The Unpublished Works of
RICHARD ROSE

Compiled and Edited by

Alan Fitzpatrick

Rose publications

www.richardroseteachings.com

0.933

This book is published by Rose Publications.

The Unpublished Works of Richard Rose. Copyright © 2010 by Rose Publications. 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 Rose Publications, P.O. Box 63, McMechen, West Virginia 26040.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents      

Foreword      

Richard Rose on the Back Farm      

Introduction      

Short Works      

Prognosis      

I Propose      

Paper on Truth      

Notes on Therapy for Sexual Reverie      

The Masturbation State of Mind      

Selected Notes      

Case 1. A.R.      

Case 2. Stan M.      

Case 3. Pete M.      

Case 4. Jerome      

Sexual Reverie      

The Entity Paper: Selected Notes      

Editor's Introduction      

The E. Paper      

Short Works      

Psycho Paper: Selected Notes      

The Direct Mind Path as Designed for Two Feet      

The Rain      

ZEN      

Argument for Esoteric Searching      

First Proposition      

Second Proposition      

Third Proposition      

Fourth Proposition      

Fifth Proposition      

Listen to the Heart as Well as the Head      

The Logic of the Albigen System      

The Law of the Paradox      

Short Works      

Ways of Seeing      

Tweeny Town      

Zen      

I Have Found      

Before my wife was born      

I had a dream last night      

Koans: What do you know for sure?      

I Believe      

Point of Reference      

On Illusion      

On the Illusion Experienced when Traveling      

On the Illusory Beauty of Nature      

The Projection of Personality      

Summary List of Illusions      

The Mind      

Mind Diagrams      

Mind-camera analogy      

Illusion      

Technique      

Postscript      

Frank M.'s Account of Jane S.'s Experience during a
Rapport Sitting with Richard Rose      

Epilogue      

Back cover      

Profound is an Understatement      

Foreword

It has been several years now since the passing of Richard Rose, and many more years prior to his lengthy illness which cut short his writing and teachings, that I recall hearing him speak on esotericism in general, and on his own spiritual experience, in particular. It was his remarkable ability to write, lecture and work with students, revealing the strength of his personality and the depth of his insight both into the human mind and the nature of what lies beyond that mind that had such a great singular and profound impact upon my life for some twenty years.

So it came to me as a surprise when Cecy Rose, Richard's widow, told me that she had come across several boxes of unsorted written papers that he had apparently left unfinished and unpublished, which she thought I might find of interest. As I began to read through Rose's papers, from poetry to dreams, research topics, and the possible start of new books, I was amazed to find that his thoughts and words came alive to me once again, even through the void of time, space and memory. Clearly, here were the words of Richard Rose the man, the philosophic teacher, and the enlightened mystic to whom I had been attracted and come to know and work with as a student from the time I was a young man. What resonated throughout the papers I read was the memory of the man whom I could call a personal friend and guide; who had done so much for me in pointing the way to a spiritual life after helping me get my head on straight and my life back together. Here were the words of a man that I owed much to and who never asked for repayment.

However, reading his unsorted, undated, and in some cases, unfinished works was not done without misgivings for I felt, too, like I was intruding on things he might have wished left unopened and perhaps unread. It's disconcerting to know that the possibility exists that Rose left these works unpublished for a reason, one of which could have been that he did not wish others to know of them, as they were clearly not sanctioned memoirs. Did he intend to publish this piece or not, and why not? Why was this one left unfinished? There were many questions raised in my mind that I could not answer, as is always the case when a person dies and leaves things undone. Yet his essays held wisdom, depth and insight that can be found in his other published works. In that, I could see that these writings I was looking at would hold value for the serious esoteric student. Consequently, I rationalized that he would want seekers to hear these words, for Rose's life's work after his own spiritual experience was to help those seeking Truth by all means possible. From his intimately revealing account in "I Had a Dream," to his deeply esoteric and profound essay, "The Mind," the teachings of Richard Rose come through clearly and, I felt, added more insight and clarity to what he had already written on esotericism that has been in print for some time.

The transcription of his writings and subsequent editing has taken almost a year and could not have been done without the help of Cecy Rose, who provided me first, with Richard Rose's unpublished papers, and then with the impetus and encouragement to undertake the project of collecting and editing what I found to be the most pertinent, not to mention the massive work involved in proofreading the prepared manuscript. Thus, to Cecy goes the credit for this book. It has been her hope that these writings of her husband could come to light for readers, and benefit those seekers and searchers on a spiritual path who might gain insight into what Richard Rose had to say, and thus further themselves along to a final answer and an Absolute experience which Rose pointed to above all else in his life's work. Here, then, are the unpublished papers of Richard Rose.

-Alan Fitzpatrick

Richard Rose on the Back Farm

Richard Rose, on his back farm in West Virginia
Richard Rose, on his "back farm" in West Virginia, around age 31, shortly after his enlightenment experience in Seattle in 1947.

Introduction

Who was Richard Rose? To say that he was an enigma and a paradox, an enlightened man and a spiritual teacher, a friend, a wit and a strong-willed personality is an understatement. Words do not suffice to define the core of who Richard Rose was because, in the final analysis, to anyone who spent time with him, Rose was, in some way, much more than the sum of his parts—he was a man who cannot be described, in whole, with practical accepted terms we use to measure a man's inner nature, his outer character and his enduring will in this world. Richard Rose did not fit any mold that people use to describe society's great men—the achievers of science, medicine, religion, politics, mathematics, engineering or the arts, for example.

First and foremost though, Rose was as common a man as you might meet or pass on the street anywhere. To say that he appeared non-descript means that you would never have had an inkling as to what he was thinking or what was his private passion, from his appearance. Rose was a common man with a very uncommon interest in esoteric philosophy—not something that most people usually find of interest. His obsession was the individual search, his search, within himself for self-definition and complete meaning to life—i.e. the answers to life's major unanswered questions: why am I here, where did I come from, and where will I go or what will happen to me after death? While these questions may be of importance to everyone at some point in their life, if not at least for a few minutes or even hours at death's door, to dedicate one's self to a single-minded pursuit of an obscure, unknown and uncharted path is another question. Plainly, it is not something that most people who aspire to greatness or accomplishment have on the checklist of things they think are important, and which they want to do and commit their life to. Religious belief usually suffices for most people as a palliative to seeking and proving spirituality. This is because everyone is looking outward to the world for self-definition—not inward to the mind. Everyone is seeking utilitarian values—something to fill the void of real self-definition, such as wealth, fame, fortune, pleasure, faith, love, family and myriad forms of material accomplishments to which they dedicate years and years of their lives. But not Richard Rose. Advancing what amounts to an undefined self and an unproven, perhaps fleeting direction in the outward world was not the focus of Rose's major effort in life.

His single-minded focus was an inner pursuit to find the source of mind, thought, real self, and meaning to life and death. If there was a God, Rose wanted to meet him, not mistakenly believe in a God without first proving the existence of God directly. He was not deterred by his Catholic upbringing which warned that "the finite mind cannot perceive the infinite." Rose employed a method he would later call "Going within," and used a foolproof system, in retrospect, that he called "Doubting everything but your ability to doubt," and "Finding Truth by removing or moving away from what is found to be untruth." His workshop was that of the mind—starting with his own—and a search beginning in his youth for an absolute, not relative answer to his own quest for ultimate self-definition. Rose's relentless search would span two decades. His commitment to himself was to search within by all means possible and never give up until an ultimate answer was found, even if it meant his own destruction in the process. To Rose, it would be better to work at life's highest endeavor and fail than to die without meaning, and without knowing Reality, if such should exist.

It is what Rose found, or rather what found him—what happened to him—a transcendence and a becoming; what the Buddhists call "crossing over to the other shore," that encompassed the total death of his relative mind and self, and which made Rose such an enigma. Who was this man and what had happened to him? That was Rose's mystery for everyone who met him. He was a man who had chased God and found the indefinable; he had made the trip to the Absolute, to Ultimate Reality, and came back to tell others about it, and how to get there themselves. But the seeker had also been forever changed in some indescribable way, best said by the great Hindu mystic Ramana Maharshi, "Like a river discharged into the ocean and its identity lost." In the process of making the trip to become "everything and nothing," Richard Rose, the relative man, had died and yet he had come back to the world of illusion to "walk among men," as Rose called it. A Rose was once more a Rose, though the memory of what happened was eternal.

The paradox of Richard Rose was that he was such a common man whom you might meet anywhere. He knew many people in his own hometown and could talk to anyone and fit into any crowd with an uncanny ease, as if he were the neighbor, the house painter, the retired contractor and the Richard Rose from Benwood—all without anyone really knowing his inner passion and his memory of an Absolute experience. In that respect, Rose was the ultimate paradox. His metaphysical experience, which had taken him beyond death and back, left anyone who got to know Rose with the feeling that there was something uniquely different about him—something other-worldly, some intangible "X" factor that distinctly set Rose apart from anyone else they had ever met, and in retrospect, would ever meet again. In the years since meeting and working with Richard Rose, I have never again met another man possessing such a uniquely unexplainable and unpredictable presence about him. It can't be chalked up to the charisma of the teacher before the starry-eyed pupil. Rose was different. It became evident to anyone listening to him that he wasn't trying, wasn't posing.

To describe who Rose was is more than just calling him an enigma and a paradox. To the reader, that means nothing. To know Rose, however, is to say that he was essentially different in so many ways from the endless cavalcade of mundane minds I've met in this world, for all people I've met, at heart, posing as if they've got the answer to life as they go about their business intending to sell themselves, their dreams, their conceit, their desires and their cleverness. Are they any more the wiser for it, or is there no inner wisdom that accompanies the ego wherever it may go in its brief sojourn on the stage? In the final analysis, in the world of manifest ego we are not much different than the cartoon character Elmer Fudd; forever cast upon the screen of predictable robot reaction, and thus we pass our time by, in as many myriad forms as there are people. Rose's unique difference from other men stemmed not from Richard Rose himself, the personality, but from the nature of the experience he had undergone, or rather which had undergone him, and that marked him forever. One moment laughing, and the next, having undergone a startling transfiguration at the kitchen table when the inner self becomes outer and the outer personality of Richard Rose disappeared, Rose was the name only of something else far greater than anything he, the "manifested man" Richard Rose, could have conjured up to sell. His teachings to others always began with a warning that one should respect one's ability to doubt and therefore doubt everything and prove for oneself what is Truth and Reality—and most important of all, a student should doubt even him. Rose told students he was not to be followed or worshipped, for who would be more the fool than one who would follow a man who said, "I come to you as a man selling air."

How and what Rose did teach is remarkable; his writings, public lectures and private work with students spanned more than twenty years, and his style of teaching in all his endeavors was a direct, no-nonsense, common sense approach. This put him at odds with the many popular spiritual teachers emerging in the late 1970's who espoused an indirect style of teaching that ridiculed Rose's direct approach by saying, "He who knows does not speak," implying, in the Eastern tradition, that something like enlightenment and the path to it cannot be talked about. Rose was quick to distance himself from those teachers who were his contemporaries by saying that it is nonsense to believe that there cannot be an approach to spiritual seeking that involves talking about the things that go into a search. He affirmed his direct teaching in a lecture titled, "Zen for the American Mind," and he said that there were many phonies around posing as spiritual teachers who were hiding behind the pose that enlightenment cannot be talked about, and that they were doing so because of a lack of genuine experience in spiritual matters. Rather, Rose believed that hucksters and phonies fleecing the unsuspecting and uninformed for money with "gimmicks" was nothing new to the field of metaphysics and esoteric philosophy. That was what made it all the more important to Rose that he talk to the sincere spiritual seekers in terms that would help them discern the phonies from the real teachers if they wanted to find one to work with.

Rose's direct method in his teachings used terms any layman could understand in regards to how one approaches what appears to be an inscrutable search for Truth. He began with the premise that one cannot find Truth by postulating concepts or believing in conceptual theories or belief-systems, but rather the only sure approach is one of negation, in which the student retreats from error, or what he finds within himself to be untruth. In that manner, the student approaches Truth, whatever that may be, by backing into it, and by a process of peeling away what is found to be false within one's self. Rose's system of searching, which he called the Albigen system, was laid out in his first book, The Albigen Papers. In it Rose detailed the blocks a person encounters, both outward and inward, to spiritual seeking, and the general steps a person would need to take if they were to make progress. In The Albigen Papers the reader will find terms used by Rose that no other spiritual or philosophic teacher has ever used: making a commitment, becoming a vector, applying the law of progression, sharpening one's intuition for discernment, conservation of energy, using milk from thorns, and re-traversing one's projected ray to name but a few. In his most esoteric work, Psychology of the Observer, Rose elaborates on the nature of the projected small "s" self mind of the individual and the need to "go within" one's own mind to reverse the attention and focus of the individual mind that is lost in externalization on the outer world. It is Rose's Albigen system, outlined in these books as well as in his subsequent lectures over the ensuing years, and his direct work with committed students using the Albigen system in their own search—it is these things that set Rose apart from other so-called teachers who advocated talking about spirituality without providing an esoteric student any concrete ways and means of bringing about a spiritual experience. In this respect, Richard Rose was the greatest esoteric philosophic thinker, writer and teacher of the twentieth century.

With Rose gone, his legacy can be found in the books that he wrote and in the tapes of lectures he gave primarily on college campuses. While his writings include The Albigen Papers; Psychology of the Observer; The Meditation Paper; Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission; Carillon; The Direct-Mind Experience; and Profound Writings East and West, Rose's written teachings were cut short by illness which prevented him from completing many unfinished papers and possible additional books. To that end, I have compiled and edited as completely as possible those papers and notes that Rose left unpublished, from the voluminous writings accumulated by Cecy Rose, since the death of her husband. Unfortunately, many of the things he was working on before his illness remained fragmented and unfinished and those are not included in this collection of unpublished works.

What you will find in this collection of Rose's unpublished works ranges widely from Rose's poetry, to his critiques of modern psychology, his psychological and philosophical advice to spiritual seekers, his comments on what he thought of the Zen system, and his highly-esoteric work, spoken from someone who had gained a perspective from outside the mind and beyond, as is found in "The Mind". As with most of the material, Rose did not include a date of the writing but it can be presumed that the material herein is from the mid 1970's through the late 1980's during which time he was the most prolific. It is difficult to determine in each case to whom Rose was directing each work—some of it may have been simple papers to be used by his esoteric students, some may have been material he wished to use in a public lecture, some may have been the subject for a book or extended paper, and some were private notes of his own thinking which he wished to record.

Each selection, is by and large, composed the way that Rose originally wrote it, and how I found it. Some of the selections were handwritten in pen or pencil, some were typed on his manual typewriter without his additional editing, and others were typewritten by him, with inclusions, grammatical corrections, and new ideas overwritten on the original manuscript, as if he was preparing them for publishing. Overall, I have edited obvious grammatical mistakes that I've found for the sake of clarity and omitted some sentences that were unfinished and lacked any purpose that I could determine. In a few cases of some papers that were obviously incomplete rough drafts, but in which the ideas expressed were noteworthy and significant enough for inclusion here, I have taken the liberty to include what was most comprehensible from the draft for the sake of continuity for the reader. Any notes I have included with the selections are written within brackets [ ] indicating my words added for explanation.

Finally, at the end of the book, I have included as an appendix or postscript an account originally written by Frank M., one of Richard Rose's earliest students, who was present during an informal meeting of a handful of people at Rose's home in possibly 1973 when one of the women present, named Jane S., had a startling and spontaneous spiritual revelation that Rose later called "the mountain experience", spoken of in Zen tradition, during which Jane received a partial transmission of Rose's memory of his Absolute experience. Frank's account illustrates how the nature of a genuine spiritual experience begins with the descent of the individual mind into a "death of the mind" experience in which the person sees the world as an illusion and everything in it as such, including their own mind. Frank's account was found amongst Rose's papers, and I thought it was relevant here to include with Rose's unpublished works as it reveals the mystical nature of this man, Richard Rose, who himself had "died" and made the trip to "the other shore," as spoken of in Buddhism, then found his way back to point the way for others.

Richard Rose on the family farm
Richard Rose on the family farm in Marshall County, West Virginia, circa 1989. The Pavilion constructed with timbers from the farm is in the background.

Short Works

Prognosis

So you want to grow old....

You look very good there by the marble door,

Pen in hand—

Waving and pointing—

Planning for those you love,

Warning and being brave....

With robot gestures and computer signals....

Trying to act supremely non-robot....

Leaning on the door pretending

That you built the place and know the combination.

When the chill upon the floor rises

To the level of the chest,

And the serenity expected,

Is startled when the coolness slows the heart....

When fires, who's dying brings peace,

And whose dying melts ambition—when such grow dim,

And their frenzied ambition reads—

Your serenity to them as senility.

Then seek the wide domain of silence

In a hidden hate-less state.

Came and are gone the many phases.

Eagerly we sacrificed our parents for our instincts,

Ennobling such reflexes

For the sake of future generations.

How we fought and chopped a clearing,

In the jungle of humanity

For another layer of choppers....

And another breed of animated choppers.

Aye, now you know what love is....

Or know the many dreams it is not—

Know of a mother's love for babies,

How she feeds them flesh,

Her husband's and her own....

Know of a husband's love for all his family,

Aching masochistically

To help the shredding of his flesh,

Until they are strong enough to eat his heart,

While learning to feed their own flesh

To people masquerading as babies.

And now you think you know what love is.

You will only find despite-ness....

You'll think that you love despite

The ruthless bites of children....

That you love an existence that eats

Your loveless children....

Despite God's mills—

God's sausage-grinders.

And finally you know

That there is no love.

Love is a computer-signal

That makes robots slay robots

And makes robots eat robots,

That agitates protoplasm....

An anti-inertia catalyst

That dissipates values

And destroys reason and definition.

Or do you know all this

And desire to hold your body here,

Until the gardens of their madness

Are ready for planning and planting—

Holding back the anodyne of death....

Thinking that you are needed

Or thinking that they are not yet strong enough....

Enough to really love.

When the blood is warm

The drinker deifies the donor.

No one drinks of wisdom

Unless blended with your energy.

So with the slowing pace

Learn more of silence.

And such is proper—

Such is your domain.

In such domain emerge the verities unverifiable.

Do not look back

Nor gesture of the plains ahead

To those whose bonds you caused....

To those of programmed fancies

Rutted in.

Ah, so you want to grow old

With rocking chair and pipe,

And grandchildren playing before the fire,

With appreciative respect

And absolution for your teeth-marks

Upon another's breast,

And with wisdom, dignity....and pure with snowy hair

Living forever at the helm

Like the Ancient Mariner....

Like the Ancient Mariner....

But you know what Truth is,

And your love is greater than Truth

Because you hide the truth to save

The anguish and pain of others....

The anguish of knowing that something vital is unknown.

And golden doors of wisdom are never opened.

Know then old sage

That you are only playing the game—

In the charade of life there is only one truth,

Which is, that there is nothing TRUE in life

And this forever prevents Real KNOWING or TRUTH.

There is nothing now, but a tranquil, endless sea.

I Propose

I propose that there is Balm in Gilead....and a crack in the cosmic egg.

I propose that there is an attainable meaning to life; an experiencable meaning.

I propose that there is no meaning to life....without an explanation of death.

I propose that belief is the enemy of the soul except when the soul believes in itself.

I believe that man has no other choice than to seek his definition which is his Truth.

From the microbe to the mastodon, all forms of life evince a determination to survive and be curious.

I propose that curiosity is therefore implanted, or genetic—so that the engineering calls for a search for permanence and individual identity.

I postulate that man, more than the monkey, is curious.

Although man is like the monkey, primarily interested in somatic functions, body pleasures and body well-being, there is between the absorption in body-function and survival urgencies, a few moments of curiosity about his meaning.

My further postulation is that those few moments of curiosity are scientifically sane and socially justifiable.

My further postulate is that any ambition in the direction of search for meaning is simultaneously a search for ultimate survival and therefore of ultimate worth and importance.

So that there is no meaning to life until there is a satisfying meaning to death—and if the search for meaning of one discovers for us the meaning of the other simultaneously, that will be good—but we must, until then, put equal emphasis on search for meaning of death.

Paper on Truth

The aim of all Science is Truth. Its value is seen in the field of medicine, and in diagnoses, as well. We might also say that the aim of some of the sciences have neglected any concentration on Truth.

Let us sample truthfulness, or better still, find the complex web of lies that many of us have to deal with in life. Are people mice, or are they studied liars, educated salesmen, ruthless professional men, and brutal officials who claim that they are protecting us?

How will you know the Lie when you hear it? If you cannot ascertain if your teachers or prelates are liars—where will you start? Where will you find honesty? Who will point you to the Path to Truth or to God?

Let us scan the field of possibilities. Does there exist a group of people anywhere who know the Truth, or truth? Who are the greatest liars of our era?

We can only assume that everyone wants the Truth in all relationships with his fellow man. We live long enough to discover that everyone would like to have sincere truthfulness from his neighbors, but not everyone would return truthfulness for truthfulness.

What do we desire? We want safe food, authentic medicine, authentic hucksters, authentic prelates, authentic traders and contractors.

We desire to know the Truth, but we will only accept revelations of Truth if those revelations do not reveal us to be conniving, selfish individuals who value a one-way definition and direction in regard to Truth.

To survive in the rat-race we must be able to know the lies and the liars, even if we are on a spiritual path.

