September 2025 TAT Forum

From Bob Harwood:

(See Bob’s response in the “Is There No Self? Another Perspective” essay above.)

From Alex S:

In the dialogue between Shawn and Richard, Richard’s position appears to be “I cannot find myself anywhere and therefore I do not exist”. The conclusion does not follow from the premise directly and with necessity. It needs the support of an underlying belief, such as ‘only that which is objective can exist’. A more defensible position, and one more in the spirit of self-inquiry, would be ‘I cannot find myself anywhere and therefore I am not an object before consciousness’ (cf. ‘Induction Talk’ by Franklin Merrell-Wolff).

Shawn’s own position is unclear. When he writes “[…] there is no self in the same sense that there is no spoon. Spoons are useful and certainly seem to exist, but if you go looking for an absolute definition of a spoon you won’t find one”, what does he mean by ‘self’, ‘exist’, and why does he tie existence to usefulness?

Perhaps both Shawn and Richard talk about the self in the narrow sense of the ego-self, whose hallmark in the belief ‘I am I and none other’.

From MT:

I have been deeply influenced by Bernadette Roberts when it comes to our self and its reality.  I also look into my own experiences and why I think and feel we all are born with self or ego. In her book What is Self? A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness, Bernadette writes “Self is what it means to be human. As a dynamic but non-eternal experience it is in passage, a passage that is our life.” She considers our ego as the immature centre and our true Self as the more mature centre. Bernadette also makes a very clear distinction between the falling away of the ego-self and the no-Self event which she went through after living in the Unitive State (a Christian term for an abiding oneness with the Divine) for 20 plus years.

Our ego is the self-energy or power that can go negatively towards what is not good for self or positively towards what is good for self on our spiritual journey through life….and back home to The Divine. I still have a lot of work to do…..my ego is very much intact but looking back over the years…….it seems to be getting thinner……fears, insecurities, obsessions gradually dissolving. Many mystics from all religious and spiritual traditions have reached the no-ego true-Self state and left written accounts of their journeys. No-self journey seems to be less well known.

From Lena S:

B.S! (respectfully)

I am a self and no one can take that away from me! I laugh at people who say they are trying to get rid of “self,” to dissolve the “I” in “I am-ness” and find non-duality as a result. Who is the “I” that wants to do that? Is that “I” crazy? After the millions of years of evolution (OK, some may say that is some conspiracy) there doesn’t seem to be any creature or plant that determined its own self-destruction. If everything was created for a purpose and interrelated into a whole, then why would /  how could some pieces be expendable? Unless the “whole” included a much greater picture beyond duality and non-duality in which we serve a greater purpose we could never know. I have absolutely no concept, no inkling, no intuition whatsoever of what “no-self” could possibly be!

From Patrick K:

Man I find this question irritating so I know it’s a really good one. Recently I have found out that a lot of Gurdjieff’s teachings were inspired by Sufism. Here is what I feel is a good quote from Attar, the Sufi poet, “The hand reaches for what the eye desires, heedless of what the heart knows to be harmful. The tongue speaks what earns immediate approval, regardless of long-term consequences. The mind chases fascinating thoughts with no regard for their truth. Such is life when servants rule the house”. The basic Sufi concept is that the self is like a house with many servants but the master is asleep in the basement.

My basic core drive on my spiritual path is to become the master of myself, putting the overarching goal of realisation aside for the time being. PD Ouspensky, the Russian philosopher, outlined a really good system, laying out the tenets of what he picked up from Gurdjieff. At first the seeker nominates a “deputy steward” (an identity that he creates, which for me I call my spiritual identity). Its job is to study the selves, because as Gurdjieff lays out, man is not one, his name is legion. He has many selves / voices / identities (which he calls “I’s”) / archetypes / negative emotions / drives / appetites / compulsions / conditionings / fears / attachments / beliefs / dependencies etc. The deputy steward works to eliminate any “I’s” that go against the work or are unsupportive of the work, to allow the harmless “I’s”, and to grow/feed the “I’s” that benefit/support the work.

