January 2024 TAT Forum

Humor {(h)yo͞omər}

“One thing you must be able to do in the midst
of any experience is laugh. And experience
should show you that it isn’t real, that it’s a
movie. Life doesn’t take you seriously, so why
take it seriously.” ~ Richard Rose, Carillon

TAT vs. T.A.T.

The Lear/Yorkin company was known as Tandem Productions and was founded in 1958. Lear and talent agent Jerry Perenchio founded T.A.T. Communications (“T.A.T.” stood for the Yiddish phrase “Tuchus Affen Tisch”, which meant “Putting one’s ass on the line.”) in 1974, which co-existed with Tandem Productions and was often referred to in periodicals as Tandem/T.A.T. The Lear organization was one of the most successful independent TV producers of the 1970s. T.A.T. produced the influential and award-winning 1981 film The Wave about Ron Jones’ social experiment.

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~ Thanks to Danny S. who sent this hilarious reference from the Norman Lear page on Wikipedia. Shawn Nevins commented: “Surely Richard Rose knew of this because a perfect corollary to Truth and Transmission is ‘Tuchus Affen Tisch.'” Lear passed away on December 5, 2023 (aged 101). Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Bunburying

Jack: This ghastly state of things is what you call Bunburying, I suppose? [Bunburying: Avoiding one’s duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person.]

Algernon: Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life.

Jack: Well, you’ve no right whatsoever to Bunbury here.

Algernon: That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.

Jack: Serious Bunburyist! Good heavens!

Algernon: Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. I happen to be serious about Bunburying [an imaginary activity Algernon invented]. What on earth you are serious about I haven’t got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature.

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~ Thanks to Ike H. for this dialogue from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Photo from Wikimedia Commons with the caption: “Still photograph from Act 1 of the original production of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). It shows Algernon Moncrieff (left, played by Allan Aynesworth) refusing to return Mr Jack Worthing’s (Sir George Alexander) cigarette case until the latter explains the inscription therein.”

Chaos

“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”

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~ Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times: The Play. Thanks to Brett S. Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash: a pile of rubber bands.

Inspiration & Irritation

Irritation moves us; inspiration provides a direction

Medical Story: Asperger’s And Me (Chris Packham Documentary)

For most of his life, broadcaster and naturalist Chris Packham didn’t tell anyone about the one thing that in many ways has defined his entire existence….

~ Comment from the Forum editor: This fellow strikes me as introspective and extremely honest. The kestrel story at 20:50 is very moving, as is Packham’s insight at 50:40: “I do feel I have this horror hanging over me that we’re making this program and I’m saying these things in an interval between disasters. I’m happy with my ability to manage my Asperger’s, and it allows me to do my job, and I’ve found someone who loves me, but there’s still one thing that I haven’t learned to deal with, and that is losing the things that I love…. I just don’t want to be a charlatan and to say that you know things are actually okay, in fact some things are better than okay, when in you, you know it’s all built on sand.”

Suchness

You came to mind today 
Dear, dear friend of recognition 
As having recently swallowed a bitter
pill of place-mark condition
Or maybe spat out having tasted
sweeter, My hope for you 

You came to mind today
With a sweep of relief 
From clever kindness and
comprehensions compelled speech 
Or an end to it, having felt resonant
call,
your own voice, 
My hope for you

You came to mind today 
With the scent of raspberries recalling
my youth
Where suchness grew, as moments,
along fence-lined alley, 
	air and sunlight warmed
what exposed,
As summers gait slowed, threatening a
stop to imposition 
Or maybe an end to it, My hope for you 

~ Thanks to Dan McLaughlin. Image by Leopictures from Pixabay

What Would You Tell Someone as Being the Most Important Thing to Do in Life?

The most important thing for someone to do in life is to contemplate the mystery of God. When I attended catechism class as a young boy, the question was put forth: “Why did God make you?” The correct answer was: “To know, love, and serve Him in this world.” What this entails is the main goal of life and to be sought after fervently. As I grow older, I understand this catechism question differently than how I understood it as a young boy and appreciate it better.

Now, I use the word “God” but do not know exactly what that is. It can be defined in many different ways. That is part of the mystery and something to be discerned as we contemplate this mystery. But for me, God is the very Source of our being. God is where we came from and where we are going after we die. Indeed, God not only is with us right now, but has always been there. However, we do not recognize it. It has been obscured. I believe that whatever we do in life, there is this inner longing to know the Source of our being. This longing has been obscured to various degrees as we face the challenges of daily living and are drawn to its joys while avoiding its sorrows, but down deep it exists in everybody.

