This month's contents: Jacob's Ladder (part 1) by Richard Rose | Poems by Shawn Nevins | Using Time Wisely by Shawn Nevins | Soul Sickness by Jones Very | The Ego by Art Ticknor | O Come All Ye Faithful by Art Ticknor | Choice by Jim Burns | Containing Tension by Bob Fergeson | Humor > Want to meet some of the Forum authors in person? Interested in meeting other Forum readers? The next TAT meeting is the spring gathering on Saturday & Sunday, Apr. 16th to 17th. Click here to learn more. 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. Index of Issues to Date | Submissions, feedback & e-mail list Enjoy the Forum? Help support it with your donation.

Jacob's Ladder (part 1), by Richard Rose
from a talk given in Los Angeles

Most of you are new to me; we've never met before, and beyond a doubt everybody comes in from a different perspective. I've given quite a few talks all over the country, and have come away after each one with the feeling that I only communicated with a fraction of the people, because of language. Everyone talks a different language. So I've always been laboriously looking for some way to get around this difference in language. I have a system of thinking on psychology, which I'm very happy to share; I'm very happy to go to whatever strain is necessary to communicate it to you. The general diagram of it is in figure 1 (from Psychology of the Observer, "Jacob's Ladder"). I also talked about this the other night to a little group, and again came away with a feeling that unless someone had done similar thinking, similar reading, in an intense desire to understand psychology -- not in the way it's written by the so-called authorities... Authorities are generally political in source. By that I mean that we have a political psychological atmosphere. Our sociology is political. Politics determines funding. And when it gets down into what I consider the more sacred sciences, psychology is one of them. It's the mind. This is a sacred territory; we don't need politics with its funding pressures to call the shots. We're interested -- I hope -- in what the mind is, and not what we should vote it to be by democratic agreement. If I were take you through, to explain me, my conviction, my findings -- it's perhaps a rather complex thing; which would take many many hours of bringing our heads together, number one. Because we've got a different interpretation of the word sanity, for instance. Sanity is a very loose word; I've talked to a lot of psychiatrists, and never found a single one who had defined it. Yet they're shooting people with hypodermics and feeding them pills. To get predictable results, they think, on the surface, but what are the results under the surface, or later on? But anyhow, in talking to people I prefer a sort of dialogue, because in a situation where you can talk or you can ask questions, I get an idea where you're coming from; I'll possibly intuit a language or choice of words, reference points, if possible, by which I can communicate with you. But for a man to get up in front of a group of people and preach -- this can be monotonous and irritating as hell. And yet talk is necessary. What we're dealing with is perspectives. I made a few notes on them, on perspectives, in the hope of, because of the knowledge of the differences in perspectives, possibly finding a way of coming together in a single perspective for an hour or so. I have some questions in regard to that. I put them in question form, because I'm not saying this is, necessarily. It's bad when you say something definitely is, in all instances, because in subjective matters especially, somebody else's opinion might get you to the same point. Even though it seems to be diametrically opposite, you may ultimately come to the same point in thinking. 1. What liabilities are incurred with unavoidable states of mind? We all come here with a state of mind. And you're not going to change it in five minutes. 2. Are perspectives rooted in valid bases and definitions, or in indefinable feelings which may be as meaningful as definitions? All of us here are old enough to have developed a philosophy of life. And we like to think that this is highly logical. Then you run into another fellow who has a perspective or conviction strictly from feeling. He doesn't make any pretense of logic. And after you suffer the fellow -- if you don't agree with him immediately you might suffer for awhile -- you find out that you agree with him, or that you're talking the same language. I've had this happen repeatedly. What is meaning? When we talk, say, about the mind, what are we talking about? Everybody has a slightly different understanding, and there are different understandings for the mind and I think some of them are valid. I see two or three definite minds. So when one person is using the word mind he might be referring to Mary Baker Eddy's "Universal Mind." Another might be referring to the objective psychologist's somatic mind. The same with our appreciation of things like colors. Or pleasure. What do you mean by the words "high" or "green"? Do we know that all people see the same color green? The only thing we know is that we all do respond, pretty much. But what does the fellow actually see when he sees green? Why do some perfumes seem to attract some people and irritate others? And a lot of them do irritate you after you've been exposed to them for awhile. 