SelfDefinition.Org
Retreat from Untruth
The Teachings of Richard Rose, American Zen Master
Alan Fitzpatrick
Chapter 13 The Surest Path: In Rose's Own Words
Search Is Necessary
Too much discussion about his enlightenment experience to students in the Pyramid Zen group bothered Rose. He had a hunch that it was counter-productive; perhaps even interfering with them doing real spiritual work for themselves. "You have to doubt what I say. Find out for yourself. If I can be of any help, ok, but I don't expect anyone to take what I say without some justification—not just blindly following ... Remember, the enemy of mankind is faith, so the first step is to doubt, doubt even me." 479
[479. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
"You're supposed to be digging for truth, not speculating about enlightenment. Don't believe what I tell you. Don't believe what I say. I have no inside formula. I can't say that if you want to get enlightened go hunt up some lesbian and try to make love to her, and your head will pop off and you'll have a trip and you'll arrive. That's nonsense. That only worked for me." 480
[480. Rose, Truth, Lies Ultimate Reality, University of Pittsburgh, March 26, 1992.]
"So what is the path? You don't need a Zen teacher. It's nice if you read books; it will put your mind in that direction. But the whole thing is finding the truth. You have to find the truth, but this is what we don't do. In my own case, what I did hunger for, which wasn't ego, was the truth. I didn't want power; I wanted to know whether there was a God. I wanted to know whether I was going to live after I died." 481 "I demanded definition, that's all. I didn't know who I was." 482
[481. Rose, ibid.]
[482. Rose, The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
"But people are lazy. People do not want to change their being. They want to do it with the body—they consider that to be their being." 483 "Under the beautiful lawn are millions of bodies who cavorted thereon. ... Satori only comes with friction and irritation." 484 "I'm in favor of a battle with yourself. Start fighting with yourself. That is why a search is necessary." 485
[483. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
[484. Rose, Meditation paper, page 15.]
[485. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October, 12, 1975.]
Rose always began with the basics that most anyone could grasp when giving advice about a spiritual search. "I maintain there's a very simple formula to follow, and that is, if you seek you shall find. Christ said it. And according to the laws of physics, which apply to spiritual laws as well, results are proportional to energy applied. And spiritual success is proportional to energy applied. You can't do it by going to church one hour a day in a half-hearted manner, one day week. You have to put your whole self into it. You have to make up your mind that you're going after it, that's all; you're not just going to play around with it or use it with conversation over a beer. And if you're dynamic, you can come through." 486
[486. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, October 23, 1974.]
"You do not reach the Truth or God unless you want it. 487 "Every man has God inside. The god is in there; you call him forth— sincerely call him forth." 488 "The paradox is that you cannot learn about God. You have to become God. You cannot learn about the Truth. You have to become the Truth. And you can't set out to do that, because that's a postulation." 489 "It's impossible to say, 'I'm going to find God' because we don't know what God is, and it's impossible to postulate Truth." 490
[487. Rose, The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
[488. Rose, Kent State University, talk at KSU, April 12, 1978.
[489. Rose, The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
[490. Rose, The Truth talk, University of Pittsburgh, February 26, 1978.]
"There is no other path to Truth. It lies within, there's no need to look without, go tramping all over the world to find it." 491 "But you have to go directly within; a person cannot learn the truth." 492 This is the way the opposite is arrived at, not by postulating what truth is or what definition is or what God is, because with these things you always begin then with a lie to the self. The only thing that you can do is to retreat from error." 493
[491. Rose. Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
[492. Rose, The Truth talk, University of Pittsburgh, February 26, 1978.]
[493. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
Zen System
How did Zen figure in to Rose? "Zen is a system that looks for Truth." 494 "It is basically a system of going and looking within yourself for the answer." 495 "It's a system of perfect psychology, of going directly into the mind, the first being your own." 496 "The thing about Zen is that you don't have to believe anything. The basic thing behind it is that you don't believe. It's to question. You question. Why do you think the way you do? Zen postulates nothing beforehand." 497
[494. Rose The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
[495. Rose, Relative and Absolute talk, Columbus, Ohio, May 11, 1978.]
[496. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exaltations, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
[497. Rose, Los Angeles talk, January 1976. (New Age Bookstore, misdated, was possibly 1979)]
"Zen is a combination of psychoanalytic method plus a direct method of going into the head, where you do not have to be involved in, or clouded by religious dogma of beliefs in the process of doing it." 498 "The purpose of Zen is to find the answers to three major questions: Who am I? Where did I come from before birth? Where am I going after death? And these aren't answered too accurately by the dogmatic religions." 499 "Who is living? Who is faced with oblivion? Who is asking the question? Does the flesh ask these questions?
