SelfDefinition.Org
Retreat from Untruth
The Teachings of Richard Rose, American Zen Master
Alan Fitzpatrick
Chapter 12 The Ascendency of Rose's Teachings
Work with a Teacher
Preparations were underway during the spring of 1977 for the first-ever TAT Chautauqua to be held at the farm in the upcoming summer under the new pavilion. Amazingly, the work was completed by the group members living there in time for the first event held in June and the second in August.
While the outward ladder work by the students surrounding Rose progressed in the new direction he had envisioned with the Chautauquas, behind the scenes, Rose picked up the intensity of what he called the "spiritual work" of the teacher with his serious students. This was now recognized by everyone close to Rose as the one-on-one interaction with the Zen teacher. It was the part of one's own spiritual path that involved working with a teacher who was enlightened and who could abbreviate one's search, if they chose to do so, you were ready, and the opportunity presented itself. It was a chance to engage the teacher in an attempt to make progress where and when you couldn't do it by yourself.
Since Rose pointed out that the greatest obstacle to truth lay with the self, and while a serious sincere student could go it alone as Rose had done, it helped to have a teacher to work with when it came to the obstacles so close to our self such as ego and false personality. Consequently, Rose worked with individuals in the group who recognized his value as a teacher and put themselves out to him rather than hide from him and disclose little of their personality traits.
Confrontation
Rose relied upon a direct Zen approach of negating false personality or ego which he learned from Pulyan. Rose did so by demonstrating or mirroring ego to the student through a variety of means—all of them involving some form of confrontation, which occurred in one of several ways. One form of confrontation that Rose practiced involved telling the student to his or her face in a straight-forward, often psychoanalytic manner what their particular problem or ego hang-up was, by explanation and analogy. While most informative, this form of confrontation could be said to be largely ineffective because the student reacted in predictable ways by usually agreeing with Rose, thanking him, and then going about their "business as usual." Why? This form of confrontation lacked practical impact. It rarely worked to change anything.
The second manner of confrontation that Rose used was the form that he relied upon in most situations because it worked effectively, and which involved mirroring to the student the ridiculous aspect of their ego, on the spot in the now moment. To accent the impact of this form of confrontation Rose liked to use an audience of peers to outline the particular person's ego using humor, pantomime and ridicule to explain it.
This style of confronting the student put them squarely on the hot seat from which there was no reasonable escape or excuse. Once there, I can say from experience that there was nothing I could do or say to lessen the impact of Rose's message he was trying to convey. His method worked effectively because the audience found the entertainment often hilarious and their laughter at my apparent ego misfortune, or theirs, magnified the effect of it all. And when I served as a member of the audience, I found Rose to be so humorous in his portrayals that tears often ran down my face from laughing. It was easier to recognize the mote in someone else's eye than one's own, and Rose was always right on the money with his mirroring. Finally, the form of confrontation that Rose reserved for only select occasions was his genuine anger directed at the person when their ego got in the way of ladder work or interfered directly with what Rose, or the group, was doing in some particular situation. You did not want to be on the receiving end of Rose's angry criticism, blunt dressing down, and hyper-critical attack on your ego, which usually preceded, in the worst case, expulsion from the group for grievous misconduct.
Obviously, not everyone associated with Rose volunteered for the exercise of confrontation. Cognizant of that, Rose was careful not to confront the exoteric members of the TAT group, who, for whatever reason, declined the personal psychological work with him, and instead, fostered and maintained a friendship with Rose, and were sympathetic to his teaching. Aware of this, Rose never crossed that line.
In general, exoteric members of TAT were, for whatever reason, unwilling or unable to commit to the total effort required for a spiritual search that esoteric students espoused, but often these lines were blurred. You had to volunteer to work with Rose on a personal level with him as an adjunct to your own efforts of going within, as well as contributing to the "ladder work" with the greater group of people at large. Also, confrontation from Rose had to have a purpose to it to have meaning for the student; otherwise it was seen as an unwanted and unwarranted personal attack upon them which was valueless. The student had to understand confrontation as an important part of unraveling the dilemma of identification with false personality which was nearly impossible to do without the help of a skilled teacher. More importantly, the student had to do something with the resulting insight from working with Rose. Without that understanding, confrontation was simply a meaningless exercise, and any visitor to the group, who happened by chance to witness a confrontation exercise taken out of context that it served, was usually taken aback by what appeared as harshness.
Seeing One's Ego
Seeing "the mote in one's own eye" as far as ego hang-ups and false personality structures was where spiritual work could easily "run dry" for any student. It was easy to see other people's egos and vanities when Rose pointed them out, but not one's own because of our inherent inability to see our own ego projection of personality directly. It was a contradiction in terms to say that I could separate one part of myself that Rose pointed out from the other when I was talking about who I really am. That's where Rose came in. Rose could cut like a knife through that smoky area of the mind that any of us preferred not to face nor have confronted. In the outside world where people expect a lifetime of ego aggrandizement, flattery, acceptance and self-esteem building, here was a man who said that ultimately all forms of ego are false, and that the pursuit of Truth involved, at some point, the overcoming or retreating from the ego itself as a form of untruth.
"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.. ..Our immortality is dependent, not on our ability to extend our personal illusion indefinitely, but to transcend it," said Rose. 413 However, talking about transcending the relative self was not actually doing it.
