Goodbye, Mr. Rose
A special obituary written by David Weimer
A graduate student of philosophy at the University of Oslo in Norway played
her violin at an open grave on Friday morning in rural Moundsville. It was a
Scottish lament, or Irish Air, called Ashokan Farewell and it was featured in
the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War. The haunting, nostalgic notes
slid from Juliet Rose's instrument to lap like gentle waves against the worn
pier of 40 people standing there.
She was playing her fiddle at the graveside of her grandfather, Richard Stephen
Vincent Rose Jr., of Benwood, known by many serious thinkers near and far as
simply "Mr. Rose." ;
Lee O. Warfield, III, of Baltimore visited Rose on his family farm in 1985 and
found himself waiting for the man to return from an errand. "I had no photos of
him, no preconceptions," Warfield said. "When he walked into the room, I stood
up and shook his hand. He said to me, 'We've met before.' And I knew that he
knew me and knew everything about me."
Twenty years after their first meeting, Warfield led a burial service for Rose
on Friday that began at a funeral home and ended with interment at the Rose
family farm. "It felt like I was giving him something," Warfield said after the
service. "I was very lucky to have met him, especially when I did. The morality
that he preached saved my life."
Rose is the author of six books on esoteric philosophy. The Albigen Papers,
his seminal work, is an expose of social, psychological, and spiritual
misconceptions. Published in 1973 and written as a guide for others on the path
of self-knowledge and realization, this work contains an examination of
spiritual movements, blocks and aids to personal spiritual progress, and a large
helping of common sense.
How did this Marshall County man become what many would call a guru or mentor?
It seemed to be his destiny. Richard Rose was born at home in Benwood on
March 14, 1917 to Richard and Marguerite Orum Rose. He attended St. Alphonsus
and St. James schools until the age of twelve when he entered the Capuchin
Monastery in Butler, PA to become a priest. At 17, he left the Catholic
monastery to finish a last year of high school at Wheeling Central Catholic. He
enrolled at West Liberty State College and would eventually travel the country
working in the field of chemistry and engineering.
As a young man, Rose had left the track he had been on to become a priest. He
became, instead, interested in yoga and spiritualism. He was a voracious reader
on subjects of esoteric philosophy, religion, psychology and mysticism. He made
of himself a laboratory, abstaining from vices including alcohol and tobacco. He
gave up eating meat. In short, he was a wandering mystic, meeting and joining
any group that he felt he could learn from. He was on a quest for the riddle of
his existence. In Seattle, in 1947, at the age of 30, he was "accidentally
successful." ;
Twenty-four cars made the half-hour journey from McCoy Funeral Home in Wheeling
to the Rose family farm east of Moundsville.
Shawn Nevins is recreation coordinator for an outdoor team-building program in
Louisville, KY. He drove five and a half hours to attend the funeral of a man
who had been instrumental in his own search for meaning. In 1991, Nevins was in
his early 20s attending North Carolina State University. "I saw Rose's picture
on a poster for a lecture called, 'What is Enlightenment?' and it just got me
curious. I wondered what it was all about."
Nevins would eventually spend three years in Marshall County, where he could
meet with Rose regularly. "It was inspiring and frustrating at the same time.
Inspiring because here's a person who I felt answered the questions that I had.
Frustrating because for one, he can't give me the answers-I've got to find the
answers myself."
This quiet-spoken Kentuckian said that Rose's legacy lies in the people who he
helped and in those who he set in motion on a philosophic path. People he
inspired.
Rose founded the TAT Foundation, a non-profit educational organization based on
his philosophy, in 1973 (TAT stands for Truth and Transmission). Today, TAT
includes hundreds of members from throughout the U.S. and Canada. A number of
its members attend four annual meetings near Moundsville.
After returning from Seattle to settle down, Rose married and spent two decades
raising three children while working as a painting contractor in the Ohio
Valley. He got his first book into publishable form in 1973. This same year, he
began giving lectures on philosophy, Zen, psychology and mysticism at colleges
and universities across the country including Harvard, Brown, Case Western, Kent
State, UCLA, North Carolina State, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and the University of
Pittsburgh. Study groups formed at various college campuses and students began
to visit "Mr. Rose" at his farm in West Virginia on a regular basis. This would
begin another two decades and more of a second career: engagement in his true
interest of esoteric philosophy. Culturally, the door was open and people were
ready to hear what he had to say on the subject.