I am on a spiritual path, and I will tell only the truth to sincere seekers. I will not lie to deranged people, but I will not reply to those who are possessed.

Those who declare loudly that they are servants of Truth and equity often are listed in the news as under indictment for breaking their own rules. [This is because to them,] money is greater than TRUTH. In the case of Pennzoil versus Texaco, the judge admitted to getting paid a large sum from the winner of the suit. Judges are being arrested and convicted. In Marshall County [West Virginia] the prosecuting attorney was arrested and convicted for using and selling cocaine. The Governor [Arch Moore] is in prison for accepting bribes.

Notes on Therapy for Sexual Reverie

A. If no physical habit is admitted, the problem is reverie.

B. Reverie leads to entity infestation, and entities must be starved out by stopping all forms of sex.

C. No one else can see your reverie or treat it. You must turn your "head" away, and/or resort to prayer or mental fixation in another direction.

If you wish another person to try to help you from your reverie, all of it should be described to the helper, so that causes can be found and eliminated.

The Masturbation State of Mind

Selected Notes

Contemporary psychologists or therapists are inclined to minimize the effects of masturbation. This stand may well be a reactionary pose that resulted from an excessive projection of guilt upon mankind by a clergy obsessed with the idea of conforming to every jot and tittle of their dogma regardless of its effects.

It seems that massive human reactions never strike an arbitration level, a middle line, or an escape from extreme diametric reactions. An individual, or a small group, can see two sides of a picture. This has been demonstrated in sensitivity sessions, group workshops on values, and in juries. However, a nation or large group of people, being composed of many directions of interest and conviction, can only be brought to a common conviction that is aimed at social change or acceptance by a radical overthrow of the opposite, previous mass-conviction.

It has been said that the masses rarely vote for something. They generally vote against something else. And this process can easily bring for the voting masses excessive conditions in an extreme, opposite direction. We get rid of a villain by putting another villain in office.

The debate on masturbation need not begin with the two extreme resolutions, that masturbation is individually and socially healthy, and that masturbation in an evil sin that will send the soul to hell. Why not begin with two other resolutions for debate: that masturbation is not individually or socially healthy, and that masturbation is not spiritually damning?

Later I would like to return to the above topics, but the prime direction of this paper is a delineation of a state of mind that accompanies masturbation. My position has two implications. I believe that masturbation leads to mental confusion for the individual as well as social incompatibility. And I also maintain that masturbation does not fulfill the aim of nature which is basically pregnancy and not herd-peace.

I think that the present confusion brought about by modern psychological advice on the matter stems from attacking the problem of incompatibility in the middle and not in the beginning. In other words, it generally pays to go to the root-cause of things. It is good to invent serum for rabies, but it is better to destroy rabid dogs. If an excessive amount of nails appears on our highways, it will be better to shovel up the nails than to doggedly try to develop tires that will stand any abuse.

In the treatment of alcoholism, we do not hesitate to pass laws that inhibit the sale of alcohol to children. This public attitude must imply that children are unable to take care of themselves until they are eighteen years of age. I doubt if any psychiatrist will advise that we allow children to decide for themselves on the matters of alcohol or narcotics. If the psychiatrist opposes accessibility of drugs and alcohol for children, and yet advises that we leave our children unprotected in regards to sexual deviants, then it is evident that he is only interested in herd-peace. He is no longer qualified to pose as an individual protector for that child's mind.

It seems that the child is expected to become like the tire—it must overnight develop an immunity to all sorts of abuse. To everyone, sex should be like candy in a candy shop, wherein no one should get "hung up" or addicted to one (normal) brand of candy.

Rarely does the psychiatrist deal with children. They cannot afford the rates. It is usually only after several vain years of marriage, in which the principals wasted themselves in that which Epstein calls "bedroom Olympics," trying by piling on excesses to cure that which may have been caused many years previously by similar excesses, that the patient hunts for the psychiatrist.

We cannot understand the mind of man by studying reflexive behavior. We must take into account the possibility that man carries a programmed direction, which others call Nature. We must also take into account the possibility that we may never see the essence of thought by scrutinizing brain tissue, or by counting the twitches in an orgasm.

I feel that there may be considerable promise in a practice of studying the genesis and progress of primitive thinking patterns that originate in infancy and childhood. We should, at least, find something concerning the programming that is the basis of all our later reaction-patterns, or mode of life.

Sex begins in infancy, in the infancy that predates our memory of it. But we need only take that part of that which we can remember to notice the direction of the mind toward sex, if we wish to study something besides statistics or unredeemable, wasted lives.

Before the act is the plan, which is the fantasy and the reverie. And very possibly, before fantasy and reverie, things were stimulated by curiosity. These reveries are as evidential as the case histories of Freud. In the society of children and adolescents, the sexual fantasies are generally common knowledge.

Before I was twelve, I lived for a while in an orphanage. From twelve to seventeen I stayed in a seminary (for the priesthood). When I was nineteen I enlisted in a youth corps. In all of these places sex became the topic of dormitory or barracks reverie—which generally occurred in the evening.

In small children curiosity precedes speculation. Sometimes they pair off and examine one another's private parts. And sometimes there is a group examination of group competition in distance urination.

I remember that during the later years of my stay in the orphanage the older boys, twelve to fourteen, had a separate bedroom from the smaller ones. We had one fellow about fourteen years of age whose imagination was uninhibited. Each night he lay on his back after the lights were out and reveled mentally in sadistic ideas. Unlike the others boys who talked mostly of masturbation or made guesses about the anatomy of girls, he entertained us ad nauseam with plans for torturing girls.

None of these boys had ever been involved with sexual intercourse. None of them knew where the female organs were, and I believe this sincerely, because anyone who would have produced such information for the group would have been very masculine and popular.

I am driving at the possibility that this fellow with the sadistic reverie may well have inherited something, or was exposed to something by his parents before he came to the orphanage. But how would a person inherit reverie—or a fetish-direction? Can a person inherit kleptomania? This means of course, can a person inherit inclinations that lead to a duplication of the acts or crimes of one of the parents? Can a child be marked by impressions received during its stay in the womb?

I do not think that these questions can be answered with a thoughtless denial, nor can they be ignored. I realize that the trend in psychology is to consider only visible data or case-history statistics—the latter being evidence similar to legal cases that establish precedence in jurisprudence.

Finding justice by relying on precedence allows finders and the findings of a judge or jury in one particular case to hold court over all future cases that may be only fractionally similar. This is done without the principals in the future case being allowed to question the motives or biases of that previous judge or jury.

As for myself, I have always preferred to listen to the tales of midwives, psychics, pimps and whores when it comes to psychology—than to mind-politicians who are inclined to build clever concept-structures in the hopes of being funded. There have been cases—all of us know of some individually—where a particular family had succeeding generations of thieves, of alcoholics, or of sundry deviates. Some specialists are inclined to blame these inclinations on environment, maintaining that a person can only inherit physical peculiarities, not mental states. I am inclined to agree that environment plays an important part in the mental directions of an individual, but "environment" must include in its meaning not just things that are sensory, but the world of thought, and any other subjective dimensions that might influence us without our knowing about it.

There may be a God after all, you know. And if there is a God, there may be a whole sea of godlets, angels, or what-have-you. Whereupon the factors in behavior may quickly become more complex, and the study of psychology may require intuition for a change. The mind-scientist refuses to look at subjective (invisible) matter as evidence. He wants to precipitate everything, and make psychology into a material science, although the mind itself, which he pretends to understand and explore, is subjective. The modern psychologist is similar to an intestinal bacillus that believes the human intestine to be the total universe, mainly because any impossible additional dimension refuses to enter the intestine and introduce itself properly—meaning in terms of a bacillus. So the mind-scientist builds his own mountain of words, trying to render them concrete. He exalts himself as he makes and mounts, finally reaching a peak of a structure that is reasonable in appearance.

We must somehow look at the world of thought. Our physical acts may be explainable, but they are not always understandable from the convenient explanations. And may the good fairies protect us from any of the prophets who would enclose all of humanity in a dark, cloacae gut of pretense, rather than admit that they may some day be excreted into a dimension of limitless light and possibility.

A man does not think. He is caused to think, so he need not feel guilty. But he can desire to think a certain type of thought, if he finds that other, more morbid thoughts keep getting him into trouble. And as such desires become desperate or appealing enough, the man might change a bit, and lessen his jeopardy. A person must talk to other people if he wishes to know how other people think. Their actions do not always reveal their thoughts. And people's protestations in public, nor anonymous revelations concerning their sexual inclinations, are not very dependable if they should happen to wish to put forth a certain hypocritical pose. I must admit that we will always be limited to anonymous or unsigned testimony when it comes to sexual behavior. We have to get down to [understanding the root of] sexual behavior, because sexual behavior relates vitally to the peace of the herd, and even more importantly, to the peace of mind of the individual. We have to study sexual reverie if we wish to trace the genesis of sexual behavior. I also realize that we have to take into account impacts upon the child, in early years, by other creatures in his environment who might impose themselves upon him sexually.

Masturbation, in other words, may come about through sexual reverie, which in turn was brought on by curiosity. Masturbation may be brought on by direct contact with people who talk about the subject, who force this type of act upon a young person, or who perform some form of sexual act before the child. It is possible that masturbation may result from individual responses to accidental friction-causing agencies, such as the clothing. But this latter category of masturbation relates generally to very small children, who do not react to the orgasmic state. It is more of a reaction to pleasurable circumstances, in this case, friction.

I would like to focus on the reverie aspects of masturbation, because such a focus will approach the latent origins of behavior, and will perhaps give us some insight into the programming, or the psychic infestations that go to make up our inescapable inner environment. To conduct a study of the thoughts of men, you need not be a psychologist. All that you have to do is talk earnestly with a lot of honest people, or people that will unwittingly give you information. I found by talking to many people over a period of fifty years, that their adult reveries about sex stemmed from either early sexual associations brought about by animal or human encounter, or from associations that arose from mental reveries that seemed to just come from within the self, and which had no basis in personal, physical experience.

Case 1. A.R.

A.R. was fourteen years of age and in the eighth grade. He attended a Catholic school and stayed in a Catholic orphanage. He later attended a seminary for the priesthood, but dropped out after a year or two, after which I lost all track of him. His mother was living, but his father was either separated from his mother or deceased. His reveries were predominately sadistic. Sometimes he allowed admitted speculation, but at other times he told interminable tales of sadistic acts that involved imaginary girls, or with his mother, which all the boys in the room accepted with tongue-in-cheek as far as being the truth. Of course, none of the boys believed that these tales were anything but fiction. The point that I noted later was that he seemed to have no idea or inclination to have reveries about intercourse. Perhaps he did not have the experience to justify any "true tales" in that direction. Or perhaps he simply knew nothing about the details of intercourse.

His reveries began with an account of pranks that he played, or supposedly played, upon his mother. He put itching powder on her toilet seat. Then he employed wild superlatives to describe her frenzied reactions. This of course brought merriment to the other boys present, and established him as an entertainer. Later, he related stories of putting thumb tacks on her chairs. Also, he told stories of putting thumb tacks on the benches where the girls sat in school. Accounts followed of tying the girls into the chairs so that they could not escape. This was always accompanied by the descriptions of facial reactions by the girls to this torture. Occasionally he talked of burning the girls on their thighs or on their buttocks with matches. These reveries went on for as long as an hour and he seemed to read them from the ceiling. No masturbation accompanied any of these talks. In fact none of the boys touched their sexual organs in public or in the room.

Case 2. Stan M.

Stan was more silent than A.R. His reverie was largely speculation of the mechanics of intercourse. He felt that a boy had to be very powerful in order to have intercourse, and that was why it was only done by men. He had an idea that the whole act depended upon the art of thrusting. He imagined that a person had to thrust a long, durable penis into the abdomen of the female through the belly button.

This boy's carriage was that of a person about to thrust something. He walked proudly, and tried to push with his chest. He was brave, and to some degree cruel, showing little compassion for the smaller boys, and only disdain for the girls. He graduated from high school, later joined the marines, and died on Iwo Jima [during WW II.] The last time I saw him, he was home on leave before going overseas. He was dressed in his blue uniform. His face seemed serious, if not puffed with stern importance. He walked stiffly with his chest out. He was an orphan in the true sense of the word. Both of his parents had died from the influenza epidemic around 1918-1920. He had no memory of his parents.

Case 3. Pete M.

Pete M. was the brother of Stan, and was older by three or four years, being about seventeen years of age. Peter had no reveries to share. He was the old man of the room. He talked about masturbation as though he was telling jokes. He always laughed when he talked about it. His attitude seemed to be that he had the inside track on maturity, and that the rest of us would someday get into this comic routine of doing strange and ridiculous things for the sake of a laugh.

Peter remained single for many years, married when he was about forty years of age. He had no children. I correlate the drive for masturbation in childhood with the late marriage. Possibly the childless marriage may have been the result of a lack of desire to achieve anything sexually except physical relief.

Case 4. Jerome

Jerome was an acquaintance from the seminary. His mother had died when he was very young. His father was a slow-moving, apathetic, unambitious laborer. His grades were less than average. It was my opinion that Jerome had chosen the seminary, and his sister had chosen the nunnery because both were apathetic and unwilling to buck the difficulties of "outside" life. Jerome's reveries were sadomasochistic. He talked about his reveries only when alone with me, or in the presence of myself and another boy. This other boy, Raymond, looked, talked and walked like a girl. Jerome would wrestle with him, and go through a drama of torturing him in the process, in which there was considerable restraint and gentleness.

The conversations or words which Jerome employed during these dramas gave me an insight into his thoughts. It appeared that he wanted to crush or cripple Raymond. That which really occurred was mild pinching and embracing under the pretense of wrestling, all the while Jerome made dire threats of breaking legs or arms. Jerome remained in the seminary, became a priest, and together with another priest, was caught in a whorehouse. Today that would not be worth mentioning, but priests of thirty years ago had to take their celibacy seriously. Members of the local congregation became aware of his visits to the prostitute, and they informed the pastor of the parish. The pastor went into the house himself and dragged Jerome out. He evidently did not operate soon enough. The prostitute spread the information about that Jerome had been paying for her to flog him. He had to be dressed in women's clothes, tied up and whipped. The church shipped him overseas, and I have not heard from him for over twenty years. Many books are now being written by prostitutes, and there is frequent mention of priests and judges coming to prostitutes for the purpose of getting whipped.

Sexual Reverie

Let us take a look at the nature of sexual reverie, and at its cause. I am not opposed to the scientific approach to the matter but I am disdainful of the quasi-scientific approach that is little more than hedging, and a refusal to look at all the evidence. We have a problem with cancer, and the scientific world in charge of remedial research has not beforehand announced the limits of its investigation. It did not simply announce that cancer was caused by a filterable virus, and then drop the research. It did not announce a drive for a vaccination serum alone, dropping all efforts to find anything that might aid or worsen the progress of cancer.

Many theories were considered before they were proved or disproved. I knew of one biochemist who considered the majority of cancer cases to be a result of tired protoplasm. He called the condition histo-stasis. Others considered it as a possible affliction lessened or increased by positive or negative states of mind. No one was eager to scoff at these conclusions until all the chips were in. As I have said repeatedly, the findings of psychology are in reality un-researched propagandized edicts. The declarations that pose as "findings" do not even conform to nature. And since modern psychology is a somatic or physiological pseudo-science, it does not conform to nature. Since it does not conform to nature, it shall not last. But it is able to do a lot of damage before becoming obsolete.

What are the possible sources of sexual reverie? Some would have us believe it emanates from a mysterious force that holds together like a cosmic compost pile, and which continues to create primarily two bastard children called Ego and Libido. These authorities are self-knighted Wizards of Id. But where is Id, and what is Id? Is it a spiritual overself, a mental dimension, or a convenient psychological compartmentalization?

Let us look at some of the theories about sexual reverie. To get some of these opinions, we have to go back to the parents of psychology, which are philosophy and religion. Psychology was still an infant thirty years ago. Today it has advanced to the moronic stage, being self-destructive.

Paracelsus is still considered by many psychiatrists to be the father of medicine. Dr. Thomas Graham, Chief Psychologist of Massillon [Ohio] State Hospital, a voluminous writer of psychological books and tracts, quotes the following from Paracelsus (Medieval Minds, by Graham):

"Imagination and faith can cause and remove diseases. Confidence in the virtue of amulets is the whole secret of their efficacy. It is from faith that imagination draws poser. Anyone who believes in the secret resources of Nature receives from Nature according to his own faith; let the object of your faith be real or imaginary, you will in an equal degree obtain the same results."

Graham is not in agreement with Paracelsus on all points, but he comments,

"Then, too, he (Paracelsus) displayed unusual perspicacity by associating sexual conflicts to hysteria and by alluding to the unconscious bases of neuroses."

Let me give you an additional quote from the book Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann. This is a quotation from Paracelsus' work De Origine Morborum Invisibilium:

"Imagination is the cause of Incubi and Succubi and fluidic Larvae. The Incubi are male and Succubi, female beings. They are the outgrowths of an intense and lewd imagination of men and women, and after they take form, they are carried away. They are formed of the Sperma found in the imagination of those who commit the unnatural sin of Onan in thought and desire....Such an imagination....may render a man impotent and woman sterile, because much of the creative and formative power is lost by the frequent exercise of such morbid imagination."

Paracelsus places man in the role of a creator, a creator somewhat responsible for the Larvae he creates. The early Christian church held a similar view, by labeling as sins any unchaste thoughts. Both Paracelsus and the church believed that there were "pneuma" or spirits that prompted men to commit sexual acts, or to do violence to others. It has always puzzled me to find that the church persisted through the centuries in blaming the individual for all that he seemed to do, while admitting that there existed legions of malefactors strategically superior to those individuals by virtue of their invisibility. Thus we have centuries of belief that our thoughts are imposed upon us by entities of another dimension. Abruptly, we have another school of thought whose pride is pragmatism, and whose direction is materialism, who deny anything that cannot be seen, and who place the origins of all thought within the corporeal brain. Christ, Pythagoras and Socrates were all exponents of the entity theory. Socrates had a personal Daemon, and Pythagoras warned his disciples of entities that could assume human form.

Let us take a look at medical history of a more recent nature in regards to masturbation. In 1908 Ivan Bloch published a large book on sexual behavior called The Sexual Life of Our Time. Bloch talks of "psychical onanism" and "erotographomania." (It seems that the coining of words that are almost inconceivable and in writing prescriptions in Latin is some sort of unconscious smokescreen to hide incomplete knowledge among doctors and psychologists.) I would like to quote several things from his book. By psychical onanism, Bloch means a state in which a person can encourage it [sexual reverie] to such a degree that orgasm results.

"In this form the imagination is tasked with representing all the factors of normal sexual gratification. The simple physical act suffices only in the first beginnings of this vice. Every practiced onanist understands that he must soon call his imagination to his aid in order to produce sexual gratification, and that ultimately, ideas alone dominate the entire libido, and the orgasm often enough terminates in an act which in every respect has throughout remained purely ideal."

In the next two paragraphs, Hammond, Von Schrenk-Notzing, Lowenfeld and Eulendberg, show not only the prevalence of sexual imagination, but the manifest negative consequences of such. Erotographomania is another word for writing obscene letters to stir the imagination of the writer and the recipient. I might add that "peeping Toms” and those who make indecent phone calls are also bothered with a disease of the imagination.

I maintain also that most migraine headaches are the direct result of an unrelenting imagination—of sexual nature. My reasons for this opinion are from the many cases which I encountered who testified that their migraine headaches were removed with sexual intercourse or masturbation. I found also that many of these cases could not find relief in masturbation; the headache still remained, but when intercourse was available to the same person under the same migraine conditions, then the headache left.

Concerning the evils of masturbation, Bloch further writes, "Tissot (1774) regarded masturbation as the evil of evils...." Tissot believed masturbation to originate in reverie, and he in turn quotes Von Canitz: "When base lust fills thy thoughts, let a horrible picture rise before the mind, of withered dead men's bones, to let the sensual stimulation be driven away." The latter quote is a translation of a German stanza by Von Canitz.

Bloch admits that some contemporary doctors believed that masturbation was not harmful, but pointed out that the number of cases of lifelong masturbation that showed no ill effects were extremely fractional in comparison to the many cases of admitted masturbation that evinced mental deterioration and decline in character.

"In reality, however, masturbation is almost always more harmful than coitus. The reasons for this are obvious. In the first place, masturbation is begun much earlier, generally at an age when the body has not yet developed any marked capacity for resistance. Masturbation in childhood, is, therefore, especially harmful. Lowenfeld is of the opinion that self-abuse begun before virility is attained, more rapidly gives rise to weakness of the nervous system—and arrest of mental development. In the second place, masturbation is more dangerous than coitus in this way: it can be carried out much more frequently, on account of the more frequent opportunities, so that masturbation four, five or even more times in a single day is by no means rare. In the third place, the spiritual influence of masturbation is much more harmful than that of normal coitus. The ‘solitary' vice influences the psyche and the character of the mere child."

Bloch points out that mental changes occur, as well as personality changes:

"The youthful masturbator becomes shy, morose, unhappy, hypochondriacal....self confidence departs....From this there results a whole series of diseases of the will, for by masturbation much less harm is done to the intellect than to the vital physical activity....(it) gives rise to cold-heartedness, and blunts the more delicate ethical perceptions. The campaign against masturbation is eminently a social campaign for altruism."