For links to the works cited see the page Bibliography and Document Links
[413. Rose, Hypnosis Lecture and Demonstration, February 17, 1988.]
I theorized one day after being confronted by Rose that if I was going to have an enlightenment experience, then my self as I know it that he was confronting, and the relative mind behind it, were the major obstacle to Truth, and would somehow have to collapse or die, for the "inside mind" to manifest. I could not see the method of doing so when Rose advised, "Let us try to get behind the false face." Therein lay the difficulty. Knowing and experiencing were two different things. While intellectually and perhaps intuitively it was possible for me to understand what Rose was saying, comprehending from experience that my ego was false was impossible. That was the problem I was having from the confrontation directed at me by Rose. I couldn't intentionally drop the ego he was pointing to. It was me who he was pointing to as the false face and I didn't know how to get rid of it.
Said Rose, "It was 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." 414
[414. Rose, The Mind.]
Group Work
While Rose believed anyone who was honest with themselves could face who they are and confront themselves, it was a daunting task to try to work alone, as Rose had done himself during his twenties. So a group and a teacher were vital in shortening the time to make the trip. Explained Rose, "I believe that it is something any man can do. Any layman, with just plain determination and common sense, can sit down and face himself. But he has to follow it up. Not just say, 'Well yes, I agree that I have kind of tricked myself here or my head has outwitted me here.' But face himself consistently over a period of let's say meditative sessions or confrontation sessions, in which he attacks and holds these up to view." 415 Thus was the daunting task for me to review the content of confrontation in our own personal meditation.
[415. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 5, Interview, WKSU Radio, Kent State University, 1974.]
Gurdjieff, on the other hand, believed the task of working on oneself to 'wake up' to be impossible without the help of a group and a teacher. The esoteric school was everything in his estimation. "One cannot work by oneself; a certain friction, inconvenience and difficulty of working with other people creates the necessary shocks," 416 because, as stated by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's student, "There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams.. ..It must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him." 417
[416. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way, page 268.]
[417. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, page 139.]
It was this state of waking conscious sleep due to many factors and obstacles that made it impossible, in Gurdjieff's estimation, for an individual to awaken without a school or a teacher. Said Gurdjieff, "It must be understood that without outside help a man can never see himself. Someone has to show it to him." 418
[418. Ouspensky, ibid.]
In Zen, showing the student his false personality that is an obstacle to him "waking up" was the job of the teacher, as it was with Rose. This he learned from Pulyan.
Attacking the Mind
Rose understood from Pulyan's use of his Zen method of confrontation that it could be used to bring the student's mind to attention from his state of so-called "Gurdjieffian sleep," and also help the student in his struggle with transcending false personality. Consequently, Rose was not interested in promoting meditational practices to students that brought peace of mind which he felt would be counterproductive. Nor did Rose think that it was wise to foster a relationship with students based on accepting our ego as is without pointing out the shadow of "untruth" that we cast with it. Accepting our egos "carte blanche" would do nothing more than lull us to sleep and cement our false personality instead of transcending it as unreal.
"I state quite bluntly that I am not desirous of bringing anyone peace of mind. I want to bring you trouble. I want to stir you, to shake you. Because protoplasm tends to inertia. You have to keep irritating it to keep it alive. ... If you are interested in finding your self-definition then you want to abandon any system that quiets you down. You want to become turbulent. You want to continue to waken yourself, to arouse yourself mentally, to attack your systems of thinking. Because you want an answer." 419 Simply, "The path is one of attacking the mind until it explodes." 420
[419. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 15-16, Interview, WKSU Radio, Kent State University, 1974.]
[420. Rose, ibid, page 186.]
When I was considering going to graduate school in psychology in the fall of 1977, Rose advised otherwise when I asked him what he thought. First, he told me that without the support of the group at this particular point of my spiritual search, it was likely that my ego desires would take me down along a divergent path to self-definition and would lead ultimately to giving up the spiritual path and allowing myself to go back to a state of sleep. "Some will make it at this thing, but most will not, due to their inability to confront themselves and overcome their obstacles," Rose told me. By going back to college, I would not change my state of mind revolving around the chief feature of my personality, but would only add on further "trimmings" of ego identifications to an already unbalanced and unreal core. This, Rose pointed out, would be adding untruth rather than subtracting it. His opinion weighed heavily on my decision. Realizing that some part of me, meaning Nature, wanted to opt out of any further spiritual work on myself, I decided to stay and attempt to renew my commitment to the path. 421
[421. Fitzpatrick Author's personal journal notes, October 1976 to January 1978.]
Just as Rose advised me, so did he do so with other group members when asked, cautioning that he did not know what our destiny was or what was best, so to take his advice with a grain of salt. Ultimately Rose thought that each person should make up their own mind when it came to pursing a spiritual path over other life directions rather than taking any of his advice verbatim. Yet, at times Rose did advise even while confronting, adding to the degree of tension he was trying to create in the student's mind. Attacking our personality poses and patterns of thinking by Rose was supposed to be an adjunct to our doing so in our own meditation and he knew when this was not happening and the student was drifting. As a teacher. Rose was there to wake us up. "The only way you can actually get a person to wake up themselves is by challenging the mind," said Rose. "You have to challenge it continually. ... You have to shake your heads up because you are like the cows with their noses in the grass. You get to ruminating, that's all—just eating and ruminating, and life goes by unless you take a certain amount of time out each week to shake your head up and start asking yourself how or why this is happening." 422
[422. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 177, August Chautauqua, TAT Farm, WV, 1983.]
