The TAT Forum

So we can study those, and sometimes they will give you an idea. But we couldn't begin to catalogue them - an individual couldn't at least - and try to deduce some great truth from them as to our relation. Because when you get down to it, for instance if you want to get to the core of Zen teaching, or the culmination of the Zen training which would be an experience - you have a certain conviction that this entire physical world is a projection, not a reality.

And immediately when this becomes apparent to you, you sort of lose interest in the mundane phenomena like levitations or haunted houses. These seem to be just strictly more of the same phenomenal world. They are a little bit more tenuous or gossamer, but they're still just parts of a phenomenal world which in itself is not too real.

Now I had a very difficult time even delivering a lecture, because I had to deliver it to people who thought in objective terms. And I think I still have trouble with that. In trying to get to people who are thinking in terms of very objective things, like tomorrow's paycheck, or pleasure, or compatibility, or conventional philosophic attitudes, conventional psychological attitudes, this sort of thing.

I have a lot of trouble communicating with that because when you find out that the whole thing is a projection, it makes you more or less lose enthusiasm about the significance or glamour of this projection.

Question: I'm sure you can't break down twenty-five or thirty years of conditioning to society's ways and tell them, "Look, this is the way you should think about it."

Rose: Right, and this is the difficulty that we run into all the time. For instance, a person will come in to a lecture and ask a question, and you are torn between trying to reply to that person in his language, or being as truthful with him as you would be in approaching total truthfulness. If you give him a totally truthful answer, he may be insulted or think that you're making fun of him.

So we're continually faced with that - trying to still talk to that man in an objective manner, to reply to him or pick up his head where it's at. The terminology in the Albigen System, as we call it, is continually difficult to translate, because people are asking such questions as, "Is it good to do this?" And of course your immediate reaction would be to say, "Why do you say 'good'? What do you mean by 'good'?"

But yet you don't like to do that because then they look at you rather amazed: "What's he doing, evading me? Playing with my head? I asked him a simple question, why doesn't he give me a simple answer?" So in some cases I'll try to come at them from their viewpoint, and lead them back to perhaps more clear thinking.

Question: What about those individuals at the base of the pyramid, who seem to have been locked into a religious belief which says, "You will believe or else you will go to hell." Are these people inhibited from breaking out of those frames of thought, or can they be lifted to a higher stage?

Rose: It isn't "inhibited." I call it trying to put three pounds of, let's say, material into a two-pound bag. A person on the instinctive level cannot comprehend the person on the step above him. And we find this in all levels of spiritual work. If you encounter a teacher who is what I call two rungs on the ladder above you - you'll reject him.

We find this all the time. Where people come into the group and their intuition picks up that we are people outside of this appreciation of the glamorous and the bizarre part of life. And people on other rungs - if they have been imbued with the game, the dance of life, and they find it all wonderful and joyous and all that, and they make the mistake of coming in and thinking that we're a bunch of joyous people who are going to enhance their joys even more with some new gimmick that will titillate their mentality - when they get the picture that we are very sober - they disappear as quickly as they can.

Because their instinct tells them, "Either you're going to get out of that place, or these bizarre pleasures that you think you have been enjoying are going to disappear - and are you ready for it?" And I'd say that ninety percent of them will leave when they become aware of this.

The instinctive level is basically just what the word implies - that there is a certain segment of people who move from the cradle to the grave in reaction only. They just react - their DNA molecule or genetic plan, their inheritance characteristics, plus their environment, cause them to function in what is a maze or groove. Which they think that they are functioning in very deliberately, that they are doing it themselves.

And they are the people who think that they are really the most alive. They more or less look down their noses at people who are devotional even and say, "That's a fool. I'm living. I'm having my fun, I'm reproducing. And I'm having my fifth of whiskey on Saturdays." These are instinctive people.

And they have no exaltation, to use one of Huxley’s words, until they get tired of that (the instinctual life-style). And this may take years of their life. If you look at people over a span of forty years you’ll witness some of your friends who were instinctive, very down to earth with just you might call an animal existence. And then one day they said, "Hey, there’s more to life than this, there has to be. I’ve been an idiot."

So they go down to church and they beat their head on the floor and they get salvation. And then they have an experience, an exaltation. They lose themselves. They give up this ego of being a proud animal and they change to devotion, to someone who has sacrificed, or to a noble movement. They do it for a person, like Jesus or Buddha or any major head of a religion, or they may do it just for the religion itself.

In whichever case, they lose themselves. All exaltations are accompanied by the giving up of part of your foolishness, which we call egos. So then this person becomes, you might say, a real fanatic. He gets into this emotional religion, and he will tell you that he’s right in there talking personally to this god, communicating personally with him. And they go along on this track maybe the rest of their life.

Or maybe you’ll find a person born into this particular category. He seems to be emotional or devotional right from the start. He goes to church, and some day he’ll tire of it. And his intellect will reason (we’re talking about the intellectual level now): "Well, according to the history and the scriptures and all this, there’s not too much evidence of this personal God."

It will become apparent to him that for instance the armies who supposedly thought that they were doing God’s work were destroyed. Individuals who lived good lives according to what someone else told them was good were destroyed. That the people who seemed to live by no rules seemed to prosper. And he begins to wonder then, "What is this? What’s going wrong?" And this doubt brings him into a search, a mechanistic sort of search such as logic and reading and so on. And this is when he in turn moves out of the emotional level.

"MEDITATION: It's Not What You Think..." by Michael Conners: