that you feel qualified to use that trap to put an end to traps.

In regard to sex, nature uses Between-ness, to confuse the mind so that it will become entrapped. The male is inspired with sadism in order to promote the attack upon the female. However, the male is also inspired with a conviction of his own insignificance which heightens the value of the female. He is torn between a desire to destroy and consume, and a fear to approach the deified object. When contact is made then, the physical organism combines with a state of confusion between the desire to mangle and the desire to worship—and the result is ecstasy.

Of course, the man can develop different reactions, if he finds himself bedded down with a woman of convenience. In this situation, his sadism is not balanced by his worship of the "angel," and during or after the act, he may pummel her a bit. This is her punishment for not being an angel.

The woman likewise projects. A genuine woman worships the male figure with masochistic reverie. However, her reverie is also filled with babies, even though she is not always conscious of it. She may even enjoy being pummeled a bit, if the pummeler is a virile god. But if his virility should wane, she might be capable of a black-widow's reaction.

The aim of nature is reproduction, not love. Love is the projection that nature slyly inserts into our vocabulary, and into our veins, so that people will make binding commitments.

In the pursuit of a mate, many a woman or man consciously or unconsciously resort to Between-ness to lure the mate—never dreaming that they are going to a lot of bother to bind themselves to a sentence of drudgery, if not misery. This cleverness amounts to keeping the mind on something else, while throwing bait to the intended victim.

The clever little girl chatters about poetry, human brotherhood, or love of animals while sitting on a bar stool. She goes to a great length to talk about a poor little rabbit that became caught by a mean old cat, unconscious of the fact that the bunny symbolizes cute little babies, or she is conscious of the source of the idea but pretends even to herself that the only reason that she loves babies is her undying respect for all life. Etcetera.

She knows that the boy who is listening, will project a nice picture of her upon her bundle. He approaches her. She ignores him, so that her heart will not start to pound, nor her irises abruptly change color. She trains herself to concentrate on a self-concocted mantra, or to focus on some spot on the ceiling when he touches her fingertips. And of course, long after he has politely explored all of her limbs, she will still pretend that she knows nothing of his intentions.

Either sexual partner can enslave the other by holding the head in such a self-obliviating state while smiling affably and allowing the other to take more and more desperate steps. Mates also enslave one another by brutal post-coital denunciation. The ironic thing about this operation (enslavement) is that the dominator or dominatress, builds an ego that is self-destructive, while seemingly possessing spineless, and will-less minions. Of what value are they?

It is a terrible price to pay for a punching bag.

SYNCHRONICITY AND BETWEEN-NESS

When occurrences are unpredictable, they are considered to be "happenings according to chance." When things are predictable, they are "causal" and they make for that which we might call a scientific approach to their understanding, or—a world of agreement.

However, when things (events) happen at a rate which shows them to be beyond that which we call chance, and yet still not predictable, then we find a phenomenon called "synchronicity."

I first encountered this word in reading Jung's writing on the same. For instance, Jung refers to the experiments that Rhine made with cards. The experimenter used twenty-five cards. The laws of chance for correct guessing (the cards had only a category of five different marks) was one in five. Yet there was an average of better than that in the guessing. He found the average to be 6.5, correct out of 25.

Occasionally one of his people being tested would guess all twenty-five correctly. He also found that the longer the tests went on, the lower the ESP ability of the tester manifested itself, and the accuracy of the guessing dropped. This latter factor bears some scrutiny, which we will get into later.

Jung goes on to examine astrology. Astrology is avoided by scientists and psychologists like the pox. But he found that the horoscopes of a large sampling of married people showed that they had similar solar and lunar conjunctions. The chance happening of these things are astronomically high. [I.e., low. -Ed.]

I read another man's book whose theme was an attempt to prove that the world was not here by chance, and that man and all organic life was the result of intelligent planning. I forget his name, but the argument is that which counts . . . if it is valid. He pointed out that the tendency of biologists was to follow a theory of evolution that was carried along simply by accidental causes.

To the biologist, in the beginning the earth was simply a solar chunk that flew out in space, and the process of cooling, attracted moisture. The seas developed, and where the sea touched the land certain complex molecules happened to form from the accidental mingling of elements with the water. Out of these soluble salts which were the outcome, and soluble acids and bases, there happened to be an (accidental) ketone enzyme. This was supposed to be the foundation of all organic life.

The author argued with the mathematical odds of such an occurrence, that the accident was impossible unless it had been planned. We also have to ponder the stability of that first ketone enzyme. There would have to be a perpetuating factor involved in that primitive ancestor, a stability of structure to withstand the harsh, lifeless environment of the era, until the necessary years or centuries elapsed when another accidental combination would cause another step of progress in a still primitive form of pre-protoplasmic life.

Science now has learned that protoplasm is very unstable. Life for even the most developed of the species is still subject to daily chance, so much so that the odds for survival for many of the lesser species seems to be miraculous. The cells that constitute our bodies are continually dying, and it is just a matter of time that their death rate exceeds their replacement-rate, and the whole organism dies. Protoplasm is so unstable that the species survives only by reproduction.

The work of J.B. Rhine is priceless, even though mankind knew intuitively for centuries that there was more to life than the chance-factor. This intuitive knowing was expressed in the religion of mankind, and before that in his totemism and collective superstitions.

But J.B. Rhine did something that is always necessary . . . he provided the foundation of acceptability for the majority who are always uncertain until the belief is correctly installed into the agreement-language whose syntax is called science.

The work of J.B. Rhine provides us with a formal discovery, and in science such a discovery is called a law. This law reads that "mind can affect matter." Which is the same thing as saying that intelligence affects chance. If we take a mechanical tumbler and roll dice within it, and mechanically record it the repetition-rate of recurrence will not vary from the one out of six outcome, since there are just six sides to the dice. This becomes a law. And the law reads that after so many hundred throws of the dice the rate for each of the spots to come up is one out of six times, or one hundred of six hundred throws, or one thousand out of six thousand throws for each given number.

When the human factor is added to the throwing of the dice or the guessing of the cards, a change occurs. With the cards, Rhine found the human factor representable in mathematical terms. It was 1.5. (That is, 6.5 guesses right, out of 25 guesses, as opposed to the mechanical odds of 5 out of 25 cards containing only 5 types of spots.)

Rhine's experiments with PK (affecting matter with the mind) showed that the individual mind is capable of producing a planned or defined change in some things. His ESP experiments with the cards showed that the mind has more faculties than psychologists previously cared to admit. It meant that either the mind had a tenuous faculty that reached out from the body and read the concealed card, or that some inner mental faculty was able to do some astounding mathematical computations subconsciously (such as remembering the place of all five cards in a deck while they are being shuffled).

Rhine in his experiments with PK and dice, corroborates the theory of the author (forgotten) who argues for God through the ketone enzyme. If the limited intelligence of man can move objects, then there must have been, in the days that predated all life forms, some intelligence that protected and possibly created, the original delicate enzymes which may have been our ancestors (according to the evolutionists).

Of course, our next question about the ketone enzyme, and its evolution of a million or billion years, is concerned with the length of time that it took for the evolution. As I noted before, even primitive man felt that there was a ponderous intelligence behind the visible creation, and he named it, and described it with superlative adjectives. One of these adjectives is the word, "omnipotent." And we wonder that omnipotence would require a million years—to create a planetary life form.

The answer to that puzzle may lie in our definition or understanding of solar time as opposed to a super-solar time or absolute understanding of things.

