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This month's contents: Jacob's Ladder (part 4) by Richard Rose | Poems by Shawn Nevins | Summer, 1992 by Shawn Nevins | Being and Doing by Douglas Harding | First Know Thyself by Art Ticknor | This Camera by Art Ticknor | Trusting the Inner Self by Bob Fergeson | Hijacking of Thought by Bob Fergeson | Humor | Reader Commentary > Want to meet some of the Forum authors in person? Interested in meeting other Forum readers? The next TAT meeting is being held on the weekend of July 1 - 3. Click here for more information. Note: This page is checked with Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7.1 and Firefox 1.0. Some of the graphics may not show in older versions of Netscape and may not come through in Forums sent by e-mail. Call for papers: What have you learned from studying your dreams? We're soliciting opinions on this topic for next month's Forum. Please your responses, limited to 800 words, by May 21. Index of Issues to Date | Submissions, feedback & e-mail list Enjoy the Forum? Help support it with your donation.

Jacob's Ladder (part 4), by Richard Rose
beginning in the February 2005 TAT Forum

Q. I sort of embarked upon this process myself. I suppose you could say I was all the way up to the process-observer point for awhile. Never satisfied, always evaluating many different types of feelings, including intuitive feelings that negated all of the empirical data I had accumulated. R. Yes. Q. But then, all of these things started to overload. I started to not be able to function on an everyday, practical.... R. Right. That's right. Q. In fact, the ability of my mind to function in an empirical, linear fashion in a way that the University requires, began to break down. So again, instead of being able to keep going, I had to.... R. Retreat. Q. Right. I had to retreat. And so I find myself slightly frustrated. Because at times I dip right back down to the bottom again. R. Sure, sure. And if you reach the top you'd go back down to the bottom again. You can't live without eating at the table and going to the toilet and your body functioning the same as it did before. And you're going to have to retreat to that set of values, and daily compare the positive and the negative again. Until the day you die. Q. (A different person.) I think you kind of reach another dimension. But you'll still be in the same place you were, and you'll still have to cope. But as for what he said about adding to the computer and things getting harder, I don't see that. As you get the thing working, things become easier, not harder. And the mind doesn't overload, because you were working against yourself in the first place, but now it's working with ideas that make it easier. But it should become easier. And the intuition mixes with the logic. And I don't believe in positive/negative. Because if you believe it then you're going to look for it. R. Let me say something to the other fellow, because he posed a problem. I don't know how much you're acquainted with Zen, but this process was demonstrated in the lives of people who reached the maximum enlightenment, or Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi. The thing happened to each person pretty much as you described. In that they saw the foolishness of life, they intuited a path but it didn't work, they approached a point in which their head, everything, all the stuff hit the fan -- and they were overcome and they couldn't continue. It was either trust yourself to accident or death, or get back and grab a hold of something tangible. Q. Exactly. R. Now strangely enough, in the Zen path, so many scholars having described this to the three or six thousand students in some of the monasteries in China, they devised a system of deliberately bombing the head. And it was the exercise of attaining no-mind, which I don't approve of. I don't approve of trying to make your mind go blank. The understanding is that when you reach the point of no-mind, the All-Mind invades it, and you know everything. But you can't go about it just by simulating, taking a symptom. You have to do it as you did it, but have faith in it and in yourself, regardless of whether you go insane, drop dead, get thrown out of college, whatever. Persist. Keep that computer going. And what happens is the head explodes. Not the physical head, but the comprehensiveness. Q. Are you implying that self-esteem, if I could use that category, is related to intuition? That the malfunction of intuition.... R. Your intuition wasn't perfected; or possibly your time hadn't come. I made a decision when I was twenty-one years of age -- looking ahead and reading books about people who had gotten into raja yoga and that sort of thing, and people who had gotten into Christian mysticism and were written off as nuts -- that I very possibly could be written off as a nut. That I could get into prostate cancer or something and die. And I said, "So what? I don't want to live undefined. I'll take the chance." You walk right up to the edge and you say, "Hey, my head's coming apart." And you get frightened. But that total lonesomeness takes you away from