Consequently, Rose, as teacher, served as the spiritual compass of the group. His best role was to help each one of us face the intimate untruth of false self. He confronted us when we couldn't or wouldn't confront ourselves, and though it was, at times, hilarious theatre if you were an observer to someone else's "education," it wasn't at all pretty if you were the one on the hot seat with Rose. One day a woman in the group who was living in the house in Benwood, came into the kitchen while Rose was talking philosophy to a group of us sitting around the table. She walked over to the kitchen sink and noting the new pile of dishes that had accumulated, took a dish rag and petulantly tossed it into the dishes to demonstrate her disgust as she stormed across the room. As if on cue, Rose stood up, tromped loudly over to the sink mimicking her footsteps, and grabbing the same dish rag, began tossing it around the room, mocking what he was intent on illustrating to her—her state of mind that she was unwittingly indulging in and identified with, thus causing everyone in the room except the woman to break out in hysterical laughter. These kinds of ego-lessons sometimes took on the appearance of brutal ridicule to get the message across to the individual, but never to the extent that Rose described as the methods of Pulyan. Simply, Rose said many times in many different ways, "In spiritual matters, sometimes 1 have to attack people's egos in order to help them." 423 Pulyan, on the other hand, was rumored to have driven several of his students to the brink of suicide by relentless and brutal attack.
[423. Fitzpatrick, Author's personal journal notes, October 1976 to January 1978.]
False Personality
For the serious Zen student of Rose's, discovering that we needed to "wake up" was the first step that had to be taken in working on oneself. This bringing the mind to a state of attention could be accomplished through working with the group and Rose, and by simply being involved in day-to-day interactions. But after a while of working on one's self, the task became more difficult as the obstacles to spiritual work were more ego-rooted. Explained Dave, a student of Rose's, "When you start out, it's a wide path. There's all sorts of garbage you can get rid of. As you go on, the path gets narrower and narrower and the things you have to let go of are very precious to you. Finally, there's no escape. You go through the funnel and that's all there is to it." 424
[424. Gold, David, After the Absolute, chapter 19, page 341.]
The funnel Dave was referring to was the experience of death of the ego or self, which is ultimately unreal and illusory, but which we cling to. Said Gurdjieff on the subject of false personality, "The struggle against 'false I,' against one's chief feature or chief fault, is the most important part of the work, and it must proceed in deeds, not words." He believed that the role of the teacher was to deliver the student from his false personality, not by patting the student on the back but by putting him in situations in which he must struggle. "For this purpose the teacher gives each man definite tasks which require, in order to carry them out, the conquest of his chief feature." As with Rose's method of confronting the student, Gurdjieff believed, "When a man carries out these tasks he struggles with himself, works on himself." 425
[425. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, page 228.]
Thus Rose wanted the confrontation, or koans as he called it, to occur in natural situations resulting from the tasks that Rose gave students involved with the "ladder work" of the TAT group at large, which could be anything from working out at the farm, working with the Chautauquas, or work with the Pyramid Zen groups in the surrounding cities. Confrontation would give the student all the "food for thought" they would need for their own meditation to work on themselves, thus taking the place of the koan in the traditional Zen sense.
For each of us, working on ourselves through introspective meditation was our part of the bargain in working with Rose. He expected each of us to make progress with our meditation and analyzing our self. He expected every student whom he gave advice to, or confronted, to make the necessary effort to do something with "the grist for the mill" that they were given in regards to their egos or false personality. To Rose, that involved "going within" their own mind, confronting themselves from what Rose had pointed out to them, and attempting to detach themselves from that part of their personality or mind that they now viewed, or should be viewing as foolishness, and therefore untruth. Said Rose, "We have to start somewhere on this self-analysis, this business of peeling-off [egos]. Now why do we want to peel-off or divest ourselves of egos? Because basically we're after the truth, including the truth about ourselves." 426
[426. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 166, August Chautauqua, TAT Farm, WV, 1983.]
Divesting the Ego
Divesting one's self of an ego, however, was easier said than done, even when Rose pointed it out more than once. It often involved a series of confrontations or attacks by him on the same theme as if Rose were shocking us again and again, as he did with me. Gurdjieff had advocated in his teachings that repeated shocks were often needed to help the lagging student "wake up" to their own nature, saying, "What is necessary to wake up a sleeping man? A good shock is necessary. But when a man is fast asleep one shock is not enough." 427
[427. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, page 221.]
For those of us living in close proximity to Rose, either in Benwood or out at the farm, getting a shock or koan from Rose was part of the daily course of events that each of us took in stride because we had signed up for it when we gave Rose our commitment and put our trust in him as a teacher. Knowing that Rose was confronting me for a reason and trusting that he had a point he was trying to make was an important part of my understanding what was happening and why. Knowing that Rose was trying to show you a phony part of your self that you were unable or unwilling to see was why you allowed him to do so, and how you rationalized to yourself that you allowed him to confront you in a manner that anywhere else in the outside world, for a man, would be fighting words. You submitted yourself to Rose's critical eye because you understood that he had had an experience that had taken him outside the relative mind, and upon returning, he had the uncanny ability to read people's psychological pedigree as if he were watching a cartoon on TV. You submitted yourself to his psychological criticism because it was an important step in knowing yourself and what was untruth he was pointing at, therefore not the real self that we were after. Explaining it, Rose said, "As we go through this process of peeling away this error we get into the first step of genuine self-realization. This process is just something that happens when you start searching. You gradually shed your egos. And after you shed them you're glad you got rid of them. You're glad that you don't have to live with that nonsense. But it is not a matter of going out deliberately trying to annihilate your ego." 428
[428. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 77, Lecture at Boston College, Boston Mass., November 1975.]
Rose explained. "The thing is that we're trying to get behind the human mind. And the only hope that you have is for some mechanism by which you can get behind it." 429
[429. Rose, A Method of Going Inside, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1977.]
Rose believed that the final kernel of the relative mind, the survival ego, had to be cracked for you, or taken away. "In Zen literature you hear about no-mind. They mean the point where the head stops. And they talk occasionally about killing the Buddha, or killing the mind. But you can't kill your own mind. The mind is killed for you. You can't set out to kill your own mind. The only thing you can do is set out to find the truth. But in the process of finding the truth, you have to somehow put a stop to this relative hassle," that Rose called the individual mind. 430 That was the paradox that permeated all of spiritual work—how to recognize something in yourself that was untruth, and then what to do about. "I've outlined something that will take you to a point where your head stops. When you reach a certain point in this self-analysis your head will stop and a phenomenon occurs," but confrontation alone could not do it. 431
[430. Rose, Definition of Zen lecture at Kent State University, 1976.]
[431. Rose, A Method of Going Inside, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November, 1977.]
That paradox was not lost on Rose. While confrontation was the cornerstone of his active teachings, it was not an end-all in-of-itself, nor were the rapport sessions with Rose that aimed at facilitating transmission from teacher to student. Confrontation was a means to an end only, to cause something to happen to the student's mind, but not necessarily precipitate enlightenment, as Pulyan suggested.
Rose did not believe enlightenment could happen by confrontation alone, because he felt the student had to have made the effort themselves to bring their mind to a state of tension in the search for truth, first of all. He couldn't give it to someone who wasn't ready. In addition, confrontation alone could not topple the last ego, the survival ego, and if it was possible to do so, the student might not be able to survive the trip, as in the case of Jane Slater, where confrontation from the energy of a rapport sitting collapsed all but her final ego. "The last ego to be removed will be the survival-urge. ... but we really do not give it up. ... It will be taken from us," said Rose. 432
[432. Rose, Meditation, page 16.]
To Provoke Meditation
On the matter of the relevance of confrontation, Rose said that "It is not meditation. It is a technique used to provoke meditation, to get the mind off dead center," and that was in fact what Rose was trying to accomplish, at best. 433 Confrontation alone, without some inner effort on the part of the student to conduct a means of directly examining themselves and their own mind would not accomplish anything esoterically. "Confrontation of many different sorts may be necessary to provoke thinking, but confrontation is a practice in itself. It involves others, meaning a teacher, monitor, or colleague." What Rose was talking about, but had not outlined in great detail in The Albigen Papers, 434 was the method of individual, practical and effective meditation in which whatever point of confrontation from a teacher or group could be observed by one's self, examined and analyzed as untruth in meditation.
[433. Rose, Meditation, page 30.]
[434. Rose, ibid, page 6.]
As early as 1976, Rose began to think about writing a paper on meditation that would supplement and become an adjunct to The Albigen Papers, as if he sensed that his handbook embodying the Albigen System had not said enough about an effective method of entering one's mind that could be called meditation.
Rose did not care for the oriental Zen approach of meditation that focused on the use of a specific word-koan. While he didn't deny that a koan like "Mu" might work, Rose felt that a meditation "which enables the student to confront himself actively with increased self-analysis, is a more tangible method, because the problem is always before him." 435 Rose had spent a great deal of time meditating during his own years of search, and was suspect that members of the Pyramid Zen group were not doing so likewise. On the one hand he was reluctant to recommend a specific form of meditation over another because he felt each person must find their own way of entering their own mind, saying, "Each individual's going within is unique to that person." 436 Yet, Rose realized something more needed to be said about the process and procedure of doing so. Confrontation alone was not enough if a student, like myself, did not know what to do with it.
[435. Rose, Meditation, page 7.]
[436. Rose, ibid, page 19.]
By 1977, Rose began writing a paper on meditation, and for the first time in his writings coined the words, "going within," to describe what he thought the purpose of meditation should be. "The ultimate aim of meditation is to go within. Going within means to find Reality by finding the Real part of ourselves. It does not mean merely playing around inside the head with random observations," said Rose. 437
[437. Rose, Meditation, page 19. Known informally as The Meditation Paper, subtitle: "Meditation and Visualization, Observation on the Thought Processes, Going Within, The Genesis of Thought". 30 pages.]