BETWEEN-NESS

We could use up many pages, describing the incidents in which the human factor affected or qualified the events that seem to violate scientific percentages of chance. Christ walked upon the water, while his chances of accidentally being able to do so involved figures hardly computable. It was not a singular incident. He advised one of the apostles to come to meet him on the water. Peter was able to walk part of the way upon the water, but he became afraid and began to sink. And Jesus chided him for doubting.

Tecumseh stamped his feet and caused an earthquake. He was also immune to the deadly fire of the American rifles.

We can discount the stories in the Bible, writing them off as mere fiction or illuminated histories. But the accounts come in, in recent eras pf individuals with powers that seemed to defy the laws of usualness or chance, such as are contained within the limits of our collective paradigm. Christ was not the first to point out that our paradigm was incomplete. Tales of magic are found in the Old Testament before anyone knew anything about the requisite for believing in Christ or the scientific negation of believing in Christ.

The tale of the Seaforth Seer (in Conquest of Illusion, by J.J. van der Leeuw) is concerned with a prophecy that covered over a hundred years, and which was later found to be accurately predicted down to details. This was beyond the chance of guessing.

Edgar Cayce predicted cures, and prescribed without any medical background. The chances of him simply staying out of jail were phenomenal, but even greater is the miracle that none of his clients suffered any great harm.

BETWEEN-NESS IN HEALTH

It is common knowledge that people become psychosomatically ill. Concurrent with this age of dissipation is a mad scramble to find quick, magical ways to repair the fun-machine.

That which results is an overbalance in belief in nutritional deficiency. There is no mad scramble to find the cause of the bad health, or nutrient-loss, or protoplasmic shortages, nor is there a return to basic common-sense morality which may bring with it a little better health.

The reason for the bold repudiation of morality lies in the fact that humanity let itself in for some psychosomatic sicknesses or neurotic unhealthiness by going overboard with apprehension about the spiritual results of amoral behavior. In other words, fear and guilt over fractured rubrics, led to neuroses and frustration.

Man does not look for a solution as much as he looks for the opposite to that which is apparently harming him. If the doctor tells him that he is eating too much starch, he may adopt an entirely starchless diet and interfere with the digestion of proteins, and perhaps also upset his general intestinal balance.

If you tell people that it is a sin to eat meat, they may get sick, first at the taste of it, then at the sight of it, and finally, at the thought of it. So man took a collective look at morality and spirituality, and decided that people were making themselves sick in many instances with too much guilt or spiritual apprehension. No thought was given to the possibility that the particular spiritual system or church in question, may have had a lot of good points—perhaps enough good points to outweigh the bad ones.

Mankind collectively attacks all of the traditional religions, led by the newly pontificated vanguard of psychiatry, and sociology.

Between-ness is a manipulative design for mankind. But it takes no magic to see that a predominance of mental problems and their consequent somatic problems result from extremes. The cure is thwarted by the adoption of opposites. The hippie child discards his heterosexual, Christian parent for homosexual gurus, whose humanitarian poses are highly questionable. The man cures himself of smoking by chewing tobacco. He finds that he now is addicted to smoking and chewing. So he cures himself of both smoking and chewing by rubbing snuff. He soon becomes frustrated, and despondent because he cannot control himself, and he finds that he has been smoking the wrong stuff. Now he is liberated. He can chew, smoke, drink beer, smoke hash, sniff heroin or shoot it straight, or drop happy pills. He no longer needs to worry about his sex habits—he has been liberated from all sexuality . . . and if he continues with the heavy drugs, he will find that he is liberated from excretory functions. And when they find his body in some alley, his fellow liberated addicts will remark sweetly that he went out beautifully.

Between-ness says that there is no way to prove that we have a Will, and by the same token there is no way to prove that we do not have one. And life must be conducted with the wisdom of our helplessness, combined with the determination to move through life with the dynamic attitude that we are able to do something about our life.

This brings us to the formula for maintaining our health. Let us take the example of the person who stops eating meat. If he has eaten meat before, he probably liked it or he would not have to psych himself up to stop eating it. The abstinence from meat in itself will hardly make anyone really sick. A person can get his protein and amino acids elsewhere. Or if he is persistent, he may find a method of transubstantiation of foods such as some macrobiotic-faddists claim to have.

To give a note of explanation on transubstantiation, some advocates of the macrobiotic diet maintain that a person can manufacture all the needed body building-needed blocks such as protein, from other foods besides meat, and specifically from rice and macrobiotic grains.

To get the disciple to wean himself from meat, many reasons are given: meat is part of a corpse; meat carries hormones that make for a savage character; killing animals involves karma . . . you may have to transmigrate . . . become food for a carnivore; meat makes your body smell badly, and makes your excretion smell even worse. And so taking these reasons in the above order, we are going to think of a corpse when we eat a steak, and that will make us sick. We fear that the ingestion of hormones will make us into an angry animal, and we get the idea that we will not be loved either by friend or mate. Next, we dread committing a sin that will bind us to centuries of penalty or Karma. And last our narcissism is aroused by the desire to be odorless and free from the need to fumigate our bed and bathroom.

The student or disciple soon finds that when he eats meat (knowingly) he finds a bad taste in his mouth. If he has a healthy bowel movement, he will immediately get remorse. Soon he finds that he cannot stand to taste meat at all (knowingly).

Nothing too bad has happened to the disciple yet. If he frees himself of the habit, and then admits to himself that he allowed himself to be aided by certain ideas, religious concepts, and narcissistic appeals, in order to bring his mind into control over the habit—he will not suffer to many after-effects to the suggestive therapy or conditioning. But very few are ever smart enough to immediately flip back into sensibility, and smile to themselves at the method of putting the head to work to impose upon the body that which the head mandates for the organism as a whole.

These very few examples that I just spoke of, successfully pulled off, a primitive form of "Between-ness" to reach a point of Will or health.

We go back to those who did not watch themselves implementing their freedom, and who consequently fell into a mental belief in sickness through meat. They may be totally free from eating meat, but now they are neurotic. We must in the case of all forms of sickness or disease (or habit) weigh the value of the cure against its cost. And then we must find a way to do the cure without the cost.

The thought becomes the disease, and it moves out in all directions to make the person create evil or disease from anything that tastes good. The person who gave up meat because of Karmic scruples, now cannot stand the sight of eggs, or fish. Soon he cannot eat honey or milk, because bees may be deprived, or young dairy-calves may be slaughtered to make more milk available. Next, he has to quit eating plants, because he may read that Kirlian observations seem to posit life for all plants. When the disciple gets down to eating no forms of life, he will be starving on sterile sand patties.

At this point there is only one cure for him. He has to go out and eat meat. If it makes him sick physically, he must become superior to the situation, and eat it until he survives the idea that it is going to kill him. Then after he gets so that meat does not bother him one way or the other . . . he can give it up. But by that time Between-ness will have brought wisdom, and he will not have any reason for eating meat or for not eating meat.

He has now reached the Swing Point. As far as diet is concerned. He will truly know that it does not matter if a man eats one thing or another . . . that which matters is that he should never worry about it. He is no longer torn by polarity. He is not addicted, nor is he placed in the role of creating evil and disease. He swings idly and alertly between the polar points of willfulness and will-lessness.

This is psychological or mental Between-ness. It is a form of navigation in the slipstreams of the mind between the gravitational fields of massive gestalts. The massive gestalts or states of mind must be transcended or bypassed if we are to be free. And to circumvent these gravitational centers or states of mind, we have to employ an anti-gravitational mirror. When the mirror is held up to the Adversity, it is seen for what it is, and it loses its power. I use the mirror-analogy here in the sense that a mirror reflects rays of color by employing the opposite—a backdrop or surface covered with a paint that has no color. Black reflects white. Anything is reflected and defined best by its opposite.

Mental Between-ness is limited to dimensions of the mind. Since we have an individual mind, and there exists a universal mind, or an Unmanifested Mind-Dimension, there is a lot to explore here. And there is at this point only the hint that this technique of Between-ness can thrust us out beyond all relative experience.

We now enter into the somewhat more complicated field of Magical-Between-ness. In this area, we find that all that is visible can be made invisible. The invisible can be made visible. That which is great shall be small, and that which is a valley may become a mountain. If we are adept at mental gymnastics.

With each exercise of Between-ness, we feel the power within us grow, and yet we wield that power on a thin razor's edge, teetering with fear that the next venture will lose all for us, and goaded on by the magical magnetism, and by the certainty that All is for man to know.

How do we do it? We do it by carrying water on both shoulders, but by not allowing it to touch either shoulder. We stagger soberly between the blades of the gauntlet with recklessness and conviction, but we pick our way through the tulips with fear and trepidation because the trap of the latter is sweet. We charge the gates of heaven by urinating our way through hell, all the while sitting for forty years on the banks of the Ganges, doing nothing. We sit on the banks of the Ganges, not from laziness, but from an anger at angriness, a fury against our inner fury for wasted activity . . . and we pull back a terrible arrow . . . but never let it go. And by so holding, with the universe as our target, the universe is filled with terror at our threat. It moves to the right, trying to evade our aim when we think to the left. So we think from our "Swing-Point" projecting a thought of left in order to make it swing to the right. And once it starts swinging, we keep it going, by thinking in the following manner: Left is Right and Right is Left. And Left is Left when Right is Wrong, and Right is Right when Left is Wrong. And only I know when I mean that Left is Right and when Left is really Left. And I have taken these facts into my head and forgotten them.

Now that nature cannot read my mind, the Universal nature is one with our motion, and things happen according to our will, which is just a whim caring little for fruition, which is just an idle thought, which we no longer own because it has happened and will happen. It is born between the thighs of dynamic mobility and inertia.

Life began at the edge of the sea. Soft waters making soil from granite shores. The mind is the edge of the body, the umbilical cord. If you wish to know your source, retraverse that umbilical cord.

But let us get back to Magic. Many of our magicians practiced Between-ness. Between-ness is the catalytic method that turned water into wine and raised the dead. It is coded in Thaumaturgy, but those are codes that are written positively, and positive codes are immediately limited. in other words, we find Thaumaturgical rites, that require animal parts, a candle, incense and a pentagram. (Various rites involve hundreds of different objects.) However, we can do the trick with nuts and bolts, a kerosene lamp, a burning inner-tube, and a square or circle drawn on the ceiling . . . or on the wall.

The head of the magus turns away or draws the entities, not the pentagram. And it is foolish to presume that the entities never get wise to a pentagram, or might refuse to get curious over the smell of burning rubber.

The mantras of children playing hopscotch are as effective as the invocations of a shaman. The child is unskilled, and his superiors will not allow him to develop his skill.

Magic is the involvement of the Mental Between-ness with the physical dimension. The amateur sorcerer calls upon heaven and hell to perform his magic, but nothing happens because he fears both and believes in neither.

The successful magician must have done enough research until he knows, as well as he knows his nose, that other dimensions exist, and that there are, in those dimensions, entities perhaps as important as the flora and fauna of this dimension. Next, he must learn how to act.

If you are confronted by an angry Tiger, and believe that you are going to be eaten, then you will be eaten. You give credence to the substance that appears to be a Tiger. If you know that the Tiger is there and try to imagine that he is not there, he will eat you. If you are a feeble-minded person who does not know that the Tiger is dangerous, he will still eat you. But if you know that the Tiger is both here and not here, and can convey the mind-state to the Tiger, that neither of you are here, but that both of you are here . . . he may be confused long enough to allow Nobody to walk away.

*******

Our first excursion into Magic should be preceded by an apprenticeship in self-control. We approach the business of a sexual habit pretty much the same as we circumvented meat-eating. You are now preparing to match wits with a Tiger that cannot be seen. This Tiger can only be recognized by the teeth marks he leaves on corpses, and by the trail of blood and sorrow that he leaves. Desire is the root of all suffering, say the Indian philosophers. You will not know that the Tiger is there until he has taken a piece out of you. He does not growl and snarl. He plays violin-music with a beautiful, dream backdrop. You will be lucky if he does not bite you until you are old, tough and wily—at such a time when the bite will not take out a vital life-center.

We have done some spiritual exercises. One of them is vegetarianism. We may have done the meatless ritual, as a ritual that appealed to our intuition only. If so that is good. But we will soon learn the entity-tiger will not attack a vegetarian as quickly as he will a stinking meat-eater. Things will now make more sense when we hear of seemingly meaningless ascetic practices. We have risen to the point where we are truly free of eating meat. We can eat it or leave it alone. So we leave it alone for a while to see if it brings us any peace of mind.

And when it brings us peace of mind, we must go out and find something that will stir up our thinking without shorting out our energy dynamo.

If you are afraid of high places, climb to some high place, but do not make a habit of it. For a while you will by immune to danger, but after a while you will forget that you are on the Swing-Point, and you will have an accident while gearing your Between-ness to goals more important than overcoming fear.

Once you have found peace of mind, and have found that you can synthetically upset or destroy your peace of mind, you will have reached a point where neither peace of mind, nor the catalytic upsetting of that state are necessary. At that time you will be beyond states of mind . . . both the most pleasant and the most objectionable ones. And at these moments you will have power.

MOVING A POWER VECTOR

To exercise power, we must use Between-ness. An executive of a giant corporation succeeds, when he has risen above the desire for success and the fear of failure. He cannot make up his mind to rise above desire and fear . . . he has to actually be free at all times, in all ways, from fear and desire. He does not make himself do these things. He grows into a creature that can move without desire and make decisions without fear . . . while caring little about the whole operation. And while caring little he continues his task, knowing that everything will go the right way.

As the business of the corporation progresses, he will encounter reverses that would send a lesser man to suicide. However, he knows that these reverses are only minor reverses that will purge the way to greater advantages, and he relaxes and watches, as the forces of nature and the forces behind nature, diligently solve the problem, by combinations of otherwise unpredictable factors.

To build our power we should start with elementary exercises. No time should be wasted. Our childhood should be spent in mastering languages and science, and any skills that are available. Do not reach for Excalibur until you have done some training with the hammer and hoe.

Gurdjieff made the remark that every man should be a householder. He should be able to build and maintain a house-structure. He should be also the master of the domestic atmosphere in the family, or household.

There is a very important reason for growing these physical, emotional and mental muscles before embarking upon outer-space travel. We need only witness the sorry predicaments of thousands of "free souls" who trusted their psychic environment while experimenting with drugs and sex, to realize that their mistake was the Ostrich-syndrome. Pretending that there is nothing here but benevolent humans does not guarantee immunity from destruction.

So, the thing to do is to prove yourself, slowly and deliberately, accepting the simple physical challenges that come to you. Learn to control your energy. Do not waste time nor money. Make every hour count, if you can. Make every dollar be a true representation of an investment of past energy in a future acceleration of direction on all levels, meaning the physical, mental and spiritual.