3. What is beauty? Everybody's talking about the ideal parts of life and the aspects of life like the nice things, that everybody's going to get for themselves and for their neighbor. What is beauty? I used to say it's the degree of refraction by which light comes to the eyes. Looking at the outside of the skin it looks pretty good, but if you peel it off and look at it from underneath it might not look so good. 4. What is goodness? Is goodness recognized by the cat the same as goodness recognized by the mouse? 5. How do perspectives affect science? I see this in science, which is supposed to be perfect: people come in with different perspectives. On the same day on the radio I heard one man say our temperature was changing; that possibly -- I didn't get into all the details -- if we had four consecutive cold winters we'd have an ice age of some sort. That the earth was swinging away from the sun, possibly, or something was happening. Another fellow said the ice cap is going to melt, and in so many years, unless they can stop this smog and air pollution, Atlantic City will be under water, the coastal plateaus will be flooded. So these are perspectives in science by people who spend their entire lives studying it. 6. What is wisdom? I presume this is what we're trying to do in this work -- to get the best answer. And is wisdom a foolishness? A lot of people after living sixty or seventy years say everything is foolishness. Your perspective changes. The wisdom of the twenty year old boy becomes idiocy to a seventy or eighty year old man. 7. Is wisdom a wasted achievement unless it is restricted to objective or material values? We define our wisdom - some people do - in terms of how many millions it will make you, and the idiot is the guy who winds up with nickels. Or is wisdom the man who gets along with his fellowman? Some think that's a form of wisdom. Now we talk about perspectives on authority. A man quotes, he throws something out at you, and he says, "This is what they say." And everyone shudders and remains silent. When you get into psychology, I've got a dual path here that I'm talking about. You'll notice in the diagram up at the top is the word Absolute. Down at the bottom (line AB) we have simple psychology. And I maintain that you can attain or reach an absolute objective by beginning with a simple analysis of a somatic self. I was talking with one of the fellows here last night, and he said, "I saw that diagram, and I can't see -- you've got the word Intuition there and on up it seems even harder to understand, something about Unmanifested Mind." And I said, "Stay off of those upper steps. You're not supposed to be up these at all; this is a diagram of probability or possibility." But the lower triangle (ABC) is very apparent. Our whole life is in a relative dimension (line AB) and this is where we lay. Not even up into the pyramid. We wallow eternally between the positives and the negatives, between masculinity and femininity, between concepts of goodness or bad, propitiousness or unpropitiousness, light and darkness, and all this sort of thing. So that we never reach a united type of sanity. Which is the thing up at the top (point C). Now why am I mentioning all of this? Because -- where is the perspective that you run into in most of the philosophy, or let's say theology that you encounter? God is postulated before proving him; this is what you run into. And we are hushed into silence. We don't dare say anything, because so many people believe. And of course this is the difference. When Dan said in the introduction that I'm a rebel, that's my rebellion. I maintain that I'm ignorant. And that's where I started from -- ignorance, not wisdom. You contemplate what's in front of you, not something way up above. That's the reason I say the figure has no meaning, except as something I discovered. It's like the Katzenjammer Kids, it's a cartoon. But maybe something's in it for you too, I don't know. It may have some meaning. You can not contemplate God. Much less legislate that you don't dare say anything contrary. Because you get authorities. What's an authority? A man who sweats or wallows through six or eight years of college. He may have been drunk all the time he was in there, but when he comes out he's a theologian and he's an authority. And he says, "God told me to tell you." And people say, "Ok, whatever you say." You see what's going on over in Iran. You've got rule from possibly a subjective state or a subjective dimension. So what else do we postulate? We postulate that wisdom is decided by democratic process. We have the best system on earth; all we have to do is vote. And this permeates, unfortunately, the study of psychology. Psychological findings today are the result of the acceptance of the normal curve. And normal is that which is 51 percent or more of the behavior. So that when 51 percent of the people become murderers, or anything else, it is normal. Consequently psychology has ceased, at least in that degree. Now I'm not saying Carl Jung, for instance, would approve of that, but I'm saying this is a trend. That we have decided that the human collective mind is