August 2024 TAT Forum

1. “At 70 trillion fps, this is the world’s fastest camera,” https://www.redsharknews.com/at-70-trillion-fps-this-is-the-worlds-fastest-camera

2. “Single-shot ultrafast imaging attaining 70 trillion frames per second,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15745-4

3. “Unblocking a malfunction in consciousness,” John Wren-Lewis, https://www.capacitie.org/content/wren/UnblockingaMalfunction.pdf

4. Any galaxy or star will do, but if you want to locate Andromeda, see, “Andromeda galaxy: All you need to know,” https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/andromeda-galaxy-closest-spiral-to-milky-way/

5. For how photons from a star strike the eye, see, “Mammalia retinas can respond to single photons,” https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/264L/images/photons-on-retina.html

6. For the phrase “now! and now! and now!” see, “The Darkness of God,” John Wren-Lewis, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799302/m2/1/high_res_d/vol5-no2-53.pdf

I desire the truth, becoming the truth, that I have it on the being level and not just intellectually where it generally only fuels the ego. To act from that true, highest level of being/wisdom, at all times, to transcend my lower ways of behaving/thinking/relating to others. At the moment my interest is leaning towards the Bible as it is striking some higher chord of devotion toward becoming the truth. The teachings of the Bible are coming across supra-philosophical. It is like philosophy/Zen seems to go so far for me and stays on the intellectual level and then the Bible teachings seem to connect the intellectual to the devotional, a longing for the highest forms of being, the highest form of being/deity that I can perceive. A more simple way of saying it is to connect the head to the heart.

To recap, what my main obstacle is to truth-seeking is that I am running in too many directions. I’d be a bad archer, I don’t have my focus on the main goal, my one single well-prepared arrow pointed and poised ready to hit the target should it appear. I’m like the guy in this picture trying to fire 10 arrows at once, Archer Tries to Shoot 10 Arrows at Once. I long for the grace to feel some deep down connection to some hope of there existing an Absolute target for my desire and longing. But maybe it doesn’t work like that, maybe something comes in through the absence of all Patrick-related malingering hopes and wishes.

I think the things that I honestly love can help me in my seeking but mostly just for motivational purposes. My daughter might be able to help more if I allow it. She is a baby and seems to look into my soul whenever she smiles at me.

The things that I hate could honestly probably help also as long as I don’t get caught up in it. If I hate something, trying to figure out why or where that emotion is really coming from is self inquiry. Also hate might be the thing that caused me to search in the first place. I think I realized that all my complaining and self pity really just came from a hatred of myself and the hopelessness of the human situation. I can’t control my thoughts and emotions and I hate that. I can’t control the world around me to make sure things turn out the way I think they should and I hate that. The hatred emotion itself is obviously very damaging but at least it got my attention.

What you desire or what you fear?

Desires definitely are tough and I need to keep them in check. The desire for enlightenment or Self discovery is probably a helpful desire. People say that at some point you have to surrender it but for now I think my desire to no longer be trapped in the mind realm is helpful. Other desires can certainly be a hindrance, probably mostly as distractions and addictive ways to waste energy. They are probably one of the main things that interferes with my seeking but recently at least some of them have been realized for what they are.

Fear is there. The worries and doubts from my first paragraph are things I’m afraid of. Fear of the unknown, fear of losing my identity, fear of death. I haven’t gone deep enough yet to have a good understanding of the role fear plays for positive or negative but my intuition tells me the role it plays is massive.

Pride or shame?

At this juncture I’m pretty tired of typing and my baby is fussy so forgive me for speeding through these. Shame is what I think is at the root of human suffering. We are shameful of our original sin, of how insignificant our ego knows, deep down, it really is. Like anything else it can be a hindrance for me if I get caught up in it.

Pride is the big one, the granddaddy of them all. Pride is in everything I do and every interaction I have with other people. I am prideful to the core of my sheer existence. Pride is ego, it is a massive hindrance and I really don’t know how in the world I could ever make it go away or realize I don’t need it.

Seeing that the arising of thought-forms, and the beliefs that arise with them, is a form of escape-mechanism we employ to avoid feeling these sensations.
Desire may be part of a reflexive pattern to avoid feeling fear.

Thought forms that arise from fear and desire, pride or shame, contain the roots of the sense of self. The thoughts and beliefs are almost always self-referential.