He believed that the first level of meditation should involve "going back into our memory to remember unhappy moments or times. ... to focus our attention upon unhappiness," in an attempt to examine ourselves psychologically from a point of detachment and ask ourselves why we reacted or thought the way we did in that past situation. The point of this meditative self-analysis of moments of conflict in our life was to free ourselves mentally from any hang-ups or traumas associated with past conflict. By doing so, we would be freeing ourselves from identification with untrue or unreal memory-reactions. His instructions in meditation were to "detach yourself, your emotional self, while watching the re-run. Watch yourself clinically, not with personal involvement" or identification with what we are observing. Seeing so, and doing so, was the formula for freeing one's self from past trauma. However, Rose wrote that there was more to meditation that just this. "At the same time that we examine ourselves psychologically, we should examine ourselves directly," 438 by looking directly at thought and the thought processes.
[438. Rose, Meditation, page 10.]
Going within the mind to examine thought itself was the second level of meditation that Rose advocated, saying, "It is my belief that meditation should involve the fixing of the attention upon thoughts and reactions thoughts, or reaction to experience, which are just other forms of thoughts," 439 when a person goes within.
[439. Rose, Meditation, page 6.]
How was this to be accomplished? The first step Rose recommended was "when we begin to meditate in the attempt to go within we should simply observe our self," a task Rose admitted was very profound and not so simple in the attempt to separate visualization from real present-time observation of thought processes. By observing thoughts directly Rose believed that it would "stimulate us to purify and clarify" thoughts by rejecting those thoughts in meditation that were more external to our thinking, and therefore not us. "Analysis will, with the increased clarity, enable us to see the anatomy of thought more clearly," Rose stated, and help us to see that all thoughts are ultimately part of a projection process going on inside our head.
Ultimately, all thoughts are not us, not even the "I" thought that can be observed in meditation as external to our awareness. Of course, if one got far enough along in the first steps of meditation, then observing by re-playing in one's mind Rose's confrontation in an attempt to discover what he was driving at, as well as observing one's reaction to him should, in theory, be possible and productive results occur. However, that was not the case for me. Whenever I attempted to go within and observe confrontation, an emotional reaction occurred that short-circuited the whole process and circumvented my seeing myself clearly. That reaction was anger. Rather than going within, I felt myself to be locked out of meditation as I could not find the means to detach myself and view the confrontation dispassionately with detachment in the beginning.
College Lectures 1977-1978
With the Meditation paper completed and the Chautauquas in full swing, Rose still made sure that he had time to lecture on the college campuses in the fall of 1977 and into 1978. Increasingly, he began to incorporate the language of the meditation paper into his lecture material when he talked on Zen and the search for Reality. Rose gradually expanded upon the idea of "going within" as an essential step of putting the higher elements of the Albigen System into action as he wrote briefly about in Chapter 8 of The Albigen Papers, penned seven years previously.
In writing about the "maximum reversal technique," Rose said in that chapter "the third step involves a conscious effort to re-traverse our projected ray," but he did not detail how this might be done by the esoteric student. He described what should happen but not how one was to do it or find it. A few paragraphs later Rose added that "as we project ourselves back through the mind-ray, we naturally come to the universal, or Unmanifested Mind-Matrix," but again he did not elaborate in any detail how one should or could project themselves back through the mind-ray. 440
[440. Rose, The Albigen Papers, pages 216-217.]
Clearly, Rose's thinking on the matter when he wrote The Albigen Papers as a teaching method was incomplete. While he had completely assimilated his experience by this time after reading and incorporating Ramana Maharshi's works on the levels of enlightenment experience, Rose had not fully assimilated his teachings to students. Not enough had been said in The Albigen Papers because Rose had not found the words to express what he wanted to say about how one enters their own mind. It had not all come together until the expansion of Rose's talks on going within. Now his thinking was reaching fruition, leading to ascendancy and completion of his teachings that would lead to Rose writing it down in a new book called. Psychology of the Observer, 441 published in 1979.
[441. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 11.]
Psychology of the Observer (1979)
The assimilation of Rose's teachings and the completion of his thinking on the relationship between the relative mind and its source, the Absolute, came together during his college campus lecturing of 1978, and culminated in the writing of Psychology of the Observer. It was a body of teachings different in content and more esoteric in depth than The Albigen Papers. In retrospect, the essay on Meditation had proven to be the bridge between the two, and the inspiration for writing the new book that came about from Rose talking more about going within and higher meditation in his lectures. There was an impetus for Rose to find the language to talk about the subject matter that would complete his teachings.
By late 1978, it was evident to him that the Pyramid Zen groups were waning. His lectures were not drawing in the same number of interested young people in esoteric philosophy. The spiritual door in the country was closing as a new materialism and pragmatism was emerging. While the Chautauquas were moderately successful in attracting people outside of the college campuses, the people attending the symposiums were older and more set in their ways, interested in talking about philosophy but not able to do anything spiritually themselves. Finally, older members of the group who had been around for five years were drifting away with other priorities in mind. The rapport sessions had not produced any phenomenal results, and Rose had not found anyone dedicated enough and ready to transmit to. By writing the Psychology of the Observer, Rose had taken a look at the clock and realized time was running out for him to lecture and teach. The book would be written and published for posterity to fill in the blanks of The Albigen Papers after he was gone.
Rose wrote the book as an in-depth analysis of the interior mind of man from the point of view of an observer to the mind. Nothing of what he wrote was a postulation on his part. Everything that he detailed encouraged the reader to discover and validate for themselves on their road to going within that mind. It was a hand-book of esotericism unlike anything written by any other westerner in history. Rose opened the book with a discussion of who we are not, saying that the view we observe is not us, it is part of the view, which includes the external world, the body, the desires, the personality, our thoughts and thought-patterns and even the relative mind itself.
