May 2026 TAT Forum

4) There is an evolution of stepping stone progress. A spectrum with pre- and beginning parents and grandparent as the polar opposites. We get good at what we work at or do regularly.

5) Rose’s “Walk around the block” prompting. A daily or regular commitment. Go to meetings. Practice meditation. Being able to do something through thick and thin, in good and bad weather, builds a certain competence and ability. A certain personal power.

5) Along the way, we get help.
Looking back, for anyone who’s not dead yet, all the stuff you go through seems like it was destined or planned to be that way in retrospect. A lot of that feeling is probably due to the fact that as you work your way through things you make decisions and adapt to the new environment and circumstances.
Regardless of that, there are serendipitous coincidental co-occurrent things that seem to go on when you’re trying to find your own way and you don’t really know what to do but you’re still trying. I think you get help. Things occur. Exactly like Murray said. Some call it a guardian angel. Some people say the universe or things manifest for you. Rose was asked once, and he said something similar, then added, “But I wouldn’t depend on it.”

6) My personal modus operandi:

Working the problem. Working on it. Working consistently on it. Take a walk. Sit in silence. Return to it repeatedly. When not in a hot emotional state. Listen to one’s deepest, nonverbal part.

Everyone’s different. We relate to some people and things and not to others. One person’s comments on how to make one’s way appeal to us, and someone else’s don’t.
Search for your fellows.
Follow your heart and intuition. Zero in on what appeals to you as “right.”

• Doors of Opportunity phenomenon.

Q4. Looking back, what would you say to your former seeker self?

Q5. Do you feel one must first build a healthy sense of self before seeking genuine realization? What role do emotional maturity, personal development, and relationship to others play in it?

Q6. Is there a relationship between becoming Truth/Love, “growing up” (developmental maturity), and “cleaning up” (shadow work)?

Q7. Do you still experience fears and desires?

Q8. Before realization, did you love Truth/Freedom/God/Absolute more than anything else? If so, how do you love what you do not yet know?

Q9. What would you say your purpose in life was before realization? What is it now?

Q10. Does self-compassion or childlike curiosity play a role in the search, alongside trauma and suffering?

Q11. I sometimes lose my sense of “I” in moments of surprise, beauty, shock, or deep absorption—where experience unfolds but the thought “I” has not yet appeared. Is this similar to your experience some, most, or all of the time?

Q12. How would you describe what happened to you to a child, a teenager, and an adult?

Q13: Is boredom a part of your life? Or is the absence of doing / Silence a ground state of Being, never not there?

Rather than respond to the painting with such a complex reaction such as guilt or repentance, I found that I remained mostly in the immediate and physical sensory feedback level, as to how my torso, head, feet, hands would feel from torture. But due to my human nature, the physical sensual inputs were highlighted by emotions, too, another physical dimension, a yet more subtle, complex step removed from the physical world. What occurred to me was that even though I am programmed to avoid suffering and strive for gratification, the impact of those two are more cerebral and less immediate than the sensory inputs themselves linked to emotions.

More recently I’ve not known what to make of the scientific finding that the decision-making centers of the mind act after the body as if the cerebral is not the determinant but rather an after effect of the body’s actions. But this would make perfect sense with the recognition that it is the immediacy that is of primary concern to human nature and where attention gets focused. The rational and feeling cerebral functions are as if the next step “going within” into a mental realm, removed from the present and the immediate. But this might seem to contradict the experience of meditation as being a mental practice focused upon the present moment. But it highlights for me that my attention, or ‘seeing’ as the primary ‘activity’ in meditation and not being mental at all, is connected with neither suffering or gratification nor the current moment. The significance being that if one were to pursue a ‘spiritual direction’, it would be away from the physical senses, beyond the emotions and even beyond the mental dimension, and that direction clearly defines that “going within” in the direction that could only be suggested as the more subtle. Although there is so much talk in spiritual circles of being in the present moment, the Now or the “This”, my spiritual aspiration is to turn from the here and now and toward the more subtle, a direction away from the immediacy. In the parlance of Ramana Maharshi, it is investigation of the seen-seeing-seer. D.E. Harding suggests looking into that which looks out. Rose pointed to the viewer of the view, but he also warned of the error of dichotomy in imagining stepping-back ad infinitum and that a retreat from untruth would not be endless, but that only by elimination of untruths might one Become Truth.