Getting in touch with sensation in its most raw way, might help see these thought-forms and beliefs more clearly. Then a distinction between the reflexive thought/belief mechanism and the raw sensation may arise. Seeing the two elements as distinct from each other and yet observable, seems to suggest that the sense of self is purely a conditioned automatic response triggered by not wanting to fully feel sensations as they arise. Sense of self may be purely a resistance pattern.

That’s how it seems at least from this perspective over here. Wherever that is.

[Indented paragraphs are material he was reading from his notes—material that was incorporated in Psychology of the Observer, published two years later:]

We talk a lot about knowing, and knowing involves two possible directions: inside and outside. The outside knowing involves the physical world, and it involves the body and observable products of the body. And one of the products that is observable is thought: thought patterns and dreams.

Now I’m laying down a certain premise. We’re talking about environment, and I’m speaking from a viewpoint that the body is your environment: that your fingers aren’t you, your fingernails aren’t you, your toes aren’t you. You can exist without them. There’s a tremendous lot that isn’t you that afflicts you, influences you. There are things that evolve from you, such as babies, that aren’t you. And there are things that emanate from you—this has been established as far back as J.B. Rhine’s experiments at Duke ³—an extrusion of the human being, somewhere, his mind, that goes so far as to move objects. And this isn’t us. It might be an arm, but it isn’t us.

With this statement, I immediately have to get into the business of defining the line between inside and outside: i.e., inside and outside experience. The designation depends upon the interpretation of the word observer. This must not be an arbitrary designation, used merely to expedite some argument I wish to use. We must at least attempt to be scientific and methodical in our handling of any complex problem. Yet these things should be expressed in simple terms, or as simply as possible.

First of all, let us look at the observer, ourself. And the word observed is chosen to indicate not only that which is seen, but that which is apprehended by any means: by the senses or by internal mental observations.

For instance, we see with the eyes but we apprehend other things by virtue of certain senses, sometimes telepathic senses. Now if you want, you can narrow yourself down and say you don’t have these. And in much of the current field of psychology this is what the authorities do: they pretend these capabilities don’t exist and they don’t have to study them. But these things are continually being validated or verified by another group of scientists.

———-
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine

Psychology, especially psychology of the modern utilitarian type, wants to be scientific,⁴ and in order to follow this pretense with the least amount of responsibility, it takes a very materialistic pose.

It poses that the body is all you have. It pretends further and declares that this can be examined with material measurement systems. And we’ll see why this is not logical or sensible.

It talks of behavior, it says, “we do this or that”, but it never says who “we” is.

Psychology never really bothers to define the mind. Well, it may in some cases, although I’ve run through quite a few psychology books where they talk about behavior but never define the mind. I read in a book one time where they said it was the collective products, the collective reactions or something of that sort, the collective actions of the person.⁵

It neglects the reservoir of thoughts and thought-data that makes up the impetus for behavior. And behaviorism would pretend that we do not think: that we do not have little entities, little separations from ourselves called thoughts.

It just says that we react and we are somewhat conscious of our reactions.

Being scientific doesn’t mean that we have to put things in a test tube in order to examine them. Being scientific means that we think in an orderly manner. And it implies that we are able to make predictions according to our findings.

This is basically the core of any science, whether it’s physics, chemistry or anything else: predictability. Now there are many psychological systems, but they do not predict. Well, certain predictions are being made,⁶ and coincidental with these predictions, bigger and bigger nuthouses are being built—to house the people who are neglected, or put there when no one knows what to do with them after they’ve been treated by the specialists.

Physics predicts. Chemistry predicts. For instance it says, “Here’s how water is made: hydrogen and oxygen, you put the two together and you prove it.” I maintain that this same type of reasoning, this same type of prediction, can be done in psychology.

We accept the predictability of the physical sciences. But if you look things over you’ll see that modern psychology pretends to predict, on enormous scales—and combined with so-called modern sociology, they would predict how we’re going to change a whole nation of people just by indoctrination. I’ve had this told to me by a college sociologist. He said, “We’re going to recreate history.” In other words, it isn’t true but we’ll make it true; everyone will believe it if it’s in the textbooks long enough.

Modern psychiatrists usually piddle around, allowing the healing of the patient to come about by group therapy—meaning group accidents.

———-
⁴ Rose argues that his own system is scientific, and calls it direct-mind science.
⁵ Wikipedia: “The primary tenet of behaviorism … is that psychology should concern itself with the observable behavior of people and animals, not with unobservable events that take place in their minds.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism
⁶ In the form of social conditioning.

Some of you here have been into group therapy and you know what I’m talking about.

The socio-psychologists are uttering advice to all levels of social authority, and social authorities are implementing the prescriptions of the former.

The social psychologists are consequently being reinforced by the people who are reinforced by the social psychologists. The basic aim of modern psychology and modern sociology is, as B.F. Skinner says,⁷ to placate the masses—by whatever sexual means is necessary, or whatever you have do to entertain them. But the thing is to placate them, keep the ripples down, keep social order, and to hell with any concern for the long term sanity of the individual.

The result of all this is that our social climate is becoming increasingly more muddled; our morality is declining under the pretense that morality is only a subjective attitude,⁸ and in the wholesale acceptance of B.F. Skinner, we’ve decided to make morality a sacrifice deemed necessary for the peace of the herd.

You who have studied psychology know what I’m talking about

But the herd is getting daily more hateful, because it is rankled by the idea of shotgun-love.

The socio-psychological authorities are reinforced by specially vested groups, which may be minorities of special interests or by lone individuals who think that they may become famous or funded by accurately representing a trend or a zeitgeist.

This modern approach is failing, because the wants of the individual cannot be granted to him until we know more about the real nature of that individual. He’s just not as B.F. Skinner says, a lion that needs masturbating.⁹ He may be something more.

A man who pretends to know what is best for humanity, or a socio-psychological dynasty that think they know what is best for humanity—and know how to force upon humanity the prescription of spiritual leeching through physical masturbation in order to render everyone placid, helpless and harmless—do not take into account the true nature of the individual, let alone the nature of the blueprint.

… and the fellow who drew up the blueprint, whoever or whatever that is.

———-
⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
⁹ In context, this notorious quote by B.F. Skinner in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (p 39) can be seen as criticism by Skinner rather than approval: “Genuine reinforcers can be used in ways which have aversive consequences. A government may prevent defection by making life more interesting—by providing bread and circuses and by encouraging sports, gambling, the use of alcohol and other drugs, and various kinds of sexual behavior, where the effect is to keep people within reach of aversive sanctions. The Goncourt brothers noted the rise of pornography in the France of their day: ‘Pornographic literature,’ they wrote, ‘serves a Bas-Empire … one tames a people as one tames lions, by masturbation.’ “ An expanded excerpt (5 pages) is here: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/quotes/skinner-on-taming-the-lions.htm; pdf of Beyond Freedom and Dignity is here: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/

We have the conceited little idea that humanity is going to create humanity. But there’s an admission that humanity is unable to take care of itself—or our Skinnerian psychology wouldn’t be advising them for wholesale masturbation. Who is advising? Who is behind this? Another robot? And where does his ultimate authority or ultimate wisdom come from?

Even discounting the force which we might call God, it is manifest that there is an order in the universe, not just among the inhabitants of this planet, this natural aquarium. And this natural plan must be known, not guessed at.

We can’t guess at what we would like it to be, and say we’re going to carry that out, just the little willful sociologists and politicians.

It may go deeper than we think. It may go deeper than just fertilizing the soil.

The material scientist would like for us to ignore all that is not seen, except with the eye.

Everything has to be visible in order to be evidential, in other words.

However, you can take one eye out and look at it with the other. You can discover nerves running from the eye to the brain, but upon examining the brain, you can’t decide that which sees.

What is it that sees?

I’m starting to direct the thinking here to the point of simply observing yourself. It need not start with a complex psychology book, if you want to understand yourself. It has to start with a bare, basic appraisal—“What’s going on?”—a simple, mechanical procedure of say looking at an object or a wall and understanding the operation. What happens when you look at the wall? And from this, we’re going to get maybe a better idea of what the observer is, in relation to the observed.

Visualization

We look at an apple on a table, and we can close our eyes and still see the apple.

It’s as simple as that: What is looking then? Where is the second picture? Call it imagination: that’s loose, that’s easy to do, just call something imagination. But what went on? Where is this vision, these things we see? Is it inside the head or out in front of us? The eyes are closed so it couldn’t be out in front of us. Two months or two years later you can still close your eyes and see that same apple, and you might be a thousand miles away so you’re not seeing it through your eyelids.

We might say we imagine an apple. But we see this apple with visualization and we don’t see it with the physical eyeball. We do not see the apple when the eyeballs are removed except by visualization. And we do not see except with the whole sense- nerve-brain combination, originally, and then with visualization.¹⁰

Not only do we have the senses, nerves and brain, but we have another faculty called visualization which has to go into this picture. And of course this happens with everything you see, not just when you want to recall. We’ll see later how this happens.

Visualization not only occurs in dreams and in deliberate recall, but with every perception at the time of perception. Somewhere behind the brain-part of the combination there is a part that visualizes. The word visualize means to create, because we are able to create that picture of the apple at any later time when the apple itself is no longer there.

With the ability to create comes the ability to delude oneself.

We’ve all experienced this self-delusion but neglect to note that we have just dichotomized ourself: one self is doing something to another self. If you delude yourself, that means that one self is recognized as true, and there is recognized as being untrue certain faculties which are part of an erroneous self—that lack the ability to react properly to environmental thoughts, reactions and various stimuli.

This can be said very simply: that there is a self that is influenced by another self. We are not monistic. Whenever you say that a man is talking to himself, there’s got to be two. I’m not saying there are two people, but there are two cameras [chambers¹¹]. There are two entities, if you want to call it that. There are two compartments, one communicating with the other.

Of course we can say this differently: that the inside self is at times incapable of true apprehension, and is capable of making distorted creations. An entire, separate set of instructions on the intuition is necessary at this point to try to correct this delusion- and distorted-creative ability.

I don’t deny that you can create. This is done all the time. But if you want to know yourself, you want to know which visions you’re creating and which visions are coming to you. For instance you take some LSD and you say, “I created that.” Another fellow says, “No, that was a real dimension.” Well, when two fellows get together and compare their two LSD trips in the same room, and they see identically the same thing, we have to stop and think then, where did it really come from? It wasn’t a creation of an individual mind. Either one of them got it from the other, or both of them got it from outside. And how did it come? Through the eyeballs? You never see that sort of thing with the eyeballs. This stuff goes on every day and people never bother to really think about it. Incidentally, I took LSD and I’m quite sure I know where the vision came from.¹²

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¹⁰ See Franz Hartman, Magic White and Black, chapter 2: “The popular idea is that sensual objective perceptions are real and subjective ones are only the products of our imagination. But a little reflection will show that all perceptions, the objective as well as the subjective ones, are results of our ‘imagination.’ If we look at a tree, the tree does not come into our eye, but its picture appears in our mind … if we look at a subjective image of our own creation, we perceive the impression which it produces on our mind.” http://selfdefinition.org/magic/hartmann/magic-hartmann-chapter-02.htm
¹¹ A reference to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, reviewed in TAT Journal (1976, vol. 1 no. 3) http://www.searchwithin.org/journal/tat_journal-03.html
¹² Explained in the Q&A section.

Observer

We must return to the point at hand: If behavioral psychology is the science of behavior observed, we cannot neglect these internal observations. And determining a few basic things may correct for us many external reactions.

If we’re going to study behavior, we’re going to have to study the factors behind behavior. It’s impossible to just start somewhere out in space, like starting to build a house without a foundation. And the entire behavior of humanity rests upon things like LSD trips, things that may come from outside.

We must determine first of all, who is observing? Is it the eyeball, the sensory arrangement, or an entirely separate creative mental self?—which up until the present mention of it may never have occurred to us as existing at all.¹³

Now of course this is nothing new. There are fields of esoteric philosophy or metaphysics in which they believe that there is a creative self that a person enters after death; I think they call it the causal world¹⁴ [Theosophy] or the desire world¹⁵ [Buddhism]—in which all a person has to do is imagine things, and they are suddenly there; that you can create almost anything you wish.¹⁶

Another point to determine is that when something is observed, we must admit that there is an observer.

This is just very simple, plain logic: if you see something—who sees? Nothing sees something? No. If you see your body, there’s an observer watching your body that is not the body.

This brings us to the admission first of all that we can observe our own behavior. We can observe not only our own thoughts, but also thought processes such as visualization and introspection. And it brings us to another admission, that either the observer and the observed are one, or the “we” that we refer to when we say we think or behave a certain way is separate from what is observed. We have to take one course or the other.

———-
¹³ Franz Hartman, Magic White and Black, chapter 2: “But here the great question arises: ‘Who or what is this unknown One that perceives the images existing in its own mind, and the sensations that come to his consciousness? What is that which you call your “I,” which knows that you know, and which also recognises your ignorance? What is that Self, which is neither the body nor the mind, but which uses these things as its instruments?’ If you know that invisible being, you may throw away this book; it can teach you nothing new, because you know God and are the wisest of men.” http://selfdefinition.org/magic/hartmann/magic-hartmann-chapter-02.htm
¹⁴ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_plane ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_body
¹⁵ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_realm
¹⁶ Rose calls this the “prop room” in 1977-0428-Zen-and-Common-Sense-KSU: “You go back through your manifested mind, the dimension of the prop room from which all this stuff is projected.”

This means that the true self is always that anterior observer.¹⁷ I maintain that the observation of the anterior observer brings us to an ultimate or absolute observer. This sounds like a simple verbal manipulation or formula, but in reality it is the true method of reaching the realization of the absolute state of mind, pointed at by writers on enlightenment.

This is how it’s done. Not by shutting your head and saying there’s nothing behind my fingernails or behind my skull or behind my thoughts. It’s by knowing what’s back there.

Agreement

So we go back to our simple search for inside and outside knowledge. We usually want to know what is “out there” first.

Nearly all the scientific minds want to know what’s “out there” first. And nearly all of our educational processes are beamed in the direction of controlling the outside, manipulating the outside. And getting paid for it.

The external world attracts us from the moment of birth. We build an orderly explanation of what we, mankind, collectively see.

I said that deliberately: We build an explanation, not truth. Science is not truth; science is an agreement.

Our external world is largely one of agreement, and the material sciences are really just systems of getting along. We develop systems of measurement, and cataloging according to genus and specie. And later we discover that we failed somewhat in our methods of calculating and cataloging. I majored in chemistry around 40 years ago and there were 92 elements, with an infallible fiat from the hierarchy of chemistry that there would never be any more. Now of course we agree that there are over a hundred elements.

This is what we were taught. We were taught a way of balancing equations that they don’t use today.¹⁸ It worked—that’s all that mattered. Today’s system of chemistry works and that’s all that matters: that the bomb doesn’t blow up before it gets into the shell, that things come out all right. But it’s explanation and agreement.

———-
¹⁷ Rose uses the word anterior to refer to an observing self that is closer to the essence than whatever self or process is being observed. So the umpire is anterior to the body, which the umpire is observing, and the process observer is anterior to the umpire. These terms are defined later in the talk. The choice of the word anterior is problematic because the word is generally understood to mean “in front of”, even though Rose states that these observers are “behind” in terms of position or perspective. Anterior also is understood to mean “prior to in time,” but a search of Rose’s works shows no indication that this was intended. It could also mean “prior to” in terms of what Rose calls the “projected ray of creation”, but Rose does not spell this out either. For details, see the separately-published appendix: Richard Rose and the Anterior Observer.
¹⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_bond_theory

It may go even deeper than that. It may go as far as that this whole visible world in which we live as one is here just because we agree that it’s here.

This habit of agreeing upon things not fully understood has not caused very great mishap to humanity as a whole when such agreements were limited to the material sciences. Many of us believed that penicillin would cure everybody of certain infections, and when deaths were reported from allergic reactions to penicillin there was no great sorrow; a few people died, but in the whole it was orderly.

It was orderly and we eventually said, “Well, watch out; some people may be allergic to it and if you get such and such a reaction, run to the hospital.” But there was no great disappointment. That which was infallible was gracefully accepted as still being 99.44% pure, and we could sacrifice a few.

In science we say we can get by with it. But this goes on to a greater degree in psychology. Our psychic and psychological determinations are made, and they seem to come from an orderly examination of the field of phenomena in question. But they too are developed and determined by campaigning for the public’s agreement.

For instance, you hear people say, “Well, Freud—he’s a has-been, he doesn’t exist anymore. He never was true, and we’re into this other thing now. Freud’s been superseded, Adler’s been superseded,“ and that sort of thing. I can’t quite see that. I’ve read the psychology of many of the people on these different steps and I find they all had something. They all have limitations, but they all had something. But there was a campaign. Freud himself carried out a campaign to establish clinics all over Europe, to package his own little brand of something that was going to help everybody.¹⁹

But there’s an attempt to perpetuate: First of all, the guy writing a thesis wants to be recognized as being knowledgeable. Perhaps he does nothing but bibliography work; he draws a little bit from this fellow and that fellow, he’s careful he doesn’t disagree with the spirit of the times, and he writes his book—so we’re swamped with a lot of inane books.

There’s an understandable fault that causes our reliance upon agreement rather than exact knowledge. To begin with, exact knowledge is the same as absolute knowledge—which does not exist, at least for us today—and we cannot delay the preparation of all medicine until we know all possible side effects upon all people.

