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This month's contents: Peace of Mind Despite Success (part 1) by Richard Rose | Poems by Shawn Nevins | Faith and Discovery by Shawn Nevins | Today I Was Happy by James Wright | I Died at 10:52 A.M. by Victor Solow | Devotion by Bob Cergol | A Childhood Story by Robert Bossman | The Mechanics of Dreaming by Bob Fergeson | Humor | Reader Commentary Note: This page is checked with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape 7.0. Some of the graphics may not show in older versions of Netscape and may not come through in Forums sent by e-mail. Index of Issues to Date | Submissions, e-mail list & misc.

Peace of Mind Despite Success, by Richard Rose

This is the first part of a public talk given by Richard Rose at Irwin, PA in 1984. We're a small group, and we can pretty much get more accomplished if it's informal. I'm going to try to give an outline of what has been accomplished over the last ten or twelve years, and the means by which it was accomplished, and the direction and the reason for it. Then I'll stop and open the meeting up for questions. And I want you to feel free to ask questions. What you have in any group when you give a talk are people of different interests and different levels of interest. I'm talking this stuff every day, and it gets to a point where I'm so familiar with it I just presume everybody that I talk to understands what I'm saying. And lots of times there is a percentage of people with no real rapport with what I'm saying, and their language is different. At the last talk I gave over in Pittsburgh I sensed that there were some very sincere people there -- and I'm inclined to be rather blunt with a lot of things that I say -- and I had kind of an afterthought in the back of my head, "Be careful. Don't say certain things tonight." Because there's some people there that might be hurt. Their pet theology is everything they've got in the world, and if you give that a kick that's no good. Now for young people -- I think young people need to be shocked out of ruts that they might get into. But when you get somebody that's sixty, seventy, eighty years of age.... I often think of my mother as a case. My mother was a very devout Catholic and had her concept of where she was going after death all mapped out for herself. And I had to stand by her bedside as she died, and I kept biting my tongue from saying anything. Because I was afraid that even consolation might betray the fact that I didn't believe what she believed about where she was going. Which is the best thing to do. I used to give talks up at Kent, Ohio and I'd ask a few people, "What are you interested in?" People weren't interested in esoteric philosophy. That was back in the early seventies. They were interested in dynamic characters like Don Juan, a lot of them were reading Alan Watts. But they were not interested in a really deep research into the heavier Zen writers like Suzuki or the deeper philosophies put out by people like Paul Brunton or Gurdjieff. They didn't even know their names. And consequently if you start quoting Gurdjieff and three fourths of the people have never heard his name, you're wasting your time. So we have to break every once in awhile and let somebody ask some questions, and then we'll try to draw a parallel about what that fellow said and what his contribution was. Incidentally, I think Gurdjieff made a tremendous contribution to psychology. I think he's the greatest psychologist produced up until 1950. [Gurdjieff died late in 1949 - Ed.] I've got a little special message I'd like to bring, if I can get it across tonight, and that is the importance of what we're doing, or what I'm trying to do, let's put it that way. Again, it's difficult to get that across, because we're talking in terms of people's valuations of a common commodity, being wisdom, or achievement on a philosophic line. So anybody that ever dabbles in a philosophic direction is going to have a different idea of what he thinks is valuable. But it goes back to 1972, when I finished writing a book. The first printing that came out in 1973 was just an 8-1/2 by 11 thing [i.e., Xeroxed, with heavier paper covers, and bound with carpet tape]. But the whole substance of this book was a direction toward clear thinking. This clearer thinking can be applied to any walk of life. And the reason we chose for the title of the flyer for this talk tonight -- Peace of Mind in Spite of Success. The reason people don't ever have success is because they don't do clear thinking. We have a case just yesterday or the day before, where the young Kennedy boy [David] overdosed and perished, and he had all the stuff at his disposal in the line of wealth in order to create an environment. He could have created any environment he had wanted with his wealth, but somehow his thinking still wasn't clear, and he settled on something that made him miserable. Last night on television Ted Kennedy's remark was, "I hope he is more at peace where he is now than what he was before." That he found peace, at least, someplace. But anyhow this book (The Albigen Papers) was a story of notes I had taken -- I was fifty-five years of age when the book first came out. Now those were notes that were taken from the time I was a young man, and I had never put them into any form at all except a heap of notes. I had started to put them together and type them out, and I was going through quite a labor of sorting them and trying to keep from repeating myself, because many the notes over a period of years repeated things I had noted before. In the meantime I got an opportunity to speak up here in Pittsburgh, at the Theosophical Society -- it was the first time I had talked on the subject. Just about that time was when the 8-1/2 by 11 copies came out. Well, things started happening. Some boys hitchhiked over from Kent to hear me talk -- I knew the father of one of the boys -- they went back and set up talks for me at Kent State, and from then I went it seemed very rapidly from one university to another, and by 1973 I was putting the book out in a 5 by 8 [i.e., professionally printed and bound] instead of the 8-1/2 by 11 format. A group of people formed, and at one time there were over a hundred what I considered dedicated people, who were living the life. The were using The Albigen Papers as a guide for their life, and it worked. The amazing thing about it is that you don't look for amazing things to happen. You don't go into it saying, "I'm going to put so much energy into this and I will get X amount of returns." That's not the formula. There is a definite formula in the book. But the book is a handbook. It's a handbook for a