Who we are, when we define ourselves as a point of more realness is the observer within our mind—our connection to essence, so that Rose defined the self as the observer, saying simply that the "view is not the viewer. ... In discriminating between that which is the Observer, and that which is the observation, we simultaneously define the many observable mental characteristics as being 'Not us.' This means that the true Self, is always the anterior Observer. And the observation of the anterior brings us to the ultimate or Absolute Observer. This sounds at first like a simple verbal manipulation of optimistic formula, but it is in reality, the true method of reaching the realization of the realization of the Absolute state of mind pointed to by writers on enlightenment." 442
[442. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, pages 13-14.]
Rose proceeded with his analysis of the mind by discussing the various observable mental aspects or attributes of the somatic mind such as desires which he called "external afflictions or assets. They are not us" in relation to our quest for a more real definition of self. 443
[444. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 28.]
Rose labeled that part of our mental self, the interior voice that balances the fears and desires of the body, as the "Umpire" which is programmed into each individual "to keep the robot from destroying itself before harvest time." Rose went on to describe the six different forms of perception that occur in every human mind based upon the qualities of perception, retention or memory, and reaction or projection. Awareness of the Umpire is done by a Process Observer in the mind that witnesses thoughts, thought-patterns, and Umpire reactions. But all of this observing, Rose noted, is the case of the mind attempting to study itself with itself. "True observation must be carried on from a superior dimension. The mind cannot be studied with the mind. It must be observed from some point outside of, and superior to the mind," 444 implying that the entire mind is an observation, thus making it a relative dimension.
[443. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 15.]
"At this point, we become aware of the mind as being external to our awareness," 445 and thus it becomes, by observation, an erroneous dimension to be transcended. Enlightenment occurs when the relative mind truly and irrevocably stops. Declared Rose at a lecture, "You keep on plugging away at this, and it may bring you to a point of what I call an explosion. And this is when it's no longer the mind, but the awareness that is in the front. The simple awareness is out front." 446 Said another way, "By accident our awareness transcends the mind." 447 This was the theme of the Psychology of the Observer. As Bart Marshall, former student of Rose, commented on the back cover of the 2012 edition, "Of his many writings, Psychology of the Observer is the most indispensable to the serious seeker. In it Rose reveals the essence of the process that led to his enlightenment, and directly points the way for us to awaken also."
[445. Rose, ibid, page 33.]
[446. Rose, A Method of Going Inside, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1977.]
[447. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 61.]
Why was it possible for Rose to reveal all that he did about the mind and its source in his books and lectures? Rose was not theorizing; he had been there during his experience, and tried to put what happened into words.
Rose wrote in the Psychology of the Observer that, "True observation must be carried on from a superior dimension. The mind cannot be studied with the mind. It must be observed from some point, outside of, and yet superior to the mind." 448
[448. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 28.]
Reality and Illusion
Everything that Rose stated was based upon personal observation and experience from outside the mind, meaning his small "s" self mind. A part of Rose had been outside the relative mind, during his experience in Seattle, in 1947. He had gone through the door of death of the personality and ego, on his way to union with the indefinable Absolute, or God, if one wanted to call it that. It was an experience of becoming one with the essence that was already within him, caused by the loss of relative mind. In the process, Rose found the relative mind to be illusory, existing only in this dimension, as he explained years later.
Similar statements from a handful of other writers on enlightenment throughout history, who have also been there, concurred. Bodhidharma, for example, stated in his recorded Zen teachings to students after his arrival in China in 475 A.D., "When the mind stops moving, it enters nirvana. Nirvana is an empty mind. 449 ... When the mind reaches nirvana, you don't see nirvana, because the mind is nirvana." 450
[449. Pine, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, page 53.]
[450. Pine, ibid, page 63.]
Coming back from that enlightenment experience, Rose, returning to the world of his body and personality, retained a memory of the Absolute experience. This in turn gave him a unique perspective on what he called this relative plane, dimension, or dream world of our day-to-day existence. Rose once clarified this perspective by saying, "All we are in this dimension is shadows. ... there is nothing real or solid about us," adding, "I can't convey it. I can't convince... To me this is a picture show, which we project." 451
[451. Rose, Obstacles, lecture in Cleveland, Ohio, November 12, 1974.]
Said another way at a lecture to answer a question posed from someone in the audience who asked, "If the soul of man can just be, why can't we just be?" Rose answered, "Because we are not the soul man. We are not the soul of man," referring to our relative selves. "We are the shadows in the cave of Plato," 452 trying to delineate with words the difference between the two perspectives, and the two selves.
[452. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 49, Lecture at Boston College, Boston Mass., November 1975.]
Perhaps said the simplest in a lecture in Pittsburgh, Rose said, "The guy who's talking will die, but you won't. You are two people. What you see is an illusion, but your inner self, your real self, is not an illusion. Your real self finds a home in a setting that is not this illusion. My feelings are—I can't prove it—that this planet is also an illusion. This creation, however it's spun, is spun in such a manner that this illusion is maintained." 453
[453. Rose, Truth, Lies, Ultimate Reality, University of Pittsburgh, March 26, 1992.]