If you have the time to do it, fix your own car when it breaks down. Learn to build and repair your own house. These are exercises in success. Success breeds success. But success in each level only comes after you become determined sufficiently so that your state of disbelief, or inadequacy is overcome.

When you have learned to fix a vehicle, do not get fascinated with the ego of achievement. Aim for higher mental forms of accomplishment while working, if need be, at any occupation. Calculus may be a good mental discipline, but it is an ego trip along side of learning to control the physical body with the mind. And when you embark upon the business of locating yourself in your head instead of your gonads, do not let anything stand in the way of learning all of the idiosyncrasies of that ambition.

When you have cured yourself of drinking, take one more drink so that you will know that you are not only free from alcohol but also from the fear of it. But make certain that you know you are cured before you take that extra drink.

Mental exercises are the exercise of mental quantum energy. As with other disciplines of the body, you should begin with minor aims, and build solidly on mental achievements.

To produce a phenomenon or a miracle, you have to have your head in a certain position of "hold." If you would like to learn hypnosis, you should do some work as a salesman. (Gurdjieff used to sell rugs to people who did not need rugs, in order to intensify his expertise.) You need not, and should not, sell anything that is not a fair exchange for the money received by you, or your company. To sell worthless articles, will make of you a person who has a high regard for trickery or untruthfulness, and any belief in untruthfulness will lead to an outwitting of the self and a ceiling to any mental development. But nevertheless, you should become familiar with the human mind, and its weaknesses.

After selling for a while, you will notice that certain mental attitudes which you allow, will be conducive to closing the sale. At first it will surprise you, that you have found it. It cannot be studied in a scientific manner. It can be expedited if you allow yourself to find rapport with the customer while controlling the rapport.

There are a thousand doors to initiate this rapport. If the customer is healthy and husky, he may have gone in for sports while in school. You may try talking about "who's on first base?" If you are talking to a person of retirement age, they may respond to nostalgic home-scenes.

Now all of this will be just clumsy conversation, unless you are able to make full rapport. When this occurs, you will have no trouble finding words or stories to keep the rapport even and unbroken. You will discover that you seem to get all the material from their heads. However, the energy of both salesman and customer will run down after a while, and another art is sensing and being able to act upon the exact moment for closing the deal, and binding the contract, with a signature.

If you wish to move on to hypnosis, there are levers (which I will outline in another paper) that will guarantee success on a modest scale immediately. And once again, rapport will increase with confidence, and the numbers of people who become hypnotizable will increase.

All the while that you are gaining power and success in the hypnosis-field, you will notice that you are developing an extrusive force. Some part of your mind becomes tenuous. Occasionally at first, and then with increasing frequency and improving dexterity, you will be able to touch and feel the mind of the person in front of you . . . and sometimes behind you.

Never at any time should you hypnotize anyone willfully. By this I mean that you should develop still another art. It is the art of knowing that you are not doing something to satisfy an exhibitionistic ego, or to develop power for yourself alone.

If you have reached the point where you can touch, enter, control, read and telepathically convey things to the mind of another, you should be simultaneously planning to teach others to learn the same type of self-control so that you can unite with others in demonstrating to mankind that there is hope, and a promise of individuality, that forever remains subject to the code of friendship and compassion.

With the energy of youth, and determination you can learn to heal in the same manner. Of course, you will discover that you are able to allow healing to happen, rather than exert levers, after a while. At first you will be able to heal people by projecting your energy toward the person. If this proves fatiguing, energy can be drawn from an assembly of people who may come as spectators. But this is the employment of mental quantum energy, downgraded to a somatic point of decay or insufficiency. It is pardonable to exercise this power a few times to encourage others to spiritual action, but it should not be encouraged, because of the use of mental energy for poor physical causes.

This brings us to another type of magic, and another graduation point in the scale of mastering Between-ness. It is the Direct-Mind System.

FAITH HEALING

The Faith-healing formula may be better understood in the light of Between-ness. Its form is triangular. We have on the base-line first, the old paradigm which is modern medicine which is ultimately a harbinger of death. Second at the far end of the base-line we have the alternate paradigm of hope which is the religion that inspired the faith.

The first is hopelessness, the second or opposite is faith.

The first base also holds the egotistic urge to heal, while the second holds the selfless will to surrender to That-which-has-to-be. Or to God. In this manner the ego is removed.

Thirdly, after an intense period of wishing for the person's healing, and praying if necessary, we take the opposite stance and put the whole thing out of our mind.

FIGURE 5. HEALING TRIANGLE

Left side:

1. Contemporary Medicine

2. Logic

3. The Urge to Heal

4. Intense Prayer or Spiritual Exercise

Right side:

1. Religious Attitude

2. Intuition

3. The Surrender to Higher Authority

4. Forgetting with Total Trust That the Right Thing Will Happen

Celibacy involves a particular art of Between-ness. It is not both-ness, or neither-ness, but the point of being a man while still conserving your energy.

The Vector is a course which does not advance upon a goal, nor does it retreat into degeneration. It is a retreat from error.

Exaltation is a condition of Between-ness.

Satori is the Between-ness that results from the intense contemplation of sense as being nonsense and nonsense as being equal to sense.

The birth of real meaning is the death of belief in definitions that are relatively described.

BETWEEN-NESS FACTORS

1. Work with one or more persons. It works better than doing it alone.

2. Plan with a light, indifferent heart. Entertain no desperate or frenetic moods while thinking out your aim.

3. After conceiving the idea and the aim, walk away from it mentally. Forget it. If it is accidentally remembered, learn to turn the inner head away.

END

POINTS OF REFERENCE

TAT Meeting at the Farm, Nov. 1982

It has occurred to me that people write books and create all sorts of philosophies and mental sciences, like psychology, and never bother to go back to a basic point of reference. And the solitary seeker who is interested in following some meditational process, is advised to "go within." But you see, those words are not sufficient. How do you go within if you do not know where "within" is? How do you go within if you do not know who is going "within?" Which train are you going to catch? Which procedure are you going to use?

We plow into many disciplines blindly. We get into books without bothering to decide beforehand our point of reference for sanity—our point of reference for meaning.

We do not all have the same point of reference, and I think that this unexpected difference is depicted in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. People lost their ability to communicate when they lost a common point of reference. And this is the reason for the lack of harmony among philosophers and among different sects or schools of metaphysical endeavor.

They cannot get together because they do not have a common point of reference, they don't even have a point of reference for their private use. An instance to better understand this is the occurrence of a nightmare. This nightmare is so damned real you are hoping that it is a nightmare, in other words you realize that you are in a nightmare and you are stuck there and you may say "I hope that I am dreaming." Why? . . . because your whole point of reference has shifted and you are in another world, you are in another paradigm, and the definitions that you had before, the morals and mores—friendships . . . and everything else, do not apply now. They are not there, they are impossible to attain, they are impossible to relate to.

Then you say "Oh in a while, I'll wake up and that will be my point of reference—being awake." No, you can lose your point of reference while awake. If they are marching you down the aisle to the gas chamber you are going to have a daylight nightmare and you will have confusion because of the simple fact that you do not have a point of reference, that you will not have a true value of consciousness, life or death—which we procrastinated defining all through our life. I think I should have brought this up years ago, that unless you have some point from which you build your entire system of thinking—then you accept a system of thinking. (I don't think we build one as much as we accept one.) You accept and then you have to correct, and correct and correct.

At a recent meeting we popped the question and went around the room and asked, "What do you think the point of reference is?" And of course, the final answer was the self, the self was the point of reference, and then you have to go back to the self and then define what you think the self is. But you can't take—as a fundamentalist—take the Bible and make it the point of reference. You can't take anything that I have written and make it a point of reference. You can't even take what mother tells you. When I found out that my mother had lied to me about Santa Claus, I doubted her advice on theology. It was a healthy system of doubting, that I got into because previously I was basing my point of reference for absolute truth upon emotions. Because my mother had breasts, and fed me off those breasts, she could do no wrong. Children are inclined to accept everything that she says, and they carry that over sometimes into adulthood.

*******

We have the chart on the evolution of energy. It started off as showing food as a source of energy, and then the body transmuted the food. This was a chain of function. This was the concept of transmutation: the body transmuted it into the flesh—the fat, muscle, bone, and glands. But then we had some of the transmutation of this energy going into a neural system, as through education. By inhibiting the activity of the body, by forcing it to sit in a classroom—it has to think of something and eventually it will think of what is on the blackboard. So the person becomes educated, he transmutes energy into another form of power.

Well, when I first realized what was happening I had no knowledge of body-chemistry, but recently they have come up with the chemistry that does occur there, and what happens is—the body produces the substances serotonin, prostaglandins, and other neurotransmitters. I noticed that people who were able to achieve a lot were people that were able to inhibit their sexual activity, while they were studying. And also some athletes did this—inhibited their sexual activity for the purpose of strength. And I came to the conclusion that the Kundalini of the oriental was the equivalent of the transmutation of energy into neural energy. It does not come from the muscles, it doesn't come from food in the bloodstream, it comes from the re-channeling of glandular energy. So that we presume that if a person was a eunuch, he wouldn't be too contemplative or dynamic. I presume that he would be like a steer. A steer is a very placid creature—it doesn't worry too much about anything.

I recently ran into this information that prostaglandins are produced in the seminal vesicles which produce 400 times more than any other part of the body.

Which corroborates my idea in that if you use your testicles too intensely in practice or procreation, you are not going to produce as much capacity for thinking, and your education comes to an end about the time that you get married. You will not have any great inspirational developments in your thinking processes, and also I believe that these events trigger what I call the death gene. I think that the death gene is activated simultaneously with some sexual operation, it might not just be sex, it may be pregnancy, or the causing of pregnancy.

But I believe that the human being is programmed to age. We age according to schedule, and the cornstalk begins to die as soon as the grain is fertilized. The pollen fertilizes the grain and immediately the stalk begins to dry up. I believe that consequently, if we know this—if we realized that there are two directions that people can take . . . one is taken from the psychological school that decrees that we are nothing but a body, and decrees that by biochemistry we are going to discover this fact—that we are just a reacting robot. The other concept or extreme attitude is that we are operating strictly according to the laws of God, or some divine creature and if He does not like what is going on he will change it. So we have to take God's behavior into our behavior-planning.

So we get into infinite religions and books on guessing, guessing on what might be . . . tuning the intuition in on something that might be mysterious, instead of going according to facts. But I think that there could be a marriage of the two—both facts and intuition. But I think that when you get to the point of reference, the point of reference implies something . . . in other words, instead of proceeding with too many purposeful edicts for humanity, it is better to first find out the point of reference—go for the point of reference.

Of course, at the same moment that you find a point of reference you find the solution. Because it goes back to the self. If you want immortality you have to say who or what is going to be immortal. I quoted something last night that if a man forgets his infancy before his manhood is upon him, what shall we remember hence. So what am I going to remember afterwards if I am going to base it upon the physical memory? If you don't find yourself you are going to have a mistaken memory, and we will all have a different phony picture of ourselves. The idea behind that lecture (“Psychology of Miracles”, above) was that you start with your self, you start with your physical self. But as soon as you start examining that which causes your thinking, then you immediately get into a tremendously abstract or subjective self. For instance, let us examine the realm of neural quantum energy. (I keep using the word quantum energy, mental quantum energy, with which you can master a book or move salt and pepper shakers. You can twist the spoon, etc.)

The mental quantum energy is capable of projecting back into the physical dimension and causing effects in the physical. This explains some incidents of healing. You can take this higher energy and project it back and rebuild the physical body of another person, and sometimes your own. But this becomes a downward vector, it becomes a downward spending of the energy. It is advisable to keep the old carcass going as long as possible, but the main thing is to find the self, to find out who is surviving, if there is a surviving. So you develop what I call a neural quantum, a person with this neural quantum energy has the ability to find wisdom as well as health.

Up until now I have tried to limit my talking to facts . . . possibly attempting to illustrate from a point of reasoning. But we now approach the faculty of Between-ness. Between-ness is difficult to define and the mechanics of the miracles that result from the exercise of the faculty are even harder to explain.

People who read ESP cards and come up with a score over fifty are establishing a fact about their ability to predict, and doing it in a scientific manner. If a person can predict something, scoring over fifty percent, the feat is no longer an accident or a coincidence.

However, the mechanics of the feat are hard to explain—even for the operator. So that is like saying that we have found a Law, and the Law tells us that such operators can perceive things beyond the range of his vision, or that they can cause things to happen. The latter ability would imply that they might be creating the card's appearance rather than reading it.

If this sounds absurd, then let us note the story of Jesus and the blind man (John, Ch. 9). Jesus claimed that the man had been made blind by God, so that Jesus could heal him. This explanation put Christ in the role of a fatalist or believer in a predestined event, in which Christ was a seer or prophet, but not a healer. God did the changing—not Christ. Yet when He was slow in providing the wine for the bridal party (in response to a request from his mother), He noted that there was a more propitious time coming up later. This would imply that He possessed a degree of expertise in Between-ness.

Joseph Sadony of Michigan was able to produce lightning. Part of his preparation involved waiting, being attentive to some inner voice, and then counting to three. This is Between-ness at its best. Counting to three is not the formula, incidentally. That was Sadony's timing himself to the coming event. That little rubric in itself was a magical gesture of Between-ness to aid the mammoth display of Between-ness, or appearance of lightning.

Incidentally, most of Christ's miracles do not come under the category of Between-ness. Most bore signs of being actually an energy transfer. For instance, in the case of the woman who was healed by touching His garment . . . Christ knew that He had healed someone although He did not see who touched His garment. He felt the "virtue" leave Him. Today this manner of healing would be called zapping. A definite quantum is lost. Norbu Chen admits that his healings are done the same way, and that they are (or were) so depleting that he expected to be burned out in a few years. I have heard the comment that Jesus would have been prematurely aged, had He not been killed when He was, and this due to His energy-loss from healings.

Zapping is an expensive method for the operator. The art of prediction, and that of Between-ness do not deplete the operator. Getting back to discussion of the validity of miracles such as prophesy or Between-ness there is in both a scientific basis for their right to be defined as existing, or real. Science is basically, prediction and proof. At least those are the factors which distinguish guessing or opinion from valid relative knowledge. The same factors can decide whether subjective sciences, sociological sciences, and theology can or should be considered Real, or non-dogmatic and worthy of any authoritative role in society.

When Sadony predicted that he could cause it to lightning, or could predict within the third count that lightning would strike, and demonstrated his causing or synchronization with the event, then the two scientific factors had been supplied.