But direction implies progress, and progress needs guidance, or that seems to be the necessary human experience, but without authority or feedback from ‘outside’ as to the ‘inside’ progress, upon what could hope be based ‘to get anywhere’? And in phrasing it that way, the problem may be more clearly recognized as unique in that to go inside, outside or progress are adverbs that do not eventually apply to spiritual work. Initially the path may be focused more as a philosophical or psychological endeavor but these can only eventually lead into subtlety where, again as Rose alluded, there are no railroad tracks, guideposts or footprints to follow. But why is that the case? The answer for me, is due to the fact that we live in a relative dimension and as we investigate more and more the subjective or inner experience, we progress further into a paradox of not knowing, of uncertainty as no observation from the outside could be ultimately true or false, that such opposites that could be measured by feedback lose their usefulness or meaning. I understand Alex’s perplexity as to a passion or commitment in life and the urge to keep going but never knowing whether one is ever led -or by what. Favorite phrases of mine are “The Cloud of Unknowing”, and those of St John of the Cross such as “to follow a path that abandons all paths”. These have no meaning except to give hope, no assurance whatsoever except to answer to a more subtle recognition that I only sense that not knowing eventually replaces knowing, and that ‘both and neither’ in all things is some thing we eventually come to live with.

The image generated below was also generated by Google Gemini with similar instructions used by Alex S: “give me a picture in the style of Hieronymus Bosch like the Hell panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych” except that I asked it to depict love, unity, feeling, openness, seeing, intuition, acceptance, enlightenment. Please note that the unearthly ghouls and monstrous humanoids are now agents that do service to New Age beliefs and join human-kind hand-in-hand. Is that Gemini’s subtle suggestion that it too could participate?

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¹ URL: http://direct-mind.org/index.php5?title=1977-11-Method-of-Going-Inside For access, send email to editors@direct-mind.org
² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Yoga
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Aquinas

you have a finite mind and you’re not going to get there. But the thing they overlooked was that the finite mind can become different; the finite mind can become less finite.

We’re not going to get into the system of that tonight, but I’m going to try to try to take you through a simple process of going within. And if you can remember this it will be of value to you, because this is the crux of all of this path, after you reach the decision that you have to change your nature, that you have to become. It’s based, first of all, upon five properties of the human mind. Now I completely avoid and bypass what is known as current psychology, the psychology that has developed down through the years to where it is today, and certain definitions they have of the mind.

At one time I believed that there were only three qualities of the human mind: perception, retention and reaction.⁴ If you look at it for a minute you’ll see why I said that; basically, you can get all of the things that happen to a human being down into those three categories: you perceive, you retain as memory, and you react. But these are not necessarily properties – they are things that happen to us, without us controlling them. When you look at it a little deeper you see that there’s something else that can be added; they’re still limited to these three categories, but there’s a variation in two of them. So that we have two types of perception: sensory perception and mental perception. It’s still perception but one of them has to come through the senses while the other can come directly. The mind itself can see. And after you meditate or think on these long enough, you’ll encounter this thing called visualization. Now visualization is one method of mental perception, and there are others. The mind can be trained to see directly, such as in ESP, astral projection, these things. The mind can see by itself. It’s still perception, and it still records on the mundane memory.

And there’s another quality we add to these three and that is projection;⁵ as things come into the human organism, things also can be sent out. Now projection would seem to be the only thing that the human being does. He can’t stop perceiving; he can’t prohibit or stop remembering – the action called memory is going to happen whether he wants it to or not. And he can’t stop reacting, although perhaps he can desire to react a certain way, which is called morality, a moral reaction. And of course there’s some question as to whether you can even control the moral type of reaction. But this projection would seem to be something that we can control; that it’s the first time that we do something. We’ll see if it’s possible to actually control that – I don’t know whether it is. But as far as everyone generally thinks, we can.

Viewer and the view

Now this whole theme hinges on a very simple point: that the view is not the viewer. In a search for the self we are looking for the viewer; we are looking for him who sees. We’re looking for the self, in other words. There is a self. But strangely enough, the smartest people, meaning intellectually smart – men of degree and reputation, doctors even, psychologists – very seldom

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⁴ Psychology of the Observer, pg. 20-21 and 26.
⁵ The second form of reaction.

really define “I” or “me” or “self“ properly. This is a massive assumption that is crossed over, to the extent that when you start defining this thing you’re going to get into endless discussion and proof. But it’s just a very simple and logical deduction that if you’re looking for yourself, it’s not the environment. Now – where does environment end and “me” begin? Where is the “me” that is the essence-me?

Let’s take a simple situation: a person lying in bed smoking cigarettes. Let’s just first present it in a picture: Your toes are visible, and possibly by smoking you’re even aware of your lungs. But we realize that the toes are not us, basically because you can amputate them and keep on living. And by the same token, if you smoke too many cigarettes they might even take out a lung. You might take out a good bit of your body and still live.

So you’re going to have to identify the rest of the body likewise as not being us, not being the central “we”. And when you do this you start to embark upon what I call a retreat – a retreat from the common definition that is assumed by most people: that “us” is the body; that “us” is that which we would like to think we are; or that “us” may be body and mind or body-mind. Modern psychology seems to hint that there’s no such thing as a mind outside of a body-mind, a reaction mechanism. Incidentally, this little five-part formula for the human mind’s attributes doesn’t argue with modern psychology in this respect – except possibly for the idea of projection – that the body can be blamed for a tremendous lot of this: The body is the one that perceives through the senses, the body is the brain, the brain is somatic, the DNA molecule is somatic.