Eventually, as the work progresses, the seeker reaches the stage where he becomes congruent in thought, word, deed, mind, body, heart and soul. His “magnetic centre”, as Gurdjieff called it, increases, he develops greater “ears to hear”. He becomes “one” self and now he becomes the “steward”. He has control of himself and all his powers, he has become a definite vector for truth, that means that his predominant focus of attention is on spiritual work. He has developed in himself a definite “will”. I feel that I am still at the “deputy steward” stage, still struggling to harness all my energies to work together, still struggling with selves negative to the search, and lots of unconscious factors etc that oppose the work.

From lennys3cents:

Other Reader Feedback

From Dan G:

In response to Bill R’s comment in last month’s Other Reader Feedback:

Is the use of Claude AI (or any AI) by Anonymous meant to show us how clever [the submitter] is, or is it just a means to avoid the challenge and effort of self-analytic/self-realization work?

I applaud the contributor for the spirit of looking under every rock, but I would have been curious what they thought of the response. 

Suspending disbelief, and pretending this output is a conscious person’s response, something feels off. The AI has no perspective it’s straining to express. The AI is a simulated seeker. It doesn’t go home at night and desperately reflect on its purpose in life. It has gained exactly zero knowledge from looking inwards. It is blind in the exact spot I wish I could see.

That said, it acts like someone who’s read tons of spirituality but never understood any of it. Such a person could possibly help someone early in the search when exposure to new ideas is invaluable. But at some point that seeker has to wonder if there are people out there they can work with to go further–people whose top priority in life isn’t getting thumbs ups, but are more like the seeker, desperate to know what the heck is going on.

*

From Don A., regarding David Lynch quotations in last month’s Forum:

The day you catch an idea that you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day. – David Lynch

I think I had been belabored with self-inquiry for decades off and on, being attracted to teachers who were sympathetic and tolerant of me. Until one day I heard the phrase “Love of Truth” when something inside clicked with what I heard from the outside. My whole self-inquiry path became one of self-discovery, it became a love from which it has seemed I could not be separated. Some people have a passion for sculpture, science, or flower gardens, as an exhilaration of an extraordinary connection between inside and outside, as if a near perfect one to one correspondence between yet two totally unrelated things. I am always reminded by how words so poorly represent the object referred to, yet for me it was a simple word phrase that allowed something inside to come forth and bloom. I was so thankful for Mr. Lynch for that—until I saw his next quotation:

I’m not comfortable with words. I love images, and I love sounds, and I love feelings. I like the idea of intuition. I think a lot of things in life are understood that way. But you internalize these things; they don’t really pop out. Certain things are built inside—little areas of understanding. I feel that I live in darkness and confusion, and I’m trying, like we all are, to make some sort of sense of it.

Yes, absolutely, and for me it was that one little thing that did “pop out”—and it took only three words!

“A spiritual path’s objective is deeply personal but often includes achieving enlightenment, self-realization, or union with the divine, leading to lasting peace, joy, wisdom, and freedom from suffering” ~ Google search on “spiritual path objective”

“Spiritual celibacy is the practice of abstaining from sexual activity as a means to deepen one’s spiritual life and connection with the divine. It is often associated with religious or spiritual traditions, where it is seen as a way to prioritize spiritual goods and devotion over worldly desires…. For many, celibacy is a path to cultivate holiness, purity, and a closer relationship with the divine.” ~ Google search on “spiritual celibacy”

=> The Reader Commentary question for next month, the October TAT Forum, is:

What do you consider as the pros and cons of celibacy?

Please  your response by the 25th of September, 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?

Indian Peaks in Colorado © Bob Fergeson. See a brief bio.

We like hearing from you! Please email your comments, suggestions, inquiries, and submissions.

Sign up for notices of TAT’s four annual events, other virtual events, and free monthly Forums on our contact page.

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.

An Adventure Into Poetry
by Richard Rose

Before writing this down, I picked up a book of quotations and looked through it for comments on poets and poetry. I had hoped to find some soul-stirring paraphrase that would reveal the secret of poetic genius, and betray to the lay world the elixir that converts base words into golden beauty.