[498. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
[499. Rose, Definition of Zen, KSU, 1976.]
Does desire for life ponder the desire for eternal flesh, and upon witnessing death of the flesh, generate a desire for some form of post-mortem consciousness?" 500 "What is the answer of organized religion? Their answer is to believe. And of course if that's sufficient for you, that's alright. But the seeker isn't satisfied with believing." 501 "And so you keep your head on the problem. Of course with Zen it may be a nonsense-koan; it may be just a simple question, "Who am I? Why am I not getting the answer?" 502
[500. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 84.]
[501. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
[502. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
"So it comes back to the fact that Zen is not any part of any religion. Zen is basically a state of mind. Zen is a mental technique and a mental discipline. It is something tremendous and intricate, and at the same time it's very simple, just common sense." 503 "It's a persistent attack on the human mind which causes you to think." 504
[503. Rose, Definition of Zen, KSU, 1976.]
[504. Rose, University of Pittsburgh, March 26, 1992.]
Commitment
Rose felt that it was essential that a person make a definite commitment to the search. "I don't care what position you're in, or what dissatisfaction you have with yourself. If you make a commitment, not to me, not to any system, but to yourself, the understanding of yourself, I maintain that things will start to move in that direction. I think the thing is very simple. All systems of realization are based on this.
Before you make a commitment, you do whatever you feel like doing. You might go out and get drunk one day; you might go to work for three days in a row and do no reading or do no thinking. But once you make a commitment, I maintain that this awakens a force within you that starts to draw you in that direction. You'll move in that direction. And I think you have to vocalize it. You don't have to vocalize it to anyone in particular but you have to vocalize it to yourself. You have to be serious, in other words. You can't say, oh well, let's have five cents worth or five minutes worth." 505
[505. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
"The determination has to come from within yourself." 506 "I reached it as a result of a tremendous amount of determination regardless of the odds, to find the Truth ... about myself, whatever I could about myself about my source and ... who I was and where I was going." 507 "If you don't make a commitment, and have a lot of dynamic determination you're going to get tired and quit." 508 "If you throw enough mud at the ceiling, some of it will stick." 509
[506. Rose, Duquesne University talk, Pittsburgh, October 10, 1974.]
[507. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 70.]
[508. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
[509. Rose, Akron, Ohio, February 17, 1988.]
Once a commitment was made, Rose believed that a person should simply start to look at their own mind from the point of an observer, not knowing or conceptualizing what truth or ultimate reality is, but searching for what is untruth. "When the commitment is made to find the Truth at all costs, some interior or anterior self sets up protection. It may even set up the whole path. You can call it God, or the guardian angel, or a spiritual alliance. Uncertainty and despair are part of the formula for finding the final door or breakthrough. The despair is necessary to pop the head, after the long ordeal of running between the raindrops." 510
[510. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 69.]
Studying the Self
"It can be said that the entire thing can be done by going within the self and looking at the self and studying the self—until of course you find your real Self, which we differentiate as being capital-S Self." 511
[511. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
"It's a delicate balance to keep the mind moving in the direction of joining something or becoming one with something while not knowing that which you're going to join. How is this brought about? We bring it about by a reversal of our attention away from ignorance—this is the trick. We employ a self-investigation, a self-psychoanalysis." 512
[512. Rose, ibid.]
"I'm sorting garbage. You retreat backwards, you step backward, you don't face and postulate, and attack face-on to a place where you have no knowledge of its point of existence. You have to retreat backwards. You step away by studying stuff and rejecting it. I say it's a business of tentatively accepting something that's less ridiculous and discounting completely that which is more ridiculous." 513 "Studying the inside of our self is a very simple process. We need not hold a doctorate in psychology to know about our thinking processes. All that is needed is some honest introspection. The findings which result can be stated in very simple terms."
[513. Rose, Cleveland talk, November 12, 1974.]