all of your contact with relativity. That lonesomeness is that your essence is separated for all time from this relative thing, including your dear relatives, your dear children that may come or may have been here already, your possessions, everything. So you may lose all that, including your degree in the university. But once you return -- just like he says, he's coming in from a point which is very valid, too -- that once you get there you realize there is no positive and negative. And that's part of the new definition that you have. Do you understand what I'm talking about, then? That when a person says there is no positive and negative, he's transcended the positive and negative. Which we know in chemistry is there; in mathematics it's there. But in a spiritual realization, once you reach that, there are no positives and negatives. For instance, I'll say that a guy who shortchanges me is a thief, maybe. But there are no bad people; I know that implicitly. There are no bad people and there are no good people. But we've still got to live in this good/bad world. Q. Do you think that we're sort of fooling ourselves, coming to these lectures and reading books and trying to work on ourselves? I have a feeling that if I got to that point, where my mind was threatened, I'd be frightened too, and set back. R. Sure. Now that's the reason for the so-called monastery -- and ashrams. A lot of people sensed this, that they'd want to be alone at that time. So they had somebody standing close to them, so when the guy said, "I'm scared stiff," why he says, "Well, if you die I'll bury you." (Laughter.) It's just like a guy taking another person through an acid trip. You say, "Now you're going to encounter such-and-such a little bug along the road, and don't jump through the window, because you'll come back, and everything will be all right." Q. The whole issue of the realm of emotions versus cognitive thought, or empirical thought -- versus the meditative state, which is neither -- the thing that throws me is the flooding of emotions, actually, that causes downfall. It stopped my cognitive, empirical powers of mind from functioning. R. Well, of course, that stops you anyhow. That's what they call the death. See, I always say -- you have to do a lot of this so-called empirical or logical thinking -- that you have to fatten up the head before the head is cut off. The head has to be fattened up for some reason before you chop it off. You can't just say. "Well, I'm going to be zero." You can't just go out and dissipate, and blow all your energy and say, "It doesn't matter what happens to me, whether a guy chops off my hand or chops off part of my mentality, or a drug blows part of my brains away." No, no. You have to concentrate. Buddha made a remark -- supposedly, I don't know whether he did or not, but it's in his books. He said, "First you have to learn to think of one thing; then you have to learn to think of everything; then you have to learn to think of nothing." Now that's translated. I have another explanation for it. It's first you have to be one-pointed; you have to be determined and you have to have a single objective. In the pursuit of that single objective you have to study the universe. You can't leave a stone unturned or a book unread, if that's what it takes, or an exercise unexperimented with. But then he says you've got to think of nothing. You can't think of nothing. What happens -- after you bombard yourself with possibilities, you blow the head. And nothing is there. Your thinking becomes nothing. But you don't think of nothing. So this is the difference between what I call choosing the symptom, trying to imitate the symptom -- in some of the Zen practices of exercising no-mind, or trying to have no-mind -- as opposed to just attacking the problem and attacking the problem, until the head just blows. Q. The idea of meditation -- I've gone through TM. I firmly believe that TM was not necessary, that I could have used any mantra I wanted to use -- but the process of initiation I went through was helpful. R. Sure. Q. I occasionally reached a state in meditation in which there was no thought, no mantra, and even no space and time. And that also became frightening, because in terms of being a biological organism, there are certain things that we must do. And I don't want to be in a Zen monastery for the rest of my life. R. I never spent any time in one. I don't think it affects you that much. I studied under a Zen teacher for awhile. In fact, there's a saying, that during the experience the hills cease to be hills and the valleys cease to be valleys, but after the experience the hills are once more hills and the valleys are once more valleys. You can't stay in that non-dimension. The body can't function, the mind can't function, in a non-dimension. You return; there's no doubt about it. Q. Ok, in that non-dimension, during that period, there was no thought. R. Right. Q. And it wasn't a dream state either. Well, I can't say that because.... R. The trouble of it is though that you didn't hang on long enough, or you wouldn't have had the thought of urgency to get back and save your