It is our task in life to cultivate this longing through spiritual practice. Our lives are a mere interlude. We lose everything at death. All the things we thought we achieved in life, the things that gave us gratification and a sense of fulfillment, all the people we loved—all this comes to an end at death. Our mortal being amounts to nothing because we are impermanent and imperfect. Perfection and permanence exist only in God, the Ultimate Source.

But life is to be lived, with its joys and sorrows. It may take a great deal of experiencing sorrow in life to have enough dissatisfaction compelling you to seek the Source of your being. Live your life, for you are to love and serve God in this world as it says in the catechism but cultivate spiritual dissatisfaction so you will deepen your longing for God. Pray, meditate, and seek out enlightened teachers.

~ Thanks to Vince L. Photo by Kellee Halliburton on Unsplash.

On Studying With Legendary Acting Teacher UTA Hagen in New York City

As nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards are announced, The White Lotus actor F. Murray Abraham, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 1985 for his role as composer Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, reflects on how the award changed his life — and nearly cost him his career. In an NPR interview, Abraham had this to say:

It’s great to be liked by someone like Uta Hagen, and I was a favorite, and I became a monitor in her class…. And every student should keep this in mind: The more charismatic your teacher is, the more you will give up your own talent in order to please that teacher. And that’s the route I was taking. And at one point, after having studied with her for over a year, I was really lost. And at one point during an exercise, she stopped me and she said, “This actor has a great talent and he pisses all over it.” And that was the last class I ever had with her. She realized that I was losing it and she wanted to force me out of the class…. And as soon as I left her, I started finding my feet again. It’s an interesting lesson for everyone to learn…. I was shutting off my own instincts in order to do exactly what she was saying. That’s a dangerous path to follow.

~ Thanks to Shawn Nevins, who wrote the: “Quote above needs to be considered by spiritual students as well as acting students!”

Please your thoughts on the above items.

Reader Commentary

Encouraging interactive readership among TAT members and friends

A reader wrote that what would make the Forum more interesting would be:

Hearing from people who are searching—and have questions instead of those providing endless advice and “answers.” What challenges they are facing. What their doubts and questions are. How they perceive their path is going. What they are doing in their lives. Where they think they will end up, etc., etc.

Can you help make the Forum more interesting?

The Reader Commentary question for the January TAT Forum:

What Have You Come to Terms With?

Thanks to Brett S. for the question and a related short YouTube video. Responses follow:

From Paul Constant:

I’ve come to terms with:
– how little I know for sure.
– how much is out of my control.
– how a life lived through the eye of Reality didn’t meet my wildest imaginations.
– fear of life, love, and death–err, mostly.

I haven’t—and may never—come to terms with grief over lost loved ones and loving pets. Grief always steals a piece of my heart and inflicts a pain like no other.

From Andreas H:

Maybe what I have come to terms with is that I have yet to come to terms with quite a few things. At least I’m beginning to accept that I’m still carrying around all these vices; there’s still a lot of vanity there, still a wish to be right, to be loved, aversion to getting older and not having the same opportunities that I may have enjoyed in my twenties, and not attracting the type of women that I may wish. I have been trying to reason my way out of all of the above, attempting to apply wisdom teachings to whisk away these earthly concerns.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that it is not going to work. I will not be able to argue my way out of clutching to this earth-bound existence. There is some reconciliation in that fact.

From Patrick K:

“Come to terms with” is similar to me as “growing wise to”. Watching the video was kind of sad. There was the guy who took care of his mother for fifteen years, I think he said, give or take. He talks about not being able to find someone. But I don’t think that’s his problem, there are bus loads of women in every town. I feel that he carries some resentment from spending those last fifteen years not living the life his peers lived and therefore is bitter, feels he has missed out. He is telling himself this story of not being able to find someone as some kind of self-pitying, regret-filled mental loop. He seems to have gotten super sensitive about it. The mother who says that she will never find happiness is difficult to appraise, because she never defined what makes her happy, or defined the word “happiness” in and of itself. It is the classic spiritual feeling of finding that what you would have thought would have been fulfilling, turns out to be another dead end. Just keep turning over every other stone, don’t give up, is my advice.

The girl who says that she may never have friends strikes me as odd, when I get the feeling that if she wanted friends, she could have plenty of them. She never revealed what having friends would do for her, or the type of friends that she would like to have. Is it more convenient to not have friends, when you will have to invest energy and time in that direction? And would that be worth it really? The friends I tend to value the most are my self-inquiry friends; that’s a worthwhile investment and is a delight as far as I’m concerned. It is always great to meet new people, too, who are interested in this work. It always gives me the feeling that we are trying to help each other onto a life boat whilst lost in a stormy sea, and together we will be better equipped to find the mother ship/Self-realisation, when we put our heads together. I think that is a Gurdjieffian analogy.

The guy talking about racism has grown wise to it, he has seen that it is not personal to him, he sees that others of different races get the same treatment. He sees that it is just the way it is. I pick up the underlying desperation of these folks and a line from Bob Fergeson’s book The Listening Attention comes to mind: “… and they wonder why the unexamined life is a misery”.

I am most like the guy who says that he hasn’t come to terms with anything and just keeps on going. I hope that I am coming to terms with the sense that I will never truly deeply come to terms with anything until the Knower is known. Reminds me of the quote from the pyramid Zen poster: “Experience is a worthless and transient existence unless the Experiencer is known”. Really hope that I can feel the truth of this statement to the very core of my being so that it drives my meditations to look in that direction, so that I really grasp why I am meditating, why I am on a spiritual path and not just kind of “hanging out in some kind of spiritual limbo”.

From lenny3cents:

What Have I Come to Terms With? (over 71 yrs)

suffering – i have not just truly accepted all suffering from my past… but feel it all as a blessing
questions – i have no more questions… and not because i have “answers”
f.e.a.r. – i lost most all
my identity – i am what i am… but that is NOT what I AM

From Anonymous:

What I’ve been wrestling with for a long time now is that I will not make any real move to be with a woman (either short term or long term). I may put myself in harm’s way, approach, flirt—but that’s it, nothing more. The energy of attraction is there. I have tried to be honest with close friends, journaled, counseling, other spiritual approaches, for some years now—and I seem to not move or change.

From Art Ticknor:

Feeling like I hadn’t made any progress. Not long before self-realization, I felt that I was right back where I’d started seeking 25 year earlier: walking in circles in a dark room with one foot nailed down. States of mind and conscious states of being can change radically in a short time.

Going-within koan. In my decades of seeking, I adopted the conviction from Richard Rose that the answers I was looking for lay within. Until the final hour of my final solitary retreat, I didn’t have a clue about how to go within. In retrospect, I can recall stepping stones and tacks into the wind along my path and the event that triggered my breakthrough.

Lack of certainty. Before I met Mr. Rose, I was absolutely convinced it was impossible to know anything for sure. I didn’t see the contradiction in that belief. 🙂 After being around Rose for a while, my intuition admitted that it may be possible to know something for sure. Self-realization brought the conviction that there’s only one thing I can know for sure, and that’s what my real identity is.

From Mark W:

I’ve more or less come to terms with being more of a feeler than a thinker. I’ve said this several times in the last few years; nevertheless, often my experiences feel surprisingly new, different, or more intense than I’m used to. So, this feeling stuff is still a work in progress for so-called positive and negative experiences. The acceptance shows through my willingness to increasingly trust that I can safely feel and view my feelings despite any potential threats.

From Gavin A:

I would like to say that i have come to terms with the belief that life is not a race. It was hard for me to accept that. Some part of me always wanted to ‘get ahead’ of both myself and others. The quickest way to get there was by rushing and pushing everyday. I’m not sure if that ever did much good, but certainly caused a lot of problems within and outside too. Taking the time to look at and take each step is more efficient, and more rewarding.

From Anima Pundeer:

All beginnings have an end. You cannot find permanence in impermanence.

From Mark C:

I would say that I have come to terms with accepting my eventual mortality/impermanence. I lost my stepmother in March of 2020 to cancer, my dad in January 2021 to COVID, and my mother in November 2022 due to what I believe was a heart attack. I was also the executor for all 3 of their estates and in the process of cleaning up and finishing their affairs, I learned just how much most of us either avoid the subject of death or we tend to think we are never going to die so we procrastinate in dealing with our affairs. I had known about these concepts prior to losing my parents, but it made it very different when you viewed this all through your loved one’s perspectives. With the exception of my aunt, I am now the oldest in the family and that has severed the layer of security that allowed me to also procrastinate about the subject of my own death.

I also had two total knee replacements in 2023, both of which seemed to have made me feel in my early weeks of recovery as though I had less life force or I had become a shadow of my own self somehow. I have always tended to see myself as this physically strong and smart guy who seemed to be able to get my way through life by my own devices, but it became much clearer to me that not only was I not “in charge” of my life, but that it was quite possible that I was just another shadow in Plato’s Cave. It reminds me of Alfred Pulyan’s phrase in reference to death that “nothing of you will remain,” but what is this “you” thing, and was it ever really there in the first place?

Next Month

The Reader Commentary question for the February TAT Forum:

What practice aimed at self-definition comes easiest to you and which one is the most difficult for you?

Thanks to Jeroen V. Self-definition is a term used by Richard Rose for finding the truth of what we are at the core of being. Oxford Languages lists definitions for define: 1) state or describe exactly the nature, scope, or meaning of, and 2) mark out the boundary or limits of.

Please your responses by the 25th of January, and indicate your preferred identification (the default is your first name and the initial letter of your last name). “Anonymous” and pen names are fine, too.

PS: What question(s) would you like to ask other TAT Forum readers?

Q: What are your thoughts on this month’s reader commentary? Please your feedback.

Richard Rose described a spiritual path as living one’s life aimed at finding the meaning of that life. Did you find anything relevant to your life or search in this month’s TAT Forum?

Galway Bay painting © Tess Hughes

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Founder’s Wisdom

Richard Rose (1917-2005) established the TAT Foundation
in 1973 to encourage people to work together on what
he considered to be the “grand project” of spiritual work.

Notes from a 1982 Winter Intensive, part 4

> Jan 20:

• Fear inserts itself on all levels
• Overcome fear by
  • Self-inquiry
  • Devotion to a higher cause
  • Cultivation of courage
• Manifestations of our chief feature¹ are intricate … require lots of meditation to see
• Hyperthyroids are not the most successful people; hypothyroids, once they have an idea in their minds, don’t have a lot of other things coming in to knock it out

> Jan 21:

• Schizoid nature of mind:
  • One part judges the cowardly part and condemns it
  • Self-castigation becomes an excuse not to change
  • To overcome this, stop confessing and start taking aggressive action
• The best confrontation is indirect—a simple question; otherwise, mental shutters slam shut
• The mind doesn’t want to review the past to look for mistakes; memory blanks become an excuse for not looking
• Have to go back over our experiences and honestly evaluate errors [in order to see where corrective action was needed]

“I’ve been celibate for over 3 years but don’t see any particular increase in mental clarity. In fact, I characterize myself as mentally dead—no curiosity and a singular inability to look at myself. Tremendous frustration with meditation, which results in drowsiness most of the time. It occurs to me that these traits may be manifestations of a fear (cowardice) complex. Since I detest myself for being passive and cowardly, I cannot afford to look at myself honestly; recognition would threaten the status quo.” [Objective analysis or self-castigation?]

> Jan 23:

• A variation of the creation formula: To know, to dare, to do, and to be silent.
• “Becoming” is becoming undistracted
• Progress is being attentive to what you’re doing

> Jan 25th speculation: How does one go within? Apparently, through eliminating distraction … by being attentive to whatever you’re doing.

1 A term that comes from Gurdjieff’s teaching. Maurice Nicoll, in his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, describes Chief Feature as the governor of personality, the ruler of one’s mundane self, which we have to struggle with in order to be free.

~ From Art Ticknor. Previous segment. To be continued….

Definition of Terms

Index of many of the key terms and principles in Rose’s work, with brief definitions, from Richard Rose’s Psychology of the Observer: The Path to Reality Through the Self by John Kent.

Jacob’s Ladder © 2001 Richard Rose. See this transcript of a talk on the topic by Rose.

Homing Ground Update

… A spot on earth where people can do retreats and hold
meetings; where the emphasis is on friendship and the search.

January 2024:

As we start the new year, December donations brought us to just over 20% of our 2023 fundraising goal of $15,750. The bulk of that total came from monthly, recurring donations. A big thank you goes to those core supporters who are there for TAT month in and month out, as well as all of you who choose monthly supporting memberships in TAT. These steady commitments are greatly appreciated and very helpful for TAT’s long-term planning.

An additional $152 came from Amazon purchases in 2024. This is a simple, no-cost way to support TAT but does require remembering to visit the TAT website first and use the Amazon link on this page before you put items in your cart: https://tatfoundation.org/support-tat/. Almost any product is eligible. For example, someone purchased toothpaste on Amazon, and TAT received $0.25 on that purchase.

In 2024, expect to see less frequent, but more effective, reminders of fundraising goals. I think these monthly reminders are a bit like that inspiring quote you put on the refrigerator—it works for a few days and then you don’t notice it anymore.

Thanks to all of you for making TAT the extraordinary organization it is, and best wishes for the new year.

Sincerely,
Shawn Nevins

PS: Monthly contributions are a great way to support the TAT Center if making a larger one-time donation seems too much. If you’re so inspired, click the Donate button below, then check the box for “Make this a monthly donation” as in the example below:

Let’s bring this to life! “The job is upon us,” Richard Rose said, “and it is worthwhile.” To contribute to the TAT Center, mail a check made out to the TAT Foundation to:

TAT Foundation
PO Box 3402
Roxboro, NC 27573

Big checks, little checks, all are welcome. Or use the PayPal link above (though we lose 2.2% of your donation to PayPal fees).

* See photos and more on the Homing Ground page. *

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