Block lists perversion as an out-growth of masturbation. Many deviates encourage the training of the young in masturbation. Bloch also lists physical illnesses from masturbation, including: spermatorrhoea, prostatorrhoea, fluor albus, painful menstruation and other disturbances of the menstrual function. The inference is clear—masturbation is not the design of Nature. Bloch's book was published repeatedly until 1928. He lived in a time when morality was no longer dictated by the Church, in a time in fact long after the tyrannous hold on the minds of men by the Church were broken.

As recent as 1938, Random House published a translation of the writings of Freud. Dr. A.A. Brill who writes the introduction states that psychoanalysis was not introduced into this country until 1908. In this book Freud seems to skirt the mental origins or bad effects of perversions. He avoids indicting masturbation, but makes a generalization on perversion:

"It (perversion) is morbid if the perversion does not appear beside the normal (sexual aim and sexual object), where favorable circumstances promote it and unfavorable impede the normal, or if it has under all circumstances repressed and supplanted the normal. The exclusiveness and fixation of the perversion justifies us in considering it a morbid symptom."

Consequently, he [Freud] treated excessive masturbation as a disease, and looked upon certain forms of masturbation as merely evolutionary. It is evident that Freud did not wish to toy with the thoughts of the masturbator, or include them in the etiology of the neurosis with any conclusions about psychic (mental) causes or results of masturbation. However, in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis we find the following, where the topic is Obsessional Neurosis.

"An unsuspected large proportion of obsessive actions are found to be disguised repetitions and modifications of masturbation, admittedly the only uniform act which accompanies all the varied flights of sexual fantasy."

Freud does not consider the sexual fantasies as anything more than a part of the sexual nature of man. His references to that fantasy do however show that he considers such reverie to be negative in value. Further in the book he lists an incident which he calls "Nestroy's Farce". Two little girls of different social background played incomplete sexual games, acting out, without orgasm, sexual acts for a short period of time.

"These occurrences, even though they are only kept up for a short period, will be enough to rouse certain sexual excitations in both children for a few years, after the games have been discontinued. There is a common ground so far, but the final results will be very different in the two children. The caretaker's daughter will continue masturbation, perhaps up to the onset of menstruation, and then give it up without difficulty; a few years later she will find a lover, perhaps bear a child; choose this or that path, perhaps become a popular actress and end as an aristocrat. Perhaps her career will turn out less brilliantly, but in any case, she will be unharmed by the premature sexual activity, free from neurosis, and able to live her life. Very different is the result in the other child (the owner's daughter.) She will very soon, while yet a child, acquire a sense of having done wrong; after a fairly short time she will give up the masturbatory satisfaction, though perhaps only with a tremendous struggle, but will nevertheless retain an inner feeling of subdued depression. When later on as a young girl she comes to learn something of sexual intercourse, she will turn from it with inexplicable horror and wish to remain ignorant. Probably she will then again suffer a fresh irresistible impulse to masturbation about which she will not dare to unburden herself to anyone. When the time comes for a man to choose her as a wife, the neurosis will break out and cheat her out of her marriage and the joy of life. If analysis makes it possible to obtain insight into this neurosis, it will be found that this well-brought-up, intelligent and idealistic girl has completely repressed her sexual desires; but that they are unconsciously attached to the few experiences she had with the childish playmate."

The above story is a fictional case. Freud was trying to use the medium of fiction to draw a picture of that which might happen. In reality, we find after reading a bit further that Freud is preparing us for a hypothesis that moral training is inimical to sexual normality. The rich girl had better morals—more was expected of her. Freud could not have been that naive. I know of no era in which wealth brought morality. In fact, going back to my authorities, the pimps and whores, the wealthier parents are usually more depraved, and they do not always raise their own children, and when the children reach unsteady adolescence, money to gratify sensuality is more eagerly given by the parents, and parental connivance helps to keep the spoiled child's orgies from becoming public knowledge.

I quoted the above for a different reason. I wanted to point out the fact that Freud was aware of mental reverie that eventually leads to damaging habits of masturbation. He classes the masturbation here as neurosis. This mental reverie was also brought about by the mutual curiosity of the two girls. There was no seduction. It ruined one girl's life. Now we can blame it on the Church, or we can give virtue to the peasant by making her an unconscionable animal who does not bat an eye over masturbation, and give to both the hated upper class and the Church the blame for a child's neurosis.

I do not doubt that the two girls might react differently. However, Freud does not give more than one possible cause for such reaction. Both cases are typical. A girl may think nothing of it, and another may worry. However, it is the girl that stops masturbating that is free, and the girl that renews the habit is the one that is ruined. Of course, the girls are Freud's creations and he can make them do as he wishes, but I can see that the caretaker's daughter may have had no intuition to protect her, and felt, from poverty, that she had nothing to lose. On the other hand, the landlord's daughter had sexual associations with someone beneath her social level. She may have been ashamed of the social contract. Or she may have had a more perfect intuition, and came to feel that she had lost some birthright. Or she may have felt guilty.

But the main factor in all this ruin that she felt stemmed from masturbation. The masturbation, Freud admits, stemmed from fantasy or reverie—not from guilt. So masturbation is not condemned, but a sense of guilt is condemned, and the sense of guilt is a by-product, not a cause. Extreme emphasis to produce a feeling of guilt is wrong, be the agent church or state. However, a certain amount of guilt or revulsion toward sex is connected with masturbation, and this revulsion is an implant of nature. Regardless of the mores or morals of the era, youth is programmed to find revulsion in masturbation, and some feeling of guilt for not being able to find natural sex with someone of the opposite sex. If this programming were not there, masturbation would put an end to our species.

Let us go to another quote from Freud. This again from his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis:

"No neurosis is present where sexual life is normal....At that time I was able to go so far as to be able to establish particular connections between certain forms of nervousness and certain injurious sexual conditions....I noticed often enough that a man who contented himself with some kind of incomplete sexual satisfaction, e.g. with manual masturbation, would suffer a definite type of actual neurosis, and that this neurosis would promptly give way to another form if he adopted some other equally unsatisfactory form of sexual life." (page 394)

You will notice that Freud here does not use the word "excessive" but indicts masturbation per se in relation to neurosis. Freud was inclined to vindicate masturbation in other writings, simply by describing it as a progression beginning in harmless infantile sexuality. Then, at times, he would announce that excessive masturbation was the villain. It seems that in order to get humanity away from the guilt syndrome Freud resorted to extremes, which he could not always maintain. The Church was wrong. Man cannot be blamed for having glands. The Church tried to free mankind from his animal natural by virtue of papal encyclical, bull and decree. The Church, in going against Nature, aroused nature.

Freud was a pioneer in trying to free man once more, this time from superstition and guilt. But many of the modern psychologists who have taken a cue from Freud have abandoned research and even common sense to issue theses, bull and propaganda first, to the extent that masturbation was perfectly normal, or was a symptom of an interior neurosis (always unnamed) or was necessary for peace of mind. This later theme is from Skinner.

Freud and his descendants, waving banners for the Kingdom of Onanism, have made the same mistake as the ancestral church by attacking the Church and spirituality—this attack being the seeming extreme necessity for awaking mankind. They will create such suffering that suffering will beget mental confusion, and the peasants will flock by the millions, not to churches but to nut houses [mental institutions]. Not to the confessional, but to the couch where the modern Abelards and Graviers take their silver and give them happy indulgences instead of penances. We shall tear down our Cathedrals and erect Sanitaria, where children will be trained first in masturbation and then take graduate courses in homosexuality. They will be trained to have sex with every type of creature that appears to be humanoid, so that no creature will feel slighted or denied the right to swim in one great pool of semen and menses—and imbecilic anonymity.

Kraft-Ebbing, a neurologist who was born almost twenty years before Freud, points heavily to the adverse effects of masturbation upon man's ability to have sensitive and aesthetic feelings and experiences. While Freud thought that masturbation was a stage of development peculiar to children, and only [became] neurosis when carried to excess or continued to adulthood, Kraft-Ebbing traces the loss of intuition and aesthetic potentials to the practice of masturbation in childhood. How liberated we have become since then. Two years ago [note: this could have been in the 1970's but no specific date is given in the notes], the staff of a Pittsburgh mental institution decided to sit together in masturbation sessions. These were not only adults, but were professionals—[the result,] massive Perlian [Fritz Perls] gestalts!

Richard Rose, at age 12, when he entered the Capuchin Monastery
Richard Rose, at age 12, when he entered the Capuchin Monastery in Butler, Pennsylvania. He would remain there until age 17, at which time he entered his final year of high school, graduating from Wheeling Central High.

Kraft-Ebbing also cites the case of the Pueblo Indians who are able to make a passive pederast out of a very virile young Indian of twenty-five years. [In the remarks following case 128.] They masturbated him excessively and made him ride horses continually without a saddle, whereupon his testicles diminished as well as his penis, and he lost his facial hair and grew breasts. I can see where excessive friction could wear away penis and testicles, but he did not ride on his chest. The development of breasts had to come about by some psychosomatic metamorphosis. It is evident that his change really came about by two means. He was masturbated by men, and eventually came to like it. Next, his mind began to create a new man-woman out of an inclination to be loved and held sacred. Of course this is my explanation, and neither explanation nor myself are scientific according to modern Dementalism. (There is no such thing as the mind according to Dementalists.)

Senior photo from Wheeling Central High School
Senior photo from Wheeling Central High School, Wheeling, West Virginia, circa 1934.

The Entity Paper: Selected Notes

Editor's Introduction

The unpublished work that Richard Rose called the "E" Paper or Entity Paper is an eighteen page essay written in the form of a rough draft sometime after the publishing of his book, The Psychology of the Observer in 1979, which he makes reference to in this paper. The original manuscript is manually typed, double-spaced and contains many deletions and insertions both with a typewriter and by hand in ink, as Rose attempted to correct and amend the original writing. It appears as an unfinished work, and was written during at least two sittings, the first eight pages of which are numbered as such, and then the remaining ten pages were appended as "a" through "k". I believe Rose did not intend this paper to be published for the public, but wrote it as something that could be given to esoteric students interested in following his psychological and philosophic system.

It was one of the mainstays of Rose's philosophic beliefs that mankind is subject to the influence of non-visible mental thought-forms which affect our day to day lives in many ways. Traditional and native philosophic and religious sources throughout the centuries have attested to the existence of such thought-forms. Rose believed that entities exist in many forms, as stated in this paper, and exist in conjunction with this manifest world as another natural inter-dimensional unseen fauna as real in that dimension as we are in this one, both finding the source of existence from the Manifesting Mind (see Rose's unpublished work "The Mind", below, and his book, Transmutation of Energy). However, it was Rose's theory that a class of entities exists to tap our quantum energy during the human sex act, and this tapping provides the sustenance for that entity life-form to continue to exist.

So that the serious student of psychology, according to Rose's private teachings, must take into account the influence of entity attachment and possession of individuals through aberrant sex acts as the source or root cause of many, if not all, of the cases of non-organic insanity, mass murder, sex-crimes, pedophilia, schizophrenia, and the hearing of "voices” that many of the individuals involved in the previously stated cases attested to hearing and seeing.

Contrarily, the serious student of esoteric philosophy who wishes to practice disciplines of meditation and sexual continence to achieve the state of mind necessary to contemplate and launch the reversed-vector of a spiritual path as stated in The Albigen Papers, must deal with the reality of entities and their influence upon the esoteric student, to disrupt his attempts at celibacy and a singular state of mind as well as the build-up of quantum neural energy. It is this energy that the sexual entity necessarily uses for its own profit at the human's expense, much as we use the flesh and milk of other animals for our own nutrition, at the host animal's expense, as outlined in Rose’s book, The Transmutation of Energy. The paper begins below.

The E. Paper

The mention of the word "demon" sends chills down the spines of many people, but no more intensely than down the backs of the psychiatrists and preachers. The reason: it is the province of these two specialists to take care of the thoughts and souls of mankind, and they are failing.

And they surely must have some guilt. The demon-factor in human misfortune and maladjustment has been emphasized for centuries in the past but timidly avoided lately by the so-called "experts;" of those who are paid handsomely, and endowed by the courts with the powers of life or death over clients and/or victims, and who are granted sinecures, charters, and tax-free temples wherein often the "devotees" are pre-teen slaves. [Rose is referring here to not only the documented sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, but also the sexual abuse of children by cults such as the Krishna religion, and others.]

I do not think that we need to get into an argument here as to whether there are or are not admitted cases of possession. We may need to get into the terminology used to cover up the psychiatrist's limitations. To the jurist, psychiatrist and prelate, demons do not exist because we cannot drag one into court and force him to testify against himself.

I am somewhat amazed at the pussyfooting of the laymen or non-professionals who write about entities. They do not wish to be branded as old-fashioned or superstitious. Society is omnipotent. The future is designed by Alice in Wonderland. All you have to do is get everybody to agree that this is Wonderland. Chant the right mantra while drinking beer and you will be blessed with champagne. Vote out things that you do not like.

What has this to do with the validity of entities? I think very much. The sudden increase in the cases of mental illness in the country, the proliferation of mental health centers (mostly run by previous inmates who like the atmosphere or by misfits whose distinguishing identity apart from the inmates is a white smock), the alarming rate of suicides, and still more significantly—the increase in the incidence of mass murders, and mass murders of children, all arrive on the scene on the heels of an era of drugs and sexual dalliance.

All of this has to do with entities because, with the appearance of these social events or symptoms, there is also an increasing number of patients who claim that they are possessed, or that they are haunted by spirits identifiable to them as separate, intelligent personalities. Such a case is described in the book Operators and Things, in the diary of David Berkowitz, as well as the case of a murderer in Steubenville, Ohio, who was convinced that he possessed or was possessed by the soul of Giuseppe Zangara, a presidential assassin.

As careful critics we might refuse any evidence [of entities] from the Bible because of time and translation, but if we are Christians or even sincere Mohammedans, we cannot deny that religion is the bulwark against cloak and dagger agents from another dimension. Even a good dog will raise its hackles at the appearance of unseen visitors—while the human superior continues to reassure himself that nothing is equal to or greater than man.

Mankind will not be able to do anything about entity-invasion until he admits a few things. He must realize that his senses are limited, and there might be a few things, or life-forms, beyond the ken of his senses. That he does not see them does not also infer that he does not have to deal with them.

In dealing with phenomena beyond our present dimension and with things from that dimension which affect us, we must be able to find a superior position from which to study both the outer dimension and its flora and fauna. For the sake of brevity here, I will refer to my book, The Psychology of the Observer, as a means of understanding and facilitating this viewing from a superior position. In other words, we cannot, as bacterium, study the world of the man, nor can we view anything subjective and dimensional through selfish or phallic lenses.

In determining truths related to items which apparently emanate from another dimension, we need to find a position superior to both dimensions—ours, and the one to be studied. This is the salient reason for the past and future study of entities. The mind has trouble even studying itself. It does not have to go beyond the mind dimension to learn a lot about itself. However, even the mind is unable to fathom itself in deeper self-analyses. We find that the mind plays tricks upon itself, and to prevent this, a superior seat of judgment for that type of divided mind must be found. This mild form of mental splitting should not be classed as schizophrenia, but it may lead to obsessive states, and obsessive states may create conditions that open doors for intelligences other than the host's.

We come now to a second factor in the understanding of entities, and that is the human language and the games which vested interests play with that language. To begin with, psychology, which in its pure state is a science of the psyche, really wants to be accepted as a sort of mental-physics. I maintain that it can still be a science and remain a master of the subjective problems. It will just have to change its addiction to graphs and curves, and its addiction to chemotherapy that changes symptoms but never gets approximately near to the causes of trauma or behavior in general.

In regard to language differences, we have a psychology which considers itself to be a material science, and on the other side, a philosophic approach and reaction to phenomena, both physical and intuited, and to the centuries-old history of such phenomena and their place in moral human relationships. Language has very subtle directions which are not always deliberately taken or intended by either scientist or philosopher. For instance, when we read through the logic of behaviorism, we can observe, if we look closely enough, that the behaviorist indulges in a particular attitude toward the body. He says, "We are the body," To the esotericist and esoteric philosopher, "We have a body."

Each speaker does not spell out his stand because such would require proof from either side. Instead, the behaviorist ignores the soul-concepts as troublesome beliefs of the Dark Ages, and proceeds to brag about momentary changes in psychotic people, and about his ideas of the proper way to supply the "needs" of the body. The word "need" is held out to the public like a beneficence, and to the theologian and philosopher, it often represents a terrible curse.

To the philosopher or spiritual authority, even the word "body" is interpreted as gross baggage, and as a means of experiencing pain to the inner man or at least to the consciousness. To him the body’s "needs" are secondary to the needs of the Inner Man, to the Soul, or to that part of him which is capable of maximum and eternal consciousness.

The psychological "scientist" runs elaborate tests and decides that anal, oral, sadomasochistic and other various forms of fetish-sex acts are harmless. In fact, some advise couples (hetero and homo) to reinforce the fetishes of the other partner, and to even encourage the other's sexual reveries.

However, I believe Nature, which is not synonymous with spirituality, always exacts a heavy price for deviation. Those who say that "kinky" sex is harmless are wrong. A few may be lucky enough to escape the Nature-retaliation (reaction).

Is there a pill for treating demons? The materialistic psychology of the sixties will not cure that which it denies, and why should it prescribe for the termination of an entity (I am presuming now that they exist), when they [psychologists] encourage their patients to accept all sexual temptations, which religious authorities claim are the sustenance of entities. I wonder if we can really afford to continue with this pretence that there is nothing here but "us"?

Without a doubt, there are two schools of thought about entities, either believers or non-believers. However, the non-believers have no scientific research to reinforce their non-belief. All that they have is a simple denial together with the relegation of all phenomena that might point toward the existence of entities to the categories of absurdity, superstitious belief, and mental derangement.

When we talk of entities here we are talking about non-corporeal intelligences, or intelligent beings whose bodies are transparent, outer-dimensional, or capable of appearing to us on their own terms, meaning that some of these intelligences manifestly communicate only to the ears and are never seen or felt, or are intuitively apprehended.

There is no inference here that such entities, if they do or do not exist are all malevolent. Some are considered angelic, and are referred to as being angels. Some are considered to be interested in cooperation with mankind, if we are to give credence to stories of elves, fairies and leprechauns. Still others can be brought to work for people who call them up. In this latter category we have the accounts of thaumaturgists such as Eliphas Levi.

Despite the fact that a predominately Christian population occupies this hemisphere and Europe, and despite the fundamentalist beliefs of most Christians, we still seem to find no inconsistencies with the stubborn stand of psychiatrists who flatly deny the existence of entities. Protestants and Catholics still go to psychiatrists even though the stand of the latter makes Christ appear to be a trickster. If there are no entities, then the exorcisms performed by Christ, driving the spirits from the possessed man and into the herd of pigs, must be a bit of fiction. The same would apply to all the incidents of angelic appearances.

The psychiatrists have, without proper scientific research, informed over a billion living believers that their religions are feeding the people false information. I have stated before that the pseudo-psychological authorities are consciously preempting the domain or religion. Not only do Christians accept the existence of entities, but Mohammedans, East Indians, and Tibetan Buddhists believe strongly in demons and angels, or entities unfavorable and favorable to mankind. Going beyond the above religions and into such fields as shamanism, the Huna of Hawaii, Aborigines of Australia, and Native-American Indians, we find very few conclusions about the workings of nature which do not incorporate into themselves the idea of entities.

And still, I know that Socrates and his daemon are no longer available for questioning, nor can we prove anything by referring to Pythagoras and his Undine, or even to William Crookes and his "Katie King". We need a living bit of phenomena to scrutinize. While we have this psychological and pseudo-scientific agnosticism to contend with, we cannot, on the other hand, summon an entity to appear for us to corroborate our claims that they exist.

Whether or not I, or all theologists, thaumaturgists and shamans fail to prove by duplication or materialization, according to scientific rules, that we live in a dimension possibly interlocked with a superior dimension is not the serious question of humanity. The serious trouble is the refusal of psychologists to disprove it or accept entities as a factor in behavior.

Are we more wise than the people in previous centuries who claimed to know the answer [to the cause of aberrant human behavior]—people like Christ, Socrates, Pythagoras and hundreds more?

The tales of thousands of criminals who claim to have killed on orders from entities (as in the case of David Berkowitz) should at least cause the psychiatrists also (like us) to say, "What if this is true? What if entities do exist?" Since there is no better explanation for the behavior of men like Berkowitz and Gary Gilmore, is it not proper that psychiatry forget about maintaining its paradigm, and its own peculiar religious-like dogma, and begin to give the idea some investigation?

There are implications behind the evidence that points to the existence of entities and the authoritative denial of the same by psychology and psychiatry. Those who deny entities because they cannot prove objectively the existence of entities are following a line of thinking that can be called an "empty world theory" in which subjective states of mind of the individual do not exist, nor can anything subjective be held accountable for motivating behavior. This approach can be criticized for over-simplification because psychologists and psychiatrists wish to avoid the inner observation of thought processes, by maintaining that their materialistic approach to psychology has no room for things not validated by hard scientific analyses. Their approach denies that there is a mind, thoughts, subjective states, and a soul by their definition. If these states do not exist, then neither do entities.