On the other hand, when Thomas Aquinas attempted to prove the existence of God he did not prove it scientifically despite his use of an irregular syllogism. The syllogism was: 1) There is motion in the Universe. 2) All motion requires a mover. 3) Ergo, only God could move the Universe.

Ergos prove nothing here. Syllogisms of this sort are only suggestions. We could split a few hairs here and note: 1) That motion does not require an intelligent mover in every instance. Things are moved by the wind, by avalanches and floods. 2) If there is an acknowledged need for intellectual planning, creating and supervision in maintenance, then it could well be a large number of intelligences, not a single one. 3) The whole appearance of motion may be an illusion in space-time.

We come once more to a very important means of deciding the definition of things, and the explanation of causes for phenomena. That is a proper point of reference.

What evaluates the motion of the universe, or gives us the most scientific explanation of the Indian Rope Trick? In both cases the point of reference is Reality as validated by the senses. We make a possible error in always believing that which our senses bring to us.

It is not so good that we use public acceptance of explanations for phenomena as a point of reference. It is not good to use belief as a point of reference. At other times I have pointed out the unreliability of the senses, but I think I failed to point out that the awareness of the true nature of a hologram, mirage, and optical inadequacies presents us with the possibility that everything that we see, or think that we see, must be qualified. We must take another look. And to take another look we have to find another sense.

This other sense cannot be a physical (sensory) rendition of the physical environment. It has to be either a perfected intuition, a divine revelation or some other means of interpreting the paradigm which manifestly envelops us.

And we cannot avoid studying the mental processes, if we really wish to approach Reality. It is not enough to just take note of the apparent unreliability of the sense-organs.

I explained in the Psychology of the Observer that the mind has six types of vision. Each sensory percept inspires a vision, preceded by a projection-type of reaction. The rays that actually carry our chief contact with the universe, do not register accurately that which is out there. The retinal rods can only carry incoming colors according to the limited code of those rods.

I mentioned six types of mental visions. We do not see things. The mind sees visions which it has to perpetually purify with internal scrutiny, because we now know that we are subject to hallucinations, and psychedelic influences that accompany some perceptions. It seems that the original designer of protoplasmic consciousness instilled in it a capacity for a cursed susceptibility to emotional projections or qualifications of simple sense-impingements. Lush, green grass fills the mouth of the cow with saliva. Green is uplifting. Brown will not be so inspiring. The weak face of the female has a psychedelic effect upon the male, whose strong features have a psychedelic effect upon the female. Each sees that which his projected vision displays. Of course, there is more to this self-delusion than faces.

I listed the last four types of visions as being Mental Visions, meaning visions that are not the direct result of a sensory percept, such as dreams, hallucinations, intuitional contemplation, reverie, visualized but accurate prophesies, and deliberate mental projections—that can be seen by others (tulpas).

THE MOVING POINT OF REFERENCE

Things which are not absolutely defined, must have a moving (movable) point of reference, which is originally a tentative point of reference, not absolutely defined itself, but which is acceptable as a point of beginning for a study.

When we say an atom is a point of reference for chemistry, we are not by any means indicating it to be an absolutely defined basis for chemistry. Future studies of the force field theory may give unexpected qualifications to electrons and neutrons. The present knowledge of the atom has for its point of reference—the human senses with which we view all calibrations.

In the domain of matter—physics and chemistry—the atom becomes a very good point of reference. However, when we begin to recognize more subjective phenomena such as force-fields, photons or celestial origins, we may have to find a laboratory procedure that transcends both the atom, and the sensory point of reference behind the atom-world.

And the crucial task immediately surfaces. We must search for a better point of reference for our Self first and for all material phenomena second, which point of reference shall explain both the Self and the nature of matter.

It is not good enough to simply say that the Self is divine and that the nature of matter is that of illusion. These are oversimplifications. The Self can be better understood by the mind, and matter cannot be denied even if a lot of evidence points in the direction of a possible alternate paradigm. If matter is an illusion, it is still a very orderly phantom, and a very powerful one capable of threatening the existence or perpetuation of what is presently considered to be the Self.

Finding a proper point of reference for subjective matters such as philosophy and the social sciences may be more important than furthering the physical sciences which at present, are little more than infinite systems of cataloging.

The study of life after death is a subjective science, and its scope may be infinite, or infinitely simple. As I wrote in one of the books—perhaps this hopeless finite mind will someday develop a faculty for comprehension of infinite or absolutely real and true conditions. And if such would happen, that faculty would bear with it, a new and nearly absolute point of reference.

When such a faculty would appear, the possessor of such a faculty would have difficulty finding a language conveying his discoveries to those without the faculty. In psychic or mystical states such as samadhi, only the person in that state knows with any conviction that which was discovered. Even though a half dozen people capable of reaching samadhi knew that which the first man experienced, they could not individually or collectively produce a language which would convey to the rest of humanity that which might well be the truest definition of Reality of Self, Time and the Cosmos (and their relationship to each other).

And once again, I think we have to point in the direction of Intuition, as a faculty which has to be developed to get beyond the vanity of syllogisms, and the fanatic embracing of dogma for the sake of comfort.

Intuition is a magical faculty, but it is not immediately infallible. The human eye is a magical faculty also, but sometimes we have to wear glasses, or train it to recognize hallucinations as being such.

To recapitulate. In the beginning Matter was the point of reference. Matter as viewed by the senses and viewed by the mind as being Reality. We now know that the senses may not see into the final components of matter, and Reality must be defined anew. A rock is no longer a hard inanimate thing . . . it is a ceaseless heap and flurry of billions of racing electrons. It could be that the electron is in turn composed of microcosmic centers of encapsulated will.

Nevertheless, Chemistry and Physics operate very comfortably with the atom as a point of reference. And now they operate simultaneously with other points of reference, such as rays.

The human must take the Self as the point of reference, even above benefits and advantages of Chemistry and Physics. All of the physical sciences are unfinished as long as life is undefined. Science tries to prolong life, but not to define it. The definition might put a new light on the importance of any need for avoiding death. Or it might be the threshold for the perpetuation of indefinite terrestrial, individual existence.

This brings us to the Self which we have to locate before we can use it as a point of reference—that is, a well-defined point of reference. The mind has improved in the ability to focus, to work with symbols, and to formulate new animate vehicles from the primitive earth and its deposits. It has used a methodical and orderly discipline.

But Intuition tells us that there is something missing. We seem to know more and more about the show, but less about the Real viewer. And the Sciences occasionally produce a vehicle like the hologram that reinforces the Intuition's indications.

Intuition itself has no science to validate that which comes mostly as feelings. To prevent the would-be intuitive man from slipping away into hallucination and superstition, it has to try to test itself perpetually in an orderly (scientific?) manner.

The exercise of the mind in this qualified state of Intuition, produces the magical state of Between-ness. Between-ness is an accidental discovery of a method to bring out a computation from the mind for which the mind had no symbols in the memory bank. Not only does it produce a new wisdom, but it produces phenomena, which in another time were called miracles.

This I am certain of, having seen the operation.

To go into details about the function of Between-ness: first I think that the operator must be prepared for years of intense research, if he or she is interested in finding answers that approach an Absolute nature. in other words, it takes years to attune the mind to samadhi, or enlightenment.

However, you can tempt yourself or amuse yourself with the identical formula—in causing lesser, mundane things to happen. You can win at cards, or cause favorable events to occur. This I have described before.

A step higher in worth, is the performance of miracles of a sort. You can heal without a loss of energy, and you can see into the minds of others. You can control the minds of others. But all of this is a waste of time.