This is where the word reasonable comes in. And we use that term as a euphemism instead of the word orderly. We hang a man when there is no longer any reasonable doubt, when circumstantial evidence that points in his direction makes him a criminal. It’s true that we’re going to go on hanging, gassing, trepanning, ice picking,²⁰ and shock treating a certain percentage of the population, and this lethal sort of lottery must have some explanation for the sake of conscience.

———-
¹⁹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud#Early_psychoanalytic_movement
²⁰ Transorbital lobotomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pick#Medical_uses

There’s always a little whisper of conscience, saying, “Do we really have to go through all of that? Isn’t there a better way out of it?” And we somehow have to depict our professional acts as being rational.

Psychology

While exact knowledge is for practical purposes impossible, there are methods that can be used that might eliminate some of the bungling, gassing and hanging. We soon learn that our inadequate understanding of the outside world is the result of defective observation mechanisms.

In other words, we don’t see properly from inside.

This points in the direction not only of our senses, but also in the direction of mental habits of visualization, dreaming, creating or projecting.

Now if you understand what those words mean, especially the word projecting, you’ll get into what’s wrong with your individual heads, as well as collective humanity’s method of appraising things. We see people and fail to understand them, that sort of thing.

We may not understand the external world properly until we understand our self. This is especially true in the psychotherapy department and the attempts by individuals to get along with their fellowman. The psychiatrist who can no longer prescribe for a patient in terms of medicine or behavioral analysis, turns the patient over to group therapy, in the hope that an accident will do for the patient that which his paradigm or theory- agreement failed to do.

That’s all you’ve got with any psychiatrist in this country: theory-agreement, and tampering with drugs that seem to have certain effects. I had a psychiatrist brag to me one day—he was shooting one of the people I knew full of needles and talking at the same time. And I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m giving him Stelazine.” ²¹ And I said, “What’s your diagnosis?” And he said, “Well, I don’t have a diagnosis yet.” And I said, “What are you giving him medicine for then?” They were holding him down, shooting this in his posterior.²²

This was a guy in college who had done too much thinking, drinking, smoking, or socializing, and it had got the best of him. His head got rattled and he went down to the doctor. The doctor said, “Go down the street, they’ve got a nuthouse, and talk to that fellow down there.” Well, they checked him in and wouldn’t let him go—they got him down and were pumping him full of drugs. (I don’t think the drug was too harmful, but it sure destroyed his ability to make a decision for himself, or even try to pull himself out of it.)

But what got me was the fact that this doctor had complete charge. A man arrested for murder would have more rights: he could call a lawyer, he could get out on some sort of habeas corpus procedure. But this fellow had no rights whatsoever; he was in the hands of this man with the needle. And I know of another case right here in Ohio where a psychologist called the police and had a fellow put in jail who wasn’t even disturbed. He had threatened to punch the psychologist, who just called the police and said, “This is one of my patients and he’s gone crazy, lock him up, he’s dangerous.” And they had him up for six months. No trial, nothing. Six months or a year, I don’t know which it was. He served at least six months of it.

———-
²¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoperazine
²² Rose told the story many times as this was a group member. When Rose held his hand the young man immediately became calm and was able to stand. Rose asked the doctor, “Can you do this?” and the doctor just brushed him off. Rose says the drug was Stelazine in 1990-0503-What-Is-Thought-Ohio- State and in 1981-0215-Psychology-of-Miracles-Akron.

Now this is the type of theory-agreement we have. I fail to find the threads of anything except authority. If you go to school long enough and get into a position where you can dare to do so, you can exert a lot of authority with a needle. But this doctor made the remark—this happened over in Providence, Rhode Island ²³—he said, “We have a drug for every thought.” That’s our science. If a man says, “I think people are persecuting me,” “Okay, we’ve got a drug that will cure him of paranoia.” If he thinks he’s pregnant, well then he’s a schizophrenic, so they’ve got a drug for that.

The other people in the therapy group serve as a mirror for the individual. (Now this part is true.) He begins to see himself in a new light and realizes that he may be taking an erratic or selfish pose that alienates him from the mainstream of human agreement.

This is the benefit of group therapy—it’s alright, that part of it.

He goes back inside of himself, and realizes that he has been fooling himself. When he recognizes this, instead of being a social misfit he may immediately become a budding psychologist.

And he does this without too many complex words, just by looking at himself.

———-
²³ Students of Rose established groups in Boston and Providence in the fall of 1975; see Pyramid Zen Newsletters for details. Rose gave talks there as follows: 1975-1118-Brown-University (missing tape); 1975-1119-Boston-College; 1975-Harvard-University (unknown date, missing tape).