Those who firmly believe that there are entities are opening themselves up for a nightmarish complexity, perhaps, in the light that they have taken on the task not only qualitative and quantitative speculation on such things as the soul and thought, but also they are forced to take on the study of the many [unseen and therefore subjective] dimensions which interpenetrate one another, and which are in turn affected or dominated by biological, molecular (substance particles) and other laws germane to such dimensions.

Incidentally, there is such a stubborn opposition to the examination of subjective faculties or attributes of the mind, such as thought and the soul, that most psychiatrists, when discussing the thinking processes of man, apply the word "subjective" to imply that the existence of things like thoughts and thought processes is something bordering on mental irresponsibility and delusional. Therefore, psychic messages, appearances of spirits, and messages from those spirits, perhaps in the line of warnings that are later validated as beneficial to the hearer, must, of course, be denounced as being "subjective," and thus not worthy of real consideration. And thus we come back to the psychological premise of modern psychology: to deny the existence of anything which you cannot treat.

We get a picture of a world devoid of any life beyond reaction, and of bodies without souls, or rightful individuality; without even thoughts, and of individuals who must forego any thought of immortality, so that they do not embarrass the new trend of psychology and psychiatry. By refusing to even take into account the possibility that there are psychic bases for behavior, or spiritual origins to human life, modern psychology is failing in its effort to understand human behavior. The behaviorists might well be overlooking the most overwhelming agents. There is manifestly an implication here that some day, in order to slow down the building of mental institutions and to curb the rapid escalation of the rate of suicides, we may have to re-write the entire book on psychology.

How much greater must become the statistics of people afflicted to a very critical extent, and who are profoundly convinced that they are victims of ultra-terrestrial intelligences which is the cause of their affliction, before we at least accept their testimony as being honest, and entities as a possible factor or cause of their affliction? I think that all people, including scientists, sense or believe that there is some sort of fire behind the wall of smoke, in regard to the case histories of people claiming to be possessed by an entity. I feel that some psychologists may believe that if they avoid talking about entities, that if entities exist, they will go away, or at least the idea will go away. I think this attitude would be more prevalent than the seeming inclination of psychologists, individually thinking that they can, as an authoritative body, vote entities out of existence.

[paper unfinished]

Short Works

Psycho Paper: Selected Notes

I have several attitudes that place me at odds with many pseudo-modern thinkers. I dislike a behaviorist psychology that would reduce us to the animal level by legislating correct or sane action by physical responses that are somatic in origin. Such a behaviorist influence is almost eagerly accepted by a society that, for the majority at least, is stoutly Christian.

Are we a tongue-in-cheek people about any idea that has popular support, even though it quarrels with another idea that has equal or more support? Most modern psychological attitudes are behaviorist, especially those that find their way into schools. The congressional politicians will not repudiate this conspiracy to make all men animals of equality, yet every time one of those same politicians runs for any high office, he makes a broad appeal to the religious part of our nature. Being a politician, he wants to be, of course, all things at once, and winds up being nothing in particular. I get the impression that the politician believes in neither psychological wholesomeness, nor in any form of religion, but rather will use an affectation for them for election-expediency.

If we have no soul, then let us admit it honestly on all levels. However, not even scientific facts can withstand the sieve of public opinion. The psychologist plots his scientific poses from a normal curve—statistics on opinions. If the majority of the popular reaction should declare that cancer could be avoided by castrating thirty-three rats on the Ides of March, such a ritual would be automatically a scientific fact.

We live in a sick society that might be called the Infallibility of the Masses Syndrome. This sickness finds its etiological source to be the product of viri (poisons and men) who know the effect of public opinion, and who go about incessantly dreaming up ways and means to work the public up to a point where they will vote or give approval to their particular lobby.

Another common social sickness is the Equality-Mania. The viri are trying to convince the people that all people are animals and that all animals are equal. But any farmer knows better. And nobody really believes in equality, but continue, with tongue-in-cheek, to go through with the farce. Not even the dolt who is unequal believes that he is equal, because if he did he would not be constantly attacking other people to try to make them prove it to him. Their cowardice will only prove their cowardice, not his superiority.

The Direct Mind Path as Designed for Two Feet

The direct path is narrow but very straight. We have made it narrow in the process of retreating from error. We keep the feet on familiar and yet restricted tracks. If we wander to and fro as we go we may become distracted by a number of parallel paths that beg for our attention with promises of joy rides and possibility-toys strewn along the way. The path is narrow enough that when we put our right foot down, it touches the right hand edge of the path, and also touches the center line of the path. Likewise with the left foot, this touches the left edge and the center line of the path. In this way we never lose our balance which is our contact with between-ness.

Our two feet help to remind us that we exist in a relative dimension, as do our hands. We have two eyes, but with them, there is no action without the hands and feet.

On a physical path, we need the eyes to guide the feet. However, on a mental path, or call it a spiritual path, an internal eye is needed to keep the physical creature from straying from a path that is affected by relative attachments of a physical origin, as such physical influences tend to throw us from the path, which to the physical or relative view is subjective and only apprehended and charted by mental forces.

So we start off on two feet. Both body and mind must be in balance. The mind which watches the two feet is as important as the chairman of a board. Perhaps the mind has to develop itself to control and prolong the life of the vehicle. That control would be intuition.

The Rain

The rain came down....

Washing away the dusty clouds of mind,

And cooling away the rising heat of action.

Soft is the rain. Incessantly soft.

The rain came down in a barren trench

And brought a message of Autumn days.

From the golden fields....

The rain came down and softly said

"You shall not fight."

And cooled the brow of hate,

And mired the wheels of war,

And sternly, kindly said,

"You shall not fight."

The rain was kind,

Wept Sodom and Gomorrah pure,

Wept Zeus' anger from the vault,

Refreshed the parched Nubian in Sahara lost,

Cleansed the hovels in the river flats,

Awaked the cotyledon with soft whispering,

Kissed the lovers lying in the meadow,

And washed the clay from gentle minds,

'Til they could see the face of God upon the sky.

The rain is soft....

It argues quietly with the wind,

Conspires with the still night

To surprise the day which is an eternity away.

A peaceful hush rises over the roof,

Over the thrall of slumber,

And soothes the fever-thoughts away

With sweet delirium.

Soft is the rain. Incessantly soft.

ZEN

ZEN is a hammer for glass heads.

ZEN is the annihilation of minds of idiots (are not all idiots?)

ZEN is the Crow-bar of frozen conceptions.

ZEN is the path to nothingness.

Nothingness is not understood by those addicted to definition.

We know nothing about life until we die.

We know nothing about death unless we are reborn, and recall.

To teach ZEN you must pity the idiots with college degrees, and be amicable with idiots who long for definition.

Argument for Esoteric Searching

First Proposition

That man is not satisfied with the present definitions of the Truth, and that mankind wants the truth. Each person, with his limitations and ability, consciously or unconsciously works toward the answering of questions of life and death that will enable mankind individually or as a whole to prolong life by knowing more about it, or to tolerate death by knowing more about it. It is my contention that each man who comes here [to the lecture] comes because he is curious about his definition....unless by some chance he comes for social reasons alone.

Second Proposition

That the definition of man must involve a true answer to the three questions—what is the source or cause of man, what is man, and what is the destiny of man. This means that man must know from whence he came, must know his real nature, and must know that which will happen to him after death.

Third Proposition

That definition depends on meaning, and meaning involves capacity. This says that a person's understanding of another person's definition will depend upon the capacity of the receiver to interpret the definer's meaning. Meaning is directly related to capacity or capability. I use the word capacity because capacity infers an ability to contain, and to receive, as well as an ability to just read with a large vocabulary, or to hear previous memory-bank potential.

This brings us to the conclusion that esoteric knowledge contains levels. However, esoteric knowledge does not contain levels so much as esoteric students contain degrees of capacity. Capacity is not limited to esoteric pursuits. It is evident that students of all interests, whether mechanical apprentices or professional students, show unequal aptitude in different studies or trades, and in the study or trade in which they show the best aptitude, there is still inequality among the colleagues of mutual vocation. This exemplifies the ramifications of capacity.

Fourth Proposition

That a change of capacity is possible. That this change comes about by either progression or by virtue of "shocks and leaps" beyond what our present reasoning may consider to be inflexible limitations.

We begin with the words "change of capacity". This means that a child may be able to lift ten pounds over his head, but that he may change that capacity within a period of time by practice, so that he may be able to lift eleven pounds, then twelve, and so on. That child may go to school and learn to read a page of one hundred words in an hour, but with practice, his eyes and coordination will change, so that he will be able to read 400 words in an hour, and then 800, and then perhaps, some day, 4000. This is what I mean by progression, or a progressive accumulation of capacity.

We go a step further on the reading. We practice speed-reading which is a sort of leap. It involves a departure from the methodical reading habits of focusing the eye on each letter and word, and being conscious of each focus. Instead, it uses the trick of focusing lightly on the page, with the presumption that the eye records the whole page, and that the mind is able to record and sort the whole sighting in a second. In this manner, some readers claim that they are able to read 200,000 words in an hour....or more.

The nature of change may involve a change of nature. A young man that learns to lift a thousand pounds may never believe that he can surpass that limit, but in a moment of fright, he may lift twice that much. Or, certain stresses over several hundred generations of weight-lifters may produce a man whose structure has been changed to enable him to lift two thousand pounds. Of course, this mutant may weigh a thousand pounds himself by that time. Likewise, with mental pursuits the demand for adjustment to problems that seem absolute in nature may involve a change in the nature of the problem-solver.

Thus we have a new understanding for two statements, the first of which is often heard in theology, which is, "The finite mind will never perceive the infinite," and the second statement, which is, "The mind may change its finite nature to suit the problem." We should not look that far ahead, however. Each of us should observe his limitations, because unless a man realizes that he has not reached his maximum capacity, he may be inclined to rationalize his present level of knowledge or being, as being the ultimate level. There is not as much trouble in advancing, once a person gets the hunger to advance, as much as there is trouble in getting the searcher to pry himself loose from the seeming security of any level he might be on.

The searcher, so paralyzed or inhibited, has arrived at his present ledge or level by a process of progression, which he can view in retrospect. It is strange that it rarely occurs to him that progression stretches ahead as well as behind. These levels are so apparent to spiritual philosophers that some have attempted to categorize them. Gurdjieff lists seven gradations and they begin with man Number 1 which is instinctive man. Man Number 2 is emotional man, and man Number 3 is intellectual, with man Number 4 being philosophic man. De Ropp speaks of stages of man. Zero stage is sleeping man or the outer directed puppet. Stage 1 is the seeker or the man with the first realization of sleep. Stage 2 is the magnetic center in which there is an active quest for a teacher. Stage 3 is the observer (Prospero dominates Caliban). Stage 4 is the master, inner-oriented, cosmically dominated man.

Fifth Proposition

That Truth is attainable by a system of progression reinforced by techniques of leaps and shocks, as such are needed, or by any means which may be developed or discovered. The concept of progression can be described first by saying that a gradated or otherwise recognizable systematic increase from the application of energy can claim unlimited increase. Where there is more, there can be still a little more. And in mathematics there [illegible] philosophy about the progression of a point toward another point which, according to even common sense, seems to be infinitely unattainable. This has to do with the problem that takes the distance between two points and divides them in two. The distance to one point is again divided, and the moving point moves three-fourths of the distance toward the point which is the objective. It would seem that the point to be reached may never be reached in this manner.

However, there is a method of proving this with mathematical formulation, or so say the students of higher math, that the point will ultimately be reached, impossible though it may seem. The formula is identical with the Law of Progression [see The Albigen Papers by Richard Rose]. If you can keep going continually in a certain direction, even though the rate of travel is continually halved, then you will get there.

The fact that energy systems, when charted, show peaks followed by declines, [which] is a result of the limitations of the engine, or energy transformer, not the failure or limitation of energy itself. At one time, such charts were drawn up on engines which produced energy from combustion, i.e. rapid oxidation which gives off heat. A steam engine had to have a certain gauge in proportion to amount of heat and water, and had to have proportional increases in weight as a result. The mechanism had to carry tons of water, steel and coal to produce "x" amount of work.

Before gasoline was developed, any outer-space travel was deemed impossible with a combustion engine. The slide-rules seemed to confirm the conviction. Yet a combustion engine brought a rocket to the moon. Of course the engine was drastically modified, in relation to the piston-type engine.

I am trying to show here that that which appeared to mankind's deep conviction about a graph-peak or an energy limitation was dispelled....and I call this process one of progression. An example of a shock or leap to help that progression further might be a human-family disaster or war that might stimulate discoveries in propulsion by magnetic methods....thus departing abruptly from the combustion engine. And still another method of space travel may involve the energy of tension that must exist in pattern-forms between planets as a result of simultaneous planetary forces of attraction and repulsion, or of centrifugal force and gravity.

The spiritual progression of man, when it reaches an apparent peak of potential, may be transcended also by a technique or system which involves shocks, or of leaping beyond relative, tangible, scientific and syllogistic methods.

One such path is that of Zen.

In esoteric philosophy we are concerned with ultimate considerations as opposed to temporal considerations. In Zen, which I consider to be the ultimate of esoteric systems, man hopes for the ultimate definition of his true state of being....now as well as forever.

We cannot look for our definition without taking into consideration the systems of authority whose business it is to define man....call it man's essence or his state of permanence, or non-permanence. In other words, when we begin any effort that other men have previously undertaken, it is good to examine the history of such efforts, and examine the conclusions reached from such data. Two such outstanding systems of effort, or human direction, are religion and psychology.

Now Zen, in one sense, really attempts to prove nothing, but religion proclaims the task as its own, and psychology denounces religion as either a therapy or a disease, while failing miserably to do any better in the business of self-definition.

The writings of Zen may not prove anything, but a Zen system may be capable of something better than objective, that is, pretensive logical definition. It promises to bring about an intimacy with both the problem and the solution. Meaning, the problem of man's origin, destiny and nature, and which is joined, merged with, or become rather than looked at from a distance to find the answer. This is done by a process which is neither devotional, nor in the final steps, logical. Zen is sensible in that it is opposed to nonsense and illusion. But paradoxically, it uses the nonsense koan to arrive at sense.

Not all Zen systems use the koan. Enlightenment is not dependent upon a deliberate technique of causing confusion to stir the mind deeply. The koan may have been necessary in monastic life where things were too peaceful. The student of Zen who lives in the world will be supplied with plenty of confusion and trauma, if such is needed to wake him up.

Religion may be satisfying, but the satisfaction there is, is generally based on faith. In Zen, faith is considered to be an enemy....with the exception that the student of Zen should have faith ultimately in his intuition or ability. The aim of religion and psychology seems to be social compatibility. Religion does it with emotion and devotion. Psychology rationalizes its worth by protesting that it is worthy of being funded by the politician because it is an explainer of behavior.

I talk of Zen, and Zen says that talk is foolish, especially talk that aims at proof. Zen accepts talk that is aimed at self-understanding. My ideas vary with some concepts of Zen. (I should say that I am not in agreement with all that is written about Zen.) I find some talk, and some attempt at demonstrating common sense to be necessary....especially in the direction of enquirers who are really sincere but who have been used to using the argumentative or logical approach to inter-human communication.

This discussion, as well as the Albigen System, is an attempt, at least, to evaluate current concepts, and to outline a common sense conviction that effort along prejudicial lines is necessary. This is followed by an orderly method of retreating into Reality. We cannot bandy words forever, and not too many of these discussions, or talks, will be given. If what I am about to say rings a bell, then we can work together. If what I say here does not ring a bell, we need not belabor each other further. It is as simple as that.

I am not really attempting to prove as much as I am to find fellows—people of related understanding—for regardless of my stupidity or your wisdom—we cannot profit by any wisdom if we do not have ears that are aligned. Try to listen a bit with your heart.

When you understand or feel with conviction the story of the chained man in Plato's cave, you will know what is needed—a system to learn to run between the raindrops, not an ego trip of intellectual expansion. And when you [read] of Gurdjieff's terms, "robot, mechanical men, and sly man," you will not ever again indulge in a spiritual path that requires devotion or emotional response.

Not only are we robots but we are robots suffering from various illusions, such as illusions about self-definition, illusions about the nature of matter because of qualifications and limitations of the senses, illusions about our thinking processes, and illusions about the cosmos.

Listen to the Heart as Well as the Head

We have a system here....and when anyone speaks of esoteric or religious systems, the idea immediately comes up....do we really need any more?....and will we have only another addition to the many systems that have disappointed mankind with their inadequacy, emotionalism, devotionalism or venality?

We take into consideration first the need for a system, not saying specifically that we need a new system, but that the old system is not working. I was standing in my kitchen talking to Phil X the other day. We have been watching the cat and were wondering if the world ecology could get along without the cat. Then our attention went to mice, and we took note of the manifest helplessness of mice. Mice seemed to be raised for cat food, for snake food, or for food for predators including foxes, coyotes, and even birds. But the cat is the number one contributor to the mortality of mice.

We note that mice have intelligence and personality and when we observe them as intimately as we do the house cat, we may well decide that they need our sympathy as much or more than the cat. But the significant fact about mice is that they seem programmed for destruction and they seem to accept that fate, because when the predator approaches, their programming causes them to freeze up and even have heart attacks from fright. Even the toad has more or a defense against attack, for he has a mechanism for puffing up. Some insects have protective coloring or resemblance to other insects, which protects them. Some animals have offensive odor, or leave a bad taste in the predator's mouth.

Why then do not mice have protection, and why during their specie-life of hundreds or thousands of years have they not been able to come up with group defense like the bees or the ants; creatures seemingly lower on the scale than mice? You would think that ten thousand years of being eaten by cats would cause some genetic concern and planning. And so it is so with the human family. Most of us are little better than lemmings. Gurdjieff noted that we were mechanical men or robots. Plato tells us in his cave story that we cannot even free ourselves from the chains of our programmed nature, and possibly self imposed delusions about reality. This in turn implies that all of the chained man's theological and esoteric air castles are imposed upon him, and his vanity prevents him from honestly admitting that he is tied. And until he realizes that he is tied up, he cannot free himself.

The mouse watches his fellow mice eaten by the cat....and does nothing. Man watches his children committing weird forms of suicide....like lemmings leaping from cliffs out of frustration and meaningless existence....and does nothing about it....except make noble excuses for animal weakness, since even an animal will try to protect its young. When the call goes out for blood, the human parent stands apathetically in the background, and prides himself that he does not miss a day's work while his children are repeatedly decimated. The difference in our civilization and that of the mice may well be expressed in the elaborateness of our rationalization; and this elaborateness is demonstrated in our rituals of dying and burial. The mouse needs no mortician, but we seem to rise above our helplessness in the face of death, and to blot out the anguish that arrives when death for others in our family indicates that we are always unprepared for the most critical event in our existence. We dress our corpses in uniforms and surround them with flowers that they cannot smell, and emit flattery that they cannot hear, and we pretend that they are sleeping.

We talk hypocritically of the good life that they led, and we do not know good from evil. And because at the singular moment of sanity that comes upon us when our dear ones lie dead in front of us, there is a real doubt about our previous mouthing of justice. Because of this, we are dazed and momentarily loosened from our rationalization, religious or otherwise, and we find ourselves hiring some robot in black linen to reassure us of our previous state of religious rationalization. We go home from the funeral and make a few resolutions, on our way to the beer joint, on our way to work to pay for the expensive funeral and to keep up our insurance payments so that we can afford to die ourselves, in a dignified ritualistic way.

I have devoted my life to the study of this lemming-quality in humanity, and to the possibility of self-definition and self-determination for the rodents and the rat-race. It is my protestation that, like the mice, after thousands of years of submitting to death without definition of life, death, or definition for existence—we should start getting our heads together. I have found something that mice and men have in common and that is that when they start breeding or reproducing, they are fairly well lost to any chance of saving themselves. Whether because some mysterious death gene is activated by the reproductive process, or because they are dominated by states of mind that result from the multiple involvements of the parent patterns, they just surrender their own lives to the programmed role of caring for the young until the age with the state takes the youth of the nation as state property (lemming army). And mice and men alike cannot make any investigation of prenatal or post mortem existence—mainly because they keep themselves hypnotized by the processes of pleasure, and the exigencies of living.

This means that adults, despite their maturity, education and experience, do not make seekers. They are generally faith-ists, believers, or else they are futilists and fatalists. The adult or parent likewise is unintuitive. This is a result of years of abuse, discipline, brainwashing, hardening of the arteries, and calluses, which he proudly labels convictions. The adult has already started to die and he has a commensurate state of mind. Any fire that may have had philosophic origins has long been quenched in decades of sexual self-comforting, and any intuition that he may have had as a child has been dissipated by the brutality of life and society. Any coherent state of mind that he may have had in his youth is scattered by the exigencies of, and the involvement in, the drama of social life.

I started my search as a child. At first I made the mistake of going to adults, to say, let us get our heads together. When I was young, most of the young people were obsessed with the idea of hurrying to become adults, to get a handful of marbles so that they could play in the game. Only in the last half dozen years has the phenomena occurred that is conductive to spiritual seeking. The young people have showed some inclination of not being as interested in the marble game, as much as they are in remaining children. And of course, about seventy-five percent of even this generation is also lemmings, in that their lemming-nature is still making them ineffectual as seekers. The instinct to remain as a child is misinterpreted by these child-lemmings who are dying by the thousands because they identify childhood with playing with our toes and nose, and start analyzing our environment—both the manifest environment, and the future unmanifest environment or inevitable direction. We must become as, or remain as, little children in the true sense of the word, if we wish to enter the kingdom of Truth. We must realize that childhood is intuition. Intuition belongs to the child, but the child who becomes involved in playing with marbles, or in pleasure trips, will soon lose his intuition.

Let us get back to systems, and systematic methods of solving the definition and destiny of man—if we wish to be scientific or to employ some methodicity in the evaluation of systems and data to date on the subject of the meaning of life, and post mortem existence. There is a monumental pile of data to evaluate and a monumental scope of evaluation in the study of systems of thinking. This group, this system, is elite. I am proud of elitism. There is no value to seeking if you are just going to sit on your gregariousness and accept herd thinking. We study and labor through the evaluation of many systems—and by a process of retreating from error, we gravitate toward meaningful action. And by gravitate I do not indicate a lazy, passive system.

We work, and work hard at finding and employing methods for keeping the intuition and logic at peak performance, and we prepare for the experience of enlightenment without guesswork. The method of arriving at enlightenment is arrived at by personal experience.

Now I know that challenging previous systems or refusing to practice many older systems in their entirety is not an easy task. Nor is it easy to understand the need to reject previous transportation facilities that failed to bring us to our destiny, unless we get some ideas of the grossness of their inadequacy. To best understand this is to ask questions—and then apply these questions to various religions and see how they are answered by those religions or metaphysical systems. The three most important questions are:

1. Who am I?

2. What is our origin?

3. What is our destiny?

We find that nearly all religions ignore question #1 and rest on the presumption that we are whatever we think we are. They also give inadequate, children's bed-time stories about questions # 2 and 3.

In answer to the three questions, in order to be fair they should provide that which common sense would require, and answers of preference must explain better than other answers. Answers, or explanatory philosophies, fail if there is another answer which is equally valid to common sense—and which explains not only the category in question, but other categories of approach to the three questions, or explains more phenomena than our first answer. Our answers especially fail in this case if the more-embracing answer is not in agreement with our postulation. For it is in this manner that any answer or philosophy reveals itself as only a postulation. Our answers to critical life-defining questions lose value also when it can be decided that their proposal or acceptance is motivated by emotion, that is, fear or desire. Answers also lose value if it can be found that they are rationalizations or merely clever concept-structures. And answers lose still more value if it can be decided that such concept-structures or rationalizations are not purely intellectual but are also of emotional motivation (desire or fear).

To give an example, we may find people extolling a philosophy that vindicates their sexual drive. It is not their sexual drive [per se] but the somatic or sexual pressure that drives them. It is as though such people would relinquish any claim to immortality or any curiosity about who might be being compatible, just to have a sexual outlet. They will be eager to help the theory along. If they do [reflexive behavioral] psychological work, they will be inclined to ignore contrary evidence that might present itself. If they are clever enough to argue, they will summon every author in the library, from Reich to the Marquis de Sade to substantiate their concept structure.

Such books add more undefined words (that is, undefined outside of their text) to our language, and we can spend our lives just listening to this type of answer. Evaluation must end somewhere and action begin. We are basically that which we do. If we continue to play with our reflexes we may never expect to get beyond that rationalization, or find out who is enjoying, or being enjoyed.

Do not let me dissuade you if you feel inclined toward fatalism or hedonism. But do not dissuade us from the right to fry to act and become. Do not come here to convert a path—as we are already decided. I know a fellow, a mathematician, who had become so engrossed in his mathematical problems that he was able to achieve an onanistic orgasm from study-tension. He thought that he had achieved control of his behavior—and announced his method as a behavioral solution. He defined his mathematical relationship as higher math; looked upon himself as a virgin because he did not need to touch anyone, and was superior in his attitude because he was convinced that he needed no one. Yet he hanged himself. We can only guess wiry. Maybe he wanted a child—and did not know the formula.

The Logic of the Albigen System

The logic of the Albigen System is like plotting a functional curve rather than using syllogistic logic. Our evidence ranges from the improbable to the proven—in research in metaphysical or spiritual matters. There are seldom hard, straight lines.

However, our research is along a soft line from observing improbable data, then probable data, then data proven tentatively or along relative terms, and finally proven in absolute terms.

The chief implement or procedure is the use of a law of probability: Where limits of capacity (capacity for proving better and better) are not known, and yet an orderly set of graduations measures a capacity creating a vector—that vector indicates unlimited capacity.

Let us take the human life expectancy, as an example. We have instances of infant deaths, but we also find statistics of people who reach one hundred years of age. This is the base of graduations. The oldest person may live to 105-110 years of age. If a person can live to be 111, then it is possible for another person to be 112, and so on.

We can see the need to apply this law in spiritual matters where the goal is not known. It has to be a vector away from the improbable. This retreat from ignorance is foolproof and capable of being measured, even if such matter forever seems subjective, for it ends in genuine reality. If a man is ignorant and later becomes less ignorant, he has changed, as he has become a bit of something else.

We went from the kite to the airplane. With the gasoline engine we reached a maximum speed of perhaps two or three hundred miles an hour. The potential for speed, thus, seems infinite. We merely had to find another motor to extend the previous limits.

If a man measures his I.Q., he employs a graduated system, and his potential is unlimited. When man, in measuring his capacity [of mind] realizes that all his knowledge is relative, and feels that this relative mind will forever limit his becoming, then perhaps he, like the airplane, needs to develop another faculty.

Ultimate Reality can only be a probability when defined by the relative mind. Capital R Reality was intended to be an ultimate or absolute term, but it cannot be comprehended by mountains of writings or words. It manifestly follows that man will have to find or become another faculty.

Thomas Aquinas said, "The finite mind shall never perceive the infinite." But if the human mind finds a faculty for perceiving the infinite, or if it becomes more infinite in nature, then it can "perceive" the infinite.

It is not enough to develop this faculty. It is also necessary to persist with it until Capital R Reality is reached; and on top of that, it is necessary to bring it back to those with limitations of the relative mind, in some definable, sensible, if not logical terms, so that others can see without the need for logical terms.

The Great Work is to Become, then to translate, then to inspire, and if necessary, to effect transmission.

We must not begin with an acceptance of someone else's transcendental data. We must first find reality as understood by the relative mind. There is false data, and incomplete data. The relative mind has trouble discerning which TV commercials are false.

The relative mind must be perfected first.

If we have no discrimination on the practical level, or have inadequate intuition in mundane matters, then we will be ill-equipped to examine transcendental matters. If we practice life-long rationalizations, procrastinations, and self-delusions, what will happen if we try to tackle something like the expedition into the essence of man?

So we begin with a philosophic preparation for a grand search. We begin with an exploration into the problem of life after death, or no life after death.

The Law of the Paradox

An esoteric student usually is on his particular path for some time before he or she discovers the Law of the Paradoxical Immanence in Things Relative [see The Albigen Papers] but it is still later that he discovers the complexity of the Law of the Paradox. The Law of the Paradox perhaps could be saying that all things are not what they seem. This is a hint that the apparent state of affairs is to a degree illusory, and this indication is important. However, there is more than a hint here. There is a law. In all things relative, the paradox exists. Black is black, but we find it to be colorless, and not black. Colorlessness appears to our reasoning as something like water, or glass—not something opaque.

Then we find we approach a little heaven of understanding when we discover that the hills have become valleys, and the valleys have become hills. We note that that which is near has become far, and that which was far has become near. By this we could mean that man seems to be succeeding with planetary travel, and neglecting that which is under his nose. The discovery of space brings things nearer in time, while the impasse that man meets in his microscopic analysis of matter takes him farther from knowing his essence or the essence of matter. The statement could also mean that space is curved, and relative.

When we talk about hills and valleys, we talk about human experience as well as topography. Good becomes bad, and bad becomes good. Suffering becomes educative, and from it we gain the knowledge of the environment that will bring us peace if not joy, for an equally brief period of time. So that sadness is known only if we know joy, and joy is known only as the exaltation between two valleys of pain and suffering.

And then we discover that joy is not joy, and pain is not pain. They are states of mind, or states of perception. We discover that there is a state of mind in which neither pain or joy is effective. This state, the modem psychologists might sardonically label as "exaltation". But it is there; it is the property of hypnotic subjects in the hysteric state, and it is the property of the saints of history—the victims of all manners of torture.

The Law of the Paradox says that a thing is defined as not being everything included in the definitions of all other things, or their word-symbols. Or, more simply, to define a rat, we find that it is compared with all other things. We never come up with exactly that which a thing is, but rather with all the things which it is not. A rat is not a house, nor a horse, nor a rock, etc. It is a rodent, but it is not a mouse, a squirrel, nor a hundred other rodents. And when we define rodent we find that it is categorized, but that it is not the things inside that category, or outside of it. A definition is an attempt to describe a thing's uniqueness. So that a rat is everything that is not a rat, and yet that is a rat.

We say that a rat is everything that is not a rat, and that is a rat (because the rat is after all not absolutely unique). He is part of a scene, and his definition by implying that which he is not, must also include himself (undefined); and thus the whole symbolic world of experience (words) becomes the definition of rat. He is both that which he is not, and that which he is. And strangely enough there is a step into reality here. By our frustrations in defining, we find that man, like the rat, is defined only by his environment, from which he seems to be inseparable.

However, let us take another step. The Law of the Paradox is paradoxical; this is the second phase of this law. Not only is black, not-black, but it is also black. Things are relative, and in being relative, are seemingly inseparable. But they also have a separate significance. This might sound like unnecessary verbiage until we realize that it must be part of our thinking, both to understand the paradox, and not to legislate our terrestrial lives with futile decisions, or decisions of futility, just because the paradox points toward the illusory nature of our world-experience.

For instance, when we come to the conclusion that good is not good, and bad is not bad, we are defining ethical points with a view looking toward the absolute. And this is where the paradox becomes paradoxical in itself. The paradoxical conclusion or reversal of definition is applied to things in the relative, exigent world of experience. To give further example, a person who sees the new attitude "good is not good, and bad is not bad," as a delightful new interpretation of the practical world experience, may go out and rob and kill, assuring himself that "bad is not bad".

He makes the mistake of forgetting that his vantage point or locus is still in the physical, relative dimension. He makes the mistake of failing to distinguish between the paradox in the relative world of definitions, and the paradox that is apparent when we look backwards from an absolute position. Thus the world is one of illusion, but the statement is, in turn, paradoxical if we try to apply it in all events of temporal or relative nature.

And the claim that good and bad are but two aspects of the same thing should not be applied in all events. Such statements may be valid in some relative or temporal cases, but only when they do not clash with other laws of the same plane or level. To explain this, let us take a man who witnesses many acts which were intended as "good," but which turned out to have the opposite effect. A man gives to a poor person, and the poor person buys bullets with the money. Or the poor man uses it to seduce the Samaritan's wife. Or the government votes money to poor people who use the money to buy revolutionary armament.

The trouble here lies in the definition of good in each particular case. A clergyman may think that he is becoming good by practicing celibacy. Yet the practice of celibacy may give him a complex that may make him monstrous. His monstrous personality may be (and usually is, in such cases) the result of a slow metamorphosis, so that he is not aware of the change. All the while he will think that he is undergoing a metamorphosis in the opposite direction; one approaching some idea of what spiritual development might bring about, as in some invention corresponding to perhaps his own narcissism, and one that will at the same time bring favorable reaction from the public. Also, strangely enough, most clergymen view the personality that brings public acceptance as equivalent to the attitude that God might smile upon. They miss the universal commandment to seek the Truth, and to be true to themselves.

The importance in all this talk about the Paradox as a law, is first to understand that it is there, to recognize it, and to find some way of dealing with the many twists and turns in spiritual searching which are directly related to paradoxical situations. Again, we must return to individual cases. It is because of the qualifying factors of individual cases, that blanket rules and laws of reaction are not possible except in a very general sense. It is for this reason, in turn, that most spiritual seekers look for a personal guide or minister to advise them, since they sense that there must be a possible choice or reactions to daily problems and encounters.

Let us take an extreme case and try to apply some rule of conduct or manner of reaction. Let us take the business of killing and murder. How can we say that "bad is not bad?" Some of the major wars in history have been holy wars. Can we brush these aside and say that our spiritual path is above such participation, because we aim for a path which will evidently bring us to a state in which there is no consideration of any importance given to polarity, or opposites—to a place where today's seeming opposites are one? For one thing, it is because we know that we are still on the path, and consequently have not reached the Absolute, that we must, in Truth, admit that we are on the path, and are still relative creatures, subject to the truths of relative laws.

The Bhagavad-Gita tells us that Arjuna is absolved of all guilt for killing, and is told that he is not running the show of life. God told Gideon to slay quite a few people. Gideon is not the only man in the Old Testament who was (supposedly) instructed by God to kill. Now we can say that the Old Testament is actually a national history, and deny that God, whatever his definition, ever ordered or sanctioned those killings.

We cannot deny that all human action has less significance when viewed from a broader viewpoint. I make this statement because some readers might challenge the term, "from the Absolute viewpoint," and demand that I identify such absoluteness, or prove that I know what the Absolute is. Let us simply note that a bacterium, or germ, in its daily killing of other germs, does not appear guilty of anything except trying to survive. In fact, we might even be grateful for the homicidal habits of certain germs, which keep down diseases in our bodies by eating other germs. Now man is not absolute, but his viewpoint is definitely broader than that of the germ. It is doubtful if the germ knows the role he is playing in the world picture. And taken from the viewpoint of a galaxy, man is much less significant than a microbe is to us. So let us say that in a viewpoint that is even beyond space and time, our terrestrial conduct is not likely to be of the same significance as it is to us now. Such a viewpoint, beyond space and time, may be said to be approaching the absolute viewpoint. So much for nitpicking.

So let us take the case of a galactic germ, or virus, Man. This man has reached satori, or believes himself to be on the path to satori. To him comes a realization that guilt is a sort of human vanity, or at best, a protective mechanism that might be a yardstick to evaluate his conduct so that he will not have trouble with his fellows. The disciple or enlightened one will not have the same reaction to murder as others might. Does this mean that he will go about killing with impunity? Of course not. This man, student, or teacher, may be aware of his essence, but he is still aware of, and accepts as real for a while, his illusory body behind it. So that the discovery by him that the layman's world and its seeming reality is paradoxical, so also is any application of his newly found world view (from the Absolute) paradoxical, if it is applied to the world of illusion, meaning the layman's world view.

A third paradox lies in the fact that even the disciple or enlightened ones must apply the laws of the Absolute, or laws that might simply be labeled Truth, if such laws or state of Being are the Truth. Actually, if there are any laws that might exist about the nature of the Absolute, they would not be utterable with human words. Even an enlightened man must live. He must eat, and his body must function as other bodies, if he wishes to stay here for any length of time. It may be healthier for him to remain a vegetarian, but then for some, health may demand the diet of their parents and ancestors. They may have to kill to eat, but it is not murder.

If a person has children or wards too weak to defend themselves, it is possible that such a disciple or enlightened one might kill to defend against a murderer. This is not murder. The wiser men, of course, will not remain in a position where they would even have to kill to defend themselves, but in an increasingly congested world, there are few inaccessible retreats. In more ancient times, hermits and mystics were able to turn their back on society. In modern times, even the wilderness is overrun. Mankind may be less bloodthirsty, but the forces of adversity (for spiritual growth) are more prevalent because, simply, Kal is represented by millions more people. They may not cut off your head, but they will be instrumental in continual harassments, and disruptions of any group efforts.

We look backwards upon a less congested world and note that the monks of yesterday, yes, the Zen monks too, found it expedient to locate their Ashrams within high walls. In today's world, walls would be needed even more, but monasteries have gone out of style, possibly because of the general attitude. Perhaps the glittering technological progress of this century has so dazzled the eyes of our younger generations, and later trapped the older peoples with its exacting processes of inventions and obsolescence, that neither young nor old ever free themselves long enough to do any contemplative thinking. Man as a whole has become so engrossed in his own toys, that he sees no creator superior to himself. He dreams of taking over even the galaxies. So that the external man is deified, and none will take the time to look within.

So we go back to our objectives, and the manner in which they relate to everyday life. In reference to our environmental problems, those who know nothing about satori, will not know how to achieve it, nor how a student of Zen is supposed to act in society when problems arise. And only after he knows something of the wisdom of Zen will he be able to advise. The advice is written in history—the history of many monasteries, or Ashrams. In today's world, men must work without monasteries to a great degree, by possibly having an Ashram that can serve as a temporary retreat. Most of the real work upon the self must be carried on in society with the student inconspicuous in the pyramid of vegetating humans. To achieve this, their ambitions for spiritual growth must be greater than in ancient times, and their brotherhood must be more closely knit, so that they will remain as working partners despite the distractions of making a living. Such a brotherhood will enable the member to retreat from society when possible, and when it is not possible, it will serve as an invisible shield and an aid-society when events or persons threaten the life of the student, or his family. Thus the student need not find himself indicted for acting alone, and find no need to act at all because of the presence of compassionate brothers.

Richard Rose at age 24
Richard Rose at age 24, three years after he embarked on a celibate path that would last for seven years. He investigated many spiritual systems during this period of his life. This photo was taken six years before his "death" experience.

Short Works

Ways of Seeing

1. Seeing with the erratic function of physical-sense seeing and compensating.

2. Seeing with intuition.

3. Seeing with the triangulation of opposites from the point of compensation.

4. Seeing the source of thought, by observing the thinking process.

Tweeny Town

In Tweeny Town, in Tweeny Town

There lived a boy and maid

And they went up and then went down

But all the children stayed.

In Tweeny Town, in Tweeny Town

These last were free of sorrow,

For they delayed the ups and downs

And looked for them tomorrow.

In Tweeny Town, in Tweeny Town,

There were none rich or tragic,

No age or youth, no chain or crown,

Betweeness was their magic.

Zen

1. Zen bypasses religion—in that it does not teach or proselytize....it puts the mind of the student or searcher in a position to know and answer for himself.

2. The student is attacked so that his preconceptions are exposed. Once his belief structure is exposed he will realize that belief may be a determination of a lazy mind, and/or, that the believing in itself without verification, precludes any correction, or adjustment.

Belief becomes absurd. Hope becomes meaningless. Apparently all of the human faculties fail.

And then a door opens, and that which we see is seen without our physical eyes. The breakthrough is the greatest moment of life.

And with it (the breakthrough) the mind finds a few new faculties. Events can be caused; other people can be affected as in healing, or altering difficulties that were once obstacles which are then seemingly thwarted.

I Have Found

I have found that the enemy of mankind is not ignorance alone but authority without quality.

I have found that the enemy of mankind is blind faith or fanaticism, and is the deification of pleasure as an answer to pressure, or the denial of ultimate survival for daily survival. We have [philosophic] systems that scorn other systems for their dogma or ritual, but which only have a gimmick to offer—and which are careful not to drive away any customers with advice on morality.

One such system is modern psychology. It would pretend itself to be a self-definitive system, but generally denies the value of morality as defined by most major religious movements—and institutes a new morality or amorality based upon the behavior of the majority of people.

I have found that you cannot decide among the many paths, religions, or isms that clamor for the votes of the individual—unless you have intuition.

And intuition cannot be attained without quieting the thoughts and closing the "doors", meaning, shutting off incoming and outgoing spigots of human energy.

Intuition is necessary not only in choosing a path but in each step of the Way. And the Way is a moral manner of living consequently as well as a clear method of thinking—for the two are tied together inexorably.

Before my wife was born

Before my wife was born I dreamed,

In the first dream in color, red were

Her dress and shoes as she tripped down

The country road to the old farm.

I was fifteen.

It was not a good dream.

It ended in horror.

But I met her seventeen years later.

A palmist described her when I was twenty-five.

The pythoness said I would marry a pregnant girl.

She described her and the place we would meet.

I laughed, stung and embarrassed.

I protested that I would never neglect a girl to that extent

Presuming I had cared enough to cause a pregnancy.

But I knew a girl, a sister of a friend,

When she was eight, and ten and sixteen.

And she came in while I was at their house one day, (She was seventeen now.)

She came home dressed in red with shoes to match.

And then I saw her clearly, and clearly

Saw the dream once more—

They were the same.

And I had long forgotten the palmist

And her earnest reading eight years before,

I only knew that I was face to face

With some destiny—

With a fate already transpired.

I knew that neither of us could change

The destiny ahead.

She did not know,

And seemed amused when I told her

That some day I would marry her.

I had a dream last night

February 25, 1974

I had a dream last night. I was at the Krishna farm, the back farm, with Phyllis [Richard's first wife]. We both realized that we had not been there for a while. The place was empty, and actually in worse condition (in the dream) than it has ever been. It was little more than a long shed, being distorted a good bit from its actual condition. The walls seemed to be only bare boards and it was all on one floor. There was a shed-like extension that never existed, but the mind while dreaming seems able to effect these major changes in the picture while retaining beyond a shadow of a doubt the overall identity of the place and the familiar and nostalgic memory.

There was something quite exquisite about the place to me. When I was younger, I had dreamed of making the place my world. I was conscious of my thoughts in the dream. In other words, I knew that I was thinking about the past of my conscious life. I was reminiscing in the dream, looking out the windows over the fields below the house, and thinking to myself that the fond affection I had for the farm would never leave me, nor would I ever lose the pain that results from the check-mating of that selfless type of affection.