Rose was a lifelong poet. At the back of The Albigen Papers, he included
a poetic account of his life changing and shattering "mountain experience" that
occurred while meditating in a rented room in Seattle two years after World War
II. He called this epic poem The Three Books of the Absolute.
Michael Casari, a mental health therapist in Philadelphia who credits his own
mental rescue to Rose, read The Three Books of the Absolute in a
tree-shaded corner of West Virginia as family, friends and admirers stood under
a blue sky with wind rustling leaves overhead. A husband, father, teacher and
mentor was ending his earthly journey.
"In my eyes, in my experience with him -- my overall view of him -- he was the
most astute Zen teacher that ever walked this earth," Casari said. In the past,
Rose asked Casari to read the poem to different people over the years, people
who might "pick up on it."
"It was instrumental in my own change of being to an indescribable degree. It
was his life story. My intention was to read it to him and to the group members
who were there." Casari had been at Rose's side during the last five days before
his death.
Robert Cergol, of Raleigh, North Carolina, was 19 when he attended a lecture
given by Rose. "I walked out of that lecture feeling like I had to reshuffle
every viewpoint and thought I'd had up until that point. I was exposed to a
world that I didn't know existed. It seemed like it was the missing piece-in not
knowing what I was supposed to do with my life." ;
That was 30 years ago. Cergol graduated from college and would eventually live
in Bellaire, Benwood and Moundsville. He worked for some time on a grounds crew
for the Wheeling Park Commission and today is a self-employed software
developer, married, and father of two girls.
Richard Rose, 88, of Benwood, author, poet, philosophic authority and friend,
died at 5:50 a.m. Wednesday July 6th at the Weirton Geriatric Center after a
ten-year battle with Alzheimer's. Decades earlier, when he was a young man, Rose
had written a short poem that someone later would ask whether it was about his
own death or not. Rose's matter-of-fact reply was, "Oh, sure." The poem is
called I Will Take Leave of You. He is survived by his wife and children,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren and truly, a host of friends.
I will take leave of you
Not by distinct farewell
But vaguely
As one entering vagueness
For words, symbols of confusion
Would only increase confusion
But silence, seeming to be vagueness,
Shall be my cadence
Which someday
You will understand.
Richard Rose (1917 - 2005) is one of the most profound and unusual spiritual teachers this
country has ever produced. A native son from the hills of West Virginia, Mr.
Rose underwent a cataclysmic spiritual experience at the age of thirty that left
him with an intimate understanding of the secrets of life and death. He was
often referred to as a Zen Master by the people who knew him because of the
depth of his wisdom and his ability to make direct mind contact with his
students. But he did not expound traditional Zen or any other traditional
teachings. What he taught sprang from his personal realization of Truth.
Disillusioned with religion, he focused on physics and chemistry in college. He
hoped to find the keys to the universe in atoms and molecules, but eventually
realized that logic and science were yet another endless tangent. He then turned
to yoga and asceticism, and in his twenties he maintained an extremely
disciplined lifestyle. "I decided to make my body a laboratory," he said, "not a
cesspool." He became a vegetarian, did not smoke or drink, and observed strict
celibacy. He also spent long months in solitude on his remote farm in the hills
of West Virginia. "Solitude is beautiful," he says. "Those years of celibacy and
solitude were the most joyful of my life."
Then, at the age of thirty, after a life of asceticism, searching, and
eventually trauma, Richard Rose had a spiritual awakening of great depth. Years
later, he discovered in the writings of Ramana Maharshi a descriptive term for
what he had undergone -- Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi -- the Hindu term for the
maximum human experience possible, in which the individual mind dies, and the
individual awareness merges totally with the source of all life and awareness --
the Absolute, God, Truth. Maharshi metaphorically spoke of this experience as a
river discharged into the ocean and its identity lost.