lifestyle. And to have things happen, to put all the energy into the venture you can possibly put into it, without any egotistical idea that you should have what you want. You should have a reservation, that if that's in the cards, if that's part of the master plan, part of the engineer's blueprint, then we say "good," we'll rejoice. If it's not in the cards, we'll keep on working anyhow. So this is a rough idea of the attitude that a person would have from the book. The book is jammed. It's a condensed thing, because it was notes I had made, just like I'm using notes here to talk by so that I don't forget something. But it was pretty much condensed because I was doing the typing myself and my coordination wasn't too good. So I was making mistakes, and I would shorten the sentences so I could get the thing over with sometimes, I think. In the book was a list of laws, which I had noted. Some of them you're acquainted with, some of them you may not be acquainted with. I'll mention a couple of them to show you the scope of the thing: "The Law of Proportional Returns." Now this has to do with any type of success. I maintain that these things in the book apply -- basically they were written for philosophic reasons -- but the application of them will fit into any lifestyle or any plan of life, whether it's economic, financial, or a power struggle, even. As I said, the procedure has to be selfless to succeed. This is one of the great blocks that stops people from really having success. I could not get this through my head when I was younger. It was slow sinking in, I think, because when a person is in their late teens and twenties, up to the time they're about thirty, they have the conviction that they can bull through with their shoulders and create a wedge in the plan, the social pattern, and make a place for themselves, and chop out a little area in which they will get rich and get happy, and everything they want will be there, and they're going to do it all with sheer determination, will power, etcetera. They've got a few other little things, too, like knowing the right people, and that sort of thing. But I realized -- it just came as a sort of a hunch -- I had been doing this -- I'd been bulling my way through for many years. And I was in my late twenties when I came to the conclusion just by accident. I didn't have too much love for humanity, but I had a lot of anger for fraudulence, for hucksters. And throughout this business of esoteric philosophy, and with religious people as well.... I mean we have the multi-millionaires on TV. And they're getting the money to pay for the TV space from little old ladies who can't afford to pay, in my estimation. ... So we've got hucksters and we've got phonies and we've got sometimes sexual deviants, where that's the only thing they can work at and at the same time get their sexual partners without too much trouble; get them inside the sphere of their religious preaching. And I'm not exaggerating. I found these things in my own search. You're going along somewhere and you think somebody is sincere, and you find they've got an ulterior motive; they don't have a motive for truth at all. They've got a personal motive. And when you get them cornered.... For instance, I studied right above Pittsburgh here years ago. I started off when I was twelve years of age, studying to be a priest. They took them at that age, right out of grade school, the Capuchins, up here at St. Fidelis in Herman, Pennsylvania, five miles from Butler. I was rather dismayed one time when I was hitch-hiking up from Butler. I had gone down to Butler for a walk, and one of the parents of one of the priests picked me up and gave me a ride back. He said, "You from the seminary?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "My son is down there. That's a wonderful place," he said. "He'll never go hungry." And I thought, "Jesus! Is that what it is?" A feed bag -- just a place to eat. This is what he was looking at. Security. I read this book The Nun's Story, about a nun that became a doctor and went down to Africa and took care of sick people and that sort of thing. In her book she mentions that the convent was full of women who came from poor families who couldn't afford to feed them. They couldn't afford to keep them, so they encouraged them to join the monastery. I think that my mother thought I was crippled and wouldn't be able to earn a living. She encouraged me to go because she thought I was weak. Which I was. But I managed to get my health built up and do a little work. (Laughs) But out of this picture that I grew up in, I determined.... I got angry. As I said, I didn't have much sympathy at first for humanity, but I had a lot of anger for these people who were parasitical. So I just had an inborn determination to make it known. And I didn't have too good of tools. I wasn't illiterate, but at the same time I wasn't used to writing philosophy. But I made up my mind to get the point across if I had to write it longhand and Xerox it and hand it out for nothing. To get the thing across. So, as a result of that -- that was automatically a gesture of concern for my fellowman. And I didn't even know it at the time. Because from that point on I worked for the future in which I would be able to help somebody else. And only then did it start to pay off. It wasn't too many years after that that something happened. I had an experience which confirmed my search. OK. We've got these laws, as I said, that I encountered, and they started manifesting themselves; and I think they're good to know, because they're applicable to almost anything, to any venture that you want to get into. One of them is the Law of Proportional Returns -- which we're all acquainted with. In other words, if you put so many pounds of coal into a steam engine, you can predict the amount of energy you're going to get out of that steam engine. That's the Law of Proportional Returns. If you do so much work as a salesman and keep it up -- they call it "throwing mud at the ceiling" -- some of it will stick. It will eventually pay off, and you will become successful by putting out the energy. The next one is the Law of the Ladder. This refers to the business of helping other people. That you can only help the person on the ladder rung below you, and can only be helped by the person on the ladder rung above you. And any attempt to reach too far down results in crucifixion. And any attempt to reach up too far would not work because you would despise the man on the second rung above you. You can only understand the one right above you. There's another law, and that is the Law of Friendship. To be continued.... © 1984 Richard Rose. All Rights Reserved.

These words are shed from the bronzed air of this season. Where every view is momentous -- poised on the brink of winter. Fall is the wisest season, crafting itself for the still, bare revelation that waits. * "Home" I am waiting for you at the edge, where thought is held by riveted attention, and self begins to slip away. I am there, where you and I become welcoming waters -- pure, dark, deep, and full. Where all is lost and all is found in this ever deep, ever still home. * Bonsai is marriage of hand and wind -- quickening the inevitable. In this way, we must seek our nature. * A weight descends upon me, driving me into my emptiness, leaving a solid block I cannot carve -- Kaaba's stone. Each day I say less and less. Everywhere I turn is holy. * We play at life believing we shape our being by action. We are so much more than waving hands and moving water. We are creation. We create nothing; act not. We are creation. * Light stabbing through blackness absorbing knowledge collapsing being into unknowing. In this desert is Self. Then I remember you are all dead, still calling to your selves from within.

Faith and Discovery, by Shawn Nevins

How can a person who doesn't have faith, who needs to find assurance that there's something absolute to find/become before he can make a commitment to find it, proceed?

You would only ask this question if you had no sense there was an answer, if no one ever reported finding it, or if you never felt the hint of being more than this fragile body. If that was the case, you would not be reading this.

I will use an analogy, and let you substitute terms. You hear stories of Shangri-La, dream of it, and perhaps for a moment glimpse it inside your self. There are maps, and maps of ways to make your own map, yet you only venture out on the weekends. You fear straying too far from the familiar, fear the rest of your life will suffer, fear what others will think, and fear loss. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, but is a bird in hand worth more than transcending the hunt for food?

"I'm not sure," you say. You want assurance of Shangri-La before you set out in search of it. You want what can only come about when you set foot in Shangri-La. Shangri-La is inside and beyond you and can only be known for certain after you have journeyed and arrived.

Well, then search for that of which you are sure. Write out what you do each day and what are the goals of those actions. What assurances are there about those goals? Their transience should be obvious. Do you wish to bet your life on transience or search for something more? You are already a naked emperor.

The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn't see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.