Phyllis had been following me about the house, not saying anything. She was younger, about twenty. (When I awakened, the realization that it was not her present personage that talked so friendly and compassionately....if that is the word....alarmed me somewhat, because it meant that I am never aware of my own age in my dreams.) Yet, in the dream, I was aware that time had passed. I was aware that the farm was very old for us. It was like an abandoned place. And that which Phyllis said implied that she knew that I had wanted to live there for a very long time.

She surprised me by keeping close to me, so this meant that I was aware of a break-up—or at least a previous parting of the ways. She was soft and genuinely interested in my affection for the place. And either had developed the same affection for it, or felt it so significant that she wanted to be a part of it. She said, "If you want to, I will move out here with you." That was all that was said, but a tremendous amount of feeling was communicated.

An interchange of messages (as happens in most of my dreams with people) was effected, without any words that were recordable, or retainable as memory. I looked at her a bit startled, because in her entire marriage she had never manifested anything but irritation with the farms. She seemed to be saying that life had become quieter for her, and that she really loved the place. I realized that she was sincere, and we started to tour the house again, planning the remodeling of the rooms, and the interior decorations. All the while we were doing this, I was aware that I was very tired....and that it was very, very late to be committing one's self to a lot of work.

I knew however that we would be there for the rest of our lives, and I was conscious of planning for a slow, little by little, process of remodeling.

The dream must have awakened me. I lay in bed awake although it was the middle of the night. I was aware of the nostalgia now, more strongly than in the dream. I said to myself, "That is what you really want. You are fooling yourself about philosophy and religion. All you want to do, really, is live in that picture of rural peace with a girl of twenty....forever. And like a fool, all through that dream, you never realized that in reality you are a very old man who is not going to do any more planning or romantic nest-building."

And the strange significance of the dream is that the contrary to my waking state of common-sense is true. I am tired, and always weary. I am conscious that there is nothing durable in life....and yet instinctively I go on, building one nest after another....in the form of starting always yet another business, trying to build a race track when I know that I will not have the capacity to strain for its completion, and then moving in another direction thinking I have found an easier nest-building process....or found a lucky formula where work will not be necessary.

One other thing which disturbed me, about the dream, was that at no time were we conscious of the children. It was as if they were either gone, or had not yet been born.

A.M.

2/25/74

[Author's note: This is the only unpublished work to include a precise date. Consequently, Richard Rose was aged 54 when he wrote down this dream. He had already begun giving lectures and starting philosophical groups at Kent State University and the University of Pittsburgh, and was separated from his first wife, Phyllis. Since this account was written in February of 1974, Rose would have been staying in his home in Benwood, where he had the dream.]

Koans: What do you know for sure?

Does a man own a house or does the house own him?

Does a man have power or is he overpowered?

Does a man enjoy or is he consumed?

Does a man really reason....or is it all a complex rationalization?

Does a man rationalize....or is he so programmed?

Can a man learn....that which he really wishes to....by himself alone?

Can a man become?

How shall he know what he should become?

Why build ant hills before knowing what an ant is?

Why do we build conceptual Towers of Babel about human thinking....

Before we know that which thought is?

How can you dare to define thought before knowing the source-cause of all thought, or the essence of thought?

When you describe bouncing....do you describe the striking object,

Or that which is struck?

Can you start thinking?

Can you stop thinking?

Is thought something received or something projected?

Is thought a sort of somatic effluvium?

Do we think, or are we caused to think?

Is negative thinking (as commonly discussed) negative to the man

Or negative to Nature?

Does the brain generate thought like a radio generates the message coming from its speaker?

Is thought limited to the brain?

When a tree bends over does it create wind by waving its branches?

Can theological facts be established by voting?

Is Mary the mother of God or is humanity the mother of God?

Is God determined by victorious armies?

Is virtue established by psychological edict....by ecclesiastical vote....

Or by the requisites of our ultimate essence?

What is sin? Is it an offense against yourself? Is it an offense against your fellow-man? Or is it an offense against God?

Is an offense against God recognized by divine outcry, such as an earthquake or a cosmic catastrophe?

Is it a sin to eat meat?

Are the animals our brothers?

Are they possessed of intelligence and soul?

Do animals sin when they eat other animals? Or are such sinning animals pardoned for keeping the ecology in balance?

Is it wrong to kill except for food?

Do we do wrong by not eating the people we kill?

Who is knowledgeable about good?

Is good that which we desire....or that which is in itself good?

What is the condition of "being good in itself"?

Is evil the child of good....or is it a twin?

If a man drives a horse through a plate glass window, should the man be prosecuted, or is it the horse who should be prosecuted?

If a man robs to feed his children, should we prosecute the man or that which drove him to rob—the children?

If a man rapes a girl, should we prosecute: A. the man, B. the girl who may have tempted him, C. his ancestors for his genetic inheritance of glandular inclination, D. the force that designed mankind? (Don't get the idea that I am condoning rape.)

Can we identify ourselves?

Are we that which we think we are?

Are we the same person that we thought we were at the age of twelve?

Or when we first got married?

Is the spouse or lover the person that convinced you for whom you projected a year or ten years of your life....are they the same person?

If you can fool yourself repeatedly about other people, what are you going to do about subjective inquiry?

Can we know God?

If we cannot determine who is a whore or a pimp from a saint, how are we going to know about any subjective matters?

Who are we?

What is the self?

Is the self a body with a subjective mind?

Is the mind that which is us, or is our self beyond the mind? Can you know the mind or the self adequately if you are unable to communicate that knowledge?

Does knowing require transmission, or does knowing require communication?

In other words, it is like the story of the deaf dog that barks in the empty woods....is there a sound? Sound means audible noise....the truth almost means audible noise, because if there isn't a noise made, how do you know if there is any truth?

Does proof require witnesses?

Proof requires prediction—you have to predict before you prove.

Prediction requires words, and words require meaning, so we get back to it. What is meaning?

What is equality?

Was Sampson equal to Delilah?

Is a baby equal to a dying man?

Are you only half of a plan by virtue of not possessing both sexes?

Is peace of mind more important than global peace, or herd-peace?

Who or what are you?

Are you only a body?

Are you rather a complex organism? Are you a cell colony....a nature-oriented bundle of conditioned reflexes?

Is the brain a monitoring station designed for the organism's indefinite survival?

Or is our body programmed for death (death gene) following procreation?

Is all religion and philosophy merely rationalization emanating from that computer—to answer constant cellular awareness of death?

Or is the universal belief in life after death an intuitive reading from that computer—a reading not completely translatable into computer symbols which are limited?

Is there a soul?

Did it exist before the body or must a soul be developed, grown, or evolved?

Prove the following: mind (as other than somatic awareness), sub-conscious mind, ego, id, superego, chakra, kundalini, tisra til, astral, etheric, causal, desire, aura, halo, ectoplasm, spiritual ear (picks up shabd), conscience, spiritual nectar, philosopher's stone, guardian angel?

What is the correct definition of sanity?

Do our psychologists practice rationalization and make-believe when they substitute behaviorism for a deeper set of factors of human origins, or factors of pre-natal determination—meaning factors that would bring us to a knowledge of the true essence of man?

Do they not procrastinate the search for real causes?

Do they not manifest a possible paranoia in fear that subjective observations and pursuits may find more substantial things about the essence of man?

Which is the worst schizophrenic? Is it the man who talks in tongues? Is it the schizophrenic who is possessed and cannot help himself? Or is it the professionals who insist upon a pretense of utter objectivity about a subjective mind-stuff....and in the process, create volumes of confusing, complex terminology describing nothing better than their own frustrating dichotomy?

Which is worse? The manic-depressives who brood or babble as a result of excessive neural voltage, chemical imbalance, some electrolytic deficiency or toxic condition, or....the pompous alienist who babbles on the witness stand that this or that man should be subjected to ice pick therapy, shock treatment, or the electric chair?

Is the purpose of life—death?

Is the purpose of death really life?

Is there such a thing as life or death without the other?

Should we ask what is the purpose of death?

What is preventing you from getting the goals you set?

What is beauty?

What is power?

Who possesses?

What is being?

We talk and discuss things but never stop to think—are we meaningful?

What is meaning?

What is the meaning to the word "communicate?"

Do people often get an exact opposite idea to the idea that you intend to communicate?

Is meaning conveyed by words?

Can we trust words to convey facts?

How can we convey abstract conceptions?

If we have to do so, we must have a necessary understanding with each person that we are communicating with—their associations and conditioning.

Is it easier to convey ideas to a person that loves you or to whom you love?

Will lovers be inclined to accept too quickly?

Do we reject ideas from repulsive people?

What is the difference between truth arrived at by scientific methods, and truth arrived at through philosophic deductions?

Are philosophic deductions the only way to handle abstract things?

What must truth constitute?

Is there only one type of truth?

Are there gradations of truth?

What is the truth about claims of immortality?

How can we study that?

Should we look for proof or immortality even though evidence for predefined immortality does not give us much hope?

What are some indirect facts or phenomena that point towards immortality?

Where there is smoke there is fire. Where there is desire, there must be some answer to that desire.

Are there entities of another dimension?

Such evidence of other dimensions qualifies life as being not limited to this planet or cosmos. (I use the word planet because that is part of the material universe, but these things may actually live between: between here and someplace else between here and oblivion.)

What is the value of spiritual systems?

We have to take this into account—we have only so many years in our life to investigate spiritual systems. Are some systems sincere?

Are some systems worthwhile?

Why do we belabor ourselves with these questions?

If we don't question our thinking, will we get a surprise very late in life that we were taken in along a certain tangent of thinking and we stayed too long on the tangent?

Where does consciousness stop and another start? Is it with the consciousness of the sperm, the consciousness then of a baby for nine months, or the consciousness of the baby born? How do we trace the life and any consciousness in that train of events?

Is it not vain to presume that man caused man, or to presume that man knows why man is here?

Is it possible that we should look both towards the origins of man and the essence of man to find out the reasons for our complex, incomplete blueprint of ourselves?

What is thought?

Where does thought occur?

How many people have thought about this?

How can people think about it, and not continue to think about it?

If thought travels beyond the head, (such as ESP) what is the vehicle for the travel?

Protoplasm ends and thought begins....where?

Thought ends, and the soul begins....where?

Does the body manufacture subtle essences such as thoughts, or does the body create or possess a receiving mechanism to pick up external essences?

Does the body manufacture thoughts?

Is the body doing anything but picking up thoughts, or is it transmitting thoughts as well?

Would such an external essence be the mind?

Is the mind in this case external to the body?

Are we then a body that is influenced by an external mind, or are we that external mind?

Are we more than the body?

Is thought a faculty of the body, or a poor transmitter from the mind dimension?

Is it possible that the somatic mind is conditioned to believe that it is doing or causing thinking?

Is it possible that during self-observation you can get a feeling that everything is programmed?

Is every effort to escape the programming a trap?

What is the relation between thought and the glands?

Does the billy goat's philosophy change from one of the pleasures of eating weeds to some odor that he catches downwind? Does he build and project a Greta Garbo or Mata Hari? Why is it that his whole philosophy changes?

Why can he give you a hundred reasons for why he is the best rooster in the world?

Does gland energy augment or decrease the thought process?

What are the faculties of the mind?

Which is the forgotten faculty of the mind?

What is duration—what is the relationship between duration and space-time?

In space-time there is seemingly no duration. So then what is duration?

If duration is not the clock, is duration is the sense of time?

How hard does the passing of time impact on us?

What is old, and what is recent?

To see clearly, don't we have to get beyond the mind's ability to project?

Is not the other faculty of the mind a curse? Is not the other faculty....the faculty for the mind to forget?

It is the ability to forget. And is it not built in the individual by Nature?

Doesn't Nature cause you to forget? In a philosophic search, is not the biggest thing you are struggling against the ability to forget?

Does not the woman who bears a child forget all about the pain when the baby is laid upon her lap, and within a year's time is talking about going through hell again?

How can you acquire the happiness of a child?

Why don't we have the happiness of a child?

Where does that happiness go?

Is the child free, and thus happy, because there is no obsession yet?

I Believe

[Editor's note: this essay was written by Rose to be given as a lecture to the public as one uninterrupted talk, before questions and discussion. It follows a format Rose devised where he alternates between two polar opposite points of view, stated as "I Believe You, and You are Lying." While neither points of view throughout this intense and confrontational session hold exclusive truth or falseness, it was Rose's intent to give this talk to shake up people's convictions about what they believe to be true about some of the most inner and intimate subjects, so as to get a person to really think, perhaps for the first time in their life, about what they believe to be true, in the hopes that someone will come to the realization that they need to examine not only their thinking, but their overall direction in life.]

I Believe You.

Where do you go after death? An old man or woman looks dead before they die. A person who dies in old age is for all eternity—a dying person. An old man or woman has a smell which shall stay with them for all eternity. An old person forgets or loses his mind. He or she is forgotten if not hated by his or her children and friends before they die. Eternity is filled with babies whose diapers are full.

Eternity is filled with stench and ugliness. Eternity is filled with rotting memories that rot for all eternity. Eternity, if it possessed forms, is filled with forms that are hideous and hungry. Eternity has a rotten heaven, filled with forms that are facts—gruesome facts. Eternity, like God, is perfect—man is increasingly rotten and imperfect by man's standards.

If, in Eternity, you lost corruption and regained perfection of form, would you recognize yourself? The brain will rot and with it your thoughts. A corpse leaves behind weeping children who know that they are waiting to become rotten corpses. A baby brings a moment of joy and years of recrimination. He who dies in a sewer is reluctantly buried by even those who loved him.

When your skin is gone, beauty and love are gone. Mucous membrane is most unstable, being quick to decay—so is love that lived for the mucous membrane. Beautiful are eyes—but only while living.

You are Lying.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. After death you become perfection. An old man or woman loses the ugly ego of Vanity. An old man or woman, by dying, loses that vanity for all Eternity—a more perfect Being. The body and all its characteristics remains discarded—the Soul is FREE.

Death brings the mind to an unqualified state. When the body goes, emotion and lust also go. Those who were ever loved are never forgotten. They become eternal symbols of love in our mind. In Eternity, all adults are babies, and all babies are mature.

Unpleasant experiences in this life give way before an eternal awareness if Is-ness. In Eternity, there is no need for memories because All is at all times. Beauty is formlessness because form involves change and time, and these things involve suffering.

Heaven created by man is ugly and rotten. Heaven as it Is, is our Self. You will recognize everyone in heaven because you will FIND YOUR SELF. The brain and the body will disappear—like dreams—to be forgotten for a brighter day.

A corpse weeps for its dead children. A baby is an angel descending; an old man or woman dying is an angel released.

No one Dies anywhere.

When you no longer see beauty in your skin, you may awaken to other beauty, i.e. Reality. When you die, the world disappears, and those things we believed in the most are the first to go.

The beauty of your eyes is Eternal.

I Believe You.

Thoughts are not related to the body. The brain is the mind. Memory is not related to the brain. The mind is nothing but collected thoughts. Not even an angel can read our thoughts. Thoughts are eternal.

You Are Lying.

Thoughts affect the glands. The mind is a dimension in itself. When the brain is injured we can suffer amnesia. The mind is the place from which all thoughts and even all form is projected. Many people prove that they can read thoughts [minds]. Most thoughts are forgotten in a few hours.

I Believe You.

We are individuals with free will. We can choose our thoughts. We can develop wisdom by concentration. We can choose our goals. We can bend a spoon with our concentration. We can change the color of our hair by concentration. We can heal people by divine help.

You are Lying.

We are all a part of God and so we are not individuals. We cannot choose our parents and we think like our parents, so we cannot choose our thoughts. We cannot even choose a topic for concentration. We cannot choose to desire, and desire chooses goals. We can bend spoons but do not know who is bending the spoon, nor can we choose the thought that prompted us to concentrate. We can hypnotize our self about colors. We can heal by projecting energy.

I Believe You.

The only immortality is memory of self. If the self dies, all is oblivion. To prepare for more consciousness after death, we must expand our mind now. An old man remembers childhood incidents. Memory cannot be destroyed.

We can remember the time and place of incidents. We cannot remember things we have never seen. Remembering is bringing forward things experienced in the past, or in the mind.

You Are Lying.

If a man has childhood acts before his manhood is upon him, what shall he remember hence? The self must die to exist in Real Awareness. The mind must die to find awareness of Essence.

An old person remembers childhood events largely through accidental coordination, and his memory is in doubt as to its accuracy because he confuses dream and imagined acts as being real.

Memory, like vapor, cannot be attacked—it just melts when heat or vitality goes. We cannot remember (or know) duration. The mind conjures up things never seen in the mind.

There is no past—rememberings are visits to a dimension.

I Believe You.

We can do nothing. Each thought causes the next one. Wisdom is vanity. Our goals are predestined. We do not bend our own fingers much less spoons. Healing is guessing the time of an inevitable recovery.

You are Lying.

We can desire to choose, which may come by desiring to be able to choose and—if we desire to choose we can become aware of the zone in which our choosing is limited.

Our essence may cause thoughts if we desire to contact our essence—and even if our essence causes that desire too, we cannot say that thought is caused only by preceding thoughts.

The search for essence must be preceded by wisdom—a wisdom which would involve a search for relative means or help to find absolute essence. If God or the Absolute is our goal we would welcome predestination.

Most of our physical actions result from programmed decisions, which the computer may decide and carry out, to the amazement of our conscious umpire ego even.

Healing is the transfer of neural energy.

I Believe You.

The body does the thinking, which is simply reaction. Thought is an attribute of the soul. Thought travels on the ether. Thought travels on electrons. A synapse is a relay point that transmits thoughts from nerve-flesh to the ether. The brain is like a coil activated by neural energy.

You Are Lying.

The body does not react—the computer reacts. The soul and the mind are not the same. Thought relates to the mundane mind. The mundane mind or individual mind is like a finger of the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind is the dimension we see into, or project images in its matrix or medium. A synapse is a tension point or point where neural energy becomes mental energy. The brain is a coil of neural energy.

I Believe You.

To receive spiritual energy or mental energy we must sit quietly. To receive neural energy you should meditate. To develop somatic energy you should fast or go on a special diet. We should never transmute energy. All energy comes from food.

You Are Lying.

To transmute neural energy into mental energy you must not dream, or sit too quietly, be should even walk, if walking keeps the attention on the subject. To transmute somatic energy into neural energy—you should concentrate and exercise. To develop somatic energy you should eat whatever is nutritious, and exercise enough to oxidize the food. The glands have the heaviest concentration of ready energy and the key is to know how to transmute that energy. We can get valuable energy from other people.

I Believe You.

Man is a robot. There is no hope for immortality. Man can learn only that which he is programmed to learn. All spiritual teachers are fakes, crooks, or ego-maniacs. If there is a true method of understanding the self, it is so complex that we cannot cope with it. The finite mind will never perceive the infinite.

You Are Lying.

Man is mechanical but if he knows it, he can study it and counter it. There is no hope for mortality. The physical things change. Knowledge of immortality must come from an experience of immortality. A man's program may be interrupted and affected by transmission. The fact that most spiritual teachers are fakes does not make it a fact that all are fakes. It does discourage lazy and rationalizing minds from looking farther and looking with greater intuition.

The Truth is simple. Real wisdom should be simplified. The finite mind can become less finite—meaning it can approach the Absolute.

I Believe You.

Good thinking is what people approve of. Bad thinking is what people avoid. Healthy thinking is survival thinking, aimed mainly at social acceptability. Social thinking is acceptance of our place allowed us by society. Sane thinking is that mental attitude decided by human average reactions to given situations. Insane thinking therefore is minority reactions. Sanity is the automatic property of the majority. Insanity is the unlucky quality of the minority.

I Think You are Lying.

Good thinking is that which brings you closer to Real Meaning.

Point of Reference

In order to get beyond loose speculation, and to attempt to be orderly if not scientific in our understanding, we must begin all study of the item under scrutiny with a point of reference. For instance, the point of reference in the study of chemistry (the study of the substance of matter) was the atom. It was a very good point of reference because everything in the universe seemed to be composed of atoms, and the atom seemed to be the indivisible and smallest unit of matter.

However, in time the chemists and physicists discovered that there was definitely something smaller than an atom. After considerable speculation, the point of reference shifted from the atom to the electron, the proton and the neutron. And with this new shift came a new understanding of matter as was previously known. With it came the speculation that matter in its smallest form might well be electricity, and not the solid mass which is visible to our senses, and which is seemingly inert such as a bar of iron.

Thus the definition of matter—the essence of matter—changes and improves, and we can agree that the atom as the first postulate for that definition was as complete as it could have been at that time.

This is not the case with other scientists and pseudoscientific systems of analysis and definition. And nowhere is the violation of true radical definition more blatant than in the most precious research of man—the study of the human mind which is called psychology or psychiatry.

To discover the nature or essence of eggs, we do not spend all our tune studying the egg carton. The tendency to limit psychological research to the environment of the mind, which was everything from the universe down to the human body, smells of organized quackery. Simple sensory observation will tell us that the body is not the mind. In death or in a coma, the body is present, but the mind is gone. Yet in the case of the coma, the mind returns with self-evidence that it was, during the coma, a thing apart.

To use the body as a point of reference for the mind is only an easy way out for the alienist. To deny individual activity by defining man as reflexive body without any other than reflexive will, is an oversimplification. The behaviorist wishes to pose with authoritative definitions for all mental phenomena, so he chooses to deny the existence of a mental quantum which he cannot observe with his senses.

We do not learn too much about the essence of eggs by refusing to look beyond the shell. To know the inhabitant of the shell, we must also wait until the occupant comes out. If we force him out, or even help him out, we may affect his definition, or the state of his essence. We cannot learn about life from dissection, even though we collect data on protoplasmic analysis which will tell us more intricately of the mechanics of protoplasm.

The point of reference for life is not protoplasm.

A point of reference must be defined. I define a point of reference as a locus from which it is possible to examine a phenomenon with the greatest potential for completely understanding that phenomenon.

So that the point of reference in chemistry is the sub-atom particle and a true understanding of them–meaning electrons, neutrons and protons. The behavior of atoms can be best understood from a view from these particles, rather than from a bar of iron.

The point of reference for electricity is the electron. The point of reference for electrons may be "force fields" but this is only speculation the point of reference and origin of "force-fields" may be will, but that is speculation. But while these points are speculation, sometimes speculation turns out to be an accurate guess, or at least a more plausible and reasonable evaluation of a given, improperly explained phenomena.

We cannot start with absolute knowledge. We begin by speculation, and where there is no idea of that which might explain the phenomenon, we still will have better and more pointed speculation if we remain conscious of the needed point of reference.

If we take the point of reference in regard to time we may take the second as the smallest unit of time. This would be wrong. The point of reference for time is the sun (until a better understanding of more infinite Time is understood).

The sun sits out there and hardly moves, except across space with its satellites. Our turning is measured by the turning away from and into the view of the sun. This twenty-four hour rotation is 86,400 seconds, or a second is one-eighty six thousand, four hundredth of a turning.

The turning is not the point of reference but the stationary object (sun) which measures the time of the wheel (earth) is like an indicator on a vertical gambling wheel.

If the earth did not rotate around the sun we would not be aware of passing years. And if it did not tilt and wobble on its axis, we would not be aware of changing seasons which helps us to further be aware of a 365 day cycle, or year. The yearly tilt does not cause the seasons—the sun causes the seasons.

With more advanced systems of measuring light with time, and time with light, we might come to understand that TIME is the basic point of reference for LIGHT and LIGHT is the point reference for TIME.

Thus we begin with elementary observation of time and source of light, or the sun and evolve with laws governing all light including that which is produced by human technology.

We move to a study of life. The point of reference that is best is that which relates to consciousness of life. Observing dead protoplasm with a scalpel yields mostly data on dead tissue. We can dissect and use powerful microscopes and learn the chemical compositions of tissue samples which were previously too subtle to survive the surgical skills of the previous century, but we still have not touched on the most important principle of protoplasm. We need to know the nature of that which sustains the delicate fluids and tissues. We need to know about life.

Let us go back to the definition. What is the locus which will provide us with the best possible understanding of life? For each of us it is the Self, capitalized to indicate it is that inner "self" which can observe the body-self and at the same time watch the process of subjective characteristics such as life and mind.

The viewer is not the view. The act of viewing or "observing" automatically places our consciousness in a position anterior to the process or thing observed. The viewer, even when viewing his body, is superior and is a point of reference to that which is viewed and that which is viewed becomes peripheral, objective and understood with maximum clarity by the viewer.

The viewer is the Ultimate Self. From this point of reference the Self examines life. The ancient sages were not fabricating platitudes when they advised “First know Thyself."

On Illusion

On the Illusion Experienced when Traveling

There is an experience reached in traveling that is a sort of magic produced by successfully eluding the drabness and commonplace association of the place in which we live and work, the release from which causes the mind to project nothing but positive excellence upon the new panorama or vacation-spot.

I remember once coming into El Paso at night, and another time leaving Albuquerque at dawn. In the clear desert air, the cities' lights were like a million red and green stars twinkling with the heating or cooling of the earth. At Albuquerque, we stopped on the grade west of the city and took pictures, as the sun rose and dimmed the many lights. The city looked enchanted to a point where the viewer nearly made decisions that it would be a nice place to come to retire.

However, when we turned on the car radio we discovered that Albuquerque possessed a magic that was different from that which we had projected upon it. We heard that there had been five murders over the weekend. The announcer was interviewing the county sheriff, who made the remark that everyone in the town was armed.

How many times have you entered some village, and found it to appear so quiet and restful that it posed a mystery as to how the inhabitants made a living. There seemed to be no industry, and very little business except for the necessary stores and gas stations. Some of these towns have a public square cooled by ancient oaks or willows.

I made it my project to stop in some of these small towns and get the real state of affairs. Most of them were retirement towns, centered in an agricultural region. I found an old man in one of these, who knew everyone in town, and most of their history.

He pointed to an amiable woman of perhaps sixty years of age. She was walking her dog. She had lost her husband twenty years ago in the war. Her mother lived in a house nearby, also alone. The latter was over eighty. Both had dogs and no husbands, and it seemed that they could not share the same house because their dogs could not get along.

A man of forty lived with his mother and father, and he worked in a nearby town. He had spent nearly all his youth in prison. Another house contained an old lady and a very young boy. She was his grandmother, and his father was in prison on a morals charge. The boy's mother had died shortly after his birth.

I listened to story after story of the natives. The more affluent families all were wrapped up in some type of scandal or other. The families of the hard working, lower class had a history of drunkenness and violent deaths. The public square which looked so peacefully enduring had been used in the old days for public festivals and public hangings.

They can write poetry and popular musical hits about Paris, but I can never be excited about that city, because I have read the history of the French Revolution. To me, Paris is the "Place de Grève" and the guillotine. But to a young person who has not been troubled by reading history, it may be an enchanting place.

When I pass a beautiful farm, nestled in the hills, I am less likely to attach serenity to it, for I will remember one like it, owned by a spinster who married a younger man just before she died in a fire at the farm. The younger man remarried and raised children who became prominent in the community.

On the Illusory Beauty of Nature

We live in a sardine can. We learn to adjust to it, but never so completely that we do not yearn to run from it all into some idyllic scene where friction and compression are non-existent.

So that when we first visit a desert, and are looking at it from a paved road, it will appear to us as a magical retreat. Its barren rocks have little on them but color, so we project magic and quality into that color. The truth is that we dare do little but stand on the safety of the paved road and admire the prospects of unlimited freedom. The beautiful deserts contain the bones of many men, some very recent additions of bones, in fact, from people who have become stranded in modern automobiles. Not only is there heat and thirst on the desert, but the rattlesnake has a habit of burying in the sand to avoid the heat or cold, and his bite can certainly shorten the steps of the man who steps on his bed.

We might visit more protected natural retreats, where water is plentiful and wildlife controlled. We can, in other words, go down to a park and imagine that we are free there. We can sit in the shade of a tree and imagine it to be paradise. The squirrels are hopping gracefully across the grass. Birds are chirping, and the chirping we interpret as singing. Because Spring has come, they are probably in love, and are singing about it. Two of them fly along together and flutter, face to face now, almost vertically, and seem to kiss each other. On the tree limbs, a pair of robins is making shrill, appealing noises to a nest of fledglings that seem reluctant to leave their cozy nest.

If things are quiet, that is, if we are sufficiently distant from the roar of traffic and industry, we may hear a soft hum in the leaves. If it is the right time of the year we may enjoy the orchestrations of the cicadas. The soft hum is something else. It is soothing, and yet disturbing. It is the noise that comes into the classroom when the teacher finds it warm enough to open the windows. It is a restless call of nature, and something in the genes of every child responds to it....and perhaps quite a few adults. It calls to the child to rush out to the new grass, where among the soft clumps, he might find magical animals and insects that have been hiding from him.

If we are on a farm, at this time of the year, we may see pastures dotted with drowsy, new-born calves, or lambs. If we are lucky we may catch a glimpse of a fawn with its mother. The chickens will be hatching, and we will see hens with their brood, uttering a new language otherwise not heard from her. The chicken-coop will resound with exuberant cackling, and on some point of vantage, the rooster will echo his sentiment about the event.

But this scene just depicted is not something seen, but something projected. We attach our own belief to that which we witness. The bird that sang in the gloaming may not have been singing. For all we know they may be cursing—each other, or mankind—or the cat.

The two birds that seem to kiss each other while trying to fly vertically were probably fighting. The flight of the swallow is not an aerial ballet, but it may be a path caused by wing-limitations of the bird, or by a need to forage in a particular manner.

We think that the birds are singing....and even associate with their singing the indulgence by God in man's need for entertainment. God created the birds to minister unto man!

So that man can have this natural music, three out of four baby birds shall be eaten by predators, some before they learn to fly. In order to raise their fledgling, the parent birds must capture and bring to the nest at least one insect a day to each of the young. The parents likewise are picking up their share of protein each day.

We begin to get another explanation for this quasi-joyful hymn in the meadow. Some of it is mechanical, as in the case of the cicada. It may be largely mechanical, I do not know. By mechanical I mean that noises are made by friction of legs or wings, and it is not vocal. So that much of the "joyful" noises may well be the whirring of drilling of flying equipment—or it may be screaming.

Our hearts may now bleed for the short life of the cicada in the sun....and the long harrowing existence from the egg in the tree limb, down to the roots, and finally fighting his way up through the soil seventeen years later—for a few short days of drilling and screaming, before he faints and falls to the ground.

We may note here, in passing, that it is extremely unlikely that the cicada deliberately planned that life cycle. We can see some relentless, external form of engineering.

We turn again to insects and worms. Are they happy little creatures who lead idyllic lives, to be eaten by predators only at the correct age when cancer, or arthritis, or some other debilitation makes life impossible for them? On the other hand, it would seem that specie is important to Nature, not the individual.

The screams of the individual do not affect Nature. The worm is a predator also, as is the wasp, spider, praying mantis, ant and millions of other small life-forms. The wasp eats the spider and vice-versa if there is a chance. The spider eats the spider and some eat the male after copulation.

The praying mantis uses the male up in the same manner.

The worm momentarily gets our sympathy because he leads a lowly life and does not seem to bother anyone. He is dragged forth by bird, mole, and hog....not to mention the fisherman. But the worm in his turn lives on organic matter. It lives on thousands of small protozoa or bacteria.

The dance of life is really a dance of death. It does not matter so much that it is—if there is some Real or divine aim behind all the carnage—but it does matter that we refuse to see the true state of affairs, or if we project colors and music that are not part of the battlefield scene.

The Projection of Personality

It is evident that Nature calls little about the immolation of the individual, or the annihilation of his personality. We like to look upon our self as a unique individual. Somehow, there is no chance at individual immortality if there is no such thing as individual-ness. We identify our self as being separate. No two humans look alike, and we take comfort in the hope that we have consequently been created with marked separateness because we are separate in soul as well. It is manifestly incomprehensible that our essence should not be separate and unique, because the body appears to be so separate and unique. Besides that, it appears to us that we feel a difference. We think different thoughts, and respond differently to similar suggestions.

Not only do we, as individuals, accept that we have a distinct personality, but all closely related humans and animals seem to accept that we have such and such a personality. Animals seem to recognize the personality of other animals. I mention this because it may be evident by now that an inference might be made that personality is also not real, but projected. And while we may come to accept that human personality may be an agreed-upon projected and accepted way of pretending about who we are, it seems unlikely that an animal would be able to join in the pretence, because of the language barrier.

A dog, pet, or animal that lives close to humans reacts at times in a way that indicates that the animal is aware of our affection. Some animals have accepted the individual personality status of other animals, and this is witnessed when a predator suckles or tolerates the presence of the young of a species which might well be its food supply.

The cat is killed by dogs, yet dogs have been known to adopt kittens. How much of this happens in the wild state is not know. A downy bird is simply a meal for the predator, unless we wish to consider that the downy bird is a distinct being of personality. Personality would be defined here as that distinctness or uniqueness. A sick downy bird would not have the same personality as the healthy and alert downy bird.

In our own projected estimate of the working of Nature, we see very little wrong with a predator eating a sick baby bird. It is going to die anyhow, and in the mouth of the predator, it will die quickly. This is our projected idea, however, and it is not commensurate with a similar idea of human disposal for the [human] sick. We would not feed our sick or dying babies to a wolf or throw it [them] to the sharks.

Is it possible that for a short while, we see a fraction of the scheme of Nature, viewing momentarily the insignificance of the sick bird because we do not project our self into the sick bird? The fluffy healthy kitten or downy bird might remind us of babies and maternal concern. Healthiness may remind us of the innocence of our own babies....and we may be shocked to see them eaten....having assured our self that God has some special respect for innocence.

It is possible that animal babies (which are healthy) are spared by humans and a few animals because those are the only beings capable or unsteady enough to be able to project maternal, protective feelings upon the young of another species. It is true that innocence may be a strong deterrent, but it is also possible that innocence is programmed for the very young to delay their extermination by creating through the appearance of innocence a state of mind in the predator. In this case, the projection would still be there, but it would fit into the general scheme or programming of Nature, for the predator to react with inhibition in some instances.

This should not be construed to imply that innocence is a projection alone, and is therefore something false to be cast aside. We will lose it soon enough, and it should not be slow in seeing its value while we still struggle in the jungle.

We are stuck in this projected world, and until we are completely free, we have to barter with accepted (projected) values. It is understandable that if this world were entirely different from that which is now perceived, and the beings in it were creatures of greater capacity for imagination and projection than for uniqueness and accurate feeling or experiencing, then reality might frighten us into insanity if we came face to face with an altered state of things all at once.

When we realize that we project a personality on to certain animals, we can realize that we project a personality upon certain humans to a greater degree than to other humans. Our babies seem to have more personality than do the babies of most other people. When we look at the babies of other people which are Mongoloid [Down's Syndrome] or sick, we put on an affectation of mercy, and announce that the poor THING is better off dead.

We can see that while much of the accepted personality of other people is a projection, it is accepted in grade [?] for accepting ours. We can also see that we are vaguely conscious of the fact that it is an unreal measurement, because we are all trying to reinforce our own personality while demanding corrections in the personality of others, and trying subtly to minimize the uniqueness of other people and their babies.

We often talk about kidding our self. Young people do not admit it as readily as older people. In this admission, however late it comes, there is automatically the realization of projection. The parents project upon the child a personality of perhaps sweetness and pliability. For a few years, the child acts out this projection. When it interferes with his growing feelings of aggression, and when it draws unhappy responses from older children, he is apt to look upon his previous self as being babified.

He likes to call this change "maturing". However, succeeding stages of enlightenment about his selves give no hope of a final stage of maturity. Even as an old man, his public behavior manifests a plea for acceptance as being a particular actor whose act is real.

When a young man is fully grown and at the peak of his virility, he looks upon himself as being a peak of perfection. He looks both ways, backward upon what he concludes to be childish immaturity, and forward upon inescapable immaturity in senility. He never views himself as the character which De Ropp labels the "cock on the dunghill".

To him, youth is king. Everyone reinforces this concept for him because some envy him, some wish to share his sexuality, and some fear his strength. The younger boys envy him, and this becomes a form of worship. Girls will place a value on him, if he is handsome, and every man can be handsome to some girl. Some older men may envy him, and other older men may fear him, but they may see his immaturity. People may even flatter him, increase his self-estimate, while really having contempt for his vanity.

This rejection of the personality which the rooster projects and which is reinforced by a majority of people shows that certain people see through it. In later years, the rooster himself will admit that he was vain and false.

So we say that the projected personality was not the real man. He was only posing as a rooster, while all the time underneath somewhere, there was really a nice fellow. But my next question is, "What then is the appearance of this nice fellow underneath?"

Perhaps we noticed that when this rooster was on top, that is, when in a position of power, he did not bully everyone. He showed kindness towards old ladies and children. He no longer tortured little animals as he did as a child. He joined the volunteer fire department, or the marines. If he happened to suffer defeat from the hands of a stronger rooster, he humbly bowed his bloody beak, and extended the hand of friendship to his adversary. Still, we can see that much of the seemingly extroverted gestures are either protection for the person, or indirect exhibitions of roosterism. A rooster is tall, but one who shows his benevolence to children, is projected by society as being taller. So that even in defeat, he can manifest tallness of one sort or another, and he is in each case, reinforced by the projections of society as a whole.

Our clothing is one mode of projecting a false personality. Society projects values upon people who wear uniforms. With the proper garb, perverts may be made to look like priests, and perverted priests may hide the facets of real impulses. I cannot envision the populace kissing the ring of the pope if he were sitting naked in a nightclub.

We are impressed by titles, and letters before the name and letters after the name. As we project perfection to the rooster, we project perfection and excellence upon the female if she is young and fertile.

But where does this personality finally end? What part of man that we see as our self, or as others, is really his unique and indestructible self? When a man grows older and looks back upon that which he considers to be the inadequate rooster days of his youth, he will appear to have a different personality.

His bearing will be more humble, more dignified, and possibly his language will be more self-effacing. This change is not the emergence of a more genuine person. As man grows weaker, he must grow more clever. His humility will be a studied trait; brought on by the profit that it will reap for him in society. His dignified pose will be a new demand, and has with it the new stance of a man of consideration for others, but at the same time, a man who will insist upon being treated in a certain way. He may crack jokes or tell stories of his youth which seem to be self-belittling, but this maneuver is still to his profit. He is showing how tall he is, or can be, all the while that he is pretending to think very little of himself.

As the man grows still older, his weakness will bring with it a certain courage. And with the courage which is borne out of indifference from suffering and weariness, will follow grouchiness and a lack of many former poses. He drops his humble pose, and, his facility for irritation robs him of much of his dignity. He is angry with the world and the poses of the many people there. He is no longer self-effacing because he has, in reality, lost most of his vanity—in most cases, that is.

But he still has not been reduced to a final personality. He may have lost the ego for power, and the urge toward sight-seeing and being a gourmet. He may even have become indifferent towards sex, so that we may be able to view the personality of a man who finds sex to be none of the facets of his personality. He, even if he is very old, will still hold on to several egos. One is the desire to be an historic man. He still longs to leave footprints in the sands of time. Another is the will to live. He rarely gives up the will to live, except when his body can no longer tolerate or support life.

Summary List of Illusions

1. That words convey more meaning than confusion.

2. That the designing of modern dress, vehicles, and dwellings is more responsive to cultural progress and not to vanity.

3. That we shall ever have more than a desire for justice.

4. That humans some day can be proven equal.

5. That public officials are honest or trustworthy.

6. That there exists private ownership in a government that recognizes "eminent domain".

7. That we can have both increased security and increased freedom.

8. That democracy is infallible, and is not subject to corrosion.

9. That we may be able to find philosophic Truth, while refusing to tell the truth or to admit the truth in elementary, social matters.

10. That "Law by Precedent" is just, or applicable, or cognizant of the factors of new cases.

11. That either our health or our children are our own.

12. That Truth may be determined by the vote of the majority.

13. That the Supreme Court can define abstract terms.

14. That psychological truths may be found by the evaluation of physical behavior while ignoring psychic behavior, and without first defining essence.

The Mind

Mind is the work-shop of the mystic, the student of Zen, the occultist, as well as the psychologist. (As gathered from Chapter Two [?] I would guess that the first three would be more qualified, at least at this writing, to lay claim to clarity in language that would portray the mind.) We are still dealing with words, even though the approach of the transcendentalist is direct rather than objective, and we still must labor with definitions.

The reader can reject the whole concept if he wishes, since the object of this book is to encourage the reader to find things out for himself. It may be that this concept will, at least, simplify rather than add to the confusion that has resulted from trying to understand the mind.

Modern psychologists, meaning even those who go back to the turn of the [20th] century, have been busy trying to identify everything but the mind. They have created a vast new Babel in their pretence at being Scientific and "functional".

While some of the early psychologists tried to qualify the mind by naming the various qualities of the mind, the present-day books on psychology cleverly avoid any listing of mental qualities, but confine themselves to various phases of behaviorism. They do not start from the bottom, or try to get to the essence of mind, as the science Physics does with the essence of matter. Instead they begin almost anywhere, and carry on experiments which are basically productive of statistics on reactions, rather than definitions of mental processes.

The age old controversy over whether the mind and the body were separate or not, is not even touched. In fact, the more you read of modern psychology, the more you will begin to imagine that there is no mind at all, but rather protoplasmic reactions.

There is of course a certain absurdity about trying to define the mind by observing the reaction patterns or by introspection. However, doing nothing is just as absurd. And we must continue to try to understand the mind, and to try to find words or diagrams to bring forward even simpler and clearer pictures of the mind's strange dimension.

Many of the earlier authorities who felt obliged to define their work came up with several compartments, and seven to nine attributes of the mind. These attributes in some cases overlapped each other, and in some cases were downright absurd. Some attributes as Imagination, Will, Intellect, and even Love were listed. For brain compartments, we learned a new one with each new author: Conscious, and sub-conscious compartments, the Ego, the Id, the Super Ego, the Super-Conscious, the Un-Conscious, the Libido.

When we try to understand the mind by believing first all of the terminology created to date, we are faced with cliff-hanging uncertainty. We must approach the subject in a simple manner, until we are able to experience the mind directly....which is the correct way to study it.

We experience two minds—the individual mind and the unmanifested Mind-Stuff.

The individual mind is individual in appearance only, but we will call it that, when we refer to the mind of personal observation.

This mind has four apparent qualities or attributes: Perception, Memory, Reaction, and Projection. All human actions are contained in these four. We perceive, we retain, we react, and we project. We are like a camera that takes pictures, and projects pictures aided by Light.