hide. Q. This drawing you've given, which to me is very useful, is a very intellectual process. You're saying we watch our actions through this intellectual yoga. How in your system of watching your actions do you deal with the emotions? Which often are the drivers, and prevent the intellect from working. R. Well -- you're kind of throwing me on the dichotomy between intellect and emotions, because -- sure, I don't think we do too much of anything unless we're emotionally impelled. I think sometimes the emotions impel us in a direction, and so for that we question our motives, and try to work diametrically opposite, or despite them. And that in turn is only emotional in origin. Q. I'm speaking about emotions in the sense of that constantly changing pattern which comes as the sensory impulses come into the human being, and associate with patterns of desire and so forth. And therefore continually changing, and preventing the mind from working. How does your system deal with that? R. You watch it. What I'm talking about, just simple positives and negatives, this is the whole spectrum of action. For instance, you go through such things as knowing, as I said, that what looks good to you today may be different tomorrow. And you look at, say, this cup I'm holding -- in the eyeball it's upside-down, and the mind adjusts it. And the same way with emotions. Emotions are like kaleidoscopic views. And you have to sort that, and keep sorting it, until you get a true perspective. Q. Do you propose, at least at first, using sitting process meditating? R. No. In fact, I can't think sitting, so I don't advise anybody else. I can think walking. Of course, I think that people who are highly agitated possibly should train themselves to sit. I'm hypothyroid; if I sat I'd go to sleep. So I keep moving. Q. Do you advocate this for all your students? R. No, no. I don't advocate. I say, "In your judgment, you have to start and look things over." And I don't say anything about diet; I don't even say anything about what books to read. I just say, though, that no matter what books you read you're going to be faced with this same thing, of the relative world, the empirical, umpire type of judgment, the understanding of an umpire mind. This will come to you. And you'll eventually evolve in the same way, into a logical opposed to an intuitional type of thinking. Now as for how you go about that -- I don't believe that any two people are the same. I knew a man one time -- one of the most outstanding cases of enlightenment I encountered in my entire life [Paul Woods]. And I studied under a Zen master whom I know was enlightened. He's unknown. His name is [Alfred] Pulyan, out of Kent, Connecticut, right next to New York. But he didn't care, particularly; he wasn't selling anything, so he didn't care to be advertised too highly. While a lot of the people with the rubber stamp -- they had the authority, by virtue of the rubber stamp, and they taught words. Which anybody can get out of ancient books. But anyhow, this one fellow, his name was Paul Woods -- out of Dallas, Texas, or San Antonio, Texas, one of the two -- was basically a Christian. And he never was interested too much in anything except the Christian religion. Devout, believed in the Church -- and they made an aviator out of him. And they sent him over to bomb Japan. So he bombed Japan. And when he landed his plane, why, he started thinking. "What happened?" He said, "The Bible says that God observes the fall of the sparrow. If God observes the fall of the sparrow, was he watching that bomb and how many people it killed?" So he went nuts, so to speak, in the eyes of his fellow officers, and they furloughed him back to the States. Where he continued to wrestle with these ideas. "What's going on? My thinking has been erroneous. I depended on the fundamentalistic approach, and it isn't working out." So he just belabored himself. His wife says, "You'd better shake yourself out of that and go back to work, or we're going to starve to death. He didn't. She divorced him. His kids wouldn't have anything to do with him. He went down and tried to get a job -- he went to work as a salesman for some car agency, and he told me he was in there and everything was hitting the fan. Just like this fellow was talking about. Everything went wrong. He was praying. He said the only thing he knew how to do that he learned from the church was to pray. And that was the Lord's Prayer. So he said he took the Lord's Prayer and he took it apart and he prayed it forwards, backwards, he analyzed it, he studied it, and he kept on praying. But he said it wasn't getting him anyplace, he wasn't doing anything. So one day, he said it was an especially bad day, he was sitting at his desk and a couple of customers came in. He had sold them a car, and they were preaching at him, bitching. And he said he just right in front of them laid his head down on the desk and prayed for God to kill him. He found a new prayer. And he just passed out. He said when he woke up, he was in the hospital. But he said he had been for about ten days on a journey, in which he saw the space/time picture. He had been in space/time. He had traveled, he had seen history. He'd be walking down the street with you, and he could describe, if he happened to be in that place, he could describe say the battle of Gettysburg. He'd be watching it, telling you what was happening. But he had come to the answer beyond all trouble. He knew what the answer was and he had still returned. But this man didn't have anything except this persistent determination. With what little tools he had in hand, his Lord's Prayer, his Christian education, his sense of logic, his sense of justice, his sense of injustice. And these things battled back and forth until his head popped. When I discovered this, I found that it isn't limited to any system. Anybody can do it. You don't have to have a teacher even. It's good to have somebody -- if you don't want to catch leprosy, well, consult a leper. Or if you want to be a mountain climber, talk to a mountain climber; he might save you breaking your neck. Or, if you're going into something and there's somebody standing beside you, and your head flips out -- and he gets a hold of you and says, "Ok, I'll stick here with you until the thing's through" -- maybe that helps. But I maintain that there's no -- it doesn't matter whether you eat meat, or eat grain, or stand on your head, or sit in a position. I think these are all external things that belong to an external world. © 1976 by Richard Rose. All Rights Reserved. This talk is available on CD through Rose Publications. To be continued...

"Quiet Rooms" A leaf falls, opens a door to an attic of lost dreams. There, a mirror waits, draped by forgetfulness and fear, containing stillness that you will, in time, uncover. * Silence hangs in the air with bewildering simplicity. Breathe deeply, and in the moment after exhalation, inside and outside reveal no difference. * "Down the Rabbit Hole" Caught by the slight curve of a riverbank, my mind is pulled out of thoughts again and into the river itself. Somewhere in you is a moment found not by adding, but by subtracting, in which a single ray becomes everything. * "The Name" There is a face whose name you can't quite remember. A name you almost hear in the slow, majestic dance of leaves on distant trees; you almost see in a rusted sheet of metal, hanging onto a barn by a forgotten dream; and you almost feel in the hands that built this barn amongst the trees long ago. That face whose name you can't quite remember hidden inside. * Within you is a quiet like a well with no walls. You feel the need to call out, but shadows do not answer. They reflect in their dark and silent way that we are Whole and need cry for no one. * Roaring, an undeniable train bears down on you. I can't hit you hard enough to transmit the solidity that presses on the door of your dreamy life. "Back there," he intoned, "Back there, behind that door, a torrential quiet bursts with answers." * My life opened in the darkness like a morning glory, though I found no color inside, only the giving of my self to an emptiness that abounds.

Being and Doing by Douglas Harding Life has a distressing way of presenting us with dilemmas, with seemingly insoluble problems about what to do and what not to do. Not so much problems with no answer as predicaments with two quite contradictory answers. We don't know where we stand. Issues aren't clear-cut. Right and wrong have a tendency to change places. You might say that life is a cleft stick, a game impossible to win, a continuing choice of evils. One of the most troublesome of these dilemmas is whether to watch or to play the game of life, whether to decline or welcome responsibility, whether to cop out or to cop in. The world's great teachers don't make it any easier for us to decide. They seem only to add to the confusion. Take Jesus for example. On the one hand, in his Sermon on the Mount, he tells us to relax, to let tomorrow take care of itself, to leave everything to the hidden Power that makes the lilies grow and accounts for their beauty. On the other hand, in the Parable of the Talents, he heaps praise on the busy, duty-bound, responsible citizen, and cheerfully consigns the unprofitable layabout to hell. Or take Nisargadatta: "As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage." And yet, again and again, he insists that conscious effort is essential in life, and indeed that earnestness is the decisive factor. Finally, take Ramana: "No-one succeeds without effort," he declares. "The successful few owe their success to their perseverance." And then immediately he adds: "A passenger in a train would be silly to keep his load on his head. Let him put it down. He will find that the load reaches the destination all the same. Similarly, let us not pose as the doers, but resign ourselves to the guiding Power." Well, which shall we do — carry our load or dump it? Help others to carry their loads, or accept no responsibility for them either? The dilemma is far from being a merely intellectual puzzle. It is real and it hurts, so much so that some of us are being torn apart by it. There is no "right" choice. Whether we take the way of just letting things happen, or of strenuous