You will be merely grabbing at the bait that will prevent you from cracking the cosmic egg—from transcending relative thinking.

To achieve this greatest reward, which is the finding of the Self, and simultaneously finding the expansiveness of that Self—and finding the Reality of the Self in relation to Time and Cosmos—you have to hitch up your harness for a long pull.

It will only take you as long as it takes to master Between-ness—Between-ness according to this formula.

You must will to find the Truth. Now that term is so general that the mind is apt to reject the quest as being without direction. But where would I tell you to look for the Truth? We do not begin with just reconstructing lies told to parents, neighbors and mates. Although these self-delusions will be remembered when you expect them the least. You begin by reading and studying everything that you can find on the subject of psychology and philosophy. Then give an equal period of time to the study of esoteric phenomena and claims to such, and to the compilation of phenomena not explainable by science. And then spend another period of time in thinking of nothing, or in an attempt to purge the mind from all thinking.

Set your mind against dogmatic, or political trends in mental and spiritual organizations. Set your mind against an obsession with money, pleasure or power. Because these things exist they are not evil (except in a relative sense) but they will reduce your ability to reach your objective if you adopt them. Set your will to find the Truth or die trying, and become so much of a vector that you will actually choose death to a life style that would damn the Search.

Then when your will is set in the matter, forget about the Will and allow anything to happen that does not jeopardize your Search. And you thus become a Will-less Will-ful vector. In making decisions you must use discrimination only in extreme cases where the vector itself is threatened. In which case you defend your principles which are part of your formula.

Practice introspection. You are looking for your Self. You must begin with studying the body, even though you may suspect that the body is only a temporary shell. You cannot allow yourself to simply suspect this—you must prove the real relation of the body to the Self. You cannot pretend that it is an impediment to Truth. While on this planet, it is the only point of reference for your awareness until you are able to leave that body and return.

If you choose to despise the body you are making a mistake. Asceticism is less reasonable than suicide. By asceticism I mean any discipline that punishes the body. You do not need to beat the brute—just guide it. However, on the other hand, we must not let the body interfere with the research that we have planned.

The body must be encouraged to remain still while the mind watches both the body and the mind. When the body becomes so still that it becomes lost in sleep, then we must become a peripatetic—for a while.

We must take all things into account. We live among millions of people. We must not expect to find ourselves more meaningful than them. We should not despise them, but we should never worship their bodies. Nor any body.

But carry a high respect for friendship. Without friendship there is no brotherhood—there is no safe retreat—no communion with guides or colleagues, and ultimately no philosophic language of any value.

*******

In the Search we cannot really pursue a "Spiritual" direction because we would first have to find a definition for

"Spiritual" and some sort of corroboration that there is a Spirit to define. It is the same with the term "search for God." If we consider God to be "out there," then the places which we would have to search would be more numerous than the stars. Nor can we look for God inside us. We must look inside of ourselves to see that which is there, not to anticipate—that which we wish to find there. On the other hand, we should never deny the possibility that intelligences superior to man exist.

And so we go back to looking at the mind. Descartes pivoted his proof of existence upon the evidence of thought. He said, "I think, therefore I am." He could have said, "Thought will not leave my field of awareness. I suffer, therefore I am aware."

When we become aware, we have reached the core of the Self.

Descartes for all of his oversimplification, had a more sensible point of reference than today's behaviorists. He had thought for a point of reference, while the behaviorists, in their attempts to prove all things by material, scientific methods, claimed the body as their point of reference. Thought became a simple reaction, and awareness as a quality was denied as a "subjective" supposition.

We have other points of reference in the different schools of psychology. Some psychologists carry the emphasis on the body even further. The point of reference for them was pleasure. Their principle therapeutic advice to patients was, "If it feels good, do it." There is no sin but pain, and it can always be cured with chemotherapy. This type of psychology was spawned in the sixties. And with it came an interdiction for any and all who opposed man's right to pleasure. People who taught celibacy to their children were considered to be prudes (or masochists) who denied their children the right to "grow and experience." You were not supposed to caution your child against homosexuality because that would lead to "sexual" discrimination.

I need not prove the statistics that followed. Everyone has access to the media which reports a segment of the population as having gone mad, lusting for sex and blood. Children are being sexually attacked, even by parents. Houses of prostitution have sprung up that supply children. Nurseries are unsafe.

What did the pleasure-oriented therapists overlook? First of all they chose pleasure as a point of reference, as a reason for being, without knowing the other possible reasons for the existence of pleasure. Pleasure is also Nature's bait, to encourage reproduction. And to many this is a trap and a deterrent to peace of mind.

The indulgence in undiscriminating pleasure can only result in pain, first, for the victim and their families, and next, pain for the hedonist who thought that a new social trend exonerated him.

There is still another point of reference in the psychological industry. It is social compatibility—meaning that the aim of this group of therapists and psychiatrists is to go for funding for tranquilizing the masses against rebellion, sedating the foolish men with strong convictions, and encouraging sex of any type as a reliever of tension.

*******

I am painting a drab picture of psychology, and yet I am insisting that each of us must study psychology. Perhaps I should have said that first we need to evaluate psychological systems to see if they can explain any of the mysteries of life and our being. This is the first step . . . to be able to identify the counterfeit.

The point of reference for psychology, must be that which will best lead us to an answer for important psychological questions such as "What is thought?" "What is the relation of thought to the body?" In other words, where does thought occur? "What is sanity?" "Is consciousness the same as awareness?" "Can we be aware in an unconscious body-state?" "Is there a consciousness that survives the death of the body?"

In the process of setting up this study of the human mind, we have to carry on several projects at once, and each of these projects may have a different point of reference, or a set of pieces of evidence that we feel that we must examine.

The stature of the researcher will depend upon his ability to work with the best possible point of reference, yet to never shut a door on any new ideas that awaken a spark of conviction within him.

We have to become sifters of old systems of thinking and new psychological experimentation. We have to be sensible and logical enough to pick up the discrepancies in the different systems of psychology and psychiatry. But with another faculty, working simultaneously, we have to study the vast field of unexplained or improperly explained mental and psychic phenomena.

Religion demands that we accept God, which relieves the exponents of the burden or proving the existence of God. Psychology of the behaviorist type, legislates that there is nothing but a body, which relieves it of the burden of explaining thought as anything but reflexive action, and memory as anything but chemical impingements in the protoplasm.

Perhaps we should start with consciousness or awareness as the points of reference.

POINTS OF REFERENCE, AND HOW THEY ARE USED

Most dealers in arguments and concept structures never give a hint of a possible point of reference. Authors and speakers generally belabor the reader or listener with an overwhelming amount of words and data that will create a picture that his audience will emotionally accept.

In the pursuit of theological truths we generally choose our directions emotionally. The layman looks for the prestigious cathedral, for the charismatic minister, or for the preacher whose words do not trouble the audience too much.

But there are some who come up with arguments that would seem to prove their religious choice to be the most logical one. The Christian point of reference is the Bible—the Mohammedan point of reference is the Koran. These books presumably convey the Word of God. What greater reference could we have, except for the claimants' disagreement over the validity of any religion but their own, so that each denies the other claimant's God the right to first place.

And within the ranks of the Christians, there is quite a bit of controversy among those denominations which do or do not have the ability to interpret or understand the Word of God, and relay any true blueprint for spiritual development to the laity.

Perhaps Thomas Aquinas, with his loose syllogistic proposition, is more informative than the interpretations of the sacred books.