Now you will immediately say, "But do we not think? Or do we not will to do certain things?" The truth of the matter is that we do not perceive, or remember, or really act or react by virtue of will or volition. The Will is in itself, only a reaction.

Mind Diagrams

Mind Diagrams
Individual Mind (as drawn by Richard Rose)

Mn= memories, P = percept, R = reaction, Pr = projection

For symbols, we will say that perception is "P" The mind is represented as a field represented by a circle. Memory is represented as "M". Reaction is represented as "R", or a two way vector arrow (an arrow pointed in both directions.) Projection is "Pr".

The great motivating factors of man are not attributes, but are external. They are curiosity and desire implanted in both man and amoeba. Without them, all flesh would precipitate into slime or solids.

We do not begin life willfully, nor live it willfully, until we are able to find out the limits of our bondage. When we find out if we are able to do anything on our own, then it is possible to try to enlarge that ability.

Looking at life as a new-born baby, we try to visualize the first thought. The first thought was preceded by a perception to inspire the reaction because thought is little more than reaction.

The first "P" became automatically the first "M" it recorded. Still there was no thought. But the second "P" or incoming vector influencing the first recorded "M", caused the first reaction. So that the first thought may have made little impression on the consciousness of the baby.

We now use the symbols "P, M, R, Pr" to represent a single of each, and use the symbols "Pn, Mn, Rn, and Pr n" to represent the accumulations of each that are the history of our experience.

Thus the individual mind is somewhat automatic. A "P" automatically reacts upon the multiple "M" field, and this reaction in turn, while being only an automatic process, still will explain much of our thoughts. Likewise, the significance that a Reaction or thought will have, will depend on the violence or sharpness of incoming Percepts. A percept, such as a blow, will possess considerable voltage, and stir up perhaps all of the memory bank "Mn". Likewise, another percept coming in later may only be the symbol of the blow, but will likewise stir up nearly the same amount of voltage and memories.

The Reaction of memories upon memories is imagination.

The Reaction of Reactions to Reactions is awareness—of the limited mind alone....not the Unmanifested Mind.

The Reaction to curiosity (an external influence) is action.

The Reaction to desire (an external influence, or implant) is pleasure, and movement toward increased pleasure, whether that pleasure be brought about by sex, or the digestion of food, or other senses.

We see that imagination is not an attribute in itself, but merely a form of Reaction.

Will is but a particular Reaction to various Reactions and Percepts. A gestalt is but the Reaction to or by a familiar pattern within the Memory.

A State of Mind is a memory-and-reaction pattern that we identify as being valid, even though hours or days later we may consider it invalid, depending upon the voltage of a strong percept that is able to place the prior state of mind in a position of lesser importance.

The behavior of man becomes complex, with the increasing complexity of the interaction of Percepts, Memories, Reactions and the ever-present "implants" which being external might be labeled as Percepts except for the lack of a percept to be motivating. An "implant" moves us, and is organic, chromosomic, or transcendental. An implant causes Percepts.

Telepathy received is still perception. Telepathy transmitted is projection. The Percepts are not limited to the five senses. In our efforts to limit perception to the five senses, we limited our understanding of the mind.

Mind-camera analogy

We come now to another analogy. This is the mind-camera analogy. The mind is like a two-way camera that takes pictures and projects the picture at the same time. Like the camera, it can record a limited number of impressions from any one lens. Likewise, it has a focus. The eye may be open and may be taking in miles of panorama. Simultaneously, many sounds may be registering upon the ear, and many odors may be registering on the olfactory nerves. We will register all of these things, but our reaction may be limited to a point of focus.

The mind is like a camera in that it has points of focus, similar to lenses. It has a big roll of film or Memory bank—Mn. The light seems to be coming from the external world.

However, there is a Light coming from behind, from the Unmanifested Mind, which is actually projecting a picture, which we are in reality only able to see when stimulated by percepts.

The Unmanifested Mind is the first experienced Reality, or the first plateau which we rest upon when reaching for Reality. The Unmanifested Mind is more real than our individual mind.

Do not get the idea that this projected picture is correct. It is looked upon as illusion. While presuming the Unmanifested Mind to be more Real, It is beaming a pure-light through a very cloudy medium....meaning, nerve-chemicals.

Several writers have tried to show that the manifested world-view is an illusion. Brunton uses the example of the eye viewing a pencil, in which we feel or know that the pencil is actually registered upside-down, with the readjustment projected by the mind. We would immediately say that the mind is thus projecting the correct picture.

This is a projection of the individual or limited mind. We know that our awareness of colors is more of a chemical change in the delicate retina, brought about by vibrations or wave-lengths of different rates. Taste is likewise chemical. The associations may not be.

Somehow, we seem to have similar associations, as though the associations or states of mind were forced upon us by being aware of the world-view of those associations.

The aspirant to cosmic consciousness may come to believe that the Light that comes from the Unmanifested Mind actually comes through that medium or matrix also, while its true origin is in the Absolute.

Illusion

Man is continually trying to find himself. He stumbles from illusion to illusion. He rarely stands on any sure ground in his entire lifetime. His confusion begets despair, and he acts out his life toward the end like a man in a nightmare, from which he can escape only by going deeper into sleep.

As has been stated before, there is no better way to see the self-deluding nature of man than through hypnosis. The application of belief to an individual mind through hypnosis is like tapping one of the great laws of the Unmanifested Mind. The Law of Creation involves Imagination plus Faith, plus the Fiat. It is said that God imagined, or dreamed up the physical world, believed in himself, and said, "Let there be Light." The spoken word was the Fiat, or the Logos.

In hypnosis we create a small microcosmos. We shut out the projections of the individual mind, and project with a proxy-Light, originating from within the operator. The fact that the individual mind accepts this new projection as his own and adopts a new state of mind as a corollary is evidence that his previous states of mind which he would like to identify with sanity are not on too sure ground.

We can see that we can never be sure of any state of mind until we are knowledgeable of all the factors that cause such, or all of the agencies that project their light upon us.

We can see ourselves as a colony of cells, or a group of cell colonies, and we do not feel very much like an individual. We do however, have behind the knowledge that we are a group of cell-colonies, a feeling of individuality and a feeling of incomplete knowledge about ourselves.

A Rosicrucian might say that we are in reality a string of luminous colored flowers of light and brilliance, forming a general radiance called an aura, which with its chakras is more real than the body which we see. And once more, we find ourselves to be a group of something.

And the deeper we peer into transcendentalism, the closer we approach an inescapable paradox....that is, if we are anything at all, we are somehow closely related to everything.

Technique

The Unmanifested Mind is not demonstrable. The technique for studying it is. If you would see the true source of illusion, instead of living vicariously on the screen of the theater, follow the light back through the lens of the projector.

This may appear utterly ridiculous if taken literally, but it remains that we must observe the observer, not the make-believe which all of us agree is life-drama. We are chained to the theater, rather than to a Platonic cave. We identify ourselves with veritable shadows, and laugh and weep at their motions. And perhaps we come back repeatedly to see the same show, to purge ourselves of Reality in a repetition of drama drawn from the Matrix of the dimension of the Unmanifested Mind.

When we observe the observer, we sense several things. One is that we have been in a dream state, and must return to a dream state as long as we are in this body. We observe also that the Dream State is very real, in that it is for us the only life for us until we awaken. And it is inescapable that we must deduce, that dream-life is a real manifestation of some agency within ourselves that acts as a creator. It is as though we were born with a false face, which all through life we accepted as our true face, because it was all we knew as a face, and because our friends accepted it as true. The face would literally have to fall off by accident for us to know that it was not our true self.

* * * * * *

Let us try to get behind the false face. We can observe, by introspection, that much of what we would like to think of as thinking, is nothing more than reaction—and mostly automatic reaction without any volition on our part. Of course we can get into some very complicated reaction patterns, and this complexity (as is noted in the Law of Complexity) is visible life.

Desire is not a reaction....we may have quite varied reactions to it. Curiosity is not a reaction, but an external force. We are not that....which was here before we learned it. Curiosity exists for the amoeba, and thus for every white corpuscle. And possibly for every cell in our bodies. It is planted in the unborn beings, and for want of a better word we call it instinct. It propels the new-born to look for food, and propels him so in deliberate action. Desire is likewise implanted in the being before it is born, and it continues to propel us until the day of our death. It too, is nothing learned, or reasoned out.

Some of us may be generals, priests or Indian Chiefs, but we are still basically robots, hiding beneath elaborate robes the gears that are the signs of our slavery, while we pose as movers of planets.

Next, we are inclined to look at the above analysis of the mind, and take pride in being able to "project". We might think for a while that our ability to project is our individuality. The truth is that we are but a channel for the projection, if we are referring to the individual mind and the Unmanifested Mind, neither of which we really are.

We like to think that we are the sum total of our thoughts, or our experiences. This is like saying that a dog is a composite of fleas, lice, ticks, intestinal worms, germs, and a final glorious heap of maggots. It is vain for us to claim to be that which we have happen to us, which we cannot control. And if you think that you are the one that is thinking, try to stop it. You will find that every thought is tied to another thought by an inexorable chain. This chain is the chain of reaction. It is basically rooted in the body, starting off as a baby, by the two catalysts, desire and curiosity.

Now you might at this point demand that we identify desire and curiosity as being implanted in us by a superior entity, which we might call God. It may well be that we are acted upon by other entities, but this interaction being other dimensional, appears divine. The proper definition for "other dimensions" is "other accepted world views" other than our own. And they may well emanate from the same Unmanifested Mind, and are so related to our world view.

Our true umbilical cord is toward the Absolute, beyond the womb-matrix of the Unmanifested Mind.

The projection that animates the whole picture of creation, as well as every cell in our bodies, we will call Light. I use a separate term, because it might appear that curiosity and desire appear to be the sole motivating forces. However, we can see, all through nature, that there is a central fountain that regenerates decaying force-fields, isotopes, delicate protoplasmic combinations, which we know are in a constant state of precipitation and deterioration. This fountain is not curiosity alone. This fountain is the force behind the entity or mechanism that implants the desire and curiosity within us. The fountain likewise supports the eternal growing and dying of celestial bodies (planets and stars).

This Light begins beyond the Unmanifested Mind. The Unmanifested Mind acts as a sort of prism that separates the differentiated rays from the undifferentiated source.

* * * * * *

The use of the word Light here should not be construed in the same sense as the light that is the cause of eye-stimuli. I wish to emphasize this to prevent an ardent investigator from pursuing the analysis of such manifested light. This particularized light of the eye is still differentiated and lower mind matter.

Likewise, we can take some steps away from illusion. We begin by recognizing that the material world presents an illusory picture. We secondly notice that we are automatons of a sort, galvanized by desire and curiosity.

But then we settle back and say—well at least we perceive, remember, react, and project. Actually, these qualities are also automatic. We cannot control these functions, unless we controlled the entire environment.

So we look to our motivating force. We look back through the eye of the projector. We are projectors of a sort ourselves. But we are like little prisons that have been projected. And this microcosm is no better aware of his function than we, operating as a hypnotist.

Why are we projected? (Not questioning the reasons for our origin, but the reason for this illusory projection instead of something more real.) It is impossible to presume the reason for this diffusion from the Absolute. It is likewise impossible to assess all of the life-forms or intelligence quanta that function in the Unmanifested Mind.

Some modern psychologists have come to believe that we exist only in the mind, which must of course place all phenomena, material or abstract, as being mental phenomena. They must then take the next step and admit that they are, body and environment, and their individual mind as well—a mental phenomena over which they have no control unless the dreamer would pretend to be consciously creating his dream. And of course, if we are all mental phenomena, we are extremely vain in legislating human conduct for our fellow-man.

We take another step and say that if we are nothing but mental phenomena, then there is no self, and consequently no immortality. And if neither of these hopes exist, then why should we confuse ourselves further with any study of the subject?

Of course, the answer is that, as regards the self, our only true essence must be Real instead of illusory. This true self is not the individual dream character that flits across the stage. It can find its real life only in the light that is its source, absolutely.

And in regards to immortality, immortality is measured in our objective minds by Time. And time is inexorably tied to space as space-time in the clearer world-view, and in the Unmanifested matrix. So that not only is there not a day, or a year, but there is also not a billion years.

There is only Is-ness.

Our immortality is dependent, not on our ability to extend our personal Illusion indefinitely but to transcend it. Our immortality is dependent upon our becoming the Light, by identifying with that which is Real, and really is us and has been us all the time.

The scientific psychologist will always fail to understand even the world-view, because he is like some bumpkin in the audience, taking pot shots at the villain on the screen. Or like a child grasping at the surface of the water whereon is playing an elusive, dancing reflection.

* * * * * *

In order to better understand the umbilical function of projection, we might take a television set, as representing the individual mind. Channel Three (three dimensional) would represent the same world-view to all of its viewers. By changing to another channel through the use of drugs or other means, we might get another world-view, coming from a different level or studio.

The television set reacts in a very complex way to the waves coming through its antennae. It sorts out the incoming percepts and projects them upon its screen. Its range is not its own option. It is set by the manufacturer.

Now we might build in a memory-bank for the television, and install electronic devices, so that at any suggestion, reactions would trigger projections. In time, the television set might even be operated by and from the broadcasting studio, which is the equivalent of the Unmanifested Mind-matrix. And at this point, the television set might begin to think that it was an individual, answering only to the broadcasting studio.

It never took into account the fact that its real power and life, as well as the power and life of the broadcasting studio, came from an inconspicuous electric wire. When the plug is pulled, all of the lights and life go out.

By this analogy we can realize the three types of projection. The television set projects into our room the picture of our accepted world view, analogous to the individual mind. The broadcasting studio, likewise projects from a matrix of cardboard sets, trick mirrors, two dimensional cities consisting of buildings with only facades, and with various trick-noises a picture that upon reception by us will seem to be real. However, both are dependent upon another projection—the voltage from an invisible power source. The individual experiences sleep when the power source is diminished to near zero, and death when completely severed between the individual mind and the Unmanifested Mind.

Postscript

Frank M.'s Account of Jane S.'s Experience during a Rapport Sitting with Richard Rose

Jane S. went through an amazing transformation during the "experience". Her faced changed physically from a bubble, air-head type to a serious-looking, suffering person. What she was experiencing—her perspective, had totally transformed her into a new person. She said, "I want to love you. Chuck, [her husband who was also present] but you're not there and not real." She began to weep, tremble and fall before my eyes. I was amazed, but I never doubted that it was real—no one could "act" this way. I was shocked to hear her husband say she was acting most of it out. I was convinced; I had studied books about illusion or maya, and about states of mind, but now I had witnessed a mind penetrating these concepts in a very real way.

We were all not there, not real to Jane, and this made her and me very sad. She knelt on the floor crying for some time. But time was the farthest thing from my mind. I wasn't sure of the mechanics of the experience, but I knew that Jane and Rose were linked in some way. His words seemed to either help her out of the despair or drive her to more tears, depending on the nature of his comments. He seemed to be along for the trip, but not able to control her every experience. After some time passed, Rose seemed to draw Jane out of the pit by making favorable comments to her. When he would say, "You're beautiful inside," the crying would slow up or stop. Without favorable comments, she would seem to fall back into the pit—explaining how hopeless and empty everything was. Her face changed dramatically again [when Rose coaxed her] and she returned to the air-headed, energy-driven person I knew. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before my eyes. Rose later said he coaxed her out because he didn't feel she could go any further. He turned his inner head away—shutting off the pictures she was picking up on. He told her if she wanted to finish it off; she should come back and stay for a definite time period.

I believe Rose said to Jane, right before the experience, "You're inside my head." Jane said, "I know, I've been there all day." Early in the day we were at the farm walking around, Jeanne and myself, Jane and Chuck, and Mr. Rose. Rose said he was able to get inside her head as we walked and talked. Also, before the experience, Rose was doing some hypnotic suggestions and he read the "Three Books of the Absolute". I remembered how alive all the words were and I seemed to drift into a state where I was feeling or seemed to be experiencing some of what he was saying. "Oh tender I-ness, what have I done to thee?" He started to point at me as if he recognized my mental state. At that instant, Jane started to cry. All of the attention in the room, including mine, was shifted in her direction.

I remember Rose had given Jane a post-hypnotic suggestion, something about sugar. I believe he said when she heard the word sugar she would crave something sweet. I remember she left the room and when she came back from the kitchen, Rose said, "Were you eating something sweet?" and she started to laugh as if she was caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Then she started to cry. I believe that's when he said, "You're inside my head," and she replied, "I've been there all day," or something to that effect.

After the experience, I thought Jane would become a totally spiritual person. I visited her a few days or weeks later and I was amazed. She was dressed in a black miniskirt on her way to a barmaid's job. Her make-up seemed excessive and she was in no mood to discuss a spiritual direction with me. She said what she saw was death [during the experience with Rose] and that she wanted to live. She didn't want to get into it anymore. I remember being upset with her because I felt her experience was real and that it was important for her to work with others and continue to pursue her own final spiritual experience. Rose had said she had seen only one part of the Picture, the nothingness of the life-illusion, but she hadn't seen that she was everything.

In those days Rose was a powerful transmitter of thoughts. Jane, in my opinion, was a highly sensitive and energetic person who was able to pick up on his head and this is what propelled the experience. Zen masters call it transmission. Jane had been into TM and EST before we met up with Mr. Rose. We also did some LSD together. She transformed during this experience. It changed her drastically so that she was trembling so much that she could barely speak. Normally it was hard to shut her up and she was highly egotistical. She did all of her husband's talking for him too. So much so that he rarely had an opinion about anything. I'm not certain if it was her fault of his passive nature.

One night, months after her experience, she was doing some mescaline and I was taking notes and asking questions. I believe she started to go back into the experience. She looked at Chuck again and asked Jeanne to touch him. She said he has no feeling, that he is not real or something close to those words. Chuck was not upset at all and offered his hand to Jeanne to prove he was real. Jeanne refused, but I didn't. Jane seemed to get upset. Shortly after that night Jane decided to divorce Chuck.

Jane was a powerful personality. She did a million things at once. She was able to manipulate more than Chuck. Jeanne was also under her spell for some time when they moved into an apartment together.

Even though I had meditated and sat with people and searched for knowledge and power during my years in yoga, I was amazed by the energy that was present in the room the night Jane went into her experience. It reminded me of an LSD trip. It was true what the yogis had said—a person could experience such an energy force without drugs. I remember the room was electrified. I could feel it. Rose later told me he could watch it move around the room. He said it was working on my head when Jane entered the room and it hit her. I seemed to freeze my mind or lock it into a single vision. All other normal distraction disappeared. Rose's words took on a new meaning—they were stirring up an emotional reaction inside....of sadness, and sorrow. After this night, I was certain that I had come to the right place to find the true self and get some answers. I was impressed with Rose. He was an older man in his fifties, but he seemed to have more energy than us who were much younger. This energy phenomenon was not isolated to the Jane S. experience. Following the formation of a group of people who felt Rose could help them, I witnessed this energy again several times.

Richard Rose, An unpretentious man
An unpretentious man, Richard Rose taught us how to have peace of mind in spite of success through his formula of energy conservation.br class="calibre7"/>

Epilogue

When Richard passed away in 2005, I had already made a commitment to myself, as his wife and student, to carry on his teachings by way of continued publications of both old and new material. With the help of Alan Fitzpatrick and John Rose (my brother), both his written teachings and audio lectures have become widely available. The dedication of these two people, along with others who have contributed to the Richard Rose Teachings Newsletter and have helped me with correspondence, leave me without adequate words of gratitude. It seems even more poignant that those who never met Richard but have read all of his books and listened to most of his lectures on CD, are now helping me pass along the teachings.

When Alan came to me with this project in mind I couldn't have felt more relieved. Finally, these "pearls" that had been typed on onion skin paper on a manual typewriter, as well as hand written on scraps of paper, would find their way safely preserved between a book cover. If no other project got completed in my lifetime, at least this finished one would let me rest easier.

This book is a legacy not only for those students who followed Richard's philosophical, spiritual and psychological teachings, but also for newcomers to the philosophy that wish to know more about what Richard Rose thought but never published. I get numerous E-mails containing questions from folks who never met Richard except through his published works. These unpublished notes should answer a lot of those questions—and answer them straight from the source.

I must admit, I still have conversations with Richard when I visit his gravesite on the family farm, concerned with whether or not I'm publishing the appropriate material, or corresponding with inquirers in the proper way. All I can truly count on is my intuition and faith in that what I learned from living with the man for over 30 years still holds some grain of Truth for people. This book should certainly serve me well in his absence.

--Cecy Rose

Back Cover

Profound is an Understatement

Rose Publications has uncovered unpublished esoteric writings, essays and prose of Richard Rose, brought to light in their original form. Author Alan Fitzpatrick has carefully compiled and edited (without altering the original content of any of the writings) the works of this highly regarded teacher, author and lecturer who discovered a spiritual path that would lead to the meaning of our very existence. The works you will read are a mere reflection of the Absolute experienced by Richard Rose, but their impact will remain timeless.

Man, in his present mind as expressed by his personality and beliefs, does not observe. He is part of an observation process.

Man, as we know ourselves, does not experience. He is experienced.

$12.00

ISBN 978-0-615-42632-7

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9 780615 426327

Rose Publications

P.O. Box 63, McMechen, West Virginia 26040

E-Mail: info@richardroseteachings.com

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