intervention, we are in for trouble. The life of the dropout who exerts no effort and makes no decisions and accepts no responsibility for himself -- let alone for others -- what sort of life is that? As for his opposite, the "square" -- the hard-working, conscientious, load-carrying, public-spirited fellow -- we all know the stresses and strains, the compromises and frustrations and anxieties that are coming to him. To say nothing of the decay and death that will too soon terminate himself and his best-laid plans. Krishna tells Arjuna about the real doer So much for the dilemma that confronts all humans. Now for its resolution. Yes, there is a resolution, a truly practical one that we can immediately start to apply in our everyday living. But first let's be clear about who it is that is engaged in that everyday living. It is the very nature of every living thing to look after itself, to see to its own welfare, to prefer itself to others. It has no time for altruism. Its job is the survival of its separate thinghood. Thus it lays claim to a portion of the world's space, filling out this volume to the exclusion of all rivals. It has room only for those things that it needs to unthing and incorporate -- in a word, for its food. In general, its behavior is aimed at its own survival at others' expense. Now this unrelenting self-seeking is more than a necessity of life. It is the life-thrust itself. Well aware of this, you don't say of an undersized cabbage in your vegetable garden that it generously takes less than its full share of water and sunlight, or praise the weakest piglet in the litter for not being greedy at the trough. On the contrary, you dismiss them as unhealthy, insufficiently alive. It's the same in your flower garden. The finest lilies are those that grab their full share, or more, of the available nutrients. It’s no different with people. Let's face it: a vital, truly alive man is one who knows what he wants, and goes after it, and gets it. He is self-reliant, energetic, audacious, determined, fully cooperative when it suits his purpose, of course, but at other times quite ruthless. Above all, he doesn't sit around moaning about his bad luck, his crippling circumstances, or what God and his parents and his genes and chromosomes did to him. Instead, he takes himself for better or worse as his own property for which he alone is responsible. And insofar as he avoids this responsibility, and lacks purpose and drive and a strong sense of doership, he falls short of manhood. You could charitably call him a retiring, humble, self-effacing man; or, more honestly, a tired man, a sick man, a failed man, and no more deserving of our admiration than the wilting plant or the undersized animal. To be manly is to take responsibility for one's particular portion of the world and all the life in it, and to live out that life zestfully, without apologies or holding back. What price, then, the Sermon on the Mount, with its insistence on passivity? And what shall we say of the Saint or the Sage who is happy to stand on the bank of the river of life, watching the waters rush by, and careful not to get his feet wet? Are the Liberated, in fact, idle, feeble, failed, irresponsible humans? Obviously not. Quite the contrary, they are specially alive and in their own way marvelously determined and energetic and -- where necessary -- quite ruthless. The Blessed Angela of Foligno, a true Seer of the indwelling God, went so far as to view with almost murderous satisfaction the deaths of her mother and husband and children, whom she regarded as "impediments" to her spiritual life. Young Ramana stole money to go off and live the holy life -- a life that throughout relied on others' earnings -- and for years he never revealed his whereabouts to his grieving mother. The real Sage or Saint or Seer is a tough and determined character. There is a world of difference between the dropout and the Seer, no matter how alike their appearance and behavior (and sometimes their account of themselves) may happen to be. And the difference is this: the dropout thinks he is essentially some kind of person (for example a carefree and unconventional person) whereas the Seer sees that he's not a person at all. The one imagines he's a thing in the world, while the other perceives he's the No-thing that contains the world. The one identifies himself with his appearance as a second/third person, the other with his reality as First Person. And not only is the Seer the Space in which things happen, but also the Space in which all the dilemmas and contradictions that afflict things happen, without affecting the Space in the slightest. In his capacity as the Container of things, as the Aware Space which is also their Source and Reality, he is himself the reconciliation of whatever divides them. Thus the Seer resolves the dilemma of passivity versus activity, of detachment versus involvement, of witnessing versus responsibility, in the only way they can be solved -- by being the Source of both. As their single Source and Spring, he is upstream of all its bifurcating tributaries. He is the Stem of the cleft stick. He is the