And the reaction is automatic – it’s like an electrical current triggering something and causing a reaction. But I think after you dig awhile you become aware that the somatic mind is identifiable and it is not us.

So when you start looking, you start by looking at your actions – and you generally don’t see your actions until you get a reflection from someone else, or you run afoul of society and run into criticism, or you get sick. So let’s say in the process of smoking a cigarette the person develops a cough, and he gets the fear that maybe he’ll be going into cancer. And this is when he realizes that the one who decided to smoke the cigarette is not him, because he argues with him – and by this he finds himself looking inside. We’re going into a meditative process now – this is what we’re trying to do tonight – take a person into a phase of simple meditation: what you would think about if you were lying in bed smoking a cigarette. This might be what would enter your mind. And this will lead you back to just simply analyzing your actions, to see which of those actions are you and which aren’t you.

And we find that we’re a composition – our so-called personality. We may have abandoned the idea that we’re the body by looking at our toes and our fingernails, and saying that this evidently isn’t us – because in seven years the entire body will be changed, it will be a different us. So where is the unchanging us? Where is this thing that is really us forever? Or which is the most durable part, if it is not that? But we come to some conclusions: that we eat and we want to eat, we want pleasure, we want power, peace of mind and a few other possible objectives – and that some of these things conflict. They conflict so strongly that we decide at some given time that they are not us.

Now take the case of a fellow who drinks. He once decided that it’s a harmless pastime, it’s just a few beers – and the next thing you know he’s an alcoholic. And eventually he gets put in jail or he gets into a fix – he may lose his property or something like that. But he gets into trauma, and he realizes that this is not him. And then he goes – he doesn’t say, “We’re going down to the doctor,” no. “I’m going down to get rid of this monkey that’s on my back.” He finally realizes that it’s a monkey on his back. Before that he thought it was one of his voices or egos – he was expanding, he was using alcohol to stimulate his business and become rich and powerful and popular and everything else, that it’s a great social lubricant.

So we find that the personality, the thinking process that we took to be our mind, that we thought was us – we find that the mind itself is playing tricks. Over a long period of time – sometimes ten and twenty years build up before a person realizes that something inside of him has played tricks on him. So we’ve got a dichotomy. There’s a manifest dichotomy, no way around it: how can a person play tricks on themselves? But this is manifestly true. A fellow is put in jail and somebody says to him, “You’re a drunk,” or, “You’ve got a habit.” Or he’s in jail because of some social habit, or he rapes somebody or he steals. All of these are the result of appetites. And these appetites are the result of what I call voice-drives. And these accumulate – they don’t necessarily start spontaneously in a few seconds.

So the person goes along in a certain way and suddenly has to face himself. And it doesn’t have to be a really violent or traumatic thing that brings about this revelation; there are lots of little things – just the fact that you don’t get along with people. You build up a certain phase in your personality that you believe is you, and you go along and you prosper with it. And then one day it falls apart. Your personality gets you fired from your job, or your girlfriend or boyfriend drops you and says, “I can’t stand you anymore; you’re too hard to get along with.” And then we see that there’s some part of us that we don’t like. And all of us will admit this dichotomy, that there’s no such thing as a monistic mentality, a monistic mind. We admit the dichotomy now.

Umpire

I maintain that this is our first view of the mind. And a tremendous lot of people assume that this is the only mind there is. But I call this mind the umpire. It’s part of the program, the computer. This is a physical mechanism, and the physical mechanism is set here for a certain purpose. It’s programmed to produce its own continuation; it’s programmed to survive. So that these different impulses, which conflict with each other to a certain extent, are still parts of the person that are thrown into the computer when the person is born. They’re implanted.

So then, why is a person born? Manifestly, if you take the end result of what happens in what people do with their lives – we’re manifestly born to reproduce. So we have a sexual urge backed up by a survival urge – everything has a survival urge – and here are two urges working together, reinforcing each other. And then add the pleasure urge. All of these things seem to harmonize together to make a powerful drive toward reproduction.

Now, say the person has the desire for reproduction but maybe economically is not too keen – has trouble getting a job or something of that sort, or maybe has too much of a reproductive urge – lord knows what causes it – but we hear of a lot of people getting into trouble because of their reproductive urges. And the fellow gets rebuffed – whether he gets rebuffed by his mate or his would-be mate, or whether he gets thrown in jail for rape or whatever the score is. But it’s possible that one of these urges that we identify ourself with very strongly can be so obnoxious that we finally will not identify it any longer as being us. It is something that afflicts us. So then an interior sense, an interior voice says, “Hey, that is not you and you’d better do something about it, if you want to live.”