Rose often attempted to say more about his own experience. He borrowed the analogies from Plato's cave and Ramana Maharshi's diagram of the mind 454 to describe in his writings the vision from his enlightenment experience that was difficult to describe with words. Also, Rose used the analogy of a movie theater projector which he called a camera. "In the book I have written I talk of the camera [theater projector] analogy. Don't look at the pictures on the wall. Try to turn around and go back through the projector. There is where the creation [for this world] came from. What you see on the wall are the shadows that were seen on the wall by Plato. In other words ... everything that is in front of us ... are shadows in the cave of Plato. But when you go back through yourself ... one of the first things you realize is that you don't exist, especially as you think you are [now]." 455
[454. Ramana Maharshi, Words of Grace, page 19.]
[455. Rose, Truth, Lies, Ultimate Reality, University of Pittsburgh, March 26, 1992.]
Stated again another way, Rose explained. "I liken man to be a ray of light that comes out of a camera towards a screen. And the screen is the Void. These are more or less Zen-ish terms, in which the world is looked upon as an illusion—which is a hypothesis because that's not known until you prove it's an illusion." 456
[456. Rose, A Method of Going Inside, lecture in Pittsburgh, PA, November 1977.]
Rose was stating with these words how he had experienced the world of existence as a projected illusion emanating from a source within his own mind. The Zen-ish terms Rose referred to were those of old school Zen teachers of China, not Japan. Bodhidharma, who brought Zen from India to China, said "All scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else, 457 and the mind is the root from which all things grow." 458 Zen Master Han Shan stated the same principle in his own words: "All manifestations before my eyes are also delusions devoid of substance. They are merely shadows within the mind." 459
[457. Pine, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, page 33.]
[458. Pine, ibid, page 77.]
[459. Chang, The Practice of Zen, page 113.]
Zen Master Huang Po said that, "Every phenomenon that exists is a creation of thought.... When thoughts arise, then do all things arise, and when thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish." 460 Finally, Rose found rapport in his enlightenment description with Ramana Maharshi who stated, "The mind projects the world out of itself and absorbs it back into itself [in sleep.] This phenomenal world is nothing but thought." 461
[460. Blofeld, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, pages 72, 80.]
[461. Ramana Maharshi, Words of Grace, pages 2, 10.]
Group Members
No one in the group had experienced what Rose had experienced – witnessing the world as an illusion and the relative self and mind as non-existent. Jane had come closest to it during the rapport session in the front room of Rose's house. She had reached what in Zen is called the "mountain experience." Jane had seen her world around her as completely illusory. However, she did not experience her self as illusory and non-existent fiction; an experience that Rose did not allow to happen because Jane was not prepared for a complete and total collapse of her egos, meaning, the death experience.
Rose often said that when you go through the experience of transcending your personal relative mind, you, as you know yourself dies, and you go through the death experience. "Enlightenment is the destruction of the mind; there's no mind left," when one goes through the death experience 462 for there cannot be enlightenment without a collapse of the ego and relative mind. "When the thing occurs, the head is destroyed. I don't mean you go crazy, but I mean the mind stops. Absolutely stops," explained Rose. 463
[462. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
[463. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
"You have to die in order to know what happens to you after death. You have to die. ... When you start to come apart and die, actually going through a death experience, you realize your previous concepts of yourself didn't do anything for you," said Rose in a Columbus, Ohio lecture. 464 "It is for this reason that those who go through the experience of transcending the mind recognize in it and describe it as being the experience of death," explained Rose in Psychology of the Observer, adding that "The mind does not die easily, and when the personality is gone, we find that we are still aware." 465 Ramana Maharshi said it another way in defining what is illusion and what is not. "Who am I? I am not this physical body, nor am I the five organs of sense perception; nor am I even the thinking mind ... that which then remains separate and alone by itself, that pure Awareness is what I am." 466
[464. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
[465. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 33.]
[466. Ramana Maharshi, Words of Grace, pp. 1-2.]
That is how one gets outside the mind and discovers the answer to the question of life, death, and life after death. One has to die to get there, and then come back. That was what happened to Rose in Seattle. However, Zen is not a system of attempting to kill the mind because "you cannot set out to kill your own mind," stated Rose. "The mind is killed for you," and then enlightenment occurs. 467
[467. Rose, Definition of Zen, Kent State University, 1976.
Consequently Rose doubted that Jane would "make the trip back," because she was not interested in a spiritual search when she accompanied her husband to Benwood, and she had no preparation whatsoever for the death experience that was close to unfolding. Aside from Jane, Rose's effort in working with students was to find someone who was so intent on finding their self-definition that they would, through confrontation and meditation, comprehend the illusory nature of their own mind and generate the experience themselves, as Rose had done. In addition, if they were able to bring themselves up to Rose's level, he knew then that he would be able to transmit the experience to them by mind-to-mind means at the propitious moment, and take them over the final edge because they were prepared.
Relative and Absolute
However, Rose's perspective during his experience went deeper than simply seeing the world and himself as an illusion. Unlike Jane, Rose, the personality, the small "s" self with its relative mind, died, and momentarily ceased to exist. But as he spoke of in his teachings, the relative mind is not all there is to us, there being a ray of awareness or consciousness that is part of Absolute Awareness, or God which is more real than the illusory self.