The fundamentalist uses an unproven basis as his point of reference . . . which inferred that God had spoken truths through the hands of different biblical amanuenses.

Aquinas used motion to attempt to prove the existence of God. If he had succeeded, he would have added substance to the Christian movement. Fundamentalism does not validate its point of reference, it just legislates.

So that when I quote from the Bible, I can only hope that the Scriptures bear some historic accuracy. I would not offer it theological claims as evidence.

But we cannot help asking ourselves, "How can so many people accept a system that holds immense power over them, if its dogmas are floating, unanchored?" I think that the obedience comes partly from the Bandwagon Syndrome and partly from fear—being afraid to leave the ranks of the church. There is a feeling of protection or security in some institutions for some people.

And so, the institutions hold together down through the centuries for several reasons. Some use the institution for a shield, and others use it for a livelihood. Still others use it for power or money. It is not uncommon to pick up a newspaper and read where a bishop or cardinal has died, leaving a million-dollar estate, or read where evangelists roll up millions of dollars.

Systems which place authority on "sacred" writings, may have manuscripts that are inspiring and filled with wisdom, but their claim to infallibility should be examined.

POINT OF REFERENCE: PREDICTION OF MENTAL OR SPIRITUAL GROWTH BASED ON SOME MANNER OF RESULTS

Disciplines based on results, claimed or real. These disciplines, or movements take a more scientific pose, and appeal to people who are not interested in blind-faith systems, or in charismatic movements. These systems predict a result, if the student or applicant will follow prescribed exercises or disciplines to prove for himself that he can arrive at an exalted or superior position.

For instance, in Anthroposophical literature, Rudolf Steiner lays out a formula or system "for the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds." This involves meditational exercises upon the chakras. The work predicts that if you follow this procedure, predictable phenomena will occur, and inner sights will open up. Of course, if a person experiments with this system he must take into consideration that sometimes the mind projects upon the eyes that which it desires them to see. So there must be some discriminatory reservation about the phenomena witnessed, or some perfection of the function that is synonymous with visualization.

Some of these movements are based on results, or on a change of being as a result of a discipline . . . or the result may be a formula which will place us on a path whose milestones will assure us that we are not wasting our time.

Among them are Zen, TM, Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Subud, Arica School, the Gurdjieff System, and systems of any number of individual gurus.

We go back to the evaluation of these groups as to their claims, the results of those claims, and to the general purpose of the system and any separate purpose of its individual teachers.

Zen predicts results. It has no dogma, and if any Zen groups espouse a dogma or a set of beliefs, it could be judged as being less than a true Zen movement. Zen does not teach. It questions. It examines all conceptions and discards them if they are not valid. Its purpose is the reaching of samadhi or enlightenment, by a system which may be called a non-system.

It is a most worthy discipline, but it cannot be said that all Zen groups are of the same noble purpose.

The purpose of TM was originally the finding of peace of mind. Later on, the public was told that its purpose was also the attainment of the ability to levitate. It predicted tranquility for the participants, and doubtlessly many people found this to be true. One point to consider, of course, was the possible role that autosuggestion played in bringing about the tranquility. I have never been able to validate the levitation claim.

Hatha yoga promises a healthier body, a body over which a person has increased control. It also promises an improvement of the mental faculties. It does have results of that kind.

Subud is similar to Zen, in that it is a subtractive system that finds realizations through the shedding of egos and negative tendencies. Its purpose is "Opening." Its procedure involves the latihan which is an exercise in letting go.

POINT OF REFERENCE: APPARENT LAWS OR EVIDENCE

This category includes Spiritualism, Alchemy, Magick, Astrology, Thaumaturgy, and possibly even Christian Science.

Spiritualism has for a point of reference, Evidence of Life after Death. Alchemy has for a point of reference, duplicatable phenomena, as does Magick. Both are also looking for new discoveries that can be formulated. These discoveries are generally along the lines of biological or chemical combinations, which hopefully may lead to a deeper insight into Nature. Thaumaturgy tries to set up laws and formulae for the manipulation of entities.

The real purpose behind all of this group of studies, is varied. It may vary from a sincere desire and search for Truth, down to an attempt at attaining power.

The scrutiny of all dialogue for points of reference may be important. God may be the point of reference at some time, for man. And man may be or is the point of reference for higher intelligence.

That which we must guard against is a national epidemic-psychosis—a psychosis or nauseous sickness which infects the minds of the entire population. It is caught first by the weaker personalities and rapidly spreads because of a tolerance for expression by sturdier personalities, and is encouraged by wiser politicians and even endorsed where profits can be made by very intelligent entrepreneurs. It can be nationally destructive and while the host is being destroyed it appears to approve of the psychotic cause of the malaise.

We do not think that national mental diseases exist. The symptoms are the desire by a large group of people for gregarious action, then the deification of the police. Next comes the deification of the group leader who adds more power to the police and to the army. When the corporation heads bow, they will receive contracts. The last symptom (which may be fatal) is the public approval of death for those who oppose this Zeitgeist type of infection.

The Nazi movement was a clinical case from contagion to consummation. Women's Liberation could easily be one. Religion is historic as being a generating culture for this type of infection. Patriotic chauvinism can be another.

And the primary infection is possible only by the exposure of weak minds to the use of an erroneous point of reference, which is: All things are definable by collective opinion.

END

The Path is Simple

The path to Truth, or Reality or Essence, is very simple:

It requires a Selfish man, an individualist not afraid of the annihilation of individualism, a fearless man not afraid of powers within him that are much greater than himself, and a man of suicidal relentlessness once his commitment is given.

All that is necessary to find the Truth is an unconditional commitment—not putting a time upon the commitment nor a greater value on any other desires or fears. If a person sincerely makes a commitment, he automatically becomes a vector in a sure direction.

But if we wish to see the commitment become an Absolute result in this lifetime, we must be conscious of our limited time, and of ways and means to expedite the realization. All energies must give priority to the vector. Every hour must be used in a way to expedite the success.

So that as soon as the general commitment is made, we should immediately commit our energies which are generally used for anger or pleasure so that transmutation will bring Intuition.

The voice of Intuition will be our most valuable teacher. It will furnish all future planning for the campaign. But do not rest. Make violent efforts but do not disturb the sleepers.

Back Cover

Richard Rose has made a science out of the Direct-Mind Experience. His hypothesis and conclusion were given life as a result of years of esoteric, psychological and spiritual investigation which peaked at the age of thirty when he went even beyond the "sudden and illuminating metaphysical experience" described by Dr. Richard M. Bucke as cosmic consciousness.

Rose's enlightenment, or "death experience," which he reluctantly recounts for his listeners, lifted the veil of Maya not only for himself but for many others who either read his account of this experience or were fortunate enough to contact him personally.

This remarkable book is an account of these contacts made over a period of a decade in which he presented lectures on the Direct-Mind Experience and Direct-Mind Science. No serious seeker of the Truth should leave its pages unturned.

Copies of this book can be obtained by writing the TAT BOOK SERVICE, 1686 Marshall Street, Benwood, West Virginia 26031.

OTHER WRITINGS BY RICHARD ROSE:

The Albigen Papers, PB $6.00, HB 8.00

Psychology of the Observer, PB $6.00

Carillon: Poems, Essays &Philosophy of Richard Rose, PB $6.00

Transmission and Transmutation of Energy, PB $6.00

Meditation and Visualization, PB 2.00