And that’s what happens. Something is watching the man raping and going to jail, or getting rejected or losing his job – and this is the viewer. This is the viewer, the rapist is the view. The umpire becomes the view. We are watching. That which watches is the essence, and that which is rejected by that anterior⁶ mind is not us. If it were us, well then we’d be suicidal; we would be allowing one of these voices to destroy us. (Well, we generally do anyhow. We generally wind up destroyed by the various voices. Ambition or sex or booze or something gets us, because we can’t hold a balance with all the different appetites that assail us.) So there is in the computer, built in, an umpire, which is not us. We can watch it working, and if you can watch something that’s working, whatever is working is the view.

Process observer

So what is watching the umpire? I call it the “process observer”. These are simple terms; rather than use complex psychological terms, or try to keep abreast of psychological terms that would be similar, I prefer to pick something very simple. Now we’re going through a meditative process in what I consider an orderly, common-sense way.

There’s another analogy that I’ve used at times called the camera analogy, in which I liken man to be a ray of light that comes out of a camera towards a screen. And the screen is the void.

These are more or less Zen-ish terms, in which the world is looked upon as an illusion – which is a hypothesis because that’s not known until you prove it’s an illusion. But regardless, there is a way. In our meditation, if we feel that we are nothing but a ray of God or something of that sort, there’s only one way to approach that. And that’s not to theorize in dictionary-terminology such as theology might employ, but to actually get into that ray and go back through the camera. In other words, go to the source, instead of verbalizing.

But what we’re doing here is a much simpler way, because you’re watching your own actions. You watch your observation of the umpire, of this decision-making process, and you find out that you’re aware; you become aware that you are watching it. You’re watching processes, you’re watching the manipulations of the mind which are not us. And this is why in Zen occasionally you’ll hear this term “kill the mind”. This is the mind they talk about killing. A lot of

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⁶ Rose uses the word “anterior” (literally, front) to describe an inner or more real perspective, but in conjunction with words like “getting behind the mind” this seems contradictory; however, “anterior” also has the meaning of “preceding”. Also see footnote #17.

people think that when they say “kill the mind” it means to overdose on drugs – that this is the path to enlightenment, to kill your head or something. No – this is the trouble with picking a word out of a text, from an old philosophy that has been translated for four or five hundred years, and trying to explain it or trying to use it fundamentalistically for your own use. When they say “kill the mind” they mean to kill the mundane mind – not to kill it necessarily, but this is a sharp word to emphasize that something drastic has to be done. But you have to get beyond the umpire.

You have to get beyond this need to continually ride herd over these appetites and the counterchecks to the appetites and all this sort of thing.

Before we got to the process observer it was very simple observation: We see a bottle of whiskey, we see a thirst, we have a sensory understanding that these two things can cause trouble or pleasure, or both. But when you get into the process observer your mental observations become gestaltic.⁷ Now when I use the word gestalt I’m talking about pattern thinking, not in the Fritz Perls idea of gestalts.⁸ The original idea of gestalts was that we think in patterns. Sometimes a single word may symbolize an entire philosophic approach. A few seconds of thinking along a certain line may embody a whole philosophy – this is what I mean by gestaltic thinking. The process observer is a gestaltic operator. And it starts watching. This is the real meditation that sets in, the real raja yoga or whatever you want to call it, whereby a person watches his mind go through certain loops and shenanigans, gymnastics and so on.

And then somewhere along the line he becomes aware of the process observer itself. Because we’re watching this thing now: something is watching the observer watching the umpire. Now what are we getting to? We’re getting to where we might think that there’s no point from which you can’t watch something else. So it looks like the real self is going to escape you; it’s just going to go further and further back – every time you look it’s going to be behind you, or behind that operation. But this isn’t true; it’s simply a matter of purification – a purification of the concept of self.

So that when you come down to the final self it will not be by logically finding a kernel inside of a kernel inside of a kernel. It will be a cracking of the final kernel. And when this occurs, then all of these things are – not illusory; in their own dimension they are real and necessary – but they are not the real self. They are all relative and describable. The final realization of course isn’t necessarily describable, because of the nature of what happens, and by what has been demonstrated or talked about by people who made the breakthrough.

To give you some hints on the type of mental processes you have to take into account in order to get behind this process observer (and you really have to get behind it): What happens in the observer who watches the process observer, is that this person just watches. This is awareness. This self watches, and that’s all. And when you get to the point where there’s only watching, and no qualification, you’re getting pretty close. Now how does this happen? We’re getting close to an absolute watcher. We’re not getting something that defines things as good or bad, white or black, high or low, in or out. And the reason this type of observation is necessary is because of the field that we’re studying.

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⁷ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt
⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_therapy