indivisible Divider. And what you, dear reader, really, really are is that Source, that Spring, that Stem. Only in appearance have you ever been human. Intrinsically, therefore, you are free of all the contradictions and tearings apart that humans are subject to. What is a human being? It is, as we have already noticed, a something -- opaque, colored, solid, small. It is full of itself. It occupies and packs out with flesh and blood a few thousand cubic inches, thus excluding other creatures from that volume. It exists by closing itself to others, by being distant from them, distinct from them. It survives by disappearing them. It proclaims itself alone, announcing to an alien world: "Here am I! Keep off! No entry!" Are you like this, in your own experience at this moment? If so, how do you manage so easily to take in this page and all the printing on it, right now? How else but by giving it room, by disappearing in its favor? Have you anything where you are, at this moment, to keep it out with? Aren't you built open, an empty vessel for filling with anything and everything that may present itself, all the way from the stars to these black marks on paper? And when you look up from this page to the face of your friend over there, don't you take in and take on that face? Or, if you disagree, if you aren't accommodation for things, but just one of them, how do you account for their brilliance at this moment compared with the obscurity of their observer, not to mention his absence? All you need to settle these crucial questions is to stop thinking long enough just to take a look. And then, if you really do experience yourself as that object you keep on seeing over there in your mirror, if you really are what you look like to others, why then you are a human being after all, and that's that. But if, on the contrary, you really are what you look like to yourself -- namely, Room for things to come and go in -- why then you are divine, and should put an end to this charade, this pretence of being "only human after all." As Divinity itself, as the Space for all and the Source of all, you are responsible for all. There is no second Power. Who you really, really are did it all, is doing it all. But notice whether this Space that you are is efforting its contents. Do you, who are attending to the scene, have any sense of intending it, of contriving it and cobbling it together, of causing and maintaining it? It is for you, who are responsible for it, to say. Isn't it rather that everything flows spontaneously, without motive or taking thought, from your Being, a ceaseless spin-off from Who you are? Wasn’t Ramana right when he said: "No motive can be attributed to that Power ... God is untouched by activities, which take place in His presence"? Here, then, is the perfect reconciliation between the detachment that witnesses all and the attachment that is involved in all. It was the false notion that you are really a human being that gave rise to the dilemma, the contradiction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Talents. At the highest level Dilemma, which is uncomfortable, gives way to Paradox, which isn't. Your true Nature is the Paradox to take care of all paradoxes: there is nothing that is not you and nothing that is you; the Aware Space is and isn't its contents; you care and you don't care; you control things and they just happen. This may sound silly, but in fact it is the perfection of wisdom. Also it works. And even at less exalted levels these conclusions make sense. The responsibility that a man feels, his sense of controlling this and that, is illusory. Every event in his life is conditioned by the other events constituting the universe, as if everybody were making a living by taking in everybody else's washing. Attributing particular causes to particular events, and feeling personally responsible for any of them, is unrealistic. The universe is strictly indivisible, and the only way to take responsibility for some of it is to take responsibility for all of it. Which is to be the Whole of it. You as the Whole of you are responsible for everything, and manage it all very well -- and this without any sense of responsibility or good management. How can you know this for sure? Only by being yourself now and consulting your firsthand experience. Only by ceasing to masquerade as a man, a woman, or a child. The answer to the dilemma of being and doing, to the problem of personal responsibility, is not to give up the feeling of being personally responsible for this and that, but to take it to the limit -- where it vanishes, and you can say with Ramana Maharshi: Action forms no bondage. Bondage is the false notion: "I am the doer." Be fixed in the Self and act according to nature without the sense of doership. Attending to the Self includes attending to your work. The work will not bind you. It will go on automatically. From "Look for Yourself," by Douglas E. Harding. Copyright 1998 by Douglas E. Harding. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California 92013. www.InnerDirections.org. For information about Douglas Harding and his teaching, visit Headless.org.