I am grossly disappointed. Here is what I found. Poets are madmen. They are in league with the devil. They are people with causes dangerous to society and if society changed to suit them, they would damn the reformation. And here and there we find worthy men, Shakespeare included, who stoutly maintain that love is the mother of poetic inspiration. This means sublimated libido.

Perhaps this is true. The poet personifies — deifies love. He adores his opposite because she has awakened new vistas for the soul. He finds a harmony and purpose in life almost divine, and rejoices even as his terrestrial ego suffers misery, so that he finds a rich glory in his tragedy.

Like Ben Jonson he is blind but his infatuation with reality is exquisite, and yet the world will forever claim that he is exaggerating.

At any rate the eye of the poet has some strange magic that colors things that have no color, and just as quickly tears the glamour from that which pretends to have color.

So I reason that poetry, — that is the reading of poetry is adventure. We can pick up a book of fiction and upon reading it sense the character of the writer. We may sense his hopes or his great love as in the writing of Emily Bronte, we may feel his noble purpose as in Les Misérables, but in fiction the most we will get is a thought, and we are usually limited to one thought to each book. That is only in the best fiction.

But in poetry, if we can borrow the lens of the poet as we read we will see something that is just not exactly thought. There is a realm between the words. The poet himself laments his inability to describe this middle realm, or this ethereal realm. Some may think it the pulse of God. Some may think it is the voice of Pan, long dead Pan. Such I think Amy Lowell felt when she parted the grass and felt a heart within the earth. As for me I will not attempt to say what I feel, because I know that it cannot be put into words.

I can only try to convey indirectly the interpretation…. [To be continued in the January 2026 TAT Forum.]

*

© 2003 Richard Rose. All rights reserved. If you like the dynamism and spontaneity of Richard Rose as writer and teacher, please visit Rose Publications at www.rosepublications.net/. Image from writecream.com/chatgpt-picture-generator with prompt: “adventure into poetry”.

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 2025:

As we look to 2025 for a new year of TAT Retreats and Friendship on the spiritual path, there are a few important updates to share. 

Since 2019 when we first moved into the current TAT Center, this home away from home has been developed and supported by many. Through donations, workdays, and the ongoing efforts of our caretaker, the property has served as a retreat center, a spiritual library, and a gathering place for friends. It would be difficult to sufficiently put into words how grateful we are for these efforts, contributions, and time together at the Hurdle Mills TAT Center, and for all who continue to support and have played a part in making the TAT Center a reality. 

To enhance the ability for TAT to provide a center for meetings and retreats, after much careful consideration, discussion, and engagement with TAT members for input, we have strategically decided that, while the current TAT Center is very good, it is not as well-suited for the future as we would like.  In the spring of 2025, the TAT Center will be for sale, and we will transition the 2025 quarterly TAT Meetings and Retreats to Claymont (Charles Town, WV) and other retreat facilities. A committee is actively looking at properties to find a future home for TAT. 

A unique piece of land with a purposefully built retreat center building, acreage for solitary cabins, and a modest caretaker home is the view we have in mind. A place that feels more like a quiet retreat center than a large suburban home, and one that requires less ongoing live-in maintenance than our current home are additional items that have been discussed. The net is cast widely, but we are focusing on the Appalachian Mountain range for property searches, seeking the right balance of solitude and accessibility.

The right property will come when it is meant to, and we look forward to that next chapter for TAT. In the meantime, many have expressed a fondness for the Claymont center, and we intend to hold retreats there until a new property for TAT is found.
​

A very special thank you to all who have been involved in creating and supporting the Hurdle Mills TAT Center during the last five years, and likewise to those planning TAT’s future home. We look forward to the coming year of TAT Meetings and Retreats and very much hope to see you there.

In Friendship, 
Michael, Shawn, and Mike
[our current trustees]

Did you enjoy the Forum? Then buy the book!
Readers’ favorite selections from seven years of issues.
Beyond Mind, Beyond Death is available at Amazon.com.

Home | Richard Rose | Books & Recordings | TAT Forum | About | Search | Site Map