Reversing the Vector
Rose believed that it was not enough to simply observe what one found to be untruth in oneself. Once it was recognized one had to attempt to remove it, he advised. "There is a little trick that I call 'reversing the vector.' It's the only way you can go. You've got to evaluate the garbage and just avoid the foolishness that you find." 514
[514. Rose, The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
"By witnessing a manifest pile of garbage into which we immerse ourselves, and accept and believe and devote our time, energy, money and everything else to without any question—in contrast to that, we pick out the best garbage until there's nothing left but pure values—or purer values and purer values. And this is what we call the system of the reverse vector: that you continually retreat from untruth." 515
[515. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
"You can't focus on truth—it's not a physical object—we've got to focus away from untruth, which we more or less can identify." 516 "When you get to the very heart of it, you'll find it's an attack upon vanity. You reach wisdom by an attack on vanity." 517 "The meditation is to find your egos." 518 "And that's what you find. Untruth is when you lie to yourself. You find that you are lying to yourself. And when you begin to remove that, you'll start to move." 519
[516. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
[517. Rose, Duquesne University talk, Pittsburgh, October 10, 1974.]
[518. Rose, The Reality of Thought talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1977.]
[519. Rose, Definition of Zen, KSU, 1976.]
"Once this self-investigation starts, you begin to see much of the world as foolishness. You begin to see much of human action as a real vanity, and much of the trouble that man causes as being rooted in his own desires." 520 "And you will realize that you're an inflated animal, after you get to accept the fact that you do have these egos too." 521
[520. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
[521. Rose, Truth, Lies, and Ultimate Reality, University of Pittsburgh, March 26, 1992.]
The Observer
After looking for some period of time at the mind, a person invariably discovers that they possess an inner mental world where we can observe a mental process taking place, which we call thoughts, memories, and visualizations. To Rose that meant that there is an observer to the mind's thoughts or processes, and thus the observer or viewer is more real than the observation or the view. "For the purpose of consistency I would begin by defining the self as the observer. We must separate the view from the viewer. The view is not the viewer." 522 "The mere fact that we can be aware of perception means that perception is not us." 523 "In matters of self-observation the viewer must never be construed as the view." 524
[522. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 14.]
[523. Rose, Meditation paper, page 21.]
[524. Rose, ibid, page 11.]
"We do not think because we are free agents. Our thinking is forced upon us. We cannot help or stop thinking." 525 "It is important to take note that we are talking about the process called thought, as we know it before having observed it analytically. We are victims of a mental process, visualization, which constantly fools us, and we often identify our self as being our thoughts." 526 "Are we our thoughts? Or are we the observer of our thoughts?" 527
[525. Rose, ibid, page 63.]
[526. Rose, ibid, page 6]
[527. Rose, Zen and Common Sense, Kent State University, April 28, 1977.]
"You start watching the mind, and the mind becomes tangible and objective—as soon as anything is observable it is objective." 528 "This brings us to the admission that we can observe our own behavior, and we can observe not only our own thoughts, but we can observe thought-processes such as visualization and introspection. In discriminating between that which is the Observer, and that which is the observation, we simultaneously define the many observable mental characteristics as being not us." 529
[528. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 13.]
[529. Rose, ibid, page 13.]
This insight that thought itself is part of the observable view could be for the student the first glimpse of truth about who we really are not when it comes to defining the self. "We find that thoughts are not us, as I stated earlier. Thoughts are obsessions. And to find out the nature of thoughts, we must make an obsession of studying thoughts and trying to understand them." 530
[530. Rose, ibid, page 64.]
"I prefer to define the self, (small-s) as being the observable part of us, and the capital-S Self as being the Observer. The latter is the real Self, the former is our most immediate environment (body with its reactions.) 531
[531. Rose, ibid, page 11.]
"We come now to a new understanding of our 'self,' if we admit that our body is not us. We realize that much of the visible world, including our body, may be erroneously projected or visualized." 532 "Our first taste of Maya or illusion comes to us with the realization that we are projecting some, at least, of this picture show of life. And with this attention we may discover that the whole world is projected through our mind, and that all our experiences are mental, not physical." 533
[532. Rose, ibid, page 13.]
[533. Rose, Meditation paper, pages 21, 29.]
"That means that the true Self, is always the anterior Observer. And the observation of the anterior observer brings us to the ultimate or Absolute Observer. This sounds at first like a simple verbal manipulation or optimistic formula, but it is in reality, the true method of reaching the realization of the Absolute state of mind, pointed to by writers on enlightenment." 534 "The mind becomes a bridge to cross; an erroneous area to be transcended. The observing self kills the false self if it stares at it long enough." 535
[534. Rose, ibid, page 13-14.]
[535. Rose, Author's personal journal notes, February 1978.]
The Paradox
However, there was a paradox involved here as Rose often pointed out to everyone. You cannot stop your own mind, you cannot kill your own ego, and you cannot transcend your own mind by willing it.
"We now come to the Law of Paradoxical Immanence for All Things Relative. Very early in the search we get a hint of this. We find, at first, observations that the visible world is in a relative state. We identify an interdependence among all things and their definitions. Everything is, for instance, relative to the ability for measuring by the eye of the beholder. We notice a mental dependency upon relationship or association. We cannot think without association, and this form of identification with ourselves is expressed in the words 'Law of Relativity' (which has nothing to do with Einstein.) Paradoxically, we are related to all things, even to our hallucinations, illusions and intangible emotions. We are related, but we cannot ever clearly think, until we come to a process of dis-association from the endless tangle of identification. Buddha hinted at this process when he advised, as a third step, that we 'think of nothing.' " 536
[536. Rose, The Albigen Papers, page 203.]
"Things may often be, or appear to be, the opposite of that which they were originally. We discover what appears to be an immanent paradox in all of our findings ... The paradox, while disquieting, is often for the thinker, the first real hint that there is transience about the observable, physical world." 537
[537. Rose, ibid, page 203.]
"We're stuck, because we're defining the mind with the mind, which is equally as fallacious as describing matter with matter. So we somehow have to step outside the mind. All of our works of psychology, no matter how many centuries they're indulged in, will not bring us an understanding of the mind until we get behind it, or get beyond it." 538
[538. Rose, Method of Going Inside, talk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November, 1977.]
Awareness
What did Rose advise a student to do to somehow step outside the mind in light of the paradox? "When you start looking at the mind with the mind intently you reach an intense frustration. ... You become more and more despairing or frustrated—finally to a point when it seems like you're just inclined to say it's hopeless. I went through that myself, where I just thought, 'I can't get beyond this; this whole thing is hopeless.' But some urge that stimulates you, or prompts you, some bullheadedness or some tenacity in you to keep on plugging away at this, may bring you to a point of what I call an explosion." 539
[539. Rose, ibid.]
"There's no hope, there's no path, and you've run out of railroad tracks. The only thing you have left at this stage, in my estimation, is you've got a vector. You've pulled the arrow in the bow back so far and it has to go someplace. It has to keep moving. Sometimes out of a clear blue sky there will be a revelation." 540
[540. Rose, Los Angeles talk, January 1976. (New Age Bookstore, misdated, was possibly 1979)]
"He [the student] is watching the mind, but he is also aware of awareness. He is aware that there is something behind the mind—something that is seemingly almost indestructible. So he doesn't look with intuition any more, he looks with direct mind at awareness. Now from this contemplation, the dashing back and forth between the process observer and the individual consciousness of awareness, man arrives at an Absolute realization. He arrives at a point in which his head is on dead-center. There's no place left to go." 541
[541. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 219, The Psychology of Miracles, Akron, Ohio, 1981.]
"We notice that we can look at awareness, and we can be aware of consciousness. We must first have spent a good deal of time studying our own awareness and consciousness with our own consciousness until we accidentally or by some unknown source or purpose—enter the source of our awareness." 542 "There is a point when it's no longer the mind, but the awareness that is in the front. The simple awareness is out front." 543
[542. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 92.]
[543. Rose, Method of Going Inside, talk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November, 1977.]
When the person comes to this realization that anything conceived by the relative mind cannot be a final answer, the mind stops—seized by the quandary which precipitates an explosive result. "When you reach a certain point in this self-analysis your head will stop and a phenomenon occurs in which our awareness transcends the mind." 544 "You realize that everything except your individual awareness is a subjective dimension." 545
[544. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 61.]
[545. Rose, Direct-Mind Experience, page 182, August Chautauqua, TAT Farm, WV, 1983.]
"Mind has a polarity which is non-mind, but which is simultaneously awareness. At this point, we become aware of the mind as being external to our awareness. 'We' are not observing all from a point of undifferentiated awareness. The mind does not stand still but continues its labor of sorting and studying the processes of the mind. It simultaneously becomes aware of its own potential for awareness. The final throes of the mind are like the intense but hopeless motions of a beheaded chicken, struggling to be eternally aware of the awareness that it witnesses. It is for this reason that those who go through the experience of transcending the mind recognize in it and describe it as being the experience of death. The mind does not die easily, and when the personality is gone, we find that we are still aware." 546
[546. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 33.]
"The Process Observer finds accidentally a means to explore the mind on all levels. It can be said another way— by accident our awareness transcends the mind." 547
[547. Rose, ibid, page 66.]