infallible. Instead of saying that the truth is the truth, in the year 1000, in the year 1500, in the year 2000, the year 3000 or 10,000. Truth is the truth; it doesn't change because it's unpopular at the moment. What constitutes the human mind is as unchangeable as the protoplasm in that human's body. If you take a chemical analysis of it, you might have a different reading, say, in the year 1800, you might have a different concept of the blood circulation or something, which may have been what I call relative truth at that time. But as you approach it it becomes closer to absolute truth. Q. How can you say truth doesn't change? R. Just by virtue of its definition. Q. So? Some thing's true one day and not true another day... R. No, no. The conclusion was not true the other day. Truth itself doesn't change. Q. No. R. Well, let me put something this way. Maybe I'm crazy. But let me run through this little bit of craziness, and if you don't approve of it and don't get anything from it, I'll apologize. But I don't really intend to try to prove to you a whole lot. I'm going to throw something out. If it looks good to you, Ok. If it doesn't -- you've wasted your time. And maybe even I have, to a certain extent. The same thing has to do with some other of our concepts about attitudes and authority. Our concepts of love. And a lot of our social study of interrelations between people and this sort of thing is not dependent upon a true understanding of people, but something perhaps that we'd prefer to have. We don't particularly want the truth; we want a certain state of things to exist. 8. Does a man love? Or is he even capable of loving? Or does a man desire to be loved? Who loves more, the lover or the tick? Does a tick love a dog - or the blood? He sticks pretty close. And some people in their human relationships stick very close. But maybe it's parasitical. 9. Is love of every and any kind programmed? Have we got any choice in this matter? We think we're doing things. Are we doing things? 10. Is there only one dimension? Now the reason I'm questioning this -- in the human effort, whether it's philosophical, religious, or what, there seems to be an effort for action. Now what is the difference in these types of actions? There are differences in perspective, and what's the difference in the type of action? I maintain that action without definition is foolish. This is what you have -- that people are acting and not defining what they're doing. To give you an example, a person says, "We're going to make the world safe for democracy. That's our group. Our little group is going to make the world safe for democracy." Another group says, "We're going to serve God." They haven't defined what they're going to serve. Another thing that is very important that nobody hardly thinks about -- they haven't defined the seeker, or the one who's trying to serve. The potentials and capabilities of that person to do anything, much less to serve a subjective, almost unattainable thing. Now don't get the idea that I'm negating God. I'm not saying that there is none. I'm saying it's foolish to postulate. Definition should precede action; at least some common sense attempt at it. © 1976 by Richard Rose. All Rights Reserved. This talk is available on CD through Rose Publications. To be continued...

The body said, "Two by two we are made to drift through this world." But you know skin and words are impenetrable barriers, and two remains two though secretly searching for one. Inside, a secret hope, a shadow whisper: loneliness and love are twisted round each other like a root merging and diverging in too small of a pot. Today, do not take the hand of another. Let love and hope spring from the lonely root inside. * An outline of life frozen in darkness by Light. Such silhouettes mark all we see and are until... until our eyes shine from looking within at a world projected without. * "Dawn" A pale lavender sky spreads into the river, into me. Rolling mists do battle on a field common to all and not one is injured or dies. On the bank, a dried-out leaf rattles a bit in the breeze, then turns over. One more day begins. * Breeze, you are always ready for today, for this moment. Exhaled from a place of quiet to rattle this world and bare the words from our thoughts for your message, whispered inside our lives, of what was, could be, and is. * At the end of every word is another. Each drained like green from the wintry world, then reborn by spring. Subjugated by mind seasons, we are dragged into being until ... until a slippery thread of continuity is found inside, seemingly ever behind what we behold between worn out leaves of winter.

Soul Sickness by Jones Very How many of the body's health complain, When they some deeper malady conceal; Some unrest of the soul, some secret pain, Which thus its presence doth to them reveal. Vain would we seek, by the physician's aid, A name for this soul-sickness e'er to find; A remedy for health and strength decayed, Whose cause and cure are wholly of the mind. To higher nature is the soul allied, And restless seeks its being's Source to know; Finding not health nor strength in aught beside; How often vainly sought in things below, Whether in sunny clime, or sacred stream, Or plant of wondrous powers of which we dream!