Spoken with relative words from this dimension that Rose returned to, he described the two perspectives as a dichotomy between the manifest world and the source of that manifestation that he became one with it, in essence, as Absolute awareness. The dichotomy that Rose spoke of after his experience was between what we see in this projected world which we assume is real and call our physical reality, and where the source of this projected illusion comes from that Rose was party to, during the duration of his experience. Said Rose, "There is a mind dimension. There's not only an individual mind, but the individual mind has contact with an entire dimension. Even as we exist in a physical dimension, there is another dimension that is as real or more real than this, depending on where you stand. When you're alive, this [physical] dimension is very real; but when you drop the body, then this dimension may be like something we have dreamed." 468
[468. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
Witnessing a mind dimension more real than this physical world could only come about for Rose by becoming one with that source as a result of the death experience. "You discover that the mind is a dimension by losing the mundane mind. The individual mind, the mundane mind, gives way and you realize—that you don't have an individual mind—that is mostly just mind-stuff, so to speak." 469 Adding to this observation, Rose said, "This mind is a relative dimension. I use the word manifested mind [to describe it.] This stage play, that we are here, with the stage, is a projection from another dimension. This is the only way I can explain it. ... This existence is more of the movie projection on the wall. ... If you're persistent, you can enter it." 470
[469. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 99, Lecture at Boston College, Boston Mass., November 1975 .]
[470. Rose, ibid, page 182.]
What did Rose have to say about the ultimate source of this projected illusion that his awareness became one with, that for want of a better term he called an experience of "everythingness and nothingness?" Rose called that source by different names, referring to it as the Absolute, Is-ness, indescribable Awareness, and an ultimate undifferentiated source of Light beyond words, saying, "The projection that animates the whole picture of creation, as well as every cell in our bodies, we will call Light." 471 It is from this source that all else is projected, said Rose. "It's manifest that this world-picture was projected before we were born. ... All of this is merely a picture. There's a prop room somewhere, a projecting room from where this [world] is projected. All this fantastic, detailed drama occurs, projected on what we call the Void. Something is projected upon nothingness, so to speak." 472
[471. Rose, The Mind, page 5.]
[472. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
Consequently, it was easy to comprehend that all of us in this dimension are asleep to the possibility that the world we see around us, including our body, personality, and mind itself, while appearing real, is not really our own doing but part of a mental projection, and consequently may not be as real as we think. Said Rose about this view, "We wallow blindly in an illusory 'World of the Relative,' and our vision, our understandings, our philosophy and theology are nightmares projected by us somewhere in our consciousness, even as the Void upon which our physical world is projected, is also somewhere in our consciousness." Rather, according to Rose, everyone takes the world they see as complete reality, without question. "It is not enough that man is born into a science-fiction drama that shows promise of being a horror-show, but we are constantly tempted to believe that it has to be that way, not knowing that it could not be substantiated or real. It is only a stage drama," Rose commented at a lecture, about what he called "this relative projected dimension." 473
[473. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, pp. 261-262, Notes on Between-ness.]
Re-traversing the Projected Ray
If the source of our projected illusory self and the world around us cannot be observed directly by our relative mind, then how would we know, or become that which we cannot perceive? Rose explained that while the source of the projection is not directly observable by our own relative mental faculties, "The technique for studying it is demonstrable. If you would see the true source of illusion instead of living vicariously on the screen of the theatre— follow the light back through the lens of the projector." 474
[474. Rose, The Mind, page 4.]
Rose was implying that by "re-traversing the projected ray" of who we are, as he advised in The Albigen Papers, we follow it from the relative mind to its true source which is the Absolute, or impersonal God.
"This involves a conscious effort to re-traverse our projected ray. It does not involve the reversal of the projection from the Absolute, because it is impossible to reverse that which IS, or is the final Reality. We can only reverse the forces of Nature, because Nature is part of the relative world-view, which being relative, automatically possesses negative characteristics. I have used the picture of peering back into the focus of the projector, as the final step of being one with the Absolute. Actually, we go back in one sense, and at the same time we find that we were back there all the time." 475 "When you find your real Self you are automatically joined with that which you search for. The final answer, being the Truth, is also the Absolute. When you reach it you're also in union with the Absolute, and you are also self-defined," stated Rose. 476
[475. Rose, The Albigen Papers, page 216.]
[476. Rose, Talk at Kent State University, February 6, 1975.]
This was the dichotomy of the Atman and Brahman of Hindu literature—that each living creature in this dimension of the manifest world possesses a ray of consciousness or awareness within themselves connected to the source of all awareness, the God or Absolute Consciousness. "When I speak of capital-S Self I'm talking about a ray of the Absolute. That is 'is-ness' itself. That's (just) my point of contact with the total." 477
[477. Rose, Obstacles lecture in Cleveland, Ohio, November 12, 1974.]
Rose was reminded of this during a trip to Egypt with a friend Walter Lee, when Rose saw a carving on a temple wall of an omnipresent sun with rays of light emanating outward; a small human hand was at the end of each ray. To Rose the carving was a representation of the same principal as the Hindu Atman and Brahman; an impersonal God manifested as the personal. The only problem with all this, Rose often countered, was that one had to prove a God, an Absolute consciousness to be so, rather than believe it as a concept. The student had to go there to make the trip themselves to know for sure that God is ultimately within. It did little good to talk about it. Said Rose, "The word enlightenment means nothing to you. The word enlightenment means nothing to anyone until they're enlightened." 478
[478. Rose, ibid.]