Spiritual Ego
The final ego that the student possesses, which is simultaneously the survival ego and the spiritual ego, collapses and dies during this experience so that a revelation of essence can unfold—of becoming one with Absoluteness. "In the beginning the student believes, I am going to find immortality. Before you find it [immortality] you will give that [ego] up. You give up the ego of physical survival and you give up all hope of spiritual attainment ... you die." 548
[548. Rose, Direct-Mind Experience, page 82, Lecture at Boston College, Boston Mass., November 1975.]
"The person starts to die, and if they feel that they are dying, they will drop all of their egos immediately. It is necessary to drop all of the egos in order to have a realization that isn't colored by relative idealistic thinking." 549 "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." 550
[549. Rose, ibid, page 184.]
[550. Rose, Los Angeles talk, January 1976. (New Age Bookstore, misdated, was possibly 1979)]
"I, the consciousness Absolute, see that the tiny man now no longer liveth ... for life is a thing apart. And since he no longer liveth, he cannot see me as I see him, nor can he ever know of his joys that are things apart ... or know of his love which is now a thing apart.....And soon I see, looking ahead, that all my joys are not, that all my love is not, that all my being is not. And I see that all Knowing is not. And the eminent I-ness melts into the embraces of oblivion... All that remains is All." 551
[551. Rose, Three Books of the Absolute, Albigen Papers, page 235-236.]
For the student of Rose, the path involves an intense and prolonged examination of the self and thought, and a relentless attack on the mind until an experience is attained. "The most important thing to ask yourself about thought would have to do with the source and direction of thought." 552 "If we use everything that might use us [in life] it's possible to go 'whole hog.' Either go whole hog or don't get into the search, because you'll wind up with rationalizations." 553
[552. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 64.]
[553. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
"You create what I call a vector—it's an engineering term but it describes best what happens—that after awhile you'll realize that you're not an individual, you're not a unique rooster that the world will never forget." 554 "Tell that person to attack his mind with his mind, and he doesn't know what you're talking about. He wants definitions then, and that sort of thing. He's still trying to find a gimmick; something tangible that he can play with, rather than just looking inside his own head." 555 "You have to attack the mind until it explodes." 556
[554. Rose, Method of Going Inside, talk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November, 1977.]
[555. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 67, Lecture at Boston College, Boston Mass., November 1975.]
[556. Rose, ibid, page 186.]
"You continually attack the computer with one or two words: 'Why? What? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Let's come up with an answer. Let's get away from all this fiction. Come on, we've been into this fiction before. We've discounted that once and for all. We've found out that's absurd." 557
[557. Rose, ibid, page 230.]
Closing Doors
And once the student truly embarked upon their spiritual search of looking inside and confronting the mind to find an answer, it was vitally important to shut off incoming distractions, such as reverie, or daydreaming that could take the air out of one's efforts. "The computer has to be shut. You have to put material in the computer and then you shut off the input and the output, if you want a decision out of the computer." 558
[558. Rose, Method of Going Inside, talk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November, 1977.]
"You may not wish to spend the years that it generally takes for the mind to tire of adventures into fantasy, ambition, and hedonism." 559 "There will be plenty of time to find peace of mind and sleep ... when you're in the grave." 560
[559. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 90.]
[560. Rose, Talk in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1975.]
"Richard Bucke wrote a book on cosmic consciousness. He was a Christian mystic, incidentally—and he states that only one in a million [people] are able to reach this. This is the top of the pyramid. The rest have no desire to even comprehend that there is an ultimate experience." [561, a]
[561. Rose, Direct-Mind Experience, page 8, Interview, WKSU Radio, Kent State University, 1974.]
[a. See: https://selfdefinition.org/christian/articles/bucke-chart-p43-one-in-a-million.htm ]
"Bodhidharma didn't go down to the pool hall for eight hours and then go back to the cave for a half hour. He stayed in the cave day and night. And he built up one tremendous power of irritation. He had to—that cave had to be hell. And out of that hell was produced discovery. But you can't do it from just sitting down for five minutes." 562
[562. Rose, Laws, Yardsticks, Exultations talk, Columbus, Ohio, October 23, 1974.]
"It amounts to the business of closing doors. The human mind is like this room, and if they're pounding on a piano next door, or the sirens are singing outside that window, you're going to be distracted and your computer [your mind] is not going to work because all this stuff is continually going to be injecting itself into your problem. So the secret of course is closing doors." 563
[563. Rose, ibid.]
"Man is programmed to reproduce. He is programmed to have heady states of mind, fantasy trips, poetic delusions, and surges of ambition. All of this is to encourage reproduction, and provide for the children, not to really serve as an experience for the self. He will only be a door for children to enter into their separate trips of egotism and sorrow." 564
[564. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 83.]
"Well, sex is the death of the human being, and you want to postpone your death as long as possible. And it's mental death long before the physical death. So to keep your wits about you, to keep your energy, this has to be done because sex clogs the mind so that the only thing you can think about is the treadmill that the squirrel is on." 565
[565. Rose. Truth. Lies, Ultimate Reality, Pittsburgh, 1992.]
"It is a delicate balance to keep the mind moving in the direction of joining something or becoming one with something while not knowing that which you're going to join. How is this brought about? We bring it about by a reversal of our attention away from ignorance—this is the trick. We employ a self-investigation, a self-psychoanalysis." 566
[566. Rose, Talk at KSU, February 6, 1975.]
Action Produces Results
"What happens is that he [the student] just keeps driving. What we have is the pursuit of Truth. The other thing is that we may be incapable of perceiving Truth. So you have action opposed by conviction that you will be unsuccessful. You live this. A person on the spiritual path lives this every moment every day of their life, they push, and push and push ... and then nothing logical, mental or verbal can explain what happens—an explosion. Your being changes." 567
[567. Rose, The Direct-Mind Experience, page 251, Lecture on Between-ness, Columbus Ohio, 1980.]
"We do not take a step forward, but are taken forward from here, by that which seems to be an accident—an accident which does not come unless we have struggled relentlessly to find that which was unknown to us, by a method which could not be charted because the end or goal was unknown. We must have first become a vector." 568
[568. Rose, Psychology of the Observer, page 92.]
"It takes an abundance of somatic thinking, and an accumulation of an abundance of energy to propel us backward on the reverse vector." 569 "I believe that results are proportional to energy applied, and if you seek you shall find. But you will not find unless you seek." 570
[569. Rose, Meditation paper, page 28.]
[570. Rose, The Reality of Thought, Columbus, Ohio, April 5, 1977.]
And what do the Zen masters of the past have to say about the path? Master Han Shan, China, 1545: "Gropers and hard workers are many, but beneficiaries and finders of the Path remain few ... Only men of will and might, brave enough to shoulder such a burden and to press straight forward without the slightest hesitation or timidity, will be able to enter into it. For the rest of the people, the chance is very, very slight. An old proverb says: 'This matter is like one man against ten thousand enemies." 571
[571. Chang, The Practice of Zen, Discourse of Master Han Shan, page 112.]
"Search out the point where your thoughts arise and disappear. See where a thought arises and where it vanishes. Keep this point in mind and try to break right through it.....What you should do is take up this awareness as if holding a sharp sword in hand ... In this manner exert your mind to the very, very end; wipe out all traces of thoughts, kill them." 572 "When any thought arises, you should try to find its source; never let it go easily or be cheated by it. ... At this crucial stage you must recognize them thoroughly and break through them. Never take them as real. Never subject yourself to their control and deceptions." 573
[572. Chang, ibid, page 113-115.]
[573. Chang, ibid, page 114-115.]
Bodhidharma, China, 475 A.D.: "All appearances are empty. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. ... Only one person in a million becomes enlightened. ... Deluded people don't know who they are. ... Everything that has form is an illusion. Just know your mind. ... All appearances are illusions. They have no fixed existence, no constant form. They're impermanent. ... Seeing your nature is Zen. ... Wherever you find delight you find bondage. ... You shouldn't doubt that all scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else. ... All motion is the mind's motion.... When the mind stops moving, it enters nirvana. ... Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist. ... If you can understand the mind, everything else is included. ... You should realize that the practice you cultivate doesn't exist apart from your mind. ... Simply concentrate your mind's inner light and behold its outer illumination." 574
[574. Pine, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma.]
Huang Po, China, 840 A.D: "Whatever the senses apprehend resembles an illusion, ranging from mental concepts to living beings. ... All of the Buddha's teachings just had this single object—to carry us beyond the stage of thought. ... Every phenomenon that exists is a creation of thought: therefore I need but empty my mind to discover that all of them are void. ... The entire void stretching out in all directions is of one substance with Mind. ... All conceptual thinking is called erroneous belief. ... Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate. ... When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.
In the words of Richard Rose:
"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." 575
[575. Rose, The Mind, page 4.]
[ end of chapter 13, of 15 in the book ]